*
MARILYN M.
slipping keenly into bright ashes,
target of vanilla tears
your sure body lit candles for men
on dark nights,
and now your night is darker
than the candle’s reach
and we will forget you, somewhat,
and it is not kind
but real bodies are nearer
and as the worms pant for your bones,
I would so like to tell you
that this happens to bears and elephants
to tyrants and heroes and ants
and frogs,
still, you brought us something,
some type of small victory,
and for this I say: good
and let us grieve no more;
like a flower dried and thrown away,
we forget, we remember,
we wait. child, child, child,
I raise my drink a full minute
and smile.
~ Charles Bukowski
John Guzlowski:
I was 14 when she died. I remember the day. I was shopping in a supermarket with my mom. We were standing in line at the cash registers when some one from way in the back of the store shouted, oh my God, Marilyn Monroe is dead. It hit me hard. I loved her movies, the funny ones and the ones that were funny.
Mary:
I like the poem. Can't help but feel sad about her life.
Oriana:
Of course she also had her glory days. But it all starts with her having been a sexually abused child.
*
Elton John: Good-bye Norma Jean
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=good+bye+norma+jean#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c8a125ef,vid:gSAaZyXX4HM,st:0
*
LIFTING THE CURSE OF LUIGI DA PORTO, THE ORIGINAL CREATOR OF ROMEO AND JULIET
I first became infatuated with Luigi da Porto, a warrior-poet from 15th century Italy in 2001, when I went to live in Verona. I’d just completed my Creative Writing masters at UEA, and, young and low on life-experience, was on the hunt for a story. It was not the most thought-through plan. I ended up working as a receptionist in an internet café during the day, and in the evenings, I’d skulk the cobbled streets of Verona, as if by lurking in the shadows of Romeo and Juliet’s city, I would miraculously find the material for a brilliant novel, some kind of a play on a love story.
Instead, I found Luigi da Porto, who became the basis for not one novel but two, and a lifelong fascination.
In 1524, seventy years before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, Luigi da Porto published Historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti (“newly found story of two noble lovers”)—or as it was referred to in shorthand, La Giulietta. It was more short story than novella, a condensed version of the tale we all know: Romeo and Juliet from two warring noble families in Verona meet at a party and fall in love. There’s a cousin, Tybalt, who kills his best friend Mercutio, as well as a nurse and an elopement and the same tragic end in which the young lovers needlessly kill themselves.
But what struck me even more than how entirely Shakespeare had lifted the story from his source material was Luigi da Porto’s epilogue, in which he bemoaned the lack of “Juliets” amongst women today. Women, he lamented, were disloyal and fickle, their hearts changing according to the fortunes of their lovers. How extraordinary, I thought, that the narrative inspiring the greatest love story of all time seemed to be written in a state of bitterness and anger towards women. What was that all about?
A little digging revealed Luigi had written it from a villa just outside Vicenza. He had become a recluse through his thirties and early forties after a spear pierced his neck during battle and paralyzed him down one side. The villa, I discovered, was thirty miles away from where I was staying, in semi-ruins but still standing.
I jumped on my Vespa and went to visit. The villa—grand, Palladian—was just a shell, mostly boarded up. But it was easy enough to climb through one of the holes and clamber about amidst the fallen rafters and pigeon shit, wondering about Luigi da Porto. Why had he disappeared here, after being a Captain of an army, a well-known nobleman, and a man of letters.
And who was Lucina da Savorgnan, to whom he’d dedicated the book? Someone in the village pointed me towards a local inhabitant who’d self-published a biography of him, and I went away clutching a copy. My Italian wasn’t good enough to translate it fully, but one of the references in the back was to Cecil. H. Clough, a Professor of Renaissance History at the University of Liverpool. And the title? Love and War in the Veneto: Luigi da Porto and the True Story of Giulietta e Romeo.
I called the university, which informed me that Professor Clough was retired but handed me his postal address. A few weeks later, I was driving through the English countryside, with an appointment to visit Cecil, by then 70 years old.
It turned out that Luigi had been an obsession of his, too. As he led me into the portacabin in his garden, he showed me the stacks of papers and books he had gathered and written about him over the years. When I told him about the novel I was attempting to write—so far unsuccessfully—he laughed. Had I heard about the curse of Luigi da Porto? Several academics had tried to write about him over the years, Cecil explained, but things always went wrong. In his case, a thesis had been mislaid, another lost in a fire.
The streak of bad luck appeared to start with Luigi himself. Cecil told me that Luigi had been madly in love with his cousin, Lucina Savorgnan, who, like Juliet in his story, he had first seen singing at a party. It was a coup de foudre and for months they met for secret lovers’ trysts up until 1511, when Luigi was crippled in battle and went to recover in the villa near Vicenza I had gone to visit. After the injury, Lucina must have rejected him, said Cecil. To make matters worse, she then went on to marry another cousin from a family that was at war with Luigi’s. Heartbroken, Luigi locked himself away in his country villa, before penning La Giulietta, with its angry—and now as I understood it, heartsick—epilogue.
But here was the kicker. Cecil had spotted that the date Luigi published the novel was on the eve of Lucina’s marriage to another man. His theory was that he had presented it to her as a wedding gift.
If this was the case, the main source for the most famous love story of time had been written as an act of vengeance, an attempt to make her feel guilty for her betrayal. Either that, said Cecil, or as a last-ditch attempt for her to change her mind and pull out of her marriage. Whatever the case, the marriage had gone ahead, and Luigi lived alone in his villa for many years before dying there, aged 44.
The novel I ended up writing after the experience, The Verona Diaries—in which a young woman haunted by her own love problems hunts down the story of Luigi da Porto—was truly awful, and never saw the light of day. I put it in my bottom drawer, where it still sits now. I’d like to think it was Luigi’s curse that kept it from being published, but the truth is it was just bad writing.
But the ghost of Luigi never fully left me, which is why twenty years later, I wasn’t surprised to find Luigi swirling around my thoughts as I was bed-bound by long Covid, floating in and out of consciousness. That’s when I had an idea for a novel in which a disgruntled ghost from the Renaissance, Luigi himself, appears at the sickbed of a young woman, promising to release her from her ills. This became the first scene of my novel, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, a novel about sickness, love, and liberation from the past.
Luigi da Porto doesn’t occupy the starring role in my novel, but in many ways, pompous, comic, both short-sighted and wise, he has all the best lines. I hope he feels, after all these years, less short-changed. And while he is still a footnote in the history of literature, for me at least, the curse has been lifted. ~ Kate Weinberg
**
“I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.”
~ Jane Campion, film-maker — Angel at My Table, Bright Star, Power of the Dog
Oriana:
It’s interesting that passionate love can last only so long. Perhaps the brain is not designed for running at that intensity for very long. It’s too overwhelming. “Love itself must take a rest,” as Byron remarked.
*
AT THE HEART OF BEING HUMAN
~ For months I couldn’t finish any of the novels that I was starting because even the ones that registered as good or interesting still somehow felt trifling and I figured only a Russian would do. Now I’m 600 pages into Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. At one point battalion commissar Krymov is arrested by Stalin’s police for unspecified political crimes—perhaps because he had praised Trotsky years before in front of a lover, and she had told another lover, who told someone else. Krymov is thrown into a cell that has just been vacated by a man on his way to be executed. It’s dark, but on the table he can feel a rabbit “molded from the soft inside of a loaf of bread.” He can tell that “the condemned man must have just put it down,” Grossman writes, because only “its ears had time to grow stale.” Imagine, your last act, the product of your last breaths, the final willful movements of your fingers: bunny ears. How to write to the heart of the matter? Grossman tried.
~ Ben Ehrenreich, the first section of How to Get to the Heart of the Matter, https://lithub.com/remembering-the-jasmine-of-ramallah-or-how-to-write-to-the-heart-of-the-matter-in-a-broken-world/
Oriana:
I have chosen this excerpt from many because it strays from the current events, even though jasmine blooms eternal in all the blood-stained cities on all continents while dictators sign orders of imprisonments and executions. I did it to celebrate the incredible ability of the human spirit to find refuge in a tiny bit of creativity still possible in the darkest moments. Bunny ears, so soft and vulnerable. That’s us, ordinary humans, each with that light within that for lack of better words has been called the “divine spark.” We need to love something, anything; and, like the gods we created, we must create.
**
SOME PEOPLE ARE HAPPY EVEN AS THEY ARE DYING
Research suggests that people nearing death talk about their experience as more positive than we imagine it would be.
Simon Boas, who wrote a candid account of living with cancer, passed away on July 15 at the age of 47. In a recent BBC interview, the former aid worker told the reporter: “My pain is under control and I’m terribly happy—it sounds weird to say, but I’m as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.”
t may seem odd that a person could be happy as the end draws near, but in my experience as a clinical psychologist working with people at the end of their lives, it’s not that uncommon.
There is quite a lot of research suggesting that fear of death is at the unconscious center of being human. William James, an American philosopher, called the knowledge that we must die “the worm at the core” of the human condition.
But a study in Psychological Science shows that people nearing death use more positive language to describe their experience than those who just imagine death. This suggests that the experience of dying is more pleasant—or, at least, less unpleasant—than we might picture it.
In the BBC interview, Boas shared some of the insights that helped him come to accept his situation. He mentioned the importance of enjoying life and prioritizing meaningful experiences, suggesting that acknowledging death can enhance our appreciation of life.
Despite the pain and difficulties, Boas seemed cheerful, hoping his attitude would support his wife and parents during the difficult times ahead.
Boas’s words echo the Roman philosopher Seneca, who advised that “to have lived long enough depends neither upon our years nor upon our days, but upon our minds.”
A more recent thinker expressing similar sentiments is the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who, after surviving Auschwitz, wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) in which he lay the groundwork for a form of existential psychotherapy, with the focus of discovering meaning in any kind of circumstance. Its most recent adaptation is meaning-centered psychotherapy, which offers people with cancer a way to improve their sense of meaning.
HOW HAPPINESS AND MEANING RELATE
In two recent studies, in Palliative and Supportive Care and the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care, people approaching death were asked what constitutes happiness for them. Common themes in both studies were social connections, enjoying simple pleasures such as being in nature, having a positive mindset, and a general shift in focus from seeking pleasure to finding meaning and fulfillment as their illness progressed.
In my work as a clinical psychologist, I sometimes meet people who have—or eventually arrive at—a similar outlook on life as Boas. One person especially comes to mind—let’s call him Johan.
The first time I met Johan, he came to the clinic by himself, with a slight limp. We talked about life, about interests, relationships, and meaning. Johan appeared to be lucid, clear, and articulate.
The second time, he came with crutches. One foot had begun to lag and he couldn’t trust his balance. He said it was frustrating to lose control of his foot, but still hoped to cycle around Mont Blanc.
When I asked him what his concerns were, he burst into tears. He said: “That I won’t get to celebrate my birthday next month.” We sat quietly for a while and took in the situation. It wasn’t the moment of death itself that weighed on him the most, it was all the things he wouldn’t be able to do again.
