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ORPHEUS IN ELKO WEST
The young man behind
the counter, hyacinth
hair falling in dark waves
to his shapely shoulders,
I said Excuse me —
but a face by Leonardo —
I stood speechless
in the blind buzz
of fluorescent lights.
dust devils and tumbleweed —
flowed in his face. The gleam
of his eyes out-gleamed
everything else as I drove
all the way to Los Angeles.
~ Oriana
**
Perhaps the most be beautiful man I ever saw. "Beautiful" is a deliberate word choice, though we don't often use it to describe men. I was stunned by the most beautiful man I ever saw where nothing meets nothing just outside of Elko West.
And he was reading a book.
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GAZA’S 13 MILLION TON OF BOMB-FILLED DEBRIS COULD TAKE 14 YEARS TO CLEAR
~ Israel’s war in Gaza has created 37 million tons of debris, much of it laced with unexploded bombs, which could take more than a decade to remove, a top UN demining official said.
Nearly seven months into the war, there is an average 300kg of rubble a square meter of land in Gaza, Pehr Lodhammar, the former United Nationals Mine Action Service chief for Iraq, told a news conference.
“Based on the current [amount] of debris in Gaza, with 100 trucks we are talking about 14 years of work … to remove it,” he said. With the war continuing, it was impossible to estimate how long clearance might take at its end, he added.
Israel has been accused of “domicide” over the intensity of its bombing campaign in Gaza, which has reduced large swathes of the strip to ruins. Sixty-five per cent of the buildings destroyed in Gaza were residential, Lodhammar said.
Clearing and rebuilding them will be slow and dangerous work because of the threat from shells, missiles or other weapons buried in collapsed or damaged buildings. On average about 10% of weapons failed to detonate when they were fired, Lodhammar said, and had to be removed by demining teams.
In Israel, an Egyptian delegation led by the country’s top intelligence official, Abbas Kamel, arrived in an attempt to revive stalled talks on a ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Egyptian efforts to halt the war through negotiations have been paired with stark warnings against a planned Israeli assault on Rafah, the only place in Gaza where Israel has not sent in ground troops.
The border town shelters more than half of Gaza’s population, most displaced by fighting elsewhere, and at a time of looming famine it is also the main entry point for humanitarian aid into the strip.
An attack there would have “catastrophic effects” not only on Palestinian civilians, but on regional peace and security, the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, said this week. Cairo has previously said an Israeli offensive in Rafah would violate the decades-old peace deal with Egypt.
Israeli leaders say four Hamas battalions have taken shelter among civilians in Rafah, and must be destroyed. Troops, tanks and armored vehicles have massed in the country’s south, in apparent preparation for the offensive.
Israeli attacks have killed 34,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, in nearly seven months, according to Gaza’s health authorities. Israel launched the war in response to the 7 October attack when Hamas killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 250 hostage.
Egypt’s Kamel was presenting to Israelis a “new vision” for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza, an Egyptian official told Associated Press.
In the first stage of the ceasefire there would be a limited hostage release, in return for freeing Palestinian prisoners held in Israel and allowing significant numbers of Palestinians to return to their homes in the north of the strip. Then talks of a larger deal to end the war would continue.
There has been growing international pressure for a deal, with Hamas and Israel accusing each other of intransigence as the war continues and the toll from weapons, hunger and lack of medical care rises.
Inside Israel, however, far-right members of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition have been pressing him to send troops into Rafah.
The security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, said on X: “The Egyptian proposal arrived because Hamas is afraid of a Rafah operation.” He added: “Rafah now!”
US troops had begun construction of a floating pier for humanitarian aid that aimed to speed the flow of desperately needed food into Gaza, the Pentagon said.
But the complex plan is still mired in fears over security and how supplies will be delivered; critics have warned the project is in danger of becoming a “smokescreen” for the planned invasion of Rafah.
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MISHA IOSSEL ON "NEVER AGAIN"
The horrors of terrorist actions and belief come from a culture stuck in the past, and refusing to progress or change. The goal is not to evolve toward the future, but to return to the dream of a "perfect" past: one that was tribal, misogynistic, concerned with "honor and shame" rather than "freedom and justice." The horrors of racism in the US, are also rooted in a nightmare past some cling to as a dream they would like to return to. And the cultural brutality and criminality of Russia certainly is stalled in the dream of power wielded by such as Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and their admirer and imitator, Putin.
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THE LINGERING EFFECT OF MARXIST IDEOLOGY ON RUSSIAN MENTALITY
The 70+ years of Marxist-Leninist indoctrination had a huge impact on the Russian culture. Although Marxism-Leninism as such is officially dead in Russia, the remnants of it are deeply inside the core Russian mindset.
Deep distrust of money and business
Having been indoctrinated that money is sinister, and owning it brings only trouble and no capital is honestly gained, the core Russians share a form of a vulgar communism. It manifests in their lust for the unearned. They believe that every person who owns more and lives better than them is obliged to pay them their share out of their perverted justice perception, or part with their life. This was evident when these Russians plundered Ukrainian middle class settlements of Bucha and Irpin, killing people out of spite, or torturing them for a washing machine or a toilet.
Poverty is sacred
Core Russians believe that living in squalor is closer to the god, and is awarded in the afterlife. Any desire to rise above it is considered sinister. A person starting their own business is viewed as a lunatic at first, as a criminal -- as soon as they start making money. As core Russians believe that the money of that entrepreneur is taken away from them.
Zero sum game assumption
The core Russians believe that a win-win game (as per game theory) is impossible, anything is down the zero-sum game casino principle. If your partner wins, you lose.
Collectivism
Russians were collectivist even before the Communism. The 70 years of being taught that “individual and their rights are nothing, a collective has all the rights”, certainly increased the collectivism to the extreme, with such side effects, as lack of responsibility and initiative.
Again, the full description of the core Russian mindset will give you a comprehensive view of these traits, most of which have evolved under influence of the Soviet Communism, the Marxist-Leninist ideology in the flesh.
Cultural aspects
The Soviet period had different attitudes than the old Russian cultural legacy in its different periods.
Initially, the older culture was cancelled as “bourgeois”; the artists and writers were forced to emigrate, or accept the new “proletarian culture” paradigm. Names of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others were crossed out of school textbooks.
In later years, however, the Soviet government took a step back and gradually pardoned the old culture. It started in 1936–37, under Stalin rule, when a 100 years anniversary of poet Alexander Pushkin’s death was pompously celebrated. Stalin realized the culture of old had a good indoctrination potential as imperialistic, and also to dominate and assimilate the conquered nations.
This was exactly the moment when the slogan “Pushkin is our everything” was born, reflecting the belief that Alexander Pushkin was not only an exceptionally talented poet and writer, but, in fact, the founder of Russian literary language and tradition.
The propaganda had twisted the biographies and ideas of older Russian writers completely. Pushkin was portrayed as an almost revolutionary, Tolstoy - as a friend to the peasants. With Dostoyevsky, they silently forgot that he completely abandoned all revolutionary ideas after serving his sentence.
Indoctrination and propaganda
Russian culture teaches that Russia is always right.
Subjugation of non-ethnic-Russian minorities
In Ukraine, for example, Russia always enforced the Imperial/Soviet Russian culture, telling that it is the greatest in the world, and superior to the native one. They even created a fake version of Ukrainian culture, which was allowed. The same happened in all countries occupied by Russia. Some peoples were totally assimilated, their older identities — erased and history rewritten.
Soft power abroad
Russian ballet, Russian art exhibitions and literary events are a part of the Russian propaganda machine. They create a wrong impression that people capable of creating such art masterpieces are absolutely incapable of wrongdoings; and justify these “wrongdoings” with demagoguery about the “mysterious Russian soul”.
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IN EVERY PLACE THAT RUSSIA LEAVES IN UKRAINE, MASS GRAVES OF EXECUTED CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN FOUND, AS WELL AS HOUSES WHERE THE RUSSIANS HAVE DEFECATED ON FLOORS AND FURNITURE. IS THIS TYPICAL OF RUSSIAN CULTURE?
~ Yes. This is a part of the core Russian domination matrix. Any non-Russian should thereby submit or be destroyed.
During WW2, USSR did exactly the same on occupied territories, but then it was easier — there were Germans to blame. And thousands of raped women who survived the ordeal did not speak up: out of shame, and out of guilt, if they were Germans. But now the political landscape has changed, and many people on Germany speak up, and say that Russia cannot carry that excuse of WW2 winner forever to mask their current atrocities, blaming Germany for being worse.
As for the “Great Russian Culture” of Tolstoyevsky [Oriana: note that this is a portmanteau word combining ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Dostoyevsky’] and Bolshoi ballet — it is largely a myth. Despite the stereotypes coined by the Russian and Soviet media, Russian culture in its entirety was created in the 19th century, aka “The Golden Age of Russian Literature”.
Even then, the penetration of culture in the society was severely limited. Only nobles were educated; most common people were illiterate, and that was a policy: the authorities were afraid that mass education could lead to a revolution, as The Great French Revolution. Ironically, most nobles of the 19th century spoke of Russian commoners with disgust, and used French language for everyday communication in their circles. From today’s perspective, it looks like a cosplay of a French pre-revolutionary royalty.
During the Bolshevik coup and the following Civil War (1917–22), the rampant crowd of criminals and low-lives flooded the cities and the countryside, looking for plunder and pleasures. They reveled in rape and killing of anyone they could. The same mass murder scenes, as on occupied Ukrainian territories, marked the passage of the Red Army. The Bolsheviks simply declared that plunder is moral, and anyone resisting it is selfish and so must be killed.
With the Bolshevik revolution, the older elites were purged or exiled. The “new culture”, based on the Communist norms and values, was created, to glorify the power of the former thugs and bandits. Although some writers and artists of the old age managed to adapt and even stay active in the USSR, the whole paradigm was changed. The older culture was labelled ‘Bourgeois’ and was actively fought. Stalin decided to reconcile with the old culture, once the artists who continued this tradition were dead, or otherwise silent.
The modern Russian culture is largely centered on the cult of crime. Criminal ethics co-exist with the society. Thugs and bandits are seen on TV, and not as outcasts, but heroes, while the police mostly mimic their traits to the point of no distinction. Pop music has two very popular subgenres glorifying the criminal life: chanson de-russe (aka blatnyak) and Russian gangsta-rap (for the younger generation).
cover of a chanson-de-russe albumRussian cultural code has moral relativism, where good and evil do not exist — they are like political powers, or sides in a game of chess. Contemporary Russian literature frequently justifies, glorifies and approves what is normally seen as evil, and frequently revises the ‘western’ definitions of it.
The core uneducated Russians, who formed the overwhelmingly vast majority of the populace (over 95%), were never cultural or civilized. The USSR forced them all into literacy, but did nothing to develop critical thinking.
a core Russian consuming industrial quantities of cheap Zhigulevskoye (aka Zhiguli, Zhiga) beer. I never saw people drinking beer directly from 1.5l PET bottles (or even 2.5l) all alone in any other country.
What we see in Ukraine today is the revenge of the core Russians. Revenge against the civilization.
These people largely have no water supply and modern sewage, using outhouses. Their houses have seen no repair for ages. But what is more important is their attitude: they consider it a norm to live like this, but hate anyone who aspires to live better. Which includes Ukraine and the entire Western World.
a Russian village house
(A typical Russian village house. Although I did not take this picture, I saw many houses like this or even in a worse shape, traveling around Russia)
The island of Sakhalin, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk city (administrative center). This is not a result of some war or accident, but systematic disrepair.
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PUTIN AS A PRODUCT OF RUSSIAN MENTALITY AND CULTURE
Putin is the product of what I call the “core Russian” mindset (aka ‘true Russian’, as labeled by a fellow Quoran).
Summary: core Russians do not value freedom, cooperation, prosperity and rule of law. They believe in raw strength, hierarchy and domination. And this mindset is shared by an overwhelming majority of Russians.
This mindset is not very well known to foreigners, who mainly interact with the westernized educated minority. Some borderline people may have features of both, i.e. in some respect, they behave like the core Russians, in other -- more civilized.
This mindset is most typical for the low-educated common people, who live outside the capital cities and do not aspire to rise above their primitive lives (see why below). But not always. A common farmer may have their own judgement and even think critically, while a professor of philosophy may not only share these destructive beliefs, but even form a pseudo-scientific foundation for them, and ingrain these ideas into the minds of his students.
This mindset is also called: chauvinistic, imperialistic, traditionalist, soviet. I prefer not to use the term ‘conservative’, because it has nothing in common with the Western conservatives.
Completely different values and morality.
