Japanese WW2 tank on one of the Kuril Islands
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ANGLAIS MORT À FLORENCE
A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.
His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled
For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.
Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate
In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.
~ Wallace Stevens
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Oriana:
Recently I found this poem on Eratosphere, a name I instantly adored (https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=275740. Alas, the poster’s attitude toward Stevens was hostile. I’ll quote only one comment, arguably one that is the least negative:
“Stevens always makes me think of Nietzsche’s comment that ‘existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon’. Stevens was an aesthete. I agree with Yvor Winters that he often wallowed in ennui and indulged in misanthropy … There is little compassion or love for humanity, no real warmth that flows from Stevens” ~ Michael F
I agree that warmth toward humanity is not what “flows” from Stevens, but — for me it is enough that Stevens loved beauty, and knew how to create beauty. Call me an esthete if you like; I find it a compliment, not an insult.
As for the man in the poem, growing old and feeling his approaching death in Florence (arguably Venice would be more fitting) — is there really no compassion for that man? Or self-compassion, perhaps, since it’s easy to identify that man with Stevens himself, a figure of tremendous loneliness.
Some would no doubt want to correct me: not loneliness, but solitude. Yes, Stevens could paint richly with words, but bleak loneliness often shows through — sorry, I can’t overcome that impression. Maybe it was his bad marriage, his lack of a dear and supportive companion to offer him human warmth and affection when he needed it — but then poetry is often written out of deprivation. It is a cry of despair in the guise of beauty, though the very existence of poetry shows an at least a temporary victory over despair — “when to be and delight to be seemed to be one.”
As in the poem by Stevens, aging is often seen as a time of diminished expectations (as Jungians would say, "the ego projects of youth have failed"), and overall diminishment. But it can also be a time of a rich harvest, of enjoying and refining what one has achieved during the more stormy years or youth. But then each stage of life has its own magnificence, if only we look for it.
“Just to be here is magnificent,” Rilke concluded. Stevens is saying this too, in his own more melancholy way.
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TOLSTOY IS NOT A GOOD FIT FOR MODERN RUSSIA
Leo Tolstoy is a great but awkward cultural legacy for modern Russia. I would compare him to the ancient ruins and Byzantine artifacts in Turkey: they generate enormous interest globally, but seem markedly detached from the Turkic and Muslim identity that forms the core of Turkish national pride.
Leo Tolstoy professed several things that clash with the Putinist narrative of the ongoing nation-building in Russia:
Tolstoy despised patriotism—the exact thing that President Putin holds for our dearest national virtue.
Tolstoy was a sharp critic of the official Orthodoxy from a religious point of view. He focussed on a huge weakness that the top clergy in Moscow never tried to address: when facing the choice between the State versus the weak and oppressed, our priests almost always sided with the State.
In terms of political movements of the 20th century, Tolstoy could be called a leftist Christian populist, a bit akin to the Latin-American Liberation theology. The combination of “anti-establishment” and “populist” in today's Russia brings upon you a label of “extremist” in no time at all—with all the fines and indictments this usually brings along.
“Leftist” is out of fashion in Russia today. Those who continue to cast Marxist spells and curses on their enemies, like the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, are actually nationalist Statists who use the widespread hate of oligarchs to get votes and contributions.
Non-violence professed by Tolstoy is totally out of place in the homeland of Kalashnikovs, T-34s, thousands of nukes and the epic annual celebrations of the victory in WW2.
Tolstoy’s infatuation with Slavic peasantry doesn’t resonate at all with our cultural elite. Peasants of the imperial era are viewed as a dark retrograde element with nothing of value to offer to the urbane, educated, and successful 21st-century Russians.
Below, a procession of Russian children carrying portraits of their family members who participated in WW2. Over the last decade, this has become part and parcel of a huge nation-wide celebration on May 9 in memory of our victory over Nazi Germany. Many participants dress their children and themselves in wartime uniforms of the Red Army to manifest their determination to “do this thing once again”, if necessary (mózhem povtorít, in Russian). This fusion of a classic militarist power show with a death cult has found its place at the core of our new national identity. This would have appalled Leo Tolstoy and his many admirers a century ago. ~ Dima Vorobyev, Quora
Matthew Downhour:
Interestingly, Tolstoy’s economic ideas were heavily influenced by Henry George, an ideology that was considered too liberal and capitalist by the communists before 1991 and too socialistic by capitalists since. Ultimately Tolstoy’s religious ideals had a bigger impact in India and the US, and his economics in Japan and Taiwan.
Fyodor Soikin:
I must point out that this describes more what Tolstoy would think about modern Russia, not what the modern Russians think of Tolstoy.
The Russians are eager to forget the ideological differences and hold up Tolstoy as a banner saying “See, Europe? We have great literature too!”
Stefan Hansel:
Much as I adore Tolstoy's pacifism, there are situations when it just doesn't suffice as an answer. Such is mankind.
Mike Zino:
Even in the early 20th century Lenin, who admired Tolstoy for many things, had trouble fitting him in with the revolutionary objectives which eventually toppled Tsarist Russia. Not that Tolstoy defended the Russia of his days — on the contrary. Exchanging letters with Ghandi and like thinkers, Tolstoy was a pacifist to the core, despite his “War and Peace” and brilliant descriptions of military events. Today, as in the heydays of his fictional epics, most people/readers ignore Tolstoy’s spiritual writings which place him at odds not only with the politics/religion of his lifespan but certainly also with the contemporary scene, not only in Russia. He was truly a sui generis.
Gerard McGonigle:
Tolstoy did not believe in the divinity of Jesus and he took some of His words beyond what He intended. For instance Jesus said “Judge not that you may not be judged.”Tolstoy thought this meant we should not have courts of law to judge those breaking the law. He did not believe in the Sacraments and held the Russian Orthodox Church in contempt, but he was a Christian, a follower of Christ, if an idiosyncratic one.
“I did not understand life. It seemed to me terrible. And suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and joy of life undisturbed by death.”
”There never has been and cannot be a good life without self-control.”
He held unorthodox views not just about Christ. He did not believe it was great men who changed history and, in common with G.B.Shaw, thought Shakespeare wasn’t much of a playwright. “ I think Shakespeare cannot be admitted to be either a writer of great genius or even an average one.”He thought Nietzsche “Stupid and abnormal.” He said of himself: “I know that I am both evil and stupid, yet people consider me to be a man of genius. So what must other people be like?”
Many people, in his own time and even now, have felt Tolstoy charismatic and even fascinating. I would say we can attribute this to his “going against the grain”, which appears to be the largest ingredient of charisma.
Tiny Mouse:
I would like to remind the author that Tolstoy started out as a career officer. He fought in the Crimean War on the front lines. And his first book is The Tales of Sevastopol. And that book is simply imbued with the spirit of Russian patriotism. So I wouldn't say that Tolstoy was alien to patriotism.
Besides, I would advise you to read Tolstoy's work "Patriotism and Government.” If you read it carefully you will be convinced that by "patriotism" Tolstoy meant "nationalism" in its worst form, namely, nazism, when a person considers his nation better than others and more entitled to everything than others.
This is a confusion of terminology.
Oriana:
There is the young Tolstoy, and the older Tolstoy, no stranger to despair. The older Tolstoy is a pacifist who despised nationalism and war-mongering.
He truly wanted to imitate Christ -- even when he no longer believed in a personal god. He believed in loving people. A famine broke out in the Samara district while Tolstoy was deeply immersed in writing Anna Karenina. Tolstoy suspended his literary work and devoted himself to organizing famine relief. Chekhov was also a deeply moral man, but Tolstoy is truly ahead of any other man of letters I can think of.
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THE WORLD IS RUNNING OUT SOLDIERS
A war between the United States and China would involve the kind of military manpower the world hasn’t seen in decades. As a point of contrast, around 156,000 troops landed on the beaches of France during the Normandy invasion in 1944. Some experts estimate that if China were to try to invade Taiwan — the most likely flashpoint for a superpower confrontation — it might need as many as a million. If the US were to defend the island, according to some estimates it might suffer as many as half the number of casualties in just the first three weeks of fighting as it did in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The last time the US fought wars anywhere close to this scale, many of those fighting were not there by choice: the military draft only ended in 1973, as American involvement in the Vietnam war was winding down. That conflict involved some 2.7 million American service members in total, more than 58,000 of whom were killed — around 30 percent of whom were draftees.
A report released on Tuesday by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a DC-based defense think tank, looked at what might happen if the American government once again felt a draft was necessary to provide for the nation’s security. For military planners, its conclusions are not encouraging.
In a tabletop wargaming exercise — in which experts are asked to anticipate how a given military scenario might turn out — participants including military officers, Pentagon staff, and academic experts were given the task of raising a force of 100,000 conscripted US soldiers in 193 days for a war with China. (One scenario involved a war over Taiwan; another, significantly less plausible one, involved a Chinese attack on the West Coast.) The most “successful” groups in the exercise found they’d likely only be able to raise half as many of the 100,000 needed soldiers; most groups raised far less.
Some of the factors complicating their efforts were simply logistical: The Selective Service System has estimated it will take 500,000 induction notices to produce 100,000 draftees. But by US law, those notices would be sent by mail to the address that draftees — which include all 18- to 25-year-old men living in the US — used to register for selective service when they turned 18. Many of these letters would probably not reach their intended recipients.
There would almost certainly be legal challenges to the draft, as well as significant public protests, while some number of draftees would apply for conscientious objector status or dodge it altogether. (An estimated 300,000 Americans either illegally dodged the draft during the Vietnam War or deserted from the military.) Many, if not most, might simply not be eligible for service: Pentagon studies have found that around 77 percent of young Americans would not currently qualify for military service due to being overweight, using drugs, or having other physical or mental health issues.
The military would also have to ensure that it had the equipment, facilities, and training resources needed to absorb these raw recruits so quickly. This was an issue in the early days following Hamas’s October 7 attacks, when the Israel Defense Forces called up a record 300,000 reservists only to be quickly overwhelmed by complaints about insufficient facilities, equipment, food, and other logistical bottlenecks.
Given the cultural and political upheaval that ultimately caused the draft to be scrapped toward the end of the Vietnam War, a return to mass conscription is not an option most US leaders would prefer to contemplate. But the CNAS report makes a stark case that US leaders need to at least consider scenarios where it would become a necessity: “US lawmakers, policymakers, and military leaders must assume that if a draft were called, it would be absolutely necessary. And if it is necessary, it must work.”
“We have been so successful at deterring major power conflict for the past 75 years that we have started to consider them a relic of the past,” Katherine Kuzminski, author of the report and director of CNAS’s military, veterans, and society program, told Vox. “Now, every country is having to think about what happens when you have a no-kidding, existential threat on your borders.”
But while we may live in a world in which the number and severity of armed conflicts are increasing again after decades of decline and in which countries around the world are ramping up their military spending, there’s one resource nearly all major militaries seem to be short of: people to actually fight those wars.
War without soldiers
In the United States, the Army is slashing its ranks by thousands of positions amid chronic recruiting shortfalls. In Europe, despite military spending increases since the war in Ukraine, the shortfalls are, if anything, even worse: Germany’s military has been shrinking for years despite a major recruiting push, while the UK may soon decommission four warships because of a lack of sailors to sail them.
Despite a military buildup prompted by concerns about China, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are falling short of their recruitment goals. Even China, which has the world’s largest military by people-power — with some 2 million active personnel — is struggling to recruit the skilled high school graduates it needs to operate its increasingly advanced weaponry. There’s an active debate among defense analysts about whether China even has the personnel needed to pull off an invasion of Taiwan.
In this context, more national leaders are starting to gingerly approach the issue of conscription. Germany’s defense minister recently presented a plan for a form of limited military conscription based on the systems now used by Scandinavian countries, which conscript some, but not most, eligible young people based on defense needs. Britain’s Conservative Party has included a plan for mandatory national service — with military and civilian options — in its platform for the country’s upcoming election. In the United States, the Washington Post recently reported some allies of former President Donald Trump’s campaign have suggested that some form of national service might be introduced if he is elected.
Whether any of these initiatives will go anywhere is hard to predict. Britain’s Conservatives are widely expected to lose, and Trump himself, who avoided service in Vietnam due to a diagnosis of bone spurs, dismissed the Post report as “fake news.” But in an era of so-called “great power conflict,” the question of who will actually be fighting the wars of the future will only become more important.
Lessons of Ukraine
The reason for the sudden resurgence of global interest in soldiers and conscription isn’t a mystery. The war in Ukraine, with its trench lines, tank battles, and artillery duels, marks a return to the sort of warfare that many had hoped was consigned to the dustbin of history.
For instance, the year-long Battle of Bakhmut, in which Russian forces — primarily from the semi-private Wagner Group — eventually succeeded in taking a small eastern Ukrainian city, was Russia’s bloodiest battle since World War II. More than 19,500 fighters were killed, according to a recent independent media investigation. That’s more troops killed in a single long battle than the Soviet Union lost in its decade-long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Finding troops for the “meat grinder” in Ukraine hasn’t been easy for the Russian government. Russia does conscript soldiers every year, but conscripts generally can’t be deployed outside Russia. In the fall of 2022, the Kremlin declared a “partial mobilization” meant to raise 300,000 troops for the military. But more than twice that number are believed to have fled the country to avoid the draft.
