Female peregrine falcon and juvenile red-tailed hawk facing off; photo by Roy Gilbert*
THORNS AND ROSES
Saint Ignatius
pale and fiery
passing by a rose
flung himself on the bush
mutilating his flesh
with the bell of his black frock
he wished to stifle
the beauty of the world
which gushed from earth as from a wound
and lying at the bottom
of the cradle of thorns
he saw
that the blood flowing from his brow
was clotting on his lashes
in the shape of a rose
and his blind hand
seeking out thorns
was pierced
by the petals’ soft touch
the cheated saint wept
amid the mockery of flowers
thorns and roses
roses and thorns
we pursue happiness
~ Zbigniew Herbert
(translator not listed; slightly modified by Oriana)
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THE THORNY ORIGIN OF ROSES
A new study has found that an ancient gene family that evolved 400 million years ago is responsible for the thorns on roses and other plants.
Other than being a symbol for love and romance, roses are commonly known for their sharp spikes — prickles that protrude from the stems to ward off animals looking to munch on the buds.
They’re not the only plant to have this defense mechanism: Other flowers such as spider flowers or brambles, the flowering shrub responsible for raspberries and blackberries, bear the sharp points, as do certain crop plants such as tomatoes, eggplants, barley and rice.
But how could all these species, many of which evolved separately over the course of millions of years, come to have the same spiny feature? A team of international researchers found that the answer lies in their DNA, tracing the origin to one ancient gene family that’s responsible for the thorns in all these variations, according to a new study published in the journal Science.
The findings not only open the door for scientists looking to create prickle-free variants but also provide insight into the evolutionary history of an extremely diverse genus of plants, experts say.
The evolution of prickles
Contrary to pop culture references, roses do not have thorns, which are the sharp woody points of certain shrubs and trees, including honey locusts and citrus trees. The flowers instead have prickles that form from the skin of the plant, similar to how hair grows.
Prickles have been around for at least 400 million years, dating back to when ferns and their relatives emerged with some bearing prickles on their stems. The trait has since then popped up — and disappeared — at different points in evolutionary time, said study coauthor Zachary Lippman, plant biologist and professor of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York.
One of the most diverse plant genera, known as Solanum — which includes crops such as potatoes, tomatoes and eggplants — first gained prickles 6 million years ago. Today, the genus has more than 1,000 species that appear throughout the world, with around 400 of those referred to as “spiny solanum” for their prickles, according to the University of Utah.
When a common trait, such as prickles, appears independently across different lineages and species, that is known as convergent evolution, and occurs when species adapt similarly to certain environmental needs. Wings are another example of a feature that evolved in this way among different species of birds, as well as other animals such as bats and even some types of squirrels that have the winglike structure, said Lippman, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Prickles and thorns are an evolved defense against herbivores — animals that eat plants — and can also aid in growth, plant competition and water retention, according to the study. It was previously unknown as to what exactly caused ferns and other unrelated plants to grow the prickles. Now, the study authors have found that an ancient gene family known as Lonely Guy, or LOG, has served as a gatekeeper for the trait, switching it on and off in different species across millions of years.
Lonely Guy genes
By removing prickles from various species, including roses and eggplants, the authors found that a LOG gene was responsible for the prickles in about 20 types of plants studied. LOG-related genes are found in all plants, even dating back to mosses, which are regarded as the first dry-land plant, Lippman said. The genes are responsible for activating a hormone known as cytokinin that is important for a plant’s basic functions on a cellular level, including cell division and expansion, which in turn affects the plant’s growth.
“It’s not that there was one common ancestor that had prickles, and then it radiated out over 400 million years to all these others, and then they were lost sporadically. In fact, what it looks like is that they seem to be quite readily gained in different lineages,” Lippman said. “Now, the question is,t how often is convergent evolution not just the trait that we see, but the genes behind the trait?”
He added, “Our study is, I think probably the first to really demonstrate the power of those tools (genetic and genome sequencing) to span such a wide evolutionary distance to ask this very classic question about convergent evolution in organismal evolution of plants or animals.”
The discovery adds a valuable tool for researchers looking into the extent of protection the prickles offer against herbivores. This level of defense has previously been challenging to assess since manually removing prickles from already grown plants — to test whether they are more vulnerable without them — damages the tissue and can compromise plants’ health, said Tyler Coverdale, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame who was not part of the new study.
“By knocking out prickles with targeted genetic mutations, we can more fully understand the ecological role of physical plant defenses,” Coverdale said in an email. “Prickles are a key evolutionary development that allow plants to withstand herbivory, which is why many of the spiny Solanum are found in areas with historically high large herbivore diversity. Without this key innovation, it is possible that Solanum would be much more restricted in its range and diversity.”
Genetically removing prickles
Before this discovery, another method of removing prickles from plants was to attempt to breed the plant with another variation that had naturally lost its prickles, Lippman said, which is why there are some rose species without the spikes today.
But now that the gene responsible for the prickles has been identified, scientists can remove the prickles utilizing genome editing techniques such as CRISPR, a method scientists use for DNA modification of living organisms. Targeted gene editing can create more variations with ease and has fewer repercussions for the plant’s growth and fruit production, Coverdale said.
“Not only does this study tell us more about the evolution of prickles specifically, it also provides us with insights into the mechanics of how to engineer plant developmental pathways for agricultural improvement,” said Vivian Irish, plant biologist and a professor in Yale University’s department of molecular, cellular and developmental biology. Irish was not part of the new study but was the senior author of a 2020 study that found thorns grow on plants through the activity of stem cells.
“(LOG genes) have been repeatedly co-opted (a biological shift in a trait’s function) in different plant species for the formation of prickles, and also repeatedly lost in lineages where prickles are lost. … (C)o-option at many different levels might be nature’s rule of thumb, and that innovation in many cases might well reflect re-using old genes in new ways,” she added in an email.
For agricultural purposes, removing prickles could make harvesting easier and pave the way to get lesser-known produce into grocery stores.
An example the authors use are desert raisins, which are berries grown on prickly bushes native to Australia. With the prickles removed, the berry could be cultivated with much greater ease and would be more similar to common grocery store berries such as blueberries and strawberries, Lippman said.
“It’s really about having more knowledge … and understanding how important mutations were to give us the food that we eat at the scale that we eat it, and knowing that there’s more potential out there,” Lippman said. “The more that we understand under the hood, the more we’re going to have a chance to tweak the system, or the engine, if you will, to make it perform even better.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/01/science/rose-thorn-prickles-evolution-study
Oriana:
My first impulse was to substitute “thorns” for “prickles” throughout. But that would go against the startling thesis of the article, i.e. roses don’t have thorns (woody) but only “prickles.” Not being a botanist, who am I to argue?
But I do reserve the right to say that “prickles” will never “infiltrate” the popular culture, and we’ll continue to say that roses have thorns — a statement that works beautifully on the metaphorical level, saying that good things, even wonderful things, have their “thorns.” As Kahlil Gibran put it (I paraphrase): That which is your greatest joy will also be your greatest sorrow.
My biggest shock involving roses was not the first time I got stuck with a thorn (ahem, prickle), but, the first month in America, leaning my face to the first rose I saw in the New World —beautiful, perfect — and so large! But there was no scent. I leaned in deeper — still no scent. I tried to smell the blossom next to it, and the next — no scent. So that was the price for the prolific size: no scent. The hybridizers bred the scent of our of the roses. I was shaken up this, later paralleled by admiring huge juicy strawberries — which turned out to have no taste. It seemed like an omen and a reminder: there is a price for everything. 
*
“Writers have no real area of expertise.
They are merely generalists
with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
~ Lorrie Moore
*
HEAD OF IRANIAN UNIT COUNTERING MOSSAD WAS AN ISRAELI AGENT, SAYS EX-PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD
Iran’s former leader claims secret service division tasked with rooting out Israeli spies had within its ranks 20 who were working as moles and provided nuclear information
The head of an Iranian secret service unit set up to target Mossad agents working in the Islamic Republic turned out to be an Israeli agent himself, according to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Speaking to CNN Turk, Ahmadinejad claimed that a further 20 agents in the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also turned against Tehran.
The alleged double agents provided Israel with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program, according to his comments in the interview, which were widely picked up by international media.
The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021 but he and all of the other alleged Mossad moles were able to flee the country and are now living in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his hardline anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 reelection. He was prevented from running again for president earlier this year.
Other Iranian officials have in the past remarked about Mossad’s penetration in Iran. A former Iranian minister who served as an adviser to former president Hassan Rouhani said in 2022 that senior officials in Tehran should be fearing for their lives due to the “infiltration” of Israel’s spy agency, according to the London-based Persian-language Manoto news site.
Damaged buildings at the site of the assassination of Hezbollah terror group leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut’s southern suburbs, September 29, 2024.
Ahmadinejad’s assertions came as Israel has been battling Iran’s proxy terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and achieving remarkable success apparently based on profound intelligence. In the past two weeks, thousands of Hezbollah handheld communications devices exploded in Lebanon, injuring at least 1,500 of its members in incidents the terror group blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility. In addition, airstrikes have killed almost the entire top tier of Hezbollah’s command structure, including the terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike on his Beirut bunker.
French newspaper Le Parisien, citing a Lebanese source, reported Saturday that Israel was tipped off about Nasrallah’s presence by an Iranian mole.
Immediately after news broke of Nasrallah’s death, the Iranians rushed their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to a secure location.
In July, the Hamas terror group’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an explosion at the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying during a visit to attend the funeral of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi. Although Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s death, Iran has vowed to retaliate.
Days after Haniyeh’s death, Iran arrested at least two dozen people for suspected connection to the assassination, The New York Times reported at the time, citing two Iranians familiar with the investigation.
Those arrested included senior Iranian intelligence officers, military officials, and staff at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-run guesthouse, the report said. Iranians feared a major security breach among high-ranking officials made the daring assassination possible.
Ahmadinejad said the agents were behind some key Mossad successes in Iran, including the 2018 theft of nuclear program documents that were taken from Tehran to Israel and revealed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The trove is thought to have been a factor in convincing then-US president Donald Trump to pull out of the nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.
The head of the counterintelligence unit was revealed as a double agent in 2021 but he and all of the other alleged Mossad moles were able to flee the country and are now living in Israel, claimed Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for his hardline anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and for the violent crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 reelection. He was prevented from running again for president earlier this year.
Other Iranian officials have in the past remarked about Mossad’s penetration in Iran. A former Iranian minister who served as an adviser to former president Hassan Rouhani said in 2022 that senior officials in Tehran should be fearing for their lives due to the “infiltration” of Israel’s spy agency, according to the London-based Persian-language Manoto news site.
An unverified image of the Tehran building where Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed on July 31, 2024.
A series of mysterious explosions and other setbacks have plagued Iran’s nuclear program over the years.
In November 2020, top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in Iran in what The New York Times would later report was a sophisticated hit led by a Mossad team that reportedly deployed a computerized machine gun.
Tehran frequently claims to foil Mossad operations in the country, but the veracity of such claims is unclear.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guard claimed that 12 people had been arrested on suspicion of serving as operatives collaborating with Israel and planning acts against Iran’s security.
Israel has been at war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza and engaged in daily fighting with the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon — both Iranian proxies — since Hamas committed its massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/head-of-iranian-unit-countering-mossad-was-israeli-agent-says-ex-president-ahmadinejad/
FTAdams:
I think the people of Iran aren't behind the mullahs, and have suffered many terrorist acts from them. Decayed loyalties and anti-regime spirit make the whole state apparatus vulnerable to penetration by foreign agents and sabotage by loyal Iranians.
It isn't a stable situation for Khamenei. He'd best stay underground, far from the Iranian nuclear installations, which are no doubt teetering on the brink of destruction as we watch.
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DO RUSSIAN NUKES STILL WORK?
RUSSIAN nuclear test
Russian nukes used to work. Russia went as far as nuking their own military and civilians, to test how their nukes work, in 1954. (Google “Totskoye nuclear exercise” — horrifying stuff.)
However, since recently, Russian nukes don’t seem to work as planned. The last test of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile Sarmat/Satan-II left a huge crater at the test site near Arkhangelsk.
The missile exploded in the silo (likely during fueling), apparently killing engineers and scientists who were there to monitor the test.
And that’s the problem: to work, nukes require a lot of maintenance, precise engineering and following strict operation procedures.
In the last few years — especially after Putin ordered Russian troops to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — lots of professionals left Russia. Even more probably ran away when Putin began arresting scientists who worked on various missile-developing projects and throwing them in jails for “treason” (because the Russian missiles didn’t work as planned).
