Luca Signorelli, detail of Last Judgment
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BAUDELAIRE IN THE SIERRAS
Is there still time for us to be happy?
High in the Sierras, the ghost of the moon
follows the granite ledge of the lake.
I think of the prince of poets.
It’s impossible to like him:
so much suffering is grotesque.
The path leads to the ridge,
then nowhere.
The mind wants to go higher,
climbs the steep sky.
Below, moist meadows carved
with rivulets of snowmelt.
Silver-edged aspen leaves,
too many coins to be counted.
I wed with world with the rings
on a lichen-flecked rock.
*
Suffering was his true mistress,
his dark opium Muse,
communion of laudanum
and cheap wine —
not the mulatto woman
who stole, lied, cheated
with servants –
What I deplore is her taste.
The obscenity trial. Artificial
Paradises remaindered at fifty centimes.
The society woman he adored
offered herself to him:
You were a divinity;
now you are only a woman.
Every street its own Babylon,
the sky a coffin lid.
No one’s more Catholic than the devil.
He dressed almost like a clergyman.
In a church, admiring the confessionals,
he fell down. The end began.
All his life he begged
his mother for money
and love — Please send enough
to last at least three weeks —
and he did
die in her arms,
paralyzed, mute, syphilitic.
With what ecstasy of scorn
he must have rolled on his tongue
the slow syllables of sordid.
*
Creased granite, dry cicada sound.
A branch like green fire
divides the pulsing altitudes.
The prodigious music that rolls across
the treetops sounds to me
like the translation of human grief.
What could anyone tell him?
To say yes to life? To look
at wild lilies and balsam,
these flowers of good,
and eat the world like the body of a god?
Why is he here, in me, asking
is there still time to be happy —
mind burning through Parisian sleet,
nerves stretched like convulsive outlines
of rain-beaten trees along winter boulevards.
Between the lake and the moon,
those eyes with the knowledge of never.
~ Oriana
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BAUDELAIRE’S MODERNISM
~ Baudelaire was the first poet to write in his own voice without the alibi of outside inspiration. It’s true, I suppose, that elsewhere in Europe some earlier Romantic poets had tentatively experimented with this kind of diary form, like Coleridge in his conversation poems. But even Coleridge was never as open in his poetry as he was in the privacy of his notebooks. Whereas for Baudelaire, in a notebook or a poem, the investigation was the same. This, for Laforgue, was what made him unique. He was the first to so lavishly and openly submit his private dirt to the pressure of the most meticulous art. ~
~ Charles Baudelaire was the first modern poet In both style and content, his provocative, alluring, and shockingly original work shaped and enlarged the imagination of later poets. His influence was not limited to France but spread across Europe and the Americas. His work guided the Symbolist movement, which became the dominant school of modernist poetry, and inspired the Decadent and Aesthetic movements. Half a century later, his presence still haunted Surrealism.
Nor was Baudelaire’s impact restricted to literature. His ideas on the autonomy of art, the alienation of the artist, the irrationality of human behavior, the intellectualization of poetry, the cult of beauty (and the beauty of evil), and the frank depiction of sexuality became central to modernist aesthetics. He also popularized less exalted cultural trends such as Satanism, sexual degradation, and the use of drugs for artistic inspiration. Not all of these ideas originated with Baudelaire, but his distinctive articulation of these principles became the lingua franca of international Modernism.
Baudelaire’s outsize impact is notable because his public career had such limited success during his short life. Little read yet much misunderstood, he survived, just barely, on the margins of the literary world. He never commanded a large audience, though he achieved unwanted notoriety from an obscenity trial. By the time of his death in 1867, however, he had attracted a coterie of admirers who would guide the course of modern literature. ~ Dana Gioia, New Criterion
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Mary:
The discussion of Baudelaire prompted me to find my old copy of Fleurs du Mal, which I remember dazzling me with its music and imagery even read in my schoolgirl French. He was a revolutionary in many ways, turning from the Romantics and their sense of Nature to focus on the urban, the visionary, the dreamlike, the decadent pleasures of "evil," sensory opulence, drug inspired experience, decadent, not respectable — the pleasures of transgression, of the odd, the eccentric, the outlawed, the unhealthy, ...and all in the most exquisite gorgeous tapestry of language--brilliantly ordered, musical, enchanting, seductive..each poem a jeweled fever dream. He is the essence of modernism, with his rebellion, his melancholy "spleen," his ennui, his fascination with the beauty of decadence....dangerous, addictive, redolent with the perfumes of those resplendent, unapologetic flowers of evil.
