CHEKHOV'S LOST SOULS; HOW THE MOON IS MAKING OUR DAYS LONGER; THE SURPRISING ENDURANCE OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE; PRECIPITATING INJURY NECESSARY TO INITIATE ALZHEIMER’S’; WALKING REALLY IS GREAT EXERCISE (INCLUDING WALKING BACKWARDS)

 

Hokkaido Beach in Japan, where snow, sand and sea meet each other ~ David Attenborough

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HOLDING THE PYTHON

I thought he’d hang
slack, but he flowed
through my hands: a body

made of motion,
a darkness leaning to enter
the leafwork of shadows —

I felt his colossal strength
pour itself into me,
the progressive

diamond along the center.
I had to follow,
I had to flow

into earth —
liquid animal,
unending arrival —

~ Oriana


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CHEKHOV’S LOST SOULS

Considered by some to be the father of the short story, Anton Chekhov created a paradigmatic form for writing fiction. By mimicking reality he produced a representational art through his stories. The revelations in Chekhov’s fictional characters transport the reader into all too familiar lives. Chekhov portrays such an honest reality through his characters and dialogue that he leaves his readers with a revelation within themselves.

One of the most prominent literary elements in Chekhov’s work is that of character; he was a writer who had “great feeling for the inner emotions of his characters.” This becomes evident through Ochumelov, a police inspector, in the story “Chameleon.” Ochumelov is walking through a marketplace when “all of a sudden the sound of a voice came to [his] ears.” After following the voice he discovers that it is Khryukin, who has come by the lumberyard to pick up wood. Khryukin claims to have been bitten by a stray dog and demands compensation and that the dog be shot.

Ochumelov, now under the eye of an immense crowd of onlookers, immediately agrees with the complainant, pronouncing, “it’s time something [be] done about gentlemen who are not willing to obey the regulations!” But when someone in the crowd who has come to see what is going on suggests that the dog is the General’s, Ochumelov changes his attitude, now blaming Khryukin for the incident. Another onlooker then tells Ochumelov that the dog is in fact not the General’s, and again he changes his attitude, claiming that “the General’s dogs are expensive…and this one — just look at it! Ugly, mangy cur!”

Ochumelov goes on to change his mind every time someone suggests something different about the incident, only in order to protect what will be good for his self. He is worried only about his image as a public figure, each time making his decision based on how he thinks the crowd will perceive him. Ochumelov is the “perfect embodiment of human injustice and hypocrisy”; he is a character that the reader will know without the use of a third person narrator.

Chekhov advanced the form of character creation from a romantic focus to what is now the modern character. Charles E. May, a modern critic of Chekhov, explains “the short story is too short to allow for the character to be created by the kind of dense and social interaction through duration typical of the novel.”

Chekhov understood this, and therefore avoids depicting the minds of his characters, instead letting the characters’ mood or feeling communicate their inner state. Conrad Aiken, perhaps the first critic to comment on Chekhov’s characterization, says that if the reader finds that the characters have a strange way of “evaporating, it is because our view of them was never permitted for a moment to be external.”    .

Aiken is suggesting that when reading Chekhov, we no longer view the character objectively, but begin to see them “only as infinitely fine and truthful sequences of mood.” That mood then becomes subjective, and we are brought into the lives of the character, instead of simply observing those lives as a spectacle.

The development of Chekhov characterization is supported through his use of dialogue. Chekhov does not allow for the thoughts of Ochumelov, Krhyukin, or any other character of “Chameleon” to be divulged by any type of explicit narration; it is only through dialogue that those details are revealed. This technique of showing rather than describing was later given the term “objective correlative” by T.S. Eliot. The objective correlative is “a detailed event, description, or characterization that served as a sort of objectification or formula for the emotion sought for.”

When Ochumelov first learns of the incident of the dog biting Khryukin, he exclaims that he will “teach people to let dogs run about!” The next line is Ochumelov telling the officer with him to find out whose dog it is, and then a voice from the crowd shouts, “I think it belongs to General Zhigalov.”

Ochumelov then tells the officer to help him off with his coat. With no narrative explanation of Ochumelov’s change in attitude, the following dialogue suddenly switches to blaming Khryukin for the incident: “You must have scathed your finger with a nail, and then taken it into your head to get paid for it. I know you fellows! A set of devils!” The dialogue in itself is enough for the reader to understand the change in mood of Ochumelov, and no narration is necessary. The only way Chekhov includes his voice in his stories is by writing them from his own experiences.

The stories that occur within Chekhov’s characters are drawn from the author’s own life. That is not to say that Chekhov witnessed an event such as that in “Chameleon”, or rode in Iona’s cab from “Misery”; it simply means that his own life experiences inspired the creativity that produced these pieces, and were perhaps evident in his characters. In “The Lady with The Dog,” Gurov, the protagonist, pursues an idealized love. Virginia Llewellyn Smith, a Chekhov scholar, believes that Anna Sergeyevna, the woman Gurov meets and falls in love with, “can be considered symbolic of the ideal love that Chekhov could envisage but not embrace.”

And there is evidence more tangible than this, such as the fact that the reader is told that Gurov “was not yet forty”: Chekhov was 39 when he wrote “The Lady With the Dog.” The “real life” experiences that are portrayed in his characters make them accessible to the reader; they are not romanticized; they remain ordinary.

Chekhov’s method of writing is similar to good acting. When an actor is on stage, and wants to be viewed as more than a spectacle — as a medium, which will evoke emotion from the audience — they must authentically feel how their role is intended to feel. Peter Brook wrote in his book The Empty Space, “If the beginner playwright often seems thin, it may well be because his range of human sympathy is still unstretched…” —  that is to say, how can an author write about something they have yet to experience? Chekhov can evoke emotions through his stories because he writes honestly. Just as we sympathize with an actor who is truly sad on stage, we sympathize with a character of Chekhov’s who is truly sad in text.

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/70/anton-chekhov-and-the-development-of-the-modern-character

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People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

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PUTIN’S ALTERNATE BIOGRAPHY

Polish journalist Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, author of Vova, Volodya, Vladimir, has presented her version of Putin's true biography.

During her trips to the Caucasus, Kurczab-Redlich came across a mysterious story that would accompany her for years to come, and serve as the basis for a sensational biography centered on a 74-year-old woman from a small village in Georgia who adamantly claimed: "I am Vladimir Putin's real mother."

"In 2000 it wasn't a secret at all," Kurczab-Redlich recalled. "I was in Ingushetia [a republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe], running between hospitals to talk to those wounded after Russian forces opened a 'humanitarian corridor' and fired on those passing through it. During one of those visits, someone from the foreign press told me, 'There's a group here that is going to meet Putin's mother.' They said she lived here, in Georgia, in a village not far away called Metekhi.

"It turned out that not long before that, a local resident came to the Chechen establishment in Tbilisi and wanted to convince the Chechens to kidnap a woman from Metekhi – grandmother Vera, Putin's mother – for half a million dollars. The Chechens did not believe the man, so he took out tapes of her neighbors who spoke of Vera Nikolaevna, and about Vova [a diminutive of Vladimir], who lived in the village as a child. The next day, when we set out, they didn't let us enter Georgia, and I realized that there is no smoke without fire."

Years later, Kurczab-Redlich would finally reach Metekhi and hear the story Vera had been telling anyone who would listen. "I wasn't the first to reach her," Kurczab-Redlich clarified. "There's a film made about her by a Dutch director called 'Putin's Mama.' I'm recounting here what I verified myself and what is absolutely clear," she told Israel Hayom in a Zoom conversation from her home in Warsaw.

Years later, Kurczab-Redlich would finally reach Metekhi and hear the story Vera had been telling anyone who would listen. "I wasn't the first to reach her," Kurczab-Redlich clarified. "There's a film made about her by a Dutch director called 'Putin's Mama.' I'm recounting here what I verified myself and what is absolutely clear," she told Israel Hayom in a Zoom conversation from her home in Warsaw.

Pass the Parcel

According to Kurczab-Redlich, "After the birth, Vera stayed to raise Vovka at her parents' house, but she wanted to continue her studies. When Vovka was around two years old, she left for Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan [then part of the USSR]. In Tashkent, she met a soldier named Giorgi Osepahvili, who promised to marry her. Vera agreed, but when she arrived with him in Metekhi, it turned out he was far from as wealthy as he had told her – nevertheless, she stayed. A year later, Vera asked her mother to bring Vovka, then three years old, to her.

“Vovka once again was passed around like a parcel, after Vera had left him with his grandmother as a child. He got used to her, was probably treated well enough, and suddenly he arrives at this strange woman, his own mother, and an environment where a different language is spoken. At first, everyone was still charmed by him because he looked different, with blue eyes and blond hair, and was generally a good child.”

“When Vovka was 7, his mother and Giorgi had children of their own. That was the cue for hell to break loose for the young Putin. His stepfather abused him, compounding the deprivation and shame of hunger the family suffered. Older villagers told foreign journalists how they gave the cute Vovka apples. Shura Gabinashvili, a former Russian teacher at the village school, told The Telegraph in 2008 that she had taught Putin between 1958 and 1960, but was warned not to discuss it publicly. Nevertheless, she said Vovka was the brightest student in her class. "He loved Russian fables and Russian was his favorite subject," Gabinashvili claimed. "He also liked fishing and wrestling. He was the shortest child in the class but he always wanted to win at everything.”  

The truth buried

But the house was not a home for Vova. Giorgi continued to beat him. In the documentary, Vera acknowledges that Giorgi treated him harshly, but said that young Vova was a quiet and bookish child who didn't enjoy socializing. The stepfather pushed to have Vova removed from the household.

Kurczab-Redlich continued, "When Vova was 10, Vera again brought him to his grandparents. He was supposed to be in fourth grade. She remembers that he cried bitterly, but says she didn't even hug him – because she didn't want to fall apart herself."

Q: How could she give up her child?

"She told me outright, 'It's awful, I know. I handed over Vovka and exchanged him for my daughters [with Giorgi]. My husband didn't want him here, the child of a stranger.' Look, this is the Caucasus, you have to understand that. They always taunted Vovka that he was a bastard. He learned sambo there [a martial art with Soviet origins]."

Q: How did she talk about him when you met her? Was there any warmth in her voice? Did she seem like she felt guilty? 

"She spoke in pain, in great pain, but she also used to say that if he had stayed in Metekhi – he would have remained unknown, a lunatic, and would never have become president."

Q: As in, she felt proud in some sense? 

"I wouldn't say that. She just presented it as a fact, matter-of-factly. She also said she gave up on him (in her heart) when he bombed Georgia [in 2008]. I must say she is very shrewd: when she didn't feel comfortable answering certain questions, she would say 'Holy Mary told me to do so'. She is a very religious woman – when it suits her, at least," Kurczab-Redlich added, laughing. 

But the days of the presidency were still a long way ahead in the early 1960s in Leningrad, where Putin's official biography begins. According to the official version, he was born to Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina, both born in 1911. According to Kurczab-Redlich's version, he was brought there by his grandparents, who left him in the hands of relatives, who would from then on be presented as his biological parents.

"Imagine that in Leningrad, before Vova's arrival, no one saw Maria pregnant or with a baby carriage," Kurczab-Redlich said. "The two children of Vladimir and Maria, Viktor and Oleg, died. One during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and the other even before that. Children who grew up in the same block said that Maria brought the new child in her arms, said he was her son, Vova, and asked that they not insult him. Something like that.

"It was strange for all the residents of the block: how could a 40-year-old woman, who almost died of starvation during the siege, suddenly become pregnant, years after the war? How did no one see her pregnant – and suddenly there was a new child in the family? They issued him a new birth certificate stating that he was born in 1952 because he had to go to first grade and relearn everything. So they enrolled him in first grade. That's how Vova's real biography began. But in his official biography, until this moment, the woman listed as his mother is not his mother, his father is not his father, his birthplace is not the real place and even the date is different by two years.”

Putin's alternative biography – the real one, if you believe Vera Putina – was very well known in Georgia, but was also often met with skepticism. Kurczab-Redlich said she was aware of this, but drew attention to the fact that it has never been disproven.

What added an air of mystery to the story, if not necessarily proof of its credibility, were the deaths of two journalists, Russian Artyom Borovik and Italian Antonio Russo, who were reportedly about to publish Vera Putina's story before the 2000 presidential elections. Borovik was killed in a plane crash on his way to Kyiv, and Russo was shot shortly after broadcasting the footage of Vera to Italy. The connection between the deaths and Putina, who passed away last May, was never proven.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/04/28/was-putins-official-biography-altered-to-hide-his-true-identity/

From a different source:

Polish journalist Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich asserts that Putin's real mother lived and died in Georgia, that she gave birth to an illegitimate son and disowned him twice, and that Putin's stepfather almost rid the world of his presence.  

Not Vladimirovich, but Platonovich

Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich is certain that Putin's official biography gives an incorrect date of birth. The dictator was indeed born on 7 October, but not in 1952, as stated, but in 1950.  

Furthermore, the current President of the Russian Federation was not born in St. Petersburg, as is commonly believed, but in the Urals. Vera Putin, Putin's biological mother, was born in 1926 in the village of Terekhino near the Ural town of Ocher. After school, she attended a technical school where she met Putin's future father, the mechanic Platon Privalov. They lived together in a marriage-like relationship.   

When Vera was pregnant, she discovered that her partner was already married. She packed her things and returned home to her parents. Vera Putin gave birth to Vladimir Putin in Tashkent. She then left her one-year-old son in the care of her parents and went back to Tashkent to complete an internship at the technical school. There she found a new lover, the Georgian soldier Giorgi Osepashvili. She married him and moved to her husband's homeland, to the village of Metekhi near Tbilisi, where she gave birth to her daughters.

The journalist reports that Osepashvili was not fond of having a son out of wedlock. In patriarchal Georgian families, according to Kurchab-Redlich, illegitimate children are considered a disgrace. When Vladimir, who was three years old, was taken to his mother in Metechi, his stepfather began to beat the child mercilessly.  

‘This Osepashvili beat him terribly. He drank and beat him with a stick and his hand. You can't imagine what it's like in the Caucasus to have an illegitimate son – for the mother and for the child. He was very unhappy. Volodya was quiet, withdrawn, lonely, hungry and poorly dressed,’ says Kurchab-Redlich. It is beyond doubt that such treatment caused trauma in Putin that is still felt today.  

At the age of 9, Vera Putina is said to have sent her son back to her parents, Vladimir and Maria. ‘She said she didn't even hug him goodbye – she was afraid to cry and the boy sobbed,’ the journalist recounted the story of Putin's mother.  

Vera Putina is said to have died in Georgia in complete poverty in spring 2023, according to the journalist. She was 97 years old. Vladimir Putin, whom Putin calls his father, was in reality a distant relative of his real mother, according to the journalist. At some point, he and his wife Maria left the Urals and settled in Leningrad. The couple had two sons, but their fate was tragic: one died before the outbreak of war, the second during the siege of Leningrad. So Vladimir and Maria agreed to take the then 9-year-old Volodya with them. They were both 48 years old at the time. Vladimir worked as a foreman in a workshop in one of the factories, Maria worked as a cleaner.

Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin served in an NKVD extermination unit in Estonia during the war. His old connections helped his stepson find a new metier. Volodya Putin had to go to first grade again at the age of 9 because he had previously learned Georgian. Putin was small in stature and the age difference was not noticeable. No one has ever seen Maria Putina pregnant or with a pram. The journalist states that she saw Putin taking a young boy to school by the hand and saying, "This is my son.”

https://x.com/GSKStrategy/status/1796808793843445967

from another source:

Even less is known about Putin’s early years. The truth of his childhood may now have gone to the grave with the death at the end of May of 97-year-old Vera Nikolaevna Putina, who claimed to be Vladimir Putin’s real mother.

To the end, she treasured the few photographs she had of her son. They showed a very small child with a velvet cravat and smart strap shoes. A boy equipped for winter, in a balaclava and scarf, and for summer, with just a pair of shorts.

A pupil in the back row at the Metekhi village school, the brightest in his class.

All had the same blond hair, weak chin and sulky bottom lip; all had pale eyes, Russian eyes. Most also had the wary, sidelong look of an unhappy child.

Vera admitted that he had been unhappy. And it was partly her fault. But there was no mistaking him when, in 1999, he left the shadows to become the President of Russia. What mother would not recognize her own son? Besides, he walked as he always had: like a duck.

The photos were only copies. Soon after she made her claim, the KGB came to her house, took the originals away and told her not to talk. But this was the most exciting happening in the village for years. Metekhi was a poor farming community at the foot of the Caucasus in Georgia. 

She was 73 when she came forward, having seen him on her new television on the news. Until then, she had kept quiet. But she was convinced that Vladimir Putin, “Vova” as she called him, was her lost, special child. He was the result of a college affair with another student, Platon Privalov. When Vova was nine, Vera sent him to her parents. But they were too ill to cope with him and sent him to a military boarding school. After that, she lost touch until she heard, somehow, that he was in the KGB.

This, of course, was not the original story Vladimir Putin has told. Putin has given almost no details of his childhood up to the age of ten. It was likely, too, that he would hide any Georgian connection, which made him half-foreign.

Some facts do stack up: in 2008 the Daily Telegraph found that Vladimir Putin had indeed attended Metekhi school for three years. Other events raised suspicions. In 2000 two journalists investigating Vera’s story, a Chechen and an Italian, were killed in separate “accidents”.

At one point strangers, two men and two women, came to Vera’s house and took blood for a DNA test. She never heard the result. But she didn’t need it. Vera knew who her son was.

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"My son Putin shot chickens as a child and hated losing fights – he’d never give up until he crushed his opponents" ~ Vera Putina

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Vera Putina died in Tbilisi, Georgia, at the age of 96. She was buried in Metekhi on 30 May, 2023.

https://ceylontoday.lk/2023/06/21/putins-puzzling-past/

PS. A bit more from Krystina Kurczab-Redlinch:

Q: How could she [Vera Putina] give up her child?

"She told me outright, 'It's awful, I know. I handed over Vovka and exchanged him for my daughters [with Giorgi]. My husband didn't want him here, the child of a stranger.' Look, this is the Caucasus, you have to understand that. They always taunted Vovka that he was a bastard. He learned sambo there [a martial art with Soviet origins]."

Q: How did she talk about him when you met her? Was there any warmth in her voice? Did she seem like she felt guilty? 

"She spoke in pain, in great pain, but she also used to say that if he had stayed in Metekhi – he would have remained unknown, a lunatic, and would never have become president.”

Q: As in, she felt proud in some sense? 

"I wouldn't say that. She just presented it as a fact, matter-of-factly. She also said she gave up on him (in her heart) when he bombed Georgia [in 2008]. I must say she is very shrewd: when she didn't feel comfortable answering certain questions, she would say 'Holy Mary told me to do so'. She is a very religious woman – when it suits her, at least," Kurczab-Redlich added, laughing. 

But the days of the presidency were still a long way ahead in the early 1960s in Leningrad, where Putin's official biography begins. According to the official version, he was born to Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina, both born in 1911. According to Kurczab-Redlich's version, he was brought there by his grandparents, who left him in the hands of relatives, who would from then on be presented as his biological parents.

"Imagine that in Leningrad, before Vova's arrival, no one saw Maria pregnant or with a baby carriage," Kurczab-Redlich said. "The two children of Vladimir and Maria, Viktor and Oleg, died. One during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and the other even before that. Children who grew up in the same block said that Maria brought the new child in her arms, said he was her son, Vova, and asked that they not insult him. Something like that.