One scientist was gravely sick with cancer — but Putin’s sadists still grabbed him and delivered from Siberia to Moscow, where he died in the pre-trial jail within days.
If anything, the desire of professionals to work on a Russian defense project is at all times low. Smart people realize the dangers aren’t worth the money that Putin is prepared to pay — and most specialists capable of operating Soviet nukes were educated back in the Soviet Union. They aren’t just smart but also wise.
If I were involved in such a project and were unable to emigrate (some people can’t), I’d find a reason to resign that can’t be refused — personal health being one way to claim inability to continue working.
Putin is terribly short of people — especially of qualified people. For instance, Russian police lacks over 150,000 personnel and simply can’t get people to fill the vacancies.
I’m sure the question of whether the Russian nukes work — or will explode before the start — is a worry not only for Putin, but first of all, for the officers who will have to be at the launching site.
The information about the last unsuccessful test was widely available online and the crater at the place, where the test silo used to be, looked pretty awful.
Sabotage isn’t out of question, and Ukrainians already reported that some of the missiles and rockets shot at their cities didn’t explode — some of these munitions even had a note inside, “I did what I could.”
So, it’s not only the question of correct maintenance and engineering, but also whether the Russians are able to check that nothing has been intentionally damaged in the nukes to make them inoperable — and that’s a big job.
How many people are working on each nuke?
How many of them have a conscience?
Will all Russian officers obey by the command to fire nukes, aimed at cities in other countries?
Most Russians may not realize the consequences of firing a nuclear missile, but officers of the strategic missile forces studied it at military academies.
They know the protocols and what is likely to happen after that — and by now, they probably realize they may not be even able to launch the missile due to a preemptive strike by the other side.
For instance, Estonia’s head of the General Staff of the Defense Forces, General Vahur Karus, made it clear that Estonia would be ready to hit Russia if there were a threat to a NATO country.
And obviously, it’s not Estonia speaking — but NATO. Estonia is simply very close to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The biggest issue for Putin to order a nuclear strike (and it’s only Putin who can make such an order — no one else in Russia, let’s be clear about that) would be his chances to stay in power after that.
To me, such a chance is close to zero.
One way or another, for Putin to give such an order is unsurvivable.
Putin is a sadistic maniac, but he’s not insane. He won’t throw a nuke even if his life is in danger — he still has kids and a de-facto wife, grandkids. Their lives are in danger if he loses power.
Nukes are Putin’s ultimate threat — once it’s used and became a reality, then he’s finished as a leader and a resident of planet Earth.
The Russian system is too dysfunctional for Putin to order a nuclear strike — even if some of Russian nukes could be functional. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Flavio Zanchi:
Some analysts have pointed out that Russia can only launch fission warheads, if at all. Thermonuclear fusion bombs require trigger materials, such as tritium, which have a short half-life and need to be replaced every ten years or so, at eye watering expense. Many doubt that the expertise and the reactor capacity to produce tritium still exists in Russia.
Daniel Law:
It is the expertise and that has vanished like the snow in the Russian Spring sunshine. Tritium production requires money and there is no money. The UK spends more on its 200 warheads than Russia on 5,241 warheads for servicing and maintenance. In addition, it is very doubtful that the missiles will lift off, as missile are built out of valuable resources. First come the senior staff with their mistresses, dachas, the accounts in Turkey and UAE, then the next ranking and last the soldiers — many missiles have been stripped and what was left the soldiers sold to obtain vodka.
Corruption in Russia is not limited to a few but to all levels of society.
Elena Gold:
And I didn’t even mention the strong attitude of China and India, without which Russia won’t survive a month — and which both are totally against the use of nukes.
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WHAT IT WOULD TAKE FOR THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR TO END
Russia attacked Ukraine because Russians thought that Ukrainians would surrender.
When Ukrainians fought back, Russians were shocked.
They were unable to understand that Ukrainians don’t want to be Russians. That they don’t want to be part of the Great Mother Russia.
By now, they understood that Ukrainians don’t want to be Russians.
They realized they can’t win this war.
But they still refuse to accept it.
The only way the Ukraine war can end is that Russia has to stop fighting, says Anne Applebaum, American journalist and historian.
“Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia.”
And that’s what it will take to end the war in Ukraine. ~ Elaine Gold
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Oriana:
The analogies here fully reveal Russia’s imperialist attitudes. As Anne Applebaum said, “Just as the British decided in the early 20th century that Ireland is not British and the French decided in 1962 that Algeria is not France, so must the Russians come to accept that Ukraine is not Russia.”
It’s only now that we seem to be aware to what degree Russia is an old-style colonialist power. It’s ambition is to absorb adjacent territories (which it has been doing for centuries) — and expand, expand, expand -- all the time claiming that the country they are trying to subjugate is a "fake country" -- it's simply Russia and has always been.
France and England were able to see that even without their colonies, they were still great countries, great civilizations. I’m not sure if Russia has enough genuine national self-esteem to be content with a somewhat smaller territory. They’d still be the largest country in the world, but somehow that’s not enough. Nothing would be “enough.”
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LENIN EVERLASTING
On the totalitarian’s continued relevance:
Later in this issue [New Criterion, June 2024), Gary Saul Morson writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork The Gulag Archipelago. Much of that book is devoted to the details of the dehumanizing brutality of the Stalinist regime: its terrifying sadism and staggering assault on basic human dignity. The Stalinist horror show, in which terror was perfected in the forge of deliberately arbitrary deployment, had its roots in the brief but brutal reign of Vladimir Lenin.
This year marks the centenary of Lenin’s death. In January 1924, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could in his two years of rule, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three. “That was young,” you may say. But we reply, “Not nearly young enough.”
It is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What we have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed, and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what may be just as creepy is his model of government.
We were reminded of this when, late last year, Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain education-department priorities. Promoting a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government. We’re here to help.’”
We suppose that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about ten thousand times on social media, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant. The difference is that Reagan’s observation was meant as a warning, an admonition about the dangers of overweening bureaucracy. Lenin, by contrast, regarded the terrifying side of unlimited government as a feature, not a bug. He liked the terror. It has always been thus with budding totalitarians.
While Maximilien de Robespierre was a piker by comparison with Lenin, he nonetheless sang from the same chorus sheet, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted him. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew that achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about virtue and its “emanation,” terror.
Karl Marx made a note of that emanation, and in due course his student Lenin aced the class. As Winston Churchill noted in The World Crisis, his magnificent history of the Great War,
Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.
The cynosure of Lenin’s character, Churchill wrote, was “implacable vengeance . . . . His purpose to save the world; his method to blow it up.”
The quality of Lenin’s revenge was impersonal. Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed reluctance—even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire classes, to light the flames of intestine war in every land with the inevitable destruction of the well-being of whole nations—these were sublime abstractions.
The perfection of that sublimity lay partly in its arbitrariness, partly in its brutality. As Lenin observed in 1906, the dictatorship of the proletariat depended upon “authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on force.” Thus it is, as Leszek Kołakowski noted in Main Currents of Marxism, that, for Lenin, “ ‘true’ democracy” requires the “abolition of all institutions that have hitherto been regarded as democratic.” Freedom of the press, for example, Lenin dismissed as “so-called” freedom of the press, a bourgeois deceit. Sound familiar?
Lenin said he wanted to vest power in the people. But he insisted that the people had no business in deciding what their interests actually were. (Again, students of Rousseau will hear echoes of his proto-totalitarian idea of the “general will,” which he applauded, and the tawdry particular wills of individuals, which he was always ready to subjugate.)
At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimately freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “ ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today, his association with tyranny having knocked him out of the great game of political PR.
But is he completely gone? One of the most depressing recent spectacles has been the rehabilitation of people and movements that, just a few years back, seemed safely consigned to the underworld. But watching Eloi-like college students praising Hamas, chanting genocidal formulae such as “From the river to the sea,” even excusing the incontinent maunderings of Osama bin Laden, makes us wonder whether any enormity is sufficiently grave to overcome the moral anesthesia of the entitled class. Someone once described the on-again, off-again socialist Philip Rahv as a “born-again Leninist”—their number, it turns out, is legion.
Which is why we predict an effort, perhaps sotto voce at first, to rehabilitate Lenin. After all, he articulated exactly the desire of everyone, from the creepy Doyen of Davos, Klaus Schwab, on down, who tells you that he’s from the global government and he’s here to help. What socialism implies above all, said Lenin, is “keeping account of everything.”
Keeping track of your healthcare, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life. Just sign on the dotted line and those repurposed nannies will take care of . . . everything. Note the ambiguous signification of the phrase “take care of.”
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Reviewing the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, Kołakowski noted the “superhuman energy” through which the party was able to exact enormous sacrifices from the workers and peasants. It “saved Soviet power” but did so “at the cost of economic ruin, immense human suffering, the loss of millions of lives, and the barbarization of society.” We in America are not there yet, not quite, but we are teetering on the threshold, which is why it is an opportune moment to remember Vladimir Lenin and reject utterly his monstrous legacy.
https://newcriterion.com/article/lenin-everlasting/
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LENINTHINK
Lenin was more severe. ~ Vyacheslav Molotov, the only senior official to work for both Lenin and Stalin, when asked to compare them.
Lenin “in general” loved people but . . . his love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred ~ Maxim Gorky
When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. ~ Lenin
~ An old Soviet joke poses the question: What was the most important world-historical event of the year 1875? Answer: Lenin was five years old. ~
The point of the joke, of course, is that the Soviets virtually deified Lenin. Criticism of him was routinely referred to as “blasphemy,” while icon corners in homes and institutions were replaced by “Lenin corners.” Lenin museums sprung up everywhere, and institutions of every kind took his name. In addition to Leningrad, there were cities named Leninsk (in Kazakhstan), Leninogorsk (in Tatarstan), Leninaul (in Dagestan), Leninakan (in Armenia), Leninkend, Leninavan, and at least four different Leninabads. On a visit to the Caucasus I remember being surprised at seeing Mayakovsky’s famous verses about Lenin inscribed on a mountaintop: “Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live!” The famous mausoleum where his body is preserved served as the regime’s most sacred shrine.
As we approach the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, understanding him grows ever more important. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, Leninist ways of thinking continue to spread, especially among Western radicals who have never read a word of Lenin. This essay is not just about Lenin, and not just Leninism, the official philosophy of the ussr, but also the very style of thought that Lenin pioneered. Call it Leninthink.
Lenin did more than anyone else to shape the last hundred years. He invented a form of government we have come to call totalitarian, which rejected in principle the idea of any private sphere outside of state control. To establish this power, he invented the one-party state, a term that would previously have seemed self-contradictory since a party was, by definition, a part. An admirer of the French Jacobins, Lenin believed that state power had to be based on sheer terror, and so he also created the terrorist state.
Stephen Pinker has recently argued that the world has been getting less bloodthirsty. The Mongols, after all, destroyed entire cities. But the Mongols murdered other people; what is new, and uniquely horrible about the Soviets and their successors, is that they directed their fury at their own people. The Russian empire lost more people in World War I than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.
Numbers do not tell the whole story. Under the Third Reich, an ethnic German loyal to the regime did not have to fear arrest, but Lenin pioneered and Stalin greatly expanded a policy in which arrests were entirely arbitrary: that is true terror. By the time of the Great Terror of 1936–38, millions of entirely innocent people were arrested, often by quota. Literally no one was safe. The Party itself was an especially dangerous place to be, and the NKVD was constantly arresting its own members—a practice that was also true of its predecessor, the Cheka, which Lenin founded almost immediately after the Bolshevik coup.
NKVD interrogators who suspected they were to be arrested often committed suicide since they had no illusions about what arrest entailed. They had practiced exquisite forms of torture and humiliation on prisoners—and on prisoners’ colleagues, friends, and families. “Member of a family of a traitor to the fatherland” was itself a criminal category, and whole camps were set up for wives of “enemies of the people.” Never before had such practices defined a state.
For good reason, many have traced these practices to Lenin’s doctrines. In his view, Marx’s greatest contribution was not the idea of the class struggle but “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as far back as 1906 Lenin had defined dictatorship as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by absolutely any rules, and based directly on force.” He argued that a revolutionary Party must be composed entirely of professional revolutionaries, drawn mainly from the intelligentsia and subject to absolute discipline, with a readiness to do literally anything the leadership demanded.
These and other disastrous Leninist ideas derived from a specific Leninist way of thinking, and that is what this essay focuses on. I know this way of thinking in my bones. I am myself a pink diaper baby and I remember being taught this way of thinking, taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Memoirs of many ex-Communists, from David Horowitz to Richard Wright, confirm that, more than doctrines, it was the Leninist style of thought that defined the difference between an insider and an outsider. And that way of thought is very much with us.
