Vasilisa Romanenko: MoonlightVIRGO IN BLUE
Let me be only utter beauty.
~ Jean Genet
The chemistry teacher once
ignited dull
yellow dust
the powdered sulfur flowered
the hidden heart of blue
pulsing into violet
I wanted that flame
I couldn’t settle for less
later in the mountains I found
the high gothic blue
of my mind
sky so steep
only flying was left
the clouds below
sent up small
probing tongues
*
What is heaven if not
a map of the earth
hidden deltas of pleasure
rivermouths
veined with fog
archipelagoes
blue is love’s
deepest hue
neither red
no, not black
the cheap taints of lust
and hell
If the soul has a color
it is blue
as infinity slipping on
the ring of horizon
to marry you
blue to blue
as tall mountains
stepping off into clouds
as the ocean lying down
like a lover
blue to blue
fire to fire
~ Oriana
*
ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM AND STALIN’S ABSURDITIES
Animal Farm was published on August 17, 1945.
Stalin took power after Lenin died on January 21, 1924.
Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism.
In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin ("un conte satirique contre Staline") and in his essay, “Why I Write" (1946), wrote: "Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”.
He took the political sentiment of Stalin and made a satire of it to expose it for what it was.
If you are at all familiar with the political views of George Orwell, you will know that as a Democratic Socialist he loathed and despised everything Joseph Stalin represented. Words like “democracy” simply didn't exist in the language of Russia under Stalin's rule — with the situation there no different now.
Orwell was known to grow considerably angry at the mere mention of Stalinism, including the time Russia became an ally to the Allies during the Second World War.
~ Brent Cooper, Quora
*
The name George Orwell carries immense ideological, political, and historical weight. He is the kind of author most of us have heard about before even encountering his work. We’ve heard about him, we’ve formed an opinion about him. With an unknown book by an unknown author, our opinion is formed after our first read, based on our first read. With Animal Farm, however, we approach it with a pre-formed opinion — a prejudice, even.
In this way it is similar to The Communist Manifesto, The Bible, and pretty much any book that is considered general knowledge. Whether correct or incorrect, whether based on reality or not, everybody approaches the work having previously heard about it, and about its author as well. Before reading a single page the reader is likely already aware that Orwell is a democrat, a socialist, that he later fought with the Spanish anarchists, that he was an advocate for individual liberties, and, above all, that he was an anti-Stalinist, that he fought against “Totalitarianism.”
This general knowledge means the reader does not pick up the book “bare-handed,” but approaches it armed with some knowledge. In my view, this prevents the reader from noticing certain aspects of the book. Regardless of how the reader feels about the Soviet Union or about capitalism, Orwell is pre-labeled a “democratic author” — democratic in the sense of “anti-totalitarian” individualism, against excessive power of the state, etc. I believe this heavy cultural bias prevents the reader from noticing several alarming elements in its narrative.
Animal Farm is a critical allegory of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It aims to discredit the revolutionary process by stressing that, though the revolution was initially impelled by desires of hope and change and transformation, it quickly derailed, and life got as bad or even worse than it was before the revolution. Some insist the book is a narrow critique of “Stalinism.” I will later explain why I believe the book does not stand narrowly opposed to the Soviet Union or Stalin’s administration, but in fact stands opposed to revolutions in general. However, that’s not the really alarming part. The quality of the critique of the Bolsheviks, the Soviet Union, so-called “Stalinism” is not my main concern here.
In Animal Farm, the animals represent the working class, and each different species represents a different social category within the working class. The pigs — the most intelligent animals — are the professional revolutionaries, Orwell’s stand-in for the Bolsheviks. The chickens, the horses, the sheep and so on are representations of the workers. The humans represent the bourgeoisie, and the book depicts class struggle in terms of animals versus humans.
In 2013 I read the book for a third time. This time I came understand the cause of my discomfort with Animal Farm. In this book, George Orwell expresses aristocratic contempt towards the people, the working class. The main target of critique in this book is not the revolutionaries, but the working classes themselves. They are depicted as dumb, incompetent, incapable of reasoning, without any historical initiative — a manipulable mass lacking any capacity for political protagonism.
When you analyze its narrative, only two subjects emerge as having the capacity for reason and historical autonomy: the human beings (the bourgeoisie) and the pigs (the Bolsheviks). The working class — the rest of the animals — is depicted as dumb and docile from beginning to end. In fact, about 70% of the book consists of nothing but such depictions.
I’ll cite several examples in order to illustrate that this is a constant theme throughout the novel. Such segments are so plentiful that there’s simply no way to chalk them all up to “cherry-picking” or “missing context.”
Orwell begins his story with Old Major, a pig metaphor for Karl Marx, who introduces the principles of Animalism — Marxism. With the exception of the other pigs, none of the animals can really grasp the depth of his theory, but they like what they hear anyway. The stage is set, and Orwell begins introducing the rest of the cast. Boxer and Clover are the first representatives of the working class that the reader learns about:
Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work.
Boxer is the personification of The Worker — a metaphor for the Stakhanovite movement in the USSR. Orwell then goes back to Old Major and the preparation for the upcoming revolution, caricaturing Marxism as a simple doctrine where animals simply label humans as a great enemy, and insist that all life will immediately improve as soon as the humans — the bourgeois — disappear. This is what Orwell says about this process:
'Major’s speech had given to the more intelligent animals on the farm a completely new outlook on life. They didn’t know when the Rebellion predicted by Major would take place, they had no reason for thinking that it would be within their own lifetime, but they saw clearly that it was their duty to prepare for it. The work of teaching and organizing the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals.'
The pigs, the revolutionaries, are said to be the cleverest. But what about the working class?
Some of the animals talked of the duty of loyalty to Mr. Jones, whom they referred to as “Master,” or made elementary remarks such as “Mr. Jones feeds us. If he were gone, we should starve to death.” Others asked such questions as “Why should we care what happens after we are dead?” or “If this Rebellion is to happen anyway, what difference does it make whether we work for it or not?”, and the pigs had great difficulty in making them see that this was contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The stupidest questions of all were asked by Mollie the white mare.
The animals being described as “stupid” or otherwise made to seem dumb or incapable is a running theme throughout the novel. Orwell continues:
'Their most faithful disciples were the two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover. These two had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers, they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals by simple arguments. They were unfailing in their attendance at the secret meetings in the barn, and led the singing of “Beasts of England,” with which the meetings always ended.
Here “Beasts of England” is a metaphor for “The Internationale.”
Boxer was the admiration of everybody. He had been a hard worker even in Jones’ time, but now he seemed more like three horses than one; there were days when the entire work of the farm seemed to rest on his mighty shoulders. From morning to night, he was pushing and pulling, always at the spot where the work was hardest. He had made an arrangement with one of the cockerels to call him in the morning half an hour earlier than anyone else, and would put in some volunteer labor at whatever seemed to be most needed, before the regular day’s work began. His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” — which he had adopted as his personal motto.'
Orwell describes Boxer as a hard worker — excited for working, someone who believes in the revolutionary project, and also always as dumb. Boxer as subject is pure, he truly and wholeheartedly believes in the revolution and in Animalism, and this makes him gullible.
Time passes, Old Major dies, and the revolution goes on without him. We are treated to assemblies organized by Snowball and Napoleon — Trotsky and Stalin — in its aftermath:
'Here the work of coming week was planned out and resolutions were put forward and debated. It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions. The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any resolutions of their own.'
Check this out: it’s not the case that the other animals are being manipulated. There’s no institution that manufactures consent here. Animal Farm is not Nineteen Eighty-Four, which portrays ideological control in complex terms, including some ideas I appreciate, like the manipulation of the past as a mechanism of domination. In Animal Farm the process is straightforward: the animals are fooled because they are dumb; there’s no complex scheme here.
You might argue “Jones, it’s not a complex book, the narrative is simplified!” Listen, I understand that the book is simple by nature, that everything is direct for a reason, but you notice this in turn: when it comes to the betrayal of the revolution, the subversion of the revolution, there’s no challenge for the pigs. Do you get it? It’s easy for the pigs, because the working class is stupid.
There are very few moments in the narrative where we see animals protesting. There’s an incident with the chickens in the second half of the book, when Napoleon (Stalin) decides to take four hundred eggs to trade with the humans. The chickens protest, the dogs — the police and the army — threaten to repress the chickens, and they give up. That’s it.
There’s two other moments, and it’s between the pigs only. Pigs who disagreed with Napoleon do question his decisions and stand against him, but the pigs are part of the revolutionary elite (from Orwell’s perspective) and not of the working class. As far as the working class goes, the incident with the chickens is the only incident. It’s treated as a triviality: the chickens tried, the dogs growled, Squealer (Napoleon’s lieutenant, Molotov?) spoke, and that’s it. The People are stupid.
Orwell also describes the animals’ literacy campaigns:
"As for the pigs, they could already read and write perfectly. The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything except the Seven Commandments. Muriel, the goat, could read somewhat better than the dogs, and sometimes used to read to the others in the evenings from scraps of newspaper which she found on the rubbish heap. Benjamin could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty. So far as he knew, he said, there was nothing worth reading. Clover learnt the whole alphabet, but could not put words together. Boxer could not get beyond the letter D. He would trace out A, B, C, D, in the dust with his great hoof, and then would stand staring at the letters with his ears back, sometimes shaking his forelock, trying with all his might to remember what came next and never succeeding.'
We’re about a third of the way through the book and it’s the third time Boxer, the metaphor for The Worker, is described as an imbecile. The third time! In my edition of the book, this happens within a scarce 20 pages. Orwell continues, and does not restrict himself to Boxer:
None of the other animals on the farm could get further than the letter A. It was also found that the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart. After much thought Snowball [Trotsky] declared that the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” […] The birds did not understand Snowball’s long words, but they accepted his explanation, and all humbler animals set to work to learn the new maxim by heart. Four legs good, two legs bad.
With the exception of the donkey Benjamin, the pigs, the dogs, Muriel, and Clover, all animals are incapable of reading. Clover isn’t actually capable of putting words together, so really it’s just Benjamin and the others. Thus Orwell begins to explain the rise of hierarchy within the revolution’s ranks. Every con is obvious, but the animals swallow any explanation, because they are stupid. Consider the construction of the windmill:
Gradually the plans grew into a complicated mass of cranks and cog-wheels, covering more than half the floor, which the other animals found completely unintelligible, but very impressive.
Once again, the animals are incapable of comprehending absolutely anything. Orwell’s portrayal of the arguments that divided the factions to which Trotsky and Stalin belonged is pathetic:
'According to Napoleon, what the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellions among the animals on the other farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves, they were bound to be conquered; the other argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves. The animals listened first to Napoleon, then to Snowball, and could not make up their minds which was right; indeed, they always found themselves in agreement with the one who was speaking at the moment.'
Notice that this critique targets neither Napoleon nor Snowball, neither Stalin nor Trotsky. This critique targets the people, you dig? Once again: the people are stupid. They don’t understand anything, they agree with whoever is speaking, they are a gullible mass. Orwell then proceeds to describe the process of “bureaucratization” of the revolution by way of the suspension of the assemblies. Remember how the animals learned to vote, but were incapable of producing either questions or answers?
'They were unnecessary, [Napoleon] said, and wasted time. In the future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee, presided over by himself. These would meet in private and afterwards communicate their decisions to the others. The animals would still assemble on Sunday mornings to salute the flag, sing “Beasts of England,” and receive their order for the week; but there would be no more debates.'
This could be volunteered as a critique of Stalinism and the bureaucratization of the revolution, since with the suspension of debates there’s no more direct democracy. However, look at how Orwell describes the reaction of the workers, through Boxer:
'Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say.'
Check this out: so far in the narrative, there’s no repression worth noting. From this moment on the dogs will begin to show up more often, as will the pigs, and Napoleon will instill a general climate of fear. Fair enough. Right up until this point, however, half-way through the book, there’s barely any repression. It’s as if the revolution gradually decays by itself due to the stupidity of the working class.
Orwell doesn’t showcase even sparks of original thought — he doesn’t concern himself with that. At all times the working class is described as subjects who feel a disturbance, who sense something is off, but are incapable of even verbalizing their own dissatisfaction in a conscious, intelligible way. They can feel, but are incapable of reasoning. This is the core message of the book. The working class are, in the metaphor of the narrative, farm animals incapable of reasoning.
Close to the end there’s a notable passage in which Orwell describes how several years go by and the farm “prospers” — the animals are still poor, barely eating, going through a famine, etc. but the pigs and dogs eat well. He discusses the new animals being born:
'The farm possessed three horses now besides Clover. They were fine upstanding beasts, willing workers and good comrades, but very stupid. None of them proved able to learn the alphabet beyond the letter B. They accepted everything that they were told about the Rebellion and the principles of Animalism, especially from Clover, for whom they had an almost filial respect; but it was doubtful whether they understood very much of it.'
Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book! The main target of this book’s critique aren’t the revolutionaries or communism: it’s the working class.
George Orwell writes from an aristocratic ethos. “Elite theory” posits the people as incapable of self-governance, without the capacity to constitute themselves as a political subject, and therefore always the object of dispute and manipulation by vying elites. The people lack the capacity for political self-determination, cannot build a political program or engage in autonomous political action. This is George Orwell’s theory, borne out by his choice of metaphors.
According to the story, every time a new bureaucratic privilege is established someone changes the Commandments that were written on the wall, until one day all Seven Commandments disappear and a single new one is written: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” If the animals knew how to read, it wouldn’t be possible for Squealer, Napoleon’s spokesman, to change the Commandments every dawn.