"It was strange for all the residents of the block: how could a 40-year-old woman, who almost died of starvation during the siege, suddenly become pregnant, years after the war? How did no one see her pregnant – and suddenly there was a new child in the family? They issued him a new birth certificate stating that he was born in 1952 because he had to go to first grade and relearn everything. So they enrolled him in first grade. That's how Vova's real biography began. But in his official biography, until this moment, the woman listed as his mother is not his mother, his father is not his father, his birthplace is not the real place and even the date is different by two years.”

What motivates Putin more than anything? What is his main motivation?

“I think he has two. He declared one when he was still a presidential candidate. He said, 'How great it is that no one is above you. I am my own master.' That was most important to him. The second is money. His childhood was so impoverished that now he cannot stop. He even has a golden toilet brush. He has about 20 palaces that he uses. He has everything imaginable. Is that a normal soul? Note that even his inauguration was different: [Mikhail] Gorbachev and Yeltsin were sworn in at the State Kremlin Palace. Vova came and received a royal inauguration. He has an inferiority complex, and I would say he is a sociopath. Other people exist for him only as long as they are needed. If they interfere with him – they will die. If they pose a danger to him – they will die.”

These days, Kurczab-Redlich is working on a revised and updated version of the biography. This time it will include Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the poisoning of [Russian opposition leader Alexei] Navalny, and the destruction of Aleppo.

"I need to write about them because people forget very quickly. They forget all the evil and horror."

Perhaps one more explanation is needed about Putin's official biography. It has always been full of holes regarding his childhood, but throughout his tenure in the Kremlin, parts of his adult life also began to disappear.

For example, in the book "First Person," commissioned ahead of his first presidential campaign, his friend Sergei Roldugin recounted pointing out Putin's foul language and Putin's secretary from his St. Petersburg, Marina Yentaltseva, city hall days shared how he used to ignore his wife. But later, after Putin consolidated power, it turned out that detailing his close friends was a bonanza for corruption investigations. Investigative journalists found that Roldugin was one of the proxies under whom Putin's vast wealth was registered, while Yentaltseva married another of the president's friends, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, and according to investigations, the two stole billions from public coffers. In 2022, "First Person" was removed from the Kremlin website.

Another biography, written by a former military correspondent named Oleg Blotsky, also disappeared. Blotsky, a Putin admirer, wrote the book "Vladimir Putin: A Life Story," which became a bestseller in 2001. But no publisher agreed to print the second volume, "The Road to Power," and TV channels ignored the existence of the biography he authored. The 200,000 copies he published with the help of the Armenian diaspora in Russia were removed from all libraries and bookstores.

Why? According to the independent Proyekt website, there are three possible explanations: Putin's family was portrayed as very ordinary and simple; Blotsky showed photos of Putin's relatives and KGB comrades, some of whom would later become nominal owners of giant companies; and finally – Putin's depiction was not particularly flattering. His then-wife Lyudmila said he was chronically late for dates ("being an hour and a half late was no big deal. I cried time and again") and refused to help her with basic tasks like carrying groceries when she was pregnant. The book by her German friend Irene Pietsch, "Piquant Friendship," in which Lyudmila called Putin a "basilisk," was also not printed after 2002. [Oriana: I read in another source that she called him “a bit of a vampire.”]

Documentary films have also been shelved. In 1992, when Putin was still working at the St. Petersburg city administration, he was interviewed extensively by documentary filmmaker Igor Shadkhan. Putin said, among other things: "We all thought – and I won't deny it, I thought so too – that if we imposed order with a firm hand, we'd all live better, in comfort and security. In reality, that comfort would quickly disappear, because that firm hand would soon start strangling us." In retrospect, seeing Putin's entrenchment of authoritarian rule, it's easy to understand why those words had to disappear.

And it is at this very point that Putin's biography dovetails neatly with his tendency to rewrite history – a practice that resonates strongly with the Stalinist tradition of erasing "traitors" from official photographs and striking their names from encyclopedias. For his part, Putin uses Russia's history as a political and diplomatic tool for all intents and purposes, concealing certain parts and distorting others. As the adage sometimes attributed to Churchill goes, Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It seems Putin thinks so too.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/04/28/was-putins-official-biography-altered-to-hide-his-true-identity/

Mary:

Putin’s childhood was certainly brutal enough to traumatize, and teach brutality. Not really surprising, in terms of the stepfather's beatings and abuse. But the abandonment by one's mother — that is extraordinarily harsh and terrible. Where could he have ever learned anything of tenderness and love?? Nowhere at all.

Glenn (Staff Sergeant, Retired):  

Being raised in such a brutal manner had to affect his adult outlook on life. It makes me wonder if this is more common than not in Russia. While in the Army I learned that Russian recruits are treated very badly in training. Often the NCO’s would beat the crap out of any recruit for most any reason with no or minimal consequences. That never, ever happened while I was on duty in the Army, and I never heard of any such incident – and I worked in personnel for 7 years. If that was happening, I would have heard about it. It would also be deeply counter to an all-volunteer army. I was in that for my last four years – prior three years it was mostly a conscription army.

Russian training tended to be subpar on most accounts, leaving them marginally prepared to regular duty. Their NCO cadre was poorly prepared to lead teams of 10 to 40 men. At 40 men you would have an officer. If that person was injured, killed, or not present, the platoon was mostly ineffective at anything. It seems that has always been the case in the Russian Army. Apparently, officers could get away with threatening subordinates with a weapon and shoot them if he chose — with no repercussions. I assume that their army needed such a threat to be real in order to keep deployed troops moving forward. A weak NCO cadre is a serious problem. 

I once saw four companies at four parallel rifle ranges engaged in live fire. There was something like 600 men there and the training session went flawlessly. No one got hurt. For lunch, the company mess crews came on site and fed us. I saw only one officer checking on opening the ranges for live fire in the morning. After that, there was not a single officer in sight. The E-8’s, first sergeants, ran the show. There were officers for each of the companies nearby and on call, but they were engaged in separate assignments or activities. After my first year or so, I was a direct report to an officer, but I largely worked on my own with limited contact. In some case I saw them only at formation at the start or end of the day.

I guess all this doesn’t directly respond to the comments about Putin. Putin’s career brought him up in the secret security branch, and it was likely a mostly cutthroat experience.

What troubles me more is the number of avid supporters that such an unfit person can acquire. That enables them to pursue their own form of control and terror. They only way that Putin, Hitler, Mao, or Trump hold onto control are their close & devoted supporters. Absolutely insane.

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WHY THEY DON’T FIGHT: THE SURPRISING ENDURANCE OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE

Few hypotheses in international relations are more influential than democratic peace theory—the idea that democracies do not go to war with one another. The idea, the political scientist Jack Levy wrote, “comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.” It has motivated U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century. In the early 1900s, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson embraced democracy promotion as a means to peace. During the Cold War, successive administrations spoke of the standoff with the Soviet bloc using grand ideological terminology. No distillation was grander than President Ronald Reagan’s address before the British Parliament in 1982, in which he claimed that the West exercised “consistent restraint and peaceful intentions” and then proceeded (seemingly without irony) to call for a “campaign for democracy” and a “crusade for freedom” around the world.

Democratic peace theory became especially influential once the Cold War ended, leaving the United States truly ascendant. In his 1994 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton claimed that “the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.” His administration then surged aid to nascent post-Soviet democracies. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was equally vocal about the need to advance liberalism in order to promote peace, telling the 2004 Republican National Convention, “As freedom advances, heart by heart, and nation by nation, America will be more secure and the world more peaceful.” As president, Bush even used democratic peace theory as one of the justifications for invading Iraq. In a speech on the war in November 2003, he declared, “The advance of freedom leads to peace.”

The idea that democracy breeds peace, however, is at best half true. The United States has repeatedly attacked other countries. Europe’s major democracies also have a long history of intervening in other regions, such as the Sahel. And rather than marking the permanent triumph of liberal democracy, the post–Cold War period is now defined by growing divisions and conflict. As is now plain, the spread of liberalism does not by itself curtail fighting.

Yet the proliferation of wars carried out by democracies does not disprove democratic peace theory wholesale. Liberal states may not act peaceably toward everyone, but they act peaceably toward one another. There are no clear-cut cases of one democracy going to war against another, nor do any seem forthcoming. In fact, the global divisions emerging today confirm democratic peace theory: once again, the line runs between liberal states and authoritarian ones, with the United States and its mostly democratic allies on one side and autocracies, most notably China and Russia, on the other. The world, then, could be peaceful if all states became liberal democracies. But until that happens, the world will likely remain mired in a dangerous ideological standoff.

GREAT MINDS

Democratic peace theory has a long history. In 1776, the American revolutionary Thomas Paine argued that liberal states do not fight one another, writing that “the Republics of Europe are all (and we may say always) in peace.” When Paine’s country gained independence and then drafted its constitution, the document implicitly referred to the idea that democracies should be conflict-averse. It placed the authority to declare war in the legislature—the branch with members directly elected by the public—in part to prevent the country from entering unpopular conflicts.

Democratic peace theory had early proponents across the Atlantic, as well. Its most influential initial champion was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In 1795, Kant published Perpetual Peace, an essay that took the form of a hypothetical peace treaty and that established the concept’s theoretical foundations. Representative republics, Kant explained, did not fight one another for a mix of institutional, ideological, and economic reasons.

Kant’s writings called for states to adopt a representative republican form of government with an elected legislative body and a separation of powers among the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches—all guaranteed by constitutional law. Kant’s republic was far from a modern democracy; only male property holders could vote and become what he called “active citizens.” Nonetheless, he argued that elected representation would inspire caution and that the separation of powers would produce careful deliberation. Although these forces would not guarantee peace, he admitted, they would select for rational and popular conflicts. If “the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared,” Kant wrote, “it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise.” For doing so, he continued,

"would mean calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of the war from their own resources, painfully making good the ensuing devastation, and, as the crowning evil, having to take upon themselves a burden of debt which will embitter peace itself and which can never be paid off on account of the constant threat of new wars. But under a constitution in which the subject is not a citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the world to go to war. For the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but the owner of the state, and a war will not force him to make the slightest sacrifice so far as his banquets, hunts, pleasure palaces and court festivals are concerned. He can thus decide on war, without any significant reason, as a kind of amusement, and unconcernedly leave it to the diplomatic corps (who are always ready for such purposes) to justify the war for the sake of propriety.”

Kant also called for republics to make commitments to peace and universal hospitality. The former idea entailed a commitment to peaceful relations and collective self-defense, rather like NATO’s. The latter meant treating all international visitors without hostility, offering asylum to people whose lives were at risk, and allowing visitors to share their ideas and propose commercial exchanges. This combination, Kant said, would build security, create mutual respect, and generate economic ties that lead to tranquility. And thus, republic by emerging republic, the combination would create peace.

Kant did not argue that his ideas would stop tension and conflict between republics and autocracies. In fact, he argued that representative republics might become suspicious of states not ruled by their citizens. But he did believe that liberal values such as human rights and respect for property would curb a country’s desire for glory, fear of conquest, and need to plunder—three forces that drive states to war. He therefore thought that liberal republics would be respectful and restrained when addressing one another, even as they remained suspicious and fearful of nonrepublics.

Views similar to Kant’s on liberty, republics, commerce, and peace spread throughout nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. French Foreign Minister Francois Guizot, a conservative liberal who served from 1840 to 1848, spoke enthusiastically about mutual freedom as a foundation for an entente with the United Kingdom. British Prime Minister William Gladstone, who led his country for much of the latter half of the 1800s, was a proponent. And when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, it helped tilt liberal opinion in Europe toward the Union and away from the Confederacy.

It was not, however, until World War I that the full democratic peace proposition became central to foreign policy. Wilson’s war message in April 1917—in which he declared that the battle between autocracies and democracies would establish “the principles of peace and justice”—was the clarion call. The clash between democracy and autocracy continued to shape policy as the decades went on.

The behavior of the United States during the Cold War, for example, was often motivated by a belief that spreading liberal values would yield peace. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared in his 1953 Senate confirmation hearing, “We shall never have a secure peace or a happy world so long as Soviet communism dominates one-third of all the peoples that there are.” President John F. Kennedy echoed that theme in his 1963 speech in West Berlin, declaring that “when all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe.”

But that same month, in a powerful address at American University, Kennedy warned of the complementary dangers of ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union. “Let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved,” he said. “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

TIME AFTER TIME

As liberalism endured and spread, intellectuals began empirically testing whether democratic peace theory actually held true. In 1939, the American journalist Clarence Streit published a qualitative historical analysis to see whether liberal democracies tended to maintain peace among themselves. Discerning that the answer was yes, he proposed that the decade’s leading democracies form a federal union, which would help protect them from fascist powers. In 1972, Dean Babst, building on Quincy Wright’s magisterial A Study of War from 30 years earlier, carried out a statistical analysis that also suggested a correlation between democracy and peace. In 1976, Melvin Small and J. David Singer confirmed this finding but demonstrated that democratic peace was limited to relations between democracies. Republics, they showed, were still prone to fight autocratic regimes.

In the decades since, international relations scholars have continued to study the democratic peace paradigm. They have shown that the relationship between democracy and peace is statistically significant even when controlling for proximity, wealth, and trade. They have determined that the theory holds even when states attempt to constrain each other.

Academics have advanced a wide variety of explanations for why the concept is so sturdy. Some have argued that part of the reason lies in the disproportionate influence that international institutions have with liberal countries. Research shows that democracies tend to delegate a lot of policymaking to complex multilateral bodies, such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization, in part because their leaders can use these groups to entrench policies before cycling out of office. Other scholars have argued that liberal norms favoring peace, human rights, and respect for fellow democracies hold sway over policymakers and publics. And still others have pointed to the benefits of trade and economic interdependence associated with relations among capitalist democracies. States that frequently trade, after all, will lose wealth if they fight one another.

Still, democratic peace theory has attracted plenty of critics. Henry Farber and Joanne Gowa have pointed out that there are other forces at work in stopping wars between democracies. During the Cold War, for example, NATO’s need to protect itself from the Soviet bloc ensured that Western Europe cooperated—although the region’s post–Cold War peace suggests more than collaborative containment is at work. Other scholars have pointed out that none of the factors used to explain democratic peace theory can stop war on its own. States that are deeply involved in international institutions, after all, do launch invasions. Peaceful norms and ideas work only if democracies heed them in the policymaking process, yet they are often ignored. The shared decision-making powers of republics should encourage deliberation, but the division of powers and rotation of elites can also lead democracies to send mixed signals, putting other states on edge.

And economic benefits can be achieved through plunder, not just through trade. Powerful democratic states can have rational incentives to exploit wealthy, weak democracies, especially if the latter are endowed with natural resources or strategic assets such as shipping lanes. Rational material interest is not enough to explain why xenophobic democracies have not tried to conquer democracies of other ethnic groups.

But put all the explanatory factors together, and democratic peace theory coheres. When governments are constrained by international institutions, when political elites or the electorate are committed to norms of liberty, when the public’s views are reflected through representative institutions, and when democracies trade and invest in one another, conflicts among republics are peacefully resolved.

RUN IT BACK

U.S. President Donald Trump subjected democratic peace theory to an intense test. He picked fights with European allies while praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dictators. Trump also cajoled and threatened liberal allies in other parts of the world, including East Asia. For a time, the United States seemed just as hostile toward fellow democracies as it was toward autocracies.

But under President Joe Biden, democratic peace is back in vogue. Like many of his predecessors, Biden has made promoting freedom a hallmark of his foreign policy. He has routinely described global politics as a contest between democracies and autocracies, featuring the United States and its allies in one corner and China and Russia in the other. Speaking at the UN in 2021, Biden pledged not to enter a “new cold war,” but he also announced that the world is at “an inflection point” and drew a sharp line between authoritarian and democratic regimes. “The future will belong to those who embrace human dignity, not trample it,” Biden said.

The president clearly aims to mobilize democracies, especially liberal industrial democracies, against dictatorships. His broad ideological framing emphasizes the threats posed by Russia to Europe’s democracies and by China to East Asia’s, including Taiwan. He has invoked ideology when promoting the importance of NATO in Europe and the Quad (the U.S. partnership with Australia, India, and Japan) in Asia and invested new resources in both bodies. Whether Biden wants it or not, the world may succumb to a new cold war. Much like the last one, it will be categorized by a clash between different systems of government.

Countries are already taking sides, lining up according to regime type. Democratic Finland and Sweden, neutral during the first Cold War, have joined NATO. Ireland has moved closer to the alliance. China and Russia have recruited Iran and North Korea to their team, fellow autocracies that are providing arms for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has, in turn, used its UN Security Council seat to make it harder for the world to monitor North Korea’s nuclear program. China is buying up Iranian oil.

This cold war—should the world indeed succumb to it—will be different from the first one. It pits democracies against autocracies, not capitalists against communists. Its geopolitics put a rising power (China) against an old hegemon (the United States), and an aggressive militarist (Putin) against an overstretched alliance (NATO).

Every party sees itself on the defensive. The United States and its allies want a “world safe for democracy” in which national security is affordable, elections are secure, markets are free, and human rights remain an ideal. China, Russia, and their allies want a world safe for autocracy, where governments are free to skip elections and neglect human rights, where markets and information are subject to state direction, and where no one outside the government questions state policy. Both sides are threatened because those two visions are incompatible.

The divisions, of course, are not always so neat. As happened during the first Cold War, a number of developing countries, including some democracies, are seeking nonalignment. And as it did during the U.S.-Soviet standoff, Washington has autocratic partners, such as the Arab Gulf countries. But even within these relationships, ideology appears to be having an effect. The largest of the states in the neutral bloc, India, is partnering more closely with the United States as the two countries compete with Beijing, and both have repeatedly praised the other for being a democracy (even if India’s democracy is showing signs of distress). The United States and its liberal allies, meanwhile, are making authoritarian partners uneasy. Biden, for example, referred to Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” during his campaign, even though the United States has relied on Saudi oil production to help keep oil prices down.

The world’s great powers can still prevent these democratic-autocratic tensions from hardening into a full-blown cold war. Through effective diplomacy, they might be able to construct a kind of cold peace, or a détente in which countries shun subversive transformation in favor of mutual survival and global prosperity. Pursuing such a world may, indeed, be an obligation for democracies. As Kant insisted and Kennedy pleaded, in a responsible representative government, leaders must strive to protect free republics but also avoid unnecessary conflict.

Yet a true cold peace would require settling the war over Ukraine, creating a new understanding with Beijing and Taipei about the status of Taiwan, and striking arms control agreements—tasks that are nearly impossible. Instead, the world’s democratic powers appear to be girding themselves for a long twilight struggle with authoritarian regimes.

This struggle may be scary, but it should not come as a surprise. It is, in fact, exactly what democratic peace theory predicts. Liberal states are being cooperative and peaceable toward fellow members of the club, working through institutions such as NATO and the Quad. But with respect to autocracies, they remain ready for war.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/why-they-dont-fight-doyle?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

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NELSON MANDELA AND NOT SEEKING REVENGE (POSSIBLY A LEGEND, BUT STILL INSPIRING)

“After I became president, I asked my escort to go to a restaurant for lunch. We sat down and each of us asked what we wanted.

On the front table, there was a man waiting to be served. When he was served, I said to one of my soldiers: go and ask that gentleman to join us. The soldier went and conveyed my invitation to him. The man got up, took his plate and sat down right next to me.

While he ate his hands trembled constantly and he did not lift his head from his food. When we finished, he said goodbye without looking at me, I shook his hand and he left.

The soldier told me:

Madiba that man must have been very ill, seeing as his hands didn't stop shaking while he ate. I said, Absolutely not! the reason for his trembling is another.

Then I told him:

That man was the warden of the prison where I stayed. After he tortured me, I screamed and cried asking for some water and he came humiliated me, laughed at me and instead of giving me water, he urinated on my head.

He is not sick. He was afraid that I, now president of South Africa, would send him to prison and do to him what he did to me. But I'm not like that, this conduct is not part of my character, nor of my ethics.