Who Whom?
Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc. ~ Lenin’s instructions to authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918.
Lenin regarded all interactions as zero-sum. To use the phrase he made famous, the fundamental question is always “Who Whom?”—who dominates whom, who does what to whom, ultimately who annihilates whom. To the extent that we gain, you lose.
Contrast this view with the one taught in basic microeconomics: whenever there is a non-forced transaction, both sides benefit, or they would not make the exchange. For the seller, the money is worth more than the goods he sells, and for the buyer the goods are worth more than the money. Lenin’s hatred of the market, and his attempts to abolish it entirely during War Communism, derived from the opposite idea, that all buying and selling is necessarily exploitative. When Lenin speaks of “profiteering” or “speculation” (capital crimes), he is referring to every transaction, however small. Peasant “bagmen” selling produce were shot.
Basic books on negotiation teach that you can often do better than split the difference, since people have different concerns. Both sides can come out ahead—but not for the Soviets, whose negotiating stance John F. Kennedy once paraphrased as: what’s mine is mine; and what’s yours is negotiable. For us, the word “politics” means a process of give and take, but for Lenin it’s we take, and you give.
From this it follows that one must take maximum advantage of one’s position. If the enemy is weak enough to be destroyed, and one stops simply at one’s initial demands, one is objectively helping the enemy, which makes one a traitor. Of course, one might simply be insane. Long before Brezhnev began incarcerating dissidents in madhouses, Lenin was so appalled that his foreign minister, Georgy Chicherin, recommended an unnecessary concession to American loan negotiators, that he pronounced him mad—not metaphorically—and demanded he be forcibly committed. “We will be fools if we do not immediately and forcibly send him to a sanatorium.”
Such thinking automatically favors extreme solutions. If there is one sort of person Lenin truly hated more than any other, it is—to use some of his more printable adjectives—the squishy, squeamish, spineless, dull-witted liberal reformer. In philosophical issues, too, there can never be a middle ground. If you are not a materialist in precisely Lenin’s interpretation, you are an idealist, and idealism is simply disguised religion supporting the bourgeoisie. The following statement from his most famous book, What Is to Be Done?, is typical:
“The only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.” There is either rule by the bourgeoisie or dictatorship of the proletariat: “Every solution that offers a middle path is a deception . . . or an expression of the dull-wittedness of the petty-bourgeois democrats.”
Contrary to the wishes even of other Bolsheviks, Lenin categorically rejected the idea of a broad socialist coalition government. He was immensely relieved when the short-lived coalition with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries collapsed. Immediately after seizing power he declared the left-liberal Kadets “outside the law,” leading to the lynching of two of their ex-ministers in a Petersburg Hospital. He would soon arrest Mensheviks and the most numerous group of radicals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, famed for countless assassinations of tsarist officials. We think of show trials as Stalinist, but Lenin staged a show trial of Socialist Revolutionary leaders in 1922.
By the same token, Lenin always insisted on the most violent solutions. Those who do not understand him mistake his ideas for those of radicals like the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who argued that violence was permitted when necessary. That squishy formulation suggests that other solutions would be preferable. But for Lenin maximal violence was the default position. He was constantly rebuking subordinates for not using enough force, for restraining mobs from lynchings, and for hesitating to shoot randomly chosen hostages.
One could almost say that force had a mystical attraction for Lenin. He had workers drafted into a labor army where any shirking or lateness was punished by sentence to a concentration camp. Yes, Bolsheviks used the term concentration camp from the start, and did so with pride. Until economic collapse forced Lenin to adopt the New Economic Policy, he demanded that grain not be purchased from peasants but requisitioned at gunpoint. Naturally, peasants—Lenin called recalcitrant peasants “kulaks”—rebelled all over Russia. In response to one such “kulak” uprising Lenin issued the following order:
~ The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people. ~
Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”
Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Kołakowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer (vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.”
Lenin worked by a principle of anti-empathy, and this approach was to define Soviet ethics. I know of no other society, except those modeled on the one Lenin created, where schoolchildren were taught that mercy, kindness, and pity are vices. After all, these feelings might lead one to hesitate shooting a class enemy or denouncing one’s parents. The word “conscience” went out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (in the sense of Marxist-Leninist ideological consciousness). During Stalin’s great purges a culture of denunciation reigned, but it was Lenin who taught “A good communist is also a good Chekist.”
*Cheka was the first Soviet secret police organization and a forerunner to the KGB.
A special logic governs the Leninist approach to morality, legality, and rights. In his famous address to the Youth Leagues, Lenin complains that bourgeois thinkers have slanderously denied that Bolsheviks have any ethics. In fact,
~ We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is a deception . . . . We say that morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. . . . That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. ~
~ When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. ~
In short, Bolshevik morality holds that whatever contributes to Bolshevik success is moral, whatever hinders it is immoral.
Imagine someone saying: “my detractors claim I have no morals, but that is sheer slander. On the contrary, I have a very strict moral code, from which I never deviate: look out for number 1.” We might reply: the whole point of a moral code is to restrain you from acting only out of self-interest. Morality begins with number 2. A moral code that says you must do what you regard as your self-interest is no moral code at all. The same is true for a code that says the Communist Party is morally bound to do whatever it regards as in its interest.
Rabelais’s pleasure-seeking utopia, the Abbey of Thélème, was governed, like all abbeys, by a rule. In this case, however, the rule was an anti-rule: Fay çe que vouldras, “Do as you wish!” People were to be restrained from yielding to any restraints. Ever since, such self-canceling imperatives have been called Thelemite commands.
Bolshevik legality was also Thelemite. If by law one means a code that binds the state as well as the individual, specifies what is and is not permitted, and eliminates arbitrariness, then Lenin entirely rejected law as “bourgeois.” He expressed utter contempt for the principles “no crime without law” and “no punishment without a crime.” Recall that he defined the dictatorship of the proletariat as rule based entirely on force absolutely unrestrained by any law. His more naïve followers imagined that rule by sheer terror would cease when Bolshevik hold on power was secure, or when the New Economic Policy relaxed restrictions on trade, but Lenin made a point of disillusioning them.
“It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror,” he wrote. When D. I. Kursky, People’s Commissariat of Justice, was formulating the first Soviet legal code, Lenin demanded that terror and arbitrary use of power be written into the code itself! “The law should not abolish terror,” he insisted. “It should be substantiated and legalized in principle, without evasion or embellishment.”
So far as I know, never before had the law prescribed lawlessness. Do as you wish, or else. Lenin had ascribed the fall of the Paris Commune to the failure to eliminate all law, and so the Soviet state was absolutely forbidden from exercising any restraint on arbitrary use of power. Indeed, officials were punished for such restraint, which Lenin called impermissible slackness and Stalin would deem lack of vigilance.
The same logic applied to rights. On paper, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed more rights than any other state in the world. I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the USSR had absolute freedom of speech—so long as they did not lie. I recalled this curious concept of freedom when a student defended complete freedom of speech except for hate speech—and hate speech included anything he disagreed with. Whatever did not seem hateful was actually a “dog-whistle.”
As far back as 1919, Soviet parlance distinguished between purely formal law and what was called “the material determination of the crime.” A crime was not an action or omission specified in the formal code, because every “socially dangerous” act (or omission) was automatically criminal. Article 1 of the Civil Code of October 31, 1922 laid down that civil rights “are protected by the law unless they are exercised in contradiction to their social and economic purposes.” Like the “material” definition of crime, the concept of “purposefulness” (tselesoobraznost’) created a system of Thelemite rights: the state was absolutely prohibited from interfering with your rights unless it wanted to.
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LENINSPEAK
Lenin’s language, no less than his ethics, served as a model, taught in Soviet schools and recommended in books with titles like Lenin’s Language and On Lenin’s Polemical Art. In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.” Nikolay Valentinov, a Bolshevik who knew Lenin well before becoming disillusioned, reports him saying: “There is only one answer to revisionism: smash its face in!”
When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as “renegades” from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” You can see traces of this approach in the advice of Saul Alinsky—who cites Lenin—to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.”
Compulsive underlining, name calling, and personal invective hardly exhaust the ways in which Lenin’s prose assaults the reader. He does not just advance a claim, he insists that it is absolutely certain and, for good measure, says the same thing again in other words. It is absolutely certain, beyond any possible doubt, perfectly clear to anyone not dull-witted. Any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie can only be short-lived, he explains: “This is beyond doubt. Hence the absolute necessity of a separate . . . strictly class party of Social Democrats. . . . All this is beyond the slightest possible doubt.”
Nothing is true unless it is absolutely, indubitably so; if a position is wrong, it is entirely and irredeemably so; if something must be done, it must be done “immediately, without delay”; Party representatives are to make “no concessions whatsoever.” Under Lenin’s direction the Party demanded “the dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another.” It was not enough just to shoot kulaks summarily, they had “to be shot on the spot without trial,” a phrase that in one brief decree he managed to use in each of its six numbered commands before concluding: “This order is to be carried out strictly, mercilessly.” You’d think that was clear enough already.
No concessions, compromises, exceptions, or acts of leniency; everything must be totally uniform, absolutely the same, unqualifiedly unqualified. At one point he claims that the views of Marx and Engels are “completely identical,” as if they might have been incompletely identical.
Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed. In his attack on the epistemology of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, for instance, every argument contrary to dialectical materialism is rejected for that reason alone.
Valentinov, who saw Lenin frequently when he was crafting this treatise, reports that Lenin at most glanced through their works for a few hours. It was easy enough to attribute to them views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.
Valentinov was appalled that both Lenin and Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist, insisted that there was no need to understand opposing views before denouncing them, since the very fact that they were opposing views proved them wrong—and what was wrong served the enemy and so was criminal. He quotes Lenin:
~ Marxism is a monolithic conception of the world, it does not tolerate dilution and vulgarization by means of various insertions and additions. Plekhanov once said to me about a critic of Marxism . . . : “First, let’s stick the convict’s badge on him, and then after that we’ll examine his case.” And I think we must stick the “convict’s badge” on anyone and everyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we don’t go on to examine his case. That’s how every sound revolutionary should react. When you see a stinking heap on the road you don’t have to poke around in it to see what it is. Your nose tells you it’s shit, and you give it a wide berth. ~
“Lenin’s words took my breath away,” Valentinov recalls. I had the same reaction when I first heard a student explain that a view had to be wrong simply because it was voiced on Fox News.
Opponents objected that Lenin lied without compunction, and it is easy to find quotations in which he says—as he did to the Bolshevik leader Karl Radek—“Who told you a historian has to establish the truth?” Yes, we are contradicting what we said before, he told Radek, and when it is useful to reverse positions again, we will. Orwell caught this aspect of Leninism: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
And yet the concept of “lying,” if one stops there, does not reach the heart of the matter. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy remarks that, contrary to appearances, the hero was not a toady. Rather, he “was attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light.” A toady decides to toady, but Ivan Ilyich had no need to make such a decision. In much the same way, a true Leninist does not decide whether to lie. He automatically says what is most useful, with no reflection necessary. That is why he can show no visible signs of mendacity, perhaps even pass a lie detector test. La Rochefoucauld famously said that “hypocrisy is the tribute that v ice pays to virtue,” but a true Bolshevik is not even a hypocrite.
Western scholars who missed this aspect of Leninism made significant errors. For example, they estimated the size of the Soviet economy by assuming that official figures were distorted and made appropriate adjustments. But as Robert Conquest pointed out, “they were not distorted, they were invented.” The Soviets did not find out the truth and then exaggerate; they often did not know the truth themselves. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith hears that fifty million pairs of boots were produced that year and reflects that, for all he knows, no boots at all were produced. Orwell, who never studied the Soviet economy, grasped a point that escaped experts because he understood Leninthink.
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Lenin did not just invent a new kind of party, he also laid the basis for what would come to be known in official parlance as “partiinost’,” literally Partyness, in the sense of Party-mindedness. Arthur Koestler understood part of partiinost’ when he described a Communist confessing to fantastic crimes because loyalty to the Party trumped everything else. If the Party needed one to confess to spying for the Poles, Japanese, and Germans at the same time, while conspiring with Trotsky to murder Stalin and spread typhus among pigs—all while one was already in prison—a true, party-minded Bolshevik would do so.
In his celebrated “Catechism of a Revolutionary,” the nineteenth-century terrorist Sergei Nechaev—whose story inspired Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed—writes that a true revolutionary “has no interests, no habits, no property, not even a name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution.” Nechaev and his contemporary Pyotr Tkachov established a particular tradition of revolutionaries, to which Lenin traced his lineage. The true Party member cares for nothing but the Party. It is his family, his community, his church. And according to Marxism-Leninism, everything it did was guaranteed to be correct.