And in the narrative it’s not the dogs who prevent the animals from reading; it’s not even Squealer or anyone else convincing the other animals to forget about learning how to read and write. In fact, Squealer explicitly tells the other animals that it’s precisely because they can’t read or write that the pigs must “expend enormous labors every day upon mysterious things called files, reports, minutes, and memoranda.” And the animals accept this, because they are dumb.
Animal Farm isn’t a critique of revolutionaries; it’s a critique of workers. It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class. It promotes an aristocratic perspective in which working people are stupid beasts incapable of reason. ~
https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/ (condensed)
Please note: the opinions expressed here are those of the author of the article and not necessarily those of the editor of this blog.
Ion Muraru:
You should have seen the people’s faces ((during Romanian communism days) and amazement when the national TV shows the cartoon “The Animal Farm”!
It fits PERFECTLY with the actual society!
Mr. Jones, the original human owner of the farm, represents the ineffective and incompetent Czar Nicholas II. The pigs represent key members of Bolshevik leadership: Napoleon represents Joseph Stalin, Snowball represents Leon Trotsky, and Squealer represents Vyacheslav Molotov. ~
ThoughtCo:
After its publication, the novel was immediately banned by the Soviet Union and continues to be banned in Cuba and China. The novel was also banned by the United Arab Emirates in 2002 because of imagery they felt was against Islamic values.
The main theme of Animal Farm is that power always corrupts.
~ In the last scene of Animal Farm, the humbler animals peer through a window of the farmhouse to behold a horrible sight: the pigs who rule over them have grown indistinguishable from their temporary allies, the human farmers, whom they originally fought to overthrow. The animals’ fate seems to mirror rather closely the fate of the common people as Orwell envisioned it some six years before commencing Animal Farm: “what you get over and over is a movement of the proletariat which is promptly canalized and betrayed by the astute people at the top, and then the growth of a new governing class. The one thing that never arrives is equality. One is almost driven to the cynical thought that men are only decent when they are powerless. ~
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831551
*
“DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE” “LONG LIVE RED TERROR”
After Lenin's death, Stalin gradually began to take power in his hands in the central apparatus of the party and central state organs. He succeeded. But in the early 1930s Stalin discovered an unpleasant fact for him. He was the leader in the central organs. But almost all local party and state bodies felt very free in their territories and did not hurry to carry out Stalin's instructions from the center. This was unexpected for Stalin. He did not take into account the fact that the local first secretary, was locally more important figure than Comrade Stalin, in the far away capital. Such a state of affairs did not suit Stalin. He needed a totally controllable party, controlled personally by him.
The most challenging for Stalin was the behavior of the Leningrad party organization, which often publicly opposed Stalin's decisions. The leaders of this opposition were Lenin's favorites Kamenev and Zinoviev.
Stalin decided to remove the opposition and at the same time set an example to other party leaders that there was no need to argue with Stalin. Stalin succeeded in persuading Bukharin, Rykov and others from the "Lenin Guard" to condemn this opposition. At first, oppositionists were simply removed from party and state posts. Stalin sent Kirov to Leningrad to monitor the "correct behavior" of the Leningrad communists.
However, in 1934, Kirov was killed. Although this murder was not connected with his party activities, Stalin used it as an excuse to shoot Kamenev, Zinoviev and other oppositionists. Everything went smoothly. After Zinoviev and Kamenev, Stalin shot Bukharin, Rykov and others who helped him to destroy Kamenev and Zinoviev.
t is quite possible that Stalin would have limited himself to eliminating his political leaders. But the example turned out to be contagious. At first, all party organizations "purged" their ranks. Every second secretary wanted to become the first secretary, so he wrote a report on his boss to take his place. Then this initiative was picked up by writers, artists, scientists - in every professional community there were those who wanted to take the places of their bosses.
The people liked it. At numerous rallies, "ordinary citizens" demanded the execution of the pests. They did not demand an investigation or proof of guilt — they immediately demanded execution. Very soon, many of those "ordinary citizens" were also shot.
Perhaps Stalin did not expect such an avalanche-like process. But he took full advantage of it.
I always stated that the biggest bolshevik crime was the the destruction of a small layer of society which was formed over the centuries and included educated people, bearers of morality and humanitarian values. All those people were either destroyed by the bolshevik bastards or fled the country. The process of historical development of Russian society was interrupted. Not slowed down, but interrupted forever.
Instead of the destroyed intelligentsia, the bolsheviks promoted the worst representatives of society. The society that was formed after the victory of the bolsheviks was a completely different society that had little in common with its predecessors in that territory. Its representatives enthusiastically demanded to have people shot without trial and investigation. They enthusiastically wrote denunciations on colleagues and relatives; they renounced their parents, who were accused of espionage.
That society has its own history of development, which has yet to be studied and described.
I used to think that Soviet society returned to normality by the end of the 1990s. However, the example of modern Russian society shows that even a hundred years is not enough to restore society. The modern Russians enthusiastically demand to kill and enjoy the casualties they bring to Ukraine. The concepts of morality and humanitarian values have not been restored in Russian society for a hundred years after the bolsheviks had destroyed their bearers.
~ Alex Lyashenko, Quora
*
In a way , the long march to Berlin liberated Russian peasants, and Stalin who hated freedom and loved Hitler’s regime, couldn’t reverse the damage and return the country to full-fledged Gulag.
The defeat of Hitler was the beginning of the end of Stalin’s ideology. But it never completely went away. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
STALIN’S “DOCTORS’ PLOT”
Just over 70 years ago, on 4 April 1953, Pravda carried a prominent statement by Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's infamous head of secret police, exonerating nine Soviet doctors (seven of them Jews) who had previously been accused of “wrecking, espionage and terrorist activities against the active leaders of the Soviet Government.” The Soviet people, especially its Jews, were astounded to learn that just a month after Stalin's death the new leadership now admitted that the charges had been entirely invented by Stalin and his followers. Seven of the doctors were immediately released—two had already died at the hands of their jailers.
The infamous “Doctors' Plot” speaks volumes about Soviet politics, Stalin's role, the persistence of a medieval view of doctors as potential poisoners, and the survival of overt anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, despite the known horrors of the recent Holocaust. For Stalin, whose deeds easily matched those of Hitler and whose deceits had been evident throughout his life, the Doctors' Plot and intended show trial were meant to cleanse the Soviet Union of “foreign,” “cosmopolitan,” and “Zionist” (read Jewish) elements. In fact, it was the only one of Stalin's show trials that did not come off—only because he died just before the spectacle was to begin.
Stalin’s Plans
On 13 January 1953 the Soviet government declared in Pravda that nine of the Kremlin's most prestigious doctors had, several years earlier, murdered two of Stalin's closest aides. Moreover, as Rapoport relates, these practitioners were accused of taking part in a “vast plot conducted by Western imperialists and Zionists to kill the top Soviet political and military leadership . . . [Until Stalin's death] the Soviet media pounded away at the supposed single ‘fifth column’ in the USSR, with constant references to Jews who were being arrested, dismissed from their jobs, or executed.”
The show trial was meant to initiate a carefully constructed plan in which almost all of the Soviet Union's two million Jews, nearly all of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, were to be transported to the Gulag—in cattle cars. Between the January announcement and Stalin's death a month and a half later it became clear that careful plans had been laid for the transfer and “concentration” of Soviet Jews. Rapoport quotes a Soviet Jewish engineer who reported seeing, in the early 1960s, a “never used camp with row after row of barracks: ‘Its vastness took my breath away.’ ” Other witnesses corroborated the existence of the deportation plans.
Anti-Semitism and mistrust of doctors
Stalin's hatred of Jews and of Jewish doctors in particular did not appear in a vacuum. European anti-Semitism had long manifested, as one of its more bizarre subtypes, a fear (and respect) for Jewish doctors. This recurrent delusion is typified by a statement from the Catholic Council of Valladolid in 1322: Jewish physicians “under guise of medicine, surgery, or apothecary commit treachery with much ardor and kill Christian folk when administering medicine to them.”
Stalin had long manifested his hatred not only of Jews but, by extension, of Jewish nationalism (Zionism). Though using somewhat derivative terminology, his slander of both was expressed in the same spirit as the omnipresent anti-Semitism of the Tsarist period in which Stalin grew up. At that time the notorious Tsarist police forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was widely circulated in Russia and beyond. This tract claimed that world Jewry aspired to international domination through control of the world's banking system and through socialist subversion. Despite the fact that in 1921 the forgery was exposed in the Times of London, it survives today, mainly but not exclusively in the Arab world, where an ongoing television series is based on the Protocols.
Sometimes Stalin's concerns conflicted. For example, when Lena Shtern, a well known Jewish scientist, was tried secretly on trumped up charges in 1952, Stalin spared her life, imprisoning her for “only” five years—probably because she was the Soviet Union's foremost expert on longevity, a field that intrigued the aging leader.
In general Stalin severely mistrusted doctors—whatever their nationality. In his memoirs Dmitri Shostakovich tells the tale of Vladimir Bekhterev, a world renowned psychiatrist who at 70 was summoned to assess Stalin's mental condition. The good doctor described him as ill, perhaps even paranoid. And how right he was. Bekhterev died immediately afterwards—poisoned by Stalin.
But Stalin's special hatred was reserved for Jewish doctors. Although in the last decades of Tsarist rule Jews were restricted from owning land and excluded from most other professions, they had indeed entered medicine in numbers far out of proportion to their small percentage in the overall population. So when Stalin decided to resolve the Soviet Union's “Jewish problem,” it made perfect sense to open the campaign with a show trial against a group of (mainly Jewish) doctors who were often branded “Zionists” or agents of the “Joint” (an international Jewish charitable organization).
A propaganda offensive accompanied the plans to deport—“for their own good”—the Jewish population. One million copies of a pamphlet were prepared for distribution—its title: “Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country.” The deportation was purportedly “in response” to a carefully orchestrated letter prepared for Pravda and signed by many terrified Soviet Jewish leaders, imploring “The Father of all the Peoples” to deport the Jews for their own protection. It appealed to “the government of the USSR, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to save the Jewish population from possible violence in the wake of the revelations about the doctor-poisoners . . . of Jewish origin . . . We, as leading figures among loyal Soviet Jewry, totally reject American and Zionist propaganda claiming that there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.”
According to Stalin's plan, the doctors would be convicted and scheduled to be hanged—symbolically—around Easter. As Rapoport explained:
Then “incidents” would follow: attacks on Jews orchestrated by the secret police, the publication of the statement by the prominent Jews, and a flood of other letters demanding that action be taken.
A three-stage program of genocide would be followed. First, almost all Soviet Jews . . . would be shipped to camps east of the Urals . . . Second, the authorities would set Jewish leaders at all levels against one another . . . Also the MGB [Ministry of State Security, i.e. secret police] would start killing the elites in the camps, just as they had killed the Yiddish writers . . . the previous year. The . . . final stage would be to “get rid of the rest.”
Contemporary responses:
Of interest is the approach taken at the time by the two main organs of British medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Lancet. The Lancet made no mention of the plot. The British Medical Journal did publish an interesting leader article exactly one week after the dramatic announcement in Pravda in April exonerating the doctors. Entitled “The accused Russian doctors,” it referred to a wishy-washy pronouncement from the World Medical Association.
The journal, perhaps a bit wiser (and braver) after the Soviet recantation, admitted that “As doctors we felt disturbed by the assault upon the professional integrity of our Russian colleagues and especially by the probable effect of the accusation on the trust patients universally have in the doctor-patient relationship.”
The only other English language reference that I could locate was a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, submitted by the Israel Medical Association, stating forthrightly that “a false charge has been leveled against the accused physicians and that the trial against them is staged for certain political ends.”
No statement appeared in the British medical press between the Pravda announcement of the Doctors' Plot in January and the retraction in April. Furthermore, I could find no other mention of this case in any section of these three journals after 11 April 1953.
Emigration of the Jews
Although the immediate de-Stalinization that followed the dictator's death made life less fearful for all of the Soviet Union's peoples, the country's Jews were not yet out of the woods. The next four decades saw periods of resurgence and quiescence in Soviet anti-Semitism.
During the Brezhnev years an unusual combination of state inspired anti-Semitism and a relaxation of the emigration regulations facilitated the exit of approximately 200 000 Jews, many of whom went to Israel. Later, with glasnost and perestroika, almost one million more Jews left, most once again to Israel. A large number of these migrants were doctors, their move strongly enriching Israel's medical profession.
In the end, Stalin's plot failed for one reason only: he died before completing the mission. The final irony is that over the past two decades the cream of Soviet Jewish medicine has gone from being vilified in their land of birth to free practitioners of their craft in the Jewish state. Stalin, one hopes, is indeed rolling over in his grave.
*
WHY SO MANY RUSSIANS SEEM TO BE GULLIBLE
Only 15% of Russians have traveled abroad — that’s why so many gullible Russians believe Putin's propaganda.
In China, only 7% of citizens have an international passport.
In Russia, 28% applied for an international passport, but only 15% used it.
In the US, 42% of citizens have an international passport.
In the UK: 76%.
In Ukraine, about 50% of citizens have international passports.
Most Russians have not seen much of the world — they haven’t even visited Europe, so they don’t know what world they live in.