“Minds that seek revenge destroy states, while those that seek reconciliation build nations. Walking out the door to my freedom, I knew that if I didn't leave all the anger, hatred and resentment behind me, I would still be a prisoner.”  ~ Alessandro, Quora

Nelson Mandela in prison

Oriana:
There is reason to doubt that this ever happened. An interesting discussion developed — does a story have to be true to be of value?

Caleb Fuller:
It’s an interesting example of how religious myths of great prophets or avatars of god develop though. Imagine several centuries of stories like this circulating in a pre-internet, pre-press, mostly illiterate age.

WC for President:
True or not, it fits with the spirit of Nelson Mandela and is a good lesson for all of us to learn and grow from.

Val Trent:
Yes, Aaron, he was tortured. I’ve been through Robben Island and heard the stories of their treatment. There was torture. Solitary. Bread and water. More. Maybe not fingernail pulling but torture nonetheless. For what? Being black? The stories that were told were from ex prisoners, so I regard that source as reliable.

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USE OF TORTURE BY RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE

According to a UN report of March 15, 2024, the practice of torture of civilians and prisoners of war by the Russian army is widespread and systematic. Residents of the occupied territories of Ukraine suffer the most from it.

According to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, from February 24, 2022, to June 10, 2024 6,000 Ukrainians – 3,800  civilians and 2,200 military – were victims of torture. During this time, prosecutors and investigators discovered 160 Russian torture chambers in the de-occupied territories. All the figures are not final, as the scale can only be truly assessed after the liberation of all Ukrainian territories.

According to the victims’ stories, the occupiers used both physical and psychological torture. A 32-year-old resident of Kherson, who was helping protesters against the Russian occupation during the full-scale invasion, was taken hostage by the Russian military. They tortured him for 17 days, threatening to rape his wife and take his young child to an orphanage.

He was released only after the family paid UAH 100 thousand, but before that, they forced him to record a video of the alleged transfer of funds to support Russia.

Other victims of torture also reported various methods of torture, including nails being hammered into joints, blunt force trauma, starvation, and detention in freezers.

In addition to targeted injuries, people were also held in cramped basements with little or no food, completely unsanitary conditions, and often virtually no water. The new arrivals were even forbidden to sleep for a certain period of time and punished for sleeping.

Most of the survivors of torture by the Russian army report significant deterioration in their mental and physical condition.

Russian captivity kills

In March 2024, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission interviewed 60 Ukrainian soldiers who had been released from captivity and prepared a report based on the data. According to the report, 58 of the 60 interviewees testified to ill-treatment in captivity.

“In almost every interview with Ukrainian prisoners of war, it was stated that they were tortured by Russian servicemen and officials in detention, using beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, torture by prolonged exposure to uncomfortable positions, and mock executions. Sexual violence was perpetrated against more than half of the prisoners of war,” stated Danielle Belle, Chief Monitor of the HRMMU.

In addition, the executions of 32 Ukrainian prisoners of war were also documented.

Those who spent more than a few weeks in captivity and were transferred to more organized facilities also reported unanimously about torture and ill-treatment in other situations, such as daily cell inspections, walks in the courtyard, and during the showering of prisoners.

In these situations, guards often beat prisoners of war, electrocuted them with stun guns, forced them to stand for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions that caused pain, and sometimes exposed them to the cold, forcing them to walk outside in winter without clothes or shoes. In some places, during certain periods of internment, prisoners of war were forced to stand still in their cells all day, every day.

Most of the released Ukrainian prisoners report severe weight loss, mental and physical health problems, serious injuries, and the development of chronic diseases.

As of January 2024, Russia held about 8,000 Ukrainian POWs.

Russian torture chamber in Balakliya, Kharkiv region. Prayer words are scrawled on the wall.
~ Swamprat Ron, Quora

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HANNH ARENDT AND MASS MOVEMENTS

The astonishing statement that Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in mass movements.

Mass movements, writes Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, are one of the core elements of totalitarianism. Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.

It is equally irresponsible, however, to ignore the important similarities that the president’s self-professed movement shares with totalitarianism. President Trump has repeatedly asserted he leads “a movement like the world has never seen before.” He has shown a willingness to assert his personal control over reality. And he has positioned himself as a Janus-faced figure who can present one version of reality to his followers and another version to the outside world. These are all characteristics Arendt attributes to leaders of totalitarian movements.

There is always a temptation to rationalize what is happening in politics, to say: this has all happened before. There is a voice in each one of us, wheedling us with common sense, telling us that Trump is simply another instantiation of American populism. That voice is likely correct. But we should be wary of such voices, Arendt warns, for “the road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.”

Arendt’s understanding of the origins of totalitarianism begins with her insight that mass movements are founded upon “atomized, isolated individuals.” The lonely people whom Arendt sees as the adherents of movements are not necessarily the poor or the lower classes. They are the “neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.” They are not unintelligent and are rarely motivated by self-interest. Arendt writes that Heinrich Himmler understood these isolated individuals when he “said they were not interested in ‘everyday problems’ but only ‘in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries, so that the man […] knows he is working for a great task which occurs but once in 2,000 years.’” The adherents of movements are not motivated by material interests; they “are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.”

Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amid economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority is stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”

Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”

The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was massive voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

Leaders of these mass totalitarian movements do not need to believe in the truth of their lies and ideological clichés. The point of their fabrications is not to establish facts, but to create a coherent fictional reality. What a movement demands of its leaders is the articulation of a consistent narrative combined with the ability to abolish the capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.


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Trump’s mania for disruption — not his policies — is reminiscent of the many movements that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. While two of these ended in totalitarianism, the majority led instead to more typical authoritarian regimes. In our contemporary focus on Nazism and Bolshevism, we frequently forget that nearly every country in Europe was already ruled by democratically elected dictatorships at the outbreak of World War II. The principal exception was the United Kingdom and, across the ocean, the United States. Why is it, Arendt asks, that the breakdown of classes, the contempt for parties and states, and the rise of movements were successful in taking over governments on the continent, but not in the Anglo-American countries?

Arendt’s answer turns to the two-party system in Britain and the United States as distinguished from multi-party democracies that were the norm in continental Europe. In a two-party system, each party plans at some point to govern the state, whereas in a multiparty system each party “defines itself consciously as a part of the whole.” On the continent, parties represented partial interests, and to justify those interests were forced to embrace ideologies that interpreted their partisan interests as the general interests of humanity.

In the Anglo-American system, on the other hand, “power as well as the state remain within the grasp of the citizens organized in the party.” Because power is always within reach, there is no need, Arendt writes, for the “indulgence in lofty speculations about Power and State as though they were something beyond human reach, metaphysical entities independent of the will and action of the citizens.” The Anglo-American parties organize citizens first, and party members second. At least this has been true before the 2016 election.

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Perhaps one of the most under-acknowledged elements of totalitarianism identified by Arendt is the rise to political and social power of a corrupt business and governing class as well as a class of intellectuals that find corruption funny rather than outrageous. In a section of The Origins of Totalitarianism subtitled “The Temporary Alliance of the Mob and the Elite,” Arendt describes the original reception in 1928 Berlin of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera:

The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” [“First comes the animal-like satisfaction of one’s hunger, then comes morality,” memorably rendered by Marc Blitzstein as “First feed the face, and then talk right and wrong.” — RB], was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior, wonderful fun.

Brecht’s Jeremiah Peachum is a businessman who organizes the beggars of London and takes a cut of their income. Peachum sees himself as a respectable businessman, compared to the gangster Mack the Knife, who marries Peachum’s daughter. And the Chief of Police is on the take. Brecht hoped to shock by showing the disappearing lines separating respectable professionals and gangsters; instead, Arendt writes, his satirical portrayal of corruption in Weimar society yielded glee.

Arendt is scathing in describing the attraction Brecht’s satire held for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie suffered under the burden of hypocrisy. They had to maintain their respectability while also winning in the hard-nosed world of business. Brecht’s satirical presentation of the immoral business elite was a release; the applause showed that the German bourgeoisie “could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy.”

It is a testament to the extraordinary scope of The Origins of Totalitarianism that Arendt reveals the hidden philosophy of the bourgeoisie 200 pages earlier in a discussion of Thomas Hobbes, “the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.” Boiled down to its essentials, the Hobbesian philosophy of the bourgeoisie is simple: “if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man.” All limits — laws and morals — are bothersome restrictions on the human drive to acquire power.

Hobbes’s idea of man as a power-seeking being finally emerged as reality in the 1870s. In the wake of two deep depressions, markets at home dried up. To keep the engine of the economy going, bourgeois businessmen needed new markets. The answer was imperialism. The bourgeoisie — which had always been apolitical, preferring to focus on business instead of politics — allied itself with governments to secure military backing for its imperialist ventures. In other words, the bourgeoisie entered politics when they needed political support for their imperialist pursuit of money and power.

The naked pursuit of power contradicts the respectability that businessmen desire. Arendt argues that the bourgeois need to accumulate power had long been hidden “by nobler traditions” of respectability and by “that blessed hypocrisy which [François de] La Rochefoucauld called the compliment vice pays to virtue.” But in the late 19th century, traditional values had evaporated and the “old truths […] had become pious banalities.” The pretense of respectability became itself a vice, leading “everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.” For Arendt, the reception of Brecht’s play makes manifest the embrace by the business and government elite of mob standards.

Arendt added a final chapter called “Ideology and Terror” to the second and subsequent editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism. “It may even be,” Arendt writes, “that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form — though not necessarily their cruelest — only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.”

Totalitarianism, she suggests, is “no mere threat from the outside” of Western civilization. On the contrary, “the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totalitarian organization” rest upon a new “basic experience” of modern life that underlies and makes totalitarianism and potentially other and related forms of government not only possible but also likely. The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life.

The best way to protect ourselves is, perhaps, to turn back to our roots in local self-government. We cannot turn back the clock. But we might begin to engage in the activity of politics and the multiplication of local power structures that can resist the totalizing impulses of sovereign states. In doing so, we would seek to rediscover the Jeffersonian project of local self-government that Arendt calls the lost treasure of the American Revolution.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/

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LENIN EVERLASTING

Much of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is devoted to the details of the dehumanizing brutality of the Stalinist regime: its terrifying sadism and staggering assault on basic human dignity. The Stalinist horror show, in which terror was perfected in the forge of deliberately arbitrary deployment, had its roots in the brief but brutal reign of Vladimir Lenin. This year marks the centenary of Lenin’s death. In January 1924, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could in his two years of rule, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three. “That was young,” you may say. But we reply, “Not nearly young enough.”

It is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What we have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed, and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what may be just as creepy is his model of government.

Lenin liked the terror. It has always been thus with budding totalitarians. While Maximilien de Robespierre was a piker by comparison with Lenin, he nonetheless sang from the same chorus sheet, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted him. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew that achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about virtue and its “emanation,” terror.

Karl Marx made a note of that emanation, and in due course his student Lenin aced the class. Winston Churchill noted this in The World Crisis, his magnificent history of the Great War.

"Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time."

The cynosure of Lenin’s character, Churchill wrote, was “implacable vengeance . . . . His purpose to save the world; his method to blow it up.”

The quality of Lenin’s revenge was impersonal. Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed reluctance—even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire classes, to light the flames of intestine war in every land with the inevitable destruction of the well-being of whole nations—these were sublime abstractions.

The perfection of that sublimity lay partly in its arbitrariness, partly in its brutality. As Lenin observed in 1906, the dictatorship of the proletariat depended upon “authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on force.” Thus it is, as Leszek Kołakowski noted in Main Currents of Marxism, that, for Lenin, “ ‘true’ democracy” requires the “abolition of all institutions that have hitherto been regarded as democratic.” Freedom of the press, for example, Lenin dismissed as “so-called” freedom of the press, a bourgeois deceit. Sound familiar?

Lenin said he wanted to vest power in the people. But he insisted that the people had no business in deciding what their interests actually were. (Again, students of Rousseau will hear echoes of his proto-totalitarian idea of the “general will,” which he applauded, and the tawdry particular wills of individuals, which he was always ready to subjugate.)

At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimately freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “ ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today, his association with tyranny having knocked him out of the great game of political PR.

But is he completely gone? One of the most depressing recent spectacles has been the rehabilitation of people and movements that, just a few years back, seemed safely consigned to the underworld. But watching Eloi-like college students praising Hamas, chanting genocidal formulae such as “From the river to the sea,” even excusing the incontinent maunderings of Osama bin Laden, makes us wonder whether any enormity is sufficiently grave to overcome the moral anesthesia of the entitled class. Someone once described the on-again, off-again socialist Philip Rahv as a “born-again Leninist”—their number, it turns out, is legion.

Which is why we predict an effort, perhaps sotto voce at first, to rehabilitate Lenin. After all, he articulated exactly the desire of everyone, from the creepy Doyen of Davos, Klaus Schwab, on down, who tells you that he’s from the global government and he’s here to help. What socialism implies above all, said Lenin, is “keeping account of everything.” Could the covid police, the bureaucrats pushing a cashless society to gain complete control over your spending, or the climate-change fanatics who want to limit your travel and impound your gas stove have put it any better?

Keeping track of your healthcare, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life. Just sign on the dotted line and those repurposed nannies will take care of . . . everything. Note the ambiguous signification of the phrase “take care of.”

What we have seen in recent years is the hideous marriage of political correctness and bureaucratic triumphalism. Its offspring are the chimerical multitude of soft tyrannies we observe all about us today—along with an enervation of spirit that renders the public ever less able to respond to the casual indignities that have become such a prominent part of daily life.

Reviewing the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, Kołakowski noted the “superhuman energy” through which the party was able to exact enormous sacrifices from the workers and peasants. It “saved Soviet power” but did so “at the cost of economic ruin, immense human suffering, the loss of millions of lives, and the barbarization of society.” We in America are not there yet, not quite, but we are teetering on the threshold, which is why it is an opportune moment to remember Vladimir Lenin and reject utterly his monstrous legacy.

https://newcriterion.com/article/lenin-everlasting/


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DOES RUSSIA HAVE AN “ADVANCED ECONOMY”?

That’s a major road in Yakutia — an autonomous republic in Siberia, Russia, which is rich in oil, gas, diamonds and gold.

This is where a lot of Russian resources are being extracted from the ground to be sold abroad. Yakutia doesn’t get much back from the Moscow government.

Putin continues confiscating large factories and industrial plants from the owners, who got control over former Soviet assets during privatization in 1990s.

No one had any money in 1990s, but some people had friends in the state bank ‘Sberbank’.
They borrowed money from the bank and purchased factories, and then the government created 10,000% inflation.

As the result, the factory owners repaid 10,000% less than they should have repaid to the state bank, in real value.

All the regular people who kept money in the bank lost their life savings.

For 30 years, no one at the top of the Russian state had a problem with the way that Soviet assets had been privatized in 1990s. But Putin began a big war and managed to install a full-on dictatorship in Russia, so he is now confiscating whatever he wishes, stating that the owners either acquired the assets incorrectly, or were not operating them correctly.

Russian oligarchs who chose not to make noise when Putin started the war in Ukraine for the fear of losing their assets, and decided not to speak up about the Russian state taking away the remains of citizens’ rights and freedoms, are now losing both their assets and their freedom — literally (the owners are arrested and thrown in jail).

In Moscow, 5-star hotel “Four Seasons”, located next to the Kremlin, has just been seized from its owner, 50-year-old Alexei Khotin.

Khotin was sentenced to 9 years imprisonment in March 2024.

Alexei Khotin

Since 2022, based on claims from the Prosecutor General’s Office, more than 100 large Russian enterprises have been seized from their owners in favor of the state. The total value of seized assets is 1.3 trillion ruble.

Putin claims that the Russian economy is growing, but in fact, officially 1/3 of Russia’s budget is now spent on military expenses.

De facto, it’s over 50%, because there are massive expenses on propaganda and also part of the budget is classified (presumed military spending).

Military production brings no value to Russia, because everything is shipped to Ukraine, where it’s getting blown into smithereens. It doesn’t create national wealth, nor it improves people’s lives.

This is why Russia’s claimed “economic growth” is false — military expenditure (which includes not only the production of weapons, but also the logistics to deliver the weapons to Ukraine) must be deducted from the GDP figure, to understand what is really happening with the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, the spending on maintenance and new infrastructure projects in Russia hit record lows, due to the lack of funds — everything is spent on the war.

roads in Siberia
That’s the quality of roads in the vicinity of Siberian cities of Lensk, Mirny, Chernyshevsk and others. During the period when Lena River isn’t under ice, goods are delivered to Lensk by boats. Then trucks transport the goods to populated areas.

Meanwhile, the Russian TV happily announced that regular tours to North Korea are now available for Russian tourists.

Important guests from Taliban were begged to attend the “International Economic Forum” in St. Petersburg (probably, paid to come).

Taliban arriving

After attending the forum on economics, the Taliban reps will fly to Kazan, Russia, to share their experience in the field of education at the forum “Shaping the Future”. The Taliban who banned girls from going to school, women from teaching at universities — or even getting outside their homes without a burqa, and where women can be publicly stoned to death.

20 years ago, I would have never believed that Russians would admire and sing praises to the North Korea, Iranian ayatollahs, Yemeni Houthis and the Taliban.

But we have what we have.


And Russians don’t even find it weird. ~ Elena Gold, Quora

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SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE POSITIONS OF JOE BIDEN AND DONALD TRUMP (written on hte eve of the debate)

You might think President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are worlds apart on most international issues. But look a little closer, and you will see that the two candidates actually share some surprising commonalities on foreign policy, trade and even immigration

While you are unlikely to hear much about those commonalities during Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN — it is, after all, a debate — it’s worth bearing these in mind when Biden and Trump take the stage for what could be one of the most consequential debates of any presidential campaign in recent memory.

Voters should also consider issues like temperament, consistency and predictability when comparing the two candidates as the future commander in chief. After all, both American allies and rivals want a certain amount of predictability when dealing with the world’s leading superpower.

American allies want and deserve to be treated with respect, not contempt. An excellent example of this is the effort to get all the members of NATO to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defense by the end of this year.

This was a policy goal agreed to during the Obama administration when Biden was vice president, but you wouldn’t know that from how, when he was in office, President Trump constantly publicly berated NATO members to spend more on their defense and claimed falsely, the US was “owed” many billions of dollars by NATO allies who weren’t meeting the 2% target.

Trump’s inaccurate berating didn’t do much of anything to move the needle on defense spending among key American allies like Germany, but it certainly engendered resentment amongst Germans against Trump. In 2018, only 11% of Germans had a favorable view of Trump, and favorable views of the US in general also dropped by 20% during his administration, according to a Pew/Körber Foundation poll.

Also, rapid changes in American policy, such as Trump publicly proclaiming his “love” for the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — whose rogue nuclear-armed regime has been a headache for American presidents going back decades — are unsettling to US allies and even rivals like China. China may be a nominal ally of the North Korean dictator, but Kim’s expanding nuclear and ballistic missile programs combined with his mercurial temperament are unnerving to the Chinese, who prize stability in East Asia.

CHINA

On what is arguably the key foreign policy issue of the 21st century — US relations with China — there is little daylight between Biden and Trump. Trump inaugurated a far more combative approach to China than his presidential predecessors.

The longtime belief that China would liberalize politically as it grew economically was officially abandoned in Trump’s 2017 national security strategy. Instead, the Trump administration started treating China as a peer competitor that had to be reckoned with and started shoring up its Indo-Pacific partnerships like “The Quad” made up of Australia, India, Japan and the US. Trump also slapped a wide range of tariffs on Chinese goods, long anathema for free marketers in both parties.