Trotsky, forced to reverse one of his positions to conform to the Party line, explained:
~ None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. . . . [I]f the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, he will say, just or unjust, it is my party, and I will support the consequences of the decision to the end. ~
Even this much-quoted statement does not get partiinost’ quite right, since, immediately after affirming that history guarantees the Party’s infallibility, Trotsky speaks of supporting the Party even when it is wrong. His ally, the prominent Bolshevik Yuri Pyatakov, did better. When Valentinov happened to meet Pyatakov in Paris, he reproached him for cowardice in renouncing his former Trotskyite views. Pyatakov replied by explaining the Leninist concept of the Party:
According to Lenin, the Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political, and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a Party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things which no other collective of men could achieve. . . . A real Communist . . . [is] a man who was raised by the Party and had absorbed its spirit deeply enough to become a miracle man.
Pyatakov grasped Lenin’s idea that coercion is not a last resort but the first principle of Party action. Changing human nature, producing boundless prosperity, overcoming death itself: all these miracles could be achieved because the Party was the first organization ever to pursue coercion without limits. In one treatise Stalin corrects the widespread notion that the laws of nature are not binding on Bolsheviks, and it is not hard to see how this kind of thinking took root. And, given an essentially mystical faith in coercion, it is not hard to see how imaginative forms of torture became routine in Soviet justice.
Pyatakov drew significant conclusions from this concept of the Party:
~ For such a Party a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, “the Party,” to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions, and can honestly agree with the Party—that is the test of a true Bolshevik.
There could be no life for him outside the ranks of the Party, and he would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it. In order to become one with this great Party he would fuse himself with it, abandon his own personality, so that there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party. ~
Did Orwell have this statement in mind when O’Brien gets Winston Smith to believe that twice two is five? In 1936 Pyatakov asked the Party secretariat to censure him for not having revealed his wife’s Trotskyite connections. To prove his partiinost’, he offered to testify against her and then, after her condemnation, shoot her. Pyatakov was himself shot.
Partyness does not entail merely affirming that black is white but actually believing it. The wisest specialists on Bolshevik thinking have wondered: What does it mean to believe—truly believe—what one does not believe?
Many former Communists describe their belated recognition that experienced Party members do not seem to believe what they profess. In his memoir American Hunger, much of which is devoted to his experiences in the American Communist Party, Richard Wright describes how he would point out that the Party sometimes acted contrary to its convictions, or in the name of helping black people, actually hurt them. What most amazed Wright was that he usually could get no explanation for such actions at all. “You don’t understand,” he was constantly told. And the very fact that he asked such questions proved that he didn’t. It gradually dawned on him that the Party takes stances not because it cares about them—although it may—but because it is useful for the Party to do so.
Doing so may help recruit new members, as its stance on race had gotten Wright to join. But after a while a shrewd member learned, without having been explicitly told, that loyalty belonged not to an issue, not even to justice broadly conceived, but to the Party itself. Issues would be raised or dismissed as needed.
My mother left the American Communist Party in 1939 in response to the Hitler–Stalin pact, but her friends who remained were able, like Pyatakov, to turn on a dime. One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.
When it suddenly dawned on them that issues were pretexts, Wright and some others like him faced a choice. Usually, however, there was no sudden realization and so no choice was required. I speak from memory now. What happens is something like this: when a criticism of the true ideology is advanced, or when embarrassing facts come out, everyone learns a particular answer. One neither believes nor disbelieves the answer; one demonstrates one’s loyalty by saying it.
It is interesting to be present when the answer is still being rehearsed. Gradually, one acquires a little mental library of such canned answers, and the use of them signals to others in the know that you are one of them. If this process took place often enough in childhood, the moment of decision lies in the remote past, if it ever happened at all. For those who joined as adults, there is social pressure to accept one more explanation. Imagine not accepting today’s charge against Trump or Chick-fil-A. Why stop now? Wright is unusual in that for him the process became acute and demanded he address it.
In his history of Marxism, Kołakowski explains some puzzling aspects of Bolshevik practice in these terms. Everyone understands why Bolsheviks shot liberals, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Trotskyites. But what, he asks, was the point of turning the same fury on the Party itself, especially on its most loyal, Stalinists, who accepted Leninist-Stalinist ideology without question? Kołakowski observes that it is precisely the loyalty to the ideology that was the problem.
Anyone who believed in the ideology might question the leader’s conformity to it. He might recognize that the Marxist-Leninist Party was acting against Marxism-Leninism as the Party itself defined it; or he might compare Stalin’s statements today with Stalin’s statements yesterday. “The citizen belongs to the state and must have no other loyalty, not even to the state ideology,” Kołakowski observes.
That might seem strange to Westerners, but, “it is not surprising to anyone who knows a system of this type from within.” All deviations from the Party line, all challenges to the leadership, appealed to official ideology, and so anyone who truly believed the ideology was suspect. “The [great] purge, therefore, was designed to destroy such ideological links as still existed within the party, to convince its members that they had no ideology or loyalty except to the latest orders from on high . . . . Loyalty to Marxist ideology as such is still—[in 1978]—a crime and a source of deviations of all kinds.”
The true Leninist did not even believe in Leninism.
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When I was a young associate professor teaching in a comparative literature department, whose faculty were at each other’s throats, I remarked to one colleague, who called herself a Marxist-Leninist, that it only made things worse when she told obvious falsehoods in departmental meetings. Surely, such unprincipled behavior must bring discredit to your own position, I pleaded.
Her reply brought me back to my childhood. I quote it word-for-word: “You stick to your principles, and I’ll stick to mine.” From a Leninist perspective, a liberal, a Christian, or any type of idealist only ties his hands by refraining from doing whatever works. She meant: we Leninists will win because we know better than to do that. Even Westerners who regard themselves as realists have only taken a few baby steps towards a true Leninist position. They are all the more vulnerable for imagining they have an unclouded view.
The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on.
Attorney General William Barr asked how his critics would have reacted had the FBI secretly interfered with the Obama campaign: “What if the shoe were on the other foot?” From a Leninist perspective, this question demonstrates befuddlement. In his book Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky imagines “the high priests of liberalism” asking how Bolshevik use of arbitrary power differs from tsarist practices. Trotsky sneers:
~ You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain it to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. . . . Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals . . . . Do you grasp this—distinction? For us Communists it is quite sufficient. ~
What is reprehensible for them is proper for us, and that’s all there is to it. For a Leninist, the shoe is never on the other foot because he has no other foot.
When I detect Leninist ways of thinking today, people respond: surely you don’t think all those social justice warriors are Leninists! Of course not. The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on. That was the key insight of his tract What Is to Be Done? When Leninism is significant, there will always be a spectrum going from those who really understand, to those who just practice the appropriate responses, to those who are entirely innocent. The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?
There is no space to address such questions here. My point is that they need to be asked. ~ Gary Saul Morson
https://newcriterion.com/article/leninthink/
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UKRAINE DESTROYS A HUGE RUSSIAN WEAPONS’ DEPOT
Ukraine on Sunday, September 29, 2024, claimed to have sent more than 100 drones deep inside Russia to hit a major weapons depot, as Kyiv ups its attacks further inside Russian territory.
"Defense forces struck the Kotluban military depot" in the Volgograd region, hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian border, a day after a shipment of Iranian weapons reportedly arrived at the site, the Ukrainian military general staff wrote on Telegram.
"A fire and ammunition detonation were observed on the depot's territory," said the post, adding that the facility was being used for storage and the modernization of missiles and artillery.
Russia did not confirm the strike but reported that it had destroyed 67 drones overnight over the Volgograd region.
A Ukrainian defense sector source told media that 120 drones flew more than 600 kilometers (370 miles) to target the depot early on Sunday.
"As a result of the hit, ammunition and missile storage sites were damaged, which will lead to a shortage of ammunition for units of Russia's occupation army," the source said.
Western governments have accused Iran of supplying both drones and missiles to Moscow for its war on Ukraine, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.
"Several explosions were recorded in the area of Kotluban, the location of a depot of the defense ministry's main missile and artillery directorate," Russian military blogger Rybar wrote, adding that "serious destruction" had been avoided.
Volgograd region Governor Andrei Bocharov said falling debris from the drones sparked grass fires but no casualties or damage.
Two-hour drone attack
Volgograd news sites cited locals as saying the drone attack lasted around two hours and prompted some to flee their homes, and that it was not the first time the area had been targeted by such operations.
Russia's defense ministry on Sunday said its air defenses had destroyed and intercepted a total of 125 Ukrainian drones over its territory overnight.
The onslaught was the largest Ukrainian drone attack since President Vladimir Putin last week announced changes to the country's nuclear doctrine to allow a nuclear response to a massive cross-border drone attack.
Russian regional governors reported some damage but no casualties from the attack.
Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev said several drones had fallen on the regional capital, causing fires in two residential buildings.
Another 18 drones were destroyed over the Rostov region, with governor Vasily Golubev saying on Telegram that the downed devices had sparked a forest fire.
Unmanned aerial vehicles were also intercepted over the Bryansk and Kursk regions, the Krasnodar region close to Crimea and over the Sea of Azov, Russia's defense ministry said.
oil depot in Kursk, September 29
Earlier on Sunday, explosions and fires were reported across several regions of Russia, likely due to drone attacks on strategic military facilities. Eyewitnesses noted explosions in Yeysk, Krasnodar region, and other areas, suggesting damage to military installations.
In Yeysk, the explosions occurred near a military base that hosts the Russian Navy’s 859th Naval Aviation Combat Training and Retraining Center and the 190th Mixed Aviation Regiment.
Moscow recently announced it had been shooting down Ukrainian drones almost daily in response to what Kyiv says are retaliatory strikes for the offensive Russia launched in February 2022.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/09/29/ukraine-says-struck-russian-ammo-depot-with-drones-a86509
MORE AMMO EXPLOSIONS IN RUSSIA
Ammo explosion in Toropets
Four days after blowing up a huge Russian ammunition stockpile in the town of Toropets, in western Russia 300 miles from Ukraine, Ukrainian drones struck again — landing a second blow on arsenals in Toropets on Saturday morning while also triggering a massive blast in Tikhoretsk, in southern Russia just 200 miles from the front line in Ukraine.
It’s increasingly evident, though not yet confirmed, that the Ukrainians are using their latest explosive unmanned aerial vehicle, the jet-propelled Palianytsia “missile drone”, for these devastating raids.
The ammo dump in Toropets reportedly held large stocks of small arms rounds, mortar shells, artillery rockets and long-range ballistic missiles potentially including Russian-made Iskanders and North Korean KN-23s. According to the Ukrainian general staff, the dump in Tikhoretsk “is one of the three largest occupying ammunition storage bases and is one of the keys in the logistical system of Russian troops.”
The general staff estimated 2,000 tons of ammo, including North Korean-made rounds, were in the Tikhoretsk dump when the drones struck. The towering fireball resulting from the impact seems to confirm that estimate. The initial Toropets raid and the later Tikhoretsk raid were both big enough to register as small earthquakes and also draw the attention of NASA’s fire-spotting satellites.
The back-to-back ammo dump raids signal a shift in Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes targeting strategic targets inside Russia. The recent attacks also signal an increase in the scale of Ukrainian deep strikes. Previous raids, some hitting targets as far as 1,100 miles inside Russia, have been logistically impressive but small in size, often involving just a handful of slow, propeller-driven drones.
By contrast, the recent raids have been much more destructive, seemingly pointing to a drone type that might not fly as far, but packs more destructive power, and is available in large numbers. That might mean Ukraine’s new jet-powered Palianytsia, which is a cruise missile in all but name. Russians on the ground in Toropets reported hearing jet engines overhead before the local munitions stockpile exploded. ~ David Axe, Forbes Staff
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MUSLIM FROM ALL OVER ARE CALLING FOR THIS MUFTI’S LIFE FOR CRITICIZING CERTAIN VERSES OF ISLAM
Mufti Tariq Masood
Mufti Tariq Masood is currently facing an intense backlash, with Muslims from across the world calling for his life.
For the first time in the history of Islam, a Maulana [a Muslim religious leader] has had the audacity to openly challenge and speak out against certain verses of the Quran, suggesting they be modified to suit modern times.
This has led to widespread outrage, with fatwas being issued against him.
Mufti Tariq Masood is now pleading for his life, even seeking a public apology for expressing his views.
However, there’s a growing need for the Muslim community to understand that, as times change, some traditions might need to evolve as well.~ Frustrated Citizen, Quora
Dennis Berthier:
He is the perfect illustration of the problem of Islam, a religion that remains stuck in the past (I mean, not 20 or 50 years ago, but 1400 years ago).