Consummately modern, he was an influence for artists both contemporary and to follow...from his translations of Poe to his influence on Rimbaud and Eliot....even to the modern treatment of poem as object...a self referential entity apart from its own historical time and milieu. He is fellow with Dostoyevsky's underground man — full of spleen, an isolate in an urban, cold and dehumanizing environment. No wonder my adolescent self found so much to underline in his poems, so much to tempt in his perfumed vision — those heady opium and laudanum inspired dreams...
Oriana:
Baudelaire as Dostoyevky's "Underground Man" -- Yes, yes, a brilliant insight.
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HOW BAUDELAIE REVOLUTIONIZED MODERN LITERATURE: HUMILIATION AS A WAY OF LIFE (The New Republic)
"He is still more modern than we are."
Around, let’s say, 1885 the young French poet Jules Laforgue was living in Berlin and scribbling observations in his notebooks. He was reading Charles Baudelaire’s notorious book of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal—a book that had been prosecuted, successfully, by the French state for obscenity—and as Laforgue read on, he jotted down small aphorisms, mini-observations. These phrases were of a private kind: “a distinguished wanderer in the line of Poe and Gérard de Nerval,” “sensual hypochondria shading into martyrdom . . . ”: that kind of thing. They were private notes for a future essay that Laforgue would never write, attempts to define the genius of Baudelaire—who had died in 1867, around twenty years earlier, at the age of only forty-six.
But quickly Laforgue’s scattered notes develop a miniature chime, a repeat: “He first talked about himself in a kind of confessional mode without an inspired style.” As he carried on with his randomly punctuated, semi-grammatical notes, Laforgue kept returning to that tiny phrase, the first: “the first [who] talked about Paris as an everyday damned being of the capital”; “the first who is not triumphant but accuses himself, shows his wounds, his laziness, his bored uselessness in the middle of this devout and industrious century”; “the first who brought into our literature boredom in the midst of pleasure and its bizarre setting the sad bedroom…”; “the first who broke with the public—Poets addressed themselves to the public—human repertoire—he the first who said: poetry will be for initiates.”
Let’s paint this silent Berlin scene as dramatically as possible: Laforgue was one of the most radical poets then writing, but his idol was a dead precursor. The reason for his slightly retro idolization was there in the first of Laforgue’s firsts: the giant shift in Baudelaire’s tone. Baudelaire was the first poet to write in his own voice without the alibi of outside inspiration. It’s true, I suppose, that elsewhere in Europe some earlier Romantic poets had tentatively experimented with this kind of diary form, like Coleridge in his conversation poems. But even Coleridge was never as open in his poetry as he was in the privacy of his notebooks. Whereas for Baudelaire, in a notebook or a poem, the investigation was the same. This, for Laforgue, was what made him unique. He was the first to so lavishly and openly submit his private dirt to the pressure of the most meticulous art.
That this basic procedure is still seen as one of art’s central procedures in no way means that we can do without him. Twenty years after Baudelaire’s death he had not been outmoded, and he has not been outmoded now. True, he might sometimes use in his poems a vocabulary of vampires and cat-women. He didn’t smoke hash in a joint but consumed it as a green jam. Sometimes he seems limited to a nineteenth-century vibe—the dark and theatrical Gothic. (Flaubert to Feydeau, while editing his novel Salammbô: “I am reaching rather dark tones. We are starting to wade through gore and to burn the dying. Baudelaire would be happy!”) But in fact Baudelaire is nowhere. He is still more modern than we are. And this, I think, is a problem that needs further definition.