Then, guess what? When Biden got to the White House, he doubled down, keeping those tariffs in place and even slapping a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also banned investments in China by US companies that might benefit the Chinese military in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced computer chips. And Biden, on 60 Minutes in 2022, said that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded, appearing to abandon the longstanding US policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, which is supposed to keep the Chinese guessing about what an American response would be if they were to attack the island.

What I will be looking for in Thursday’s debate would be how the candidates see US military commitments to Taiwan, given that US intelligence has assessed that China’s President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, has told his military to be ready to invade the island by 2027, a year that would fall inside the next presidential term.

I’ll also be looking for — given that inflation continues to be a persistent worry for many Americans — how the candidates might address the continued imposition of US tariffs on everyday goods that are made in China, like shoes and luggage, which function as an additional tax on ordinary Americans,

THE GAZA WAR

Then, go to the Middle East, where the war in Gaza rages on. Previously, the Trump administration failed to seriously address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and arguably inflamed the issue with actions such as moving the US embassy from its longtime location in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That provoked protests in which dozens of Palestinians were killed. Like Israelis, Palestinians believe that Jerusalem is their rightful capital.

When he was in office, Trump not only turned a blind eye to Israel’s much-expanded settlement building in the West Bank, but he also appointed as US Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who said publicly, contrary to longstanding US policy, that he did not believe that Israeli settlement activity was illegal, and the Trump administration could support Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — a family friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — negotiated the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states but gave nothing to the Palestinians.

It was the seemingly impending extension of the Abraham Accords to include the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel — a deal encouraged by the Biden administration — that seems to have, in part, precipitated Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. In a rare interview two weeks before the Hamas attack, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince bin Salman, told Fox News, “Every day we get closer” to normalizing ties with Israel.

Hamas wanted to disrupt this Israel-Saudi normalization, according to President Biden, speaking at a campaign event in October.

The Biden administration has largely continued the Trump administration’s uncritical embrace of the Netanyahu government despite mounting frustration with Israel’s leader. Biden’s support of Netanyahu even has its own name — “the bear hug”— and while Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken have occasionally protested publicly about the level of casualties in Gaza and, of late, they haven’t been doing too many bear hugs with Netanyahu, their de facto policy remains strong support for Israel. To underline this point, the Biden administration is going forward with the sale of $18 billion of F-15 fighter jets to Israel.

The US government has provided many of the bombs Israel has used in its all-out war on Hamas, while the much-ballyhooed American-built pier in the Mediterranean to help get aid to starving Gazans has been a fiasco. It’s hard to recall a war in which the US supplies one of the belligerents with many of its weapons and the other side with aid supplies.

What I will be looking for during the debate is how the candidates will address how best to end the war in Gaza given the stalling of the peace plan that Biden laid out publicly at the end of May that would start with a six-week ceasefire and the release of some of the hostages held by Hamas.

IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA

Trump’s first overseas trip as president was to Saudi Arabia, where he was given a princely welcome since his anti-Iran stance closely aligned with Saudi interests. Trump pulled out of the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 and, two years later, authorized the killing of a key Iranian military leader, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in a drone strike in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, because, according to Trump, he had “targeted, injured, and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen.”

When he was campaigning to be president, Biden vowed to reevaluate America’s long alliance with the Saudis following the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by officials working for the de facto ruler of the kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. But Biden officials are now all in on MBS because they believe the road to long-term peace between Israel and the Palestinians lies through Riyadh if the Israelis and the Saudis can agree to normalization of relations tied to some two-state solution.

Despite some early efforts to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration has not renewed the agreement. Early this year, Biden also authorized a drone strike that killed the leader of an Iranian-backed militia in Baghdad, in response to the killing of three American soldiers in Jordan.

After the Israelis killed a top Iranian general in Syria, the Biden administration led an international coalition to protect Israel when Iran, in retaliation, fired hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel in mid-April. None of the strikes ended up causing significant damage in Israel.

Following the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration, the Iranians kept their enrichment of uranium far below the threshold needed for nuclear weapons. In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from that agreement, the Iranians now have enough fissile material for several nuclear weapons, according to a report by the US Congressional Research Service earlier this year.

The Biden administration is currently negotiating a defense pact with the Saudis, which is clearly intended to assuage their concerns about the Iranians and their nuclear capabilities. This would be similar to US agreements to defend allies like Japan or South Korea.

During the debate, I’ll be listening for how the candidates will deal with the theocratic regime in Iran now that it is close to being armed with nuclear weapons.

ABANDONING A U.S. ALLY

Trump and Biden jointly engineered what is perhaps the most embarrassing and cynical abandonment of an American ally in history when Trump signed a withdrawal deal from Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2019, and Biden went through with that deal two years later.

The panicky, deadly US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 made the hasty American retreat from Saigon in 1975 look like the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.

The Americans left tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with them behind and allowed the Taliban to re-establish their misogynist theocratic rule, while the country is now home to some twenty terrorist groups, according to the United Nations. Biden’s repeated invocations of his love for democracy didn’t play well during this episode.

The Association of Wartime Allies, an advocacy group for Afghans who had worked for the US, estimated that only about 3% who had worked for the US government and had applied for special visas were evacuated out of Afghanistan, leaving 78,000 behind.

Given that each candidate bears some responsibility for this mess, I’m hoping that the candidates might address how best to bring those American allies out of Afghanistan, since the US doesn’t recognize the Taliban regime or have an embassy in the country.

THE BORDER

And even on an issue as fraught as the southern border — something that we will surely be hearing a lot about from Trump during Thursday’s debate — for two years, Biden kept in place a Trump-era COVID health code known as Title 42, that kept most migrants to the US from being able to claim asylum. Title 42 resulted in 2.8 million immigrant expulsions from the US, many of them during Biden’s term in office. The Biden administration did try to lift Title 42 in 2022 but was challenged in the courts, so the measure remained in place until May 2023.

After Title 42 expired, the largest wave of migrants in US history, many of them claiming asylum, surged across the southern border. In response this month, Biden ordered that migrants who cross the border illegally cannot claim asylum if migrant arrests at the border surpass an average of more than 2,500 a day, which has been the average since he came into office. In plain English, the Biden administration has effectively closed the southern border to asylum seekers.

Biden also even allowed portions of Trump’s southern border wall to continue to be built, saying the money for the wall had already been appropriated.

To be sure, there are real differences between Trump and Biden on immigration; this month, Biden said that hundreds of thousands of spouses of American citizens who are in the US illegally could get a path to citizenship, while Trump has promised if he were reelected that there would be mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

When Trump was in office, his administration also presided over the cruel practice of separating more than 3,000 migrant children from their families. But the fact remains that when you look at the larger picture, Trump and Biden’s policies on the southern border now more resemble each other than not.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated this year that immigrant workers will add $7 trillion to the US economy over the next decade. Given the significance of immigrants to the American economy, I’m hoping to hear both candidates’ plans for how best to encourage legal immigration that go beyond bumper-sticker slogans like “Build the wall.”

UKRAINE AND NATO

Then there is the rather large elephant in the room, which is Trump’s bizarre bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Were Trump to be reelected, might he end all US support for the war in Ukraine?

That is a real possibility, especially since Trump has said he could end the war within 24 hours. (Since the Ukrainians and the Russians have been fighting for a decade since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, this claim seems improbable at best.)

Also, Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, told me for the podcast In the Room that he believes if Trump were reelected, he would carry through on threats he made privately while in office to pull out of NATO.

But consider that this spring, Trump didn’t get in the way of a massive $61 billion US aid package for Ukraine. Given Trump’s iron grip on his party, he could have opposed this package, and it then would have surely failed to pass in the US House; instead, Trump kept silent, which last month gave more than 100 Republican House members permission to vote for the desperately needed aid to Ukraine.

So what I will be listening for during the debate is some explanation of what the Trump plan is for the Ukraine war and more broadly for NATO in general, which his own former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, publicly described as the “most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.”

To be sure, Biden and Trump have striking differences in style and temperament. But it’s also helpful to recognize that beyond their shared advanced ages, on some key policy issues, Biden and Trump also share some of the same positions — even if it’s politically inconvenient for them or their supporters to admit it.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/25/opinions/surprising-similarities-and-differences-biden-and-trump-bergen/index.html

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TRUMP’S BIGGEST LIES

1. Claimed Democrats allow the post birth abortion. They don’t.

2. Said all Americans support overturning Roe. 73% don’t.

3. Claimed every legal scholar wanted Roe overturned. They don’t.

4. Said the U.S. currently has the biggest budget deficit (Trump did and Biden cut it by $1.9 trillion

5. Claimed the U.S. has a record trade deficit with China. Trump did at $280 billion.

6. Alleged Biden gets a lot of money from China. Trump has at least 5 Chinese bank accounts among other countries.

7. Claimed no terror attacks occurred under his administration.

8. Said Iran didn’t fund terrorist organizations. Yes they do, as does Qatar which he and Jared continue to deal with

9. Claimed Biden wants to quadruple taxes. Biden wants to tax the rich as we should.

10. Said the U.S. provided way more aid to Ukraine than Europe. They contributed more to Ukraine every year.

11. Claimed the U.S. provided $200B in Ukraine aid it’s $120 and 90% is spent in American republican states.

12. Said 18 or 19 million people crossed the border. It’s closer to 9.

13. Claimed migrants are from prisons and mental institutions. 😬 nope.

14.Said Biden only created jobs for illegal immigrants.

15. Claimed Nancy Pelosi turned down the National Guard and later acknowledged it. Christopher Miller did on January 4, 2021 in a letter

16. Said he deployed the National Guard to Minneapolis. The governor did.

17. Claimed there was fraud in the 2020 election. Yeah, HIS.

18. Asserted NATO was going out of business and the U.S. was paying 100% of its costs. These are Putin’s words.

19. Claimed he lowered insulin prices. Biden did along with 80 other drugs.

20. Alleged Biden indicted him. A grand jury did. 4 times in 4 jurisdictions.

21. Said Europe has no U.S. cars. Wtf?

22. Claimed food prices quadrupled under Biden. Bullshit.

23. Alleged Biden made up the claim that Trump called dead service members “suckers and losers” (corroborated by John Kelly, verified by major news outlets).

24. Claimed Biden called Black people “super predators”. Trump has done so much to harm Black Americans.

25. Said his tax cut was the largest in history.

26. Claimed China and others stopped buying from Iran. I have no idea why he said this.

27. Said he signed the Veterans Choice Program into law (Obama signed it in 2014; Trump signed an expansion in 2018. Biden created the PACT act which increased 1 million Veterans claims

28. Said our country was in terrible shape and has the highest inflation. No. Argentina has the worst.

~ BlueQueenResists, Quora

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TRUMP’S BEGINNINGS

Let me start with Grandpa Trump, Fredrick. He came over from the old country, left the squalor of New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods. He decamped for the Yukon territory to make his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. But not in the sweaty trenches with pick and shovel: Freddy ran a liquor saloon and whorehouse. He made a fortune mining the miners gold. He brought that wealth back East and started businesses. Eventually Little Fred came along, Donald’s daddy. Imagine Grandpa’s ire at having built up the family fortune only to have the great depression stumble along to disrupt his real estate dreams.

Fred junior, convicted felon Donald’s papa, did take over the senior Trump’s now successful business. He managed to get ahold of Bigly Federal Housing contract$ to construct large housing developments in the 50’s and 60’s. He became a major landlord in the New York City suburbs. He was sued for his company’s practice of marking a “C” on applications that were submitted by black people. Donald’s father and mother were KKK members, with Fred senior being some sort of ring leader. Unlike Donald, Fred stayed “happily” married throughout. That clearly was not inherited by his son.

Fred III, Donald’s big brother was supposed to take on the mantle of Fred senior’s real estate empire. The senior Fred was a no nonsense workaholic who never stopped for family, or even for himself. Taking a vacation was as alien as Donald owning a dog. Don’s big bro couldn’t take the overbearing fathers harsh treatment, he drank himself to death by age 40, leaving Mary Trump, Donald’s cousin.

By this time, Fred senior had already become used to paying for his second son’s endless peccadillos. And had paid to get the kid out of the Vietnam Draft. The practice of rich people buying their sons a way out of serving was part of the civil unrest in the mid to late 1960’s. Mitt Romney was another such. His father believed that God had a special purpose for little Mitty, so daddy bought his ticket out of the dirty end of the war.

Fred senior understood entirely how feckless young Donald was. Always being led around by his dick or his mouth. College at Wharton School of Business was rocky at best. Donald has had his education records sealed. Donald tells the world his papa gave his a little starter nest egg: just a million bucks to eke out a living…

In fact, Fred senior continued paying for Donald’s bankruptcies until he died. When the Taj Mahal was teetering on the brink of collapse, Fred senior “bought” $400,000,000 worth of chips and then left them in the casino bank.

Prior to the bankruptcy of his Taj casino, Trump was already friendly with the concrete and steel families in Manhattan. He was also being funded by Russian oligarchs and he helped them cleanse ill-gotten gains. Donald’s adult children are from the same self centered vein of entitlement that their dad has capitalized on. They were busted in New York state for ripping off their children’s cancer charity to pay for their lavish lifestyles.

So, Donald Trump, convicted felon and adjudicated sex offender, is a whiny little bitch who comes from a line of nasty men. ~ Philip Rabe, Quora

Robert Caccomo:

Donald’s grandfather, Frederick Drumpf, did indeed make money running a restaurant/brothel in Yukon. He had emigrated to the United States at the age of 16 and eventually found his way to Canada, where he made money off the miners during the Gold Rush. In 1901 he sold his business for a nice profit and decided to return “home,” Bavaria, to find a wife. He was successful in finding a wife, Elisabeth Christ, a woman 12 years younger than Frederick who lived across the street from his mother in Kallstadt.

They returned to America and settled in The Bronx but didn’t stay long as Elisabeth was homesick for Germany. After their first child, Elisabeth, was born in 1904 they returned to Bavaria but got thrown out by authorities. Seems that when Frederick had originally left Bavaria in 1885 he had not performed his obligatory military service, starting a Trump tradition, and so the authorities stripped him of his citizenship and tossed out of the country for evading conscription.

The Drumpfs returned to NYC in 1905 where they lived first in The Bronx and then moved to Queens. They had 2 more children and Frederick worked as a hotel manager and a barber on Wall Street and dabbled in real estate. In what was probably his biggest contribution to the Trump legacy during this time Frederick anglicized their last name, shortening it from the Germanic Drumpf to the more prosaic Trump, before dying in the typhoid pandemic in 1918. He left behind a modest estate which Elisabeth went to work with, hiring contractors as “E. Trump” to build houses on the empty lots her husband had owned, selling them and earning her income on the mortgages she provided to the purchasers.

In 1923 her eldest son, Fred, graduated from high school and went to work for his mother. In what was to become another family tradition Fred liked to put himself center stage for his work during this period but in fact it was his mother’s business and his mother’s money that enabled him to become a developer in his own right. He was by all accounts a very hard worker and slowly but surely he became a major real estate developer with his mother behind him the entire time.

There were plenty of bumps for Fred along the way. He was arrested at a 1927 Memorial Day parade taken over by the KKK, suggesting he supported the racist ideology that was the very basis of the organization. In the 1950s one of his tenants, Woody Guthrie, accused him of “racial hate” and eventually a 1973 lawsuit was brought by the Department of Justice for discrimination. It was settled two years later with multiple conditions that required Trump to allow fair access to housing for minorities. He was investigated for profiteering by the US Senate in 1954 and by New York State in 1966, although neither investigation resulted in an indictment.

He married Mary Anne MacLeod, a Scottish immigrant he met at a party, in 1936. She was a Scottish Gaelic speaking former domestic servant who had grown up in poverty. They proceeded to have five children, Maryanne, Fred Jr, Elizabeth, Donald and Robert, with Elizabeth and Donald being the only two currently still alive. In addition to being a man obsessively driven to succeed Fred was a stern parent and a teetotaler who at the end of the day would ask his wife to report on the actions of their children and provide discipline, if necessary.

Their first son, Fred Jr, had been envisioned by Fred as the heir to his real estate empire but Fred Jr wanted nothing to do with real estate and became an airline pilot. Fred was insulted that Fred Jr did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps and according to Mary Trump, Fred Jr’s daughter, Fred “dismantled him by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality.” Fred Jr. died of a heart attack brought on by complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.

Donald, on the other hand, loved the idea of being a big shot real estate developer and was happy to be named as the President of his father’s real estate company at the age of 25, three years after graduating from college. It was a position that enabled him to financially pull the strings of his father’s company, often for personal profit.

The list of reprehensible things he has done in his life, from personal things like manipulating his father’s will to disinherit his dead brother’s children, to business practices of declaring bankruptcy (six times!) to avoid paying contractors who then themselves were personally ruined, is long and well known. What continues to be a mystery to me is why this modern day P.T. Barnum continues to be the darling for so many.

This is a man who has never done an honest day’s work in his entire life, whose father paid off doctors so he could avoid military service and then publicly ridiculed those soldiers who died serving the country, who thinks it’s hilarious to mock the disabled, who thought it was fine to bill the United States $340 million so he could play golf while he was serving as President.

Trump’s Golf Trips Could Cost Taxpayers Over $340 Million.

He is a stupid man who is now suffering from dementia and has no business being anywhere near the White House. And to top it off he is a person who wants to amend the Constitution, if he gets back in office, so he can remain President indefinitely. How is it that so many people support this clear and present danger to the ongoing existence of democracy in the United States?

Mike Martino:
In one of the most beautiful and elegant flourishes of history, that grandpa whoremaster actually built a couple of his businesses on other people’s land…then SUED THEM over it.

I’m not one to blame anyone for the sins of a father, but it is certainly true that sometimes a lineage carries a strong family resemblance.

Or curse.

Tim Barger:
Trump did get around $400 million from his dad, but that was through manipulating the estate, and screwing the rest of the family, upon Trump Senior’s death. His dad did buy $1 million in chips to try to bail out the failing casino but to no avail. The casino was doomed from the very start due to Trump’s lack of business expertise. Everything about the casino didn’t pencil out from the very start, but Trump’s bravado and ego made the choices -- nothings changed there. When the Atlantic City council was making the decision to give concessions to a casino developer, they figured correctly that the financing costs weren’t viable.

Trump claimed “not for him, because he was The Donald”, he could get the money others couldn’t. Of course that was BS and he ended up financing through high interest junk bonds. Then he over spent on pomp and ostentatious crap building an edifice to his ego. The finished project would require more people coming through the front doors than any demographic projections could fathom. People in the casino business just shook their heads and said “how the hell could you fuck this up.” But that’s Donald; overall over 40% of all his business ventures have failed. This is a matter of public record. If it wasn’t for Mark Burnett and The Apprentice, Trump was done and we wouldn’t be talking about the loser. No Fortune 500 would have him in their management, not one Fortune 100 CEO has contributed to his campaign. The man is a fraud, a con and a profoundly ignorant narcissist.

Narc Hunter:
The pattern of entitlement, lack of boundaries, the oldest son drinking himself to death, "image is everything" all are classic symptoms of generational narcissism.

Jason:
You left out the part about his own childhood. Fred Sr. was very tough teaching his kids that there are only winners and losers in life, and to be a loser would basically result in being cut off. Under intense pressure as a young kid in a time when segregation laws and such were still the norm, Donald saw bullying as a way to be a “winner”. He became extraordinarily mischievous and Fred sent him to New York Military Academy at age 13 to straighten him out. It was brutal there and it changed him a lot. He learned to thrive there while still following the rules and ranked up. His experience of success ultimately ended up making him extremely competitive and charismatic. Then after that there was his Trump tower project that actually made his father proud for once. Having the torch passed on to him instead of his brother continued to fuel his drive for success although he did not boast about it much. He felt very bad for his brother who developed a drinking problem.

Nina Varela:
Trump is Putin’s useful idiot.