Without traveling to other countries and communicating with people of other nations — and no free media providing different opinions, Russians are locked in their own informational bubble, believing their own propaganda. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Mark Kempson:
Sounds a little like North Korea, Elena. I had an experience when I traveled to Russia as a kid after I graduated. I was in Red Square and wearing a pair of levi jeans. A young man came up to me and offered me $500 American dollars for them. (It was a long time ago, and I would have paid less than $100 for them). He wanted me to drop them there and then! I don’t think he would have been able to wear them because he was bigger than me. I was tempted, but declined because the thought of going back to my hotel in a very small and tight pair of underpants that did not leave much to the imagination was too embarrassing. This young man was so sad about it and kept telling me how good I looked and he wanted them. It made me realise how much I took for granted.
Star:
During communism and shortly after the fall of the regime people offered incredible amounts for stuff like jeans or a video recorder because they had lacked everything for a long time. I know someone who sold an apartment and bought a video recorder (in another ex-communist country). It's unbelievable to us today but at the time money had not their real value. People wanted all sorts of things and had no concept of prices and costs. That disgusting evil regime killed or turned upside down millions of lives and is still damaging people, like in North Korea.
Gary Rosenberg: WHY THE GRAPES OF WRATH WAS BANNED IN THE SOVIET UNION
My father was in the USSR during WWII with his family as a teenage refugee from Poland. Once they were released from the Gulag in Siberia and got to Tajikistan, he saw some American movies, such as “King Kong”. What he did not see was “The Grapes of Wrath”.
I believe it was in Quora I read that Stalin banned that film, because even though it shows Americans under difficult economic conditions, the poor family around whom the plot revolves owned a car, which was not the case for almost all private Soviet citizens. Stalin did not want the public to see that even financially strapped Americans owned cars.
*
WAITING FOR THE BUNKER SCENE
*
GONE, THE HUGE ARMIES OF WW2
This is a World War Two infantryman. He has minimal equipment. He costs very little to put in the field. You can make LOTS of these guys, very quickly, and very cheaply.
This is a modern American infantryman. He’s expected to be moderately educated. He will be extensively trained in both basic and specialized skills. He has body armor that the WWII guy could only dream of. He has night vision that costs more than everything the wwii guy is wearing, combined.
Every part of this guys costs FAR more to produce, train, and deploy.
And this is now the standard. You aren't going back to hordes of guys with simple rifles and cloth shirts.
Which means you aren't fielding multi-million man armies. The days of the Red Army taking 8 million casualties and still being able to field dozens of divisions? Don't think that's coming back. ~ Quoura
Stephen Vignovich:
The manufacturing base is not there anymore. I mean, Bethlehem Steel was the major armor maker. It's now a concert venue. I lived in Philly and close to all the manufacturing plants that were used during the war.All the shipyards on the Delaware and Philadelphia. They're either condominiums, parks or just abandoned places. Things like the Frankfurt Arsenal Are warehouses, school and a bunch of other things.The Navy yard, I believe, is just a bunch of. office parks now. no manufacturing going on there. There is one shipyard running on the Delaware left. The place Sherman tanks were made is now a Walmart. so that's just a few places. And I know it's like this across the country. I mean, where would you even find places to weave the fabric anymore in this country?
Victor Diaz:
Modern tech is much more expensive than old tech. Even when accounting for inflation. P51 cost like half a million adjusted for inflation. Now even our cheaper fighters cost millions more than that. F35 costs like 100 million.
*
DOMESTIC ABSURDITIES: TRUMP’S COGNITIVE DECLINE
At Trump’s Las Vegas rally his teleprompter malfunctioned causing the former president to ad lib some of his remarks.
During one stretch, Trump delivered a 600-word riff about his concerns over battery-powered boats that included an extended stream-of-consciousness debate over whether it would be better to die by shark attack or electrocution.
“So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, over here,” Trump said. “Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
Trump ultimately concluded: “I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, who resigned as communications director in Trump’s White House in December 2020, said on “The View” there are “glaring warning signs about Trump.”
“Listening to him now does not sound like him in 2016 and he was not ever particularly eloquent,” Griffin, a co-host on the show and a CNN contributor. “I’m recognizing and seeing a decline in him. Others who’ve known him have said it and I think that that matters.”
Notably, Trump’s allies see his age as a potential factor that could keep him out of jail following his felony conviction. Asked about the likelihood of Trump ending up behind bars, Jonathan Turley, an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School friendly to the former president, said it would be “absurd.”
One of the reasons?
“He is an elderly first offender,” Turley said.
Amid the constant questions about Trump’s longevity, though, he has told his supporters not to worry. He has good genes.
“My father lived a long time. My mother lived a long time and they were happy and they were great,” Trump told the Vegas crowd. “So maybe we’re gonna live a long time.”
[Both of Trump’s parents died with dementia.]
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/politics/donald-trump-birthday/index.html
~ Those who knew him when he was younger, such as Tony Schwartz, the ghost author of “The Art of the Deal”, have publicly noted his loss of much of his vocabulary and ability to express himself. Trump never sounds like an educated man and contradicts himself regularly. But none of this was true when he was middle aged and far more articulate. Look at old videos of him on Youtube and you’ll see for yourself. ~ Jonathan Buttall, former Professional in Behavioral Health
~ "I am very smart. MIT. I am connected to MIT. If a boat is sinking and you have to choose between ... electric boats ... they tell me 'sir' ... there have been a lot of shark attacks lately ... the shark misunderstood the woman so ... it was a misunderstanding ... he ate her leg ... electrocution or eaten by shark?" ~ Trump during a recent speech in Nevada
Oriana: "the shark misunderstood the woman so ... it was a misunderstanding ..." If that's not dementia, what is?
I happened to look at those nineties’ interviews. Every voter should. What an eye opener.
William Weir:
His awkward stance and his difficulty with motor skills are a possible sign of dementia. More concerning are his mental issues. He cannot make coherent statements, he is prone to fits of rage, he lacks self control. He also lacks basic reasoning skills, but it’s unclear if that is from cognitive decline or just having a low IQ in general. Either way, he certainly is less coherent and less rational than he seemed in interviews twenty years ago. Biden on the other hand is just making the same kind of word mistakes that he’s been famous for over the last fifty years, something he has always attributed to having struggles with stuttering.
Peter Sutphen, therapist:
The videos of him with Charlie Rose (1992) and Oprah (1988) demonstrate that he was an intelligent, articulate man. When you see him speak now, and especially when you read a transcript of his interviews such as with Time and the New York Times, it is shocking in his inability to stay on task and to articulate points beyond broad generalities and meaningless sales blather. Of course we all decline in cognitive ability as we age, but this appears to be outside of normal limits.
Paul Irving:
I’ve seen the episode in Israel where he seemed to forget where he was & what he was doing during a press conference with Netanyahu. That looks like more severe dementia than suggested by his general deterioration, but there’s another possible explanation: a stroke.
And where there’s one stroke there are very often others. The accumulated effect of minor strokes (which one can have without knowing) could account for everything. If so, he’s likely to keep going downhill. His lifestyle doesn’t help: obese, likes rich food & avoids exercise, e.g. in Taormina all the other G7 leaders went for a walk round town, but Trump had himself driven in a golf cart.
Laslo Kovacs:
He has a number of the symptoms, at least from my own experience with friends who suffer from early onset dementia. He uses “pause words” as if he’s buying time…his “very very very” and “bad, bad, bad” speech routines. He also uses a lot of “neutral words”, such as “thing”, as if he can’t remember the actual noun.
His train of thought is often incoherent. Aside from his obvious ignorance of world affairs and of history—put that aside as another problem with Trump—just listen to how fragmented his thoughts are, as if he thought he completed a sentence when he didn’t.
If you are skeptical that he has dementia, let me challenge you to a test. Go to YouTube and pick out some interview with Trump speaking, perhaps 20 years ago say on a talk show. Compare how he is articulating and thinking there with what you hear now.
Shocking, isn’t it?
*
My father died from Alzheimer’s and I certainly see Trump display some of the same symptoms.
*
Trump has described using an “iron dome” missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”
"If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you.”
“It’s a magnificent love story, like Gone With the Wind. You know Gone With the Wind, you’re not allowed to watch it any more. You know that, right? It’s politically incorrect to watch Gone With the Wind. They have a list. What were the greatest movies ever made? Well, Gone With the Wind is usually number one or two or three. And then they have another list you’re not allowed to watch any more, Gone With the Wind. You tell me, is our country screwed up?”“All my life you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson, he was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else, second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal, Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it.”
~ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/06/donald-trump-speech-analysis
*
JONATHAN HAIDT ARGUES THAT THE USE OF IPHONES HARMS CHILDREN
Jonathan Haidt: My theory in brief is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years. We’re mammals. All mammals have a play-based childhood. We gradually deprived kids of that starting in the 1990s. By 2010, kids have not had a full normal suite of outdoor activity unsupervised, but their mental health didn’t go down during that period. It’s only one phase. The second phase is when we get the arrival of the phone-based childhood. That’s really what did them in, and it’s both of these causes together.
As a social scientist, I share the view that things are usually complicated. It’s usually all kinds of interactions. But sometimes there are things like leaded gas. Leaded gas had a huge impact, especially on Gen X. It had a pervasive effect on kids around the world, especially on boys, because it disrupts the frontal cortex development. So you get a huge crime wave in many, many countries around the world.
Then we banned leaded gas around 1981 and then crime plummets 15 or 17 years later all around the world. So I hope that my fellow social scientists will say, “Yeah, usually it’s not monocausal, but you know what? Sometimes it could be.” We should be open to the possibility that it was one big thing.
Okay, now what’s the evidence? We use experiments to establish causality. If you have a random assignment and one group is asked to get off social media and the other isn’t, you look at that and you can see the causation. As we’ve gone on in time, there are a lot more experiments, there are a lot more correlational studies, there are a lot of longitudinal studies, and there are now a lot of quasi-experiments where you look at what happens when high-speed internet comes into one part of British Columbia a couple years ahead of another part of British Columbia, things like that.
So I’ve organized all of the studies, and I did this work with Zach Rausch and Jean Twenge, and guess what? The correlational studies are overwhelming. There are some that don’t show an effect, but the great majority do, and it’s usually larger for girls. The longitudinal studies are a little different. It’s like if you use more social media at time one, does that mean you’re more depressed at time two? And most of those studies suggest that kind of linear causal effect. A few show a reverse, but most suggest that.
So the skeptics now are saying, "Well, there’s no evidence." Wait a second. There’s a lot of causal evidence just in the experiments. We can debate whether you’re convinced by them, but you can’t say there’s no evidence. There are now a lot of experiments. It’s not just correlational data.
Sean IIlling:
One of the counter arguments is that it’s true that reported cases of anxiety and depression are up, but a big part of that is that people are more willing to be transparent about their struggles now because it’s no longer a source of shame or stigma, and that’s a good thing. That wouldn’t explain everything, but perhaps it explains some of it?
Haidt:
I would assume so, but now that I think about it more, I’m actually a little more skeptical. Because when I was growing up in the ’70s, my mother sent me to a psychologist for a brief time. It was very shameful. I didn’t want anyone to know. There was real shame to any sort of mental health issue in the ’70s and into the ’80s.
By the ’90s, however, the stigma began to drop, and by the 2000s it’s really dropping. Yet we don’t see the numbers rising. We don’t see young people saying, “Oh yeah, I’m more anxious, I’m more anxious, I’m more anxious.” We don’t see that. By the time you get to 2012, mental health issues have been largely de-stigmatized.
Sean:
Is it possible that some of these associations between social media use and psychological distress are a reflection of kids who maybe already have mental health issues and they’re disproportionately using these platforms more than their more healthy peers? Maybe we’ve just created platforms that tease out the problems that were already there?
Jonathan:
Well, it’s not exactly teasing out. It’s amplifying. Long before social media, some 2- or 3- or 4-year-olds were anxious and you could see it. They’re exposed to something new, they pull away. So kids who are prone to anxiety, there are some suggestions that they are more likely to move to social media, in part because it’s easier than talking to people. So it’s true that some portion of these correlations can be reverse correlation.
Sean:
Have there been more general changes in diagnostic criteria and the way hospitals and clinics code these sorts of things that might explain some of the spikes in reported cases?
Jonathan:
There was a big change that would affect things globally around 2015, that’s true. But yet we don’t find a big jump in 2016. We found it in 2012 and 2013. So skeptics will find some study in New Jersey that seemed to show that maybe suicide rates didn’t go up in New Jersey. Well, okay, fine. One study found that in New Jersey. But the CDC data is pretty damn clear about the whole country. So yeah, I think the skeptics are often cherry-picking. They’re finding the occasional study that doesn’t find an effect.
Sean:
The broader point about smartphones creating problems for all of us — fragmenting our attention, pulling us away from the real world and real connections — we know it’s not good, and I don’t need a peer-reviewed study to tell me that it’s not good.
Jonathan:
In this case, it’s not like we’re reviewing for an academic journal and we’re saying, “We’re not going to let anything in until we’re certain.” The risk of not acting if I’m right is beyond comprehension, another generation lost to mental illness and reduced learning.
It’s always good that we have skeptics. They keep me and Jean Twenge honest. They push us on certain points. But to say, “There’s no evidence and we don’t think we should do anything until we’re certain,” that’s a misunderstanding of the role of science in society. Science doesn’t require absolute certainty. It doesn't even require settled science before we can act.
The tobacco industry, the oil industry — they've tried to muddy the waters [on tobacco use and climate change respectively] and say, “Oh, it’s not settled science. There’s some contradictory findings.” Now there, the cost of acting was quite expensive, but we did it anyway. Here the cost is nothing. That’s why I think we can do it.