Johan arrived at our third meeting supported by a friend, no longer able to grip the crutches. He told me that he had been watching films of him cycling with his friends. He had concluded that he could watch YouTube videos of others cycling around Mont Blanc. He had even ordered a new, expensive mountain bike. “I’ve wanted to buy it for a long time, but was tightfisted,” he said. “I may not be able to ride it, but thought it would be cool to have in the living room.”
For the fourth visit, he arrived in a wheelchair. It turned out to be the last time we met. The bike had arrived; he had it next to the couch. There was one more thing he wanted to do.
“If by some miracle I were to get out of this alive, I would like to volunteer in domestic care services—one or two shifts a week,” Johan said. “They work hard and it gets crazy sometimes, but they make such an incredible contribution. I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the apartment without them.”
My experience of patients with life-threatening disease is that it’s possible to feel happiness alongside sadness, and other seemingly conflicting emotions. Over a day, patients can feel gratitude, remorse, longing, anger, guilt, and relief—sometimes all at once. Facing the limits of existence can add perspective and help a person appreciate life more than ever.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_are_some_people_even_as_theyre_dying?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
Rabbi Tarfon said: The day is short, and the work is plentiful; the laborers are lazy, and the reward is great, and the Master of the house is insistent. He used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it. (Pirkei Avot 2:15-16)
Pirkei Avon: Chapters of the Fathers, is a compilation of the ethical teachings and maxims from Rabbinical tradition.
*
ETYMOLOGY OF “LIBERAL”
The word ‘liberal’ (with its roots in the Latin liber and liberalis) combines two meanings: freedom (liberty) and generosity (liberality).
I admit that I’ve forgotten that “liberal” can mean “generous.” Though I’ve been praised for my generosity before, it was mostly my generosity with my time and caring. But there is room for more. I donate to Wikipedia, but not liberally. And there is no excuse for that anymore.
*
ISRAELI SOLDIERS ACCUSED OF RACISM OVER NOT RAPING ARAB WOMEN
Haaretz sparked outrage online after a reporter tweeted, ''IDF soldiers don't rape Arab women due to racism.”
Journalist Naama Riba was responding to a user who wrote: "I can't understand how people repeatedly connect rape to appearance instead of understanding that it's an act of the strong over the weak.”
Riba wrote: “Principally, that's correct. In this case, IDF soldiers don't rape Arab women due to racism.”
Editor of the Hashiloach journal, Sagiv Barmak, responded to her: "Or maybe, just maybe, IDF soldiers don't rape because they understand that rape is a horrific crime. Have you thought about that?”
One user responded: "Naama, how do we get to such a twisted state that allows you to write such a thing? What nonsense do you have to be exposed to during life for your brain to think like that?”
Another user added: "Why are you so sure? Even when Jews do something good or refrain from doing something bad, it's because they're bad? In the eyes of Hamas, we are the offspring of apes and pigs, that's real racism in my opinion, yet that didn't prevent them from raping.”
In 2007, Hebrew University awarded a prize to a student who wrote a paper theorizing that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.
At the time, Arutz-7 wrote: “Can't it just be that Israeli soldiers come from a culture that very much condemns rape? And why not mention the much-touted 'purity of arms,' i.e., the high moral conduct, of the Israeli Army?”
Amnon Lord, then editor of the Hebrew Makor Rishon newspaper, commented that: "It is noteworthy that Palestinian propaganda around the world frequently falsely accuses Israelis of murder and rape. Such that this situation is unique: An army is found blameworthy of rape, and is also blameworthy of not raping.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/en/news/391832
Oriana:
Not raping as a racist act? But if the Israeli soldiers did rape some Arab women, then that would be considered a racist act. This is an impossible situation and I’m not going to waste time trying to resolve it somehow. I applaud the soldiers for not raping anyone. It’s much better if the soldiers are forbidden to commit rape, and the rule is strictly enforced.
By the way, there are many beautiful Arab women who are not veiled. And if they live in Israel, they do not fear getting raped (though any woman, anywhere, needs to take some precautions, like avoiding being alone in dark, empty spaces — that alone is sad).
an Arab woman office worker
Joe:
*
AN AMAZING DEATH-BED CONFESSION
as told by a retired nurse:
I was working in a nursing home some years ago, and we had the nicest gentleman there. I mean he was the best patient we or any nurse could ask for. So, after get pneumonia and declining he had only days to live, he asked me if he could tell me something that he never told anyone. Of course I agreed and was happy to hear whatever he had to say.
He proceeded to tell me that his grandfather sexually abused his little sister and his grandmother knew about it and protected his grandfather, so he put poison in their food when they had to stay there for the night. The next morning they both were dead. No autopsy was performed and everyone assumed they had passed from old age. He smiled at me and said, “It was my job to protect her.” I just simply smiled and told him he was now my favorite person. Moments later he passed on. I will never forget him. ~ Lynda Parisi, Quora
*
J.D. VANCE’S RADICALLY FLIPPED HIS POLITICAL ATTITUDES
Much has been made in the popular press and social media about the inconsistencies and changes in J. D. Vance's life. For starters, Vance has changed his name numerous times over the 39 years of his life. But more important than name changes, in 2016 Vance referred to Donald Trump as "a cynical asshole," "America's Hitler," and "cultural heroin."
That same year, he said, "I can't stomach Trump," "I find him reprehensible," and "I'm a 'Never Trump' guy, I never liked him." But by 2021, when he was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, Vance began saying only positive things about Trump, who endorsed Vance in his campaign. As we all know, eventually Vance changed from a Never-Trumper to Trump's vice-presidential running mate.
Then there is Vance's religious odyssey. Understandably, when he was a child being raised by his grandmother, he initially adopted her belief in Jesus and loathing of organized religion, especially televangelists, whom she called "crooks and perverts."
As he got older, the pain he experienced from living in a dysfunctional family led to constant arguments with his grandmother about whether God really loved them.
As a teenager, he reconciled with his father and attended his father's Pentecostal Church. But after a stint in Iraq with the Marines, he became skeptical about many things he had believed, and, by the time he attended college, he read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and began calling himself an atheist. However, he found secular worldviews insufficient for providing meaning in life and eventually converted to Catholicism.
There is no shortage of articles and memes about Vance's inconsistencies. He has been called a shape-shifter, a grifter, a hypocrite, a chameleon, and a flip-flopper. A good example of such an article was written by biomedical scientist Trish Zornio, "Who is J.D. Vance? Even he doesn’t seem to know." The following line from her article summarizes her viewpoint, "The man is a walking set of contradictions, and he might as well have 'Will sell soul for power' tattooed across his forehead.”
SO, DOES J.D. VANCE HAVE A CONSISTENT PERSONALITY OR NOT?
As a personality psychologist, my working assumption is that every person shows enough consistency in their thoughts, feelings, and behavior to say that they have a personality, and that includes J. D. Vance. If we sort through the voluminous material that has been written by Vance and about Vance, I predict that we would find many examples of consistent personality traits.
As an exercise in assessing personality from written documents, I suggest that the reader study the emails exchanged between Vance and Sofia Nelson, a transgender former Yale Law School classmate. Excerpts of the exchange were released by The New York Times. Although the friendship ended when Nelson discovered that Vance did not support gender-affirming medical treatments for adolescents, the emails seem to indicate genuine affection between Vance and Nelson.
For example, in one email, Vance apologized to Nelson portraying her gender identity inaccurately in his book Hillbilly Elegy: "I recognize now that this may not accurately reflect how you think of yourself, and for that I’m really sorry. . . . I hope you recognize that the description came from a place of ignorance, when I first started writing years ago. I hope you're not offended, but if you are, I'm sorry!" He signs the email "Love you, JD.”
In her reply, Nelson calls Vance "buddy" and "sweet" and signed her email "Love, Sofia.”
The emails also indicate positions held by Vance that differ considerably from statements he has made as a candidate for vice president. A spokesperson for Vance issued the following statement to The New York Times regarding Vance's apparent inconsistencies between the emails and his current positions: "Senator Vance values his friendships with individuals across the political spectrum. He has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family, and he has thoroughly explained why he changed his mind on President Trump. Despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best.”
I encourage the reader to compare for yourself what J. D. Vance wrote before and after he became the vice presidential nominee. Ask your friends (ideally from across the political spectrum) to do the same and compare notes. See whether you can identify possible consistencies that might underlie the apparent inconsistencies in J. D. Vance's personality.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202408/does-j-d-vance-have-a-personality
Oriana:
Even cats and dogs have personalities, so no doubt JD Vance has a personality. I think that the author is not thinking of personality so much as a consistent worldview. In addidtion, the big question is whether his evolution from contempt for Trump (“an American Hitler”) to a Trump supporter has been in good faith, or whether he is merely an opportunist who will spout whichever views seem to increase his appeal to the voters. 
That’ bulldog face makes me think that he really is meant to serve as Trump’s bulldog. Attack, attack! Onward with full hatred!!
With Vance’s claim to fame being the narrative of climbing out of rural poverty to wealth and education (before embracing MAGA and attacking the elite institutions he benefited from), he may have an advantage. Trump also supposedly “likes people who are rich and have hot wives.”
*
SOME FACTS ABOUT ABORTION
“In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 13 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 34 percent said it should be legal under any circumstances, and an additional 13 percent said it should be legal in most circumstances.
https://newrepublic.com/post/182680/supreme-court-shocks-everyone-abortion-pill-mifepristone
“Only one percent of abortions happen at 21 weeks or later. Most, the vast majority of pregnancies and abortions that are considered late in a pregnancy have to do with severe, devastating medical circumstances.” ~ Jocelyn Frye, https://newrepublic.com/post/182677/witness-gop-senator-john-neely-kennedy-abortion-question
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TIM WALZ AS A TEACHER — A FORMER HIGH SCHOOL PUPIL REMEMBERS
Most of the nation might have just learned of the existence of Tim Walz, but Sam Hurd has known the vice presidential candidate for nearly two decades — since Walz was Hurd’s junior year geography teacher at Mankato West High School from 2005-2006.
Walz has made his life as a teacher a selling point in his political career, including in the jockeying ahead of being picked to be Kamala Harris’ running mate. To get a sense of what he was really like as a teacher, POLITICO Magazine reached out to Hurd, now 35, and himself a middle school teacher.
In an interview, Hurd recalled that Walz didn’t overload students with homework, but challenged them in other ways — forcing them to wrestle with issues like the Cambodian genocide and how the French government treated its Muslim citizens.
And Walz was never sitting, always circling the room.
“Wearing a tie and sweating profusely and just working his ass off as a teacher,” is how Hurd remembered him.
Walz left such an impression on Hurd that the former student, who now lives in Baltimore, made the drive up to Philadelphia on Tuesday to see the very first Harris-Walz rally.