Since then, however, Russia has managed to stabilize its manpower situation. It has done this in part by offering large signing bonuses that exceed average annual salaries in many remote and impoverished regions of Russia, and by granting pardons to prison inmates. (Pardoned prisoners made up the bulk of the fatalities in Bakhmut.) These tactics have largely kept the public backlash to the hundreds of thousands of casualties manageable.
The worries about personnel are far more acute in Ukraine, which has a democratic political system and about 100 million fewer citizens than Russia. The long lines that formed outside recruiting centers immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 are a thing of the past. Today, there are desperate shortages of Ukrainian troops on the front lines.
The average age of these soldiers is over 40 — shockingly old by global standards. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently signed a controversial law to lower the age for draft eligible men from 27 to 25. (The average age of an American GI in Vietnam was 19.) The government has resorted to a number of carrots (giving volunteers the right to choose their own battalions) and sticks (highly unpopular street patrols to find young men avoiding the draft) to replenish the ranks. And like Russia, Ukraine is also now recruiting prison inmates to serve.
Another similarity to Russia: Ukraine was in a state of precipitous population collapse even before the war, thanks to a combination of plummeting birth rates and out-migration. Its population declined from 51.5 million when it became independent in 1991 to just 37 million in 2019. Add to that the more than 6 million people who fled the country after the outbreak of war, those currently in the military, those killed or seriously wounded in the war, and those who’ve turned to black market employment in order to avoid conscription, and it’s no surprise that Ukraine’s civilian economy is facing serious labor shortages.
The war has presented Ukrainian leaders with an agonizing choice that goes even beyond the brutal prospect of sending thousands of young people to their deaths: Fighting for their national survival today might require decimating the nation’s already grim demographic future.
Grayer world, grayer wars
Demography is also on the mind of military planners in rapidly aging East Asia, which is furthest along the global trend toward lower fertility rates. With the ever-present risk of a major war with neighboring North Korea growing, South Korean men have to perform at least 18 months of military service — and at least among democracies, it’s one of the toughest countries to avoid the draft. Even members of K-Pop supergroup BTS have to put in their 18 months.
But the country is also facing some stark population math. To maintain current troop levels, South Korea needs to enlist or conscript 200,000 men per year. But if current birth rates
continue, in 20 years there will only be about 125,000 men available per year to fill those spots.
South Korea has one of the world’s fastest aging societies, but it’s hardly an outlier. Two of the regions with the fastest falling birth rates — East Asia and Eastern Europe — are also the places where risk of interstate war or superpower conflict may be highest right now.
In China, demographic decline is further compounded by the legacy of the country’s one-child policy. A high-casualty war — which China has not fought since its conflict with Vietnam in the 1970s — would devastate many families in a society where lone adult children are often expected to provide for their aging parents. Perhaps in recognition of this concern, the People’s Liberation Army amended its policies to allow parents as well as spouses to claim death benefits for a soldier killed in the line of duty.
There might appear to be a bright side to all this. Not so long ago, some theorists were predicting a “geriatric peace”: societies with fewer available soldiers as well as older — therefore, presumably, less aggressive — populations might simply be less likely to start wars.
But the recent actions of Russia — where population decline is only slightly slower than in Ukraine — provide a powerful counterexample to that theory, not to mention the rising tensions and territorial conflicts in fast graying East Asia. The calculations of aggressive leaders like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping might just as easily be explained by what international relations theorists call “power transition theory”: the idea that governments will try to lock in military gains before their power starts to decline.
In other words, looking at decades of population decline to come, China’s Xi might decide that now is the moment to act in Taiwan, while he still has the troops to take it.
Andrew Oros, a professor of political science at Washington College who is writing a book on the security implications of East Asia’s aging societies, suggests that we may be seeing what he calls “dual graying” of conflict in the region: As societies age, they may be more likely to engage in so-called “gray zone” tactics — sabotage, propaganda, hacking, deniable attacks by unofficial militias and dual-use fleets — rather than all-out war. “This kind of gray conflict is something that older states are still very capable of doing,” Oros told Vox. “You don’t necessarily need to be fully able-bodied to fight a cyber war.”
Dulce et decorum est?
It’s not just that the pool of available soldiers is getting smaller. Those in that pool are less willing to join up than ever. Polls show young people around the world are becoming far less willing to fight for their country. Young Americans have far more negative views of the military as an institution than older ones.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, who supervised recruiting as commander of the Army’s Accessions Command, said one challenge is an anti-establishment mood in society at large, one that has even infected feelings about the military — an institution that long had wide support from Americans, whatever their politics. “There’s something of a loss of confidence in institutions across the board — courts, the government, the media, and the military,” Freakley told Vox.
When those feelings are paired with what is now a period of relatively high employment and higher wages in even low-skills sectors in the private economy, and the idea of arduous and potentially dangerous military service can look less appealing. It’s not a coincidence that Russia has been doing the bulk of its conscription in poorer, more remote regions of the country where the private sector can’t compete with military bonuses.
This trend holds even in some countries facing imminent military threat.
Taiwan recently extended compulsory military service for its citizens from four months to a year, but service is widely unpopular among many young Taiwanese and the government has struggled to expand its roughly 169,000-strong military.
A recent Carnegie Endowment poll shows that in Ukraine, a significant generation gap has opened up in attitudes toward the war. Ukrainians over 60 are about 20 percent more likely to say that Ukraine is winning the war and that it should fight until it liberates all its territory than those between 18 and 25 who would be more likely to do the actual fighting if the country began drafting more aggressively.
Jennifer Sciubba, a population demographer who focuses on defense issues, told Vox that “when you have a larger pool [of potential recruits or conscripts] to draw from you have to worry less about cultural shifts. It becomes a great issue in countries where the shift toward smaller populations is more pronounced.”
Uncle Sam wants you
A range of policy changes are being considered in light of these trends. Some Asian countries are loosening age and height requirements to expand the pool of potential recruits or conscripts. Australia, dealing with its own recruitment woes, is considering allowing foreign nationals to serve in its armed forces for the first time. At a recent panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Gen. James Slife, vice chief of staff of the US Air Force, said his commanders were looking at loosening some restrictions, such as requiring airmen to have driver’s licenses. (Gen Z-ers are far less likely to drive.)
The elephant in the room when it comes to discussion of manpower is gender. Israel may be the best-known example of a country with universal (with some notable exceptions) military service for both men and women. Norway and Finland are among the few countries with selective service systems that draft women as well as men, though Denmark recently joined them. Taiwan only recently rolled out plans to allow women to register for reserve training.
In the United States, where women are no longer excluded from combat roles in the military, the Supreme Court has rebuffed several legal challenges to the all-male Selective Service System.
But CNAS’s Kuzminski suggests that this is an issue for the government to deal with now, rather than when a wartime draft actually becomes necessary.“The legal underpinning for the all-male registration law is on pretty shaky ground,” she said. “It’s not about the social policy side of things. From our perspective, it’s about the fact that you cannot afford to lose a week, a month, two months, while this gets moved up through the courts.”
Then there’s the question of whether the wars of the future will be fought by humans at all. The Pentagon recently announced plans to build thousands of cheap drones as a means to, in the words of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, “overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people.”
Gen. Nick Carter, former chief of the UK’s Defense Staff, predicted in 2020 that his country might someday “have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots.” (The country currently has 130,000 servicemembers, all human.)
Freakley, who commanded US combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, was skeptical of the idea that “mass” could be achieved through autonomous systems alone, pointing out that similar claims had been made in previous generations by advocates of airpower. “There’s always a balance between manpower and technology,” he said, “but what history has shown us in warfare is that if you want to control another nation, you’ve got to put boots on the ground.”
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/355547/soldiers-shortage-demographics-population-conscription?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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SOVIET DEPORTATIONS IN THE BALTICS, 1941
On June 14, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia commemorate the day of victims of communist terror, mass Soviet deportations in 1941. Soviet soldiers in trucks snatched more than 200,000 people in the occupied Baltic countries — often at night — packed them into cattle wagons and dispersed them to labor camps across Russia and the USSR. Many died on the way or shortly after arrival from hunger, cold, and brutality.
The Soviets labeled about 1/4 of the population as ‘undesirables’ to be detained or deported — without even a pretense of a legal process.
That included babies, pregnant women, children separated from their parents, elderly, and people who were seriously ill.
deportation train
There were 2 types of deportees: regular people who were shipped off to Siberia, often whole families, and political prisoners.
Political prisoners were those who actively resisted the Soviet occupation. They were sent to concentration camps (GULAG). Often charges were made up and people were sent to GULAG just to make the numbers, as required by the NKVD plan on “ideological cleanup”.
No one was safe.
Many families were taken just to fill the quotas if the listed family couldn’t be found; others were taken because they had similar names to those listed. Some local collaborators just wanted to settle scores.
Mass deportations provided the USSR with slave labor in underpopulated parts of its empire, but the main goal was to transform the Baltic countries from proudly independent, functioning states into permanently subservient provinces.
2 years earlier, in 1939, the Soviets and Nazis formed an alliance by agreeing in their Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to illegally divide the European states between them through crimes of aggression, thus igniting the World War 2.
The Baltic countries declared neutrality at the outbreak of WW2, but the Soviets used the pretext that they were supporting independent Poland against its Nazi-Soviet occupiers to execute the next phase of its planned aggression in the Baltics.
In agreement with the Nazis, the Soviets invaded and occupied the Baltic countries, overthrew the governments, and staged their own fake elections to produce ‘winning’ candidates who would ‘request’ Soviet annexation. Obviously, this was all totally illegal under international and domestic laws of these countries.
After liquidating politicians, the first wave of mass deportations in June 1941 aimed to decapitate the independent states. It targeted families of civil servants, military leaders, police officers, business leaders, intellectuals, and public figures.
Before the deportations, there were mass shootings. Only those deemed “redeemable” (i.e. those who were innocent) were deported. Stalin’s ideology always was, “no person — no problem.”
Living conditions in Siberia were extremely harsh, whichever group of deportees people belonged to. People were simply dropped off the train in the middle of nowhere, and had to build houses and find food by themselves.
That is, if you even survived the journey.
Many did not.
Baltic people were always mostly agricultural nations, and had an extremely strong connection to their land, going back to the Baltic pagan religion, many elements of which are still part of the Baltic identity. Soviet deportations tore the very fabric of this identity.
June 1941 deportations were conducted simultaneously across large parts of Eastern Europe, not only in Baltics. And deportations continued after the WW2.
In total, over the years, the Soviets subjected an estimated 6 million people under their rule to forced migration.
The Russification of occupied territories of Ukraine that we see today is an old Russian tradition, going back to the USSR and the Russian empire.
Mass killings and deportation of people and bringing Russians to replace them is something Russia has never been made to answer for.
In 2021 Putin ordered to close ‘Memorial’, the oldest human rights organization in Russia and a Nobel peace prize winner.
Founded in late 1980s, its goal was to document political repressions in the Soviet Union and build a database of victims of the Great Terror and GULAG camps.
Once again, Russians are supposed to forget the past and erase from memory all the crimes their ancestors participated in. Then, crimes against humanity and genocide can be committed without a single pang of conscience.
We are seeing it now.
Again.
But just as Russian imperialism failed in the Baltics, despite (or because of) mass deportations, we know it will fail again against Ukraine. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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RUSSIA WILL NOT BE ABLE TO FIGHT ANOTHER WAR AFTER UKRAINE
Consider the fact that the Russians currently have a massive population and demographic problem, for at least two decades.
How’s that, you may ask?
It is after all a country of approximately 140 million.
Since 2021, Russia has lost at least a couple million of the best and brightest they’ve got, who fled the country in the run-up to the illegal invasion of Ukraine in Feb 2022.
The women of Russia, who already outlive and outnumber Russian men by the world’s largest margin, are not getting pregnant at rates that can overcome the population flight and extreme death toll of the war. It was already so before the war, with steadily declining birthrates.
The country’s birth rates have been in decline since 1994 when Russia was estimated to have 149 million citizens. By the start of 2022, its population was estimated to be 145,6 million, with 3,358 births a day being more than canceled out by a daily death rate of 3,663, according to Statistica.
The “patriarch” of the Russian Orthodox church has called for a ban on abortion already, recognizing the urgent state of decline.
Putin knows the problem is grave and has offered incentives and tax breaks to counter the decline in birth.
The effect of the war on the Russian population issue is staggering.
Over half a million Russian troops are killed or seriously wounded since that time.
Today the average daily Russian invaders killed in Ukraine is around 1,000. Some recent accounts from The Kharkiv and southern Kherson fronts indicate possibly greater losses than that…whole companies of infantry are routinely wiped out in massed assaults on Ukrainian positions.
In some cases, Russia is trying new tactics, but they appear ridiculously ill-conceived and abysmally-led in almost all circumstances. Chinese golf carts, motorcycle troops, and “turtle tanks” are not working, but they are steadily getting Russians killed.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) calculates that the average rate of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine every month is “at least 25 times the number killed per month in Chechnya and 35 times the number killed in Afghanistan”.