Mary:
I think children have lost more than free play. I grew up in the city, with walkable neighborhoods, where school, parks, libraries, movie theaters stores, and friends were all in walking distance, and didn't require adult supervision, planning, scheduling and cars to get to. We could run errands for adults rather than depending on them to run us around to "play dates," sports, music or art lessons, scout meetings etc. The very idea of scheduling a date for play makes it artificial and anything but free.
Life in these walkable city neighborhoods allowed for rich and varied experience, directed by the child's own developing interests, abilities, and imagination. It developed independence and self reliance. The world was there to explore and enjoy in ways we could invent and discover without the need to perform to parental expectations or under pressure to fit adult definitions of what play should be.
Suburban living itself, with unwalkable neighborhoods, no sidewalks, and schools, parks and other destinations only reachable by car or bus, automatically changes the experience of childhood play and the development of friendships, independence, and self reliance. I think it diminishes these experiences, creates more isolation, and less autonomy. Self organized play gives way to more adult organized activities, often with a competitive performance element.
I think this can be alienating and lonely. Maybe it’s even one of the factors that makes engagement with social media so attractive, even addictive — offering connections absent for far too many.
I miss those childhood days, that seem so idyllic in memory. Probably less safe than today's parents would demand, but there wasn't such a fear of danger and focus on safety as there is now, when the world seems far more threatening than we thought it was.
Oriana:
I grew up in a walkable city as well — and with plenty of reliable public transportation to places farther away, like the bridges on the Vistula, where I loved to stand in a trance. Just the city was the greatest imaginable adventure. Just looking out the window was entertainment. And indeed quite often I’d run into a schoolmate, or politely greet adult acquaintances.
Back when such questions were still relevant, I realized that if I had a child I couldn’t offer her the kind of rich childhood I’d had — and by “rich” I mean precisely the city. No shimmer of lights on rainy evenings, no embassy row, no hundreds of years of history summarized by the cooing of the pigeons. For walking, she’d have shopping malls, not the royal park with the half-hidden palace where secret talks were taking place between America and China. Not the sundials, not the marble and bronze statues, not the great modern crowds under the baroque clouds. The vespers church bells, the lilacs, the great chestnuts in bloom. Even the sleet, the elongated reflections in wet asphalt.
One I settled in the American suburbia, what could I have given to my imagined child? Just that empty suburbia, which seemed awfully impoverished to me. Just the sound of neighbors wheeling out their garbage bins, then pulling them back in.
*
’TERMINATION SHOCK’: CUT IN SHIP POLLUTION SPARKED GLOBAL HEATING SPURT
Sudden cut in pollution in 2020 meant less shade from sun and was ‘substantial’ factor in record surface temperatures in 2023, study finds.
The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big “termination shock” that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research.
Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulfur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulfur content of fuels by more than 80%.
The new analysis calculates that the subsequent drop in pollution particles has significantly increased the amount of heat being trapped at the Earth’s surface that drives the climate crisis. The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.
High ocean surface temperatures smashed records in 2023, alarming experts who have struggled to explain the huge rises. But scientists have mixed views on the role played by the cut in shipping pollution.
Those behind the new study say it could be a “pretty substantial” factor. Others say it is only a small factor, and that the reasons for the extraordinary rises in sea and global temperatures remain an alarming mystery.
Dr Tianle Yuan, at the University of Maryland, US, who led the study, said the estimated 0.2 watts per sq meter of additional heat trapped over the oceans after the pollution cut was “a big number, and it happened in one year, so it’s a big shock to the system”.
“We will experience about double the warming rate compared to the long-term average” since 1880 as a result, he said. The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years.
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, combined satellite observations of sulfur pollution and computer modeling to calculate the impact of the cut. It found the short-term shock was equivalent to 80% of the total extra heating the planet has seen since 2020 from longer-term factors such as rising fossil-fuel emissions.
The scientists used relatively simple climate models to estimate how much this would drive up average global temperatures at the surface of the Earth, finding a rise of about 0.16C over seven years. This is a large rise and the same margin by which 2023 beat the temperature record compared with the previous hottest year.
However, other scientists think the temperature impact of the pollution cut will be significantly lower due to feedbacks in the climate system, which are included in the most sophisticated climate models. The results of this type of analysis are expected later in 2024.
“[Pollution particles] are one of the largest uncertainties in the climate system, and pretty hard to measure,” said Dr Zeke Hausfather, at analysts Carbon Brief. He said the new analysis did a good job of using satellite data to estimate the change in trapped heat after the pollution cut, but he disagreed on how that translated into a temperature rise. Hausfather’s estimate of the temperature rise due to the pollution cut was 0.05C over 30 years.
“The [pollution cut] is certainly a contributing factor to the recent warmth, but it only goes a small way toward explaining the 0.3C, 0.4C, and 0.5C margins of monthly records set in the second half of 2023,” he said.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the new research was “definitely a positive contribution, but it’s not using a fully coupled climate model, so there is still more work to be done. We’ll see how this all gets reconciled over the coming months.”
In March, Schmidt warned: “We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.” He said the recent El Niño event and a rise in solar activity were not sufficient explanations.
Deliberately pumping aerosols into the air over the oceans to stimulate more cloud cover has been proposed as a way of cooling the Earth. Yuan said years of shipping pollution followed by a sharp cut was an accidental large-scale experiment: “We did inadvertent geoengineering for 50 or 100 years over the ocean.”
The new analysis indicates that this type of geoengineering would reduce temperatures, but would also bring serious risks. These include the sharp temperature rise when the pumping of aerosols stopped – the termination shock – and also potential changes to global precipitation patterns, which could disrupt the monsoon rains that billions of people depend on.
“We should definitely do research on this, because it’s a tool for situations where we really want to cool down the Earth temporarily,” like an emergency brake, he said. “But this is not going to be a long-term solution, because it doesn’t address the root cause of global warming,” which is emissions from fossil fuel burning.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/30/termination-shock-cut-in-ship-pollution-sparked-global-heating-spurt?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
THE FAILURE OF ‘GENTLE PARENTING’
My first exposure to gentle parenting ended in projectile vomiting.
It was 2007, the summer after my junior year of college, and a new babysitting client was walking me through the dinner and bedtime routines for her two young children. As we ascended the staircase to an expansive second floor, the younger of the pair — a placid 16-month-old propped on his mother's hip — locked my gaze and jabbed his index finger into the side of his other hand.
"That's baby sign language for 'more,'" his mother explained, acknowledging that her toddler hadn't mastered the proper mechanics. I should oblige him anyway, she told me. Babies know what they need even if they can't yet articulate those needs through speech, she said. It was important to honor their choices.
The toddler had just finished eating half a banana. As instructed, I retreated to the kitchen and returned with the other half. He devoured it quickly and repeated the gesture. I returned with another half banana. He gestured again; again, I delivered. Then again. And again. Until it was too much.
Partially digested bananas sprayed everywhere, much to the surprise of his mother. "Oh, my God!" she wailed as she tried, in vain, to contain the gloopy stream with her free hand. "How many bananas did you just give my baby?" she hissed, regurgitated fruit oozing through her fingers. She had watched me feed her baby but hadn't clocked just how many times her son had requested another banana.
I was young, broke, and beholden, which meant I had to swallow my pride. "He — he kept saying 'more,'" I sputtered.
She employed me for nearly a year. And she was far from the only client who began to emphasize their children's preferences.
As an in-demand babysitter for the property-owning intelligentsia of Toronto, I witnessed this gentle-parenting takeover up close. Flimsy collapsible strollers were replaced with unwieldy stretch-cotton contraptions that strapped infants to parents' bodies and ensured tuned-in and responsive caregivers. Children old enough to unclasp a nursing bra were encouraged to put those fine motor skills to use until they decided they were ready to chew solid foods. Baby sign language progressed from a type-A-parent novelty to the standard operating procedure. Most striking of all, multiple clients barred me from issuing a firm "no" in the presence of their preschoolers, let alone to them — it was a soft "no, thank you," or bust.
Seventeen years later, gentle parenting is now the default among my professional-class millennial peers. Less a rigid doctrine than a guiding set of ideals, the approach has assumed an assortment of labels — intentional parenting, mindful parenting, respectful parenting, and, during my babysitting years, attachment parenting — each with its own jargon and figurehead (Doug Fields, Kristen Race, Janet Lansbury, and Dr. William Sears, respectively). Despite some superficial differences in their particulars, all are designed to swap out the old-fashioned, "because I said so" ethos of "authoritarian" child-rearing with one grounded in empathy and negotiation.
Gentle parents give their children choices and respect their wants and needs. Instead of punishing unwanted behavior, gentle parents aim to validate their child's feelings and help them strategize their way out of distress, letting them learn through natural consequences. It is, in short, a very different way of raising children than what most of today's adults received from their parents.
Proponents of gentle parenting say it produces securely attached kids who are self-possessed, emotionally attuned, and kind — claims that seem to be supported by developmental-psychology research. But in practice, the parental authority required to make the approach work often flees the scene. Too often, gentle parenting gives way to leniency and overindulgence, creating brittle and self-centered "iPad kids" who are ill-equipped to navigate setbacks — and parents whose servile devotion to their children's happiness is a headache for the people around them.
Teachers blame gentle parenting for bad behavior in classrooms, which some believe is accelerating an exodus from the profession. And new research suggests that the helicopter parenting that often dovetails with gentle-parenting-gone-awry is contributing to the youth mental-health crisis.
As a result, "gentle parenting" has become a loaded concept. Increasingly, parents are realizing that the time- and energy-intensive method is producing decidedly ambiguous outcomes, which has caused some to throw in the towel, once and for all. The gentle-parenting boom, as most of us know it, is beginning to look more and more like a bust.
Though many of the practices associated with gentle parenting predate the term's coinage, the British author Sarah Ockwell-Smith is generally credited with bringing the label into the mainstream. Her 2016 book, "The Gentle Parenting Book," introduces the method as one that "embraces the needs of parent and child, while being mindful of current science and child psychology." Ockwell-Smith positions her approach as an "authoritative" parenting style, the conscientious middle ground between a "permissive" style of parenting in which the child is in charge and the authoritarian parenting tactics of the past — both of which researchers have found create long-term problems for kids.
In a 2014 blog post, Ockwell-Smith summed the approach up as "parenting with your child's feelings in mind as much as possible" and then taking those feelings into consideration when deciding how to react. "The key here really is thinking, 'Would I like it if somebody did this to me?'" she wrote. "If the answer is 'no,' then why would you do it to your child?”
For some parents, the guidance adds up to good common sense. Abby, a 38-year-old mom of two in a well-to-do suburb of Milwaukee, said she gravitated toward a gentle-informed parenting approach as a correction for the rules and expectations that came to bear on her own upbringing. Abby, who has asked Business Insider not to publish her real name to protect her children's privacy, appreciated that the method could be adapted to accommodate different developmental needs — both of her children have autism — and that it didn't force kids to meet society's ever-shifting goalposts for success.
Others are drawn to the philosophy's emphasis on cultivating independence and self-confidence, as opposed to obedience or external validation. For Anna Monette Chilstedt, a 36-year-old marketing director in Boulder, Colorado, this means adopting the Lansbury-approved "RIE" method — an infant-parenting pedagogy that encourages "sensitive observation" — to raise her 6-month-old daughter. "I want her to have a lot of self-confidence and -assurance that she knows how to keep her body safe, knows her limits, and feels confident that she will be cared for," Chilstedt said. "From there, she'll be equipped to handle whatever life throws at her.”
Mary Benedetti, a Toronto social worker and psychotherapist who works with children and families, said that there's a lot to appreciate about gentle-parenting guidance. "Parenting advice based on attachment research, trauma research, and neuroscience is extremely valuable to children," she told me. Ample research links an authoritative parenting style — such as gentle parenting — with the most favorable psychosocial outcomes in children.
Where some parents run into trouble is in the method's implementation. "Clear, kind, but firm limits are needed," Benedetti told me. Gentle parenting works only when there are ground rules in place for what constitutes acceptable behavior and caregivers who consistently uphold consequences when those lines are crossed. But the open-ended guidelines laid out by gentle-parenting authors and influencers don't always make hard behavioral limits easy to outline or enforce. A crowded arena of parenting experts and influencers — such as Instagram's "Dr. Becky" Kennedy and an endless supply of TikTokers — bring their own strategies and buzzwords into the mix, which can exacerbate confusion.
If a child is meant to feel empowered to make their own choices about how to engage with the world, when should the adult step in and say that the child's choices were wrong — to declare, "Actually, you've had enough bananas," regardless of whether the child agrees? And if a parent's job is to help their child process their big and messy feelings, does that mean every negative emotion needs to become a conversation? These are among the questions that gentle parents must contend with, often on the fly. Without meaning to, some of these parents may drift into permissiveness, ending up with kids who feel empowered to do everything but respect others.
When gentle parenting veers off course, it can be detrimental. Research recently published in The Journal of Pediatrics found that a decades-long trend toward high parental involvement — and, specifically, the diminished childhood independence that can result from it — neatly tracked with rising rates of depression and anxiety in children and teens, which have reached a record high. Separate research links permissive parenting with "high levels of aggressiveness, antisocial behavior problems, and lack of self-discipline." These attributes are not only unpleasant to be around but also risk a child's ability to form meaningful relationships — a key predictor of lifelong physical and psychological well-being.