This set of belief is frequently mockingly called homo sovieticus. There is a story behind it: USSR had claimed to develop a new, better species of a human being, devoid of greed and selfishness. The label reflects that they indeed grew a new species, but with completely different traits. Whether it was the intention, is another matter.
Being a core Russian has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. It is upbringing and indoctrination with a certain imperialistic ideology.
A core Russian is not necessarily stupid. Such a mindset can be combined with a cunning brain, searching for opportunities to steal, or attack. Core Russians become great career criminals.
Is it created by propaganda? It is twofold: propaganda instills these ideals into a human being, but people with such a mindset are more receptive to propaganda. Those with a critical thinking are a fringe minority, as it is now.
What defines the core Russian mindset:
Moral relativism. There is no good and no evil. There is ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. What is good for ‘Us’, is good. “Us” is usually ‘Russia’, but can be narrowed further down.
Collectivism. A single life means nothing. An individual must conform or is an enemy. Hence, core Russians always say ‘we’, even if there is no crowd to back them.
Logical relativity. Kind of a logical Schrödinger’s cat. The same statement is both true and false (or multiple mutually exclusive statements are all true) — it depends on the circumstances, who is speaking and to whom it is addressed, and what the motive is.
A consequence of the previous one: there is no truth, as it cannot be objectively established. There are only points of view.
An obvious consequence: lack of critical thinking. It is a key core Russian trait, sometimes mentioned separately. Obviously, if one accepts contradictions, making logic unworkable, one cannot debunk false statements.
Another consequence: sociology does not work. When a core Russian is asked a question by someone they think as important, they always try to guess the “correct” answer that will satisfy the one who is asking. To get true answers, the interviewer must choose questions carefully, like at a criminal investigation. However, it should not deceive you: they sincerely approve the war in Ukraine, as it fits their values.
Willful ignorance. A core Russian does not want to hear any opinions or facts that contradict their established beliefs. Education is viewed as a hindrance. A core Russian saying sounds like: “Oi, ain’t you the cleverest one?”. Don’t get misguided, this particular phrase is a direct insult.
Magical thinking. A lot of core Russians personalize natural or society phenomena. They believe that everything is caused by a will of some very powerful person or entity. It is not necessarily a religious belief in God, but some mystical power, rituals, superstitions that a person automatically follows without any explanation or even internal rationalization.
This is sometimes reflected in irrational behavior. Such as a man repeatedly fails to achieve something, but instead of analyzing the mistakes and reconsidering the strategy, he repeats exactly the same steps, hoping to be lucky next time. Or, having won in a game of chance, believes he is lucky and plays again, until he loses everything.
Such people are susceptible to superstitions and conspiracy theories.
Zero-sum game assumption. Core Russians do not believe in a mutual benefit. If someone offers them a deal which looks profitable for both sides, they still look for a catch, and try to cheat, so that their partner loses — even if the partner’s loss eventually backfires on them. If such a person is caught cheating and is brought to court, he sincerely replies: Because I wanted to win, not to lose!
Example: Russia does not want Ukraine to become free and prosperous, because by doing so, they believe that they will lose competition and be out of trade. And this opinion is shared by the majority of their population.
Misunderstanding competition. Core Russians always treat the western concept of competition as a hostility at best, ruthless fight till death at worst. This is reflected in their movies and stories about the West. As a result, in Russian business, such culture of competition is in place. They fight till they have no competitors, often relying on corrupt officials to drive competitors out of business. An ideal achievement for a core Russian is monopoly. Total domination of a market.Such misunderstanding comes, probably, as a side effect of misunderstanding cooperation, and from Soviet culture, which described competition in such a way.
This approach applies to all spheres: business, sport, even pop culture. Only in Russia, garage bands spoil each other’s equipment and tear off posters.
Fatalism. Everything is pre-determined. A person cannot change their fate. We are little people and nothing depends on us. This is sometimes labelled as “acquired helplessness syndrome”.
When the Tsar/the state requires them to sacrifice their lives for some greatness, they accept it, as a twist of fate.
Might is right. Core Russians only respect strength. Raw strength. This is why there are so much casual manslaughter, caused by a drunken brawl gone badly, including father-son debates. Any formal agreement (such as ‘law’), is only respected if there is some enforcement directly behind it, and punishment for violation is severe.
Crime does not exist. (derived from moral relativism). Everybody steals. If they are successful, they are lucky. If not, too bad for them. But stealing from me is a crime, and I will kill for that!
Killing is bad, they say, but a core Russian will kill, either when they gather as a mob, or when they are given sanction.
This is why exposing corruption of their elites, while very revealing for the western audience, has no effect on the core population. They simply do not see it as bad. Their typical response is: “Would you, having such opportunities, not steal?”
Militarism. A core Russian man usually becomes very sentimental when remembering his military service. Although the details are frequently obscured and covered by phrases like “you don’t know, you were not there”. In reality, the service is typically some drills and idle talks. But it develops subordination and kills whatever remains of critical thinking — an order must be always fulfilled, even if it is impossible, stupid or in breach with the law. Core Russians despise anyone who has not served in the army, although their own service has little to do with proper army training.
Core Russians adore military style, they always dress up in camo trousers and coat, even if they do not plan a hunting expedition. They like to show off replicas of Soviet or Russian tanks, warships, planes, etc.
The army is usually the only social elevator a core Russian can catch. The other one is organized crime.
Cult of crime. Although not shared by all core Russians, nevertheless, it is favored by a significant subset of them. Not all of them have connections with the criminal world, but they still copy their manners, wear gangsta style clothes, etc.
The criminal subculture is very trendy in Russian pop media, and many pop stars deliberately romanticize the ‘bad guys’. Prison life, cry over the misspent youth, ‘mama, please forgive your wayward son’, bravado and contempt for the non-criminal people — these are the motives of ‘blatnyak’, aka ‘chanson de russe’ — the pop subgenre that romanticizes and glorifies thug life. “Blatnyak” motives are very prominent in the mainstream Russian pop culture.
typical Russian criminals in prison — a PC game screenshot (note Stalin among the tattoos)
Russian police are also severely influenced by this subculture. In a way you can’t tell a thug from a cop by jargon.
The core Russian youth prefer the Russian gangsta rap, emerged in late 2000s, who openly glorify murder with sadistic tendencies.
a core Russian youth. aka gopnik. Note that the young man is crouching in a "gopnik squat" since the ground is too wet and dirty to sit on.
Cult of WWII. Militarism is further enhanced by the WWII cargo cult (rus. pobedob’esie, победобесие — a term used by non-core Russians, meaning “unholy victory”), slowly developed since Soviet times to a new quasi-religion. Because they are taught that Russia single-handedly defeated the greatest evil in the world - Hitler. WWII is labelled “Great Patriotic War” (GPW): 1941–45. This was done to hide the facts that USSR collaborated with Nazi Germany before 1941, and occupied other countries in the same fashion.
A WWII cargo cult parade, Russia, circa 2020
The history of WWII/GPW is interpreted in the same Us/Them paradigm: everything USSR did was right, and if you disagree, you are the enemy and side with Hitler.
This is why they label Ukrainian resistance fighters, both of WWII and now, as Nazis.
Contempt for the weak/lack of empathy. Since early childhood, most Russian boys bully one another, until some sort of social hierarchy establishes. Then they usually concentrate their bullying on one or two smaller ones who cannot fight back and quickly become an outcast.
If you ask a bully why do you behave like this, they say “Because I can”. Meaning that they do not get a punch back in their face.
The core Russian youths are labeled gopniki (see above) — they share this attitude and attack anyone they can, to rob or just for the fun of it.
This explains the attack on Crimea in 2014. They did it simply because they were ready, and knew that Ukraine was unprepared to fight back, just after the Revolution of Dignity.
Love of grandeur. A core Russian likes to show off, when they believe their neighbors won’t harm them for doing so, and/or their wealth comes ‘from above’, i.e. granted by the Tsar or his subordinates. They build palaces, buy huge yachts, extremely large and useless limousines, etc. They decorate everything with gold and precious stones. They hoard huge amounts of cash in their vaults (also because they do not believe in investment). This is also due to the fact that they know that their wealth may come and go any moment.
They also like to hire servants, even if they do not really need them, just to be able to show their higher standing over them. Domination is everything.
A Russian can be either rich or poor. Rich is considered ‘lucky’, or ‘granted by the Tsar’. Poor is the norm, how people are supposed to live. Anyone who tries to rise up from the poverty is frowned upon.
Once a Russian is rich, he starts resenting his former poor friends, calling them names and separating from them.
But this does not apply to the Tsar or his boyars (see above).
Paternalism. A core Russian depends on a strong father figure, represented by the national leader (Tsar), to feed them, to provide them with everything.
The state is not just an arbitrator who sets the rules and enforces them, but the ultimate master. A core Russian is born to serve his master. When a leader is not a tyrant, he is despised by his subject as ‘weak’.
Atomization. As a consequence of paternalism, Russian society is very atomized, to the point there is no society as such: only a crowd of individuals. People do not establish horizontal connections easily. Having some work to do, they always rely on someone to tell them what to do, instead of doing it themselves.
Lack of initiative/responsibility. Following the logical chain above, we see that a person who tries to take responsibility beyond their immediate family is frowned upon. If they ask someone “could you please do that”, they may respond with an angry “you are not my boss to tell me”. If an initiative is successful, people say ‘we did it’, or even ‘it is done’ forgetting the one who suggested it, or even did most of the work. But if it fails, the initiator is the one who failed, even if others directly sabotaged it.
Xenophobia/supremacy cult/psychopatriotism. Core Russians believe they are a supreme race, who inherited the empire from the Romans (the “Third Rome” concept). All other nations are considered inferior, and are called vile names. This applies both to non-Russian ethnic groups who live in Russia (who, in turn, despise everyone except themselves), and foreign nations. Also, smaller nations are despised more than the bigger ones.
As a consequence of this and resentment to merit, the provincial core Russians usually hate residents of Moscow and St. Peterburg. They believe their wealth is gained at their expense, because someone above distributes it unfairly (i.e. unevenly). The hate goes both ways: once a provincial core Russian settles in a big city, he start hating provincials -- he believes they are after his job and home.
‘Historical rights’ concept. One of justifications of their expansionism is that Russia owned something in the past. No matter how exactly did they part ways with that land or property, they want it back simply because they previously owned it.
Compare it to a guy who sold you a house, then, after a long while, gets drunk and tries to kick you out, because he used to own it in the past, and he is very sentimental about it. Even if he sold it many years ago.
Male chauvinism. A woman has no say, she’d better watch the children - that defines it all. In this text, I sometimes intentionally use ‘he’, because women usually keep to themselves, letting their men speak. But they, too, are part of this mindset, and bring up children in it.
Not giving a damn. This is a typical reply of a core Russian, when someone tries to persuade them to think of the consequences of their poor decisions, or else. Eg: Putin is leaving your country without a future — I do not give a damn about it.
This is the explanation of their disregard for their own life, not only someone else. This attitude leads to reckless driving and behavior in general, many fires, accidents, disasters costing lives.
Contempt for creativity, innovation and arts. Russia has always been technologically backward and relied on espionage rather than innovation. Russian design is ugly and uninspiring. Russians have always admired the works of artists, but held the artists themselves in contempt as effete weaklings.
My bandmate was once stopped by the police walking home late in Moscow, on suspicion of drug abuse (alright, he had had a couple of drinks after a gig). The usual cop intimidation small-talk:
So, the long hair? What do you do for a living?
I am a musician. Play in a band.
Got it, unemployed junkie.
He was finally released, after some more questions like this. And he does not do drugs at all.
Alcoholism and drug abuse. How do they drink vodka in northern lands? In Sweden: with water. In Finland: without water. In Russia: like water. Getting blasted is a survival mechanism in a hostile society.
Russian drinking culture can be mathematically expressed in a formula: maximum raw alcohol per ruble. They drink everything that burns, if it is cheap. And millions die from alcohol-related problems, including surrogate poisoning and even alcohol OD. Such disregard for own life is the “I do not give a damn” attitude. No surprise they have the same disregard for others.
In high society, it turns upside down: they drink the most expensive stuff money can buy, but in the same manner of downing it bottle after bottle, without even trying to taste it. And drugs — the Russian artistic/media/business high society consumes cocaine openly at their parties, when no outsiders are allowed.
Russian language has the greatest number of synonyms for two words: drunk/getting drunk, and a fool.
In some parts of Russian society, it is a norm to be constantly drunk. It is generally tolerated and even rationalized: eg. he is an artist, he needs inspiration.
Living in the moment and disregarding the future. Core Russians never plan anything in the long run: they essentially live in this moment. They never invest on anything, but instead favor conspicuous consumption.