And the problem is, “moderate” muslims like him are extremely rare and when they dare to speak they become the target of the extremists.
Most of those who call themselves “moderate” explicitly refuse to condemn the terrorists.
BarryAmos:
It's time that people stopped believing that this medieval bullshit has any basis in reality.
Robert Davenport:
Islam isn’t medieval —it’s more like Old Testament.
Barry Amos:
Exactly , it’s all imaginary bs dreamt up as a means of control . We know what's right and wrong, we don't need religion or politics to tell us.
Gian Paolo Perusing:
Who criticizes the Koran gets killed.
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GERMANY EXPELS RADICAL MUSLIMS
Germany takes major action against radical Muslims!
28 Afghans were expelled from the country and sent back to Afghanistan.
The patience of Germany, which has adopted a very liberal attitude towards refugees, is now ending.
Afghan Muslims used to commit stabbing in Germany. Afghan Muslims were at the forefront of crime.
Just a few days ago, Germany had also issued an order to expel radical Islamic cleric Mohammad Hadi Mofatteh from the country.
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WELCOME TO HELL: IDF STRIKES HOUTHIS
The IDF struck Yemen' Hodeidah and Ras Issa ports, attacking oil reserves and military supplies, JPOST reported.
The IDF hit was the most powerful counter-strike against Houthis exceeding the massive strike on Hodeidah in July, soas the IDF confirmed.
Yemeni oil storage tanks on fire, July 24
Dozens of Israeli aircraft participated in the operation, striking 1,800 kilometers from Israeli territory, after the Houthis fired three ballistic missiles on the Tel Aviv and central Israel areas in recent weeks, including one on Saturday.
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PUTIN WANTS TO BAR RUSSIAN WOMEN FROM VACATIONING IN TURKEY
~ The State Duma also known as Vice Police plans to legislate a ban on Russian women from going on a vacation to Turkey.
You see, wherever they travel to, Russian women put on bikinis, drink cheap booze, lose inhibitions and sleep with local men.
The deputy chairman on Family Protection wants to change it by redirecting women traffic:
“There’s a lustful and bestial attitude towards Russian girls in Turkey.”
Deputy hasn’t watched Turkish soap operas very popular with Russian housewives in which a romantic Turkish man would bring bouquets of flowers to a woman’s office every morning for an off chance to get a platonic kiss on the cheek.
That’s too much effort and no ROI! Mister Turkish man, I advise you to try dating Russian women instead. They are easy as a Sunday morning - a smile, winky-winky, a firm squeeze on the hand is all it takes where tons of plucked flowers have failed. Supply and demand.
What’s the alternative to a purported beauty and the beast vacation?
“A vacation in war-torn Syria,” says the deputy confidently who herself spends her vacations in the French Riviera, thank you very much.
“Go to Syria where there are beautiful beaches with mine fields. The attitude towards girls is completely different. If the man likes you, he will kidnap you to have an arranged marriage. This is in line with conservative family values preached by our president. No one will lay a finger on you and you can become an ISIS bride to fight for Jihad course.”
While government is trying to shut up the populace and tell them who to sleep with and how many children to bear, President Putin prepares for a preemptive nuclear strike to take the entire population of Russia out of circulation.
A working group has been assembled in the Presidential Administration in case Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin “gets fed up”.
Gets fed up with what? With his red lines being crossed and the war that’s been dragging for too long. He wanna strike but hasn’t decided on the date yet. There comes the working group.
The agenda for the first meeting is to discuss what words to use to explain to the populace why Moscow has suddenly disappeared from the map and they can’t fly or take a train to any place in Russia anymore because all the flights and rides used to be routed via Moscow. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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RUSSIAN PROPAGANDISTS VIEW ALASKA AS “RUSSIAN LAND” AND PROCLAIM THAT IT WILL “ONE DAY RETURN TO RUSSIA”.
Propagandist Vladimir Solovyov cheerinly announced Alaska “Ice Crimea”, to the delight of his co-hosts.
alaska ice crimea
Retired General Gurulyov, who is a member of Russia’s Federal Duma (parliament) defense committee, went further — suggested to invade Alaska from the islands in Bering Strait.
(Here I accidentally lost my original article, but found a similar one)
~ You know that Putin is looking at Alaska and thinking of that oil money he can't touch.
alaska oil rig
I don't think that the Soviets cared much as they were busy with communism. They were eccentric about securing borders and building the military.
So, was it a colossal blunder by Russia to sell Alaska to the USA in 1867 for a mere $7.2 million? Well, hindsight is 20/20, but it wasn’t that simple at the time.
Back in the 19th century, Russia wasn’t rolling in dough.
The Crimean War had left the empire financially bruised, and maintaining a distant territory like Alaska was expensive and logistically nightmarish.
They called it "Russian America," but it was more like "Russian Annoyance" given the challenges.
Alaska was hardly the frozen, barren wasteland it’s sometimes imagined to be.
In fact, it had significant untapped resources. Fur trading was booming, and later, the discovery of gold would spark a frenzy.
However, at the time, the vast riches were more theoretical than tangible for the Russian Empire.
Enter Tsar Alexander II and his canny diplomats.
They were worried about the possibility of losing Alaska to the British, who were creeping ever closer from their stronghold in Canada.
Rather than risk it being taken by force, Russia decided to sell it to the Americans, who seemed more focused on expanding westward than northward.
The deal was brokered by Eduard de Stoeckl, the Russian ambassador to the United States, and U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, who was convinced it was a fantastic deal (hence "Seward’s Folly," as skeptics called it).
Now, when the deal was struck, the actual money wasn’t handed over in a suitcase of cash.
Instead, the payment was made in gold, and the logistics of transferring that gold across the Atlantic were a saga in themselves.
The gold was shipped on the U.S. Navy ship USS Benicia, which encountered storms and treacherous seas. At one point, there were fears that the gold might have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, making it quite the high-stakes transaction.
And then there’s the quirky fact that when the Americans took formal possession of Alaska on October 18, 1867, in Sitka, the Russian flag was lowered and got stuck halfway down the flagpole.
Russian soldiers had to climb up to free it, only for the flag to drop into a puddle. A bit of an awkward symbol, perhaps? ~ Cyrus II, Quora
Greg Kemnitz:
The logic was trivial: fight and almost certainly lose an expensive war to the British, or get some desperately needed cash from the Americans.
Alaska — like many colonies — was a money pit for the Russian monarchy, even if some Russians got rich off its fur trade. Their wealth didn’t benefit the Czar’s coffers…
Peter Moore:
It’s amazing how two of the USA’s largest land acquisitions were fire sales to deny the British.
Robert Otnick:
Those who don’t regret the selling of Alaska were the Aleuts who were virtually enslaved by Russians eager to master the fur trade and the sea otters which were nearly hunted to extinction. Other natives such as those on Kodiak Island, and those in the Southeast who alternately fought and traded with the Russians.
Russia as a country and the Tsars and their ministers had no real idea of what they had when they had Alaska, much as the rulers of England in the 18th Century had no real idea of the vastness of America. Ruling a territory from so far away really meant no rule while their traders exercised essentially military authority. The Russians left many place names, many Russian Orthodox churches, but hardly any Russian speakers. There are several Russian speaking white communities, but they came to Alaska from the United States not Russia proper.
Meanwhile, Alaska gives the United States a seat on the Arctic Council, which it would not otherwise have.
The sale price of $7.2 million USD (equivalent to about $132 million today) was seen as a good deal for Russia at the time.Today, Alaska's estimated worth is over $500 billion.
Amalie Glacier in Alaska
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THE SAHARA DESERT WAS ONCE GREEN FERTILE LAND
The Sahara, which means desert in Arabic, extends across North Africa. The Sahara is the world's largest non-polar desert, covering over 9,000,000 km², the size of the United States.
Although the Sahara is famous for its sand dunes, most of the surface is made up of hamada or rocky plateau. The Sahara's stunning dune fields only cover about 15% of the entire desert surface and are found mostly in the north-central region. In the dune areas of Algeria and Libya, the depth of the sand varies because the dunes can build up to several hundred meters high, but then change as the sand shifts.
What many people don't know is that the Sahara was once a fertile area that supported thriving human communities. A study of core samples has revealed that the ancient climate of North Africa underwent rapid desertification and climate change that transformed the region from a humid, subtropical landscape to a desert in a matter of years. This occurred around 4200 BC and returned to the same desert conditions that dominated the area 13,000 years earlier.
As the climate began to change, the Sahara region became arid and vegetation died out. With nothing to hold the soil in place, wind action was able to remove all the fine sediment until only sand and rock remained.
PROBABLE CAUSE
The transition from the mid-Holocene climate to the current one was driven by changes in the Earth's orbit and the tilt of the Earth's axis. About 9,000 years ago, the Earth's tilt was 24.14 degrees, compared to today's 23.45 degrees, and perihelion (the point in Earth's orbit closest to the Sun) occurred in late July, compared to early January. At that time, the Northern Hemisphere received more summer sunlight, which amplified the African and Indian summer monsoons.
The changes in Earth's orbit occurred gradually, while the climate and vegetation of North Africa evolved rapidly. German researcher Claussen and his colleagues believe that various feedback mechanisms within Earth's climate system amplified and modified the effects of the orbital changes. By modeling the impact of climate, oceans, and vegetation both separately and in various combinations, the researchers concluded that the oceans played only a minor role in the desertification of the Sahara.
Wadi El Hitan (Whale Valley), in Egypt, contains the fossil remains of an extinct suborder of whales. The valley was evidently part of a shallow marine basin 40-50 million years ago. Desertification has helped preserve and reveal a huge amount of fossils. ~ Alessandro13, Quora
Sam Nangat:
When ice melts it has a property that water forms like a lake in the center first. Then with gradual melting it begins to flow as and when an outlet forms. With the great meltdown after the last Ice Age, massive lakes formed at the center (read many times bigger than the Great Lakes of America). Then with subsequent melting, the vast reservoirs began their flow, sometimes in one direction, sometimes another. Which is why all civilizations speak of the Great Flood. Noah's flood was one such. (One can only imagine the sheet of water which flowed down which caused his ark to come to a rest at Mt. Ararat).
Check the sheet of ice on Greenland, which is a fraction of the ice sheet which covered the Northern Hemisphere during the last Ice Age, which reached all the way to where New York is now. Also check the water melt on the massive ice floe.
Brian:
Research suggests that Antarctica was covered in rainforests that were home to a diverse range of animals, including possums and beavers.
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THE CURRENT GREENING OF ANTARCTICA
Plant cover has increased more than tenfold over the last few decades
Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy continent.
Analysis of satellite data found there was less than one sq kilometer of vegetation in 1986 but there was almost 12km2 of green cover by 2021. The spread of the plants, mostly mosses, has accelerated since 2016, the researchers found.
The growth of vegetation on a continent dominated by ice and bare rock is a sign of the reach of global heating into the Antarctic, which is warming faster than the global average. The scientists warned that this spread could provide a foothold for alien invasive species into the pristine Antarctic ecosystem.
Greening has also been reported in the Arctic, and in 2021 rain, not snow, fell on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record.
“The Antarctic landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonized by plant life,” said Dr Thomas Roland, at the University of Exeter, UK, and who co-led the study. “But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically – showing that even this vast and isolated wilderness is being affected by human-caused climate change.” The peninsula is about 500,000km2 in total.
Roland warned that future heating, which will continue until carbon emissions are halted, could bring “fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region”. The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience and based on analysis of Landsat images.
Prof Andrew Shepherd, at Northumbria University, UK, and not part of the study team, said: “This is a very interesting study and tallies with what I found when I visited Larsen Inlet [on the peninsula] a couple of years ago. We landed on a beach that was buried beneath the Larsen Ice Shelf until the shelf collapsed in 1986-88. We found it to now have a river with green algae growing in it!”
“This place had been hidden from the atmosphere for thousands of years and was colonized by plants within a couple of decades of it becoming ice free – it’s astonishing really,” he said. “It’s a barometer of climate change but also a tipping point for the region as life now has a foothold there.”
The acceleration in the spread of the mosses from 2016 coincides with the start of a marked decrease in sea ice extent around Antarctica. Warmer open seas may be leading to wetter conditions that favor plant growth, the researchers said. Mosses can colonize bare rock and create the foundation of soils that, along with the milder conditions, could allow other plants to grow.
Dr Olly Bartlett, at the University of Hertfordshire and also co-leader of the new study, said: “Soil in Antarctica is mostly poor or nonexistent, but this increase in plant life will add organic matter, and facilitate soil formation. This raises the risk of non-native and invasive species arriving, possibly carried by eco-tourists, scientists or other visitors to the continent.”