*
AGAIN, BRIEFLY, ON THE HISTORY OF MODERN ISRAEL

There were always some Jews in Israel.

More Jews began migrating here but it wasn’t “Palestine.” It was a remote corner of the Ottoman Empire.

Indeed it wasn’t empty, and indeed the local Arabs did not want any Jews here at all. They tried to get the Ottoman government to forbid land sales to Jews, but that generally didn’t work, and Jews did buy land here.

This was way before WW2. The Jews founded cities like Petah Tikva, Rishon LeZion, Zichron Yakov in the late 19th century, Tel Aviv was founded in 1909. Hebrew University of Jerusalem (world class) was founded 1925. For instance.

It is quite correct that the local Arabs wanted to drive out all the Jews and keep all the land for themselves. They began massacring Jews after the Ottoman Empire broke up and the British took charge. Finally they launched a war to drive out the Jews. They lost. ~ Judy Kupferman, Quora

The Jews declared an independent state — Israel — and beat 6 huge Arab armies that attacked them. ~ Milo Smith

It is important to note that the intention of the combined Arab armies was not to capture some land or to weaken Israel militarily so that they could dictate terms at a later, expected date; the intention of those combined armies was to kill every Jewish person, destroy Israel, & replace it with yet another Islamic State. There is a name for this kind of activity — it is called genocide.

The Arabs failed, Israel fought back & beat the genocidal attackers who cried for a ceasefire to which Israel agreed so the attackers went home to reorganize, rearm, & prepare for another genocidal attack. Thus was the pattern established of a genocidal attack on Israel by whichever Islamic extremist group felt up to the challenge, & Israel fought back against the genocidal attackers who cried for a ceasefire to which Israel agreed upon which the genocidal attackers went home to reorganize, rearm, & prepare for the next genocidal attempt.

The latest big attack was on Oct 7th after which a Hamas spokesman stated on camera that attacks like that of Oct 7th would be repeated endlessly until every Jewish person had been killed, Israel had been destroyed, & an Islamic State set up in its place. The genocidal campaign against Israel & Jewish people which started on 15th May 1948 continues to this day. Every other narrative eg stolen land, genocide against the "Palestinians", Israel attacking a hospital & killing 500 people, Israeli soldiers committing mass rape, Israel holding Palestinians hostage, Israel starving the people of Gaza, etc etc is a smokescreen intended to conceal the ongoing campaign of genocide against the Jewish People and their ancestral homeland of thousands of years standing, Israel.

No, the "Palestinians" are not an ancient people who lived in "Palestine" since thousands of years BCE, whose land & country were stolen by Zionists—the only Palestinians up until 1948 were Jewish people who lived in Israel (renamed Palestine by foreign empires). Arab "Palestinians" came into being in the 1920s as part of the Palestinian propaganda lies which form the false narrative that they endlessly spew—this is the Big Lie theory being employed to convince the world through sheer repetition that their false narrative is the true version of Jewish history as it relates to the Land of Israel. ~ Wm Rogers, Quora

Arthur Simonds:
In 1947, the British were unable to control the area and asked the United Nations to take control. Their suggestion was two countries. The Jews accepted. The Arabs refused and in 1948, once the state of Israel declared independence, several armies attacked. They lost.

Judy Kupferman:
In fact, the local Arabs attacked in 1947 right after the partition resolution. The surrounding countries waited till May 1948 when the British left.

Jon Woods
The Arab armies lost and now claim they are victims despite constant attacks since then.

*

*
WHY SOME PEOPLE ALWAYS GET LOST

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

“People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate,” says Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University who was a co-author of a look at how navigational ability develops in the 2022 Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

While it’s easy to show that people differ in navigational ability, it has proved much harder for scientists to explain why. There’s new excitement brewing in the navigation research world, though. By leveraging technologies such as virtual reality and GPS tracking, scientists have been able to watch hundreds, sometimes even millions, of people trying to find their way through complex spaces, and to measure how well they do. Though there’s still much to learn, the research suggests that to some extent, navigation skills are shaped by upbringing.

Nurturing navigation skills

The importance of a person’s environment is underscored by a recent look at the role of genetics in navigation. In 2020, Margherita Malanchini, a developmental psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, and her colleagues compared the performance of more than 2,600 identical and nonidentical twins as they navigated through a virtual environment, to test whether navigational ability runs in families. It does, they found—but only modestly. Instead, the biggest contributor to people’s performance was what geneticists call “nonshared environmental factors”—that is, the unique experiences each person accumulates as their life unfolds. Good navigators, it appears, are mostly made, not born.

A remarkable, large-scale experiment led by Hugo Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, gave researchers a glimpse at how experience and other cultural factors might influence wayfinding skills. Spiers and his colleagues, in collaboration with the telecom company T-Mobile, developed a game for cellphones and tablets, “Sea Hero Quest,” in which players navigate by boat through a virtual environment to locate a series of checkpoints. The game app asked participants to provide basic demographic data, and nearly four million worldwide did so. (The app is no longer accepting new participants except by invitation of researchers.)

Through the app, the researchers were able to measure wayfinding ability by the total distance each player traveled to reach all the checkpoints. After completing some levels of the game, players also had to shoot a flare back toward their point of origin—a dead-reckoning test analogous to the pointing-to-out-of-sight-locations task. Then Spiers and his colleagues could compare players’ performance to the demographic data.

Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills, they found. People from Nordic countries tended to be slightly better navigators, perhaps because the sport of orienteering, which combines cross-country running and navigation, is popular in those countries. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks such as those in the older parts of European cities did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid, perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Results like these suggest that an individual’s life experience may be one of the biggest determinants of how well they navigate. Indeed, experience may even underlie one of the most consistent findings—and clichés—in navigation: that men tend to perform better than women. Turns out this gender gap is more a question of culture and experience than of innate ability.

Nordic countries, for example, where gender equality is greatest, show almost no gender difference in navigation. In contrast, men far outperform women in places where women face cultural restrictions on exploring their environment on their own, such as Middle Eastern countries.

This cultural aspect, and the importance of experience, are also supported by studies of the Tsimane, a traditional Indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. Anthropologist Helen Elizabeth Davis of Arizona State University and her colleagues put GPS trackers on 305 Tsimane adults to measure their daily movements over a three-day period, and they found no difference in the distance moved by men and women. Men and women also were equally adept at pointing to out-of-sight locations, they reported in Topics in Cognitive Science. Even children performed extremely well at this navigation task—a result, Davis thinks, of growing up in a culture that encourages children to range widely and explore the forest.

Most cultures aren’t like the Tsimane, though, and women and girls tend to be more cautious about exploring, for good reasons of personal safety. Not only do they gather less experience at navigating, but nervousness about security or getting lost also has a direct effect on navigation. “Anxiety gets in the way of good navigation, so if you’re worried about your personal safety, you’re a poor navigator,” says Newcombe.

Personality, too, appears to play a role in developing navigational ability. “To get good at navigating, you have to be willing to explore,” says Uttal. “Some people do not enjoy the experience of wandering, and others enjoy it very much.”

Indeed, people who enjoy outdoor activities, such as hiking and biking, tend to have a better sense of direction, notes Mary Hegarty, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So do people who play a lot of video games, many of which involve exploring virtual spaces.

To Uttal, this accumulating evidence suggests that inclination and early experience nudge some people toward activities that involve navigation, while those who are temperamentally less inclined to explore, who have less opportunity to wander or who have an initial bad experience may be less likely to engage in activities that require exploration. It all snowballs from there, Uttal speculates. “I think a combination of personality and ability pushes you in certain directions. It’s a developmental cascade.”

Mental mappers

That cascade presumably influences acquisition of the specific skills that are hallmarks of good navigators. These include the ability to estimate how far you’ve traveled, to read and remember maps (both printed and mental), to learn routes based on a sequence of landmarks and to understand where points are relative to one another.

Much of the research, though, has focused on two specific subskills: route-following by using landmarks—for example, turn left at the gas station, then go three blocks and turn right just past the red house—and what’s often termed “survey knowledge,” the ability to build and consult a mental map of a place.

Of the two, route following is by far the easier task, and most people do pretty well at it once they’ve taken a route a few times, says Dan Montello, a geographer and psychologist also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a classic experiment from almost two decades ago, Montello’s student Toru Ishikawa drove 24 volunteers, once a week for ten weeks, on two twisting routes in a tony residential area of Santa Barbara that they’d never visited before.

Later, almost every person could accurately state the order of landmarks along each route and roughly estimate the distance travelled between them. But they varied widely in their ability to identify shortcuts between the two routes, point to landmarks not visible from where they stood, or sketch a map of the routes. Those who couldn’t identify shortcuts or find landmarks may suffer from an inability to create accurate mental maps, the researchers think.

Research by Newcombe and her then graduate student Steven Weisberg underscores the importance of such mental maps in navigation. They asked 294 volunteers to use a mouse and computer screen to navigate along two routes through a virtual town. Once the volunteers had learned the routes and the landmarks they contained, the researchers asked them to stand at one landmark and point to others on both routes.

People fell into three classes, the researchers reported in 2018 in Current Directions in Psychological Science. Some people had formed a good mental map: They could point accurately to landmarks on both the same and different routes. Others had good route knowledge but struggled to create an integrated map: They were good at pointing within a route but poor between routes. A third group was poor at all the pointing tasks.

That ability to build and refer to a mental map—a person’s survey knowledge—goes a long way toward explaining why they’re better navigators, Montello says. “When the only skill you have is the ability to think in terms of routes, you can’t be creative to get around barriers.” Survey knowledge gives the ability to navigate creatively, he says. “That’s a pretty stunning difference.”

Not surprisingly, better navigators may also be better at switching modes and choosing the most appropriate navigational strategy for the situation they find themselves in, says cognitive neuroscientist Weisberg, now at the University of Florida. This could mean using landmarks when they are obvious and mental maps when more sophisticated calculations are needed.

“I’ve moved toward thinking that our better navigators are also using a lot of alternate strategies,” Weisberg says. “And they’re doing so in a much more flexible way that affords different kinds of navigation, so that when they find themselves in a new situation, they’re better able to find their way.”

For example, when Weisberg moves around Gainesville, where he lives now, he keeps track of north, because that works well in a city with a regular street grid; when he goes home to the winding streets of Philadelphia, he relies more on other cues to stay oriented.

Researchers do not yet know whether every bad navigator is simply poor at survey knowledge, or whether some of the lost might be failing at other navigational subskills instead, such as remembering landmarks or estimating distance traveled. Either way, what can poor navigators do to improve? That’s still an open question. “We all have our pet theories,” says Elizabeth Chrastil, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, “but they haven’t reached the level of testing yet.”

Pros and cons of GPS

Simply practicing seems like it should work—and, indeed, it does in lab experiments. “We can improve people’s navigational abilities in virtual environments,” says Arne Ekstrom, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona. It takes about two weeks to show fairly dramatic gains—but it’s not yet clear whether people are really becoming better navigators or just getting better at finding their way through the particular virtual environments used in the experiments.

Support for the notion that people might improve with practice also comes from studies of what happens when people stop using their navigation skills. In a 2020 study published in Scientific Reports, for example, neuroscientists Louisa Dahmani and Véronique Bohbot of McGill University in Montreal recruited 50 young adults and questioned them about their lifetime experience of driving with GPS. Then they tested the volunteers in a virtual world that required them to navigate without GPS. The heaviest GPS users did worse, they found.

A follow-up with 13 of the volunteers three years later revealed that those who had used GPS the most during the intervening period experienced greater declines in their ability to navigate without GPS, strongly suggesting that GPS reliance causes diminished skills, rather than poor skills leading to greater GPS use.

Experts also suggest that struggling navigators like Uttal could try paying closer attention to compass directions or prominent landmarks as a way to integrate their movements into a mental map. For Weisberg, the only way he learns spaces in an integrated way is by paying attention to major cardinal directions or prominent landmarks like the ocean. “The more attention I pay, the better I can link things to the map in my head.” He recommends that struggling navigators ask themselves which way is north ten times a day, referring to a map if necessary. This, he suggests, could help them move beyond mere route knowledge.

There’s another option for those who don’t really care about improving their skills as long as they just don’t get lost, Weisberg notes: Just make sure your GPS is handy.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-do-some-people-always-get-lost?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

*
WHY HURRICANES NEVER CROSS THE EQUATOR

“Hurricane” is the local name of a global phenomenon. Large tropical storms in the western part of the Pacific Ocean are called typhoons. In the Indian Ocean, they’re called cyclones. In the North Atlantic or the eastern part of the Pacific, they’re hurricanes. The term “tropical cyclones” is often used as a catch-all term. Occasionally, a storm will “cross over” and get two labels, as happened in 2006 with Ioke. Arising in the Central North Pacific as hurricane Ioke, the storm wandered into the Northwest Pacific, where it was known as typhoon Ioke.

Two: There will never be a hurricane Israel. Hurricanes are named alphabetically, alternating male and female names, from lists that rotate every six years. The first Atlantic hurricanes of 2025 will be Andrea, Barry, Chantal, and Dexter, while the first Pacific ones will be Alvin, Barbara, Cosme, and Dalila. Similar systems are in place for cyclones and typhoons. Names of particularly heavy storms are taken out of rotation, as are names deemed politically or culturally sensitive. So, for one reason or another, there will never again be Atlantic hurricanes called Floyd (last used in 1999), Katrina (2005), or Sandy (2012); nor Pacific hurricanes called Adolph (2001), Israel (designated for 2001 but never used) or Isis (2004).

Three: There are no hurricanes (or whatever you want to call them) in the Southeast Pacific or the South Atlantic. Almost 90% of large tropical storms form within latitudes 20° north or south of the equator, where the waters are at least 27°C (81°F), warm enough for storms of these strengths to form. 

The Southeast Pacific and South Atlantic are the only two tropical ocean basins where this isn’t the case. This is due to the Peru Current and the Benguela Current, which carry cool water from higher latitudes toward the equator into these two basins respectively. A rare exception was hurricane Catarina, which made landfall in Brazil in 2004. Catarina is the only hurricane-strength storm on record in the South Atlantic. Some meteorologists have attributed its formation to global warming, which means there may be more in the future.

Hurricane Catarina, 2004, approaching Brazil, as seen from the International Space Station.

Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones never cross the equator, and usually don’t form within five degrees latitude of that line. This is because of the Coriolis force, which is the effect that the rotation of the Earth has on the direction of sufficiently large masses of water or air: in the Northern Hemisphere, they will rotate counterclockwise, and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Coriolis force is zero at the equator and weakest nearer the line, which is why cyclic storms don’t form in a 400-mile-wide strip on either side of this divider. And since storms would have to perform the physically impossible feat of changing direction as they cross over from one hemisphere to the other, they would in all probability simply lose their momentum and end up as a massive volume of hot air. We don’t really know, because it hasn’t happened yet — in 2001, a cyclone over Indonesia came closest yet, skirting the equator at 150 km, less than 100 miles.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/hurricanes-versus-equator/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

*
FIGHTING IN NORTHERN ISRAEL

Israel has been attacked by Hezbollah, an Islamist terrorist organization controlling Lebanon, since October 8th without any provocation, no excuses of an “occupation,” just the usual Jihadist death cult.

Why is no one talking about it?

Why isn’t Lebanon being held accountable by the international community?

This is further proof that the October 7th attacks are a radical Islamic assault against the only Jewish state in the world. This attack is being sponsored and led by Iran and Qatar.

If you think it will end in Israel, you might want to listen to the Jihadists; they are very open about the fact that the West is next. (Quora)

Hours after the rocket launches, the IDF said fighter jets struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including a site housing “technological assets,” a weapons depot, rocket launch positions and other infrastructure.

On the Lebanese side, at least 81 people have been killed, according to an AFP tally. The toll includes at least 60 Hezbollah members, eight Palestinian terrorists, a number of civilians, and one Reuters journalist.

Israel has also diverted massive forces to the north even as it has done the same in the south, to prepare for the possibility of Hezbollah trying to replicate Hamas’s atrocities in southern communities. It has also ordered the evacuation of border communities to protect residents.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/northern-towns-bombarded-as-30-rockets-fired-from-lebanon-idf-shells-launchers/

After eight months of war in Gaza, the spotlight is on Lebanon and ending Hezbollah’s attacks. However, Hezbollah is a much stronger, entrenched force than Hamas, and an attack into Lebanese territory would likely trigger Lebanese government response and political condemnation abroad — all factors that Israel needs to weigh as it considers its next steps.

However, touring the ground here, it is easy to understand why there is a sense that Hezbollah cannot simply be allowed to act with impunity.

Hezbollah has carried out more than 5,000 rocket, missile and drone attacks on Israel since Oct. 7. While there have been periods of relative calm, attacks in recent weeks have increased significantly, to the point it is now normal for several attacks a day, whether from rockets, anti-tank missiles or drones, the latter of which are seemingly becoming more precise. In return, Israel carries out its own attacks, striking Hezbollah launch sites and what it says is terrorist infrastructure in areas in southern Lebanon. 

The exchanges have led to large fires on both sides of the border, devastating crops relied on by villagers regardless of nationality.

Even outside of the evacuation area, where life has largely been able to carry on as normal, there are clear impacts from the attacks over the Lebanese border. The northern Galilee is usually a center of tourism, with people staying in small cabins, known as Tzimurs in Hebrew. These local businesses are now all shuttered.

Even in areas away from the frontline, normal activities such as hiking are out of the question for families because Hezbollah has increased its attacks deeper into Israel. Videos posted online showing a bus coming under fire have made people reticent to send children on school trips, for instance. Civilian life does not look set to return until Israel’s government assures residents that there has been an agreement that removes Hezbollah from the border, or until a military operation is launched.

Israeli communities along the border today largely remain evacuated. However, some people, mostly middle-aged and older men, have returned. Some of the men serve as reservists in the local security teams of these communities, an organizational structure that has existed since the early days of Israel in one form or another. After Oct. 7, the men were enlisted as reservists and received uniforms and rifles. They have also been given the task of training new members so that most communities have a platoon-sized force of these soldiers. The men only serve in their community, usually guarding the community’s gate, a local, small tripwire as part of the much larger force of IDF units that protect the border.

At the IDF’s Northern Command in the hill town of Safed, which is several miles from the border with Lebanon, the base is a center of activity. IDF soldiers and officers are clear eyed about the challenges ahead, but highly motivated. Lt. Col. Eran Salmon, a commander in the IDF’s Home Front, compared the current crisis to Israel’s “second war of independence.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/06/in-northern-israel-emptied-villages-and-talk-of-war-in-lebanon/


*


HISTORY OF MODERN ISRAEL IN A NUTSHELL



In 1948, there was no Palestine. There was no Israel. There was a land that was occupied by an Arab majority and a Jewish minority.



After World War I  the land was being controlled by the British government. Prior to that it was controlled by the Turks.



In 1947, there was a proposal for how the land could be divided, with partial territory for Arabs (so-called Palestinians), partial territory for Jews, and some areas controlled by an international coalition that was for all nations.



The Jews accepted the plan. The surrounding Arab nations rejected it and attacked.

What they did not anticipate was the fervor the Jewish people would fight back with. And when all the smoke cleared, a tired and very unlikely underdog victor emerged on top and declared its independence. This was the birth of the modern State of Israel.



They had more land than originally anticipated, and only expanded later on after once again being attacked in 1967.



So really, neither nation existed at the time of the formation of Israel. And neither really had a proper military either. If anything, the Jewish nation was victorious with no military fighting back against several nations with armies.



They were attacked with murderous intent.



But Israel emerged victorious.

There are a lot of other details. And plenty of room for discussion. But this is 1948 in a nutshell. ~ Quora

*
SOME STATISTICS CONCERNING MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS

Bball Wally:
It's a cancer. In the UK they are less than 7% of the population but make up 20% of the prisoners. They are not welcome.