Anna Lussenburg, a Calgary, Alberta, child-behavior interventionist known professionally as "Annie the Nanny," has seen the gentle-parenting pitfalls firsthand. Many of her clients, she said, are "former gentle parents" who are now contending with kids who put holes into walls, bite, and throw tantrums at the slightest provocation. From where she stands, there's no mystery as to why.
"With gentle parenting, there is this constant hyperfocus on helping your kids deal with 'big feelings,'" Lussenburg said. "But who says they're big? The adult is the one that's saying they're big. Feelings are feelings; we have all sorts of feelings all day. When we hyperfocus on the negative ones, we start feeling worse rather than better.”
Emphasizing a child's feelings can magnify minor problems and effectively puts the child in the driver's seat when what they really need is adult guidance. "When you stop doing whatever it is you are doing and you let your day be dictated by their behavior, you stop leading, which makes children very uncomfortable," Lussenburg said. "You're looking to them to tell you things are OK, instead of them looking to you.”
While the dynamics between parents and children are generally a private matter, their implications are not. When a child's immediate desires become the lens through which they're expected to treat others, and vice versa, that framework becomes everybody's business. When gentle parenting goes wrong, everyone takes note.
Often, the debate over what constitutes "correct" gentle parenting comes down to social values. Should a child's feelings take precedence over how others experience that child's actions? Who should be held accountable for a disturbance in the peace? Where is the line between a child who feels empowered to self-advocate and one who's simply entitled? The research indicates that firm rules and consequences are needed. But when it comes to the thorny particulars of how to parent a child day-to-day, the debate becomes more about respect.
There are certainly plenty of sensible, developmentally appropriate reasons kids act out. Maybe they're hungry or tired, or they're distressed by the perfectly legitimate frustrations of being a small person navigating a big world without the benefit of a fully formed prefrontal cortex. Different kids come equipped with different neurodevelopmental tool kits or material circumstances that may make it easier or harder to emotionally self-regulate or modulate their behavior.
They also misbehave because, yes, misbehaving is a normal part of growing up. Learning boundaries, testing them, and being an occasional pest are all part of the game.
But there's a difference between legitimizing a child's feelings and letting those feelings run the show. What people want isn't always what they need. Sometimes the child asking for his third banana just needs to be told “no.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/gentle-parenting-bust-millennial-parents-helicopter-kids-misbehave-permissive-authoritative-2024-6?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Joe:
Some adults believe politics has little to do with children’s behavior, but this is a myth. Science supports the anecdotal evidence that the parents’ ideology, along with misinformation on social media, increases children’s anxiety and troublesome behavior. Furthermore, it negates the influence of parenting, whether old-school or gentle. You cannot bring up a child to believe in justice and moral behavior when the conservative party denies the immoral behavior of their presidential candidate, members of the House of Representatives, Senate, and the Supreme Court.
Although elementary and secondary students may not have a sophisticated understanding of politics, they are familiar with the daily news. Being a child of the fifties, I was aware of Emmet’s Tills hanging in 1955 and the violence it created. Even though I was eight when it happened and lived in an all-white small town in Michigan, I knew about Eisenhower’s Mississippi dilemma. Although the president justly received criticism for his slow reaction, my friends and I thought Ike was a good man because he embodied the military virtues of courage, honesty, and love of country.
First graders followed Kennedy’s path to victory. For us Irish Catholics, John Kennedy’s election gave us equality with Protestants. VE Day, VJ Day, and PT109 became synonymous with courage and justice for all. Eisenhower and Kennedy were not the saints that adults led us to believe. However, those presidents believed that public civility and respect led to effective governmental action, advancing the promise of democracy in the United States. In elementary and high school, their public discourse influenced the behavior of my classmates and me.
Children may not understand the complex differences between degrees of sexual assault, but they know what assault is and what porn means. They know that the president did something wrong, and the Republican party lies when they state Trump’s behavior is not criminal. Elementary and secondary students understand what a criminal is. They know Donald Trump is a felon, as is his deputy campaign manager, his lawyer, his Chief Strategist, his National Security adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his Campaign Fixer, and his company CFO.
Children know a felon is a criminal and that the rioters’ social media posts convicted them (over 1,000 convictions). When conservatives deny the crimes of the insurrectionists and Trump, they undermine parents’ and teacher’s moral authority. Today, children no longer believe in the values exhibited on TV: Sesame Street, Little House on the Prairie, and The Waltons. In 1960, my brother was in the third grade. He had many questions about Elizabeth Taylor’s and Eddie Fisher’s affair. Today, the former president’s sexual escapades with a porn star are known to children in all grades.
The most important question is how will negating Trump’s guilty verdict for sexual assault influence the behavior of teenage boys? Will children’s interpretation of the conservative message of presidential immunity from crimes against common decency make it impossible to teach children good behavior? Whether intentional or unintentional, the defense of immoral actions by religious and political leaders blocks the children from forming a deep moral understanding. Therefore, it is impossible for parenting to make a difference, whether it employs old-school or gentle methods. ~ Joseph Milosch
Oriana:
My feeling is that given the right parents, the children will be OK.
I grew up in a country that was a puppet of Moscow. Already starting in preschool I had a vague feeling that something was wrong and that the government was lying. When the preschool Christmas tree was decorated solely with the cardboard numeral six (for the six-year plan, a minor variation of the Soviet Union’s five-year plan), I knew this was wrong. Fortunately the authority of my parents always took precedence over such ridiculous propaganda displays.
I also have a vague memory of a different, more subversive preschool, where we assembled to say “Our Father.” Since a crucifix or a religious painting would have been illegal, we directed “Our Father” to the portrait of Lenin — or was it the whole trinity of Marx, Lenin, and Engels (yes, in that order, with the portrait of Lenin hung slightly higher)?
There were so many of such absurdities that the only solution for the children was to listen to the preschool teacher while in preschool, and to the parents while at home. Location, location, location!
Add to this that at the age of eight I started going to catechism classes. The big message was not to question, not to speak unless spoken to: “Children and fish have no voice.” We learned that quite easily — safety lay in silence — and actually managed to grow up sane, eclectically believing some things in our history textbook, and dismissing others. So I wonder if perhaps you dismiss parenthood too quickly — like school and the church, parents and grandparents were major players. The point was to survive until the brain was mature enough to form some meaningful personal ideas of morality and social contract. Of course I see it only in retrospect. And yes, there was a degree of unpleasant tension as we increasingly realized that the government was illegitimate and immoral. One way to escape the tension was to tune out the government entirely.
*
SIXTEEN AND EVANGELICAL
The church at the corner of Algonquin and Barrington roads was so big that it was often mistaken for a community college. At Willow Creek, a mile-long driveway wound around a manmade lake where believers got baptized in the summer months, and in the spring it was littered with Canadian geese and their goslings. The parking lots were so big that I learned to drive there, on uninterrupted swaths of flat Midwestern bog.
My family lived three miles away; my parents were both pastors there; my first job was there. My friends were there. For a time that still feels like something out of a Pat Conroy novel, I had a group of wonderful friends. We moved as one organism in those high school days, submerged as we were in the urgent, heady waters of teenage faith in the middle of the cresting wave of American evangelicalism. Bound to them by the kind of affection born of knowing someone when they were 16, I still count these people as dear to me. But the truth is it has been a decade since we were all together.
When I was young, I had certain ideas about how the world worked, how God worked. One story of youthful zeal is that it fades with age, as life gets harder and more complex; that the center of an uncompromising faith structure cannot hold in a complicated world. As my friends and I have aged, though, we’ve all developed wildly different relationships to our religion. We’ve grown up and apart and orbited each other like satellites.
I am almost 34 now. I am a mother, a wife, a writer, a homeowner, and it is just beginning to dawn on me—a realization I’m sure is not unique to me—that I will never again be a teenager. I have also noticed something that psychologists and poets have been saying for centuries: We become what we dwell on. And what we dwelt on in high school, what we breathed, was God’s goodness. And what I dwell on now is God’s goodness still, but also the loss that has attended my life and the lives of those I love and how a good God could allow it all.
I set out to write this because I wanted to know what has happened to me and to my friends since high school; how we have navigated faith and doubt as life has dealt us more hardships than we could have anticipated were coming, including the suicide of one of our own. I wanted to know how, and if, the faith withstood the hardships.
*
Our group expanded and contracted depending on the year, on who was away at college and who suddenly got close with friends at school, but mainly we were 15 or so teens living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, attending various high schools and all part of a big youth group at a big church. We spent Sunday nights at church together, and Sunday mornings at church with our parents, and most of us were there Wednesday nights for services too, and maybe once again during the week in one capacity or another.
But we spent a lot of time together outside the church too, on other aimless pursuits—long drives down endless leafy roads cracked hot by Midwestern summers, high school dances, winter nights watching comedies in mildew-dank basements.
And then there was Laurie. Laurie was a year older than us, and, in the economy of high school youth group kids, the coolest—kind, outgoing, breezily athletic. Laurie dated Brian seriously enough that most of us assumed they would get married. They were like the mom and dad of our friend group: very steady, and mature in a way that felt like a rebuke to our own high school immaturities.
Laurie’s parents had divorced when she was young, and she lived with her mom and stepfather and stepsiblings. That was enough to make her slightly unusual among a group of friends whose parents were all otherwise still married. And even in a group of friends connected by religion, Laurie was singularly, enthusiastically devoted to her faith—“on fire for God,” as we would have said. There was no one in our group of friends who didn’t receive a note of encouragement from her, always in her precise handwriting, always ending with a reference to 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”
Laurie’s faith was contagious, expansive, inviting. It incorporated everyone she knew; she had conversations about Jesus with cashiers at restaurants, homeless people living in downtown Chicago, friends of friends who ended up at the same party. And her faith felt expansive enough that we all took shelter under its umbrella; she was so sure of God’s goodness, his nearness, his truth. Where I often felt myself faltering, Laurie was confident. Where I hesitated to share my faith with anyone, I admired Laurie’s ability to naturally insert Jesus into any dialogue. And among our friends, when Laurie was around, we would spend most of the time listening to her talk about Jesus’ character. She sounded like a lovestruck newlywed.
It was hard for Brian, in a way, knowing that people were looking up to him when everything wasn’t as perfect for him as people thought it was. “I think the reality is that everyone saw Laurie and my relationship at Student Impact as the perfect relationship,” Brian recently told me. “People would tell us that small group leaders were pointing to our relationship as an example.” He saw his relationship with Laurie as something more intentional than dating: “I saw so many people date and break up and date and break up,” he said. “In my mind, we were dating with a purpose, with an outcome in mind—I was thinking long-term.”
I was 20 years old and in the backseat of a car when I got the call that Laurie was missing. It was a Thursday evening, and I was 2,000 miles away from Chicago, on my college campus in Southern California, returning to my dorm from an off-campus Bible study. Randi called me first, then Kaitlin, and then all I remember for the next two days is being glued to my blue Razr cellphone. We floated theories: She was kidnapped. Carjacked. She had gone downtown to hand food out to people living on the streets and didn’t tell anyone.
Details trickled in: Police found her cellphone, wallet, and keys near the Adler Planetarium. They found her shoes and jacket nearby. Her black Jeep had been towed by the city to a location further north before police realized whose it was. They found a note. On Saturday, they found her body in Lake Michigan.
Laurie’s death was bewildering to us then and remains bewildering nearly 15 years later. She had, at some point unknown to most of us, been introduced to a consuming doubt about the goodness of God. She couldn’t hold the pain at bay in the face of the overwhelming blackness of a world that she wasn’t made for. She had believed faithfully for years, but the doubts that had crept in were too strong to overcome. We hadn’t known. How hadn’t we known?
Laurie and Brian had both put off their first year of college to do missionary work in Querétaro, Mexico. After they got home, they’d broken up. She’d started dating someone else; they got engaged. She saw other friends, new friends from college and from the Starbucks where she worked. It was all in the course of normal life, in which we each befriended new people in our new locations, but in hindsight we saw only the conversations we hadn’t had, the phone calls we hadn’t answered.
The line for Laurie’s wake snaked through the church basement where her mother and stepfather received visitors for hours. The wake was open-casket. Laurie’s body was both bloated and well-preserved, having been in the freezing waters of the lake for days. Her funeral, held in the church’s enormous chapel, was standing room only.
We spent the year after Laurie’s death checking up on each other. When, several years later, our friend Matt’s sister died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, we all gathered back in the church for the funeral. We were trained for grief.
Laurie’s death acted like a prism: We all went into it as one coherent bloc, and it refracted us, and we couldn’t be put back together in quite the same way. God was the glue that had bound us, and even though we still loved each other, our faith—the collective unit of faith that we had and we were—fractured. There would be no more late nights singing worship songs.
Randi, who had missed a phone call from Laurie just before she disappeared, picked up her phone on the first ring for months afterward. She couldn’t forgive herself. “There are always flags, and how come I didn’t see a flag?” Randi now remembers thinking. “If I’m her best friend, how come I didn’t notice?” Randi felt angry with Laurie, angry with God for putting us through her death, alone in the loss of her friend. Laurie’s death consumed Randi. And then time went on, and she realized that she wanted to continue to follow God. “When I look back now, I say, ‘That was a really big mountain to climb,’ ” Randi said. “But I was able to kind of come out of that. … It didn’t put my faith on a downward trajectory.”
For others of us, it was the beginning of the end. “Would I have lost my faith, my belief in a personal God, a ‘relationship’ with Jesus Christ, if Laurie hadn’t taken her life?” Steve asked when I spoke to him. “There’s just no way to tell. I had all those things at 20 years old, and by 23 they were gone and haven’t returned. I can’t expect anyone to believe her life trajectory was not a major factor [in my loss of faith]; still, I’ve been unable to prove to myself otherwise just yet.”