This is why Russian oligarchs spend money on yachts and prostitutes, instead of ambitious life goals, such as a space flight or cure for cancer. Also, because they do not give a damn.
Preferring petty short term gains instead of plentiful long term benefits. The war in Ukraine “to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU and the NATO” is a hallmark of sacrificing long term benefits (peace, prosperity, respect, reputation, wealth) for short term gains (plundering Ukraine)
The blue shack is an outhouse, with a sign scribbled on it: "Shit here."
Generally, core Russians prefer to have a small, but regular pay, to an ambitious well-paid job that requires more effort, such as additional training. Or even coming to your boss and saying “I want to do that!”. In the extreme, it results in people preferring one-time jobs to permanent employment: why bother with the interviews, if you can unload that truck and get the money right away, and get drunk immediately afterwards.
Preferring having enemies instead of having friends. For the Core Russians, having enemies means being feared and being respected. Having friends means being suspicious and vulnerable.
Core Russian small talk is usually a lengthy and boastful description of the brawls a man has participated in, with gruesome details, and the number of enemies he had defeated grows with each shot/glass of vodka downed. A core Russian is always ready to fight, but does not give a damn for a reason to start one. “I do not like you” is usually more than enough. ~ Timfey Vorobyev, Quora
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NOTHING CHANGES — RUSSIA AND THE BALTIC COUNTRIES
According to Toots, an intrinsic element of Russian society is pokazukha: pretending everything is fine while reality is anything but. It also applies, at least partly, to Russian intelligence, no matter that it’s a powerful system employing thousands.
“Chaos is a trait of Russian culture. There always needs to be a shepherd; otherwise, it’s anarchy,” remarks Toots, who grew up in the Russian-majority eastern Estonian city of Kohtla-Järve. While discussing Russia, he deliberately uses the word “adversary” instead of “enemy,” which he believes is unnecessarily charged. When engaged in a struggle with Russia, one can expect them to be excessively emotional, but also relentless. They are great, ambitious, merciless, and most of all, cruel.
Toots wasn’t surprised by the atrocities committed in Bucha. Nor were any other of the counterintelligence agents I interviewed in Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania. They’re aware of how Russians conducted themselves in the Baltics during the Second World War. Of how they conducted themselves before that. Of how they’ve always behaved. The West lacks such awareness.
“The West is fortunate,” Toots remarks. “We’re a buffer between them and Russia. They’ve forgotten a lot and think Russia is just like them.“
It isn’t. And Putin isn’t the only issue.
When Director of the Lithuanian State Security Department Darius Jauniškis served in the Soviet military, he was constantly confronted by Russian soldiers with an intent to dominate.
“I fought them,” he says, “because I knew that as soon as you submit to their will, you become their slave. But if you strike back, then you might even earn their trust.”
When I ask how many scuffles he was in, Jauniškis’s hand shifts to reveal a talisman on his wrist. There were many, he says. Very many. The subject isn’t incidental. He uses it as educational material for his younger colleagues, broadening the experience into an analysis of Russia as a whole: they recognize and respect strength alone.
That is precisely how Baltic counterintelligence officers refer to Russia – not ‘it’, but ‘they’. The war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war. The cruelty is not Putin’s. The rapes, murders, gouged eyes, hangings, and burned corpses aren’t special tactics employed by Russia’s leader. It is Russia as a whole.
“The majority of Russians are to blame,” says Sinisalu.
Western colleagues sometimes have a hard time believing this.
“They’re certainly more naïve and optimistic than we are,” says one Baltic counterintelligence officer.
“If you want to know Russia, then don’t go to St. Petersburg or Moscow,“ says Toots. He once spent six months in Kronstadt, a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg but filled with an entirely different breed of people. There, no one removed their hats at the table or knew a single thing about etiquette.
Everything was decaying and chair legs were on the verge of snapping off beneath you, but no one lifted a finger to fix anything, simply sighing “Ah…” and giving a dismissive a wave of the hand. The atmosphere was infused with something intrinsically foreign to the West – Russian society is accustomed to suffering. An injustice that sends Parisians out onto the streets won’t make a single resident of Novosibirsk scratch the back of their necks.
One acquaintance who has frequented smaller Russian settlements gave a vivid description of common local history museums: one room covering a period that stretches from the Paleolithic to 1941, followed by five rooms covering the years 1941–1945. The Second World War. Victory over the Nazis. The sole source of honor in such humble environs, where an expanse of endless mud begins at the museum door and a local drunk is curled up against the wall, dozing like a sleepy housefly.
Officers of the Baltic security services do not describe Russia’s imperialism and brutality as a military tactic, but a rampant social norm.
“I believed that their mentality changed over the years and they had a reckoning after the war. That would have been normal,” Jauniškis says. “But I was mistaken.”
Indeed, how could Russia have any reckoning when the country has never been held responsible? The Nazis temporarily rose to the top of the cruelty ranking during the Second World War, which has caused people to forget Russia’s atrocities.
“They’ve never been held accountable," Sinisalu says. "And that has made them feel invincible."
EMPIRE
Even so, he was surprised when the first reports of Russia’s brutalities in Ukraine began to emerge.
“I thought they’d go right back to their old rhetoric, but the past manifesting anew in a cruder and more robust way was unexpected,” Peeter remarks. Deportations. Rapes. Alleged struggles with hostile elements, but actual executions of children.
Our assessments of Russia haven’t changed in the last 30 years,“ says Mežviets. The chief analysis is this: Russia wishes to regain its status as an empire by any means.
“To them, there are no states, only zones and territories,” Peeter explains. Russia sees itself as being surrounded by vassals and ancillaries – there is no third option.
“They’ll never come to terms with the breakup of the USSR,” Mežviets says. As Russia’s leaders themselves have declared: Russia ends where it is stopped.
“It’s a conqueror’s mindset,” Jauniškis says. “Everyone around them are enemies.”
Surprisingly, the heads of all three Baltic counterintelligence agencies answer with the same name when I ask about the origins of Russia’s present-day mentality: Ivan the Terrible. A ruler who lived almost 500 years ago, conducted successful military campaigns aimed at territorial expansion, and stood out for his exceptional cruelty, even slaying his own son in a fit of rage. Russia’s modern-day brutality and expansionism is a carbon copy of Ivan the Terrible’s murderous imperialism.
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Ivan the TerribleDisappointment of falling behind the West has caused Russians to either ramp up national exceptionalism or take offense, grow embittered, and believe that the country has been robbed of something. As one Russian acquaintance tells me, “Russians aren’t interested in truth, but justice.” No matter that this historical justice is nothing but a paper-thin fantasy.
The cruel culture pervading Russia’s modern army was entrenched during the era of Stalin’s Gulags. It isn’t random, but systematic. Rigid hierarchies, an inability to account for variation, autocrats locked in information bubbles, and, at the same time, a population yearning for autocracy – perhaps the hardest aspect for Westerners to wrap their heads around – have existed in Russia for centuries and will only persist.
Baltic counterintelligence directors don’t only speak about Putin, but recall the reign of Peter the Great, who ordered all Swede-supporting Russians to be executed. Again, Sinisalu and Toots chime in together with a Russian maxim: "Beat your own to frighten others."
“Violence is a historical pattern in Russia, and that will not change,” Sinisalu calmly adds. “Human life has no value there.”
Constantly, we’re told that Russia is composed of ingredients like Chekhov, borsht, generosity, fraternity, piousness, and Dostoyevsky. But let us recall what Dostoyevsky wrote: a Russian can only operate in radicals, being radically good or radically evil. One of his protagonists allows a “thoroughly native object to be seen – an enormous fist sinewy, knotted, and overgrown with a sort of reddish fuzz, and it became evident that should this profoundly national object descend upon anything it would leave nothing after it but a damp spot.”
Contempt for Ukraine isn’t just one of Putin’s delusions – its roots stretch much deeper. Before interviewing a well-known Russian theater director, I was warned he is generally a liberal anti-Putinist but believes that Russia occupying the Crimea was the right move, as Ukrainians “aren’t human.”
Just recently, Estonian Ambassador to Ukraine Kaimo Kuusk stood at the edge of the mass graves and visited the former torture chambers in Izum. He was told that the Russian torturers weren’t yokels, but spoke in elegant urban St. Petersburg or Moscow accents. Russia’s total defeat in Ukraine is the sole opportunity for change.
“Historically, force has always had an effect on Russia,” Peeter says. “No matter how much you wish there was another solution, there isn’t.”
Ukrainian corpses are not merely the act of a crazed war-waging fanatic, but the outcome of a much broader, tenacious mindset that has gone unpunished for centuries. Many are prepared to allow Putin to save face, no matter that the cost is Ukrainian bodies with nooses tied around their necks and their faces removed.
During the Soviet occupation, Toots spent time working in a missile division stationed in Ukraine. Once, they were ordered to construct a large, paved launch pad. They were supplied with no gravel, asphalt, or a single piece of equipment. They didn’t even have vodka that could be traded for supplies. Against all odds, it was finished two days later. The division stole the steamroller and scraped the rest of the materials together from who-knows-where.
“You’ve got to be creative,” is all he says.
I drive back to Estonia. A few days later, we celebrate my great-aunt’s birthday. She’s turning 100. Her children say she’s in good shape, still as sharp as a tack, and climbed up onto the roof to teach the chimneysweep a thing or two just a few years ago. However, she hasn’t slept well since February 24th. Insomnia struck after reading the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“She’s afraid,” say her children. “She’s afraid the rapists will come back again.”
https://ekspress.delfi.ee/artikkel/120083694/human-life-has-no-value-there-baltic-counterintelligence-officers-speak-candidly-about-russian-cruelty
Mary:
Oriana:
Putin tries to liken himself to Peter the First, the great westernizer and the founder of the city of St. Petersburg. But someone managed to put a sign in the Red Square in a place visible from Putin's office: "You are not Peter the First. You are Adolph the Second."
Does every century have to have its Hitler? How sad.
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THE PACIFIC OCEAN AND THE WEATHER
The Pacific Ocean — Earth’s largest body of water — is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year.
The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world.
The current El Niño is among the strongest humans have ever experienced.
It fueled wildfires, droughts, and floods in South America. It bent the jet stream, trapping heat over the southern United States last summer, and ended the year with the warmest winter on record for much of the country. It fueled both heavy rain and extreme dry conditions in southern Africa, killing crops and putting millions at risk of hunger. It heated the world’s oceans to the highest levels ever measured. It raised global temperatures to their tallest peaks scientists have ever recorded.
“The last year has been an amazing year in terms of records set around the world for extreme heat,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The periodic swings between El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is a natural phenomenon cycling every three to seven years.
Over the past year, the El Niño also synced with other natural patterns like the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean’s temperature cycle, driving thermometers up further. But humanity’s relentless injection of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere is pushing these changes to greater extremes.
Forecasters now expect that warm water across the Pacific to begin retreating westward, heralding a shift to La Niña. McPhaden said one of the most common definitions of La Niña is when surface water temperatures over a large area of the Pacific drop by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius below the historical average for three months or more. El Niño is typically defined when the same region is a half-degree Celsius hotter.
NOAA projects an 85 percent chance that the ENSO cycle will shift to its neutral phase between April and June 2024, and then a 60 percent chance a La Niña will develop between June and August 2024.
Historically, strong El Niños are followed by short neutral phases, about three to five months, before switching to La Niña. “The handwriting is on the wall with regard to this La Niña,” McPhaden said. “The question is exactly when will it come and how strong will it be?”
It also takes several months between when ENSO changes and when it starts to influence weather. So the warming impact of the outgoing El Niño is likely to persist and could raise global temperatures this year even higher than they were last year if the rising La Niña is weak or moderate. Heat waves are currently baking Southeast Asia, triggering school closures and health warnings.
When La Niña does set in, it will slow and reverse some of the intense weather patterns the world experienced over the past year. But it will also set the stage for more hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.
To make this all even more complicated, this is all occurring in a world that’s warmed to the highest levels humans have ever experienced, so it’s not clear yet how far some of these extremes will go.
How La Niña will likely play out in different parts of the world
Though they are on opposite sides of a cycle, the effects of El Niño and La Niña are not quite mirror images of each other. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia Extension.
The specific types of weather impacts also vary by region, but looming shifts in the cycle can help forecasters calculate what kinds of heat, rain, and drought conditions are in store in the coming months. For instance, ENSO makes it easier to predict climate variability in the southeastern US, particularly in cooler months. “We have a pretty strong signal here compared to the central plains,” Knox said.
During a La Niña, the cooler waters in the equatorial Pacific soak up heat energy from the atmosphere while air currents deflect the jet stream — a narrow, high-altitude band of fast-moving air — pushing it northward.