Coming on the heels of one of the worst COVID-19 mortality rates in the world and a mass exodus of young men and their families fleeing from conscription, Russia may have lost two million people in the past three years, according to The Economist.
The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 is currently at the same level as those in Haiti.
Think about that one. No offense, Haiti.
Those are a few of the problems.
Another massive problem is purely military.
You can’t send a million men into battle, lose more then half in the span of less than three years and expect to ever grow the military by sheer force of will or magic.
Recruitment, training, equipment does not happen magically either.
The Kremlonazis also are working hard to convert to a “wartime” economy and increase defense output dramatically. Today, in short, Russia has a big big problem with the balance between consumer consumption and military production. When the war is over, Russia will be bitten very hard indeed by extremely grave economic consequences due to the impact of sanctions, wartime spending (including significant bonuses for enlistment and death payouts). Once the war is over people will have no money and inflation will be crippling.
Then there is the problem of the impending Russian bank collapse.
Further, there’s the issue of all of Russian central bank reserves in the West, some $300 billion of wealth that Russia will never claw back.
You can’t simply pump more oil and gas into your BRICS friends and hope to overcome these factors with oil and gas revenues.
The arms export industry, an area where prior to 2022 Russia was a world leader, is in tatters. The Russians have already had to claw back some shipments intended for their weapons clients, and cannot credibly replace the extreme losses of hardware already suffered.
Getting back to the pure decline in population, the Russian conquest in Ukraine was very certainly driven to some degree by their well-known population issues.
It’s likely not the primary Russian “driver” for the war, but its certainly a factor in their thinking.
A free Ukraine enjoying Western standards of living, with a burgeoning technology base and abundant natural resources which can threaten Russian exports in the long term, just by virtue of its existence, also serves to further threaten Russian growth, for a number of reasons.
In the end we are left with the fact that when Russia loses in Ukraine, and it will, Russia on every measurable level and facet will be in an irreversible decline. And, just due to the fact that it’s Russia, (with all the problems, bullshit and corruption that go with it) there’s almost nothing which can save it. ~ Jake Timber Daen, Quora
Mark Lammas:
Ukraine will also suffer from a severe shortage of males. The difference is that gentlemen from other countries of Europe will be happy to solve that problem by marrying decent and beautiful young Ukrainian ladies, and may well stay there to help rebuild the nation. [Oriana: Keep on dreaming . . . ] Nobody will want to go and live in Russia.
Mark Daichent:
After the Thirty Years War, the male population of what today is Germany had been so severely reduced, that for a period of time polygamy was permitted.
Alan Kruza::
Russia always seems like Trump to me. Whenever he seems about to face accountability, he squeezes out of it and seems stronger in the end. So it seems with Russia. Russia, like Trump, needs to face accountability, and soon.
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HOW THE LEFT FELL IN LOVE WITH MILITANT ISLAM
~ American moderates have been shocked by the support for the Islamic extremists from Leftist academics and activists. How could ardently feminist supporters side with a culture that represses women? How could trans-rights activists back a society where any deviation from sexual or gender norms can result in death? What could the far left have in common with Islamists who seem to stand for everything they are against?
Prominent leftist scholars like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler have expressed support for such terrorist groups as Hamas and Hezbollah and have described them as part of the international and progressive left.
Dig down and you'll see Islamists and radical leftists have a lot more in common than meets the eye.
If you remove the Islamic imagery from Islamist extremism, you'll find a world outlook based on a Marxist world view—a power struggle between the exploiters and exploited that demands a revolution to set things straight. This world view fuels and is fueled by resentment and indignity.
It sees right and wrong as a binary. It is a viewpoint in which boils everything down to power dynamics. There are oppressors and the oppressed, colonizers and the colonized, good and evil. It is a totalitarian way of thinking—all human relationships are seen through power dynamics and cannot be examined through any other lens.
In other words, the boxed-in way both groups see the world is the same. Their causes are just vessels to carry their revolutionary ideology.
Art, language, romantic relationships, and even the family unit are all made political and action is demanded—the just must rid the world of the unjust to create a new world order or utopian society. This is exactly how students are taught to think at elite American institutions today. Critiques of different topics such as race relations, health care, gender, and the climate are all subsumed into this ideology.
With the immense role of Islamic extremism in the Middle East, many forget that not too long ago, the most influential political movements in the region were secular. Leftist ideology influenced by Marxism was not only extremely popular but even managed to take power with Nasserism in Egypt, Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq, and communism in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. Unsurprisingly, these countries were all major recipients of Soviet aid and collaboration.
But following their failure to conquer Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, secular Arab revolutionary movements needed to reinvent themselves. They then turned to Islam. The idea was to use religion as a motivator to stir up the population, while ridding it of its moral restraints. In essence, they used Islam as a tool to spread their ideology.
One of the pioneers of this process was Egyptian author and scholar Sayed Qutb, who is known as the godfather of modern jihadist thinking and was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was executed in 1969 for plotting to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Before his death, he was instrumental in transforming Islam from its traditional roots and moral principles to Marxist/Hegelian theory—Hegelianism was a precursor to Marxism.
Although Qutb was against Marxism, he was heavily influenced by it. His understanding of the world was one of a life-and-death struggle between Islam and ignorant societies, which he referred to as Jahiliyah (pre-Islamic societies) that must be eradicated to achieve an authentic Muslim society. In Qutb's 1964 short book "Milestones," he outlined the ideology, strategy, and tactics of jihadism. It's an Islamic version of Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin's 1902 political pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?" which was a blueprint for the ideological formation of the Soviet Union.
It's no wonder that books authored by Chomsky and Qutb were found by U.S. forces in Osama bin Laden's library at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And university students are reading Chomsky and Butler as well as other authors who embrace this world view, including Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Rashid Khalidi. This environment caused videos supporting Bin Laden's "Letter to America," published after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to surge in popularity on TikTok last November.
It's also not surprising that many radical leftists and jihadists see Israel as the cause of all the Middle East's problems. Israel and Israelis are not seen as an independent nation and a people striving to live and prosper but as an extension of European imperialism meant to repress the Arab population.
For example, in that same course on Islam and gender, the professor mentioned positive treatment of LGBTQ people and women in almost every Middle East country except for Israel, the first nation in Asia to recognize same-sex unions. She then accused Israel pinkwashing, cynically giving its LGBTQ residents rights only to legitimize its oppression of Palestinians.
Nothing good can be said about Israel because it is the root of all evil. In the eyes of my professor and others on the far left, Israel is the epitome of an oppressor, the unjust and the evil, and any good it does is a cynical attempt to distract from its repression of Palestinians. In this view, Israel and the Jews become hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind. This is why academics such as history professor Russel Rickford of Cornell University felt "exhilarated" by the massacre of innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, and why tenured professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University called the same attack “awesome."
Any act to advance their cause is allowed, no matter how violent. This is why Hamas could carry out a sadistic massacre against women, children, and the elderly and three out of four Palestinians support it despite such actions being expressly prohibited by the Prophet Muhammad.
Modern antisemitism, which often manifests as the idea that Jewish power and wealth is the cause of injustice, shares a similar structure to Marxism. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools" became a common axiom in the late 19th century. Some historians argue that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin understood this and used antisemitism to boost his popularity.
Most Americans wrongly assume that Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union. But Marxist-based thought has been preserved in the Western world in universities and many leftist-progressive movements.
There are, of course, irreconcilable differences between Islamists and Leftists. For one, Leftists are mainly atheistic while Islamists are deeply religious. Although some Leftists have sympathy for Islamist causes, most Islamists are disgusted by their rainbow flag-waving ideological counterparts. But that does not change their shared ideological roots.
There is a Russian saying, "everything changes, but nothing disappears." The Marxist understanding of the world didn't go anywhere. In the Middle East, it just put on a mask of piety, hijacking the world's second-largest religion. ~ Joseph Epstein
https://www.newsweek.com/how-left-fell-love-militant-islam-vice-versa-opinion-1885741
Mary:
I've always considered myself a leftist, if not as fervently as in my university days, always felt that class explained many fundamentals, so I was confused and dismayed by the support of the left on campuses for the Palestinians. How could they support terrorists who would deny rights so hard fought for? A group that would fervidly deny and execute any rainbow carrying LGBT folk, any "immodest" feminists, and force all to live under rigid medieval religious rule that respects no personal freedoms. How could they be so wrong headed?
I think the answer is the rigidity of their own thinking...peering at everything through the same rigid and unrelenting lens...a binary system of oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, colonizer/colonized, that is reductive and distorts actual situations to fit the system they espouse. I am not an apologist for capitalism, but the Marxist revolutionary dialectic does not accurately see and describe the Israel/Palestine conflict.
Just as in Russia and China, the peasant underclass was not Marx's industrial working class, Israel is not a Colonial Power, and the Palestinian jihadists are not the colonized oppressed. To frame the story on those terms is inaccurate, distorting, perhaps Romantic in the minds of these pro Palestinian "resistors" but ultimately grossly mistaken. It is the Palestinian cause that openly declares its intent to commit genocide...and it is that intent that makes any cooperation, any attempt at peace, both impossible and irrelevant. Not because the Israelis won't accept it...but because that peace would be anathema to Hamas...who are absolutely supported by the Palestinian populace.
Oriana:
I think “rigidity of thinking” is right-on, though perhaps it should be called the “rigidity of NOT thinking.” And also refusing to feel any empathy toward the victims of barbarous atrocities on October 7, and refusing to condemn the Hamas atrocities.
I’ve said it before, but since no one else seems to be saying it, let me say it again: the Israelis and Jews in general are labeled “white” (which is false for many of them), while Hamas and Arabs are seen as “people of color” — and that is enough for the white = bad, color = good equation. It’s a parallel with Orwell’s Animal Farm: “two legs bad, four legs good.” You’d think that educated people wouldn’t tall for such oversimplification, but youth’s desire to serve some grand cause is so strong.
One historical irony here is that the state of Israel started as a socialist project. In its early years, Israel used to be seen as a leftist, socialist country. Kibbutz members didn’t own private property; even children didn’t “belong” to their parents, but were raised collectively. A hard-to-grasp Israeli joke was that a kibbutz member decided to commit suicide, so he bought a wanted ad in a newspaper, seeking someone to commit suicide with (since everything was to be shared).
But Israel as such is hardly a joke. It is a miracle. There is no precedent for resurrecting a nation after two thousand years of diaspora. The saying, “They made the desert bloom,” may seem trite to us — but just try to repeat this feat.
Not being stifled by an oppressive religion like Islam was certainly an advantage, but since Orthodox Judaism is just as oppressive and was in fact a model for Islam (e.g. praying five times a day), the answer is not in religious differences but rather in being secular — most modern Jews are basically that — versus being rigidly religious, meaning trying to live as if we were still in the Middle Ages, especially when it comes to the suppression of women. I hasten to add that there are certain obscure Christian sects and Hindu sects that are equally oppressive toward women in particular, but toward all members in general — every religion carries within it the seed of extremism.
Religions are in decline, which should be celebrated and not bewailed. True progress requires a diminishment of religious authority, and development of the ability to think and question without fear.
Religion is not unique in trying to suppress the ability to think on one’s own. Certain ideologies are the equivalent of religion — Marxism is the most frequent example. Dystopian science fiction provides endless examples of repressive tyrannies. Most “true believers” are born into the system and indoctrinated and intimidated since early childhood. They go forth and try to convince others to join forth in the glorious service to the ideal, never mind that no ideal can be fully realized, and all have some undesirable consequences.
*
And no, Israel is not a colonial power. A colonial power like Great Britain in the past needs a home country from which to send its armies to conquer other countries into becoming colonies. Israel is in unique category of trying to establish a national state in its historical homeland.
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WHAT THE YALE FACULTY GROUP LEARNED DURING A VISIT IN ISRAEL
We represent a group of 25 Yale faculty who have just returned from a five-day visit to Israel. Our mission was to learn from and make meaningful academic connections with our Israeli counterparts. Much of what we learned and observed astounded us.
The environment is challenging, yet the Israeli academic enterprise has proven breathtakingly resilient. Imagine operating a university where a quarter to a third of students, staff, and faculty have been murdered, injured, taken hostage, or are on active military reserve service. Imagine teaching in classrooms with both Arab students (some with family in Gaza or the West Bank) and Jewish students (many just returned from military service or with casualties among family and friends). Imagine trying to manage standard faculty promotion, review, and tenure processes in the face of boycotts and similar discrimination from hostile academics around the world.
Contrary to the apartheid charge leveled against Israel in general and Israeli academic institutions in particular, we saw precisely the opposite. At Hebrew University, we received a presentation from two young female students, one a hijab-wearing Muslim and the other Jewish, just returned from reserve duty. The presentation ended with their heartfelt embrace.
At Ben Gurion-Soroka Hospital, Technion-Rambam Hospital, and the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center, we saw how integrated their medical schools and faculty are. The percentage of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are Arabs greatly exceeds their share in the total population.
We heard Arab university vice presidents, and their Jewish counterparts take full pride in jointly leading Israeli university life. Unlike the scene on American campuses, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze and Jewish students understand that their job is to learn, not to fight each other.