He never made it inside the packed venue, but as he waited in line, word spread that he was a former Walz student, and he was challenged by Pennsylvanians who had been rooting for Gov. Josh Shapiro to be Harris’ vice president choice instead. All he had to do, Hurd said, was point to Walz’s charisma: “As a teacher 20 years ago, that’s who he was.”
~ What’s the first word that comes to mind when you look back on Tim Walz as a teacher?
Passionate and service-oriented. I think those are the two things that pop for me.
Was he known as a tough grader? Was he a strict teacher, or someone you knew would give an extension?
I only had him for a year, and it was actually his last year before running for Congress. And the thing that I would always hear about Walz was that he’s not really a homework guy, so long as you could reasonably show up, participate in discussions and just have thoughts that you could articulate. He wasn’t really a lecturer. He valued the thoughts and experiences of kids. He was known for treating kids quite a bit like adults in that way.
On Fridays, we would focus on current events and he would have this rotating group of students do a little bit of their own research and bring in about two or three minutes of context. And then he would open the floor and the rest of class would be an active discussion. I remember him grading us quite a bit on our ability to look something up, give a little bit of context about it, and try to come up with questions that would get our classmates to talk and think and care about it.
Do you remember any of the current events that sparked deep conversations or debates?
There was one that stood out, now that I look back on it in 20 years. We were reading about France’s attempts to come up with social policies around Muslim women covering themselves in certain public places, and whether or not we believe that to be a Western ideal or an example of this demand for democracy gone a little bit too far, that’s maybe not as respectful as we want it to be of cultural differences and identity.
I was doing a lot of listening that day. Walz did a really good job of making kids feel that cognitive dissonance of what it’s like to grow up in the most powerful country in the world, but also these things that you would never consider as a white middle-class kid in southern Minnesota.
Did Walz participate in the debates or just moderate?
He was mostly a moderator. He could flavor things with his own experience and people that he talked to, but he was infinitely more interested in getting kids to talk to each other.
Do you remember what his classroom looked like? Any notable items on his desk or walls?
His room featured lots of flags and photos. He was one of many teachers in my school who felt compelled to show kids that there’s a really big world out there. He had a few hand-carved or hand-painted gifts that he’d received in the past. He spent considerable time around China, so I think he had some pottery and some paintings.
Somewhere toward the whiteboard, at eye level, he had a giant photograph of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. When I later went to Cambodia, I thought of him, and remembered seeing this incredibly exotic, beautiful place. [As a student,] I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to get there. I’m just a kid in high school from Minnesota.” That was just another one of those subtle things that if you were in a Walz classroom, you kind of felt like you could do those things. He made students feel like that was within their reach no matter who they were.
There wasn’t anything special as to how his room was organized. But we would sit and face each other in a circle when it came to discussions, and that was cool. That was something that I didn’t have a lot of practice within my other classes.
Tim Walz seems to have an endless stockpile of dad jokes. Do you remember any jokes he’d tell to the class?
He clearly loves working with kids, and has this relentless energy.
There’s something humorous about him showing up every day wearing a tie and sweating profusely and just working his ass off as a teacher. I don’t think he ever once sat behind his desk and did anything. He was always circling the room. He was always sitting on a desk and talking to you. There was no “Now it’s time for work. It must be quiet. I’m going to sit behind my desk now, and you guys are just going to be working away at things.”
I don’t think he was as funny as he was irreverent in weird teacher ways, and yet we all knew this resume that he had, and we’re like, “Wow, he’s a football coach. Wow, he’s a vet.”
There’s not really anything that seemed to faze him. That was sort of a disarming thing about him — his life experience made you feel more comfortable. He gives you a sense of security because you can just tell that he’s encountered a lot of different people in his life. He’s a pretty calm, collected dude. I think we all probably treated him in a slightly different way than all of our other teachers because of it.
He was the picture of humble, masculine service energy in our school. There was a student who, I want to say in 2002 or 2003, came out to Walz, and that was really the only adult or maybe teacher that they had come out to before as gay. And Walz was pretty determined to, if that student was up for it, start a Gay-Straight Alliance at our school. Walz, I think it wasn’t lost on him — the idea of him being a football coach and military guy. To him, that’s just what you do for kids.
You mentioned that you were a student volunteer for Walz when he was running for Congress. What was that like?
There were probably — in terms of student volunteers — about a dozen of us or maybe a couple dozen of us across different grades that were pretty hardcore in terms of going to parades, phone banking, doing all the grassroots kind of stuff.
I remember Election Day in 2006, I was excused for the day to go canvass around town and drive people to the polls. It was the first time, and really the only time that I’ve ever done something like that.
What was it like to celebrate Walz’s victory with him?
On Election Night, the party for Democrats was at this big hotel downtown in our hometown, and it all happened pretty late. It was a Tuesday night — a school night — but my dad was there so it was all good. Me and my friends and Walz’s circle of student volunteers all got to be backstage a little bit. It was probably only 10 p.m. but it felt like midnight to me.
When he won, Walz was like, “Guys, we’re going to run out there together and come up on the stage.” When he ran up to the podium, he asked us to come up. And he just circled everybody up and jumped up and down for a little bit. I remember him just saying, “We did it. We did it.” It was just hugs and jumping and screaming long before there was any kind of ladies and gentlemen acceptance speech.
Some of Walz’s past assignments have gone viral — such as when his class basically predicted the Rwandan genocide a year before it occurred. Do you remember any unorthodox projects or lessons in his classroom?
I remember him being one of the few adults who would pretty openly talk about genocide. He spoke a lot about genocide in Cambodia. Some of these terms that he would throw out, like “killing fields” — I remember on a trip to Cambodia, I got to go to Phnom Penh and see the prisons and killing fields. And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s what Walz was talking about.”
I remember starting that discussion by getting inside the heads of lawmakers and politicians and dictators. I think we did a little bit of reading on Pol Pot himself, because to us that was such a faraway place as a 15- or 16-year-old. I think the hook was just trying to get inside the heads of dictators and leaders who overstepped their boundaries.
You are now a teacher yourself. Is that at all because of Walz? Has he shaped your teaching style?
He’s certainly one part of it. When I think about the things in my current teaching that are all kind of credited to Walz — a lot of the warm-up games and activities in my classroom are definitely geared toward the world a little bit. When we have free time, I try to encourage kids to think about what’s going on in the world, and think about just how big the world is.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/08/tim-walz-was-my-teacher-what-i-learned-00173212?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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MORE ON STALIN’S GREAT TERROR
Those were the worst of times, the years of Yezhovshchina. ~ Anna Akhmatova
Stalin and Yezhov, nicknamed the "bloody dwarf"
On July 30, 1937, the NKVD of the USSR signed order No. 00447. This was the start of Stalin's "Great Terror."
“The Kulak Operation” targeted those whom Stalin’s regime considered “class enemies”: former kulaks (well-off peasants), former nobility, former members of “anti-Soviet parties", former White Army officers, pre-1917 civil servants, church officials, people with links to foreign countries (Germans, Estonians, Finns, etc.), and other "socially undesirable elements”.
In the next 400 days, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, millions sent to GULAG.
About 700,000 people were shot, after they signed confessions that they planned to damage the Soviet state — signed under torture.
More than 1.7 million people were arrested and given various prison terms; hundreds of thousands of them never returned from the GULAG.
There were no trials, not even an appearance of trials. Instead, the NKVD gave the power to sentence people to death or decades of GULAG to "special trios."
“The trio” included the head of the local NKVD, the head of the regional communist party committee, and the prosecutor.
The accused didn’t have attorneys. There were no lawyers. There was no public. Just the accused, the trio, and the prison guards. Sentences were given within minutes, one by one: guilty. The Soviet conveyor belt of death.
Some death lists were approved by Stalin himself. The USSR dictator personally sanctioned the execution of more than 40,000 people.
There were already purges in the first half of the 1930s: in 1934, 80,000 people were convicted in OGPU-NKVD cases. And let’s not forget the man-made famines of 1932–33 that killed millions.
Many thought that the purge would not affect them, that the NKVD came for ”saboteurs” and “spies” — that if you were a model citizen, obeying every Stalin’s order, satisfying all his whims, then you would be okay.
Lavrenty Beria was a notorious rapist
And then suddenly millions of these “model citizens” found themselves signing “admissions of guilt” under horrendous torture.
Their wives were either shot or sent to GULAG, as were their teenage children. Minor kids were sent to orphanages or adopted by families of other law-obedient Soviet citizens.
Children of “enemies of the state.” No names — just numbers.
Stalin didn’t invent “The Red Terror”. It was invented by Vladimir Lenin — the father of October 1917 Bolsheviks’ coup. Lenin ordered to kill anyone who was against “the proletarian revolution”. And anyone who potentially could be against it — just in case.
The horror of the Red Terror is realistically conveyed in the Russian-made film "Chekist" (1992). It should have been shown to Russian schoolkids. It wasn’t. Now it’s too late and Putin’s goons won’t allow it.
Putin’s goons are making a hero and “the father of the nation” out of Stalin, erect monuments to him.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian men are sent to slaughter in Ukraine — 1,000 of them are ending dead, maimed or wounded every single day.
And these men came to Ukraine to kill people who simply lived their life on their land, and they came because of the hatred with which Putin’s goons poisoned their minds and souls.
And all these Russian citizens of today behave like the Soviet citizens of 1930s, they are sure that if they are being “good patriots”, they will be okay.
Russia is falling into the same pattern.
Again.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Heinz Werner-Priess:
My granddad was sent to GULAG in 1939 because he was German. His dad owned a company, thus he was also a capitalist. He only survived because of two lucky coincidences. Because he came from a capitalist family, he knew about accounting. Because they didn't have skilled workers, he was allowed to work in accounting. As a result, his calorie consumption was significantly lower than that of people who had to do hard physical work. Starving to death takes longer this way.
The second reason was his perfect hearing. Although he couldn't read music, he could play almost any musical instrument. No matter whether you gave him a cello or sat him in front of a piano. After he learned where each note was, he was able to replay any melody he had heard before. The guards used this talent to get him to play something for them in the evenings. As a result, he also gained fans in the kitchen and was secretly given bread from time to time. This all had to be done secretly because the employees who gave him food risked severe punishment.
The physically easier work and the extra food meant that after 10 years he was still alive. He weighed 40 kilos (88 lbs) but he did not starve to death. In his case, he was released after surviving for 10 years.
Barbara:
“In the light of recent research, the qualification of “Great Purges” seems incorrect to characterize this murderous outburst of violence. The extreme diversity of the victims makes difficult any legal qualification of this crime, which appears to be in a class of its own: 800,000 people executed in secret (over half of them under Order n° 00447) by means of a bullet in the back of the head after a pretense of justice; this over a period of sixteen months, at a rate of 50,000 executions per month or 1,700 per day for nearly 500 days. Let us therefore content ourselves with a “minimalist” classification: the Great Terror was one of the worst and largest mass crimes carried out by the Stalinist State against one per cent of its adult population.”