La Niňa tends to push the jet stream northward, leading to cooler weather to its north and drier conditions to the south.
That air current then tends to box in cold weather to its north in places like Canada and Alaska while trapping moisture in regions like the Pacific Northwest. States like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina tend to be warmer and drier during La Niña winters, while the Midwest tends to be cloudier, cooler, and wetter. (NOAA has published maps of the globe showing how these patterns typically play out around the world).
Mickey Glantz, director of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the impacts of ENSO, noted that La Niña doesn’t just shift weather — it can also intensify existing rain and heat patterns in some regions. “La Niña, to me, is ‘extreme normal,’” Glantz said. “You have a wet season, it’s going to be really wet. If you have a dry season, the probability is it’s going to be really dry.”
La Niña may bring about a more severe hurricane season
One of the biggest consequences of a shift to La Niña is the higher likelihood of major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are built from several ingredients, but two parameters are especially important when it comes to ENSO: water temperature and air stability.
The ocean needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter to form a hurricane, and the air above it needs to hold steady. El Niño years tend to heat up the Atlantic Ocean, but they also induce wind shear, where air rapidly changes speed and direction in the atmosphere, disrupting tropical storms before they can form. Still, the Atlantic was so abnormally hot last year that it fueled an above-average hurricane season.
The Atlantic Ocean is still startlingly hot, but now the looming La Niña is likely to stabilize the air above the sea — creating a foundation for more hurricanes.
The Weather Company and Atmospheric G2 projected that the 2024 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, would see 24 named storms compared to an average of 14. They projected six hurricanes will reach above Category 3 strength, compared to just three in a typical year.
Researchers at Colorado State University expect 23 named storms. University of Pennsylvania scientists anticipate 33 named storms in the Atlantic this year, the highest count ever projected.
Why ENSO cycles are becoming harder to predict
The added difficulty in predicting how La Niña will play out is that people have heated up the planet. A “cool” La Niña year is now hotter than an El Niño year from 20 years ago. “It’s not the same climate regime that we forecasted the earlier [ENSO cycles] so it’s getting a bit harder to forecast,” Glantz said.
How will future climate change in turn affect ENSO? NOAA illustrated the answer with a helpful albeit highly technical schematic (bear with me):
natural weather swings
Climate change is likely to amplify the swings in the ENSO cycle.
The swings between the cool and warm phases of the ENSO are likely to get stronger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace. So many of the most densely populated parts of the world, like the Andean region in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, are going to experience a more aggressive whiplash between wet and dry years, between calm and stormy summers, and between warmer and cooler winters.
For scientists, the rest of 2024 is going to be an important case study in the impacts of climate change and natural variability, sorting out where they diverge, where they intersect, and where they lead to more disasters. The world will be a real-world laboratory, showcasing severe weather that could become more typical as average temperatures continue to rise.
“It’s going to be a very interesting year,” McPhaden said. “We’ll have to wait and see and be ready for more extremes.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/24145756/la-nina-2024-el-nino-heat-hurricane-record-temperature-pacific
*
HOW RIOTING FARMERS UNRAVELED EUROPE’S AMBITIOUS CLIMATE PLAN
In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient.
The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our children’s plates!,” then-Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie tweeted. Livestock farmers clogged Lyon’s downtown with tractors and paraded cows in front of city hall, brandishing banners declaring, “Stopping meat is a guarantee of weakness against future viruses.” An impromptu coalition of livestock producers, politicians, and parents unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s court to overturn the change.
It may have seemed a tempest in a teacup — a quintessentially French squabble. But it was a microcosm of European agricultural politics, reflecting the great paradox of European Union (EU) farmers’ relationship to the state.
On one hand, farmers are wards of the welfare state, dependent on national governments and the European Union for the generous subsidies and suite of protectionist trade policies that keep them in business. On the other, they are business people who balk at regulations, restrictions, and perceived government overreach. The tension between these positions regularly erupts into farmer revolts when governments attempt to regulate food or farming in the public interest as it might any other industry. EU politicians, meanwhile, often feel the need to kowtow to agribusiness because of its ability to mobilize protesters and voters alike.
This year, it has become clear these protests have the power to transform Europe’s future.
This past February, three years almost to the day after Doucet’s school lunch announcement, roads around Lyon were again blocked by farmers raging against the French government and the EU. It was one surge in the wave of protests that has swept through Europe in recent months, set off by a litany of demands, including continued subsidies and no new environmental regulations. In short, all the benefits of government with none of the governance.
In Paris, farmers traded blows with police at the country’s Salon de l’Agriculture trade fair. In Germany, they tried storming a ferry carrying the country’s economy minister. In Brussels, they rammed through police barricades with tractors. In the Netherlands, they lit asbestos on fire alongside highways. In Poland, they massed along the Ukrainian border to prevent the import of cheap grain. In Czechia, they paved Prague’s streets with manure.
The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint. That agenda is colliding with Europe’s longtime paradigm of few-strings-attached welfare for agribusiness.
Agribusiness interests have been working to foil the Farm to Fork strategy, the crown jewel of the Green Deal meant to overhaul Europe’s food system, since its inception in 2020. This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations. Now, plans to make Europe a global leader in sustainable agriculture appear to be dead on arrival.
How European agriculture got this way
Despite its centrality to European politics and policy, agriculture is a very small industry within the bloc’s economy, making up about 1.4 percent of the EU’s GDP and no more than 5 percent of GDP in any of the Union’s 27 countries. The sector is also one of the biggest recipients of EU funds, with subsidies to farmers and investment in rural development consuming about a quarter of the EU’s budget, on top of often generous national subsidies.
Meanwhile, European agriculture’s environmental footprint is vastly disproportionate to its economic contribution. It uses a third of all water on the increasingly arid continent. It’s responsible for 10 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, including much of its methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse gases primarily released by animal agriculture. It accounts for about a quarter of global pesticide use, which has been linked to soil and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and a slew of impacts on human health.
Of course, we need to eat, and food needs to be produced. But Europe’s monocrop- and livestock-intensive agriculture system is anything but sustainable.
Yet the EU continues to pour massive amounts of money into subsidizing an economically negligible sector that is responsible for many of the continent’s environmental problems and that, off the back of those subsidies, organizes to prevent environmental regulations or even conditions on those very subsidies.
Many countries around the world generously subsidize food production — including, famously, the United States, where agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of GDP and punches far above its weight politically. But much of the US agricultural sector’s billions in annual federal payouts comes in indirect forms like subsidized crop insurance, including more than a third of the $24 billion it received in 2021 — and these subsidies make up a much smaller share of the industry’s contribution to GDP relative to agriculture subsidies in the EU. In Europe, decades of government policy have integrated food production into an extensive state welfare framework where, on paper, the good of farmers is equated with the public good.
That system emerged from the ruins of World War II, when shoring up farming and food security became an existential policy imperative on the devastated and often starved continent.
Post-war policies were designed to secure the food supply, provide farming families with a stable income, and stimulate rural economies in the interest of the public good. European agriculture policy became its own welfare system defined by subsidies and protection from foreign competition.
It worked. By 1950, agricultural production in Western Europe had recovered to pre-war levels. When the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, formed in 1957, agriculture was central to the discussions, as economic integration would require dealing with the problem of highly subsidized and protected farming in member states.
The answer was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), launched in 1962, a centerpiece of EEC and later EU policy. An extension of national-level agricultural welfare policies, the goal of the CAP was “to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.”
In other words, rather than using policy to build agriculture into a viable competitive business, the goal was to protect agriculture from the market and commit to a long-term policy of keeping farmers in business. CAP was “from the outset a public policy reflecting highly subjective political ‘preferences,’ not rational commercial interests,” economic historian Ann-Christina Knudsen argues in her book Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.
For decades, CAP has been the EU’s biggest budget line. As recently as the 1980s, it made up about two-thirds of the Union’s budget. While bouts of trade liberalization and the rise of other priorities have steadily reduced its relative size, about a third of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget was earmarked for CAP. Over 70 percent of this money is distributed as direct payments to farmers.
Since payments are primarily based on farm size, the biggest farms get the lion’s share of that money. Over half of the EU’s 9 million farms produce less than 4,000 euros of products per year and make up a combined 2 percent of Europe’s farm production, while the top 1 percent of farms — those that bring in over 500,000 euros — control 19 percent of all farmland and are responsible for over 40 percent of output. The top 0.5 percent of farms receive over 16 percent of all CAP payments.
Lavish subsidies have helped make Europe a net exporter of agricultural products, with early concerns about food security long since displaced by a global thirst for Irish whiskey and Dutch beer and hunger for Irish butter and French cheese.
Coupled with decades of government policy incentivizing industrial production methods that favor big operations, such as factory farming and large-scale monocropping, CAP has served to push Europe’s farmers to get big or get out. Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost over 5 million farms, virtually all of them small operations sold by retiring farmers or those simply unable to compete with their larger neighbors.
Large farmers, in turn, have organized into powerful political interest groups that aim to dictate agricultural policy to their governments. Farmers and their political allies pack the EU’s agriculture committee. Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money.
And where governments are seen as truant in delivering on their promises, cities and nations can be brought to a standstill by blockades of tractors, helping galvanize public opinion and push politicians into acquiescence.
Europe’s turn toward environmental protections is clashing with farming interests
Today, the growing importance of environmental goals in EU politics has driven a wedge into the sometimes contentious but mostly cozy relationship between farming interests and governments.
While EU subsidies do come with some environmental strings attached, such as requirements to protect wetlands or engage in soil-friendly crop rotation, these are often poorly enforced and noncompliance is common. In Europe, much like in the US, agriculture is governed with a lighter touch compared to other industries, a paradigm often known as agricultural exceptionalism.
In the Netherlands, for instance, farms have for decades been granted a derogation on nitrogen emissions, allowed to emit more than any other industry. This meant that, over the years, dairy farms and heavily fertilized crop fields leached nitrogen into the soil and water, poisoning rivers and wetlands.
In 2019, the Dutch government sought to close the loophole and buy out livestock farmers unable to comply with the restriction. Farmers launched a series of protests marked by the now-ubiquitous use of tractors to block roads and public spaces in a show of force against government bureaucrats. Many felt aggrieved that government, by pushing the resource-intensive industrial farming that had made the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse, had helped create the very environmental problems now being blamed on farmers.
Cities across the country ground to a halt, and the protesters formed a new political party, the far-right-aligned BoerBurgerBeweging (the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB). Last year, it won the country’s provincial elections in a landslide on the back of rural votes as well as broader anti-government and anti-EU sentiment, controlling 20 percent of seats in the Dutch senate.
It was a portent of things to come.
2019 was also the year the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, proposed the Green Deal, which aims to achieve net zero emissions across the EU by 2050 through emissions reduction across all industries, renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, and reforestation programs. Farm to Fork, the food system component of the plan, calls for dramatically reducing pesticide use and food waste, and promoting more sustainable dietary choices through product labeling and school lunches; independent modeling suggested it could cut agricultural emissions by up to 20 percent and halve biodiversity destruction.
Environmental policies are broadly popular with the European electorate, and that plan was arrived at through the EU’s highly bureaucratic — but nonetheless democratically deliberative — process. But because it originated with the European Commission, whose members are unelected, it was seen by some as being mandated by unaccountable functionaries. Farmers bristled at the idea of being told to devote some of their land to biodiversity and nature restoration. Growers of monocrop products like grains and grapes for wine balked at drastic pesticide reductions. The pesticide industry and its lobby saw its profits threatened.
But most impacted would be livestock, the sector least able to meet stringent environmental or animal welfare standards. Animal agriculture makes up 40 percent of European agricultural production, releases more than 80 percent of the continent’s emissions from agriculture, and receives more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies, according to a recent study using data from 2013.
Immediately, the agricultural lobby began petitioning politicians to delay or do away with the proposed rules, starting with the proposed pesticide reduction measures. At first, EU politicians held in their support for reforms, voting in 2021 to implement Farm to Fork. But as Covid-19, with its disruption of food supply chains, dragged on and Russia invaded Ukraine, raising the specter of a food shortage, ag lobby groups gained new ammunition to fire at what they framed as the Green Deal’s attack on food security and the livelihood of farmers. Attacks on pro-Green Deal politicians escalated, including threats of violence against its staunchest supporters. Bit by bit, political support for Farm to Fork began to erode.