In presentations by an Israeli Arab journalist and a Druze professor, we learned that contrary to conceptions prevalent on American campuses, the majority of Israeli Arabs do not seek to separate from Israel. Indeed, while Israeli Arabs do have demands, we learned they are in service of more integration into Israeli society—better schools, law enforcement, and physical infrastructure—not less. Similarly, we learned from a Druze professor the strong connection to the Jewish State felt by the Israeli Druze.
We met face-to-face with faculty in academic disciplines matching our own at each of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tel Aviv University. We also met with the leaders of Sapir College in Sderot which came under direct attack on October 7, and Tel Hai Academic College which is currently evacuated due to the Hezbollah threat from Lebanon.
The President of Israel's Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a Nobel Prize winner addressed the challenges facing Israeli academics in discussion with us.
Facing such brilliance (and in such a small country), we were dismayed to learn the extent of academic discrimination being directed at Israeli academics: faculty who were invited to address conferences only to be told later—and in one case upon arrival in Australia—that they were no longer welcome to speak; external reviewers returning evaluation requests because they refuse to consider Israeli scholars; journals reneging on decisions to publish papers that were already accepted.
This is especially upsetting to us given the emergence of organized faculty extremists on American campuses with the publicly stated objective of boycotting Israeli academia. Our reaction to such prejudice is clear: we will build upon already existing collaborations with our Israeli colleagues, invite Israeli speakers to campus, offer to provide objective evaluations and reviews within our academic areas of expertise, and provide opportunities for budding young Israeli researchers.
We could not come to Israel without visiting the sites of the Oct. 7 atrocities and seeing with our own eyes what Hamas did to innocent civilians. We saw the carnage and devastation at Kfar Azza where 64 kibbutz members were murdered, and many others taken hostage. We visited the site of the Nova Festival where more than 360 young Israelis were murdered, raped, and kidnapped. We learned how at Soroka hospital in Beer Sheva, arriving Oct. 7 casualties peaked at the rate of one every 40 seconds, yet the hospital was able to stay open and maximize the number of lives they could save.
Every Israeli university, like all of Israel, remains traumatized from Oct. 7. Yet Israelis are resilient, and this is doubly true for Israeli academics. Indeed, virtually all the faculty and students we met asked how they could help us deal with the grotesque protests so commonplace on American university campuses. Seeing the strength of our Israeli academic colleagues, we return committed to telling their stories and fighting back against the hate.
Hebrew University, Tel Aviv
https://www.newsweek.com/what-we-learned-our-academic-visit-israel-opinion-1885030
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BURQA BANNED IN DENMARK, BUT NOT THE U.K.
Denmark was one of the European countries to ban lslamic veil.
Danish minister called facial coverings ‘incompatible with Danish values’.
Denmark banned the burqa and niqab in public places in 2018. The law was passed by the Danish Parliament with 75 votes in favor and 30 against, and it came into effect on August 1, 2018. The ban is seen as targeting Muslim women who wear these garments, which are perceived as a form of female oppression and a potential security hazard. Those who disregard the ban face fines of 1,000 kroner ($156) for the first offense and up to 10,000 kroner ($1,568) for repeat offenses.
In April 2011, France became the first European country to impose a ban on full-face veils in public areas.
~ Ram Bahkt, Quora
HoojavV:
United Kingdom needs to take the exact same action against the burqa and niqab… there is no place in western countries/society for this antiquated hateful muslim ideology and practices.
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HITLER OR PUTIN: WHO’S THE BIGGER COWARD?
Hitler stayed in Berlin as the allied troops of several countries were attacking and bombing the capital of Germany in April 1945.
Putin fled to Valdai as a small ‘Wagner’ unit was driving towards Moscow on June 24, 2023.
I’m pretty sure if armies of 3 countries, including the USA and UK, were attacking Moscow,
Putin wouldn’t have stayed there.
He’d run away well in advance to a secret bunker somewhere in North Korea, Iran or China.
Actually, if Putin persists in his ways, this can really happen in the foreseeable future.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
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CHARLES TAYLOR’S PRESCRIPTION FOR THE ILLS OF MODERNITY: CONNECTION
Charles Taylor
Lyric poets and mathematicians, by general agreement, do their best work young, while composers and conductors are evergreen, doing their best work, or more work of the same kind, as they age. Philosophers seem to be a more mixed bag: some shine early and some, like Wittgenstein, have distinct chapters of youth and middle age; Bertrand Russell went on tirelessly until he was almost a hundred.
Yet surely few will surpass the record of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who is back, at ninety-two, with what may be the most ambitious work ever written by a major thinker at such an advanced age. The new book, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Belknap), though ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.
Taylor is a perceptive reader of his poets, and he offers a wonderful synthesis of how poets from the Romantics onward have sought to overcome the ‘disenchanted’ vision of reality. He calls our attention to a way of understanding the Romantic age that makes it appear lively, salient, and worthy of the reader’s contemplation. ~ James Matthew Wilson
Taylor shows how poetry puts readers in contact with experiences of divine harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic experience. This book dares to treat poetic language as a unique category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is elusive to the understanding. ~ Matthew Hunter
As hardly needs mentioning, Charles Taylor is currently one the most renowned and influential contemporary philosophers. He is also widely quoted and discussed both in the social sciences and humanities. Taylor has gained this attention through his remarkable capacity for presenting his conceptions in the broadest possible intellectual and cultural context. His philosophical intuition is fundamentally antinaturalistic, and tends toward developing broad syntheses without a trace of systematizing thinking, or any anarchic postmodernist methodology. His thought unites the past with the present, while culture is treated as a broad mosaic of discourses.
Religion, art, science, philosophy, politics and ethics are all fields through which Taylor deftly moves about in his search for their hidden structures and deepest sense.
Taylor’s philosophical output is truly prodigious. Recently, as his monumental study A Secular Age (2007) indicates, he has been focusing much of his attention on the problem of secularization. Secularization has had a fairly long tradition and is commonly regarded to be an offspring of modernity. As a philosophical idea, it is associated with the epistemological perspective and the birth of the Cartesian ego cogito. In this context Taylor comes up with such descriptive terms as “disengaged self,” instrumental reason, and the independent individual. The modern self endeavors to construct its world anew, irrespective of previous knowledge and tradition.
Thus, such an experiment was bound to, as it in fact did, question the hitherto time-honored hierarchies and categories, triggering the process of advancing disenchantment, as Taylor calls it after Max Weber. Subsequently, the separation of faith and reason, science and religion followed.
The Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor’s exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.
Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor’s magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Miłosz, and beyond.
In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry’s reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving―too obviously true―to be ignored.
Taylor
is a perceptive reader of his poets, and he offers a wonderful
synthesis of how poets from the Romantics onward have sought to overcome
the ‘disenchanted’ vision of reality. He calls our attention to a way
of understanding the Romantic age that makes it appear lively, salient,
and worthy of the reader’s contemplation. ~James Matthew Wilson
Taylor
shows how poetry puts readers in contact with experiences of divine
harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a
situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic
experience. This book dares to treat poetic language as a unique
category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is
elusive to the understanding. ~ Matthew Hunter
“In an idiosyncratic blend of the philosophical, the historical, and the speculative, Taylor describes the shift from a world brim-full with spirits and magic to a world where divinity is absent. His account resists the idea that the rise of secularism is a process of subtraction, of loss, and of disenchantment. Rather, Taylor describes secularity’s birth as the migration of ideas, subtle changes in those ideas, and the opening of new possibilities. If Taylor’s communitarian scholarship celebrated historical and social rootedness, A Secular Age is an encomium to the sheer happenstance of how those circumstances arose.”―Azziz Huq, American Prospect
It begins with a deceptively simple question: How did it become possible for anyone to not believe in God?… A Secular Age recounts the history of an idea, in other words, but in it the past is not an inert, settled fact, but a reservoir to be drawn upon to shatter the sameness and the apparent inevitability of the present. As a history it clarifies crucial intellectual and theological divisions that continue to structure debates about divinity, but with the aim of reforming the way we think about them, ‘to show the play of destabilization and recomposition.’ Though this isn’t a book you take to the beach, it remains eminently readable.
As philosophers go, Taylor is a kind of behaviorist, more concerned with elaborating the implications of a way of thinking than with showing its contradictions. Unlike most philosophers, though, Taylor seems at pains to remain accessible to a general audience to capture complex philosophical debate in ordinary language. An important part of Taylor’s argument is that religion and the belief in God, most particularly the experience of transcendence, are not at all outmoded… Though it avoids predictions or prescriptions, A Secular Age leaves us with the sense that the future will be a far poorer, less human place, if we do not discover some expression for that transcendent otherness. ~ Steven Hayward
The central thesis of A Secular Age is that secularization must be understood not simply as the decline of certain beliefs and institutions, but as a total change in our experience of the world. There are subtle, original discussions of the modern self, of changing conceptions of time, of the religious landscape of art, and much else besides. Taylor has a great gift of empathy, an ability to inhabit and bring to life the mental world of both believers and unbelievers. A true Hegelian, he sees the goal of philosophy as understanding, not judgment.” ~ Edward Skidelsky
Taylor’s huge and elegant work takes on the transformation of the world from 1500, when it was almost impossible not to believe in a Creator, to 2000, when religion was simply one choice on a menu of belief systems. He finds the answer in ‘exclusive humanism,’ which sees ‘no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.’”~ Donald Harman Akenson
For Taylor, the modern age is not an age without religion; instead, secularization heralds ‘a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others. The result is a radical pluralism which, as well as offering unprecedented freedom, creates new challenges and instabilities.” ~ London Review of Books
In Malaise of Modernity,
Charles Taylor focuses on the key modern concept of self-fulfillment,
often attacked as the central support of what Christopher Lasch has
called the culture of narcissism. To Taylor, self-fulfillment, although
often expressed in self-centered ways, isn't necessarily a rejection of
traditional values and social commitment; it also reflects something
authentic and valuable in modern culture. Only by distinguishing what is
good in this modern striving from what is socially and politically
dangerous, Taylor says, can our age be made to deliver its promise.
~ Brett Alan Williams
“We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others - our parents, for instance, and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” ~ Charles Taylor
HOW MARCUS AURELIUS CAN HELP US ENDURE THE COMING ELECTION
Americans have devised all sorts of strategies to deal with the unrelenting stress of this year’s presidential race. The rematch between President Biden and former President Trump has been called “the most dreaded election in modern political history.” As the two rivals prepare to debate on Thursday, about six in 10 American adults say they are already worn out by campaign coverage.
But there’s another way to cope with anxiety about the future — by turning to the past.
Mention the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, and it may conjure images of boring, bearded men in togas who lived thousands of years ago. But sages like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius offer plenty of practical advice for today’s voters who are navigating the relentless grind of this year’s presidential election.
Stoic philosophy, which teaches that it is impossible to live a happy life without living virtuously, also talks a lot about confronting one’s worse fears. The definition of Stoicism varies, but bestselling author Ryan Holiday describes it as the a “tool in the pursuit of self-mastery, perseverance and wisdom.”
The first Stoic school was founded in Athens by a philosopher named Zeno of Citium around the beginning of the 3rd century BC. Zeno, who lost his entire fortune in a shipwreck, found consolation in philosophy. He later quipped, “My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.”
We too can begin such a journey, Holiday says. He says that like us, the Stoics also knew something about dealing with loss, political instability and living in a time when many people felt politically powerless. He cites Aurelius, a Stoic follower who became one of Rome’s greatest emperors. He led Rome during a global pandemic that killed at least 10 million people and grappled constantly with war and murderous political divisions.
“Aurelius experienced this devastating global pandemic that ravaged society,” says Holiday, who just released “Right Thing, Right Now,” the third installment in his bestselling book series on Stoic virtues. “But he would have also seen what it [the pandemic] did to people: the tribalism, the fear, the anger along with the flights of fancy. He saw everything that we just saw over the last couple of years.”
CNN talked to Holiday and Massimo Pigliucci, author of “How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.” Both authors, through books, videos and podcasts, are two of the most popular modern-day interpreters of Stoicism.
They offered three pieces of Stoic advice for handling the anxiety of this year’s election.
DON’T LET THE FUTURE DESTROY THE PRESENT
It pays to look ahead in the world of politics. Pollsters predict trends. Pundits gauge the potential impact of political gaffes. Party leaders assess the implications of court decisions. Worry about the future is constant.
That type of worry, though, spreads like a contagion to voters. People obsess about what will happen to them if the wrong candidate is elected. Some fixate on nightmare scenarios about the country descending into civil war. This grinding anxiety echoes Shakespeare’s famous line from “Julius Caesar”: “A coward dies a thousand times, a hero dies but once.”
Stoics only die once, though, because they reject fixating on the future. Stoicism teaches people to separate what they can control from what they cannot. Their advice: don’t become engulfed by nightmare political scenarios that may or may not come to pass.
“The Stoics say that he who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary,” Holiday says. “The idea that you should wake up every day in miserable anticipation of a thing that may or may not happen is to punish yourself on top of whatever the pain that will come from that thing actually happening,” Holiday says.