Luke Hatherton:
The NKVD also ate its own. A great deal of the men who started the purges were themselves found to be enemies of the state, arrested and executed before the terror was over, including both of the leaders of the NKVD before Beria.
A great number of NKVD were also captured by the Wehrmacht, interrogated by the SS in an almost comical cycle of perversity and executed during the war.
Beria survived due to a combination of great cleverness, his necessity to the war effort, and then to his leadership in the development of the H-bomb. He knew the H-bomb would be completed by July 1953, which is why is it suspected that he poisoned Stalin with warfarin mixed into his wine over a period of weeks in early 1953. Warfarin is tasteless, odourless and very hard to detect in the body.
Stalin suffered a massive stroke early on March 1, collapsed and pissed himself while lying on the floor of his private quarters, and was not discovered until nearly 24 hours later, as his inner circle was either too terrified to enter the quarters or deliberately chose not to do so in order to give Stalin time to die. Stalin had mumbled repeatedly to the men that he was going to kill all of them, and some doctors suspect he was succumbing to dementia.
After Stalin’s death, Lavrenti Beria, once referred to during the brief Nazi-Sovit honeymoon as “our Himmler”, bragged, “I took him out! I saved all of you.” Beria was ecstatic at Stalin’s death, and as the weather warmed, he would swing on the hammock on the front porch of his dacha, belting out Georgian folk songs.
Either way, Stalin hung himself on his own rope. He died on March 5.
Beria was a strange mixture of cruel and pragmatic. He knew the Soviet state had to change to survive, and proposed capitalist reforms, as well as trading East Germany to the West in exchange for a huge injection of American cash.
This possibly incredible change (or beginning of the end?) to the Cold War when it was just getting going was put to an end due to the East German Uprising of mid-1953, which was triggered by Stalin’s death but had its roots in communist incompetence, and the fact that Beria had made too many enemies among Stalin’s inner circle due to his sexual depravity, which disgusted even those hardened men, many of whom had participated in the purges themselves.
Beria, the last head of the NKVD, was arrested on 26 June and shot on 23 December. Like his predecessor 13 years earlier, he begged for his life. Two more political killings followed, and then Khrushchev put an end to political killings in the USSR.
Another photo of Beria. He was probably the one who put rat poison in Stalin's drink.
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TRUMP’S NEPHEW REMEMBERS TRUMP AS OBNOXIOUS
All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way is a 352-page portrait of Trumpian dysfunction. With an assist from Ellis Henican, Chris Christie’s go-to co-author and a Fox News commentator, Fred Trump III delivers a well-paced and engrossing read.
The author is the son of the late Fred Trump Jr and a nephew of Donald Trump. Trump III thinks his uncle is a jerk, vindictive and terrified of losing, but also someone who struggles with accepting responsibility. The buck always stops elsewhere.
“In my family that sometimes seems like the cast of a 1950s sitcom, my uncle Donald had a role of his own,” Fred III writes. “He was the obnoxious one.”
No surprise there.
“Many of his adult traits – his determination, his short fuse – first displayed themselves in his childhood.”
Over time, they festered.
“I can’t sum up his early days in a single slogan, but I think I can do it two: ‘I wanna do what I wanna do’ and also ‘That’s not fair.’”
Think of Trump’s reaction when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, or was beaten by Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus. You get the picture. If Trump fails to win, the system must be rigged.
Fred Trump III is a successful New York real estate executive, with a career forged outside the Trump Organization. With Lisa, his wife, he campaigns for rights for disabled people. William Trump, their son, suffers from a lifelong neurological disability, which his father describes in poignant detail.
When Donald Trump was a teenager, he was banished to military school. There, he rose through the ranks of cadets. “He was a stickler for everything,” Fred informs us. “When he performed inspections, he showed no mercy.”
On the other hand, “thrust into such a high leadership position, the hard-charging senior … suddenly forgot how to lead”. Past is prelude. Fast-forward to the outbreak of Covid-19, in 2020. As president, Trump repeatedly told governors the burden of caring for the sick fell on their shoulders first.
Martin O’Malley, a Democrat and a former governor of Maryland, called it the “Darwinian approach to federalism”. Trump also argued that more Covid testing “creates more cases”.
At the time, one administration insider confided to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.”
Fred Trump III’s father was the black sheep of the family. He drank too much and died too soon. After his death, paterfamilias Fred C Trump in effect cut Fred Trump III and his sister, Mary Trump, out of his will – at the urging of Donald and his surviving siblings.
William’s condition meant non-stop care and a mound of bills. Trump III now delivers a robust “thank you” to “William’s amazing angels”, his caregivers, along with his medical professionals and others. For a time, Donald Trump was the one family member who helped meet the cost of William’s care. Eventually, he grew reluctant.
“Donald took a second as if he was thinking about the whole situation,” Fred writes. “‘I don’t know,’ he finally said, letting out a sigh. ‘He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.’”
Trump III describes his own reaction: “Wait! What did he just say? That my son doesn’t recognize me? That I should just let him die?
“Did he really just say that? That I should let my son die … so I could move down to Florida?”
All this from a president who brags of being “the most pro-life president in American history”.
Then there’s race. Once upon a time, Steve Bannon pondered whether Trump, his former campaign and White House boss, was a racist. “He had not heard Trump use the N-word but could easily imagine him doing so,” Michael Wolff wrote in Siege, his second Trump tell-all.
Now, with fewer than 100 days until election day, Fred Trump III delivers his answer. In a fit of rage, he says, the N-word cascaded from Trump’s mouth.
In the early 1970s, someone left two gashes in the roof of Trump’s white Cadillac convertible.
“Donald was pissed,” Fred remembers. “Boy, was he pissed.”
“‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the niggers did.’”
When the Guardian broke news of this passage, the Trump campaign issued a blanket denial.
“Completely fabricated, and total fake news of the highest order”, said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson. “Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked.” Tell that to Bannon and Wolff.
For his part, Bannon has compared Trump’s infamous escalator ride to announce his candidacy to Triumph of the Will, the Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl, according to Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted, by Jeremy Peters, a New York Times reporter.
Mary Trump would probably be similarly unimpressed by the Trump campaign’s denial. In 2020, she published Too Much and Never Enough, a bestseller about her family and her uncle. Speaking during her book tour, she said her uncle was “clearly racist”.
Fred Trump III says he never voted for his uncle. Rather, he cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. “Did I want the supreme court to reverse abortion rights by overturning Roe v Wade? No.”
Fred also considers Stormy Daniels’ liaison with Donald Trump, the source of his 34 convictions, arising from hush-money payments. Now, with Trump squaring off against Kamala Harris, the primordial forces of race and sex will occupy center stage in the election campaign.
“America isn’t close to finished with the Trumps,” Trump III writes. “And neither, it seems, am I.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/04/fred-donald-trump-new-book-all-in-the-family
from Slate:
. . . more telling anecdotes in All in the Family.
One example is a story in which the young Fred was watching TV with his two uncles, Donald and Rob, at his grandfather’s house. “Hey Fred,” Donald said to his nephew, “hit Rob.” For some reason, Fred complied by punching his uncle in the arm, whereupon Rob turned and slapped his nephew across the face. “Donald thought the whole thing was hilarious,” Fred writes.
It’s not clear how old Fred was at the time, but likely he was still a kid. Donald is 17 years his senior. “Honestly,” Fred writes, demonstrating what seems to be a constitutional tendency to downplay his family’s dysfunction, “it was like a Three Stooges episode.” All it lacked were “the clanging bells, the boing-boing and the nose twists.”
The crude bullying and let’s-you-and-him-fight cowardice of this interaction is classic Donald Trump, even more so than the “mashed potatoes story,” a famous incident within the clan. In that anecdote, an adolescent Donald refused to stop teasing the younger Rob at the dinner table. So Fred III’s father (Fred Jr., the eldest son of the family’s patriarch, who was also named Fred) dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on Donald’s head.
As Mary Trump, Fred III’s sister, told it in her own bestselling memoir, 2020’s Too Much and Never Enough, to this day Donald still fumes every time the mashed potato story gets trotted out, furious at having once been made the butt of the joke. He hates nothing more. Fred III firmly believes that Donald made his final decision to run for president at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when Barack Obama mocked him for spreading conspiracy theories. One look at his uncle’s face, and Fred III knew that Donald was “already calculating how to get back at him.”
As Fred tells it, his father, Fred Jr., was a well-liked “free spirit” who just wanted to fly airplanes—a dream crushed by his father, who sent Donald to tell him that a pilot is nothing more than a “glorified bus driver.” Fred Jr.’s unhappiness (which Mary—and to a lesser degree Fred III—attributes to this thwarted hope) drove him to alcoholism and an early grave.
Fred III seems to have been the only person who made an effort to visit Fred Jr. during his years of diminishment, when he was relegated to a cotlike bed in the attic of Fred Sr.’s mansion. Fred III also delivered an impromptu elegy at his father’s low-budget funeral because he was the only person motivated to speak.
Surely the most shameful incident detailed in All in the Family (as well as in Too Much and Never Enough) is the scheme by Donald, Rob, and their older sister Maryanne to disinherit Fred Jr.’s children after Fred Sr.’s death in 1999. Led by Donald, who was in financial straits due to numerous unwise business deals, the three pressured their disoriented father, who had been diagnosed with dementia, into revising his will.
When Fred III and Mary refused to take this lying down, their uncles and aunt threatened to cut them both off from the family health insurance plan. At that time, Fred III and his wife were struggling to save their infant son, William, from a rare seizure disorder that left him intellectually and developmentally disabled, and they desperately needed the insurance to pay for William’s care.
None of this is news, but it’s appalling every time you revisit it, and in All in the Family it’s made even more appalling by how completely and happily devoted Fred III is to his son. (The first people Fred III lists in the book’s acknowledgments are all the caregivers who have ever helped them, by name.) The truly shocking revelations in Fred’s book aren’t the racial slurs Donald blurted out 50 years ago, but the more contemporary instances when Donald suggested that severely disabled people aren’t worth caring for, and that because William “didn’t recognize” his father (untrue), Fred III should “just let him die and move down to Florida.”
How Fred III managed to make peace with his uncle is a mystery. (Lawsuits regarding Fred Sr.’s will were settled out of court, but Fred III notes that he and Mary got significantly less than their fair share.) The man doesn’t appear to have a spiteful bone in his body. This may be the most astonishing thing about All in the Family: that Fred III turned out so well. As Donald sees it, he is the success in the family, and Fred Jr. was an abject failure. But unlike his brother, Fred Jr., for all his flaws, was capable of love. He raised a son whose adult life is shaped not by ambition or greed but by love. If Fred Jr. were alive today, he would have every reason—and much more reason than his brother Donald—to be proud.
https://slate.com/culture/2024/07/trump-nephew-fred-iii-all-family-book-review.html
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THE POLITICIZATION OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY
Intensely personal decisions about children and family are suddenly becoming a fierce political battleground.