“I tried really hard to figure out how to be a good Christian in high school,” Chris told me. “And I think that came with a lot of guilt around feeling like I was getting it wrong.” Laurie’s suicide scared him, in part, because it made faith seem insufficient. “I ran from the faith that I had because it didn’t seem like it was going to provide me with the solace I needed.” Still, Chris attended a Christian college and slowly probed the topic of Laurie’s death with his new friends.
“My life experiences have caused me to have a different faith,” he said. “It’s more chipped and broken. … [But] it’s OK if my faith is a lot more academic than it is emotional for a while.”
Jenna suffered from depression in high school, even as she felt a profound sense of belonging in our youth group. Being a gay teenager in suburban Illinois in the 1990s wasn’t something anyone was talking about, at school or at church. Those years, she recalled, were “a very challenging time of thinking, I’m supposed to love myself, and God loves me, but I don’t feel like that can be one and the same.” After Laurie’s death, Jenna says she had a hard time believing in a loving God and stopped going to church for a time. She skipped chapel at her Christian college in Colorado. And although she returned to church for a time after school, she doesn’t attend right now. “Faith will always be a little bit a part of my life, but it’s probably the least present it probably ever has been in my life. For me, that’s OK right now.”
*
Looking back on teachings about sexual purity now—the conversations about modesty, about saving oneself for marriage—I am struck that we never, not once, had a conversation about consent. It was reasonable for a boy to suggest that he was “tempted” by a girl wearing skimpy clothes, but the blame was always placed on the girl for dressing that way. We never talked about power, about how being a man in power could warp a person’s soul, how that warping could turn into abuse, how that abuse would go unchallenged. We were liabilities, even as men thought they were loving us. We were taught that men have the upper hand, and that it was a woman’s job to defuse that lust. We never talked about what it meant to be a person, a complete, vulnerable, whole-bodied person who had control over her being.
A world without God wouldn’t make sense to me. But it now makes sense to many of my friends. I finally understand that we never had a shared faith structure. We went to the same church, some of us for years. We heard the same sermons, slept in the same cabins at camp, read the same books of the Bible, listened to the same music. But we went home to different families.
We heard different stories about what it meant to be gay, to be a Christian, to experience the death of someone we loved. After Laurie’s death, we were left holding the broken pieces of a faith some of us had never expected to falter. There are seasons of my life when the practice of going to church feels like the only thing that keeps my faith in God alive. I am, perhaps, not brave enough to imagine what would happen to me without those Sunday mornings. Or I realize that I cannot believe apart from other people. Either way, the foundation feels shakier now, but my feelings also feel less important.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/sixteen-and-evangelical?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
I appreciate this article because it focuses on the social nature of religion. A deity “exists” only as long as there are people who proclaim to believe in that deity and are willing to go through certain rituals that affirm the faith. It’s those social rituals that create the deity.
In the remote past, gods were not imagined as kind and merciful. They had to be appeased —bribed — with animal (or even human) sacrifices so they wouldn’t seek to make us suffer just for the fun of it, like malicious children. Then — don’t ask me how, though scholars have some theories — the idea of a kind god arose.
But I personally never believed that god was kind. He spied on everyone, collecting evidence against us (incorrect thoughts included), so we would end up in hell, in eternal torment. If hell existed, that was argument enough to show that god was evil. But for me the more powerful argument was hell on earth — and god’s failure to move his finger — or blink his eye, or however we want to verbalize it — to prevent overwhelming, destructive suffering. A hell-based, evil god was the only kind that made some sense to me, based on what the sad-faced nuns caught me in catechism classes.
Fortunately, after two or more years of self-torment and ever-increasing doubt that any kind of god existed, evil or not, liberation happened. It had nothing to do with the argument about the existence of evil. Rather, I learned about various mythologies, and the inevitable (in retrospect) insight simply had to emerge: Adam and Eve, god’s lying and the serpent’s speaking the truth, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the Whale, Moses parting the Red Sea, and of course the various miracles of Jesus — it was just another mythology. The moral teachings were mostly fine, but didn’t require belief. The golden rule, based on empathy, was in fact a better guide. If I didn’t literally belief in Zeus or Wotan or the Slavic four-faced “see the world” god, why should I believe that one deity, reflecting one particular ancient culture, was real while all the other gods were fiction?
Later, when I became entangled with someone who went on to commit suicide, the question of an evil god returned — but only to a degree. Time really does heal, if only in part. The question again became not whether or not any kind of deity existed, but how best to spend the life right here, on earth, and now, without any expectation of an afterlife. How to love an imperfect fellow-human, and not the impossible commandment “love thy enemy.” Loving our friends was hard enough. An even great challenge was to love our own imperfect self, and figure out how to add a drop of goodness to the ocean of being.
At first I half-expected to return to “faith” (I am not even sure how to define that word) when I got old enough and scared enough — trying to escape not so much hell, but the abyss of non-being. Some ten years ago, I even went to mass several times, to see if anything would happen. But the only thing that happened was a confirmation that the church had nothing to offer to me. It may have something to offer to recovering addicts, for instance, and that’s fine. I’m glad that religion is there for the people who need it.
But life is actually more interesting without religion's illogical, muddy, antiquated answers.
*
The Catholic Church is the longest operating institution in the West. No other institution has managed to stay alive for so long with the capacity to disseminate and circulate ideas and concepts, through a body of intellectual priests, bishops and theologians, organized within a bureaucracy like the Catholic Church has. ~ Jones Manoel
*
NIPPUR, IRAQ: ONCE THE SPIRITUAL CENTER OF THE WORLD
Mosque at Nippur
Travelers to what was once was the spiritual center of the world can learn about the region's long and storied history – as well as see the biggest annual pilgrimage on Earth.
Founded 7,000 years ago, Iraq's archaeological site of Nippur was once the heart of one of the earliest recorded religions. Today, visitors to these weather-beaten ruins about 200km south of Baghdad are rare. But that wasn’t always the case.
Once, so long ago that time itself had only just been conceived, Nippur was the spiritual center of the world. Pilgrims came to this holy Mesopotamian city from far and wide, and Sumerian kings were blessed here by one of the world's original gods.
The ancient Sumerians, who lived in what is now central Iraq, invented civilization as we know it. It was the Sumerians who constructed the first cities and invented farming. They refined the wheel and developed writing, mathematics and even the 60-minute hour. And it was also the Sumerians who were one of the first to conjure up the idea of organized religion and pilgrimage.
Eventually though, the Sumer civilization faded away and was replaced with other civilizations led by people who prayed to different gods. Over thousands of years, the land once known as Mesopotamia became Iraq, and Islam became the main religion. But, although the gods have changed, modern Iraqis continue to place as much importance on pilgrimage as those first travelers to Nippur did.
Today, just more than 100km west of the archaeological site of Nippur are the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, two of the world's most important Shia Islamic pilgrimage sites. Visiting these cities will give travelers an insight into the region's long and storied history — as well into contemporary Iraq.
NIPPUR: WHERE GOD WAS BORN
For the ancient Sumerians, Nippur was the link between heaven and Earth. The hill in this picture was said to be the home of Enlil, the ruler of the cosmos and the most important Sumerian god. Although Nippur itself was never a center of political power, control of the city was vital because Enlil could bestow kingship on the monarchs of other Mesopotamian city states. This spiritual significance meant that Nippur attracted devotees from across the region.
The Sumerians were technologically advanced, and in addition to developing early forms of organized religion, they also developed the earliest writing system in the world. Archaeologists have uncovered around 30,000 clay tablets at Nippur, and much of the site remains unexcavated.
Ancient pieces of pottery can still be found littered across this vast archaeological complex. And perhaps that’s the most alluring thing about Nippur. The site is one of extraordinary importance to human development and were it almost anywhere else in the world, it would invariably be packed with tourists. But here, on the edge of the Iraqi desert, there’s not much apart from wind, dust and some barely discernible walls.
A LONG PILGRIMAGE HERITAGE
Seven thousand years after Nippur was the most important pilgrimage site in the Middle East, the pilgrimage spirit remains strong in central Iraq. Every day, thousands of Shia devotees from elsewhere in Iraq and around the world arrive in Karbala and Najaf to pray at the holy cities' shrines.
Many of these pilgrims are Iranian. Large numbers of Iranians come on organized religious pilgrimage tours and often fly straight to the international airport in Najaf before traveling on to the holy sites in Karbala. This photo shows pilgrims praying inside one of the shrines of Karbala.
THE EARLY DAYS OF ISLAM
Iraq didn’t just play a crucial role in the development of early civilization; it also helped nurture Islam and played a key part in the creation of Shia and Sunni branches of the religion. This branching occurred in 632 CE, shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, when a dispute erupted over who should take his place as the new leader of Islam. One group, who later became known as Shia, favored Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib, or Imam Ali. He died in Kufa, Iraq, in 661 CE and was buried in the nearby city of Najaf. Over time, a huge shrine complex has built up around his tomb that has become one of the biggest pilgrimage sites in the world for Shia Muslims
As well as the shrine of Imam Ali, Najaf is home to what is thought to be the world’s largest cemetery, with more than five million people buried here. The Wadi us Salaam cemetery, which means Valley of Peace, covers around 10sq km and was founded 1,400 years ago. Many Shia Muslims wish to be buried in this cemetery close to the shrine of Imam Ali and an average day sees between 80-120 new burials take place.
But between 2014 and late 2017 the number of burials rose to around 150-200 a day after Shia militia, as well as the regular Iraqi army, battled the jihadist group Islamic State (IS), who at the time controlled around 40% of Iraq. Before heading to the frontline, many of those fighting against IS came to pray at the shrine of Imam Ali and requested that they be buried in the cemetery if they were killed.
THE HOLY CITY OF KARBALA
Around 80km north of Najaf is Karbala, another major Shia pilgrimage city. There are two hugely important shrines here. The first contains the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali. The third Imam of Shia Islam, Husayn ibn Ali was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed near Karbala in 680 CE in the Battle of Karbala by soldiers of the Umayyad caliph Yazïd I. This picture shows the incredible ceiling tilework of his shrine. Although most pilgrims and visitors are Shia Muslims, the shrines are open to everyone.
Also in Karbala and opposite the Shrine of Husayn ibn Ali, to which it’s connected via a wide pedestrianized walkway, is another key Shia pilgrimage site: the Shrine of Al-Abbas. The son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and half-brother of Husayn ibn Ali, Al Abbas was Husayn’s flag bearer at the Battle of Karbala and also died in the same battle. Like the Shrine of Husayn ibn Ali, this site is also open to everyone and known for its fabulous tilework and architecture.
Although large numbers of pilgrims visit the shrines of Najaf and Karbala every day, the numbers reach a peak during the annual Shia pilgrimage known as Arbaeen, which marks the end of the 40-day period of mourning that commemorates the death of Imam Husayn and Al Abbas at the Battle of Karbala.
During the 2023 pilgrimage, a staggering 25 million people took part, which makes Arbaeen by far the biggest annual pilgrimage on Earth. By contrast, in 2023 only around 2.5 million pilgrims participated in the Hajj to Mecca, and, while the Maha Kumbh Mela, a huge Hindu pilgrimage in India, sees even larger numbers of participants, it’s only held every 12 years. In Karbala, a man carries a giant flag asking for Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th and final Imam of Shia Islam, to return to Earth and bring justice and peace to the world.
A CONTROVERSIAL PRACTICE
Even though Imam Husayn died in the Battle of Karbala more than 1,000 years ago, for many believers, this event still conjures up feelings of deep sadness and grief. Many pilgrims arriving at his tomb burst into tears.
Others show their emotion in more dramatic ways. Tatbir is a form of self-flagellation that involves striking oneself with fists, chains or even knifes until blood is drawn. It’s a controversial practice that many Shia scholars and leaders see as self-harm and therefore forbidden under Islam. Today, some pilgrims perform a stylized version that shows their intent without actually causing any harm, as they lightly and rhythmically go through the motions of striking themselves. This is sometimes done to the trance-like beat of drums.
The late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was a Sunni Muslim. The Sunni minority make up around 40% of the Iraqi population, but under Hussein the Sunnis held almost all the positions of power. During his long reign, Hussein became increasingly fearful that Iraq’s large Shia population might form an insurgency movement to challenge his absolute rule. Among his crackdowns on Shia followers was a ban on the mass pilgrimages to the shrines of Karbala and Najaf.
In 1991, after the first Gulf War ended, Shia Iraqis did indeed rise up in rebellion. This rebellion was brutally crushed by Hussein and culminated in his Sunni Republican Guard attacking the shrines in Karbala and killing hundreds (the exact number of casualties are unknown) and severely damaging the shrines. Today the buildings and their tilework have been carefully restored to their former glory and are once again proud places of pilgrimage for believers.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240611-the-pilgrimage-sites-of-iraqs-timeless-and-holy-cities
*
TO BECOME YOUR BEST SELF, STUDY YOUR SUCCESSES
~ Nearly fifteen years ago, in 2005, we published a Harvard Business Review article with our colleagues which introduced a new approach to personal and professional development: the idea that receiving affirmation is a powerful way for us to grow, particularly when it comes in the form of stories describing moments when we are at our best. In this article we introduced the Reflected Best Self Exercise (RBSE), a tool based on our academic research which is now used by thousands of people globally in corporate trainings, team building, executive leadership programs, and in graduate and undergraduate courses in a variety of disciplines.