Pigliucci says Stoics coped with the political turbulence of their day by focusing on what they could control: their emotions. He cites the Serenity Prayer, which is often recited at 12-step programs. The prayer is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, a towering Christian theologian from the 20th century, and asks God to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
“Seems like excellent advice for the upcoming presidential elections,” Pigliucci says. “Have the courage to do your duty as a citizen; vote, maybe send money or volunteer for a campaign; then accept the outcome because it will be what it will be.”
DON’T BE TO CYNICAL TO BE INVOLVED
Maybe you’ve met this type of person. They don’t vote because they say it won’t make a difference. You might hear them in a barbershop or perched on a barstool, griping. All politicians are corrupt. The Illuminati control everything. Pass me a beer.
Some people deal with the anxiety of the election by checking out of politics altogether. The ancient Athenians had a word for citizens that refused to exercise their right to vote. They called them “idiotai,” from which the word “idiot” is derived.
Many Stoic leaders would never be labeled as “idiotai.” They were passionately involved in politics and the pursuit of justice.
That may surprise people. Stoics get a bad rap because of the way the way the word is defined: someone “indifferent to pain or pleasure,” not showing “passion or feeling.” But ancient Stoic leaders would have been at home jousting on Sunday morning political talk shows or marching in a Black Lives Matter protest.
Holiday says Aurelius wrote constantly about justice in his classic book, “Meditations.”
Ryan Holiday
“He talks about the common good more than 80 times in ‘Meditations,” Holiday says. “He talks about it more than just about anything. He actually says the whole purpose of life is good character and acts for the common good.”
The stereotype of the dispassionate, uninvolved Stoic is “as wrong as it could possibly be,” Holiday says.
“If you look at the actual lives of Stoics, these are people who got married, had families, ran for public office and fought for causes,” Holiday says. “There was a generation of Stoics that were such a perpetual thorn in the side of emperors that they were known as the Stoic Opposition. At one point, all of them are kicked out of Rome because they won’t go along to get along.”
Cynicism can be masked cowardice — some cynics are afraid of the risks that come with getting involved. But the Stoic leaders were known for their courage in standing up to political tyrants. Pigliucci tells a famous story about political courage that centers on Helvidius Priscus, a Stoic philosopher.
When the Roman emperor Vespasian threatened Priscus, the Stoic philosopher, with execution for speaking out against political tyranny, Priscus responded by saying:
“Well, when have I ever claimed to you that I’m immortal? You fulfill your role, and I’ll fulfill mine. It is yours to have me killed, and mine to die without a tremor; it is yours to send me into exile, and mine to depart without a qualm.”
BE KIND, EVEN TO YOUR POLITICAL ENEMIES
It’s hard not to be cynical when it comes to US presidential politics. Candidates brazenly lie on the campaign trail. Partisan websites and social media platforms spread so much disinformation that’s hard to know what to believe. Politicians who once loudly opposed certain candidates now bend the knee to curry their favor.
It’s easy for our dislike for our political opponents to morph into hatred. But Holiday suggests we consider how Aurelius dealt with political treachery in his time. Aurelius survived an attempted coup from his most trusted general. He had unlimited power and could have devised an array of sadistic measures to torment or kill his traitor. But he refused to do so.
“In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy,” Holiday writes in an essay on Aurelius. “The best revenge, Marcus would write “is to not be like that.”
When family or friends insult you or stop talking to you because of a political disagreement, it’s easy to respond in kind. The Stoics, though, have two words of advice, Holiday says: Be kind.
That may sound naïve when personal attacks have become the norm in modern-day politics and this year’s presidential race. But Epictetus said that “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master.”
“The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness,” Holiday writes in his new book.
Holiday says that when Aurelius was on his deathbed, he had one regret: He was still chastising himself over the times he had had lost his temper and been unkind to others.
Holiday says he’s had to apply that Stoic advice to his own personal life. He has risen in prominence in part because he’s sold a reported 6 million books on Stoicism. He’s also built a mini-empire around Stoicism that includes YouTube videos, an Instagram feed and a Stoic newsletter.
His elevated public profile has led to some personal challenges. He says he and his family have been constantly harassed because they have taken stands against book banning, in support of women’s rights, and for the removal of Confederate monuments. A friend betrayed him.
Holiday says a younger version of himself would have “wanted blood” for those who have tried to hurt him. Instead he considered the actions of Stoic leaders like Aurelius, drawing a direct link between the “dark energy” that the Stoic leaders faced in their time and what he sees in the 2024 presidential election cycle.
“There is this energy across all societies that is driven by hatred, fear, and that wants to protect what it has and prevent other people from getting their piece of it,” Holiday tells CNN. “And that energy was certainly there in Roman times. “
But solutions to that dark energy are there, too. Stoic leaders may seem like distant figures encased in marble, but we can learn from them, Holiday says.
They wrestled with and ultimately defeated the same dark energy that drove the political tribalization of their day. So can we. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/22/us/stoic-philosophers-election-anxiety-cec/index.html
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THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE
A church wedding, 1960s
Romantic norms appear more fluid now than ever before.
Over the past few decades, cohabitation rates have nearly doubled, more children are being born outside of marriage and in recent months — there’s been buzz around polyamory and open relationships. With younger generations less set on following tradition, marriage could look very different in the future.
This summer, NPR’s Morning Edition is looking into marriage as part of our “Summer of Love” series.
We asked NPR listeners for their thoughts on marriage and they told us how they structure their relationships and other ways they’ve found love.
Jennifer Koca, 37, polyamorous woman with a primary partner of 7 years in Richmond, Va.: “I definitely dreamt about getting married a lot when I was a kid, but as I got older, I realized marriage is basically just a piece of paper.”
Doyle Tate, 31, single dad in Jacksonville, Fla.: “I would love to be married one day. I decided that I wasn't going to wait for a man who may never come. So I started the process of surrogacy when I was around 30. Aphrodite Rose is now four-and-a-half months, so it's been wonderful.”
Aravind Boddupalli, 28, married man in Baltimore, Md.: “My love life with my partner Mae looks like a true partnership. We are an interracial marriage, but I don't think it's ever posed an issue for us in our respective communities.”
So what do changing romantic norms mean for the future of marriage?
Michel Martin spoke to futurist Jake Dunagan about what marriage might look like in the future. Dunagan studies governance at the Institute for the Future, a think tank committed to research and education. As part of that work, he thinks about topics like the future of marriage.
Interview highlights
Jake Dunagan: [Marriage] has been a norm in human society in a diverse way. We've invented and reinvented marriage. We ask marriage to do a lot in our society, from sexual reproduction to romantic love to personal fulfillment, political alliances. Do we want to keep those bundled in marriage or do we want to split those up? You know, do we want a function for socially sanctioned romantic love?
Do we want something about economic mobility and robustness? Do we want something about parenting and bringing up children together? So if you think about the futures of marriage, you know, do we have those official formal sanctions and ceremonies for each one of those? Maybe or maybe not. But we have things that might stretch the meaning of what marriage is.
Michel Martin: We are hearing, though, more in the media about polyamorous relationships. That's not necessarily polygamy. And often we're hearing from women who are interested in these kinds of relationships. There is no society currently in which polygamy is recognized, where women have equal social standing. So is there a form of this that could take place in which women might be the initiators of these kinds of relationships in which they would have equal social and legal standing?
Dunagan: Polygamy has basically been a patriarchal institution. The younger generations are definitely more diverse, they're more tolerant of gender continuum, [they’re] ideologically value-based, they're more open to that.
Marriage asks a lot of us: It asks us to be monogamous for a long time, it asks us to be good roommates and good partners, it asks us to be good co-parents together. And I think certainly, given some of the indicators, the younger generations may be more open to exploration of what that institution looks and feels like.
Martin: What do you think are the commonalities of what people are looking for in marriage that will endure into the future?
Dunagan: I think romantic love. We want to feel connected to someone, feeling a sense of belonging and togetherness. And I think whether we idealize romantic love or sexual attraction, I mean, those are core parts of marriage. We will in some sense always have that.
There's a sense that I'm a better person or I'm a more complete person with someone else, or maybe more than one if we want to go that direction. But that sense of fulfillment is very strong. And so marriage is often a pathway for that. And so I think that will continue.
You know, do we need to do reproduction through the institution of marriage? I'm less inclined to say that has to be there. But I think the sense of being connected to someone for a long time, finding someone or something that really makes you feel better about yourself and more whole. I think there's something there that we all want and that will endure. And I think marriage can be a part of that story.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/19/nx-s1-4996445/morning-edition-summer-of-love-marriage
Oriana:
One arrangement to consider is "living together apart" (LAT). It means preserving the independence of having your own separate household.
LAT: LIVING TOGETHER PART
Couples decide to live separately for different reasons, whether it’s because they love their solitude and space, they have to be in different locations for work or financial reasons, or because they feel like not being together constantly actually strengthens their bond. “Living apart might offer some relief to couples who value their individual space, as well as each other,” Sims Allen says. If you both have established careers on opposite sides of the country, but you meet on a cross-continental flight and fall in love, you might decide it’s best for both of you and your relationship to keep your jobs, at least for a few years. Or maybe one person loves the mountains and the other needs the ocean, but you make it work anyway.
“The couple loves each other, but doesn't feel they need to live in the same house to express their togetherness,” Sims Allen says. “They have an arrangement that is outside the box of traditional marriage.” Maybe having your own dedicated space is crucial for your well-being, and your partner understands that. It’s a conversation that should happen early on and both partners should be on board, or at least willing to try it and see if it’s right for your relationship.
The Pros of Living Apart Together
Having your own space while in a loving relationship has plenty of benefits, from maintaining your individualism to reduced fighting.
Your can focus on your own needs.
Living apart means decorating however you want, making your own schedule, or seeing friends and relatives without feeling guilty about splitting time with your spouse. "Each partner can sleep when they want, be as messy as they want, and be as loud as they want," says Riordan. "Each member of the couple invests heavily in his or her own individual needs and wants.”
You'll avoid the challenges of cohabitation.
According to Sims Allen, married couples who choose to live apart can have a “rich and intimate life that focuses on the heart of the relationship and not the daily details of existing together and running a household.” Meaning, your relationship won’t be defined by the daily stresses of whose turn it is to take out the trash or who didn’t close the kitchen cabinets.
Having breaks allows your time together to be about bonding and spending quality time, instead of just time. DePaolo says that when LAT couples are together, “they focus on what they enjoy about each other and don’t spend a lot of time fretting about the small stuff.”
You'll probably argue less.
Living apart together reduces the pressure points in a relationship, says Riordan, who affirms that couples who live apart often engage in less conflict. "LAT relationships have fewer 'sharp edges,' because the couple often retreats to its separate living quarters before conflict escalates," he explains.
It's easier to keep the spark alive.
Arguably one of the biggest benefits of living apart together is that perennial spark. "LAT couples make this decision based on a genuine belief that distance makes their heart grow fonder," says Riordan. "They embrace a longing for their partner, and credit the distance with the evergreen spark in their relationship.”
https://www.brides.com/living-apart-together-5189895
Oriana:
There are of course of course challenges as well. If the main purpose of the relationship is raising children, a single household makes more sense. If both members of the couple need a lot of solitude for their work, then LAT is a welcome alternative to the constant interruptions and compromises that living together entails. More than one woman has complained to me that a man who first proclaimed how much he respects the woman's the need for space later turned out to be in fact expecting her to do cooking and laundry and was trying to move in and gain all the traditional services by degree.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Some men are excellent at cooking and/or laundry (I speak from experience, starting with my father, who was the family chef). I can confirm that two solitaries can have a very satisfying relationship -- and I know I'm not the only one out there. This is definitely a "to each his own" situation. Above all: let's drop judgment and celebrate each couple who have been together a long time and are happy, whether they live together or separately. Lasting love is a miracle to be honored, no matter what form it takes.
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RECYCLING PLASTICS: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?
Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.
It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.
Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.
Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.
But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.
Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.
Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.
While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.
So when three companies used ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology to successfully conjure up that fruit cup, they announced it to the world.
“This is a significant milestone,” said Printpack, which turned the plastic into cups. The fruit supplier Pacific Coast Producers called it “the most important initiative a consumer-packaged goods company can pursue.”
“ExxonMobil is supporting the circularity of plastics,” the August 2023 news release said, citing a buzzword that implies an infinite loop of using, recycling and reusing.
They were so proud, I hoped they would tell me all about how they made the cup, how many of them existed and where I could buy one.
Let’s take a closer look at that Printpack press release, which uses convoluted terms to describe the recycled plastic in that fruit cup:
It’s easy to conclude the cup was made with 30% recycled plastic — until you break down the numerical sleight of hand that props up that number.
It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants, environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.
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So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a time when it really matters.
This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis. As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard push to shift the conversation to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle.
It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a bit of success. American and European regulators have spent tens of millions subsidizing pyrolysis facilities. Half of all U.S. states have eased air pollution rules for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like benzene and dioxins and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil.
Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.
Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.
Not now. Maybe not ever.
Lesson 1: Most of the old plastic that goes into pyrolysis doesn’t actually become new plastic.
In traditional recycling, plastic is turned into tiny pellets or flakes, which you can melt again and mold back into recycled plastic products.
Even in a real-life scenario, where bottles have labels and a little bit of juice left in them, most of the plastic products that go into the process find new life.