Mario:
Here in France: About 8% of the general population, 40% of the prison population, up to 80% in cities like Paris, Lyon and Marseille. In the world, 19% of the population, yet they are the majority of terrorist attacks. Islam is a problem.

*
“And now for something entirely different . . .”

*
AN ANECDOTE ABOUT A CHILD MATH PRODIGY

In Germany, in a very lively classroom, J.C. Buttner, an elementary math teacher, assigned a “punitive” task to his students.

The task, quite difficult to carry out, also considering the young age of the children (7-8 years), consisted of calculating the sum of all the natural numbers from 1 to 100 (1+2+3...+100=?) .
All the students started with a series of calculations at the limits of imagination, committing —obviously — countless errors.

Everyone, except one child who noticed a symmetry within the problem, useful for not making a rough calculation.

He noticed that, by grouping the numbers in pairs (the first with the last, the second with the second to last, the third with the third to last, etc.), the sum of these pairs of numbers was always the same: 1+100= 101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101 and so on until you reach 50+51=101.
The child then understood that there were 50 sums, each of which gave the result 101.
As a result, the total was 50 times 101, or 5050.

A few minutes after starting the task, the student raised his hand and uttered the answer:
5050!

The teacher was incredulous, he had just realized that in the classroom he probably had a genius.

That 8-year-old boy was called Carl Friedrich Gauss.

*
HOW A HUGE VOLCANIC ERUPTION NEARLY WIPED OUT HUMANS:
MOUNT TOBA

About 74,000 years ago, Sumatra’s Mount Toba experienced a super-eruption, one of the largest in Earth’s history, potentially kicking off a massive disruption in the world’s climate.

Some scientists have suspected a volcanic winter resulting from the eruption was a big enough shift to wipe out most early humans due to genetic evidence suggesting a steep drop in the human population. But now a cutting-edge study on an archaeological site in northwest Ethiopia once occupied by early modern humans has added to a growing body of evidence that suggests the event might not have been so apocalyptic.

Instead, the new research found humans in that location, known as Shinfa-Metema 1, adapted to the arid conditions brought on by the volcanic eruption in a way that may have facilitated humanity’s pivotal migration out of Africa to the rest of the world.

Microscopic fragments of volcanic glass found alongside stone tools and animal remains in the same layer of sediment at the Shinfa-Metema 1 site, near Ethiopia’s Shinfa River, show humans were occupying the site before and after the volcano erupted more than 4,000 miles away.

“These fragments are less than the diameter of a human hair. Even as tiny as (that) they are still big enough to analyze the chemistry and the trace elements,” said John Kappelman, a professor of anthropology and geological science at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature.

By piecing together clues from the fossils and artifacts found at the site, along with geological and molecular analysis, the team began to understand how the humans living there forged ahead despite the likely climate shift that the volcanic cataclysm triggered.

Catching fish

To understand the climate around the time of the eruption, Kappelman and his colleagues analyzed oxygen and carbon isotopes, variations of the same element, from ostrich eggshells and fossilized mammal teeth. That work shed light on water intake and revealed the animals ate plants that were more likely to grow in drier conditions.

“The isotopes are incorporated in the hard tissues. So for the mammals, we look at their teeth, the enamel of their teeth, but we also find it in the eggshell of the ostrich,” he said.

An analysis of the site’s flora and fauna also found an abundance of fish remains in the aftermath of the eruption. The finding is perhaps not surprising given how near the site was to the river, but fish are rare in other Stone Age sites from the same period, the study noted.

“People start to increase the percentage of fish in the diet when Toba comes in. They’re capturing and processing almost four times as much fish (as before the eruption),” he said.

“We think the reason for that is because if Toba is in fact, creating more aridity, that means it’s going to be a shorter wet season, which means longer dry season.”

The team theorized that the drier climate, counterintuitively, explains the increased reliance on fish: As the river shrank, fish were trapped in water holes or shallower streams that hunters could more easily target.

The fish-rich water holes may have potentially created what the team described as a “blue corridor,” along which early humans moved north out of Africa once they were depleted of fish. This theory contradicts most other models that suggest that humanity’s main migration out of Africa took place along “green corridors” during humid periods.

“This study … demonstrates the great plasticity of Homo sapiens populations and their ability to adapt easily to any type of environment, whether hyper-humid or hyper-arid, including during catastrophic events such as the hyper-explosion of the Toba volcano,” said Ludovic Slimak, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse, in an email. Slimak was not involved in the research.

The study authors were also able to explore the geology of the ancient riverbed, which suggested that it flowed slower and lower at that point than in the present.

“We can do that by just looking at the cobbles,” Kappelman said. “A very energetic river can move bigger boulders and cobbles than a river that isn’t that (energetic.) What (cobbles) we find for the ancestor river are smaller than the river today.”

Oldest known arrowheads?

The researchers also uncovered the remains of several small triangular points, which tantalizingly rank among the earliest examples of the use of archery and provide clues that the site’s inhabitants might have used bows and arrows to hunt fish and other larger prey.
Slimak, who has studied similar points discovered in France that date back 50,000 years, agreed with the new study’s assessment of the artifacts.

“The authors also highlight very clear indicators suggesting the existence of archery here 74,000 years ago,” Slimak said. “There is therefore every reason to … consider these ancient Homo sapiens as bearers of already highly advanced technologies, largely emancipated from natural and climatic constraints, crucial factors for understanding their migrations later on, across all continents and under all latitudes.”

Ancient species of humans likely left Africa multiple times, but archaeologists and geneticists largely agree that the most significant dispersal of Homo sapiens, our own species — which ultimately led to modern humans living in every corner of the globe — took place around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago.

The new research offers another potential scenario for how this dispersal happened while not ruling out previous theories, said Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, who called it an “intriguing paper.”

“I’m sure each of these propositions will fuel debate amongst the relevant specialists but I think the authors have made a plausible (though not definitive) case for each scenario they propose,” Stringer said via email.

“Of course this new work doesn’t mean that humid corridors were not still important conduits for dispersals out of Africa, but this work adds credible additional possibilities during more arid phases.”

Lake Toba now fills the caldera of the ancient volcano. The island in the center of the lake is formed by a resurgent dome. 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/africa/toba-supervolcano-early-human-migration-africa-scn

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SOLAR WITHOUT COBALT

A new battery cathode material, developed by chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), could provide a more sustainable option for powering the next generation of electric cars.

Instead of relying on scarce metals, such as cobalt or nickel, the new cathode is based on organic materials that can conduct electricity at similar rates to cobalt-containing batteries. Lithium-ion batteries with this new organic cathode material also charged up faster than their cobalt-containing counterparts, while still having a comparable storage capacity.

Novel battery materials that avoid the use of rare earth elements can have a positive impact on the environment by reducing mining operations, the researchers say, and so this new battery material could be a more sustainable alternative. The study is published in ACS Central Science.

Transitioning away from cobalt

Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular form of commercial rechargeable battery. These batteries comprise two electrodes – a positively charged “cathode” and a negatively charged “anode” – held apart by a separator. An electrolyte fills the remaining space in the battery, which allows the ions to flow freely between both electrodes during charging and discharging.

To improve the stability and energy density of lithium-ion batteries, most cathodes in lithium-ion batteries also contain small amounts of cobalt. While the addition of this element does help the performance of lithium-ion batteries, many are wishing to turn away from the use of this element considering the environmental damage and exploitative practices that have been associated with cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Currently, the DRC provides over two-thirds of global cobalt supplies.

Cobalt-Free Batteries Could Power the Next Generation of Electric Vehicles

The new cobalt-free battery cathode is based on organic materials that remove the need for rare earth metals.

Instead of cobalt or nickel, the new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials. In this image, lithium molecules are shown in glowing pink. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A new battery cathode material, developed by chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), could provide a more sustainable option for powering the next generation of electric cars.

Instead of relying on scarce metals, such as cobalt or nickel, the new cathode is based on organic materials that can conduct electricity at similar rates to cobalt-containing batteries. Lithium-ion batteries with this new organic cathode material also charged up faster than their cobalt-containing counterparts, while still having a comparable storage capacity.

Novel battery materials that avoid the use of rare earth elements can have a positive impact on the environment by reducing mining operations, the researchers say, and so this new battery material could be a more sustainable alternative. The study is published in ACS Central Science.

Transitioning away from cobalt

Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular form of commercial rechargeable battery. These batteries comprise two electrodes – a positively charged “cathode” and a negatively charged “anode” – held apart by a separator. An electrolyte fills the remaining space in the battery, which allows the ions to flow freely between both electrodes during charging and discharging.

To improve the stability and energy density of lithium-ion batteries, most cathodes in lithium-ion batteries also contain small amounts of cobalt. While the addition of this element does help the performance of lithium-ion batteries, many are wishing to turn away from the use of this element considering the environmental damage and exploitative practices that have been associated with cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Currently, the DRC provides over two-thirds of global cobalt supplies.

“Cobalt batteries can store a lot of energy, and they have all of [the] features that people care about in terms of performance, but they have the issue of not being widely available, and the cost fluctuates broadly with commodity prices. And, as you transition to a much higher proportion of electrified vehicles in the consumer market, it’s certainly going to get more expensive,” said Mircea Dincă, the W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT and the senior author of the new research.

To guide the move away from cobalt, researchers are interested in creating alternative battery materials that use less or no rare earth metals (including cobalt and nickel) that need extensive mining to acquire. Ideally, only highly abundant elements would be used to produce the next generation of batteries.

Currently, lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) has emerged as a promising alternative material, with some car manufacturers already utilizing it in their electric vehicles. However, LFP only has approximately half the energy density of comparable cobalt- and nickel-containing batteries.

Organic materials are another exciting alternative, though current research efforts have generally been hampered by these materials having relatively low conductivities and storage capacities. This is because, to make the organic materials conductive, they are usually mixed with polymer binders that help maintain a strong conductive network. Unfortunately, such binders can make up to 50% of the overall material, which severely hampers the total storage capacity of organic batteries.

Alternative battery materials

Six years ago, Dincă and his colleagues began working on a Lamborghini-funded project to develop an organic battery that could overcome these conductivity issues.

The result is a material made of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), a small molecule with three hexagonal rings that form a structure similar to graphite when assembled into a layer. The TAQ molecules also contain certain functional groups that allow the molecules to form strong hydrogen bonds with each other, which improves the stability of the material and makes it very insoluble.

“One of the main methods of degradation for organic materials is that they simply dissolve into the battery electrolyte and cross over to the other side of the battery, essentially creating a short circuit,” Dincă explained. “If you make the material completely insoluble, that process doesn’t happen, so we can go to over 2,000 charge cycles with minimal degradation.”

To further stabilize the organic material, the researchers also added a small amount of cellulose and rubber to the cathode. These fillers make up less than one-tenth of the cathode’s composition, meaning they do not interfere significantly with the battery’s overall storage capacity. These fillers help the cathode to better adhere to the battery’s current collector, as well as increase the overall lifetime of the battery cathode by preventing the formation of cracks.

Organic batteries match current batteries in performance

The researchers studied the structure of their new cathode material using a wide array of techniques, including in-operando X-ray diffraction, wide-angle X-ray scattering, mass spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy and ultraviolet/visible/near-infrared spectroscopy.

The researchers also carried out a series of benchmark electrochemical tests on their new cathode material, to measure its performance against traditional cobalt-containing batteries.

They found that batteries with an organic TAQ cathode had comparable conductivity and storage capacity metrics with cobalt-containing batteries. The TAQ cathode batteries also charged up faster than other batteries. Lamborghini has already licensed the patent on this new technology.

“I think this material could have a big impact because it works really well,” Dincă said. “It is already competitive with incumbent technologies, and it can save a lot of the cost and pain and environmental issues related to mining the metals that currently go into batteries.”

Compared to rare earth metals, the primary materials that make up the TAQ cathode are far easier to source; the quinone precursor and amine precursor used in its synthesis are already produced in large volumes commercially. The researchers estimate that the total materials cost for assembling a battery with this new cathode type could be as low as one-third the cost of current cobalt batteries.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/cobalt-free-batteries-could-power-the-next-generation-of-electric-vehicles-383059

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HOW THE MOON IS MAKING THE DAYS LONGER


With each passing year the Moon gets further away from the Earth and the average day length gets a tiny bit longer

Billions of years ago the average Earth day lasted less than 13 hours and it is continuing to lengthen. The reason lies in the relationship between the Moon and our oceans.

Throughout human history the Moon has been an inextricable, ghostly presence above the Earth. Its gentle gravitational tug sets the rhythm of the tides, while its pale light illuminates the nocturnal nuptials of many species. Entire civilizations have set their calendars by it as it has waxed and waned, and some animals – such as dung beetles – use sunlight reflecting off the Moon's surface to help them navigate.

More crucially, the Moon may have helped to create the conditions that make life on our planet possible, according to some theories, and may even have helped to kickstart life on Earth in the first place. Its eccentric orbit around our planet is thought to also play a role in some of the important weather systems that dominate our lives today.

But the Moon is also slipping from our grasp.

As it performs its finely balanced astro-ballet around the Earth – circling but never pirouetting, which is why we only ever see one side of the Moon – it is gradually drifting away from our planet in a process known as "lunar recession". By firing lasers off reflectors placed on the lunar surface by the astronauts of the Apollo missions, scientists have recently been able to measure with pin-point accuracy just how fast the Moon is retreating.

They have confirmed that the Moon is edging away at a rate of 1.5 inches (3.8cm) every year. And as it does so, our days are getting ever so slightly longer.

"It's all about tides," says David Waltham, a professor of geophysics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who studies the relationship between the Moon and the Earth. "The tidal drag on the Earth slows its rotation down and the Moon gains that energy as angular momentum.”

The gravitational tug of the Moon on the Earth's oceans creates the tides, which in turn drag the Moon into a higher orbit

Essentially, as the Earth rotates, the gravity of the Moon orbiting above tugs on the oceans to create high and low tides. These tides in fact are a "bulge" of water that extends in an elliptical shape both towards and away from the gravity of the Moon. But the Earth spins on its axis much faster than the Moon orbits above, meaning friction from the ocean basins moving beneath also acts to drag the water along with it. This means the bulge moves slightly ahead of the Moon in its orbit, which attempts to pull it backwards. This slowly saps our planet's rotational energy, slowing its spin while the Moon gains energy, causing it to move into a higher orbit.

This incremental braking on our planet's spin means that the length of an average Earth day has increased by about 1.09 milliseconds per century since the late 1600s, according to the latest analysis. Other estimates put the figure a little higher, at 1.78ms per century by drawing on more ancient observations of eclipses.

While none of this sounds like much, over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, it all adds up to a profound change.

The Moon is thought to have formed in the first 50 million years or so after the birth of the Solar System. The most widely accepted theory is that a collision between the embryonic Earth and another object about the size of Mars, known as Theia, cleaved off a chunk of material and debris that coalesced into what we now call the Moon. What is clear from geological data preserved in bands of rock on Earth is that the Moon was a lot closer to Earth in the past than it is today.

The Moon currently sits 384,400km (238,855 miles) from us on Earth. But one recent study suggests that around 3.2 billion years ago – just as the tectonic plates were starting to move around and ocean dwelling microorganisms were gobbling up nitrogen – the Moon was just 270,000km (170,000 miles) from Earth, or about 70% of its current distance.

"The faster-rotating Earth shortened the length of the day so that [within a 24-hour period] there were two sunrises and two sunsets, not just one each as today," says Tom Eulenfeld, a geophysicist who led the study at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in Germany. "This may have reduced the temperature difference between day and night, and may have affected the biochemistry of photosynthetic organisms."

What studies like his reveal, however, is that the rate of lunar recession hasn't been constant either – it has sped up and slowed down over time. One study by Vanina López de Azarevich, a geologist at the National University of Salta in Argentina, suggests that around 550-625 million years ago, the Moon could have been retreating as much as 2.8in (7cm) a year.

"The speed with which the Moon was moving away from Earth definitely changed over time and will do so in the future," says Eulenfeld. For much of its history, however, the Moon has been moving away at a far slower rate than it is currently.

In fact, we are currently living in a period when the rate of recession is unusually high – the Moon would only have had to recede at its current rate for 1.5 billion years to reach its present position. But the process has been occurring since the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, so it was clearly much slower at points in the past.

"The tidal drag right now is three times bigger than we might expect," says Waltham. The reason may be due to the size of the Atlantic Ocean.

The current configuration of the continents means that the basin of the North Atlantic Ocean happens to have exactly right proportions to generate a resonance effect, so the water it contains sloshes back and forth at a rate close to that of the tides. This means the tides are larger than they otherwise would be. As Waltham puts it, think of pushing a child on a swing – they get higher if each push is timed with the existing motion.

"If the North Atlantic was slightly wider or narrower, this wouldn't happen," says Waltham. "The models seem to show that if you go back a few million years, the tidal strength drops right off because the continents were in different positions.”

But it is likely to continue to change in the future. Modeling predicts a new tidal resonance will appear 150 million years from now, and then will vanish around 250 million years from now as a new "supercontinent" forms.

So, could we eventually have a future where the Earth no longer has a Moon?

Even at its high current rate of retreat, the Moon is unlikely to ever leave the Earth entirely. The Sun's own calamitous demise will probably intervene long before that happens in around 5-10 billion years. Humanity is likely to have been snuffed out long before then.

In the shorter term, however, humanity may itself play a role in lengthening the days a little further by reducing the amount of water locked up in glaciers and the ice caps due to melting caused by climate change.

"The ice basically suppresses the tides," says Waltham, noting that around 600-900 million years ago, when our planet is thought to have entered a particularly frosty period known as snowball Earth, there was a dramatic slowdown in the rate of lunar retreat. The impact is, however, hard to predict, as some of this will be counteracted by rebounding landmasses as the weight of ice sheets is lifted from them, and other complications.

In theory, the next crop of astronauts to fly to the Moon with Nasa's Artemis program may be able to say they looked back at their home planet from further away than their predecessors on the Apollo program 60 years ago (although the point they arrive during the Moon's elliptical orbit around the Earth will probably determine this more – the distance between its closest and furthest points varies by 43,000km every 29 days).

For the rest of us, our lives are far too brief to notice the picoseconds being added to each passing day's length. If you blink, you'll miss it.

**
EARTH’S INNER CORE IS SLOWING DOWN

Alongside the Moon's effect on the length of Earth's days, a recent study also suggests days could be getting ever so slightly longer for another reason – the rotation of the iron-nickel inner core of our planet may be slowing down.

The research by scientists at the University of Southern California indicates that the solid inner core, which is suspended within the Earth's liquid outer core, gradually super-rotated faster than the material above it between 2003 and 2008, but then has slowed down over the following 15 years.

Using analysis of seismic waves from earthquakes, the researchers created models of how the rotation of the Earth's core has varied between 1991 and 2023. Their models suggest our planet's inner core is now rotating slightly slower than the Earth's mantle, the layer between the crust and the outer core. The change in the core's rotation nearly 4,800km (3,000 miles) below the surface may lead to shifts in the length of day, "on the order of a thousandth of a second", says John Vidale, a professor of earth science at the University of Southern California, who was one of the researchers behind the study.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230303-how-the-moon-is-making-days-longer-on-earth

Moon far side


*
MARCUS AURELIUS — THE “PHILOSOPHER-KING”

Marcus Aurelius, one of the most celebrated Roman Emperors and a central figure in the philosophical school of Stoicism, continues to capture the imagination of historians and enthusiasts alike. Known for his philosophical writings and his reign as emperor from 161 to 180 AD, Aurelius' life has been well-documented. However, the exact circumstances of his death are less certain, leaving it somewhat shrouded in mystery.