Research stemming from this work shows that people benefit significantly from positive feedback about their strengths and contributions. It fosters healthy emotions, builds personal agency and resourcefulness, and helps to strengthen the quality of our relationships with colleagues, friends and family members. Sharing information about our reflected best selves with new colleagues as a part of onboarding processes also increases job satisfaction and reduces employee turnover.
Going through the full Reflected Best Self Exercise itself provides concentrated, if infrequent, dose of positive feedback. But there are organic ways that you can learn about and activate your best self at work every day as well. We’ve seen this more continual approach help people find new opportunities to develop parts of themselves that get lost in the daily demands of work, notice new ways of crafting their jobs, or take new steps towards longed-for callings. This article highlights five practices for noticing and capitalizing on everyday opportunities for development based on your best self.
Notice Positive Feedback
Most people are well-attuned to critical feedback; it is jarring, threatening, and emotional, and as a result, quite memorable. In contrast, it is often easy to let positive reflections on our actions subtly slip us by. Lingering in the glow of praise can also feel uncomfortably immodest. It therefore takes practice to savor moments of positivity and to hold them in your memory.
To capture these moments, create a space (digital or physical) where you save any positive feedback that you receive. This could include thank-you notes, comments written in your formal evaluations, or references to your work in email threads. And don’t limit this collection to your professional life: feedback about your personal life can be equally powerful.
When you get mixed feedback, tease apart the positive and negative aspects. Doing so will create mental space for you to focus exclusively on the positive feedback for a concentrated period of time and to use it to build an understanding of what you should keep doing. For example, professors who receive course evaluations from hundreds of students could form a peer-coaching partnership with a trusted colleague. You would each be responsible for pulling out the positive comments from your respective course evaluations and placing them into your Kudos file.
Once you have a stash of positive feedback, set a time in your calendar to review and revisit it regularly, giving yourself the opportunity to look at it with fresh eyes. Ask yourself: What patterns or themes can I identify? What opportunities can I find to express more of my best self? What more can I learn about these strengths, and who might provide that perspective? While some people may prefer to do this on their own, it’s also great to partner with a trusted friend or coach.
For example, the professors in the story above could make twice-yearly early dates with a trusted colleague to share positive feedback stories and help each other interpret them and think creatively about how to incorporate what they learn into their courses.
Don’t just accept positive feedback; inquire into it so that you can better understand exactly how you made an impact. The key is doing this in a way that doesn’t seem egotistical, allowing others to see that you are not only receptive to but grateful for their feedback.
For example, follow up on praise. We often brush off compliments because we aren’t comfortable receiving them. But they are actually an opportunity for learning—though only if they are specific and storied. Try to unpack generic labels and vague comments; seek to understand what worked well for you and for others in specific situations. Say: “Thank you for noticing X; your feedback made my day! Could you tell me what about my actions seemed to have a specific impact on you? I am trying to figure out what my strengths are so I can continue to make a positive impact at work.”
During formal performance evaluations, ask for one detailed example of the strengths your manager identified. Ask too if there are any other opportunities they know of where those strengths could be used. For example, after getting feedback that “team meetings seem to go better when you are there,” one professional we know asked her boss if there were other meetings where her calm presence and facilitation skills could be used to improve group conversations. Her boss realized that she could be useful at an upcoming customer forum, and a new outlet to display her strengths was born.
Consider setting up a meeting with a mentor or coach to discuss only your strengths and how you can develop and leverage them for greater impact. Set up a separate discussion to talk about your developmental opportunities in your areas of weakness. Because bad feedback has a stronger hold over us than good, it is nearly impossible for you to focus on both strengths and weaknesses in the same meeting. If you provide feedback to others, consider using this practice to help your employees grow and thrive.
Study Your Successes
Conduct after-action reviews of your own work to set benchmarks and identify best practices for future work. Use the example of sports teams: review the “tape” to identify what went well, and to develop future “plays” based on what you find.
If you receive positive feedback in person, take some time after leaving that interaction to write reflectively about the experience, creating a short narrative about what you did and the impact it had. Journaling is a powerful practice, and can help you see ways in which you can bring out your best self. For example, an intellectual property director we know took up journaling to try to boost his personal and professional development.
Reflecting on his entries allowed him to notice that he was best able to manage his demanding clients when he had an informal dinner with them the night before where he often got some hints about the client’s interests and concerns. This client preview boosted his confidence and put him at ease and allowed him to be fully present in the more formal meetings. Once he understood this, he began holding these informal dinners more regularly—allowing his best self to come forward more consistently. This resulted in stronger relationships with clients, and ultimately a promotion.
Also take time to reflect on your strengths more generally. For example, how can your strengths complement your weaknesses? And consider the shadow side of your strengths: how can your weaknesses overpower or lead you to misapply your strengths, and how can you avoid this occurrence?
Once you make a practice of analyzing your best self by noticing positive feedback, asking questions, and studying your successes, you will develop a more holistic and cohesive understanding of the contents of your best self and the contextual factors that allow you to bring this best self into your work. The next steps help prepare you to bring this best self to life in two ways: practicing and paying it forward.
Practice Enacting Your Best Self
In particularly toxic environments, it can be hard to get any affirmation at all. Finding ways to enact your best self in these contexts can be personally empowering, especially during low points in your workweek, work year, or career. Here are some options:
Create space in your job for your best self to show up. If you can, craft your job so that at least one aspect of your role brings out your best self. If your job is truly difficult, find even a narrow set of tasks in which you can draw on your best self to offset the less gratifying aspects while you consider the long-term viability of your tenure. We often feel most valuable at work when we can see the impact we have on others. Therefore, finding roles and outlets that allow you to give to others at work or in your professional community is likely to be an important way to create space for your best self to show up.
Dale Carnegie and John Maxwell likened the process of developing people to mining for gold: you must move tons of dirt in the process, but you go in looking for the gold, not the dirt. Similarly, people who recognize and affirm others’ contributions can bring out the best in themselves and others more consistently.
Remember, becoming your best self and bringing out the best in others is a life-long journey. With courage, curiosity and commitment, you can use best-self development to positively transform yourself, your relationships, and your organizations.
https://hbr.org/2019/05/to-become-your-best-self-study-your-successes
Oriana:
Everyone knows the saying “Count your blessings.” Counting my blessings helped me many times. There are variations on this theme, an important one being “Count the things you love about yourself.” It’s about living from your strengths rather than from your wounds.
As for studying my own strengths, I can instantly identify two: persistence and applying the method of daily baby steps when working toward a challenging goal. I developed those after I had decided to master English. Not just to to "learn" English enough to pass school exams, but master it. I wanted to read Shakespeare in the original (the genius is lost in translation). It took endless, headache-producing (literally) afternoon sessions with books and dictionaries, but I made it. The "key to the world" was mine.
*
*
EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD NEARLY COLLAPSED 600 MILLION YEARS AGO
A new study suggests more solar radiation reached Earth while the magnetic field weakened, leading to a rise in oxygen that drove an explosion of multicellular organisms during the Ediacaran Period.
Earth’s magnetic field sustains life on our planet, protecting us from solar winds, radiation and extreme changes in temperature. But around 591 million years ago, it almost collapsed. According to a new study, this near-disaster may have actually been the key to a burst of evolution, which paved the way for larger and more varied life forms to develop.
Published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment this month, the study found that a drastic weakening of Earth’s magnetic field that lasted for 26 million years corresponded with a period of the planet’s history called the Ediacaran. During this time, a large amount of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans allowed for the first multicellular, oxygen-using organisms to arise from the sea.
The creatures that evolved during the Edicaran hardly resembled anything seen today, however, taking on disc-like forms and shapeless masses—some of which exceeded three feet in size. These fronds and fans include Earth’s earliest known animals, such as the blob-like Dickinsonia.
A fossil impression of Dickinsonia, one of the earliest known animals, found in present-day Australia.
Scientists theorize that without the protection of the magnetic field roughly 600 million years ago, solar radiation pounded the Earth’s atmosphere, stripping away hydrogen and other light gases from the atmosphere. This left behind an abundance of free-floating oxygen atoms for organisms to use.
“If we’re right, this is a pretty profound event in evolution,” lead author John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester, tells Stephanie Pappas of Live Science.
Building on previous research that pointed to historical fluctuations in the magnetic field, the team of researchers examined rocks containing crystals that cooled over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Now, these structures act as time capsules, evidencing the strength of the magnetic field at various points in Earth’s development.
An analysis of feldspar from southern Brazil revealed that 591 million years ago, the magnetic field was 30 times weaker than it is now. But two-billion-year-old rock from South Africa suggested that at that time, the magnetic field held the same strength it does today.
Back then, Earth’s core was liquid, not solid. The liquid inner core churned as it released heat into the cooler mantle, moving molten iron around the core and enabling Earth’s magnetic field to exist. By the Ediacaran, this difference in temperature had decreased, reducing the movement of the core and, consequently, the presence of the magnetic field.
“By the time we get to the Ediacaran, the field is on its last legs,” Tarduno explains to CNN’s Katie Hunt. “It’s almost collapsing. But then, fortunately for us, it got cool enough that the inner core started to generate [strengthening the magnetic field].”
The new findings also shed light on a long-standing question: At what point did the Earth’s core solidify? Previous estimates ranged from 2.5 billion to 500 million years ago, but the team’s analysis places the event on the more recent end of that spectrum, closer to 565 million years ago. The solidification of the inner core was also a crucial event for the evolution of life—it allowed Earth’s magnetic field to regain its strength and protect the planet’s water from being entirely eroded by solar radiation.
“We need the Earth’s magnetic field to preserve water on the planet,” Tarduno tells Live Science. “But it is sort of an interesting twist that during the Ediacaran, the really weak magnetic field may have helped accelerate evolution.”
Previously, the scientific consensus held that photosynthesizing organisms like cyanobacteria created the surplus of oxygen during the Ediacaran, and it accumulated in the oceans over time, study co-author Shuhai Xiao, a geobiologist at Virginia Tech, writes to CNN.
The new findings don’t necessarily disprove this idea—instead, they might show the Earth gained oxygen in multiple ways.
“We do not challenge that one or more of these processes was happening concurrently. But the weak field may have allowed oxygenation to cross a threshold, aiding animal radiation [evolution],” Tarduno says to CNN.
David Dunlop, a physicist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the research, tells Dino Grandoni of the Washington Post that while the recent work needs further study, the analyses were “impeccably done.”
“The hypothesis, although obviously speculative as any ideas about the earliest origins of life must be, seems worth a close look,” Dunlop tells the publication. “Causality is always hard to prove, but I am all for new ideas being put out for public scrutiny. It provokes further study and that is all to the good.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earths-magnetic-field-nearly-collapsed-600-million-years-ago-then-weird-and-complex-life-evolved-180984353/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
FISETIN: THE BEST SENOLYTIC SUPPLEMENT
Cellular senescence is a physiological process through which, in response to stress, cells stop dividing but don’t die. Some senescent cells linger indefinitely in tissues by upregulating pro-survival mechanisms called senescent cell anti-apoptotic pathways (SCAPs) and downregulating pro-apoptotic pathways.
Accumulation of lingering senescent cells occurs with aging and can impair tissue function. This connection to unhealthy aging occurs in part because senescent cells produce chemical mediators, collectively known as senescence-associated secretory profile (SASP), that may disrupt tissue function and immune responses and affect health.
Maintaining balanced senescence is important because, although senescent cells can have undesirable actions, cellular senescence is also part of healthy tissue function. Some senescent cells exert beneficial effects by promoting tissue repair and regeneration and stimulating immune responses that help to maintain tissue homeostasis. In normal conditions, these transient senescent cells are quickly eliminated by the immune system, but when their clearance fails, they can linger in tissues and gradually accumulate, becoming detrimental.
The accumulation of lingering senescent cells and the continued action of the hundreds of types of SASP molecules they secrete—cytokines, chemokines, matrix metalloproteinases, and other bioactive molecules—can contribute to tissue dysfunction by influencing physiological signaling pathways that disrupt immune function and promote tissue health deterioration and functional decline. These tissue changes brought about by senescent cells can influence our overall health and contribute to the aging process.
Senolytics are substances that target senescent cells, normalize their overactive pro-survival mechanisms, and allow them to finally complete the process of cell death, thereby eliminating them and stopping the production of SASP mediators. By doing so, senolytics support the body in protecting itself against senescent cell burden and maintaining balanced levels of cellular senescence.
Senolytics and Aging
Cellular senescence is one of the hallmarks of aging. The number of senescent cells in the body increases with aging and their accumulation accelerates as we age. The word senescence actually derives from the Latin word senex, which means senior or of old age.
Unchecked cellular senescence can be regarded as both a consequence and a cause of aging. Senescent cells build up in tissues as a consequence of several age-related changes: 1) an increase in several cellular stressors that induce senescence; 2) poorer efficiency of the immune system at finding and clearing senescent cells; and 3) a reinforcement and propagation of senescence caused by SASP factors released by lingering senescent cells.
These processes create a snowball effect of senescence build-up.
SASP molecules secreted by senescent cells contribute to persistent immune signaling changes that interfere with tissue repair and regeneration and hinder healthy tissue function. This causes progressive tissue degeneration and functional decline, age‐related dysfunction, poorer physical function, and other detrimental physiological changes that can accelerate the aging process and contribute to poorer health as we age.