A study in 2017 showed the rate of moss growth was increasing but it did not assess the area covered. Another study, in 2022, showed that Antarctica’s two native flowering plants were spreading on Signy Island, to the north of the Antarctic peninsula.
Green algae is also blooming across the surface of the melting snow on the peninsula.
Trees were growing at the south pole a few million years ago, when the planet last had as much CO2 in the atmosphere as it does today.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/04/antarctic-plant-cover-growing-at-dramatic-rate-as-climate-heats
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HOW EYE COLOR CHANGES WITH AGE
The first pictures of the new-born baby that flashed up on our family chat showed a charming, surprised-looking face with wide, slate-grey eyes – similar in shape to his father's brown eyes, but closer in color to his mother's green. By his second birthday, however, the pictures revealed he had become a happy toddler with eyes the same dark brown shade as his father's, with all trace of the dark grey of those early photographs gone.
We might think of our eye color as one of our defining physical traits, as personal to us as the shape of our nose or how much our ears stick out. It is a trait that can often leave a lasting impression on us too – eye color can even influence how trustworthy we find someone.
But, surprisingly, our eye color doesn't always remain constant throughout our lives – in fact, a wide range of external influences can change it, from injury to infection and sun damage. And sometimes the change appears to happen spontaneously.
Evidence suggests that whether a baby's eye color changes or not depends a lot on the color itself. One study led by Cassie Ludwig, an ophthalmologist at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, tracked 148 babies born at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in California, recording their iris color at birth. Nearly two-thirds of babies were born with brown eyes, and one-fifth with blue.
Two years later, Ludwig and her colleagues found that of the 40 blue-eyed babies in the study, 11 had brown eyes by the age of two, three had hazel, and two had green. Of the 77 brown-eyed newborns, almost all (73) still had brown eyes at the age of two. It appears, then, that blue eyes are much more likely to change than brown eyes during the early stages of our lives. But why?
One clue lies in the fact that when the babies' eyes did change color, they tended to become darker, not lighter. In Ludwig's study, one-third of the babies' eyes changed color in their first two years, with the most common change being eyes becoming darker. Just five of the 148 children in the study (3.4%) had eyes that got lighter with age. The trend towards darkening may be due to the build-up of a protective pigment in the irises – but more on this later.
Such relatively common, healthy color change is mostly confined to early childhood. In another study in the US, which tracked more than 1,300 twins from infancy to adulthood, eye color usually stopped changing by the age of six, though in some cases (10-20% of those studied), it continued to change throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Among non-identical twins, eye color was more likely to diverge in later life than among identical twins.
This suggests a genetic element to the propensity to change eye color, notes David Mackey, professor of ophthalmology in the Lions Eye Institute at the University of Western Australia.
After becoming curious about the phenomenon of eye color change, Mackey found that these two studies were more or less all the research that had been done on childhood eye-color change. Anecdotally, he found that it was not uncommon for parents to expect that their babies' eyes would change color. "I heard parents and their friends saying, 'Oh, yes, the baby's been born with blue eyes, but that will change over the next few years'," he says. "I'm there thinking, I just can't find any data about any of this. I found those two papers and they are fairly small studies, but they do show that eye color does change.”
Though the data is limited and has only been carried out in just one country, the US, changes in eye color appears to be most common among people with Northern European, Pacific Islander or mixed-race heritage.
There are parallels with the changes sometimes seen in hair color in those populations throughout childhood. "You'll see photos of some children who are blond as babies, but they've got quite dark brown hair when they become older," says Mackey. "The pigment in your hair can increase gradually over time, and that's probably because the cells that are making pigment are actually building up their numbers and migrating into the area.”
It may be a similar story for eye color, he suggests, with greater quantities of pigment building up in the months or years after birth. "The main pigment in the eyes is melanin and it's the way that melanin is distributed that gives you the different eye colors," he says. "Simply classifying them: you've got blue eyes, some people also talk about grey but really it's a variant of the blue, then you've got the hazel and green combinations, and then you've got the brown, and that can be slightly brown or extremely brown. All of that's related to how much melanin is there."
Higher levels of melanin can have a beneficial function in intense sunlight – as in the skin, the pigment offers protection from sun damage.
In irises with little melanin, the blue color comes from the way the fibers of collagen at the back of the iris scatter light, in the same way that the sky appears blue because of way light is scattered in the atmosphere.
As to why some children's eyes express more melanin over time, this remains mystery, says Mackey.
"We actually don't know what influences those color changes," says Mackey, but there could well be an environmental factor at play. "You can almost say that for everything there's an interaction of genetics and environment, even for things we think of as totally genetic or as totally environmental," says Mackey. "But what environmental factors could influence it? We don't really have that data for the general population.”
While many of the changes in eye color are harmless, they can also be linked to something more serious – such as injury, infection or sun damage.
The one of the best-known eye changes from injury was David Bowie's left eye. The striking difference between his dark left eye and pale blue right eye was the result of a punch to the head that his left pupil permanently dilated, a condition known as anisocoria. However, the punch didn't change the blue color of Bowie's irises, it was the enlarged pupil that made his left eye look darker.
It is, however, possible for injury to alter iris color, says Mackey. "That can happen – if you get a lot of blood inside the eye that can stain parts of the eye. Or you can just have all the pigment scrambled everywhere and it settles.”
More commonly, infection is the root cause. A famous case of true heterochromia, where the color of the irises differs, is the actress Mila Kunis, whose right eye is brown and left green. Kunis’ heterochromia resulted from an infection of the iris, which destroyed some of the pigment in her left eye.
"Some infectious diseases can cause the pigment to disappear," says Mackey. One is Fuch's heterochromic cyclitis, which is caused by a viral infection – often rubella, also known as German measles. "The virus likes living in the eye, and that can flare up in later life and cause you to lose pigmentation there.”
Other viruses, too, can thrive in the interior of the eye and sometimes affect pigmentation. In one extremely rare case, an Ebola survivor experienced a change in eye colour from blue to green when the virus was found to persist in his eye fluid after it had been cleared from elsewhere in his body.
Sometimes a change in eye coloration doesn't affect the entire iris, but small flecks. The appearance of pale flecks known as Brushfield spots can appear in the irises of people with Down syndrome, while brown flecks called Lisch nodules are a common sign of the genetic condition neurofibromatosis type 1.
And just like on the skin, freckles and moles can appear in the iris and elsewhere in the eye.
"You might have a freckle that doesn't do anything," says Mackey. "But for some people these can grow into tumors, and they can be a serious problem.”
Indeed, though most eye-color change is a benign source of fascination for those who witness it, Mackey cautions that it's always worth keeping a careful lookout for a less welcome change.
According to researchers at the American Academy of Ophthalmology (2017), around 10,000 years ago, everyone had brown eyes. Today, approximately 70-80% of the world’s population have brown eyes, making brown the most common eye color. While not the rarest color, only 5% of the population have hazel eyes.
How is eye color determined?
The eye’s iris, the pigmented area surrounding the pupil, gives eyes their color. Melanin is the pigment responsible for both eye and skin color. Hazel eyes are in the brown family, but they feature other color hues like green and amber in addition to brown.
There is a complex network of genes that determine eye color in humans. Most of these genes play a role in producing, transporting, and storing melanin pigment.
The more melanin you have in your iris, the darker your eyes are. Therefore, people with brown eyes have the most melanin. People with the least melanin have blue, gray, or green eyes. Hazel eyes have more melanin than blue but less than brown.
Babies are not born with the total amount of melanin in their irises. More melanin may accumulate in the iris in the first few years of life, causing a child’s eyes to change or darken. Blue eyes that change to brown develop significant amounts of melanin, while those that turn green or hazel produce slightly less.
HOW LIGHT AFFECTS EYE COLOR
Have you ever noticed that eyes change color in different environments? This is because of how particular light and sunlight hit and scatter within the iris. Melanin in the iris absorbs different wavelengths of light.
Eyes with a higher concentration of melanin (darker eyes) absorb more light and reflect less from the iris. The opposite occurs in eyes with lower concentrations of melanin (light-colored eyes); less light is absorbed, and more is reflected off the iris.
Hazel eyes have been called the chameleon of eye colors, changing color based on their surrounding environment. Are they green, gold, brown or a mix of all?
Hazel eyes are complex, and while what exactly determines hazel eye color is still up for debate, researchers have narrowed it down to the amount of melanin present, scattering of light, and perception.
Hazel eyes have a lower concentration of melanin, causing more light reflection off the iris. This higher level of reflection is why we tend to see changes in hazel, blue, or green eyes. The distribution of melanin can differ in parts of the iris, causing hazel eyes to appear light brown near the pupil and greener at the edge of the iris.
The main difference between green eyes and hazel eyes is how melanin spreads in the iris. As mentioned, the melanin in hazel eyes may vary in different parts of the iris, causing different eye colors to appear.
As light is reflected off hazel eyes, it produces other eye colors like green, brown or gold. The melanin in green eyes is more evenly dispersed, causing light to scatter so they appear as one color: green.
Are hazel eyes rare?
Only about 5% of the world’s population have hazel eyes, making them rare. While anyone can have hazel eyes, they are most commonly found among those of Middle Eastern, Brazilian, Spanish, or North African descent.
The rarest eye color is green, with only 2% of the population having them. Even rarer than green eyes is heterochromia, a condition where a person has two different colored eyes. Less than 1% of the world’s population has this condition.
What makes hazel eyes unique?
Hazel-colored eyes reflect light in a way that makes them change color. Considered unique because they feature a combination of various colors like brown, green, and amber, they are often divided into hazel brown or hazel green eyes.
https://www.smartbuyglasses.com/optical-center/eye-care/hazel-eyes/
Oriana:
I happen to have hazel eyes myself, more in the blue-green category, with bits of amber visible sometimes more, sometimes less clearly, depending on the light (Also — I may be wrong about this — I seemed to have more flecks of amber and brown when I was younger.).
Most of my life I had no idea that the accurate term for my eyes is indeed “hazel.” I feel ridiculously happy when I ponder that finally, finally, I know the name for the color of my eyes!
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RECYCLING IS NOT LIVING UP TO ITS PROMISE
A ragpicker by Manet, c.1870; Norton Simon museum. Rags were used to make quality paper.
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, invoking the ragpicker, a new type on the streets of his native nineteenth-century Paris. “Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot, he catalogs and collects.”
Buried in Baudelaire’s descriptions of ragpickers are processes that historians have recently laid bare. With industrialization came the rise of consumer culture, and with consumer culture came the rise of disposal culture. Add unfettered fossil fuel use and the invention of single-use plastics and we arrive at the ragpickers of today: people in Indonesia climbing mountains of trash, or children scavenging for survival in the slums of Delhi or Manila or northeastern Brazil.
Consumer lifestyles in high-income nations have clogged the oceans with garbage and broken our recycling systems. Only 9 percent of the world’s plastic waste is recycled, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, but plastic consumption is on track to triple by 2050. Running out of places to put our daily detritus, the United States and the European Union export hundreds of millions of tons of garbage each year to poorer nations where it is landfilled, littered, or burned.
In two new books, the rise of recycling is a story of illusory promises, often entwined with disturbing political agendas. In Empire of Rags and Bones, Anne Berg, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, examines one of the first modern recycling systems: the “waste regime” of Nazi Germany, where planners and engineers devised programs to recycle metal, rags, and paper; repurpose wires, cables, and railroad equipment; compost kitchen scraps; and collect old shoes, utensils, and junk—all in the service of a genocidal war.
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Scientists were decades away from discovering the planet-warming effects of carbon dioxide when millions of Germans took up recycling with near-religious fervor. It wasn’t environmental concerns that energized mass campaigns to eradicate waste, but a war economy. This was not unique to Germany: Across the British Empire and the United States, World War II catalyzed public and private efforts to persuade citizens to salvage metals, paper, and objects that could be used to make munitions. But in Germany, recycling campaigns were compulsory and extreme, bound up with the regime’s plans for total war and the total mobilization of the population. Lacking overseas colonies (the post–World War I settlement stripped the Reich of its imperial holdings), Germany was strapped for raw materials.
In 1936, preparing for war, Nazi leaders announced a Four-Year Plan, a series of economic measures that introduced recycling regulations and mandated waste avoidance strategies. In the Nazi imagination, Berg tells us, waste was an abundant resource that could be exploited, cycled through the economy in a zero-waste scheme to extract value from existing goods. The solution was to uncover the hidden value of waste. Lurking in the people’s garbage were the resources to fuel Germany’s expansion, the sole guarantee of the Reich’s security and racial purity.