By the end of 2023, before most of Farm to Fork had even been implemented, many of its core initiatives were already watered down or abandoned, including pesticide reduction mandates and farm animal welfare improvements. Also declawed was the nature restoration law, which would require EU member states to restore 20 percent of degraded habitats to preserve biodiversity, by calling on farmers to plant tree and flower strips along the edges of fields, for example. Industrial beef and dairy operations were also granted an exemption from industrial emissions targets despite being among the food system’s biggest emitters, responsible for most agricultural methane emissions.
Throughout, political allies of agricultural lobbies like the right-wing European People’s Party have celebrated these wins over the specter of “NGO environmental dictatorship.”
Farming interests are blocking the development of sustainable alternatives
The same groups pushing against environmental regulation in the name of keeping the government out of business have few compunctions about turning to governments to thwart their competition. Meat producers in particular are threatened not only by environmental regulations that would affect them most, as the food system’s biggest emitters, but also by meat alternatives that have the potential to cut into their market share.
Cell-cultivated meat, a novel technology that can harvest animal tissue from stem cells rather than slaughtered animals, has not yet received regulatory approval for sale in the EU and remains largely theoretical. That did not stop politicians in Italy, under pressure from agricultural lobby groups, from passing legislation last November banning not just the sale of cellular agriculture products, but also scientific research into the technology.
Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a member of the country’s far-right ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), declared cultivated meat a threat to Italian culture and civilization. Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest.
Farming lends itself to populism, which often acts as a cover for cold business calculations. The cultivated meat ban reveals that agricultural lobby group demands are generally about realpolitik rather than a principled position about state intervention — no different from any business that aims to protect its bottom line. Political scientist Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, has described such policy fights as “organized combat” between interest groups, which tends to favor powerful incumbents over new constituencies aiming to build political support for social or economic change. In Italy, an entrenched and politically well-connected agricultural lobby had the power to write its preferences into policy while proponents of cellular agriculture did not, allowing them to nip potential competition in the bud.
Something similar is at work in the unraveling of the EU’s green agenda. Proponents of environmental legislation, while technically having science and public support on their side, were either unprepared or lacked the heart for a fight with the battle-tested farming lobby.
All that took place before Europe became engulfed by protests. Then came the tractors.
Last December, a proposed cut to diesel subsidies (used to power tractors and other farm machinery) in Germany, which had more to do with the country’s budgetary crisis than with environmental regulations, sent aggrieved farmers into the streets.
Dozens of other protests erupted around Europe stemming from particular national issues. But as they grew, they coalesced into a generalized grievance about the failure of government and the EU to sufficiently support farmers, with new environmental policies offering a particularly easy target for ire.
Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers. ... Instead of taking responsibility for these problems, farmers often adopt a defensive position of denial.”
The protests have brought farmers of all stripes to the streets, big and small, organic and conventional. Despite their differences and the historic exclusion of small farmers from EU policymaking, most of Europe’s farmers share a common interest in maintaining subsidies and reducing regulation.
They also raise some valid points about the contradictions in EU policy, such as in their calls for more protection from foreign competitors that produce with lower standards than in Europe, including livestock produced in jurisdictions with no animal welfare protections or raised using growth stimulants banned in Europe. But this argument is undermined by farmers’ calls to weaken those very standards.
By late February, when a massive protest by farmers from across the continent ran amok through the EU quarter of Brussels, politicians across the continent were buckling to farmers’ demand. At the EU, even the watered-down version of the nature restoration law that had passed a vote in EU Parliament despite protests was stalled — perhaps indefinitely — as states including Belgium and Italy withdrew their support.
But perhaps most worrying has been the willingness of EU politicians to weaken already existing environmental standards, including loosening environmental conditions and reporting requirements for all farms smaller than 10 hectares.
These decisions may have also been motivated by upcoming EU elections. Many Europeans support the farmers’ cause, and as the Dutch case showed, the protests have the potential to galvanize voters to support parties seen as “pro-farmer.” With widespread concern about large gains for right and far-right parties in the EU Parliamentary elections next month, even ostensibly pro-Green Deal politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been forced to act appropriately deferential to the protesters.
Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices
The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground.
Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere.
But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones.
To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints.
One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.
Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices
The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground.
Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere.
But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones.
To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints.
One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24146466/europe-farmer-protests-eu-climate-environmental-policy-subsidies-livestock
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PLASTIC-EATING BACTERIA
Scientists have developed a "self-digesting plastic", which, they say, could help reduce pollution.
Polyurethane is used in everything from phone cases to trainers, but is tricky to recycle and mainly ends up in landfill.
However, researchers have come up with a sci-fi like solution.
By incorporating spores of plastic-eating bacteria they've developed a plastic that can self-destruct.
The spores remain dormant during the useful lifetime of the plastic, but spring back to life and start to digest the product when exposed to nutrients in compost.
There's hope "we can mitigate plastic pollution in nature", said researcher Han Sol Kim, of the University of California San Diego, La Jolla.
And there might be an added advantage in that the spores increase the toughness of the plastic.
"Our process makes the materials more rugged, so it extends its useful lifetime," said co-researcher, Jon Pokorski. "And then, when it's done, we're able to eliminate it from the environment, regardless of how it's disposed.”
The plastic is currently being worked on at the laboratory bench but could be in the real world within a few years, with the help of a manufacturer, he added.
The type of bacteria added to the plastic is Bacillus subtilis, widely used as a food additive and a probiotic.
Crucially, the bacteria has to be genetically engineered to be able to withstand the very high temperatures needed to make plastic.
And there might be an added advantage in that the spores increase the toughness of the plastic.
"Our process makes the materials more rugged, so it extends its useful lifetime," said co-researcher, Jon Pokorski. "And then, when it's done, we're able to eliminate it from the environment, regardless of how it's disposed.”
The plastic is currently being worked on at the laboratory bench but could be in the real world within a few years, with the help of a manufacturer, he added.
The type of bacteria added to the plastic is Bacillus subtilis, widely used as a food additive and a probiotic.
Crucially, the bacteria has to be genetically engineered to be able to withstand the very high temperatures needed to make plastic.
Polyurethane pellets and spore powders are melted together at high temperatures
But not everyone is convinced by the idea of developing biodegradable alternatives to conventional plastics. Some scientists argue it is far better to reduce the amount of plastic used in the first place.
The penultimate round of UN talks for a future plastics treaty have just drawn to a close in Canada, aimed at agreeing a global deal on tackling plastic pollution.
Prof Steve Fletcher, director of the Revolution Plastics Institute at the University of Portsmouth, said the most effective way of tackling plastic pollution was to agree on global legally binding cuts in plastic production.
He told BBC News: "Care must be taken with potential solutions of this sort, which could give the impression that we should worry less about plastic pollution because any plastic leaking into the environment will quickly, and ideally safely, degrade. Yet, for the vast majority of plastics, this is not the case.”
The research is published in the journal, Nature Communications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68927816
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FIRST GAS-POWERED AUTOMOBILE
Although Nikolaus Otto wanted to attend technical school, it was not to be. His father, the village postmaster and innkeeper, had died shortly after the boy’s birth and the economic decline following the unsuccessful German revolution of 1848 left his mother unable to afford to send him. So instead, Nikolaus took a job as a grocery store clerk, then as a traveling salesman, peddling tea, sugar, and kitchenware to grocery stores across western Germany, dreaming all the while (presumably) of life as an engineer.
While traveling for his sales circuit Otto learned of the gas-powered internal combustion engine that had been invented by Etienne Lenoir. Lenoir’s invention was revolutionary (being the world’s first workable internal combustion engine) but impractical. It was exceedingly noisy, inefficient, generated excessive heat, and relied on expensive fuel that had to be transported and stored in a gaseous state. The problems with Lenoir’s engine, Otto believed, could be solved by using liquid fuel instead. Although he had no formal technical education, Otto invented a carburetor and in 1861 created a new gasoline-powered engine—what would become the world’s first practical internal combustion engine.
Lacking the money to commercialize his invention, in 1864 Otto partnered with Eugen Langen, a German businessman who recognized the potential of Otto’s engine. Together they built a factory, improved the prototypes, and in 1867 exhibited the engine at the Paris Exhibition, where it won the gold medal. With the resulting publicity, business boomed. Otto and Langen brought on additional investors and hired a brilliant engineer named Gottlieb Daimler as their technical director. By the mid 1870’s the company (by then called Gasmotoren-Frabrik Deutz AG) was the world’s premier engine manufacturer and Nikolaus Otto had become a wealthy man.
In 1876 Otto came up with a new and improved design, changing the internal combustion engine forever. To increase power and efficiency, while decreasing noise and vibration, he invented a revolutionary four stroke engine, going against the prevailing belief that every cylinder stroke should produce power. The four-stroke engine became known as the “Otto engine” and his concept was called the “Otto cycle.” The engine was an immediate success. In 1882 Daimler installed one in a carriage and created the world’s first automobile.
Having invented machines that would change the world, Nikolaus Otto died in Cologne at age 58, on January 26, 1891, one hundred thirty-three years ago. ~ Shiv Tandon, Quora
Nikolaus Otto
Donna Porcella:
I accidentally came across the Mark 1 internal combustion engine being demonstrated while in Deutz. It was a big cylinder (maybe 4 liters capacity) with ignition coming from a pilot light. It ran at around 50 RPM and it was an atmospheric engine, just like the first steam engines, that is, the power stroke came from atmospheric pressure. Fuel ignition only gave enough power to lift the piston, condensation of the burnt fuel (mostly steam) in the cylinder created a partial vacuum which provided a working power in the down stroke of about one horsepower. Its main advantage over a steam engine was that it provided power immediately, no waiting for the water to boil.
It was a commercial success and won a medal at the Paris Exposition.
Charles:
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SCHOPENHAUER ON SEMI-SATISFIED LIFE
A man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
On 13 December 1807, in fashionable Weimar, Johanna Schopenhauer picked up her pen and wrote to her 19-year-old son Arthur: ‘It is necessary for my happiness to know that you are happy, but not to be a witness to it.’
Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal behind their family compound. It is possible that he slipped and fell, but Arthur suspected that his father jumped out of the warehouse loft into the icy waters below. Johanna did not disagree. Four months after the suicide, she had sold the house, soon to leave for Weimar where a successful career as a writer and saloniste awaited her. Arthur stayed behind with the intention of completing the merchant apprenticeship his father had arranged shortly before his death. It wasn’t long, however, before Arthur wanted out too.
In an exchange of letters throughout 1807, mother and son entered tense negotiations over the terms of Arthur’s release. Johanna would be supportive of Arthur’s decision to leave Hamburg in search of an intellectually fulfilling life – how could she not? – including using her connections to help pave the way for his university education. But on one condition: he must leave her alone. Certainly, he must not move to be near her in Weimar, and under no circumstances would she let him stay with her.
What her line of 13 December doesn’t reveal is that Johanna simply couldn’t tolerate Arthur: ‘All your good qualities,’ she wrote on 6 November, ‘become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others … If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.’ He was, in short, a boorish and tiresome know-it-all.
If people found Arthur Schopenhauer’s company intolerable, the feeling was mutual. He spent long depressive periods in self-imposed isolation, including the first two months of 1832 in his new rooms in Frankfurt, the city that became his adoptive home after a stint in Berlin. He defended himself against loneliness with the belief that solitude is the only fitting condition for a philosopher: ‘Were I a King,’ he said, ‘my prime command would be – Leave me alone.’ The subject of happiness, then, is not normally associated with Schopenhauer, neither as a person nor as a philosopher. Quite the opposite: he is normally associated with the deepest pessimism in the history of European philosophy.
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on two kinds of observation. The first is an inward-looking observation that we aren’t simply rational beings who seek to know and understand the world, but also desiring beings who strive to obtain things from the world. Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty.
If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’.
Schopenhauer knew from his extensive studies of classical Indian philosophy that he wasn’t the first to observe that suffering is essential to life. The Buddhists have a word for this suffering, dukkha, which is acknowledged in the first of its Four Noble Truths. The fourth and final of these truths, magga, or the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to the cessation of dukkha, would also inspire large parts of his moral philosophy.
The second kind of observation is outward-looking. According to Schopenhauer, a glance at the world around us disproves the defining thesis of Gottfried Leibniz’s optimism that ours is the best of all possible worlds. On the contrary, Schopenhauer claims, if our world is ordered in any way, it is ordered to maximize pain and suffering. He gives the example of predatory animals that cannot but devour other animals in order to survive and so become ‘the living grave of thousands of others’. Nature as a whole is ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson later put it, pitting one creature against another, either as the devourer or the devoured, in a deadly fight for survival.
Civilization doesn’t help much either. It adds so many sites of human suffering. In The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer wrote: “if you led the most unrepentant optimist through the hospitals, military wards, and surgical theaters, through the prisons, torture chambers and slave stalls, through battlefields and places of judgment, and then open for him all the dark dwellings of misery that hide from cold curiosity, then he too would surely come to see the nature of this best of all possible worlds.”