Who Was Marcus Aurelius?

Before discussing the various theories of his death, it's crucial to understand who Marcus Aurelius was. As a philosopher-king, Aurelius is often remembered through his work Meditations, a series of personal writings that offer insights into his stoic philosophy.

His reign was marked by a dedication to duty, morality, justice, and wisdom. Aurelius is depicted as a ruler who preferred philosophical contemplation over the extravagances of imperial life.

Marcus Aurelius' Rise to Caesar

His rise to power was meticulously orchestrated within the complex web of Roman politics. Born to a prominent family, his destiny was shaped early on by Emperor Hadrian, who saw potential in him for leadership. Hadrian's strategy for a stable succession involved the adoption of Antoninus Pius as his heir, contingent on Antoninus adopting Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as his successors. This adoption secured Marcus' path to the throne.

Column of Marcus Aurelius was erected in AD 180 to commemorate his victories over the barbarian tribes of the Danube.

In 161 AD, following the death of Antoninus Pius, Marcus ascended as co-emperor with Lucius Verus. Their partnership was marked by rare harmony, showcasing Marcus' ability to govern wisely — a skill honed from his upbringing in the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. This seamless transition and co-rule highlighted the effectiveness of Hadrian's succession planning, ultimately shaping one of Rome's most philosophically inclined leaders.

THE DEATH OF MARCUS AURELIUS

Marcus Aurelius died at age 58 on March 17, 180 AD, in either the city of Vindobona (modern-day Vienna, Austria) or Sirmium (modern-day Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia) after returning from a military campaign against Germanic tribes on the Danube.

The traditional and most widely accepted explanation of his death is that he succumbed to natural causes — possibly the Antonine plague, which was rampant during the final years of his reign. As he had planned, his only surviving son, Commodus, succeeded him.

Four golden coins of Marcus Aurelius Emperor at National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain

The death of Marcus Aurelius marked a significant turning point in Roman history. He was the last of the "Five Good Emperors," and his passing ushered in a period of instability that eventually led to the decline of the Roman Empire.

His son, Commodus, who succeeded him, is often cited as one of the less capable emperors. And his reign contrasted sharply with the philosophical and administrative rigor of his father.

While the exact circumstances of Marcus Aurelius’ death may linger in a shroud of mystery, what remains undisputed is the legacy he left behind. His stoic writings continue to be studied and revered for their wisdom and practicality. In a time of often brutal and autocratic rule, his life stands as a testament to the power of philosophy and ethical governance.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-philosophical-life-and-mysterious-death-of-marcus-aurelius?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us


“Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life. ~ The historian Herodian about Marcus Aurelius

Deadly infection

Marcus Aurelius, the revered ruler of ancient Rome, sincerely desired to see his empire prosper and his people thrive. His dreams faced a significant obstacle: a terrible disease. This situation was not unique in ancient times. During Marcus Aurelius's reign, a plague spread like wildfire, wreaking havoc across the empire. This was a common problem in ancient times when medicine wasn't advanced enough to prevent widespread epidemics, especially during times of war when large populations lived in close quarters without proper hygiene.

The Antonine Plague occupies an essential place in the history. The emperor successfully ended the war with the Marcomanni despite a severe plague (pestilentia), which killed many thousands both among the people and among the soldiers. The epidemic struck many provinces and devastated the whole of Italy so that villas, villages, and cities were left without plowmen and inhabitants, turned into ruins, and overgrown with forests, as historian Paulus Orosius described it.

A mysterious plague swept through the ranks of the Roman army, claiming soldiers and even the emperor of Rome. In his final moments, Marcus Aurelius remained true to his principles. The theme of death and thinking about it was a crucial theme in his "Meditations," and as a stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius prepared himself for it.

"Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.”

Concerned for the welfare of his closest advisors, he ordered them to keep their distance, fearing the spread of contagion. Yet, even in death, he ensured the smooth transition of power, summoning his son, Commodus, to receive the symbols of imperial authority. In the heart of Vindobona (modern Vienna) or as many sources tell in the province Pannonia (modern Serbia), amidst the cries of the afflicted and the anguish of a grieving empire, Marcus Aurelius breathed his last on March 17, 180.

Most experts today think Marcus Aurelius likely died from a contagious illness, possibly the Antonine Plague. This pandemic, named after his ruling family, the Antonines, started in 166 AD and took numerous lives.

https://makeheadway.com/blog/emperor-philosopher-legend:-but-how-did-marcus-aurelius-die/


*
CAN WE PREDICT AN EARTHQUAKE?

Wajima, a city on Japan’s Noto peninsula, suffered extensive damage after the New Year’s Day earthquake and ensuing fires in 2024.

The recent Noto quake permanently reshaped Japan’s coast, lifting the land in the area as much as 13 feet and moving the coastline as much as 800 feet. It’s a small sign at the surface of the powerful forces roiling miles below. The Earth’s tectonic plates slowly jostle each other over millions of years, drifting, slipping, and colliding. As they shift, they create mountains and valleys and build up extraordinary forces that can explosively release in a few seconds, knocking over towering buildings and resculpting the landscape.

Why is it so hard to see these massive movements coming? It turns out that the wide span of timescales involved — from millennia to moments — makes it hard to predict earthquakes in a useful way.

James Goltz, a researcher studying earthquake warnings at the University of Colorado Boulder and a guest scholar at Kyoto University, explained that there are three basic ways that scientists try to gain an advantage against earthquakes. 

The first and most robust is long-term forecasting. Using historical data on Earth’s movements and maps of fault lines, researchers can anticipate where quakes are likely to occur, but not necessarily when.

Although geologists can estimate how frequently a major earthquake strikes a region, these recurrence intervals are often measured in centuries, if not longer. Being able to forecast that a major earthquake will occur in a given year, let alone on a specific day, is almost certainly out of the question. A warning that a major quake is likely to occur in a region in the next 500 years can be useful for designing building codes or constructing highways, but such an assessment doesn’t help much if you’re trying to plan an escape route.

The next tactic is short-term forecasting. “That’s something that is relatively new and controversial,” Goltz said. This is where scientists try to use more recent and more subtle shifts in the Earth to predict a larger quake. Smaller tremors sometimes precede larger earthquakes, so researchers are examining what kinds of warning signs have occurred ahead of past disasters to develop criteria for predicting the next one, ideally several days in advance.

But sometimes small tremors are just small tremors, and sorting out which ones herald a disaster is dicey.

This remains an active area of research, but the risks are difficult to communicate to the public, and the stakes are high. In 2012, six scientists received jail sentences for their assessment that a major earthquake was unlikely after a series of tremors rocked L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009. A major earthquake struck days later, on April 6, 2009, killing 309 people. The Italian supreme court later overturned the verdict. 

“We can’t ignore a possible foreshock because of the consequences,” Goltz said. “On the other hand, we sometimes feel that this is too low a probability to be actionable, and [forecasters] really don’t want to put themselves out on the limb saying we feel like there’s some caution warranted because of this particular earthquake.”

If a warning system sends out too many alerts, that could inure people to hearing them and result in complacency when a major earthquake does occur.

HOW A FEW EXTRA SECONDS COULD SAVE SCORES OF LIVES

The third major way to gain a lifesaving advantage over an earthquake is to issue alerts once a quake has already begun.

“Earthquake early warning is an innovation in itself in the sense that it doesn’t know anything about the earthquake at all until the seismic waves have reached the surface,” said Robert-Michael de Groot, who leads public outreach for the US Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system. The goal is not to predict a quake but to respond fast enough to provide useful information.

In this regard, the US is behind Japan. ShakeAlert first launched in 2019 in California and today only covers part of the country. It serves 50 million people in California, Oregon, and Washington — some of the most seismically active states in the US — but leaves out other earthquake-prone states like Alaska and Hawaii.

It works in a similar way to Japan’s early warning system, however. ShakeAlert is building a network of almost 1,700 stations and is 90 percent of the way there, according to de Groot. They’re spread out over a wide area to monitor ground movements, sending signals — sometimes just one second’s worth — to data processing centers that analyze them to model the shape, direction, and magnitude of a quake, filtering the trivial from the significant.

“Most earthquakes happen very fast. Most earthquakes we experience are very small,” de Groot said. “We have 20 to 30 earthquakes every day here in Southern California, and most of them we don’t feel.”

If the signals portend a large quake, the system can send out alerts to cell phones and public address systems as well as trigger a cascade of automatic actions, like slowing down trains, opening valves on water pipes, and closing fire doors in some buildings.
 
“We rely on ultra-fast detection, telemetry, and processing, all taking just a matter of seconds,” de Groot said. “Seismic waves travel at 13,000 miles per hour, so it’s a race against time.”

This still doesn’t buy people directly above the epicenter much time to react — a few seconds, if they can even get an alert at all. But for people farther away, it can provide valuable time to seek shelter. The challenge here is making sure people know what to do: drop, cover, and hold on. Even if you receive an alert after the shaking arrives, it could signal that an even larger rumble is on its way.

“We always tell people that ShakeAlert is not going to take away the need for you to respond to shaking,” de Groot said. “If you feel sort of that early jiggle, jiggle, jiggle that happens, hopefully that gets you to take protective actions, but what we really are concerned about is making sure you get the alert before the damaging shaking — the shaking that could potentially harm you — occurs.”

MANY COUNTRIES COULD LEARN A LOT FROM JAPAN

Japan’s earthquake detection and warning network was put to the test during the January Noto earthquake. The quake was triggered 6 miles underground, which is considered to be fairly shallow, and left little time for warning systems to kick in.

Earthquakes typically generate two distinct modes of movement. After the initial rumbles begin, a second, slower-moving wave ripples out from the epicenter, causing the ground to oscillate up and down and forming the more destructive phase of the quake.

The Japan Meteorological Agency, which handles earthquake warnings, sent its first alert across the Noto region 6 seconds after it observed the first wave. For people living within a radius of about 12 to 18 miles, those early warnings on their cell phones, radios, and neighborhood PA systems didn’t arrive until they could already feel the more damaging second wave, but they still bought valuable time ahead of larger shocks.

“This particular earthquake, we actually had two earthquakes in a very short time,” Masumi Yamada, an associate professor in the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University told Vox. “At the beginning it was small, and then it got larger and larger and larger.”

But Yamada noted that some uncommon factors also exacerbated the death toll from the earthquake beyond its raw strength and despite the early warnings.

While the Noto Peninsula is more sparsely populated than the metropolises on the other side of Japan’s main island, the quake occurred on New Year’s Day, which is a major holiday and a time when families gather, so people were congregating at home when the tremors began. The demographics of the region are older than the average in Japan, and so is the housing stock, with many homes not up to the latest earthquake resistance codes. More than 76,000 homes were damaged that day, and 90 percent of deaths were caused by falling buildings. Sixty percent of deaths were among people in their 70s or older.

mobile pharmacy

It was also a very cold day. At least 32 people died from hypothermia or other cold-related causes after the quake. And during the harried response, a Japan Coast Guard plane carrying relief supplies for earthquake survivors collided with a commercial airliner, killing five of the six coast guard crew members.

The efforts to reduce earthquake casualties thus cannot start and end with the shaking earth. It requires a holistic approach, ranging from restricting where people are allowed to build in the first place to implementing strategies to reduce injuries from rubble, broken gas pipes, and downed power lines in the aftermath. As Japan has learned, saving lives requires public education as well, including disaster drills and established evacuation routes.

For other countries aiming to emulate this kind of system, Yamada said that in addition to deploying a seismic sensor network, earthquake early warning systems also need robust high-speed data networks to prevent bottlenecks. “Those kinds of things will happen when a big event occurs and there’s an increase of data and the system slows down,” she said.

It won’t be quick, easy, or cheap, but early warnings could prove to be the most effective way to contain an earthquake’s devastation, and the lessons could also reduce the toll of every type of catastrophic natural disaster that humanity faces.

https://www.vox.com/354073/earthquakes-are-among-our-deadliest-disasters-scientists-are-racing-to-get-ahead-of-them?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

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MINING MINERALS FROM . . .  SEAWEED



Two key principles underlie this research. One, seaweed grows quickly and sucks minerals out of the water to do so. Two, seaweed’s cell walls are structured from sulfated polysaccharides—compounds made of long chains of sugar molecules. Sulfated polysaccharides are negatively charged, meaning they attract positively charged minerals floating nearby. 

“It’s pure chemistry,” Umanzor says. “Positive with negative, and then it just collects.”



Several years ago, Scott Edmundson, at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington State, began digging into whether seaweed could store valuable minerals. He’d come across a paper describing how rare earth elements were accumulating in seaweed in polluted areas along Morocco’s Atlantic coast and was struck by the potential.



Reading about seaweed’s natural propensity to sieve minerals from seawater sparked a “wacky idea” to test how far the process could go, Edmundson says. So he and other PNNL scientists ran an experiment to see if they could deliberately grow seaweed to take up minerals. The project—which was also funded by ARPA-E—finished last year, though they’re continuing to dig into the topic. So far, the team’s work suggests that seaweed can be processed to produce a carbon-rich component used in concrete or biofuel manufacturing and a second mineral component containing elements such as phosphorus.



There are a lot of unknowns, says Edmundson. Different seaweeds appear to have distinct mechanisms for getting minerals out of seawater and unique ways of incorporating or concentrating them in their tissues. “There’s layers upon layers of variability that are unclear at the moment,” he adds.



Underpinning all of this research are important, unanswered questions, including why seaweed absorbs these minerals at all, whether it can do so in concentrations high enough to be useful, and whether the elements can be pulled out in a financially viable way.

The key to making all this work, says Umanzor, is figuring out how to extract metals and rare earth elements from seaweed without destroying it. For seaweed mining to make financial sense, the process needs to leave the algae in good-enough condition to still be used for other applications, including as fuel, food, or a component in bioplastic production.



Another crucial piece of the puzzle is finding the right spot to grow the seaweed. Despite their name, rare earth elements are not all that rare. These and other critical minerals are present throughout the ocean in tiny amounts. Yet there are areas where they likely exist in higher concentrations—like downstream from large deposits on land. 



That’s why Umanzor and her collaborators are examining if rare earth elements are sloughing off Bokan Mountain in southeast Alaska and ending up in the ocean, and whether growing seaweed in a nearby bay can snag what runs off. Bokan Mountain is being considered for conventional mining, but if it works, seaweed extraction could offer a more sustainable alternative.



Susete Pintéus, a marine biologist at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Portugal, coauthored a 2022 review paper on seaweed’s role in the green energy transition. She says seaweed extraction alone—if it works—cannot completely eliminate conventional mining for these metals because the demand is so great. “[Seaweeds] can contribute,” she says, “but they will not solve the problem themselves.”



Even though seaweed collection can’t fully replace mining, Umanzor says that by extracting materials as they leach naturally out of the land—as they might on Bokan Mountain—algal mining offers a way to scoop up minerals that were going to be lost to the sea.



Umanzor never imagined that the humble seaweed could become a vessel to capture valuable materials. But in this role, it might support a more sustainable future.



“Metals have to come from somewhere, and extracting them is very destructive,” she says. “It’s worth exploring other possibilities that align more with our ideas of a greener world—or a bluer world.”



https://hakaimagazine.com/news/what-the-heck-is-seaweed-mining/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us




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HOW THE BRAIN CLEANSES ITSELF OF ITS OWN WASTE

About 170 billion cells are in the brain, and as they go about their regular tasks, they produce waste — a lot of it. To stay healthy, the brain needs to wash away all that debris. But how exactly it does this has remained a mystery.

Now, two teams of scientists have published three papers that offer a detailed description of the brain's waste-removal system. Their insights could help researchers better understand, treat and perhaps prevent a broad range of brain disorders.

The papers, all published in the journal Nature, suggest that during sleep, slow electrical waves push the fluid around cells from deep in the brain to its surface. There, a sophisticated interface allows the waste products in that fluid to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which takes them to the liver and kidneys to be removed from the body.

One of the waste products carried away is amyloid, the substance that forms sticky plaques in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

There's growing evidence that in Alzheimer's disease, the brain's waste-removal system is impaired, says Jeffrey Iliff, who studies neurodegenerative diseases at the University of Washington but was not a part of the new studies.

The new findings should help researchers understand precisely where the problem is and perhaps fix it, Iliff says.

"If we restore drainage, can we prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease?" he asks.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BRAINWASHING

The new studies come more than a decade after Iliff and Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish scientist, first proposed that the clear fluids in and around the brain are part of a system to wash away waste products.

The scientists named it the GLYMPHATIC SYSTEM, a nod to the body's lymphatic system, which helps fight infection, maintain fluid levels and filter out waste products and abnormal cells.

Both systems work like plumbing in a house, says Jonathan Kipnis of Washington University in St. Louis, an author of two of the new papers.

"You have the water pipes and the sewage pipes," Kipnis says. "So the water comes in clean, and then you wash your hands, and the dirty water goes out.”

But the lymphatic system uses a network of thin tubes that transports waste to the bloodstream. The brain lacks these tubes.

So scientists have spent decades trying to answer a fundamental question, Kipnis says: "How does a waste molecule from the middle of the brain make it all the way out to the borders of the brain" and ultimately out of the body?

Part of the answer came in 2012 and 2013, when Iliff and Nedergaard began proposing the glymphatic system. They showed that in sleeping animals, cerebrospinal fluid begins to flow quickly through the brain, flushing out waste.

But what was pushing the fluid? And how was it transporting waste across the barrier that usually separates brain tissue from the bloodstream?

WAVES THAT WASH

Kipnis and his team began looking at what the brain was doing as it slept. As part of that effort, they measured the power of a slow electrical wave that appears during deep sleep in animals.

And they realized something: "By measuring the wave, we are also measuring the flow of interstitial fluid," the liquid found in the spaces around cells, Kipnis says.

It turned out that the waves were acting as a signal, synchronizing the activity of neurons and transforming them into tiny pumps that push fluid toward the brain's surface, the team reported in February in the journal Nature.

In a second paper published in the same issue of Nature, a team led by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided more evidence that slow electrical waves help clear out waste.

The team used mice that develop a form of Alzheimer's. They exposed these mice to bursts of sound and light that occurred 40 times a second.

The stimulation induced brain waves in the animals that occurred at the same, slow frequency.
Tests showed that the waves increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and the flow of dirty fluid out of the brain. They also showed that the fluid was carrying amyloid, the substance that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

In a paper published a few weeks earlier, Kipnis had shown how waste, including amyloid, appeared to be crossing the protective membrane that usually isolates the brain.

Kipnis and his team focused on a vein that passes through this membrane.

"Around the vein, you have a sleeve, which is never fully sealed," he says. "That's where the [cerebrospinal fluid] is coming out" and transferring waste to the body's lymphatic system.

From mice to humans

Together, the new studies suggest that keeping the brain's waste-clearance system functioning requires two distinct steps: one to push waste into the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain, and another to move it into the lymphatic system and eventually out of the body.

"We've described them separately," Iliff says, "but from a biological perspective, they almost certainly are coupled."

Iliff says many of the new findings in mice still need to be confirmed in people.

"The anatomical differences between a rodent and a human," he says, "they're pretty substantial."

But he says the results are consistent with research on what leads to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's.

Researchers know that the brain's waste-clearance system can be impaired by age, injuries and diseases that clog blood vessels in the brain.

"All of these are risk factors for Alzheimer's disease," Iliff says.

Impaired waste removal may also be a factor in Parkinson's disease, headache and even depression, Iliff says. So finding ways to help the brain clean itself — perhaps by inducing those slow electrical waves — might prevent a wide array of disorders.