A 1938 book by Claus Ungewitter, the head of the regime’s Office of Chemistry, served as the Nazi “garbage bible,” Berg writes. Ungewitter’s scientific treatise outlined how value could be recovered from manufacturing processes and from old rags, sewage, and municipal waste.
During World War I, Europeans had collected scrap for the first time, Ungewitter noted, detailing how Germans contributed to the war effort by rounding up paper, rubber, kitchen discards, lamp sockets, celluloid, and early plastic. He believed that Germans could go much further by irrigating agricultural fields with sewage, melting down fences and door hinges to recover metal, churning out briquettes from coal dust, and converting garbage slag to make cement and build roads. Nazi bureaucrats soon took Ungewitter’s ideas into S.S.-owned industries and concentration camps, concocting ways to wrest value from waste and inventing new uses for old materials.
The details of Nazi waste reclamation are gory: There are slippers made of hair and a disgusting “garbage sausage” that sickened any prisoner forced to eat it. There are crates of gold teeth and mountains of garments and shoes, objects that entered the visual record in 1945 as an illustration of Nazism’s murderous designs. The piles of glasses and teeth that confronted Allied troops entering the camps show how coordinated and comprehensive the regime’s efforts were to extract value from waste, using the labor of those it condemned to death.
While these atrocities became synonymous with a civilizational breach, they grew out of Europe’s racist, brutal history of colonial rule. As Nazi imperial planners prepared for the conquest and depopulation of the east, and calculated allocations of food and other resources, they studied other colonial powers. Just as Europe’s colonial empires plundered gold, timber, cotton, spices, and fossil fuels, “the imperial visions of the Third Reich, too, were focused on natural resources,” Berg writes, “such as iron, oil, and fertile soil, and the Nazis robbed whatever luxury goods they could get their hands on.”
In the end, the contingencies and pressures of war led the Nazi empire to extract gold from people, rather than land, and resources from slave laborers instead of nature. Concentration camp prisoners, POWs, and deportees from enemy nations unloaded trains crammed with junk, scrapped metal, and squeezed value from every available textile. Ordinary Germans, meanwhile, proved eager to display their commitment to the future and became dedicated recyclers. In Berg’s telling, the Volksgemeinschaft was also a Müllgemeinschaft (garbage community), and even down to the regime’s final weeks with Allied troops closing in, Germans clung to the fantasy that old textiles and piles of rubble could be recycled into weapons of war, leading them to final victory.
In Berg’s story, this chapter in the history of recycling is about war and imperial exploitation. Perhaps even more confounding is that today, books about Nazi Germany fill libraries, and yet historians have somehow failed, until now, to grasp the ideological and strategic importance of recycling. As Berg makes clear, waste is everywhere in the archives—the Nazis rarely hesitated to create a bureaucracy (or a paper trail)—and yet scholars couldn’t see it. Our systems are designed to make waste invisible, at least for those of us who produce most of it.
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It wasn’t just recycling but also plastic that emerged from war. The difficulties of rubber extraction and a worldwide ivory shortage led to the 1907 invention of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, a process Jeffrey L. Meikle traces in American Plastic: A Cultural History. Bakelite could be molded and machined and proved more versatile than labor-intensive rubber or ivory, once the preferred material for European makers of boxes, buttons, combs, and piano keys.
The decimation of African and Indian elephant herds thanks to European hunters also spurred the invention of celluloid, another hard, durable substance that originated in nature (its inventor combined nitrocellulose with the sap of the laurel tree), only to be replaced by heat- and water-resistant Bakelite. It was Europe’s colonial quest for raw materials, its booming consumer markets, and then the chemical and war-making industries that created and popularized plastic. The U.S. military, eager to conserve precious rubber, contributed to plastic’s spread in World War II by using it in fuses, parachutes, airplanes, antenna housing, bazooka barrels, helmet liners, and combs distributed to service members as part of a hygiene kit.
The 1960s ushered in the dawn of single-use plastics, when shopping bags, straws, tubs, utensils, and food wrap became exceedingly cheap to produce and convenient to use, as long as no one paid attention to where it was going. When the first curbside recycling programs appeared in the 1970s, just as U.S. landfills started running short on space, the point of recycling was no longer to mine an untapped resource, or to get the most out of old stuff, but simply to find a place to put it.
Some three decades later, the accumulation of plastic wastes led the U.S. to look abroad for dumping destinations. "By the 1990s, half the plastic Americans chucked into the recycling bin “was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” instead of making it to the local recycling center, says Humes. “Why invest in expensive technology and labor to keep up with the constantly changing world of packaging and plastics when the mess could be bundled off to China in exchange for easy money and the appearance of being green?”
There is a chasm, Humes points out, between “theoretical recycling” and “actual recycling.” (The chasing arrows symbol is a lie: The majority of plastic types captured by the arrows are considered “financially unviable” to recycle.) In 2018, China banned most imports of plastic, meaning that recyclables collected in the United States could no longer be shipped out of sight, out of mind. Instead of bringing in easy revenue by sending waste to China, U.S. cities, towns, and waste companies now faced staggering costs, and as a result, recycling fell off a cliff.
The pandemic’s disruptions of global supply chains only exacerbated the problem of sending junk to other countries. Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other nations now absorb a portion of our waste, “a global hot potato,” as reporters referred to it in The Guardian. The bulk of this waste (more than 80 percent) is mismanaged, often dumped in open landfills, according to researchers. The flow of plastic from rich countries to poorer ones, glutting waterways and leaching harmful chemicals into the environment, recalls colonial-era destructiveness. Reading Humes’s book alongside Berg’s, the overwhelming takeaway is that waste management perpetuates systems of domination and oppression. Under Nazism, waste was a resource, while under capitalism, waste is a commodity.
Humes reports on garbage changemakers—individuals and communities scattered across the country that have come up with new ways to mitigate waste. There’s the father-son team behind Seattle’s Ridwell, which collects and repurposes single-use, zombie trash that refuses to die. Or Sarah Nichols at Maine’s Natural Resources Council, whose efforts to shift the burden of waste disposal from consumers to producers resulted in a 2021 law that levies fees on producers and sellers of packaging and containers to foot the bill for actual recycling. Several college campuses have diverted much of their waste from landfills while ditching fossil fuels. The trash cognoscenti, as Humes calls them, understand that everything must begin with the end in mind. Zero-waste is the goal, and recycling won’t get us there.
The best way to solve our garbage crisis, Humes suggests, is to produce less of it in the first place. He intersperses his reporting with thoughts on how to prevent food waste, how to shop package-free, and how to participate in resale and secondhand economies. Citizen-consumers have power, he notes, to buy less; to live, work, and study in low-waste ways; to vote for better policies, and to model change in our communities. Instead of taking out the trash without mulling over where it’s going, for Humes, the key is to “think about what will happen to a product or package at the end of its useful life.”
Berg’s history of Nazi recycling concludes with a reminder: “Waste is supposed to be invisible.” Since the nineteenth century, not seeing our trash has been a marker of civilization and progress. Modern sanitation and urban infrastructure carried away our waste, enabling us to produce more of it. What Berg and Humes tell us is that destructive values and oppressive power structures are embedded in our garbage. To exist and persist, our systems make waste. The first step toward change is to start seeing what is hidden in plain sight.
https://newrepublic.com/article/178688/recycling-mostly-garbage?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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PROGRESS IN SOLAR TECHNOLOGY
The sight of solar panels installed on rooftops and large energy farms has become commonplace in many regions around the world. Even in grey and rainy UK, solar power is becoming a major player in electricity generation.
This surge in solar is fueled by two key developments. First, scientists, engineers and those in industry are learning how to make solar panels by the billions. Every fabrication step is meticulously optimized to produce them very cheaply. The second and most significant is the relentless increase in the panels’ power conversion efficiency – a measure of how much sunlight can be transformed into electricity.
Current commercially available solar panels convert about 20-22% of sunlight into electrical power. However, new research published in Nature has shown that future solar panels could reach efficiencies as high as 34% by exploiting a new technology called tandem solar cells. The research demonstrates a record power conversion efficiency for tandem solar cells.
Traditional solar cells are made using a single material to absorb sunlight. Currently, almost all solar panels are made from silicon – the same material at the core of microchips. While silicon is a mature and reliable material, its efficiency is limited to about 29%.
TANDEM SOLAR CELLS
To overcome this limit, scientists have turned to tandem solar cells, which stack two solar materials on top of each other to capture more of the Sun’s energy.
In the new nature paper, a team of researchers at the energy giant LONGi has reported a new tandem solar cell that combines silicon and perovskite materials. Thanks to their improved sunlight harvesting, the new perovskite-silicon tandem has achieved a world record 33.89% efficiency.
Perovskite solar materials, which were discovered less than two decades ago, have emerged as the ideal complement to the established silicon technology. The secret lies in their light absorption tuneability. Perovskite materials can capture high energy, blue light more efficiently than silicon.
In this way, energy losses are avoided and the total tandem efficiency increases. Other materials, called III-V semiconductors, have also been used in tandem cells and achieved higher efficiencies. The problem is they are hard to produce and expensive, so only small solar cells can be made in combination with focused light.
The scientific community is putting tremendous effort into perovskite solar cells. They have kept a phenomenal pace of development with efficiencies (for a single cell in the lab) rising from 14% to 26% in only 10 years. Such advancements enabled their integration into ultra-high-efficiency tandem solar cells, demonstrating a pathway to scale photovoltaic technology to the trillions of Watts the world needs to decarbonize our energy production.
The cost of solar electricity
The new record-breaking tandem cells can capture an additional 60% of solar energy. This means fewer panels are needed to produce the same energy, reducing installation costs and the land (or roof area) required for solar farms.
It also means that power plant operators will generate solar energy at a higher profit. However, due to the way that electricity prices are set in the UK, consumers may never notice a difference in their electricity bills. The real difference comes when you consider rooftop solar installations where the area is constrained and the space has to be exploited effectively.
The price of rooftop solar power is calculated based on two key measures. First, the total cost to install solar panels on your roof, and second, how much electricity they will generate over their 25 years of operation. While the installation cost is easy to obtain, the revenues from generating solar electricity at home are a bit more nuanced. You can save money by using less energy from the grid, especially in periods when it is costly, and you can also sell some of your surplus electricity back to the grid.
However, the grid operators will pay you a very small price for this electricity, so sometimes it is better to use a battery and store the energy so you can use it at night. Using average considerations for a typical British household, I have calculated the cash savings consumers would gain from rooftop solar electricity depending on the efficiency of the panels.
If we can improve panel efficiency from 22% to 34% without increasing the installation cost, savings in electricity bills will rise from £558ְ/year up to £709/year. A 27% bump in cash savings that would make solar rooftops extremely attractive, even in grey and cloudy Britain.
solar panels being produced (note the use of industrial robots)
As research continues, considerable efforts are being made to scale up this technology and ensure its long-term durability. The record breaking tandem cells are made in laboratories and are smaller than a postage stamp. Translating such high performance to meter-square areas remains a vast challenge.
Yet, we are making progress. Earlier this month, Oxford PV, a solar manufacturer at the forefront of perovskite technology, announced the first sale of its newly developed tandem solar panels. They have successfully tackled the challenges of integrating two solar materials and making durable and reliable panels. While they are still far from 34% efficiencies, their work shows a promising route for next generation solar cells.
Another consideration is the sustainability of the materials used in tandem solar panels. Extracting and processing some of the minerals in solar panels can be hugely energy intensive. Besides silicon, perovskite solar cells require the elements lead, carbon, iodine and bromine as components to make them work properly. Connecting perovskite and silicon also requires scarce materials containing an element called indium, so there is plenty of research still required to address these difficulties.
Despite the challenges, the scientific and industrial community remains committed to developing tandem solar devices that could be integrated into almost anything: cars, buildings and planes.
The recent developments toward high efficiency perovskite-silicon tandem cells indicate a bright future for solar power, ensuring solar continues to play a more prominent role in the global transition to renewable energy.
https://theconversation.com/new-solar-cells-break-efficiency-record-they-could-eventually-supercharge-how-we-get-energy-from-the-sun-239417?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE ASTEROID THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS WAS NOT ALONE
The huge asteroid that hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was not alone, scientists have confirmed.
A second, smaller space rock smashed into the sea off the coast of West Africa creating a large crater during the same era.
It would have been a “catastrophic event”, the scientists say, causing a tsunami at least 800m high to tear across the Atlantic ocean.
Dr Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University first found the Nadir crater in 2022, but a cloud of uncertainty hung over how it was really formed.
Nadir Crater in West Africa, discovered in 2022
The asteroid that created the Nadir crater measured around 450-500m wide, and scientists think it hit Earth at about 72,000km/h.