If you had to guess the world’s purpose just by looking at the results it achieves, you could only think it was a place of punishment.
These observations, the first on human nature and the second on nature itself, support Schopenhauer’s pessimistic claims that life is not worth living and the world should not exist. We are never given in advance the choice whether to exist or not but, if we were, it would be irrational to choose to exist in a world where we can’t profit from life but only lose. Or as Schopenhauer puts it in another key line: ‘life is a business that does not cover its costs’.
Is there a place for happiness in all this? There certainly should be. It can’t be ignored that happiness exists; too many people have experienced happiness for themselves and seen it in others. But once Schopenhauer admits that happiness exists, there is a risk that his pessimism will start to unravel. Even if it’s true that every living thing must encounter suffering, this suffering might be offset by finding some amount of happiness too. Some suffering might be the means to a happiness worth having or even a part of such happiness. If this is so, then Schopenhauer hasn’t yet given us a good reason not to want to exist. Happiness might make life worth living after all.
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Schopenhauer doesn’t deny that happiness exists. He does, however, think that we are generally mistaken about what happiness is. According to him, happiness is no more than the absence of pain and suffering; the moment of relief occasionally felt between the fulfillment of one desire and the pursuit of the next. For example, imagine the satisfaction of buying your first home. What makes us happy here, Schopenhauer would say, is not the positive state of being a homeowner, but the negative state of relief from the worries that come with not owning your own home (as well as relief from the notoriously stressful process of buying property itself). This happiness, Schopenhauer would be quick to point out, is likely to be short-lived, as a host of new worries and stresses emerge, such as paying down the mortgage, or doing up the bathroom.
He reinforces his stance on the negative nature of happiness with some astute psychological observations. All of them highlight the difficulty of achieving and appreciating happiness. For example, we tend not to notice all the things that are going well for us, but instead we focus on the bad things, or as Schopenhauer puts it with his keen eye for an analogy:
‘we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches’.
If we do manage to resolve whatever is bothering us, we tend quickly to take it for granted and shift our focus to the next problem: ‘it is like a bite of food we have enjoyed, which stops existing for our feeling the moment it is swallowed.’ Moreover, however small the next problem, we tend to magnify it to match the previous one: ‘it still knows how to puff itself up so that it seems to equal it in size, and so it can fill the whole throne as the main worry of the day.’ Consequently, we rarely feel the benefit of the things we have while we still have them: ‘We do not become aware of the three greatest goods in life as such – that is, health, youth and freedom – so long as we possess them, but only after we have lost them.’ Or as later immortalized in lyrics by Joni Mitchell: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.’
None of this is to say that no one ever feels happy. Again, this would fly in the face of the personal experience of countless people who have felt happy at some point in their lives. It does tell us, however, that happiness differs from pain and suffering in the way that it’s felt. Pain and suffering announce themselves whether we like it or not. They highlight that something is wrong and needs fixing. However small and trivial the problem might be, pain and suffering will make it our number-one priority. Happy feelings, on the other hand, don’t always announce themselves. We can have all the things that should make us feel happy and yet fail to feel happy. It could be because pain and suffering are tirelessly flagging up things not to feel happy about, but it could just be that – like the mouthful of food after it’s swallowed – we have forgotten all the things that are doing us good.
For this reason, Schopenhauer emphasizes the essential role of recollection and reflection in generating feelings of happiness: ‘Our cognition of satisfaction and pleasure is only indirect, when we remember the sufferings and privations that preceded them and ceased when they appeared.’ To appreciate the benefit of having things, in other words, we must recall what it was like not to have them. The fact that this happiness is based on the cessation of previous suffering is not incompatible with intense feelings of pleasure.
The intensity of the pleasure is proportionate to the intensity of the suffering that preceded it. Although far from happiness, Primo Levi gives a powerful example of the possibilities of profound relief in his book If This Is a Man (1947), his account of imprisonment at Auschwitz, when he reports on the brief moments between the labor tasks he was forced to complete: ‘When we reach the cylinder, we unload the tie on the ground, and I stand stiffly, my eyes vacant, mouth open, and arms dangling, sunk in the ephemeral and negative ecstasy of the cessation of pain.’
In fact, recalling our own actual suffering from the past is not our only option for feeling good about the present. We can instead reflect on all the suffering that was merely possible for us. This kind of reflection might be just as effective in generating feelings of relief, only about the limitless bad things that could have happened to us but fortunately never did. We might even reflect on the bad things that are happening or have happened to other people. In this respect, Levi’s painful recollections offer us another service: it is impossible for observers to read If This Is a Man without feeling extremely fortunate never to have encountered the scarcely imaginable hardships and indignities that Levi describes.
On the pleasure of avoiding another’s misfortune, Schopenhauer quotes Lucretius:
It is a joy to stand at the sea when it is lashed by strong winds,
To stand at the shore and to see a skipper in distress
Not that we like to see another person’s pain,
But because it pleases us to know that we are free of this evil.
Schopenhauer wisely cautions us about this kind of pleasure because it ‘lies very near the source of true and positive malice’. He might have in mind its proximity to – or identity with – Schadenfreude, the attitude of taking joy in the suffering of others. Lucretius identifies the thin line that separates Schadenfreude from sadism: it is not that we enjoy someone else’s misfortune, but that their misfortune acts as a reminder of how fortunate we are, and enables us to feel pleased about it.
Sometimes, however, Schopenhauer condemns Schadenfreude in the strongest terms: ‘the worst trait in human nature is Schadenfreude’. The difference between Schadenfreude and cruelty, he says, is merely the difference between attitude and action: ‘As Schadenfreude is simply theoretical cruelty, so cruelty is simply practical Schadenfreude.’ While attitudes such as envy – wanting someone else’s success for yourself – are flawed but merely human and therefore excusable, Schadenfreude is positively ‘devilish’.
On Schopenhauer’s understanding of things, then, in order to be happy, we must aim to eliminate pain and suffering from our lives, and in order to feel happy, we must also take the time to reflect on their absence. In search of an ethical system based on similar insights, Schopenhauer turned not to the moral philosophers of his own day but instead to ancient Greek schools of thought. Of all of these schools, he suggests, his own views on happiness have the closest affinity with Stoicism: like him, he claims, the Stoic philosophers such as Stobaeus, Epictetus and Seneca identified a happy life with a painless existence.
In general, ancient Greece is a good place to start the search for a philosophy of happiness because, according to Schopenhauer, the Greeks agreed on one thing: the task of practical reason is to figure out the best kind of life and how it can be achieved. Furthermore, Schopenhauer says, with the exception of Plato, they all equated this task with providing a guide to a happy life. They cared only about how virtue can improve our earthly lives, and thought little about how it might relate to any life after death or otherworldly realm.
Thinking of happiness as the avoidance of suffering is the view that distinguishes Stoicism from other schools, according to Schopenhauer, as well as the one he shares with it. He identifies two functions of practical reason that the Stoics used in their quest for a painless existence. There is the indirect function, on the one hand, where careful planning and forethought allow the Stoic to pick out and follow the least painful path through life. On the other, there is the direct function, where instead of removing or avoiding obstacles in life’s path, the Stoic reconsiders these obstacles in a way that changes his feelings towards them. One is a change in practice, while the other a change in thinking.
Stoicism’s distinctive contribution to ethics lies in the nature of the change in thinking it recommends, according to Schopenhauer. First, the Stoic observes that painful feelings of privation ‘do not follow immediately and necessarily from not-having, but rather from wanting-to-have and yet not having’. It then becomes obvious that to avoid these painful feelings altogether, we must eliminate the wanting-to-have part.
Furthermore, the bigger our ambitions about what we want to have and the higher our hopes of achieving them, the sharper the pain when we fail. If we cannot help wanting to have some things, then we should at least keep those wants within realistic and achievable proportions. Perhaps lapsing back into his own pessimism, Schopenhauer adds that we should become suspicious of ourselves if we begin to expect a great amount of happiness waiting for us in the future; we are almost certainly being unrealistic. ‘Every lively pleasure,’ he says, ‘is a delusion.’
Thus the Stoic aims for ataraxia, a state of inner calmness and serenity however turbulent the world outside might be. Schopenhauer believes his observations about the inevitability of suffering can help to achieve this aim if taken on as convictions. Pain and suffering sting all the more if we think they are accidental and could have been avoided. While it might be true of any particular suffering that it could have been avoided, suffering in general is unavoidable and universal. If we manage to take this on board, Schopenhauer thinks, we might worry less about encountering suffering, or at least worry about it in the way that we worry about other things we can’t avoid, such as old age (for most of us) and death.
The last thing we should do is believe the opposite: that we are destined to find happiness in life rather than encounter suffering. If we believe the world owes us happiness, we are bound to be sorely disappointed, not least because, when we do achieve whatever we think will make us happy, we will have new unfulfilled desires that will supersede the old ones. We are also bound to feel resentment towards the obstacles that stand between us and the happiness we feel entitled to.
Some people, Schopenhauer observes, concentrate and externalize this resentment by setting a goal for a happy life that on some level they know is unachievable. Then, when it never materializes, they always have something other than themselves to point to and blame for why they aren’t happy. ‘In this respect,’ Schopenhauer says, ‘the external motive for sadness plays the same role that a blister remedy does on the body, drawing together all the bad humors that would have otherwise been scattered.’
While Schopenhauer does feel an affinity for the Stoic way of thinking, he doesn’t see eye to eye with Stoicism on every issue. In fact, he rejects the basic premise common to all the ancient Greek schools; a happy life is not even possible, according to Schopenhauer, because, remember, all life is suffering. Devising systems of morals to act as a guide to a happy life is, as far as Schopenhauer is concerned, a fool’s errand. The logical end of Stoicism is especially sticky, according to Schopenhauer, because it conceives the goal of happiness as the task of eliminating pain. If he is right that all life is suffering, then the only way really to eliminate suffering is to eliminate life itself. The ultimate end of Stoicism, then, would be suicide.
Instead, Schopenhauer gives us a different picture of a happy life, one that is not total happiness. While suffering can’t be excluded from life altogether, it can be reduced by making sure no kind of suffering goes on for too long. Going back to Schopenhauer’s image of the pendulum, a happy life would include enough success in fulfilling our desires that we are never in too much pain, but also enough failure to ensure that we are never too bored. It would be a ‘game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and from this to a new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is called suffering.’ A well-paced oscillation between wish and fulfillment, which is at most a semi-satisfied life, is the best we can hope for as far as happiness is concerned.
If a good life, conceived as a happy life, is a futile aim for ethics, this raises the question of what the real aim of ethics should be. The background of Schopenhauer’s pessimism is never far away from this question. It’s not obvious to Schopenhauer that the semi-satisfied life presented above is better than nonexistence. Such a life would still contain a preponderance of suffering, even if no kind of suffering would go on for too long.
Rather than trying to make the world into a happy home, then, Schopenhauer opts for an ethics that might save us from the world altogether. He endorses asceticism, the practice of severe self-denial exemplified in the saints and mystics of many world religions, over Stoicism: "How completely different they seem, next to the Stoic sage, those who the wisdom of India sets before us and has actually brought forth, those voluntary penitents who overcome the world; or even the Christian savior … who, with perfect virtue, holiness and sublimity, nevertheless stands before us in a state of the utmost suffering."
Note that Schopenhauer’s otherworldly ascetics are not happy. They have entirely given up the game of a semi-satisfied life. Instead, they accept, and come to symbolize, the universality and inevitability of suffering, in order to transcend it. In relation to the ascetic, Schopenhauer is more likely to use words such as composure and peace than happiness and pleasure.
To say that Schopenhauer endorsed asceticism might appear to suggest that he practiced it himself. Far from it. The most ascetic part of his daily routine in Frankfurt was the cold sponge bath he took between seven and eight every morning. After that, he made his own coffee and settled down to write for a few hours before receiving selected visitors, until his housekeeper appeared at noon, cuing them to leave.
He played flute for half an hour each day – an activity that, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, belied the sincerity of his pessimism – and then made his way to his favorite spot to eat, the Hôtel d’Angleterre, for a hearty afternoon meal. After this he might make himself another coffee, take an hour’s nap, then read a little light literature before walking his dog, a white poodle called Atma, while smoking a cigar, all before settling in for his typical nine-hour sleep. The life of the Buddha it was not.