Why it matters: The U.S. fertility rate has been steadily falling, mirroring trends in other developed countries, and hit a record low of 1.62 births per woman in 2023.
Driving the news: A growing chorus of conservative pundits, influencers and politicians are promoting a specific, traditional image of family life — and criticizing people who don't live that way.
Sen. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, has given the pro-natalist movement its biggest platform yet.
Most recently, he made headlines with a resurfaced 2021 comment calling Vice President Harris and other Democrats "childless cat ladies" who "don't really have a direct stake" in America's future. Vance's team says the remark was taken out of context and referred to America's leadership class, not adults without children.
On a conservative podcast in 2020, Vance said of adults without children: "I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable.”
By the numbers: 47% of adults under 50 who don't have kids say they're unlikely to have them — up 10 points from 2018, according to a recent Pew survey.
Among their reasons: They can't afford it, they want to focus on different things, or they just don't want to.
That trend has very real implications for America's future and economic growth, especially if immigration is limited.
But experts say simply telling women to have more kids — irrespective of whether they want to, whether they're able to, or whether they can afford to — is missing the point.
"It's legitimately tapping into frustration of what it takes to support a family, but for some reason, it's directing that anger toward professional women," says Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh historian.
The other side: Even though it contends with a real problem, "no matter how you frame the issue, pro-natalism often comes across as extremely strange," New York Times conservative columnist Ross Douthat writes.
"The idea of freedom from procreation as a hard-won feminist liberty ... means that any talk about increasing birthrates instantly evokes 'Handmaid's Tale' anxieties about patriarchal coercion.”
Between the lines: It's not just about more kids. The push for childbearing often promotes a narrow view of the ideal family.
"The focus is on middle class and above, native-born, Christian, white women," says Elizabeth Ananat, an economist at Barnard. "It's like a fantasy of a 1950s TV show."
Popular podcasters Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson spend a lot of time telling young men to "double down on traditional masculinity," New York Times columnist David French writes.
On Instagram and TikTok, "trad wife" influencers go viral with videos extolling the virtues of being a stay-at-home wife and mother. Critics say the trend often presents an incomplete picture of housework and child care.
The latest: Democrats have fought against GOP attempts to rebrand as the "pro-family" party, pointing, for example, to Senate Republicans' rejection of a bipartisan bill last week that would have expanded the child tax credit.
"It's sort of unbelievable how judgmental the Republican Party has become," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in a video last week. "Republicans have just decided that they're going to tell you how to run your life.”
The bottom line: Discussions about family and the birthrate are louder than they've been in decades. Look for this issue to take center stage in the run-up to the election.
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/04/jd-vance-women-families-children
Oriana:
Single women are the group most likely to vote Democratic, by a large margin.
Unlike men, women do not seem to become more conservative with age. If anything, they become more radical. Perhaps the older many woman get, the more empowered they feel to take action on behalf of their own interests at last, rather than always pleasing others, afraid to speak their own truth.
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MISHA FIRER ON CORRUPTION
Another Sergey Shoigu’s lieutenant got canned for corruption. This one is body positive. It takes all kinds to steal from the army in Russia.
Vladimir Shesterov was the head of Patriot Park. It is an arms expo and a cannon fodder training grounds for the SMO outside Moscow.
It also has some interesting landmarks worth a visit to get a glimpse into kleptocrats’ bizarre mindscape.
There is a Warhammer 40000 church built from Nazi battle tanks that glows satanic red in the dark. On the walls inside are mosaics of communist soldiers with submachine and artillery guns celebrating victory over Christians in geographic Europe.
A bronze statue in the shape of an open vulva of a fertility goddess symbolizes grieving mother who lost her son to wicked Christians.
Nearby Shoygu used to entertain third world despots at the army expo with tank biathlon sports games. They came to buy every manner of weapons of mass destruction to thwart free and fair elections.
Acolytes of Victory Over Nazis Cult gather annually on May 9 dressed in Red Army uniforms and flailing toy guns and shouting hurray re-capture Reichstag made of cardboard.
Former Minister of Defense and mastermind of Patriot Park is Sergey Shoigu. He is the son and grandson of Siberian shamans. They believe in magical thinking. It’s like Law of Attraction on magic mushrooms.
Pagan grounds of Patriot Park have been used to conduct ceremonies led by KGB agent call sign “Patriarch Kiril” and his entourage of fake priests to connect with the world of spirits to influence future events.
That didn’t quite work out in Ukraine as you well know. Instead of Kyiv in Three Days, there’s Cold War II. So Putin ordered to punish fraudsters.
It’s not Shoigu’s fault that superstitions proved ineffective.
Putin may jail every corrupt army general, but he can’t change the fact that it’s hard to get a population to fight a war for you when they want you dead.
Russians view Putin as public enemy number one. This is hardly surprising because Putin despises Russian people and hates Christian civilization. He got what he had asked for.
Wishful thinking works. Without billions of rubles embezzled from the construction of the world’s most expensive shamanic site Patriot Park. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Niko Christian Wallenberg:
Russian military is infamous for being top heavy with disproportionate number of high ranking officers in this “rank factory” who do nothing but collect their salaries and embezzle funds from what is supposed to be the second best military in the world: clearly they are also keen on food having little else to do.
Brian Collins:
Niko Christian Wallenberg:
There’s nothing Christian about it: it’s a militarized sham of a cathedral that was built solely for the glorification of Russian military — even some members of the Russian Orthodox Church’s clergy who still have backbone have called it out — and of course they become targets for Kiril and his goons who are firmly in bed with Putin as the Tsar in all but name, just as the Russian Orthodox Church by large always has been in bed with its Tsars, whatever their official title might be.
David Williamson:
Soviet Klingon God: very large frame with extra small head, slightly cross-eyed and no brain. IQ of houseplant, but can lift and carry heavy weights. No need to pray because he’ll cannon-fodder you anyway, whenever he gets around to it.
Tom Binns:
To adapt Warhammer 40k’s payoff line: “In the Russkiy Mir of the future there is only war…”. Grim and obscene is how I view it. Is that “Saint” Aleksandr Nevsky who is being depicted with the Byzantine-style halo?
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THE STRANGE STORY OF THE KURSK SUBMARINE
Vladimir Putin’s presidential term started with Kursk nuclear submarine disaster on 12 August 2000.
The submarine sank in the Barents Sea and all 118 personnel on board perished.
The crews of nearby ships, which all were taking part in a large-scale naval exercise, felt two explosions, but the generals did not start any search for the vessel for 6 hours. The explosion was so powerful, it was recorded by seismologists in Alaska.
It took over 16 hours to locate the submarine (the emergency rescue buoy had been switched off). It was finally located on the ocean floor at a depth of 108 meters (354 ft).
Newly inaugurated Putin was on holiday and refused to cut his vacation short to deal with the crisis.
After the explosions, 23 sailors remained alive on the submarine — they died waiting to be rescued. Putin was refusing to allow foreigners to be part of the rescue mission, and Russians were unable to do what was needed to be done.
Desperate relatives were waiting for news about their men at the quayside, growing more and more despondent because of the inaction by the state officials and the Navy.
All this time Russian officials lied about what was happening. “The communication with the crew has been established, they are getting hot food!” was telling the Navy spokesman. Blatant lies.
Only on August 20 — 8 days after the catastrophe — the Norwegian vessel ‘Seaway Eagle’ was allowed to begin working on the recovery mission. Norwegian divers did in 24 hours what the Russians could not do in a week — they managed to open the submarine's emergency escape hatch. But it was too late. All survivors of the accident were already dead.
When the Russian TV — which was still reporting freely at the time — done an investigative piece on the tragedy and showed the widows of the marines, Putin accused the program in ”hiring whores for $10” to discredit him:
“You hire whores on purpose. You gave them 10 dollars each, specifically to discredit me,” Putin claimed.
It was after the Kursk disaster that Putin began raider seizures of the independent media.
This was 24 years ago.
Today, the words “Kursk” and “Putin” are again in the news, but this time it’s the Kursk region of Russia — and the Ukrainian troops’ incursion into Russia.
And once again, Putin is lying about it.
But this no longer surprises anyone.
”Kursk” disaster didn’t cripple Putin’s grasp on power — but maybe Kursk will?
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Wally Bond:
That’s cold. Definitely signs of a sociopath.
Mitch Conner:
It was a mix of Norwegian and British divers, and a British diver named Tony Scott who opened the e valve to determine whether the ninth compartment was flooded. After being told to turn it the wrong way.
Mitch Conner:
Fourteen officers were sacked in the aftermath, notably they were the ones who reinforced the conspiracy that it was a US sub that collided with the Kursk, and not Russian incompetence and lack of funding. I thought that was also pretty telling at the time too.
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“Every country has its own mafia. Putin's Russia is the first where the mafia has its own country.” ~ Gary Kasparov
“TO GIVE BIRTH LIKE IN NIGER”: RUSSIA’S DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS, THE OLYMPICS WITHOUT RUSSIANS, AND MORE
To Give Birth Like in Niger: Demographic Catastrophe in Russia Can Be Overcome By Stripping Women Of Their Rights and Contraception”
~ an article heading in Moscow Komsomolets newspaper in praise of “traditional family values” penned by Yekaterina Sazhneva.
This middle aged woman with dyed blond hair enjoys her rights to work as a journalist in a nice, air-conditioned office in Moscow and keeps a profile in banned in Russia LinkedIn.
She has only one child, Polina. Her daughter is in the early 20s. I wonder if Yekaterina wishes for Polina to become a baby machine to serve Putin’s whims. I think the answer is “no.”
In 2021, Minister of Transportation of the Khabarovsk Territory Maxim Prokhorov was sent to jail for five years. He received bribes which he immediately converted into building and finishing a cottage in the Moscow region.
Khabarovsk is located in Siberia. The distance to Moscow is 3,500 miles. Why was Prokhorov risking his freedom and spending his extra income on a cottage in Moscow region when he lived in Siberia?
Moscow is the only territory in Russia that has decent infrastructure and healthcare.
Kremlin has been paying Western YouTube bloggers to come to Moscow and make videos to convince the world that Russia is doing fine despite sanctions.
The truth is every Russian public official exiled to labor in the provinces daydreams about finishing his career in Moscow territory.
This is where they buy apartments and cottages in preparation for retirement and to give to the children rather than improving infrastructure and standards of living of the local residents of the entrusted in their care region.
The new Minister of Transportation of Khabarovsk Territory is 36 years old. He graduated from a university and spent two years as a deputy to the jailed minister.
Eager to get kickbacks to buy property in Moscow, young minister purchased city buses that run on natural gas. However, he forgot to check if there are gas stations to power them. It turned out there aren’t any.
Kremlin continues to blaspheme Olympic Games in Paris because Russian athletes had not been invited.