Now Dr Nicholson and his colleagues are sure that the 9km depression was caused by an asteroid hurtling into the seabed.
They cannot date the event exactly, or say whether it came before or after the asteroid which left the 180km-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. That one ended the reign of the dinosaurs.
But they say the smaller rock also came at the end of the Cretaceous period when the dinosaurs went extinct. As it crashed into Earth's atmosphere, it would have formed a fireball.
“Imagine the asteroid was hitting Glasgow and you’re in Edinburgh, around 50 km away. The fireball would be about 24 times the size of the Sun in the sky — enough to set trees and plants on fire in Edinburgh,” Dr Nicholson says.
The Gosses Bluff crater in Australia is similar.
An extremely loud air blast would have followed, before seismic shaking about the size of a magnitude 7 earthquake.
Huge amounts of water probably left the seabed, and later cascaded back down creating unique imprints on the floor.
The violent impact between 65m and 67m years ago produced a crater more than five miles across, the scans reveal, with scientists estimating that the asteroid measured a quarter of a mile wide and struck Earth at nearly 45,000mph.
It is unusual for such large asteroids to crash out of our solar system on course for our planet within a short time of each other.
But the researchers don’t know why two hit Earth close together.
The nearest humans have come to this scale of event was the Tunguska event in 1908 when a 50-metre asteroid exploded in the skies above Siberia.
The Nadir asteroid was about the size of Bennu, which is currently the most hazardous object orbiting near Earth.
Scientists say the most probable date that Bennu could hit Earth is 24 September 2182, according to Nasa. But it is still just a probability of 1 in 2,700.
There has never been an asteroid impact of this size in human history, and scientists normally have to study eroded craters on Earth or images of craters on other planets.
To further understand the Nadir crater, Dr Nicholson and team analyzed high-resolution 3D data from a geophysical company called TGS.
Most craters are eroded but this one was well-preserved, meaning the scientists could look further into the rock levels.
“This is the first time that we've ever been able to see inside an impact crater like this - it’s really exciting,” says Dr Nicholson, adding there are just 20 marine craters in the world but none have been studied in detail like this.
The findings are reported in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m04v0k0no
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COMMON LONGEVITY MYTHS
Myth: A sunny, optimistic disposition increases your life span.
An upbeat personality won’t help you in the long-life sweepstakes. A Longevity Project study that followed more than 1,500 people for 80 years found that the cheery, happy-go-lucky folks actually lived shorter lives. The ones who lived longest: persistent and prudent types. The lighthearted folks, based on an everything-will-turn-out-fine philosophy, tended to take more risks with their health (such as skipping recommended screenings) as they aged.
That’s not to say you need to be dour or worried to tack on more years of life. Laughter actually is good medicine—one study found that older adults who laughed every day had lower rates of heart disease and stroke. Just try to balance life enjoyment with a serious approach to maintaining your health.
Myth: Working too hard will put you in an early grave.
Hard workers actually have a 20% to 30% lower risk of early death, according to the Longevity Project study. If your workplace causes you take-home stress, that’s bad for your health. But for most, the social engagement and mental stimulation of working bring real benefits. One study found that healthy people who worked a year longer before retiring had an 11% lower risk of dying during the 18-year study period.
But it’s not being paid so much as having a sense of purpose that helps extend longevity, says research in Psychological Science. You can find purpose in just about any type of activity, from volunteering to helping care for a grandchild to taking up a social hobby. “It’s about the importance of community and being in service to others,” says Catherine Johnson, M.D., founder and medical director of Precision Medical Care in Clarendon Hills, IL.
Myth: If people in your family tend to die young, you will too.
Genetics account for only a small percentage of your longevity. Sure, your DNA matters some—if you have at least one parent who lives past the age of 70, your chances of living longer go up, research shows. But lifestyle habits and your environment, both of which impact how your DNA is expressed, play a much bigger role, says Dr. Johnson. When researchers studied more than 123,000 people, they found that five lifestyle habits in particular—maintaining a healthy weight, never smoking, exercising, following a healthy diet, and drinking only in moderation—greatly increased life expectancy at age 50. Quality health care and access to clean air and water play a role too, says David Fein, M.D., medical director of the Princeton Longevity Center.
Still, talk to your doc about your family history, which can indicate greater risk for genetically linked disease, so you can take advantage of health screenings and find ways to lower those risks, Dr. Fein says.
Myth: Aging is the worst!
No doubt some aspects of aging are suboptimal (ahem, that neck wattle!), but it’s far from all bad—and research found that people who embrace aging live 7.5 years longer on average than those who dread it. This may be in part because people who have a bleaker outlook on getting older are less proactive about seeking health care when issues pop up; they may simply ascribe them to aging and fail to address them, another study found. So even if you think every stiff joint or energy dip is because you’re not as young as you used to be, it’s worth talking things through with your doctor.
Just one example: It’s true that our immune response weakens over time, which can leave the body in a chronic state of inflammation, and that is linked to heart disease and some cancers. But by eating less sugar, exercising more, spending more time outside, managing your stress, and consuming foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, you can dial inflammation way down, says Dr. Johnson. “I used to tell my patients, ‘Oh, that’s just what happens when you get older,’ but I’ve stopped saying that,” she says. “I believe we can manage how our bodies age.”
Myth: It’s too late to do any good by giving up bad habits like smoking and tanning.
It’s never too late to improve your health and even increase your life span. Take smoking: A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people who stopped smoking when they were between ages 45 and 54 gained about six years of life compared with others who kept puffing.
The same goes for resigning from the couch potato club: A BMJ study found that physical activity helped people live longer, even if they hadn’t exercised before. And if you’ve been lax about slathering on sunscreen, researchers showed in a four-year study from the University of Queensland that daily sunscreen use slowed skin aging even in middle age. You might not be able to fully erase damage done by a history of unhealthy habits, but making a change is always worthwhile, Dr. Johnson says.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/stop-believing-these-longevity-myths-to-live-a-longer-healthier-and-happier-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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IS AGING A DISEASE THAT CAN BE REVERSED?
Aging can be considered a disease—one that can be targeted, treated, and perhaps even reversed
DAVE ASPREY, founder of the supplement company Bulletproof and one of the many Silicon Valley tech titans obsessed with lengthening their life spans, famously declared he wants to live beyond 180 years. That sounds, frankly, exhausting. Yet who wouldn’t want to take a languorous sip from the gerontological cup, assuming reasonable health and fitness?
Therein lies the catch: A long life is something that’s desired and dreaded in equal measure. My uncle was a rocket scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. When I visited him in his final years, I did not recognize this once dynamic, brilliant man. He was confused, frail, vague.
In 2014, Ezekiel Emanuel, a noted oncologist and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a blunt essay for The Atlantic titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” He argued that the “manic desperation to endlessly extend” life siphons resources and “robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world.” Emanuel stands by it. “You don’t want to wait until the end of your life and live it unconsciously,” he told me recently.
But what if we could change not just the expiration date but the time leading up to it? Research shows that most people are ill with disease for five to eight years before they die. Must they be? A wave of scientists are saying no. They maintain that aging is a disease—one that can be targeted, treated, and perhaps even reversed. Longevity—a quest as old as humanity itself—is the wellness world’s latest buzzword, appearing everywhere from specialty gyms such as Longevity Lab NYC to NutriDrip’s $600 “Nutriyouth” IV formula (which promises to “turn on ‘good genes’ ”) to the Victoria Beckham–sanctioned supplements Basis NAD+. Meanwhile, big-name investors (Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel) are backing companies that are designing drugs to stave off the impairments associated with growing old: Thiel’s Breakout Labs is intent on the modest goal of “reprogramming nature.” The longevity sector, according to some industry analysis, is on track to be a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
ONE MORNING THIS PAST SUMMER, I met Nir Barzilai, M.D., founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, at the entrance of the three-mile pedestrian path of the Mario Cuomo Bridge, which stretches across the Hudson River. Affable and bespectacled, the 64-year-old author of the new book Age Later has suggested we exercise during our chat—exercise being one of the magic bullets for a long and vibrant life, or “health span,” as he and other experts term it. (When it comes to health span, Barzilai says, genetics account for only some 20 percent. The rest is environment and lifestyle.) On this morning, he has not yet broken his 16-hour life-lengthening daily fast. Research has also shown that “stressors” such as intermittent fasting can prompt your body to activate the genes that help repair broken DNA and protect chromosomes.
As we walk, he takes me through his other practices: Along with his fasts and exercise, Barzilai takes a daily dose of metformin. An inexpensive diabetes medication that’s been around since the 1950s, metformin is thought to mimic the calorie restriction of fasting by limiting the amount of sugar the body absorbs (side effects are generally mild, among them abdominal pain, nausea, and loss of appetite). A 2017 study of more than 41,000 male metformin users found that it reduced—by a significant amount—the likelihood of dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. A growing number of doctors are prescribing it off-label, but Barzilai wants the medication to be FDA-sanctioned for every elder adult. He’s about to undertake a six-year national trial (called TAME, for “Targeting Aging With Metformin”), partially and anonymously funded by a noted tech billionaire. [Oriana: Berberine exceeds metformin in its anti-aging effects, with neglibible side effects.]
If fasting is not exactly your speed, diet is still tremendously important. As for what you should eat, the gold standard remains the Mediterranean diet—one that is high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, and olive oil, and low on red meat—the only diet, says Barzilai, proven by clinical research to decrease cardiovascular mortality. A recent study in the medical journal Gut found that following it for just one year slowed the development of age-related inflammatory processes.
David Sinclair, Ph.D., Harvard geneticist and author of the bestseller Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, says the Mediterranean diet essentially “tricks the body into thinking we’ve been doing exercise and fasting.” Of course, this is not a permission slip for bottomless bowls of rigatoni; too much of a good thing is too much. Dan Buettner, the National Geographic Fellow who helped popularize the idea of the “blue zones”—the five areas worldwide with the longest-lived denizens—says he follows a rule practiced by the residents of Okinawa, Japan, and stops eating when his stomach is 80 percent full.
And perhaps consider occasionally skipping dessert: Research shows that sugar intake accelerates age-related inflammation. “The more sugar you eat, the faster you age,” says Robert Lustig, professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. (The American Heart Association recommends that women keep it under six teaspoons per day.)
Other crucial life practices: adequate sleep and stress management. In blue zones, says Buettner, “people downshift all day long, through prayer, meditation, or just taking naps.” And scientists are also coming to more fully understand the role that other people play in prolonging life. A 2019 study in the journal SSM-Population Health found that social relationships significantly increase life span in older adults. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of this year’s Successful Aging, has found that friendships at age 80 are a bigger predictor of health than cholesterol level. Friends and even neighbors, he writes, protect your brain, while loneliness “has been implicated in just about every medical problem you can think of.”
But what about the factors you can’t control? Most of us don’t know what’s lurking in our genome and are not often aware we might inherit some disease until we see the symptoms. That is changing, with tests that are leagues beyond 23andMe. The new Preventive Genomics Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is the first academic clinic in the country to offer comprehensive DNA sequencing and interpretation of nearly 6,000 disease-associated genes, ranging from common cancers to the rare Fabry disease, which impairs fat breakdown in cells and affects the heart. “Roughly 20 percent of people will be carrying a variant for a rare disease, such as hereditary heart problems,” says director Robert Green, M.D., medical geneticist at Brigham and Women’s. Where a full panel of tests used to cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars, the clinic charges $250 for a smaller panel and $1,900 for full sequencing and interpretation. (These costs are not yet covered by most insurance.)
“In the near future,” says Barzilai as we finish our walk, “we can be healthy and vital in our 90s and beyond.” He laughs. “It may sound like science fiction, but I promise you, it’s science.” While I can comprehend the misgivings about prolonging life, I’ll admit that I’m still programmed to crave those extra years, and will adopt what changes I can to make them more vibrant. My role model here is Gloria Steinem, now 86. “I plan to live to be 100,” she once remarked. “Which I would have to do anyway, just to meet my deadlines.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/is-aging-a-disease-you-can-reverse-a-look-at-the-science-behind-the-longevity-movement?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
The closest we have to prescription-requiring metformin in the supplement category is berberine. It's actually better than metformin, since it doesn't just lower blood sugar; it also optimizes the lipid profile (cholesterol and triglycerides).
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Ending on beauty:
CONFESSION
Having forgiven me my sins, he fell silent.
In the violet dusk candles spattered,
And a dark prayer stole
Covered my head and my shoulders.
Isn’t that the voice that said, “Maiden, arise!”
My heart beats faster, faster.
The touch through the cloth,
Of a hand absently making the sign of the cross.
~ Anna Akhmatova, 1911