Schopenhauer’s endorsement of asceticism is more admiration than aspiration, then. In his defense, and again unlike the ancient Greeks, Schopenhauer thought that the theoretical study of ethics had little to do with living an ethical life, or vice versa: ‘it is just as unnecessary for the saint to be a philosopher as it is for a philosopher to be a saint,’ he wrote, ‘just as it is completely unnecessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor or a great sculptor to be beautiful.’ Only a small number of exceptional individuals achieve the ascetic life in which true salvation consists, he said. The rest of us have to make do with a semi-satisfied life at best. But if Schopenhauer’s way of living constitutes an example of such a life, it might not seem so bad after all.
https://aeon.co/essays/for-schopenhauer-happiness-is-a-state-of-semi-satisfaction
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A FORMER COMMITTED CHRISTIAN DESCRIBES HIS JOURNEY
I was raised (indoctrinated) as a Methodist, and was a fully committed Christian. When doubts bubbled up, I was able to push them aside or ignore them. I was very involved with the church where I taught Sunday School, sang in the choir, went to Bible studies, ran funding drives, counted the offerings, chaired committees, and enjoyed the sense of community that being part of a church provides. I loved it so much, that I just couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t believe. Why wouldn’t they want the assurance of eternal life in the presence of a mighty and loving creator?
By the time I got into my thirties the doubts started getting stronger. Being an Engineer with a drive to fix things, I saw these doubts as an opportunity. If I could master them then I would be able to show others how to handle them. I felt that the doubts had been put before me so that I could figure them out and go on to help others with what I had learned.
So I did something that I had never done before – instead of reading the Bible in the small chunks I was accustomed to, I decided that I would let the truth take me where ever it goes, and I read the Bible from start to finish. That also meant that I had to look at the Bible as if I was an outsider in order to understand why others wouldn’t believe. In other words, I had to drop my assumptions that god was always good, and that the Bible was always true and always correct.
As I read through it with this new perspective I was horrified at what it actually said. In the Old Testament god was portrayed as a vicious, brutal, vindictive dictator ordering death and harsh punishments for the silliest of things. I knew that the New Testament was gentler, so I hoped that I would find an explanation for how that transition could be made. What I found instead was that the New Testament had to have the Old Testament the way it was to justify the belief in the ‘sacrifice’ of Jesus to appease the vicious god of the Old Testament.
I came to the realization that the crux of the entire religion was based on an ancient superstition related to the magical qualities of blood — magic that science shows we no longer need to explain what blood does and how it actually works. There could be no forgiveness of sins with the spilling of blood because that superstition has been shown not to be true. That meant that there couldn’t even have been a demand for a blood payment for the curse of original sin because the magic required to make it work didn’t really exist.
When that realization hit me, the whole belief system fell apart — and the bible transitioned from being a book of magical love and divine intervention to being one of myth. Only after that did I see the silliness of many of the stories such as the creation story, and Noah’s Ark. And I realized that what the Bible called demons and evil spirits we today call diseases and infections that can be treated with medical science.
At this point, I don’t see any way that I can ever believe in the Bible again.
Gullibility has a price that I’m no longer willing to pay. Because I now believe that there is no eternal life, I’m no longer willing to waste any more of my current life believing in and professing the existence of a deity unless there is some very solid evidence that it really exists. Old books written a long time ago by VERY superstitious people no longer qualify as ‘evidence’ for me. ~ Mark Whitt, Quora
Mark Whitt:
Exactly how does the blood of Jesus wash away sins? God requires the blood of an innocent - that’s why ‘innocent’ animals were used for the sacrifices in the temple. What makes ‘innocent blood’ special and necessary? Why is that needed to transfer sin from one to the other, and exactly how does that occur?
Something else that I’ve learned in the process is that belief is not something you can choose to do. You either believe something or you don’t. I was no longer able to ignore my doubts so I had to investigate them. Once I did I found that I could no longer believe.
However, I’ve changed my mind before and leave open the possibility that I might change it again if the right information and/or evidence comes along. If there really is a loving god out there then I’m sure it will happen. If it doesn’t then it looks like I got it right this time.
Oriana:
Some elements here echo my own journey. I genuinely tried my best to suppress my doubts. As I became acquainted with the classical mythology and, to some extent, other world mythologies (Hindu, Norse, Ancient Egyptian, etc), soon after I turned fourteen, I had this thought about the Judeo-Christian religion, a thought that could not be suppressed and changed my life forever: “So, this is just another mythology.”
Many years later, I began to read the first page of Genesis, but didn’t get very far before I saw it again: “This really IS mythology.” It was so glaringly obvious. Just the first page of Genesis is myth writ large, and by large I mean GIGANTIC.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Not that we gain nothing by reading myth as myth. Who hasn't enjoyed the story of Jonah and the Whale? Who wasn't at least somewhat disturbed, in the story of the Garden of Eden, by a deity that lies and the snake that tells the truth?
Is God good, or evil? Why hasn’t humanity come up with a more loving god? Is it simply impossible, life being what it is? Is God life itself? Is it the universe, beyond good and evil? [Here Milosz slyly replied, "Beyond good and evil, there is only evil."]
Yet the Bible is inseparable from the Western culture. We should study it -- as literature and mythology. 
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THE CASE FOR NOT DIETING
~ The long-term success rate of dieting is 5 to 10 percent. That is dismal. All the deprivation, all the stress, all the struggle, and it won't work for most of us.
It's not that we lack self-discipline or willpower to be successful. The problem is that dieting couldn't be more opposite to how we're evolutionarily designed to survive and function best. Could you ever imagine our distant ancestors going against their biological drive for survival by purposefully eating less food when it was available?
Having a crazy sweet tooth helped us survive when food was scarce, and having extra body fat was an important life insurance policy. Those who were more driven to eat and those who were better at storing fat had a better chance at survival.
Our DNA has changed very little in the past 10,000 years and we are not hardwired to eat less.
Even worse, dieting is one of the best ways to gain weight, not lose it. Continually being on and off a diet can create a cycle where the increase in stress makes us fatter over the long run. In fact, 66 percent of dieters don't just gain the weight back, they gain more fat, and it's stored preferentially as visceral fat around the midsection.
Dieting is one of the most physiologically and psychologically stressful things we can do. Research shows that people who diet end up gaining more weight over time than people who never do because:
1. Dieting releases cortisol. Research has shown that calorie restriction increases the production of the stress hormone cortisol. Low blood glucose from not eating enough or going too long without eating signals the body that a famine is occurring. This triggers the fight-or-flight response and cortisol is released.
2. Cortisol makes us overeat. One of cortisol's jobs is to replace the energy we theoretically spent fighting and fleeing. When dieting, the only thing we're "fighting" is the urge to eat that chocolate chip cookie, and we usually don't win. This cortisol-induced hunger makes us seek out large amounts of food high in fat and sugar.
3. Cortisol makes us store fat. Cortisol puts the body into fat storage mode to replenish the fat stores that were released to fuel the fight-or-flight response. It takes the food we overeat and converts it into stored fat on the body, primarily around the midsection.
4. We lose precious muscle mass. When the body is in fat-storage mode, it breaks down stored protein from muscle mass and converts it into usable energy [6]. Less muscle mass and more fat makes us less sensitive to insulin [7, 8], an important hormone produced by the pancreas for processing blood glucose. The pancreas has to continually work harder to produce greater amounts of insulin to process glucose, which places stress on the organ. Long-term, this stress wears out cells in pancreas and can lead to diabetes.
5. Our metabolism slows. When the body goes into energy-conservation mode, it doesn't just store fat. It also slows metabolic rate in order to conserve precious and limited energy supplies. Dieting can suppress resting metabolic rate by up to 20 percent. Over the long run, the loss of muscle mass and decrease in metabolism can increase body fat -- the exact opposite of what we're trying to do on a diet.
Here's how you can sustainably reduce body fat in a way that doesn't trigger the fight-or-flight response.
1. Eat approximately every three hours, alternating between moderate-sized meals and small snacks. By eating small amounts all day long you keep blood glucose levels balanced and don't trigger the fight or flight response. It prevents the release of cortisol and keeps your metabolism burning strong. (Oriana: But the inconvenience of this constant munching?)
2. At meals, eat only enough to last you for about three hours. The goal is to eat to the point of feeling content, not full. This ensures there's enough glucose to fuel the body, but not so much that it will be stored away in the fat cells. (Oriana: Personally, I love going without food for five-six hours. That means I can concentrate on the work in front of me.)
3. Plate It Out at meals. Create a 50-25-25 food distribution on your plate. Your first order of business is to find a source of lean protein. It slows blood glucose levels, increases satiety, and prevents a blood glucose spike that could be stored as fat. Lean protein should comprise 25 percent of your plate. Next up are fruits and/or vegetables, which should take up 50 percent of your plate. Lastly, whole grains should make up the final 25 percent.
4. Make your snacks low-glycemic and in the range of 50 to 150 calories. Having a small snack between meals ensures blood glucose levels don't get too low and trigger the release of cortisol. It also prevents you from getting so hungry you overeat at meals. Low-glycemic foods are broken down into glucose more slowly, make you feel fuller for longer, and are less likely to be stored as fat.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/5-reasons-why-you-need-to_b_6511702
Oriana:
The first principle of Intuitive Eating is to eat only when you feel hungry, and quit as soon as you feel satisfied. It’s listening to your body, which is why Intuitive Eating is also called Mindful Eating.
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SPAYED AND NEUTERED DOGS SHOW INCREASED SYMPTOMS OF AGING
~ In North America, the spaying and neutering of pet dogs has almost taken on a moral or religious tone. Some of the websites maintained by humane societies and veterinary groups even talk about "The Responsibility of Spaying and Neutering Dogs" and refer to the behavioral benefits of these surgical procedures with statements like, "Your dog should be spayed or neutered because sex hormones lead to unnecessary stress and aggression among dogs.”
Not a Universal Practice
Apparently the message that spaying and neutering are desirable or perhaps even necessary practices for pet dogs has gotten through to the general population, since in North America between 70 and 80 percent of dogs are spayed or neutered. Because of the often repeated belief that neutered dogs are less likely to be aggressive, many dog parks, apartments, and dog boarding kennels, require that pets that use their facilities be surgically desexed.
The picture in Europe, however, is quite different. A Swedish study found that 99% of the dogs in their sample were not neutered. A Hungarian study showed 57% intact dogs, and a British survey found 46% intact dogs. In fact it is against the law to neuter dogs in Norway, unless there is a specific medical reason.
Unwanted Physical Consequences of Spaying and Neutering
North Americans tend to focus on the purported behavioral benefits of spaying or neutering while ignoring the scientific data suggesting that there are physical downsides related to these procedures. Michelle Kutzler of Oregon State University has pointed out that spaying and neutering is associated with an increased risk of several long-term health problems, including urinary incontinence, bladder stones, hypothyroidism, diabetes mellitus, hip dysplasia, cruciate ligament rupture, obesity, as well as several forms of cancer.
Does the Behavior Change?
What is even worse is the fact that the scientific data suggests that the behavior changes that are being sought by spaying and neutering dogs (reduced aggression and lower excitability) are actually not obtained according to two major studies. The number of dogs tested in these two studies is quite large. Deborah Duffy and James Serpell, at the University of Pennsylvania, tested two different samples, one of 1,552 dogs and the other of 3,593 dogs. Parvene Farhoody, at Hunter College in New York, tested 10,839 dogs. Thus, the combined studies provide data on 15,984 dogs in total, making this an amazingly powerful data set.
The main findings were consistent across all three samples of dogs. Given that one of the accepted behavioral reasons for spaying and neutering is to reduce aggression, the distressing results of these investigations is that spayed and neutered dogs actually show considerably more aggression, as well as increased likelihood of some ancillary unwanted behaviors. Thus the data indicates that spaying and neutering actually increases the severity of the problem behaviors that they are intended to solve.
Spaying, Neutering, and Signs of Aging
A new study by a team of investigators headed by David Vajányi at the University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Košice, Slovakia provides additional arguments against the advisability of spaying and neutering dogs based on both behavioral and physiological changes caused by these procedures. This new research suggests that dogs that have been surgically desexed actually show accelerated signs of aging.
This current study had a moderate sample size of 785 dogs. It looked at a number of different factors associated with signs of aging and found that whether dogs had been spayed or neutered was one of the most significant determinants as to their frequency. For example, they observed that regardless of sexual status, the weight of dogs increased with age. Desexing itself causes a significant rise in a dog's weight, and the expected age-related weight gain was almost twice as much in the neutered dog than as the gain observed in intact dogs.
They summarize their results saying: "When considering neutering status, we observed that neutered animals had more obvious manifestations of aging than intact males and females; with statistical significance for the manifestations such as weight increase, more frequent urination, and deterioration of vision. Neutered dogs, especially dogs of larger breeds, also had more difficulty with movement, which is probably related to their frequent high weight."