A state controlled TASS agency official answering the question of how he would rate the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris answered with the following rant:
“I don’t even want to say anything about the Olympics in Paris. It was a disgusting spectacle. Such a disgrace! Now remember and compare it with the Olympics in Sochi or the World Cup which were brilliantly held in our country. Turn off your TVs and don’t follow the shameful freak show on the Internet!”
The Russian official was angry because the master spy who had been sent to Paris to disrupt the opening ceremony got drunk and spilled his plans to his new fast friends. The Grinch failed to steal Opening Ceremony of Paris Olympics and is fuming.
Winter Olympic Games in the subtropics with artificial snow and doped up athletes where fifty billion dollars had been embezzled was in comparison a Godly show. It promoted traditional family values before any Russian had learned about their existence.
Kremlin banned Olympic Games and is now trying to slow down download speed of YouTube. The goal is to force Russian users to switch to the local video hosting alternative named Platforma.
Platforma, dubbed in jest “Youtube Killer,” has been just a front to embezzle funds to purchase cottages and apartments in Moscow for its senior management.
At the crucial junction when Youtube got torpedoed, Platforma deplatformed itself and simply stopped working.
“Technical problems,” shrugged shoulders top managers. “Go to Platforma alternative. It’s called YouTube.” ~ Misha Firer, Quota
Anapa, Russian Black Sea Coast resort
Oriana:
Odd, how I don’t miss Russia in the Olympics. There is no denying that they had some outstanding athletes — though at times with some dirt attached, some debate about doping or hints of abusive coaches. Perhaps it’s simply that the very word “Russia” has acquired such bad connotations. One way or another, they were a stain on what was meant to be a festival of peaceful competition.
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THE EXPLOSIVE RISE OF SINGLE LIVING
~ Over the past half-century or so, the U.S. has been transformed from a very married nation to a place in which married people are teetering on the edge of becoming a minority. Whether we look at the number (or percentage) who are not married, the number who have never been married, or the number who are living alone, the trends are remarkable, and sometimes record-setting.
If You're Unmarried, Are You in the Minority?
According to the most recent Census Bureau statistics on marital status, it is married people, not unmarried, who are in the minority—they account for 49 percent of people 15 and older. The other 51 percent—136.3 million people—are divorced, widowed, or separated, or they have always been single (never married).
I prefer marital status statistics that start counting at age 18 instead of 15. Over the past few years, though, the Census Bureau no longer shows those numbers in its key table. When those data were available, the trend was flipped, with just over half of adults 18 and older who were married, and just under half who were not married. Either way, being single (unmarried) in the U.S. today is totally ordinary.
Of all those adults 15 and older who are not married, two-thirds of them have never been married.
Percent of all unmarried in the U.S. who are:
Widowed: 11 percent
Divorced: 19 percent
Separated: 3 percent
Always single (never married): 67 percent
Are You Around 30 and Never Been Married?
If you are around the age of 30 and have never been married, you share that status with about half of the people your age. For men in 2023, the median age at which they first married was 30.2; that means that about half of men who were marrying for the first time were 30 or older. Women were a little younger; their median age when they first married was 28.4.
These numbers are particularly remarkable when compared to the year at which people in the U.S. married at the earliest age, in records dating back to 1890. That year was 1956. Women were just 20.1 when they first married; that means that about half of them were teenagers! Men were a little older at 22.5.
On average, today’s young adults have an additional 8 years of unmarried life than their peers from 1956. (And of course, that’s only for those who do marry. Those who never marry have a whole lifetime of being single.) Think how different the experience of young adulthood is likely to be for those who are already married in their very early twenties compared to those who are unmarried as they approach 30.
Are You Around 40 and Never Been Married?
In the U.S. today, it is not unusual to be about to turn 40 and have never been married. In the most recent data, from 2023, more than a quarter of adults between the ages of 35 and 44 had never been married (26 percent). For men, that percentage was even higher (29 percent); for women, it was lower (22 percent).
Do You Live Alone?
If you live alone, you share that experience with more than 38 million other adults in the U.S. It’s a record number. As a percentage of all people 18 and older, it is a shade lower than it was the year before—14.8 percent in 2023, compared to 14.9 percent in 2022).
In 1967, only about 9 million adults in the U.S. lived alone. That was just 7.8 percent of all adults 18 and older.
Although 38 million people living alone is a huge number, it is far less than the total number of unmarried people. (It also includes an unknown number of married people living alone, apart from their spouse.) Most single (unmarried) people do not live alone—unless they are single at heart. The single at heart love their solitude, and just over half live alone.
Another way to think about how common it is to live alone is to consider different kinds of households. If you live alone, do you think your household is unusual—not like those households comprised of married couples and their children? Think of it this way: If you were to wander around the U.S., knocking on doors at random, how often would you find one person living there, and how often would you find a nuclear family (married parents and their kids)?
In 1970, you would be more than twice as likely to find nuclear family households than households comprised of one person: 40 percent of all households were comprised of married couples with children and 17 percent were people living alone.
Now, that’s flipped. In 2023, there were far more households comprised of one person living alone (30 percent) than married couples living with kids (18 percent).
Unmarried America
In 2003, Business Week ran a cover story titled "Unmarried America.” In the following 20 years, the number and percentage of unmarried Americans have continued to grow. Nonetheless, the U.S. is still a very marriage-oriented society, with laws, policies, language, and norms very much reflective of the desires and perspectives of people who are married. After all, no one asks married people, “When are you going to get single?” or “Why are you still married?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202406/the-record-setting-rise-of-single-living-in-the-us
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SHOULD WE KEEP “BC” AND “AD”?
Astronomical clock in Lyon, 17th century
It is obvious to say that the orthodox dating convention of Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD), Latin for ‘In the year of our Lord’, are constructs which have framed the passing of our daily lives and how we record the events therein for more than 1,000 years. Yet BC and AD are odd for their abbreviation and lack of consistency; why is the former in English while the latter is Latin? The lack of a year zero per se is also a conundrum, with the flow of time from one epoch to another jumping from 1 BC to AD 1. This in turn creates some uncertainty over key dates; for example, was the turn of the recent millennium 1 January 2000 or 2001?
This last oddity is explained by the origin of the dating system. Based on the belief that Christ’s birth occurred 753 years after the foundation of Rome, the system was conceived in around AD 525 by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk from Tomis (modern-day Constanta, Romania), but was not used widely until 300 years later. In the sixth century the concept of ‘zero’ had not been introduced in Europe, although it had been established elsewhere. There is no zero in Roman numerals. Zero did not appear in the West until Arabic numerals made their way across Christendom in the early 13th century. More problematically, scholarly opinion has since determined that Jesus was probably born sometime between 6 BC and before the death of King Herod in 4 BC (Matthew 2; Luke 1:5).
Bede, the Anglo-Saxon historian, opted to use Dionysius’ dating system in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in AD 731. Shortly after, Charlemagne encouraged the use of Anno Domini throughout the Carolingian Empire. For Bede, the use of the AD system was important because with it he could fit the conversion of the English people into a narrative of God’s plan; for Charlemagne the use of AD reinforced the centrality of Christ in his empire: with it, Christ’s name was reflected in a quotidian manner, namely in the way they recorded the passing of time and therefore their lives.
The spread of the system across the empire is ultimately at the heart of its enduring dominance; it became particularly popular across Catholic Europe from the 11th to the 14th centuries. In around 1700, following Russia, Eastern Orthodox nations also implemented the AD system. It then found favor in the Republic of China which, although using its own Minguo Era system, chose to adopt the Western calendar in an international context.
Use of the term ‘Before Christ’ did not emerge until much later, partly owing to an inability to settle on a simple, universal phrase. Bede had experimented with ‘the year before the incarnation of the Lord’, and ‘In the year before the birth of Christ’ was used by the German monk Werner Rolevinck in his world history of 1474, but it was not until 1627 that ante Christum, ‘Before Christ’, first emerged in France, introduced by a Jesuit theologian called Denis Pétau. While AD was adopted in its Latin form relatively early, initially by Bede but also in legal and ecclesiastical documents in Latin, the period ‘before Christ’ was of limited interest to medieval lawyers or clergymen; ‘before Christ’ emerged in a post-Reformation, vernacular-speaking world, so it was more natural to adopt an English expression.
Alternatives have arisen over the centuries, including vulgaris aerae, or ‘vulgar era’, (c.1615), ‘Christian era’ (1652) and ‘common era’ (1708). While these often make no specific reference to the birth of Christ, they are nonetheless based on the same point of division as BC/AD. Most failed to gain widespread traction.
More recently, a subtle revision to the seemingly ‘standard’ (Western) dating system of BC/AD has emerged and is quietly replacing it. In contemporary historical discourse there has been an explicit move to rebrand BC/AD as Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE). These terms were first proposed in the early 18th century, in an English astronomy book by David Gregory, The Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical (1715). They reflect, perhaps, a post-enlightenment departure from the ubiquity of religion in society and nascent scientific thought and writing.
Why is all this important? In losing BC and AD, we would only stand to gain a relatively nondescript replacement in BCE/CE. What is a ‘Common Era’? What can we expect from the period ‘Before Common Era’? These phrases have simply piggybacked the existing conceptual dating framework and revised the wording with similar – but largely meaningless – terms. The point is evidently to offer more neutral dating terminology in an increasingly secular landscape. Indeed, the advantages of opting for terminology without reference to Christ appear to be that they comply precisely with a more temporal outlook, with all the potential benefits that can stem from that choice: to permit an interfaith use of the same calendar.
Yet by so doing we are missing the point that, certainly in Western Europe, Anno Domini was precisely how letters, missives and chronicles opened and the year was recorded. It was the method of recording the vital dating information required by historians of those periods since the birth of Christ (i.e. the last 2,000 years). Where possible, historians ought to use language that reflects the terminology used by those who wrote the documents we use today to understand the past. We are mistaken in so casually rebranding the fundamentals of historical discourse without stopping to properly consider a meaningful alternative or to defend the existing approach.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/calling-time-bc-and-ad?utm_source=Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5158bc40d1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-5158bc40d1-1214148&mc_cid=5158bc40d1
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WHAT GOD, QUANTUM MECHANICS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS HAVE IN COMMON
Some people confuse agnosticism (not knowing) with apathy (not caring). Take Francis Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Institutes of Health. He is a devout Christian, who believes that Jesus performed miracles, died for our sins and rose from the dead. In his 2006 bestseller The Language of God, Collins calls agnosticism a “cop-out.” When I interviewed him, I told him I am an agnostic and objected to “cop-out.”
Collins apologized. “That was a put-down that should not apply to earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don’t find an answer,” he said. “I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence.” I have examined the evidence for Christianity, and I find it unconvincing. I’m not convinced by any scientific creation stories, either, such as those that depict our cosmos as a bubble in an oceanic “multiverse.”
People I admire fault me for being too skeptical. One is the late religious philosopher Huston Smith, who called me “convictionally impaired.” Another is megapundit Robert Wright, an old friend, with whom I’ve often argued about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism. Wright once asked me in exasperation, “Don’t you believe anything?” Actually, I believe lots of things, for example, that war is bad and should be abolished.