The numbers are much lower for pyrolysis.
It’s “very, very, very, very difficult” to break down plastic that way, said Steve Jenkins, vice president of chemicals consulting at Wood Mackenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. “The laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.”
Waste is heated until it turns into oil. Part of that oil is composed of a liquid called naphtha, which is essential for making plastic.
There are two ingredients in the naphtha that recyclers want to isolate: propylene and ethylene — gases that can be turned into solid plastics.
To split the naphtha into different chemicals, it’s fed into a machine called a steam cracker. Less than half of what it spits out becomes propylene and ethylene.
This means that if a pyrolysis operator started with 100 pounds of plastic waste, it can expect to end up with 15-20 pounds of reusable plastic. Experts told me the process can yield less if the plastic used is dirty or more if the technology is particularly advanced.
I reached out to several companies to ask how much new plastic their processes actually yield, and none provided numbers. The American Chemistry Council, the nation’s largest plastic lobby, told me that because so many factors impact a company’s yield, it’s impossible to estimate that number for the entire industry.
Lesson 2: The plastic that comes out of pyrolysis contains very little recycled material.
With mechanical recycling, it’s hard to make plastic that’s 100% recycled; it’s expensive to do, and the process degrades plastic. Recycled pellets are often combined with new pellets to make stuff that’s 25% or 50% recycled, for example.
But far less recycled plastic winds up in products made through pyrolysis.
That’s because the naphtha created using recycled plastic is contaminated. Manufacturers add all kinds of chemicals to make products bend or keep them from degrading in the sun.
Recyclers can overpower them by heavily diluting the recycled naphtha. With what, you ask? Nonrecycled naphtha made from ordinary crude oil!
This is the quiet — and convenient — part of the industry’s revolutionary pyrolysis method: It relies heavily on extracting fossil fuels. At least 90% of the naphtha used in pyrolysis is fossil fuel naphtha. Only then can it be poured into the steam cracker to separate the chemicals that make plastic.
So at the end of the day, nothing that comes out of pyrolysis physically contains more than 10% recycled material (though experts and studies have shown that, in practice, it’s more like 5% or 2%).
Ten percent doesn’t look very impressive. Some consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainability, so companies use a form of accounting called mass balance to inflate the recycled-ness of their products. It’s not unlike offset schemes I’ve uncovered that absolve refineries of their carbon emissions and enable mining companies to kill chimpanzees. Industry-affiliated groups like the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification write the rules. (ISCC didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
The American Chemistry Council told me it’s impossible to know whether a particular ethylene molecule comes from pyrolysis naphtha or fossil fuel naphtha; the compounds produced are “fungible” and can be used for multiple products, like making rubber, solvents and paints that would reduce the amount of new fossil fuels needed. Its statement called mass balance a “well-known methodology” that’s been used by other industries including fair trade coffee, chocolate and renewable energy.
Legislation in the European Union already forbids free attribution, and leaders are debating whether to allow other forms of mass balance. U.S. regulation is far behind that, but as the Federal Trade Commission revises its general guidelines for green marketing, the industry is arguing that mass balance is crucial to the future of advanced recycling. “The science of advanced recycling simply does not support any other approach because the ability to track individual molecules does not readily exist,” said a comment from ExxonMobil.
If you think navigating the ins and outs of pyrolysis is hard, try getting your hands on actual plastic made through it.
It’s not as easy as going to the grocery store. Those water bottles you might see with 100% recycled claims are almost certainly made through traditional recycling. The biggest giveaway is that the labels don’t contain the asterisks or fine print typical of products made through pyrolysis, like “mass balance,” “circular” or “certified.”
When I asked about the fruit cup, ExxonMobil directed me to its partners. Printpack didn’t respond to my inquiries. Pacific Coast Producers told me it was “engaged in a small pilot pack of plastic bowls that contain post-consumer content with materials certified” by third parties, and that it “has made no label claims regarding these cups and is evaluating their use.”
In the end, I ran down half a dozen claims about products that came out of pyrolysis; each either existed in limited quantities or had its recycled-ness obscured with mass balance caveats.
Then this April, nearly eight months after I’d begun my pursuit, I could barely contain myself when I got my hands on an actual product.
I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)
This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.
Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.
“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.
The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.
Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.
But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?
I asked ExxonMobil how much post-consumer plastic it was actually using. Catie Tuley, a media relations adviser, said it depends on what’s available. “At the end of the day, advanced recycling allows us to divert plastic waste from landfills and give new life to plastic waste.”
I posed the same question to several other operators. A company in Europe told me it uses “mixed post-consumer, flexible plastic waste” and does not recycle pre-consumer waste.
But this spring at an environmental journalism conference, an American Chemistry Council executive confirmed the industry’s preference for clean plastic as he talked about an Atlanta-based company and its pyrolysis process. My colleague Sharon Lerner asked whether it was sourcing curbside-recycled plastic for pyrolysis.
If Nexus Circular had a “magic wand,” it would, he acknowledged, but right now that kind of waste “isn’t good enough.” He added, “It’s got tomatoes in it.”
I asked Jenkins, the energy industry analyst, to play out this scenario on a larger scale.
Were all of these projects adding up? Could the industry conceivably make enough propylene and ethylene through pyrolysis to replace much of our demand for new plastic?
He looked three years into the future, using his company’s latest figures on global pyrolysis investment, and gave an optimistic assessment.
At best, the world could replace 0.2% of new plastic churned out in a year with products made through pyrolysis.
https://www.propublica.org/article/delusion-advanced-chemical-plastic-recycling-pyrolysis?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
Do we really have to use so much plastic? I much prefer glass jars (recycle those with the lid on).
Here is an article on trying to get plastic out of our kitchens:
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YOUR PLASTIC-FREE KITCHEN (WELL, ALMOST)
Plastics have been taking over American kitchens since Earl Tupper introduced his plastic storage containers in 1947. Tupperware was the Trojan horse that opened the door to a never-ending stream of plastic kitchenware. It seemed like a good deal at the time—plastics are convenient, cheap, easy to clean, and easier still to throw away without a thought.
But the result is that now many common foods in our kitchens contain high levels of bisphenols and phthalates. Microplastics have been found in lungs, blood, and breast milk. In April, the EPA established national limits on PFAS—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances commonly known as “forever chemicals”—in our drinking water.
The classic approach of “reduce, reuse, and recycle” doesn’t work so well in the case of kitchen plastics. Very little plastic gets usefully recycled, and there are downsides to reusing the stuff: Studies have shown that reuse and recycling can release more hazardous chemicals. The goal, says Erika Schreder, science director at the environmental health research and advocacy organization Toxic-Free Future, is to reduce our exposure to plastic chemicals.
Let’s start in the kitchen. “I would probably start with food storage,” says Schreder. “It’s one of the easiest changes to make.” Here’s a list to get you going. Pick and choose what works for you. Don’t stress about removing all plastic all at once: Doing something is better than nothing.
Embrace glass jars. Remember canning jars? This food-storage hero from the mid-1800s has made a big comeback. Two classic brands are Ball and Weck jars. True, they’re heavier than plastic but will last forever. If you’re not ready for that minor investment, you can clean out old spaghetti-sauce or jam jars to give them a second life. If filling with something hot, pre-warm the jar and fill it on a conductive surface, like a cutting board, to avoid cracking. (If you’re still storing in plastic, Schreder warns, “Always make sure your food is cooled down,” as the heat can cause more chemicals to leach.)
Replace your plastic cutting board with one made of wood or bamboo. Do the same with plastic cooking utensils, especially those that are black, which have been found to contain flame retardants.
Skip plastic bags at the supermarket and use mesh bags with a drawstring for all your fresh foods at the grocery store or local farmers' markets. These inexpensive bags can be washed with your laundry too. They won’t last forever, but they’ll last a lot longer than plastic bags with none of their downsides.
Until the industry comes up with a new material to replace plastic wrap, use food-safe beeswax-coated fabric wrap to cover sandwiches, wedges of cheese, cut apples, and all the other remnants you don’t want to toss. The wrap can be used again and again after a quick wash and rinse and a brief hang dry. You can even make your own (here’s how) or you can find them online.
Stop making tea with teabags that use plastics of any sort—either the bag, which could be nylon or other manmade material, or the seal at the top, which might also be plastic. (Tazo, which is owned by Starbucks, uses trace plastic in its seal.) According to studies, when plastic tea bags are brewed in hot water, microplastics are released. Many brands use solely paper—Numi tea bags, for example, are plastic free and wrapped in a compostable sleeve. However, the information isn’t printed on the packaging, which means you’ll have to contact each company individually. The safest way around this is to brew loose tea or use a tea ball. Bonus: less waste.
Silicone stash bags, mats, and molds are FDA approved, but that “doesn’t mean all of the ingredients have been thoroughly reviewed and deemed safe,” says Schreder. Maybe the material isn’t 100 percent silicone, or the colors used to make it cheery are adulterated. Instead, use old-school (and eminently recyclable) aluminum foil, which hasn’t been shown to transfer worrisome chemicals. Schreder, who admits to still using Ziploc (the one plastic bag that doesn’t use PFAS), says, “I would call on the packaging industry to come up with a plastic-free option.”
Do you use a meal-prep service or shop for food online? Thistle, Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods, and CookUnity are just a few brands across the country that work with Dispatch Goods to collect and reuse packaging—including those icky gel packs that collect like unwanted takeout utensils. If you or your kid are in college, you can find returnable stainless-steel containers from Usefull on campuses around the country.
Get rid of hard-to-recycle items like plastic bags and films, pill bottles, and beyond by joining the Ridwell service, which gives its members a convenient metal container for your porch and picks up from your home every two weeks.
Randomly, here are some easy swaps:
Throw your trash out in Bio compostable bags, or Dailygood bags made from 97 percent post-consumer plastic.
Replace coated baking sheets with all-aluminum ones from Nordic Ware.
When dining out, bring your own glass or metal containers for leftovers so you don’t add more junk to the waste stream.
Swap out your plastic SodaStream bottles for glass carafes.
Replace melamine plastic bowls and plates with ones made from glass, aluminum, or ceramic.
Stop using parchment paper, which is coated in silicone.
Stop buying sponges made from plastic. Try versions made from coconut fibers, sheep’s wool, and walnut shells (really!).
Wash your hands with soap made from cubes that can be dropped into any container and mixed with water. For dishwashing liquid, bring your own bottle to a local zero-waste store and have it refilled.
Until we have regulatory policies that ensure all chemicals are safe, we will still have toxic chemicals in our homes. Focus on a few things here that will improve your life and reduce your exposure. Don’t try to seek perfection, says Schreder, which is “too much onus on the individual, instead of holding the industry and government accountable enough."
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/your-plastic-free-kitchen
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EXERCISE: MOVE LIKE AN ANIMAL
‘Animal flow’ bodyweight workouts are gaining popularity for their strength and mobility benefits. How do they work?
Maybe I was naive, but I thought crawling would be easy. Babies do it, after all, and I’m better than them at most things.
And yet, by my third go crawling across a gym floor in northern Bethesda, I was disabused of my confidence. My arms and legs burned, my breath was ragged and sweat dripped down my face even though the AC was cranked up. Also, I was doing it wrong.
“Reset,” said Marcus Vilmé as my limbs tangled. Vilmé is a certified personal trainer and instructor of Animal Flow, a bodyweight workout in which the practitioner moves through a series of “animal locomotive movements”.
Animal Flow is one of several so-called quadrupedal movement training (QMT) workouts that are growing in popularity and attention. On TikTok, QMT videos have millions of views. Programs like primal movement and GMB Elements assert that for humans, the key to greater strength and mobility is to move more like an animal.
“It’s a way of reconnecting with our natural selves,” says Darryl Edwards, author of the book Animal Moves and founder of the Primal Play Method. “I don’t want to be a caveman. I’m happy in the 21st century. But I want to move in a way that feels more natural and instinctive.”
But are there really benefits to crawling around like a creature? How does it work?
Each program is slightly different. In Animal Flow, the basic forms include Ape, Beast and Crab. These pair with various switches and transitions, like the underswitch and Scorpion, to form “flows”.
The crawl movement I was doing – or failing to do – with Vilmé was called the Beast. Balancing on your hands and the balls of your feet, you prowl forward with the right hand and left foot, then the left hand and right foot. A few sequences later, you do the same thing backward.
Once I had more or less mastered the Beast, Vilmé and I progressed to underswitches: pivoting from a Beast position (balancing on all fours face down) to a Crab position (balancing on all fours face up). It was challenging, but I only confounded Vilmé a couple times by mixing up my left and my right.
By the end of the session, both my body and my brain felt exhausted. The moves require strength, balance and coordination. It feels a little like solving a puzzle, but the puzzle is your own body. It’s kind of like dancing in that way, Vilmé and I agreed. I didn’t mention that I’m bad at dancing.
THE BENEFITS OF QUADRUPEDAL MOTION
“It’s a combination of cardio and resistance training,” says Edwards. This combination, he says, is one of the most effective forms of exercise, especially for those with limited time.
Vilmé also notes that because QMT is a bodyweight workout, it can be done anywhere.