As for cognitive changes that are associated with age and sexual status, the researchers suggest "that the presence of circulating testosterone in sexually intact dogs can slow down the progression of cognitive impairment in dogs that have already shown signs of moderate impairment. Similarly, estrogens may also have a protective role”.
The desexing of dogs is a reasonable procedure if your sole aim is population control; for other purposes, whether a dog should be spayed or neutered should be carefully thought through. If you are considering these surgical procedures as a means of behavioral control (reducing aggression or over-excitement) it is probably not an advisable course of action. The data suggests that spaying and neutering doesn't reduce canine aggression and may even make the behavior problems worse. Furthermore the negative physiological consequences, including increased signs of aging, provide a definite risk for your pet.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/202404/spayed-and-neutered-dogs-show-more-signs-of-aging
Oriana:
Hah! I’ve just discovered another topic where people have strong opinions. To neuter or not to neuter? What about castration causing obesity and lethargy? It seems that the answer is along the lines of “It depends . . .”
Sex hormones have some very important functions besides their role in reproduction, e.g. the development of muscles and bones, as well as good brain function. Here is one answer I like:
There is a study that is often quoted by those who are pro spay-neuter. This study concluded that desexed dogs lived longer — however it also states that the most common causes of death in desexed dogs is cancer and autoimmune diseases, while in intact dogs the most common causes of death is trauma and infectious diseases.
Basically, desexed dogs are dying from misplaced cells and overactive immune systems whereas intact dogs are dying from accidents and bugs they’ve picked up. These 2 causes of death are very likely linked. A dog that’s allowed to wander is more likely to meet its end by the bumper of a car, and is able to get into things that are unsanitary and interact with wildlife while it’s out unsupervised.
Ensure that your intact dog is in a secure place when you have to leave it at home and supervise any time that it’s put outside, and train it well. Do these 3 things and your dog will live a long, happy, healthy life, with a much lower risk of cancer, obesity and joint issues than a desexed dog.
If you want to ensure it’s incapable of producing unwanted litters, have a vasectomy performed on males instead of a castration and an ovary sparing spay done on a bitch, although I would recommend that you do an ovary sparing spay on a bitch anyway due to the high risk of pyometra (uterine infection).
She’ll still have heats and will still need to be locked away from other dogs for the duration of her heats, however they will be less messy and she won’t be able to get pregnant, while also keeping all of the benefits of retaining her sex hormone producing tissue. A dog's sex hormones protect them from cancer and keeps their ligaments in good condition. It’s well worth the extra effort to leave them intact. ~ Skye Iron, Quora
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WHEN TO EAT CALCIUM-RICH FOOD
A new study of more than 36,000 American adults suggests that too much dietary calcium intake in evening meals could lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
Experts say that circadian rhythms help regulate the absorption of calcium, and daylight hours are generally the best for that process.
But too much calcium in general, especially from supplements, can lead to issues that contribute to cardiovascular problems.
Reducing the intake of dietary calcium at dinner and instead increasing it at breakfast could lead to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, a new study suggests.
The study examined the dietary calcium intake of more than 36,000 American adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys between 2003 and 2018.
The study participants were 17,456 males, 18,708 females, and 4,040 cardiovascular disease patients; their calcium intake from morning and evening meals was divided into five different quadrants.
Excluded from the study were people under 20 years old, pregnant women, anyone using calcium supplements, people who consumed more than 4,500 kilocalories (kcal) a day, and those with incomplete data.
Ultimately, researchers found, spreading the intake of calcium over the two meals was the best for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. But substituting a 5% calcium intake from dinner with that at breakfast pulled that risk down 6% overall.
Still, the authors write, there are other factors that are either unobserved or unknown that could affect the ultimate results, and that cohorts of other races and countries need to be examined for any discrepancies or similarities.
“Currently, the evidence for the relationship between dietary calcium intake and [cardiovascular disease] risk is insufficient and controversial,” the study authors wrote, while noting that this was the first such study to examine the links between calcium consumption at breakfast/dinner and cardiovascular disease.
“Studies have shown that too much or too little calcium intake has adverse effects on [cardiovascular disease],” they noted in their paper.
CALCIUM AND CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH
Calcium’s role in the body is most notably in the formation and maintenance of bones and teeth, but it also regulates muscle contraction, helps with blood clotting, and maintains the muscle processes of the heart.
Cardiovascular disease is known to be the most common cause of death, with at least 17.9 million people dying from it in 2019.
Where calcium and cardiovascular disease intersect may have to do with circadian rhythms, which can also affect the way that nutrients are absorbed in the body.
As the current study authors noted in their paper, recently: “Some studies have demonstrated that the circadian clock system can interact with nutrients to influence bodily function. In mammals, circadian oscillations in physiology and behavior are controlled by a master clock located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus.”
Some researchers also believe that these internal rhythms can regulate the absorption of calcium and metabolism.
Melanie Murphy Richter, a registered dietitian nutritionist and the director of communications for the nutrition company Prolon, who was not involved in the study, told Medical News Today that circadian rhythms make a big difference:
“From a circadian pattern perspective, research suggests that calcium absorption might be slightly higher during the day because certain hormones that are required for calcium metabolism like the parathyroid hormone, for instance, tend to also be higher during daylight hours.”
Richter added that overuse of calcium supplements in general can also be problematic, given that dietary calcium can be difficult to consume too much of by itself.
“Most of the issues relating to calcium intake and cardiovascular health are related to supplementation, where toxic overloads are more easily achieved. Taking too much calcium can result in a condition called hypercalcemia,” she said.
“Hypercalcemia can contribute to heart arrhythmias, heart palpitations, fainting, and sometimes even more severe heart issues. Additionally, high calcium intake can contribute to the formation of calcium deposits in our arteries which can decrease blood flow and therefore increase incidents of stroke, hypertension or heart attack,“ explained Richter.
“Not to mention, excessive calcium supplementation can increase vascular inflammation and oxidative stress which can impact the development of more problematic cardiovascular diseases,” she added.
WHO SHOULD TAKE CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTS
Kristin Kirkpatrick, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic Department of Wellness & Preventive Medicine in Cleveland, OH, and a senior fellow at the Meadows Behavioral Healthcare in Wickenburg, Arizona, who was also not involved in the study, told MNT that the decision to take a supplement — and which one to take — all depends on a person’s specific needs.
“Since calcium has other risk factors seen previously in studies, and since the different types of calcium — for example, citrate vs. carbonate — act differently in the body and have varying amount of calcium the body can absorb, and absorption itself may vary based on type as well, the decision to take calcium must be carefully weighed against current health concerns and risks,” Kirkpatrick said.
“I encourage all my patients to discuss the pros and cons of calcium with their physician first. Not all calcium supplements are equal – I encourage my patients to check the latest data and independent lab analyses of certain calcium supplements,” she told us.
Richter said that supplementation depends on a lot of factors — age, genetics, overall health — but that a balanced, healthy diet may eliminate the need to do so.
“Older individuals, especially peri-menopausal women, for instance, are at higher need of calcium due to the reduction of estrogen production in the body which can decrease calcium absorption. To prevent bone loss and diseases like osteoporosis, it is wise to supplement with calcium and increase calcium-rich foods in the diet,” she noted.
Richter explained: “Anyone who eats a high processed foods diet low in leafy greens, nuts, and seeds are also going to be at higher risk for calcium deficiency, in which case, supplementation might be beneficial. Anyone who is lactose intolerant and needs to avoid dairy (a high calcium food) but isn’t also mindful of replacing their foods with vegetables and seeds may be at higher risk for low calcium levels. Overall, however, if you are eating a balanced diet rich in plants, nuts, seeds, and occasional dairy or fortified dairy alternatives, you likely do not need to supplement.”
Kirkpatrick said that the way the body responds to calcium warrants smaller portions.
“Given that vitamin D enhances calcium absorption, there is a case for taking calcium in the morning. This allows for exposure to vitamin D throughout the day, primarily through sunlight,” Kirkpatrick noted.
“However, another approach is to divide the calcium dose into smaller portions taken with meals. This is beneficial because the body can only absorb a limited amount of calcium at a time,” she explained.
Richter added that certain supplements also have combinations of other elements that can be beneficial.
“Calcium supplements can be combined with magnesium, vitamin D, and zinc. In fact, all three of these additional nutrients can enhance bone support by increasing calcium absorption,” Richter said.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/less-calcium-at-dinner-more-at-breakfast-may-help-lower-cardiovascular-risk#Is-there-an-optimal-way-to-take-calcium-supplements?
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CAN INTERMITTENT FASTING BE BAD FOR THE HEART?
Intermittent fasting is a rather contentious topic when it comes to health and well-being. While there are studies that point to its short-term benefits such as reduced cholesterol when people eat within a 10-12 hour window, or an improved gut microbiome in people with obesity, there is some conflicting evidence on its benefits for weight loss.
Some studies have also shown that intermittent fasting can help lower certain heart disease risk factors, such as reduced cholesterol and blood pressure. However, a recent poster presented at EPI Lifestyle Scientific Sessions 2024 in Chicago suggested that eating within an 8-hour time window may increase the risk of cardiovascular death by as much as 91%.
Considering that time-restricted eating is a relatively new area of research, experts agree that there is a lack of long-term studies on the effects eating practices such as intermittent fasting have on the body, in particular the cardiovascular system.
In light of of these recent controversial findings, Feature Editor Maria Cohut and I sat down to discuss all things intermittent fasting in the latest installment of our In Conversation podcast.
Joining us was Ali Javaheri, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine from the Center For Cardiovascular Research at Washington University, who helped us answer questions, such as: “How does intermittent fasting affect the body?”, “Is it safe for everyone?”, and “What should we keep in mind if we decide to practice it?”
On March 18, the American Health Association announced study results linking intermittent fasting with an increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. The findings, which were presented by researchers at an AHA conference and have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, drew immediate skepticism from medical professionals who pointed out its limitations.
Intermittent fasting involves alternating between set periods of eating and not eating. The study focused specifically on a type of intermittent fasting called time-restricted eating, which limits the number of hours a person can eat during the day. The scientists found that people who followed a 16:8 diet, or ate only within an eight-hour window, had a 91% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared to people who ate across 12 or 16 hours.
Lead author Victor Wenze Zhong, PhD, a professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, said in the press release that it’s “crucial for patients, particularly those with existing heart conditions or cancer, to be aware of the association between an 8-hour eating window and increased risk of cardiovascular death.”
However, Heba Wassif, MD, MPH, a cardiologist at the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic who is unaffiliated with the research, cautioned against placing too much weight on the study’s findings. “Until we have more information, I can only say that long-term effects [of time-restricted eating] remain unclear,” she said.
Here’s what else you need to know about the study, including why experts caution against placing too much weight on the findings.
Researchers reviewed information from over 20,000 U.S. adults enrolled between 2003 and 2018 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a study designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States.
Participants included a roughly equal number of men and women. About three-quarters were White, 11% were Hispanic, 8% were Black, and the rest self-identified as another racial category.
Participants reported details about their food consumption and patterns for the survey on two separate days. Researchers followed participants for an average of eight years.
In addition to finding a general link between eating solely within an eight-hour window and a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, researchers also found that people with existing cardiovascular disease who followed this practice had a 66% increased risk of dying from stroke or heart disease. Participants with cancer also had a higher chance of dying from heart disease.
The study found no association between time-restricted eating and increased life expectancy.
Zhong noted in the press release that the study doesn’t suggest that intermittent fasting increases the risk of cardiovascular death but only shows an association between the two.
Wassif said she found the study’s results surprising because “previous studies had shown benefit of this type of diet.”
Indeed, some research has suggested that intermittent fasting may improve health by lowering blood pressure, inflammation, and cholesterol.
And according to Leis, there’s evidence to show it can help with weight loss.
“When people fast, you end up using your glycogen stores and then you switch over to ketosis, breaking down fatty acids for energy,” he explained. “There is data to support that due to this reset, you end up losing weight.”
Leis thinks there’s “a role for intermittent fasting to benefit those at high risk for cardiovascular disease,” but recommends that anyone thinking about starting intermittent fasting consult a doctor to figure out which plan—if any—is right for them.
“Maybe the 16:8 method doesn’t work for you but the 12:12 does,” he added. “Patients should discuss with their doctor to see what fits with their profile.”
https://www.health.com/intermittent-fasting-heart-disease-death-8613103
ending on beauty:
LULLABY
old comforter
so many nights
you've seen me through
my worst desolations
O let me die beneath you
~ Sutton Breiding
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