But when it comes to theories about ultimate reality, I’m with Voltaire. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” Voltaire said, “but certainty is an absurd one.” Doubt protects us from dogmatism, which can easily morph into fanaticism and what William James calls a “premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Below I defend agnosticism as a stance toward the existence of God, interpretations of quantum mechanics and theories of consciousness. When considering alleged answers to these three riddles, we should be picky.
Why do we exist? The answer, according to the major monotheistic religions, including the Catholic faith in which I was raised, is that an all-powerful, supernatural entity created us. This deity loves us, as a human father loves his children, and wants us to behave in a certain way. If we’re good, He’ll reward us. If we’re bad, He’ll punish us. (I use the pronoun “He” because most scriptures describe God as male.)
My main objection to this explanation of reality is the problem of evil. A casual glance at human history, and at the world today, reveals enormous suffering and injustice. If God loves us and is omnipotent, why is life so horrific for so many people? A standard response to this question is that God gave us free will; we can choose to be bad as well as good.
The late, great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist, who died in July 2021, slaps down the free will argument in his book Dreams of a Final Theory. Noting that Nazis killed many of his relatives in the Holocaust, Weinberg asks: Did millions of Jews have to die so the Nazis could exercise their free will? That doesn’t seem fair. And what about kids who get cancer? Are we supposed to think that cancer cells have free will?
On the other hand, life isn’t always hellish. We experience love, friendship, adventure and heartbreaking beauty. Could all this really come from random collisions of particles? Even Weinberg concedes that life sometimes seems “more beautiful than strictly necessary.” If the problem of evil prevents me from believing in a loving God, then the problem of beauty keeps me from being an atheist like Weinberg. Hence, agnosticism.
Quantum mechanics is science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is, physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works. Many physicists—most, probably—adhere to the Copenhagen interpretation, advanced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But that is a kind of anti-interpretation, which says physicists should not try to make sense of quantum mechanics; they should “shut up and calculate,” as physicist David Mermin once put it.
Introducing consciousness into physics undermines its claim to objectivity. Moreover, as far as we know, consciousness arises only in certain organisms that have existed for a brief period here on Earth. So how can quantum mechanics, if it’s a theory of information rather than matter and energy, apply to the entire cosmos since the big bang? Information-based theories of physics seem like a throwback to geocentrism, which assumed the universe revolves around us. Given the problems with all interpretations of quantum mechanics, agnosticism, again, strikes me as a sensible stance.
The debate over consciousness is even more fractious than the debate over quantum mechanics. How does matter make a mind? A few decades ago, a consensus seemed to be emerging. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his cockily titled Consciousness Explained, asserted that consciousness clearly emerges from neural processes, such as electrochemical pulses in the brain. Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that consciousness is generated by networks of neurons oscillating in synchrony.
Gradually, this consensus collapsed, as empirical evidence for neural theories of consciousness failed to materialize. As I point out in my recent book Mind-Body Problems, there are now a dizzying variety of theories of consciousness. Theorists such as Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, have conjectured that quantum effects underpin consciousness, but this theory is even more lacking in evidence than integrated information theory.
Researchers cannot even agree on what form a theory of consciousness should take. Should it be a philosophical treatise? A purely mathematical model? A gigantic algorithm, perhaps based on Bayesian computation? Should it borrow concepts from Buddhism, such as anatta, the doctrine of no self? All of the above? None of the above? Consensus seems farther away than ever. And that’s a good thing. We should be open-minded about our minds.
I’m definitely a skeptic. I doubt we’ll ever know 1. whether God exists, 2. what quantum mechanics means, 3. how matter makes mind.
These three puzzles, I suspect, are different aspects of a single, impenetrable mystery at the heart of things. But one of the pleasures of agnosticism—perhaps the greatest pleasure—is that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon.
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Theodor H. Schwartz, Neurosurgeon:
On relieving pressure in brain by cutting a hole in the skull
One of the most common surgeries that neurosurgeons do is head trauma. And head traumas are very common. But these are neurosurgical emergencies. Anyone who has hit their head severely enough, they will have swelling in their brain. And we can now save these people's lives just by opening up the skull. Because as the brain swells, if it has nowhere to go, that's when the pressure goes up. So neurosurgeons can go in very quickly and remove part of the skull, and let that pressure out and then put the skull back, maybe, two or three weeks later, or maybe even a few months later when the swelling has gone down and we can save lots and lots of lives that way.
On the union of the brain and the mind
I think everything that a human being experiences, in the external world and the internal world is all your brain. I think that's all that there is. I don't think there's some mystical second substance called "mind." ... We think the mind and the brain are different things because it's built into our language. It's how we talk about the mental world around us. We were raised speaking a language with words that refer to things that may not exist in the real world — and one of those things is mind. … I do not think we have as much agency over what we do, if any. And I think the brain is processing information, below our radar, unconsciously, subconsciously, whatever you want to call it, and creating behaviors. And we are just along for the ride to some extent.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/05/nx-s1-5061556/for-this-brain-surgeon-the-operating-room-is-the-ultimate-in-mindful-meditation?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
I quoted the first paragraph since I couldn’t help thinking that our remote ancestors who seemed to have such a knack for drilling holes in the skull, allegedly to release evil spirit, did save lives now and then when it was a matter of severe concussion and brain swelling. They didn’t have our modern language for it — their world was full of demons and other magical agencies — but once in a while they had the right procedure.
Speaking of language, can we really prevail over the millennia when the mind was separated from the brain, where there was matter and spirit — and the mind belonged to the spirit world. And it’s of course more splendid to see the Northern Lights as the Valkyries collecting the spirits of dead heroes to take them to Valhalla than to talk about the ionosphere and wave frequencies —though it seems the more we know, the more mysterious, fascinating and colorful it becomes.
Still, I don’t know if we can ever romance the language of neuroscience for the layman, but the neuroscientists do experience at least moments of ecstasy when they contemplate the intricate mysteries of neural interaction. My mother was a brain research scientist. One time, in her old age, she fearlessly stated: “The most wonderful thing in the Universe is the human brain.”
If that sounds like a blasphemy to you, consider the intrepid Emily Dickinson:
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—
The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
Emily Dickinson, c. 1862
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EACH MAJOR RELIGION CLAIMS TO BE THE ONLY TRUE ONE
~ Until I was 14, I simply accepted everything I’d been told about Islam. I was taught that being born into a Muslim family is a blessing and is the greatest gift that Allah can bestow upon someone. I initially thought the Sunni path I followed was the one true path, just like my Shia, Bori and Ismaili friends adhered to the teachings of the sects their families followed. I noticed how everyone around me claimed to have a monopoly on the truth, which made me question who was actually right. I started to view Islam — and religion in general — as something dogmatic, irrational, unscientific and, most of all, completely sexist.
…
I want to share what I’ve learned about Islam over the years. I plan to defend it and give credit where it’s due — Islam, after all, gave women the right to work and own property back in the seventh century — and I also plan to ruthlessly point out areas that need reform (yes, Islam does allow men to have four wives and sex slaves).
. . .
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Islam, it’s that my former religion, just like any other ideology, has its flaws. Religion should not be immune to criticism. It’s important to have an honest dialogue about religion and identify what can be improved — and that’s exactly what I plan to do. ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/06/07/ex-muslim-students-op-ed-about-leaving-islam-removed-due-to-personal-safety-concerns/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=friendlyatheist_060715UTC050609_daily&utm_content=&spMailingID=48823200&spUserID=MTEwMzMwODA5NzI1S0&spJobID=700905956&spReportId=NzAwOTA1OTU2S0
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“EX-MUSLIM BECAUSE”
#ExMuslimBecause ~ Ironically, apostasy laws. No real God can be such a coward that he has to urge some of His creation to kill others.
#ExMuslimBecause ~ I have lived under in an Islamic state in Iran. Nothing could be worse.
#ExMuslimBecause ~ I was told I was a Muslim. But then I learned that religion is not a gene and being born to believers doesn't make you one.
#ExMuslimBecause ~ I couldn't debate or criticize islam without my parents yelling or screaming at me, and threatening me.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/11/20/people-who-left-islam-are-explaining-why-using-the-exmuslimbecause-hashtag/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=friendlyatheist_112015UTC051111_daily&utm_content=&spMailingID=50068899&spUserID=MTEwMzMwODA5NzI1S0&spJobID=802774045&spReportId=ODAyNzc0MDQ1S0
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THE GRAYING (AND DYING) OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
“Priests and nuns are growing old and dying, and there’s nowhere near enough new recruits to replace them. A Washington Post article puts the problem in context with the story of Sister Rachel Terry, a young nun living in a convent in Washington with just four other nuns who are all decades older than her, all in a building originally meant to house far more people. The article includes these dramatic statistics:
The U.S. population was 195 million in 1965, and there were about 181,000 nuns…
Today there are 321 million Americans and approximately 48,000 nuns. And the vast majority of them are retired. Sixty-nine percent of all nuns are 70 or older. Just 3 percent of nuns in the United States are under age 49.
Nor is the priesthood doing much better. As this article points out, the retirement costs for a huge population of elderly priests are a looming iceberg for a church whose finances are already bleeding from an exodus of ex-Catholics.
Low donations by parishioners and rising expenditures led 24 percent of U.S. parishes into the red in 2013, according to a study published in August by the Center for Church Management and Business Ethics at Villanova.
Cost-cutting has contributed to a decline in the number of U.S. parishes, a steep drop in the number of Catholic schools, as well as fewer hospitals, according to CARA.
A review of 51 dioceses that provide detailed financial information showed a clergy pension funding gap of nearly $700 million – a figure that does not include other post-retirement benefits, or obligations to lay staff. If the remainder of the roughly 197 dioceses in the United States face similar funding issues, the total pension gap would be close to $2 billion.
Even though the church has vast wealth, most of it is in real estate and other non-liquid assets that can’t easily be tapped. They’re dependent on donations to fund their day-to-day operation, and those have been drying up as more and more people cease attending.
And they’re further hampered by their medieval organizational structure. Unlike any other employer, they can’t just lay off priests or nuns. They’re responsible for them for life. The pensions paid to retired clergy are meager – around $20,000 a year, less than the cost of living in most areas – but even so, with a tidal wave of retirements on the horizon, there’s a financial crisis looming up ahead.
The lessening of religiosity in general makes such a drastic lifelong commitment less appealing than it used to be. Smaller families mean that there’s less parental encouragement for people to join the clergy.
And last but not least, the spread of equal rights has severely eroded Catholicism’s feudal employment model: Marriage equality and greater acceptance of LGBT people generally mean that gay Catholics have options other than lifelong celibacy, whereas the increasing economic and political power of women make the subordination of nuns in a male-dominated church far more noticeable and an offensive anachronism.