“If I’m at a hotel and all I have is a little balcony, I can do a flow there,” he says.
QMT is also good for improving coordination, balance and control, says Dr Anatolia Vick-Kregel, assistant director of fitness and wellness at Rice University.
Balancing on all fours engages various stabilizer muscles, especially around the core and shoulders, she explains. This greater stability helps prevent injury and supports the body’s posture and alignment.
There might also be cognitive benefits. In a 2016 study, 11 students did a series of progressively challenging QMT classes over the course of four weeks. After four weeks, those who completed the QMT training showed “significant improvement” on a neuropsychological test used to measure participants’ executive function, while a control group showed no improvement.
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/article/2024/jun/21/animal-flow-bodyweight-quadruepdal-workout
Oriana:
I don’t think there’s any need to worry about not doing it just right. It’s more important that you enjoy the exercise — because then you’ll be motivated to do it.
And I agree that “moving like an animal” is by no means easy, unless you’re just using it to climb the stairs. Then it’s fun. But down at the floor, your arms have to support the weight of your body, and most women don’t have sufficient upper-body strength to sustain it long. But … it’s fun to try, and practice makes perfect.
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CANCER VACCINES SHOW NEW PROMISE, AND OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
After decades in development, cancer vaccines now show signs of efficacy and potential to help patients fend off the disease for good.
The world’s first personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results doctors described as “extremely impressive”.
Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years, data presented at the conference showed.
A second trial found cancer vaccines can significantly improve survival for breast cancer patients after surgery.
Meanwhile, with more vaccine trials launching globally, the NHS announced that thousands of patients in England will be fast-tracked into the studies as part of a world-first “matchmaking” scheme, called the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad.
Under the scheme, patients will gain immediate access to clinical trials for vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn of treatments for cancer.
Hodgkin lymphoma cured more effectively with treatment mix
Results from a phase 3 trial showed a treatment combination of six therapies, BrECADD, was more effective and caused fewer side effects than the standard chemotherapy regimen, BEACOPP.
After four years, progression-free survival (PFS), the amount of time patients live without the disease growing or spreading, was 94.3% for BrECADD and 90.9% for BEACOPP.
Overall survival, which indicates how many patients are alive after treatment, was 98.5% for BrECADD and 98.2% for BEACOPP. Most significantly, people in the BrECADD group had a 34% lower risk of disease progression than those in the BEACOPP group.
The most common side effects were abnormal blood cell counts. The researchers found that severe blood-related side effects arose in 31% of people in the BrECADD group and 52% of people in the BEACOPP group.
Tests predict prostate cancer risk and breast cancer recurrence more accurately
Delegates were briefed about two new tests aimed at providing an early warning sign for two of the world’s most common cancers.
The first, for prostate cancer, involves a DNA sample collected with a simple spit test. Trial results suggest it is more accurate than standard tests. It works by looking for genetic signals in the saliva that are linked to prostate cancer.
The second, a blood test, predicts the risk of breast cancer returning three years before tumors show up on scans. The breakthrough could help more women beat the disease permanently.
AI could help encourage people to undergo cancer screening
A study evaluating the use of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based patient navigation tool showed promise in helping patients in underserved communities schedule and receive cancer screening if they had missed or skipped previous appointments.
The study involved 2,400 patients at a cancer centre in the Bronx, New York, where most people were from ethnic minority communities and low-income households, and many were born outside the US. It used MyEleanor, a virtual patient navigation tool that initiated personalized, AI-based conversations with patients.
More than half the patients (57%) engaged with MyEleanor. Of those who engaged, 58% accepted a transfer to a human patient navigator to reschedule a colonoscopy.
Researchers concluded that the tool could help reduce the bowel cancer disparities experienced by people in these communities.
Drugs melt bowel tumors, stop lung cancer advancing, stall breast cancer spread
Several drugs showed exciting results in fighting cancer. An immunotherapy drug, pembrolizumab, that “melts away” tumors dramatically increases the chances of curing some bowel cancers and may even replace the need for surgery, doctors said.
Giving the drug before surgery instead of chemotherapy led to a huge increase in patients being declared cancer-free, a clinical trial found.
Meanwhile, 60% of patients diagnosed with advanced forms of lung cancer who took lorlatinib were still alive five years later with no progression in their disease, data presented at the conference showed. The rate was 8% in patients treated with a standard drug, the trial found.
Doctors hailed the trial results as “off the chart”, saying the drug stopped lung cancer advancing for longer than any other treatment in medical history.
A third study found the drug Enhertu reduced the risk of cancer spreading in patients with HER2-low breast cancer by 38% compared with those who received chemotherapy.
Doctors also said weight-loss drugs offered a new weapon in the global fight against cancer, with “enormous potential” to prevent new cases and shrink tumors after research showed the jabs could cut the risk of developing the disease by a fifth.
Cancer survivors trying to conceive can successfully become pregnant and give birth
Early onset cancer was a key focus of discussion. One study showed the rates of younger people developing the disease in the UK had risen 24% in two decades, a sharper increase than any other age group.
The trend has prompted a renewed interest in fertility: preserving the ability to become pregnant is often important for young people diagnosed with cancer. Certain treatments, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery, can have a temporary or permanent impact on a person’s fertility.
Researchers looked at long-term pregnancy and birth outcomes for breast cancer survivors who attempted pregnancy after treatment. They found most patients (73%) who attempted to have a baby after treatment became pregnant at least once.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/07/what-are-off-the-charts-breakthroughs-cancer-treatments
Oriana:
Those exciting new drugs are mainly in the category of “biologics.” They disrupt the metabolism of the cancer cells, their signaling pathways, their ability to spread. The drugs were developed as our understanding of the biology of cancer has grown over the years. However, my dream is not that patients stay on expensive drugs for the rest of their lives — that’s the dream of Big Pharma. Fortunately cancer has its lobby (though the AIDS lobby was supposedly the most powerful patient advocacy ever), and it keeps pushing for a cancer cure rather than just life-long dependence on drugs.
Above all, cancer can be prevented. The metaphor most to my liking is “moss grows only on the shady side of the tree” — not on those parts that are in the sun. Anti-cancer diet is fairly easy (as long as people remember that excess protein gets converted into cancer-feeding glucose); fixing stress is much more challenging. A neighbor of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer after her husband left her for a younger woman. That kind of huge emotional wound may be near-impossible to heal. Again, the first step is better understanding. Clarity heals — even by itself, in my experience.
Mary:
This reminds me so much of the early 80's, when AIDS was newly becoming a major killer and we knew almost nothing about it...what it did, how it was transmitted, where it came from, and most urgently, how it could be treated. A diagnosis was a death sentence, no one survived. Now, nearly 50 years later, AIDS has become a chronic illness, where most patients can live a fairly normal life, and enjoy a fairly normal life span. Reasearch and development has taken us this far this fast.
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KARL HERRUP’S APPROACH TO ALZHEIMER’S
~ In recent years, our knowledge base has broadened considerably, affording us the luxury of being able to revisit our hypotheses about causes of AD. Based on its prevalence, it now makes sense to begin this exercise with the more common sporadic form of the disease rather than with the rare familial forms. The precise etiology of sporadic AD is not known in detail. We do know, however, that the most critical risk factor by far is age. This makes intuitive, if not mechanistic, sense. In all species, age brings a progressive slowing of brain function in virtually every domain. Our cognition slows; our ability to form new memories is reduced; our motor functions deteriorate; even our brain's homeostatic functions become less and less robust.
This functional decline is correlated with the loss of structural complexity of our brain cells. Neuronal dendrites become less complex, spine and synapse density decrease, the cell bodies of the larger neurons accumulate lipofuscin, astrocytic function declines (e.g., glutamate uptake and recycling), our immune systems become less responsive, etc. And as this list of insufficiencies grows, the brain's defenses against many diseases, Alzheimer's included, is weakened. The question is as follows: how do the signature symptoms of AD emerge from this state?
The new model envisions three key events that occur sequentially when an individual develops Alzheimer's disease. The first is a precipitating injury that begins the pathogenic process. This injury in turn triggers the second key event: a chronic inflammatory process that adds additional relentless stress to brain cells already weakened by age. The third event is a major shift in the cellular physiology of the brain cells. Described in more detail below, it represents a tipping point that marks the beginning of a cell's degenerative process and leads to major synaptic dysfunction and neuronal death—the final and most direct causes of Alzheimer's dementia.
A PRECIPITATING INJURY
Although aging gradually takes its toll on our brains, the hypothesis stipulates that some event—a physical head trauma, a major illness or infection, a vascular event (possibly so small as to be clinically undetectable), the metabolic stress associated with adult-onset diabetes, or even the stress associated with a major life event such as a death in the family—is required to initiate the disease process. A genetic mutation can be such an injury, but only if it must interact with the aging process to be expressed. The injury triggers a protective response among the cells of the brain, but the age-related failure of the normal homeostatic mechanisms means that the response continues, even if the injury itself abates. The key concept is that it is the nature of the response, not the nature of the injury, that determines the outcome of Alzheimer's disease.
A useful analogy to consider is hip fracture. For a wide variety of reasons, the risk of breaking our hipbone increases dramatically with age. Bone density decreases; osteoporosis becomes more likely; balance is less sure; reaction times slow; muscles weaken; visual acuity fades; etc. Each of these is a risk factor, but the factors themselves do not cause the hipbone to break; there has to be a precipitating injury (usually a fall). Applied to AD, the analogy is meant to suggest that while any of the changes in the brain that come with advancing age may increase our risk of Alzheimer's, without an injury none can cause dementia.
The idea that AD begins with an initiating injury has both theoretical and practical relevance. Theoretically, it means that Alzheimer's is not a part of normal aging any more than breaking your hip is a part of normal aging. They are both pathological events with an underlying biology. The practical relevance is that, if research can identify the most common sources of injury, we may be able to intervene proactively and delay disease onset. Currently, it is not possible to identify a single candidate for this precipitating injury. But the frequent co-occurrence of vascular pathology with AD and the protective effects of genetic and environmental factors that improve cardiovascular health suggest that a common if not exclusive initiating injury would be a vascular event such as a head trauma or microstroke.
THE ROLE OF INFLAMMATION
Discussions of brain inflammation tend to focus on the microglial cell; however, a variety of cell types participate in the AD inflammatory response. These cell:cell interactions have been reviewed for other diseases, and evidence for their importance appears in the AD literature as well. Through a variety of feedforward loops, the microglial cells are assisted by the responses of astrocytes and brain vascular endothelial cells in maintaining a chronic shift in the inflammation status of the brain. The result of this network-like response is a chronic stress on neurons and their function. Cell cycle proteins are activated, reactive oxygen species are produced; mitochondrial function is reduced, dendritic/axonal transport is impaired, etc. A second tenet of the new model, therefore, is that a chronic immune response, persisting over months and years, creates the unique chemistry and cellular physiology that results in the core symptoms we recognize as dementia of the Alzheimer's type.
TWO BIOLOGIES: EARLY AND LATE STAGES OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
Thus far, the reenvisioning of AD has included two important tenets. The first is that Alzheimer's must be triggered by an injury. The second is that the establishment of unique type of chronic inflammation is required to set the brain's chemistry on the path to AD. To fully capture the neurobiology of the disease, however, a third tenet must be introduced: the progression to full Alzheimer's disease requires a functional discontinuity between the physiology of the brain cells in early and late stages of the disease. This dramatic change of state results in a “new normal” biology, primed toward neurodegeneration and dementia. The exact meaning of this transition in biological terms is only beginning to be understood, but some of its consequences are already becoming apparent. It is envisioned as a one-way cellular door; once a cell crosses the threshold, it can never return to its earlier state.
The best example of this change-of-state concept can be found in the paradoxical association of neuronal cell cycle events with the process of neurodegeneration. Neurons are generally considered to be permanently postmitotic cells. But when they are stressed, fully differentiated neurons can and do reinitiate the enzymatic cascades of a normal cell cycle. Curiously, the cycle stalls after DNA replication such that the neurons can neither proceed into late G2/M-phase and complete division, nor reverse and turn off the cell cycle proteins. This new neuronal “state” is of more than academic interest as it is dramatically elevated in populations of neurons that are at risk for death in several neurodegenerative diseases, the best studied of which is AD.
The at-risk neurons reexpress cell cycle proteins, accompanied by true DNA replication. These unscheduled neuronal cell cycles appear during early disease stages. which argues that they are an integral part of the disease process. The full mechanistic implications of the appearance of cell cycle events (CCEs) in a “postmitotic” adult neuron are not yet understood, but certainly the doubling of the DNA content of any cell would seem to qualify as a profound and irreversible change of state.
In any one population of neurons, the percentage of “cycling” neurons rises rapidly from near zero to final values and then remains stable—a rapid change of state. A similar progression is likely to occur in the human AD brain. The results of anti-inflammatory treatments of AD mouse models are also consistent with a change-of-state model. While 3 months of NSAID treatment can block new CCEs from appearing, even 6 months of NSAID treatment do not reverse the cell cycle protein expression pattern once it has begun.