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/06/26/g-s1-6177/brain-waste-removal-system-amyloid-alzheimer-toxins?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

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HOW TO IMPROVE BRAIN HEALTH   

Use the opposite hand

Using your opposite hand instead of the one you are comfortable with can help your brain to integrate its two hemispheres and develop new neural pathways and connections. Studies using brain scanners show that when you use your stronger hand just one side of your brain is engaged. When you use the opposite non-dominant hand, however, both hemispheres light up. Brush your teeth with the opposite hand, or use a different hand to control your computer mouse. Wash the dishes differently. Switch hands and switch on your brain's unused pathways.

Brain Boosting Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy can be a powerful way to reboot your brain and improve brain function. Scents in specific essential oils stimulate parts of the brain that control memories and emotion. In 2013, Northumbria University carried out a study with a group of elderly participants and found that merely being in a room diffused with the smell of rosemary boosted memory scores by 15 per cent.

Exercise regularly

Thirty minutes of moderate exercise daily has been shown to increase the production of new synapses (the junction between two nerve cells) in your brain and studies have demonstrated that regular cardiovascular exercise that elevates your heart rate is one of the best ways to encourage neuroplasticity in the brain.

HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) stimulates BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor), the ‘brain fertilizer’ protein that triggers new brain cell growth. BDNF increases blood flow and oxygen to the brain, and boosts the mitochondria in your neurons, the tiny ‘batteries’ that power your brain. Regular exercise – even half an hour three times a week – can increase its levels by 300 per cent. People who exercise have been shown to have less deterioration in their brains than people who don’t.

You can also lift weights to improve your memory. A study from 2019, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that weight training can improve your ability to think and reduce, or even reverse, aspects of age-related memory loss.

Scientists injected rats with a substance known to cause brain inflammation, similar to the effects of aging or early stage dementia. They then split the group into two: half the rats had tiny weights attached to them while they had to climb up ladders to reach a treat. The weight was gradually increased, effectively weight training them.

A third group was the control group: they had neither brain inflammation nor weights.
All the rats were then put into a maze, which they had to complete several times. In the first few tests, the control animals were faster and more accurate than those whose brains had been impaired. However, after a little practice, the weight trained animals caught up to and even improved upon the speed of the control group. The brains of the weight-trained rats were found to be full of enzymes and genetic markers associated with creating new neurons and increasing the brain’s ability to grow and adapt.

Listen to Binaural Beats

Listening to a form of sound wave therapy called binaural beats boosts the main hormones responsible for brain health in older age, DHEA and melatonin, by between 50 and 100 per cent and reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, in half.

Shake-up your routine

Ever find yourself going completely blank mid-sentence? We all experience a descent of brain fog once in a while. Sometimes it’s due to a bad night’s sleep; other times the pub is to blame. But one thing you might not have considered is that a lack of novelty could be leading to your fuzzy thinking.

Experiencing new things isn’t just for the adrenaline-seeking junkie. When you forego the same old routine and search out novel and exciting experiences, your brain gets stimulated, which leads to a rush of dopamine and adrenaline.

Scientists now know that seeking out new things can actually lead to the growth of brain neurons. This is thought to be because of a protein called Brain-Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF), which improves neural functioning. Levels of BDNF increase in stimulating environments.

That doesn’t have to mean bungee jumping or swimming with sharks, if that’s not your ticket. It can be small, subtle everyday changes that break you out of the same old routine and jolt your brain into thinking about something new. For example, try listening to a different genre of radio station, or take a completely new route home from work.

Start running or walking

A 2017 study from the New Mexico Highlands University found that ‘foot impact’, the striking of your foot on the ground, increases blood flow to the brain. So, although cycling or rowing can increase oxygen levels to your brain, walking and running (which has an even stronger foot strike) had additional benefits, building grey matter volume and strengthening overall cognitive skills.

Similarly, you can power up your brain before big meetings by going for a ten-minute walk. Stanford University researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz asked people to think up ideas while sitting at their desk, or after walking at a comfortable pace on a treadmill. Their findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition in 2014, found that the walkers had increased creativity, came up with better ideas and were more able to concentrate than those who stayed at their desks.

“There is a growing body of research that shows moderate exercise, even something as simple as a quick walk, sharpens our concentration and helps us come up with solutions to problems, or think up great ideas, during a working day,” says personal trainer Matt Roberts.

“Our working culture means many of us stay chained to our desks in the belief this makes us work harder. But you’ll work better if you take regular walks.”

Spinal checks

Adjustments by osteopaths and chiropractors can improve brain function, and especially the functioning of your pre-frontal cortex which controls decision making, focus and intelligence. If you are suffering from brain fog, anxiety, depression or frequent headaches, your back may be a good place to start.

Get enough sleep

How many hours do you sleep each night? Too little or too much and your brain simply doesn’t work properly. In one 2017 study of more than 9,000 people, less than six hours sleep or more than eight hours sleep resulted in a reduction of memory function and decision-making ability. Instead, 7-7.5 hours seems to be optimal.

Multitask new things

Picking up a new skill is never as easy as it looks – and that’s especially true as we get older. In general, children exhibit more neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to grow and change) than adults so they tend to be better at picking up new skills. Think about toddlers: in the space of just a few short months a baby can learn to walk, talk, and eat solid food.

This concept gave Rachel Wu, a psychologist at the University of California, an idea. In 2019, she and her fellow researchers hypothesized that if we learned in a manner similar to toddlers, we might be able to pick up skills more quickly. Which is to say, if we attempted to learn multiple skills at the same time, we would pick them up faster.

Wu and her team asked adults between the ages of 58 and 86 to simultaneously take three to five different classes for three months, resulting in a total of 15 hours of learning time each week, similar to what a university student might expect.

The participants did cognitive assessments before, during, and after the studies to test their working memory, episodic memory, and cognitive control. After just a month and a half of studying, the participants increased their cognitive abilities to the point that they were getting similar scores to people 30 years younger than themselves.

"The take-home message is that older adults can learn multiple new skills at the same time, and doing so may improve their cognitive functioning," noted Wu. "The studies provide evidence that intense learning experiences akin to those faced by younger populations are possible in older populations, and may facilitate gains in cognitive abilities.”

Get your ears checked

Research has shown that there is a connection between hearing loss and brain decline and the development of dementia. In 2015, the University of Colorado found that when hearing loss occurred, although the brain rewired itself, handing the areas that usually deal with hearing over to sections that process touch or vision, the hearing parts of the brain were considerably weakened. Turn on the hearing aids, however, and a neuroplastic adjustment takes place within your brain that reverses any damage.

Drink more water

Your brain is 73 per cent water and even loss of fluid equal to 2 per cent of your body weight has been shown to affect decision making and create problems with focus and memory. 75 per cent of us are regularly dehydrated, which can trigger depression, chronic fatigue and attention deficit disorder (ADD). [Oriana: If you hydrate, at least in part, with green tea, you get the benefits of anti-oxidants as well.]

Book in for an online yoga session and breathe correctly

Pranayama breathing will oxygenate your brain and clear your nasal passages. A 2021 study on the effect of oral breathing on cognitive activity showed that the functional connection decreased a significant amount during a working memory task in oral breathing rather than nasal breathing.

Similarly, did you know that meditating lights up your frontal lobes – the area for problem solving and impulse control - and develops the areas of the brain related to attention and sensory processing? Meditators have higher volumes of brain tissue, reduced brain inflammation, well balanced neurotransmitters and less stress.

Stimulate your tongue

The tongue is where two of the most important meridians in the body meet. Brain fog and memory issues can be treated by boosting energy flow in the area with a series of acupuncture sessions. Stimulating the tongue with an electric pulse has also been shown to activate the neural network in the brain in charge of balance, and can help multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and stroke patients improve their muscle control.

Train to be less absent minded

Do you ever find yourself doing something completely absent-minded? You pour cold water in your tea after forgetting to turn the kettle on? You start scrolling through Twitter and forget to pick the kids up from school?

These are what cognitive scientists would call 'lapses in executive function'. Executive function is the ability to consciously control our thoughts, emotions, and actions to achieve our goals. It’s basically the exact opposite of being absent-minded.

Having strong executive function is important to our lives because those who have it are generally more switched on, and research has shown it can be an indicator of good social skills, academic achievement, mental and physical health, making money, saving money and even staying out of jail.

So researchers are keen to understand how we can improve our executive function. The more they learn, the more difficult they understand it to be. For example, if you do a lot of puzzles, you might be very focused when completing puzzles, but it doesn’t necessarily make you any less prone to absent-mindedness in the real world.

Speaking in a TEDx Talk in 2018, cognitive scientist Sabine Doebel shared her findings that executive function could be affected by context. In her experiments, she invited children to complete delayed gratification tests: either they could have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later. Some waited, others didn’t.

Then she told the kids that they were on a certain team and their team (who they’d never met) was either more or less likely to wait. She found that the results skewed to match the fictional odds of the team. And the kids on the team more likely to wait used more executive function strategies to help them wait.

This led Doebel to the conclusion that you can improve executive function with context. If you want to focus while learning something, surround yourself with others doing the same. Or teach yourself strategies to use executive function in the particular context of what you’re doing, like putting your phone away before reading, or performing a certain action every time before practicing a skill.

Experiment with light therapy

The Vielight 810 is a small machine that attaches to your nose and sends a near infrared light up into your brain, pulsing at 10 Hz, the frequency that repairs brain cells and neural networks. Photons of light go deep into the brain’s ventral areas where dopamine, which controls sleep, is made, and also triggering the release of serotonin, the calming neurotransmitter.

Learn to Cross Crawl

Cross Crawl exercises use opposite sides of the body. For example, on all fours lift your right arm and left leg, then reverse. Exercises like this strengthen communication signals between your body and brain, boosting brain function in the process. The movement fires up neural pathways in the right and left side of your brain at the same time, building a connective path between the two sides of the brain and boosting clarity of thought, focus and spatial awareness.     

Like paying regular instalments into your pension scheme, adding ‘Brain Gym’ time into your weekly schedule is an essential long-term investment in your future; top up your hours, little by little, and you can relax in your retirement, reaping the benefits of your earlier efforts when you most need them.

Change your diet

Research published in 2021 by Harvard University Medical School found that certain foods are linked to better brain power. While it is important to stress that there is no fast-track method to prevent cognitive decline nor any magic food that can boost brain health, following a healthy diet of green, leafy vegetables; fatty fish; berries and walnuts is your best strategy of keeping your brain sharp as you age.

Leafy greens contain healthy nutrients like vitamin K, lutein, folate, and beta carotene which can help slow down cognitive decline, while flavonoids found in berries can help improve memory.

Fatty fish are great sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which have been linked to lower blood levels of beta-amyloid which is the protein that forms damaging clumps in the brains of those suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Walnuts, on the other hand, are high in alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) which also lower blood pressure and keep arteries clean.

Additionally, you need to start eating a brainy breakfast. Breakfast has long been dubbed the most important meal of the day, and with good reason.

According to Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals, people who eat breakfast are more alert and perform better in tests than people who skip it. This is because eating breakfast elevates blood glucose levels which, in turn, helps the brain function more efficiently.

The fact is that the brain is a bit of an energy hog. Despite making up just 2 per cent of overall body weight on average, the brain swallows up 20 per cent of total calorie intake in order to go about performing its functions. So it stands to reason that putting in more calories would allow it to function better.

However, not any food will do. Different parts of the brain respond differently to foods. For example, the frontal cortex is particularly sensitive to glucose levels; too much or too little can send it out of whack.

So, with that in mind, here are a few ideas of different breakfast foods that might give your brain a morning boost.

Eggs: Rich in vitamins B6 and B12, which are tied to brain health, they’re also one of the best sources of choline, which the body uses to create acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood and memory. Choline is linked to better memory and brain function.
Salmon: it’s filled with Omega-3, a fatty acid which the brain uses to build new cells and nerve cells.

Blueberries: Their antioxidant properties help prevent oxidative stress and inflammation, two conditions that may contribute to brain aging and neurodegenerative diseases. They may also improve communication between brain cells and boost memory too.

Give your brain a dopamine fast

Dopamine is a chemical created by the brain that is involved in feelings of happiness, motivation, attention and decision-making. It’s a complicated little thing.

In general, the things that cause our brains to give us a hit of dopamine are things that bring us joy. Looking at pictures of cute dogs on Instagram, watching our favorite movie, biting into delicious food, listening to a good song, having sex, etc.

Which rather begs the question: why would anyone want to take a fast from dopamine?

Well, the thinking behind this Silicon Valley trend (try to contain your eye-rolls) is that dopamine is like an addiction for the brain. It gets a ‘hit’ of dopamine from seeing that picture of a cute dog – and then it seeks to replicate that by searching for more cute dog pictures. Soon, you've procrastinated away the afternoon. So, the idea goes, by fasting from dopamine, we can become more aware and attentive to our surroundings.

How, you ask? Well, as with most Silicon Valley trends, it’s a very basic concept taken to extremes: no electronics, no reading books or magazines, no sex or masturbation, no food, no talking, no music or podcasts, no coffee or stimulants. The idea is to do this for a full 24 hours before slowly reintroducing dopamine back into your life.

Get your eyes checked

When your sight weakens, so does your brain processing power, which relies on your eyes to feed it precise information. If your eyes are not in top condition the messages your brain picks up will be similarly fuzzy, and your brain’s responses will be far slower than they should be.

Learn to think more elastically

The term ‘elastic thinking’ was coined by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow, who believes that we can open ourselves up to creative insights by loosening control of the filters in our brain that block unusual associations from reaching our conscious mind.

Theories suggest that deep within the unconscious mind, the left and right hemispheres of the brain battle it out to get their ideas accepted by the jury of the executive brain (or pre-frontal cortex). The associations that get waved through tend to be the most straight-forward based on the context, which is why they are usually correct.

Mlodinow has an example of how our brains tend to jump to the most obvious conclusion. Take the statement, “The cooking teacher said the children made bad snacks.” The context of "cooking teacher" tells your brain that the appropriate meaning of “made bad snacks” has to do with the creation of food. Replace “cooking teacher” with “cannibal” however, and the context changes: the same words (“made bad snacks”) immediately have a very different interpretation. Yet the writer of the sentence could conceivably have meant that the cooking teacher was a cannibal.

Sometimes it’s only by opening ourselves up to these unlikely, or “remote” associations, says Mlodinow, that we can get the correct — or most exciting — meaning. And that's how we can channel the power of elastic thinking.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-improve-your-brain-health-and-avoid-alzheimer-s-and-other-forms-of-dementia?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us


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HOW TO PREVENT LOWER BACK PAIN THE EASY WAY

Low back pain affects at least 619 million people worldwide, and that number is expected to increase to 843 million people by 2050, according to research estimates.

Unfortunately, nearly 70% of people who recover from an episode of low back pain have a recurrence within a year, experts say. In addition to acute physical discomfort and lost time at work, treatment often requires education, physical therapy and exercises such as Pilates that may require fees or specialized equipment. [Oriana: I used to do Pilates at my local YMCA. It took no special fees or equipment — just a yoga mat. It improved my posture in no time, and back pain became a memory. Even though I haven’t done Pilates for several years now, my back muscles are still strong and I rarely experience back pain, in spite of a lot of sitting at the computer.]

Yet there is an easy, free way to prevent low back pain, at least for a while, according to a new randomized clinical trial.

People in the study who walked regularly after having at least one episode of low back pain were pain free nearly twice as long as those who did not.

“The intervention group had fewer occurrences of activity-limiting pain compared to the control group, and a longer average period before they had a recurrence, with a median of 208 days compared to 112 days,” said senior author Mark Hancock, a professor of physiotherapy at Macquarie University in Sydney.

“Walking is a low-cost, widely accessible and simple exercise that almost anyone can engage in, regardless of geographic location, age or socio-economic status,” Hancock said in a statement.

WALKING FOR AT LEAST 30 MINUTES A DAY

The study, published in The Lancet, followed 701 Australian adults, mostly women in their 50s, who had recently recovered from an episode of low back pain that derailed their ability to perform daily activities. Each person was randomly assigned to a control group with no intervention or an individualized walking and educational program.

Those in the intervention group were asked to build up to 30 minutes of walking five times a week over a six-month period at speeds adjusted for age, physical capacity and individual preferences. Jogging was also allowed.

“After three months, most of the people who took part were walking three to five days a week for an average of 130 minutes in total,” Hancock told CNN via email.

Participants were asked to wear pedometers to track their daily steps and keep a walking diary. At three months into the program, they also wore an accelerometer that objectively measured daily step count and the amount of brisk walking or other physical activity.

The program also provided six physiotherapist-guided education sessions over six months, a more cost-effective model than typical treatment, Hancock said.

“We included 3 standard sessions with a physiotherapist and 3 brief phone catch ups,” he said in an email. “In the few previous studies of prevention exercise programs for back pain the intervention included approximately 20 group classes.

“We also discussed simple strategies to reduce the risk of a recurrence of low back pain and instructions on how to self-manage any minor recurrences. The education was embedded in the same sessions as the walking prescription.”

In addition to providing participants with longer pain-free periods, the walking program reduced the amount of time taken off work and medical visits by half, said lead study author Natasha Pocovi, a postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie.

“The exercise-based interventions to prevent back pain that have been explored previously are typically group-based and need close clinical supervision and expensive equipment, so they are much less accessible to the majority of patients,” Pocovi said in a statement.

“Our study has shown that this effective and accessible means of exercise has the potential to be successfully implemented at a much larger scale than other forms of exercise.”

Due to the structure of the study, it was not possible to determine how much of the benefit was due to walking or the educational program provided by physiotherapists, Hancock said.

“We believe it is likely the two components complement each other, with education helping to overcome avoidance and fear of movement, while the health coaching and walking program resulted in behavior change,” he said.

However, because the intervention appeared to be behavioral coaching, and not actual physical therapy, the act of walking may indeed have been the key reason for improvement, said A. Lynn Millar, a retired physical therapist and former professor at Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was not involved in the study.

“This is important, as many studies have shown that pain response is partially a behavioral response,” Millar said in an email. “The coaching was limited in duration, thus they can suggest that the primary intervention of walking was the major contributor to the long term response.”

What walking does for the body

What is it about walking that is so helpful for lower back pain? For one, exercise is good for every part of the body.

“First, the person is sitting less, and sitting is not the best posture for the back,” Millar said. “Second, walking will improve general circulation, and will improve blood circulation to the muscles of the back that are actively supporting the individual during the motion. Movement of a joint also helps circulate the joint fluids, thus the joints of the spine may be benefiting from the motion.”

Walking improves metabolism and the amount of calories burned, experts say. Lower weight can ease the load on the back and legs, ensuring better spinal health. Taking a brisk stroll also improves the strength of core muscles around the spine and in the legs, all of which can improve posture and provide better support to the spine.

Walking also increases muscle endurance, assuring muscles are less susceptible to fatigue and injury. Weight-bearing exercises such as walking increase bone density, protecting against injury while stimulating the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good hormones that reduce pain and stress.

When starting a walking program, good shoes and arch supports are necessary, and potential problems may be offset by exercise programs such as resistance training and stretching, Millar said.

“I also think it is important to have varied paces and distances throughout the week. Some problems are caused by progressing too rapidly, and not paying attention to initial aches,” she said.

“I also used to see people that were walking in shoes that did not have good support, or they had become so worn, the support was gone,” she added.

If your “back goes out” during walking, activity modification such as cycling or swimming may be necessary, Millar said.  Taking a day or two off from walking and doing some back exercises and stretching can also help.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/health/low-back-pain-walking-wellness/index.html

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ending on beauty: (wrong season, but the beauty of the poem wouldn’t let me go)

AT DAY-CLOSE IN NOVEMBER

The ten hours' light is abating,
And a late bird flies across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
Float past like specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time,
And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here
Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here,
A time when none will be seen.

~ Thomas Hardy
My thanks to Violeta Kelertas

Pine tree at sunset, Van Gogh, 1887