In the short term, the church is likely to plug the hole by accelerating something they’ve already been doing, which is importing priests and nuns from the countries that still produce a surplus [e.g. Nigeria]. But many of those countries where Catholicism still holds more cultural power are socially conservative and illiberal, and clergy with those attitudes are likely to clash even harder against progressive, do-your-own-thing American Catholics. In the long run, it will probably make the chasm between the hierarchy and the laity even larger and contribute further to the church’s decline. 
Catholics in Nigeria, Palm Sunday
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2015/09/the-graying-of-the-priesthood-continued/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Atheist%2009%2024%2015%20(1)&utm_content=&spMailingID=49615803&spUserID=MTEwMzMwODA5NzI1S0&spJobID=763209570&spReportId=NzYzMjA5NTcwS0#sthash.l8b6a3H7.dpuf
Oriana:
The last place I'd want to be for any serious illness is a Catholic hospital. It sounds like an oxymoron, with Catholicism being so death-oriented.
But it is an interesting problem: what to do with all the excess Catholic churches, some of them quite lovely but too expensive to maintain?
Charles: THE WOULD-BE NUNS HAVE DECIDED TO BE NONES
Amazing
statistics! The would-be nuns have decided to be nones. Bottom line is
that the Catholic church, once one of the richest organizations in the world, is
going broke.
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USE OF ULTRASOUND TO TREAT PARKINSON’S, ALZHEIMER’S, AND ADDICTION
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been used to successfully treat thousands of patients who suffer from tremors and Parkinson's disease. DBS is a type of neuromodulation that uses implantable devices to provide electrical stimulation in order to alter nervous system activity. In 2012, Ali Rezai, MD, and his team of researchers made history when they implanted a pacemaker into the brain of an Alzheimer's patient for the first time in the United Sates.
Dr. Vibhor Krishna, a neurosurgeon recently hired under the Chronic Brain Injury Discovery Theme Initiative, has joined Dr. Rezai's team which is now investigating the use of DBS as a novel approach to target other disorders including traumatic brain injury. Studies have revealed that if the appropriate nodes in the brain can be accessed and stimulated, there will be a benefit to the patient through modification of the symptoms associated with the condition.
Another method that is being evaluated as a neurological therapy option is high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). Human tissue is exposed to HIFU waves, which results in heat production and the formation of cavities within the tissue. Prolonged exposure of tissues to this high intensity sonographic energy creates these cavities as a consequence of the formation of gas bubbles, which burst and damage the tissue. Dr. Krishna contrasts Gamma Knife radiosurgery to HIFU, indicating that HIFU provides real-time monitoring and precise targeting, while being non-invasive.
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CHAPEL HILL, NC – In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine co-authored by Vibhor Krishna, MD, associate professor of neurosurgery at the UNC School of Medicine, researchers show that a new focused ultrasound treatment improved dyskinesia and motor impairment in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Parkinson’s disease is a common neurological disorder characterized by the loss of dopamine neurons in the brain.
Patients with Parkinson’s disease can be effectively treated with medications such as levodopa. However, some patients develop dyskinesia – involuntary movements – and motor impairment. Dyskinesia is an involuntary movement of any region of the body that can occur with long-term use of levodopa. At the same time, motor impairment is characterized by the return of debilitating Parkinsonian symptoms as medication effectiveness declines.
Vibhor Krishna, MD
“Focused ultrasound is an exciting new treatment for patients with certain neurological disorders,” said Krishna, who also is vice chair of inpatient operations in the UNC Department of Neurosurgery. “The procedure is incisionless, eliminating the risks associated with surgery. Using focused ultrasound, we can target a specific area of the brain and safely ablate the diseased tissue.”
Patients who receive focused ultrasound treatment can go home the same day after surgery. This treatment was FDA-approved for patients with essential tremor in 2016, and now this pivotal trial has led to FDA-approval of focused ultrasound ablation to treat dyskinesia and motor impairment in Parkinson’ disease.
“Almost twice as many patients achieved improved motor function or reduced dyskinesia in the focused ultrasound group than those who underwent a sham procedure,” Krishna said. “In addition, we observed that 75% of patients in the focused ultrasound group maintained their results for up to one year after the treatment.”
For this pivotal trial, the researchers randomly assigned 94 Parkinson’s disease patients with dyskinesias or motor impairment to undergo either focused ultrasound ablation or a “sham” procedure. The primary outcome was a response to therapy at three months, defined as a decrease of at least three points from baseline either in the score on the Movement Disorders Society–Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale, part III (off medication state), or in the score on the Unified Dyskinesia Rating Scale (on medication state). Secondary outcomes included changes from baseline to month three in the scores on various parts of the Movement Disorders Society–Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale.
Sixty-nine patients were assigned to undergo ultrasound ablation, and 25 underwent the sham (control) procedure. In the focused ultrasound group, 65 patients completed the primary-outcome assessment, while 22 in the control group completed the study. In the focused ultrasound group, 45 patients (69%) had a response, as compared with 7 (32%) in the control group.
The adverse effects related to ablation of the globus pallidus were infrequent and included speech difficulty, visual disturbance, and gait difficulty – in one patient each. There was one serious adverse event documented one week after the treatment in one patient.
“Our research aims to optimize focused ultrasound treatment to minimize risks and maximize improvements,” Krishna said. “We observed that clinical outcomes after focused ultrasound ablation can be site-specific. Specifically, we observed two distinct hotspots in the globus pallidus that correlated with improvements in dyskinesia and motor impairment respectively. In the future, we aim to investigate whether these findings can lead to a personalized approach to treating Parkinson’s disease with focused ultrasound.”
https://news.unchealthcare.org/2023/02/new-focused-ultrasound-effective-for-treating-parkinsons-movement-disorders/
Oriana:
I urge you to watch the video. It’s fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/wtch?v=qF_DAWvOUfy
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UP TO HALF OF THE DEMENTIA CASES MAY BE PREVENTABLE
Nearly half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed if people adopted certain habits, according to the report, which was written by a group of almost 30 experts convened by the Lancet and based o n an analysis of hundreds of studies.
Some risk factors for dementia can be best addressed through policy solutions—for example, by passing climate policies that reduce the public’s exposure to air pollution, a risk factor for cognitive decline. But there’s also plenty that individuals can do. Even people with genetic risk factors for dementia may be able to extend their cognitively healthy lifespans if they take certain actions, says Livingston, lead author of the report.
Here’s where to start, according to the latest research.
Keep your brain busy
Research suggests people who get a strong early-life education, as well as those who work mentally stimulating jobs during midlife, are at decreased risk of developing dementia later on. But even if neither of those are the case for you, there’s still plenty you can do to keep your mind sharp.
Aim to have plenty of new and varied experiences that get the brain working in different ways, Livingston suggests—things like learning a new skill, reading a book (especially one outside your usual genre), or traveling somewhere you’ve never been. Variety is key, Livingston emphasizes. “If you just do Sudoku, you become good at Sudoku, but that doesn’t generalize to the rest of your brain,” she says. “Your brain has lots of different functions, so the idea is to keep them all engaged.”
Socialize
One of the best ways to keep your brain busy, Livingston says, is by “talk[ing] to a variety of different people, because you don’t know what they’re going to say.” Doing so is a win-win: you’re keeping your brain sharp by coming up with responses and conversation topics, and getting plenty of social interaction at the same time.
Social contact is good for nearly all aspects of health, studies show—and that goes for cognitive health, too. People with active social calendars from midlife onward may be up to 50% less likely to experience cognitive decline as they age, relative to people who are more isolated, according to one research review from 2023. And there seems to be something special about friendship. Research suggests that people who socialize not just with family, but also with non-relatives, tend to have better cognitive performance as they get older.
Stay physically active
Being sedentary isn’t good for your physical, mental, or cognitive health. A 2023 study found a strong link between having 10 or more hours of sedentary time per day and being diagnosed with dementia. Conversely, studies suggest that regular exercise may slash the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by nearly half, and any kind of dementia by almost 30%.
The U.S. government recommends getting at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise each week to maintain good health and ward off chronic disease.
But even if you can’t reach those benchmarks, doing anything is better than nothing. Virtually any amount of physical activity “really begins to shift the dial,” Livingston says. “You don’t have to be an ultramarathon runner”—just spend a little time each day moving in whatever way is enjoyable and sustainable for you.
And if you can, get moving outside. A 2022 study suggests spending time in green space may keep the mind healthy.
Wear a helmet
If your preferred form of exercise is a contact sport or an activity that comes with the risk of falling—like riding a bicycle—it’s crucial to wear a helmet when you do it. Suffering even one head injury over the course of your life may put you in danger of developing dementia, according to 2021 research. (This is the “precipitating injury” that was discussed in an article I used in a previous recent blog.)
Take care of your mental health
Another argument in favor of regular exercise: it may help prevent or treat depression, which is another well-established risk factor for dementia.
But, of course, exercise alone may not be enough to protect mental health. Psychotherapy and medication are considered the gold-standard treatments for depression, and a 2022 study found that people with depression who were treated using such methods had a significantly lower dementia risk than people with untreated depression.
Control blood pressure and weight
Many of the health metrics that come up doing a routine physical—including your levels of “bad” cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes risk, and weight—also have ties to dementia risk, studies suggest. Controlling these factors by exercising regularly; eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other nutritious foods; and taking medication, if recommended by your physician, may help preserve your cognitive health, too.
Remenber that smoking and drinking damage the brain
If you needed yet another reason to quit smoking, here’s one: current smokers may be up to 40% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than people who have never used cigarettes, according to a 2015 research review—but that increased risk seems to mostly disappear among former smokers. Quitting, in other words, seems to be beneficial for your health in numerous ways.
Excessive alcohol consumption can also harm the brain, studies suggest. Current U.S. dietary guidelines recommend that men have no more than two alcoholic beverages per day and women no more than one. And having even fewer than that is likely a good idea, according to a flurry of recent research. Increasingly, science suggests that the less you drink, the better for your brain and body.
Protect your senses
Hearing and vision loss are both associated with dementia, perhaps in part because these conditions decrease the brain’s exposure to external stimuli and in part because they make it harder to stay cognitively, physically, and socially active. While there are some things you can do proactively—such as keeping volume low when listening to music—both conditions can be somewhat unavoidable parts of aging.
If they happen to you, don’t delay getting treatment. Studies show that using hearing aids or correcting vision problems, such as by having cataracts removed, can slow one’s rate of cognitive decline.
https://time.com/7005862/how-to-prevent-dementia-cognitive-decline/?utm_source=pocket_discover_health
Oriana:
As usual, there are confounding variables. People who smoke are more likely to poor and uneducated, factors associated with a cascade of other indicators of poor health. When it comes to socializing, aside from high-quality socializing with intellectually challenging individuals, I find that I like solitude best — and solitude is in fact healing even after a quality conversation, which may bet too excitatory. On the whole, the rule for longevity is “quiet brain.”
ending on beauty:
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
~ John Keats
Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night on the Rhone
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