Neurons are not the only cells of the brain whose cell biology is changed during the progression of AD. Astrocytes become activated in regions of AD neuropathology, as do the microglial cells. Equally intriguing from the change-of-state perspective, the microglia can apparently adopt a phenotype found in macrophages known an “alternate activation state.” This state is accompanied by a shift from an acute proinflammatory reaction to a chronic state of activation more suited toward vascular growth and tissue repair.
Hypothesizing that AD involves a cellular change of state from early to late disease has theoretical as well as practical importance. At the theoretical level, it encourages us to revisit the cellular events that occur after the change. The prediction is that the biology of early AD differs in qualitative ways from the biology that ultimately produces the dementia. As an analogy, if someone were to stop smoking after they developed lung cancer, they would not be likely to alter the progression of the cancer. The biology of the cells involved has changed and the process is now independent of the initiating injury and transformation.
It also offers a theoretical explanation for the failure of the prospective human trials of NSAIDs: the trials were all begun after AD symptoms were manifest. With the disease already in progress, it is likely that many of the neurons in the subjects' brains had gone through their change of state. Their biology no longer required chronic inflammation to sustain their abnormal state. Coupled with the evidence cited above that the change of state may be quite abrupt in entire cohorts of neurons, the human NSAID trial data are consistent with the new model. At the practical level, the model predicts that there is a postamyloid, postinflammatory biology that offers important new areas for neuroprotective drug discovery.
The role of autophagy and endosome dysfunction
Autophagy involves the coordination of a number of vesicle populations culminating in a process that assists the cell in degrading long-lived proteins and spent organelles. It is stimulated rapidly in response to various stresses, and results in the formation of an autophagosome, which then fuses with a lysosome and leads to the degradation of the contents. This process is of particular interest in AD research because if it is overstimulated, it can lead to cell death.
As might be expected, neurons at risk for death in AD show marked defects in their autophagic function. The presenilin mutations may also play a role here. Recent evidence has shown that one of the normal functions of presenilin is to facilitate the acidification of the cell's lysosomes, a requirement for efficient autophagy. As autophagy is one of the main defense mechanisms for clearing failed organelles and large protein aggregates from a cell, any compromise at this stage would only hasten the loss of cellular integrity and make the cell death process more rapid and more sure.
Amyloid and the amyloid cascade hypothesis revisited
It is gratifying that the new model comfortably incorporates the amyloid cascade as a contributing cause of AD pathogenesis. Extracellular Aβ naturally accumulates with age, and with time, the non-neuronal cells of the brain would be expected to sense its presence and react. The associated cytokines then enhance the production of the Aβ peptide. This creates a feedforward reaction.
Other factors, such as excessive synaptic activity of the type found during epilepsy or excitotoxic injury, can also enhance Aβ production. Thus, driven by one or more of these means, Aβ aggregates stimulate the immune response, and the immune response stimulates more Aβ production. In this way a cycle is created—the amyloid deposition cycle.
While this description requires no change in the well described chemistry of APP metabolism, recasting the amyloid cascade as an amyloid deposition cycle presents a new view of the linkage between this chemistry and the biology of AD. In this view, the deposition of amyloid is tightly linked to, but mechanistically distinct from, the forces that drive the development of dementia. Thus, the model predicts that while Aβ deposition and chronic inflammation each renders the other more likely, neither one has an absolute requirement for the other to be present in the brain.
This recasting of the role of Aβ in AD has both theoretical and practical significance. At a theoretical level, the prediction that the amyloid deposition cycle can run independently offers a fresh way of looking at the 30% of elderly individuals who are cognitively normal but are found to have significant plaque deposits in their brains. Rather than characterizing them as preclinical Alzheimer's, the new hypothesis suggests that it would be more accurate to say that they are cognitively normal, but their high plaque burden places them at enhanced risk for developing AD in the future.
At a practical level, the model makes another important statement: the presence of plaques in the brain, while highly correlated with AD, should not be an essential part of an Alzheimer's diagnosis. This is a major departure from current thinking and thus deserves careful consideration, as it will impact both our premortem and postmortem diagnostic criteria in substantial ways.
One attractive feature of adopting this idea is that it removes a troubling piece of circular logic from our current models. Presently, we are comfortable identifying individuals as having plaques without Alzheimer's, but we have stipulated that it is impossible to have Alzheimer's without plaques. There is no inherent biological reason for this; we have simply defined away this category.
If an individual presents with a classical behavioral and neurological course of AD symptoms, but their brain does not contain the requisite plaque burden and tangle density at autopsy, the dementia that they had was not Alzheimer's disease—by definition. Note that the new model predicts that this total discordance between plaques and AD will be rare in practice since the amyloid deposition cycle is stimulated by the same immune response that drives the neurodegeneration. This encourages us to continue to use Aβ and plaque-based outcome measures in our diagnoses. But just as there can be Parkinson's without Lewy bodies, it may be wise for us to consider the possibility that there can be Alzheimer's without plaques.
The requirement for chronic inflammation opens a wide array of well studied targets for potential intervention. Many laboratories are already exploring this pathway, but there is much to learn. A critical unanswered question, indeed a key challenge for future research, is how does a process as nonspecific and prevalent as brain inflammation reproducibly create the unique set of symptoms we recognize as Alzheimer's disease? While part of the answer is likely to lie in the persistent nature of the response, the bulk of the answer is most probably found in an Alzheimer-specific quality to the “marinade” of cytokines and chemokines that are produced by the aging astrocytes, microglia, endothelial cells, and others.
A useful context in which to view this challenge can be found in the observation that experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE) and multiple sclerosis (MS) are both demyelinating conditions caused by brain inflammation. Yet, EAE is now recognized as an imperfect model of MS with treatments that function as cures in the model proving ineffective or worse in the human disease. This emphasizes the diversity of possible neuroinflammatory responses in different conditions and urges us to learn their details in the context of the AD brain.
Finally, beyond Alzheimer's, the new model contains the seeds of a reexamination of other diseases. The proposition of an initiating injury that is required to begin the process of Alzheimer's disease comes with the strong implication that different injuries to the same age-weakened brain will lead to different responses of the cells of the brain and in so doing begin different disease processes.
The most clear-cut example of this would be Parkinson's disease. In this case, the ability of paraquat and MPTP to mimic the symptoms of the disease hints that Parkinson's may represent the brain's reaction to oxidative damage and mitochondrial malfunctions rather than inflammatory changes. What makes this last notion particularly appealing is the prediction that if different late-onset neurodegenerative diseases can evolve from a common origin but take different pathways to neuronal loss, then the late-life dementias should often appear as mixed dementias. This follows because it is unlikely that one type of injury precludes a second. The occurrence of these mixed dementias vexed researchers performing the early studies of Alzheimer's disease, but can be viewed in the context of the new model as a predictable consequence of how the diseases begin.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=karl+Harrup#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:890daf35,vid:OlHAtjOlefY,st:0
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004746/#B25
Oriana:
I’ve read this article with great excitement primarily because it postulated the importance of a PRECIPITATING INJURY, such as a head injury. Without that injury, sometimes at a young age, the cascade that leads to dementia doesn’t get started.
This was not the type of popular article that invariably points out that sugar and other refined carbohydrates lead to a lot more than tooth cavities — yes, the consumption of junk food is implicated in increased risk of dementia, but that goes for multiple diseases. Lack of exercise, both mental and physical, also contributes to increased risk.
But just as the treatment of gastric ulcers got nowhere as long as we believed that gastric ulcers are caused by stress, and made a stunning leap forward when it was discovered that a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori was the main culprit, so we are still waiting for what I’d call the “H. pylori moment” in brain diseases. Is traumatic brain injury, chiefly due to concussion, the answer? If so, should certain types of sports be outlawed — or is still too early take action?
It’s taken many years of research before we knew enough about the damage cased by cigarette smoking to initiate a stunningly effective anti-smoking campaign. It took decades for lead to be removed from gasoline. One could multiply the examples. Evidence of harm must become very solid before it can’t be ignored or explained away. We know that concussion is harmful, but the evidence still isn’t solid enough to punch us in the face (please pardon the bad pun, especially considering that boxers are at a higher risk of AD).
And it may yet turn out that the most common precipitating injury is something other than concussion. However, once it’s identified, we can seek to prevent it.
We certainly live in interesting times. A lot of new treatments are on the horizon, born of a new understanding of many diseases.
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CEREBRAL SMALL BLOOD VESSEL DISEASE TIED TO DEMENTIA, ALZHEIMER’S
Research led by in part by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) finds that the most common cerebral small-vessel disease feature seen in brain magnetic resonance imaging is a primary vascular factor associated with dementia risk.
Results of the major international study emphasize the significance of that feature, known as white matter hyperintensity (WMH) burden, in preventive strategies for dementia.
“Our findings provide converging evidence that WMH is a major vascular factor associated with dementia risk,” said Muralidharan Sargurupremraj, PhD, an assistant professor at the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Health San Antonio. “They also support WMH as a surrogate marker for clinical trials to prevent dementia by controlling vascular risk.”
Sargurupremraj is the first and co-corresponding author of the research, titled, “Genetic Complexities of Cerebral Small Vessel Disease, Blood Pressure, and Dementia,” published May 22 in JAMA Network Open, a monthly open-access medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
The study notes that with increasing life expectancy, the prevalence of dementia is expected to reach 75 million people globally by 2030, which makes devising strategies to prevent or delay its occurrence a major public health priority. The scientific community widely recognizes that most dementia cases, including Alzheimer’s disease, are related to a combination of vascular and neurodegenerative lesions.
And cerebral small-vessel disease is thought to be the main underlying contribution to cognitive decline and dementia, with nearly half of dementia cases showing both Alzheimer’s and cerebral small-vessel disease neuropathologic characteristics, the study notes.
Still, while observational studies had shown evidence of an association between white matter hyperintensity burden and increased risk of stroke and dementia, causal evidence had been limited. White matter hyperintensities are lesions in the brain that show up as areas of increased brightness in T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging.
In
the new study, researchers were able to provide evidence of a causal
link between vascular traits and Alzheimer’s disease, using genetic
instrument variable analyses known as Mendelian randomization – a method that leverages the natural randomization of genetic alleles to test how differences in the genetic effect on modifiable exposure influence disease risk.
Specifically, in a two-year analysis ending July 24, 2022, and using Alzheimer’s disease genome-wide association studies of up to 75,000 European dementia cases, they found causal evidence of an association of larger WMH burden with increased risk of the disease, accounting for pulse-pressure effects.
The study also highlighted the importance of combining several complementary epidemiological approaches and data types, and of accounting for caveats of instrumental variable analyses when exploring the impact of vascular traits on late-onset diseases like dementia.
“As vascular disease is a treatable contributor to dementia risk, our findings have broad significance for prevention strategies of Alzheimer’s and dementia as a whole,” Sargurupremraj concluded.
The researchers advise future studies to examine whether their findings can be generalized to non-European populations.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1049057
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AMERICAN MEN DIE 6 YEARS EARLIER THAN AMERICAN WOMEN
We’ve known for more than a century that women outlive men. But new research led by UC San Francisco and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows that, at least in the United States, the gap has been widening for more than a decade. The trend is being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic, among other factors.
In a research paper, published Nov. 13, 2023, in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors found the difference between how long American men and women live increased to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it’s been since 1996. This is an increase from 4.8 years in 2010, when the gap was at its smallest in recent history.
The pandemic, which took a disproportionate toll on men, was the biggest contributor to the widening gap from 2019-2021, followed by unintentional injuries and poisonings (mostly drug overdoses), accidents and suicide.
“There’s been a lot of research into the decline in life expectancy in recent years, but no one has systematically analyzed why the gap between men and women has been widening since 2010,” said the paper’s first author, Brandon Yan, MD, MPH, a UCSF internal medicine resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School.
“While rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” Yan said.
Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, Yan and fellow researchers from around the country identified the causes of death that were lowering life expectancy the most. Then they estimated the effects on men and women to see how much different causes were contributing to the gap.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest contributors were unintentional injuries, diabetes, suicide, homicide and heart disease.
But during the pandemic, men were more likely to die of the virus. That was likely due to a number of reasons, including differences in health behaviors, as well as social factors, such as the risk of exposure at work, reluctance to seek medical care, incarceration and housing instability. Chronic metabolic disorders, mental illness and gun violence also contributed.
Yan said the results raise questions about whether more specialized care for men, such as in mental health, should be developed to address the growing disparity in life expectancy.
“We have brought insights to a worrisome trend,” Yan said. “Future research ought to help focus public health interventions towards helping reverse this decline in life expectancy.”
Yan and co-authors, including senior author Howard Koh, MD, MPH, professor of the practice of public health leadership at Harvard Chan School, also noted that further analysis is needed to see if these trends change after 2021.
“We need to track these trends closely as the pandemic recedes,” Koh said. “And we must make significant investments in prevention and care to ensure that this widening disparity, among many others, do not become entrenched.”
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/11/426536/us-men-die-6-years-women-life-expectancy-gap-widens
Oriana:
One significant difference between men and women is the difference in size. Women are smaller on the average. It's a well-established finding that, within a species, smaller individuals live longer than the big ones. Think of those tiny Japanese women climbing temple steps without needing a railing -- they have a good chance of living to a hundred and beyond.
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ending on beauty:
Sara Teasdale:
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