Senolytics can target senescent cells and promote their elimination by normalizing their pro-survival and anti-apoptotic mechanisms and allowing them to finally complete the process of cell death, thereby also mitigating the detrimental action of SASP mediators. Preclinical research has shown that the selective elimination or disruption of senescent cells with senolytics can restore healthy functions in a number of different tissues and organs, and enhance healthspan and longevity in animals.
Preclinical studies have demonstrated the ability of senolytic compounds to promote healthy metabolic function, mitigate age-related dysfunctions in the liver, support heart and kidney tissue repair after injury, counter age-related bone loss, and support cognitive functions in animal models of brain aging among other beneficial actions. Human studies with senolytics are still limited because this is a relatively new area of research.
Nevertheless, the first clinical trials with senolytics had promising findings, showing the ability of senolytics to reduce markers of senescence in blood, skin, and adipose tissue in individuals with metabolic and kidney dysfunction and to support physical function in a small group of individuals with lung dysfunction. Many other ongoing clinical trials are assessing the potential of senolytics in the support of general health with aging.
In addition to senolytics, another approach to the management of senescent cells is SASP neutralization using senomorphics. Senomorphics are compounds that neutralize or prevent the production of SASP mediators by blocking signaling pathways, disrupting the secretion of SASP molecules, or inhibiting the activity of individual SASP mediators.
However, this approach can be complex because senescent cells from different tissues can produce different SASP factors and promote tissue dysfunction through different mechanisms. The advantage of senolytics is that they can also abolish the production of SASP molecules, but as a consequence of targeting and eliminating the senescent cells that secrete them, which is a more permanent approach.
Senolytics are a relatively new area of research. It was only in 2015 that the term senolytic was coined, when a study revealed two compounds that were able to eliminate senescent cells and extend healthspan in old mice. As research on senolytics advances, synthetic senolytics are being developed, but importantly, many natural compounds with senolytic action are being revealed. Many of these natural senolytics are compounds that are commonly consumed as part of the human diet. Nutritional senolytics are a growing area of research because they are a promising intervention to support healthy aging through nutrition.
However, although there are many different fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, and other types of foods in the diet that contain senolytic or senomorphic compounds, no food source has been shown to contain senolytics in sufficient amounts for actual senolytic benefits, so far. In other words, in research studies, these compounds showed senolytic action (i.e., they were able to promote the death of senescent cells) only at amounts that are much higher than those available in foods. Many biological actions of natural compounds are said to be dose-dependent, meaning they only occur above specific amounts. That’s the case with the senolytic compounds identified so far: the amounts present in foods are not sufficient to achieve the dose threshold for a senolytic action. Therefore, you shouldn’t expect a senolytic benefit from those foods.
There are a few examples that illustrate this well. Quercetin was one of those first two compounds—the first natural compound—to be described as a senolytic in 2015. Quercetin is a flavonol from the flavonoid group of polyphenols (we’ll learn more about polyphenols below). Quercetin is widely distributed in fruits and vegetables. The highest concentrations of quercetin are found in onions, asparagus, capers, leafy greens such as kale and spinach, herbs such as fennel leaves, dill, and oregano, and berries such as blueberry, cherry, and cranberry, and in small quantities in many other fruits and vegetables.
A clinical trial that used a combination of senolytics that included quercetin to reduce senescence used a dose of 1000 mg of quercetin. Considering that onions, a good and common source of quercetin, provide 45 mg of quercetin per 100 g [29], you would have to eat over 2 kg of onions—close to 5 pounds—to get a serving of 1000 mg of quercetin.
Alternatively, you would have to eat the outer skin and the thin hairy roots at the bottom—the parts people usually throw out—because that’s where the highest levels of quercetin in onions are found (we’ll learn why when we discuss polyphenols below) Onion skins and the tougher outer layers may have up to 48-fold more quercetin than the edible portion. But you would still have to eat a lot of onion skins.
Another famous senolytic discovered not long after quercetin is fisetin. Like quercetin, fisetin is a flavonol polyphenol. Fisetin was found to be the most potent senolytic among a panel of 10 flavonoid polyphenols (that included quercetin) screened for senolytic activity in senescent mouse and human fibroblasts (i.e., the cells that produce the extracellular matrix that provides the structural frame of tissues).
Fisetin is found in many dietary fruits and vegetables, including strawberries, apples, persimmon, lotus root, onions, grapes, kiwi, peach, and cucumber.
But fisetin is also found only in very low amounts, even lower than quercetin. The richest known food source of fisetin are strawberries, but they provide only 16 mg of fisetin per 100 grams of fruit. The amount of fisetin being used in ongoing clinical studies is 20 mg per kg body weight daily (orally for two consecutive days), which corresponds to a daily serving of 1400 mg for a person weighing 70 kg, i.e., around 155 pounds. To get a senolytic serving of 1400 mg fisetin from strawberries, you would have to eat 8.75 kg of strawberries—around 19 pounds!
The discovery of quercetin’s senolytic actions spiked interest in finding other natural compounds that could have similar properties. The search for natural senolytics revealed several other compounds such as luteolin, curcumin, piperlongumine, and oleuropein. Like quercetin and fisetin, these are also present in foods in small amounts. Furthermore, they’re often found in the highest amounts in foods you use only in small quantities like herbs and spices.
Luteolin is a plant flavone, another type of flavonoid polyphenol. Luteolin is found in many fruits, vegetables, and herbs, mostly in the leaves and flowering parts. Luteolin is found in high amounts in Chinese celery (leaf celery), celery seeds, Mexican oregano, fenugreek seed, radicchio, and chamomile flowers (used to make chamomile tea); it is also found in peppers, parsley, thyme, sage, and black olives, for example.
Curcumin is a polyphenol found in turmeric that is responsible for many of its health benefits. Piperlongumine is an amide-alkaloid found in several types of peppers, most abundantly in long pepper (Piper longum), from which it got its name. Oleuropein belongs to a specific group of polyphenols called secoiridoids. It is present in olives, but it is found in larger amounts in olive leaves.
In addition to nutritional senolytics, research on natural compounds that may support the management of senescent cells has also revealed a number of nutritional senomorphics, including resveratrol, kaempferol, apigenin, and epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Resveratrol is a stilbene polyphenol famously found in grape skins and red wine, but also present in peanuts, cocoa, and berries such as blueberries, bilberries, and cranberries. Kaempferol is a flavonol found in vegetables, spices, and herbs such as kale, arugula, watercress, capers, saffron, dill, chives, and tarragon.
Apigenin is one of the most common flavones in foods. It is found in many vegetables and fruits, including parsley, Chinese celery, celery seeds, kumquat, artichoke, rutabaga, sorghum, and flax. It is also found in very high amounts in the flowers used to make chamomile tea.
EGCG belongs to a class of polyphenols called catechins, predominantly found in tea. The main source of EGCG is green tea, but it is also found in white, oolong, and black teas. Small amounts can also be found in berries and nuts such as pecans and hazelnuts, for example.
One of the interests of nutritional senolytics research is to identify other senolytics present in foods in more meaningful amounts. For example, a recent study that screened natural food compounds had the specific goal of finding new senolytics available in foods at higher amounts than fisetin. The study searched for compounds that could reactivate apoptotic processes in senescent cells through a pathway fisetin also targets [inhibition of PI3K, an activator of the PI3K-AKT anti-apoptotic pathway]. The study revealed 23 natural compounds that targeted that pathway, but out of those, only five are found more abundantly in food sources: kaempferol (mentioned above), eriodictyol, cyanidin, cianidanol, ellagic acid.
Cianidanol is a catechin found in tea, eriodictyol can be found in citrus, and ellagic acid is found in high amounts in pomegranate, for example. Cyanidin, an anthocyanin flavonoid found in high amounts in red fruits and berries, has already shown senolytic potential by delaying the aging process in a stress-induced premature senescence cellular model. But even these compounds are supplied in the diet in amounts far below what is expected to have senolytic actions in the body.
You may have noticed a pattern in the food sources of the senolytic compounds mentioned above: they are all fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices. These are all foods that are rich in polyphenols. You may also have noticed that most of the senolytic compounds we mentioned are in fact polyphenols. So what are polyphenols? Polyphenols are a family of natural compounds found abundantly in plants. They are divided into four main classes: phenolic acids, flavonoids, stilbenes, and lignans.
Flavonoids are further divided into several subclasses including flavones, flavonols, flavanols, flavanones, isoflavones, proanthocyanidins, and anthocyanins. Polyphenols play many important roles in plant physiology. Many polyphenols are plant pigments that protect plants from environmental stressors while giving them their characteristic colors. For example, luteolin and curcumin are both yellow pigments—it’s curcumin that gives turmeric its color; anthocyanins are pigments that vary in color between red, purple, blue, and black, and which, as you may have guessed based on this color palette, are found in high quantities in berries.
Because they are defense compounds, polyphenols tend to concentrate where the plant interacts with the environment. That’s why they’re often found in the highest amounts in the skins or peels of fruits and vegetables (like quercetin in onion skins).
In the human body, dietary polyphenols also support protection from stressors, both environmental and endogenous. Polyphenols support stress response and defense mechanisms such as antioxidant defenses, help to preserve healthy cell and tissue function, and support the gut microbiome, contributing to general health, including metabolic, cardiovascular, and brain health.
As we’ve seen, based on current knowledge from scientific studies, polyphenols are not found in foods in sufficient amounts for senolytic benefits. To get the necessary amounts from food alone would require excessive amounts of those foods. But you will still get plenty of other health benefits from eating polyphenol-rich foods.
Fisetin and quercetin can be obtained as supplements. Quercetin has been available as a supplement for a long time, and there has been more research on quercetin than fisetin. To be on the safe side, use no more than 1000 mg/ day of quercetin. Some suggest taking occasional breaks from quercetin,
One advantage of quercetin is that it is quickly metabolized and doesn’t accumulate in the body. It can cross the blood-brain barrier and thus presumably protect against neurodegenerative diseases.
Quercetin can be used together with fisetin. The two compounds seem to synergize, especially in their anti-cancer action.
If you prefer to obtain quercetin from food, remember that the richest source is onion.
Note: Flos sophorae is a Chinese medicinal herb used for treatment of hemorrhoids and uterine bleeding.
*
BLOOD PROTEINS SHOW YOUR AGE
How can you tell how old someone is? Of course, you could scan their driver’s license or look for signs of facial wrinkles and gray hair. But, as researchers just found in a new study, you also could get pretty close to the answer by doing a blood test.
That may seem surprising. But in a recent study in Nature Medicine, an NIH-funded research team was able to gauge a person’s age quite reliably by analyzing a blood sample for levels of a few hundred proteins. The results offer important new insights into what happens as we age. For example, the team suggests that the biological aging process isn’t steady and appears to accelerate periodically — with the greatest bursts coming, on average, around ages 34, 60, and 78.
What’s more, this work raises hope for interventions that may slow down the “proteomic clock” and perhaps help to keep people biologically younger than their chronological age. Such a scenario might sound like pure fantasy, but this same group of researchers showed a few years ago that it’s indeed possible to rejuvenate an older mouse by infusing blood from a much younger mouse.
Those and other earlier findings from the lab of Tony Wyss-Coray, Stanford School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA, raised the tantalizing possibility that certain substances in young blood can revitalize the aging brain and other parts of the body. In search of additional clues in the new study, the Wyss-Coray team tracked how the protein composition of blood changes as people age.
To find those clues, they isolated plasma from more than 4,200 healthy individuals between ages 18 and 95. The researchers then used data from more than half of the participants to assemble a “proteomic clock” of aging. Within certain limits, the clock could accurately predict the chronological age of the study’s remaining 1,446 participants. The best predictions relied on just 373 of the clock’s almost 3,000 proteins.
As further validation, the clock also reliably predicted the correct chronological age of four groups of people not in the study. Interestingly, it was possible to make a decent age prediction based on just nine of the clock’s most informative proteins.
The findings show that telltale proteomic changes arise with age, and they likely have important and as-yet unknown health implications. After all, those proteins found circulating in the bloodstream come not just from blood cells but also from cells throughout the body.
Intriguingly, the researchers report that people who appeared biologically younger than their actual chronological age based on their blood proteins also performed better on cognitive and physical tests.
Most of us view aging as a gradual, linear process. However, the protein evidence suggests that, biologically, aging follows a more complex pattern. Some proteins did gradually tick up or down over time in an almost linear fashion. But the levels of many other proteins rose or fell more markedly over time. For instance, one neural protein in the blood stayed constant until around age 60, when its levels spiked. Why that is so remains to be determined.
As noted, the researchers found evidence that the aging process includes a series of three bursts. Wyss-Coray said he found it especially interesting that the first burst happens in early mid-life, around age 34, well before common signs of aging and its associated health problems would manifest.
It’s also well known that men and women age differently, and this study adds to that evidence. About two-thirds of the proteins that changed with age also differed between the sexes. However, because the effect of aging on the most important proteins of the clock is much stronger than the differences in gender, the proteomic clock still could accurately predict the ages in all people.
Overall, the findings show that protein substances in blood can serve as a useful measure of a person’s chronological and biological age, and — together with Wyss-Coray’s earlier studies — that substances in blood may play an active role in the aging process. Wyss-Coray reports that his team continues to dig deeper into its data, hoping to learn more about the origins of particular proteins in the bloodstream, what they mean for our health, and how to potentially turn back the proteomic clock.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/aging-research-blood-proteins-show-your-age
*
ending on beauty:
Is reality just a failure of the imagination?
That’s not what the dandelion thinks
Breaking through the asphalt.
~ Dean Young
No comments:
Post a Comment