Toward the opening of his new book—a series of overlapping, digressive essays on Baudelaire and his artistic entourage—Roberto Calasso begins with his definition of Baudelaire’s modern condition. “In Baudelaire’s time, thinkers were obliged to commit an ‘infinite sin’. . . : to interpret infinitely, without a primum and without an end, in unceasing, sudden, shattered, and recursive motion.” This infinite interpretation, he argues, was the new Parisian atmosphere—and it was Baudelaire’s personal territory: “The real modernity that takes shape in Baudelaire is this hunt for images, without beginning or end, goaded by the ‘demon of analogy.’ ” And the reason why interpretation is infinite, argues Calasso, why this hunt for images and analogies goes on forever, is that sometime in the nineteenth century in Paris it became apparent that there was now no canon against which interpretations could be defined. There was no orthodoxy. “And perhaps never as in Baudelaire, in the graphs of his nervous reactions, was that situation so manifest.”
This, concludes Calasso, is the secret of Baudelaire’s continuing shock value: “It is not something that concerns the power or the perfection of form. It concerns sensibility.” Baudelaire was the most sensitive instrument for recording the modern condition of total semantic confusion.
This is Calasso’s theme—the mystery of nineteenth-century appearances, as described by Baudelaire. It was Baudelaire, after all, who invented the phrase “the painter of modern life” to describe his beloved artist Constantin Guys, and this phrase is the hidden center of Calasso’s book—which is attentive not just to Baudelaire’s poems but also, especially, to the lavish suite of Baudelaire’s writings on art. Baudelaire was not just a great poet. His complete works are dominated by a mass of prose: letters, journals, literary essays, reviews, and, above all, his salons. He “allows himself to be perceived,” as Calasso writes, “through scraps of verses, fragments of phrases dispersed in the prose.” From this central point Calasso strolls, as through some luminous aquarium.
His book is baroque in its construction: its argument does not proceed from point to point but through a sequence of slow drifts and sudden aphoristic shocks. It is a gorgeous, willful, and convincing re-staging of Baudelaire’s style. But as Calasso performed his intricate investigation I kept being haunted by this idea of Baudelaire’s modernity, the problem of his uniqueness. And it was prompted, I think, by the problem of quotation. Baudelaire’s writing is a deeply unstable element, like plutonium. What, for instance, is one meant to make of this shocking sentence from Baudelaire’s late notes—“A fine conspiracy could be organized to exterminate the Jewish Race”?
Or of this, from one of his earliest works, the preface to his Salon of 1846—“And so it is to you, bourgeois, that this book is naturally dedicated; for any book that does not appeal to the majority, in numbers and intelligence, is a stupid book”? In both cases, separated by the zigzag of Baudelaire’s career, it is impossible to determine the precise dosage of irony. All the usual ways in which texts meant anything, in Baudelaire’s writing, could be casually, methodically upended.
What does it really mean for a writer to abandon the inspired style? Or to be a painter of modern life? Baudelaire loved to make it sound exuberant. When he wrote the words “new,” or “modern,” he often emphasized them in jazzy italics, to show how new the category of the new could be. But the deeper tone to this new confessional mode, in the end, was much more wounded, more melancholy. It was gruesome. And the gruesome is what you need to investigate, if you want to think about Baudelaire’s new style.
The public political humiliation, the private financial humiliation: this is the backstory to Baudelaire’s style. Humiliation was his studio. It was the medium in which he lived. His journals contain an entire section that was to be called “Hygiene”—notes where Baudelaire berated himself for his procrastination, his everyday laziness. He was the bohemian always appalled by his bohemian style. Utopia was a place where the riches of one’s genius would be matched by the riches of one’s earnings.
For humiliation, after all, was one effect of literature’s new commercial liberation. Baudelaire was one of the first writers to try to exist free from family inheritance, or aristocratic patronage, or government grants. But he discovered that this only leaves you alone with the market. And as soon as the market enters the picture, writing becomes a bleak strategy for reconciling sincerity to oneself with an appeal to other people. It leads to the writer performing pirouettes of self-definition and self-hatred. You never, in the words of Groucho Marx, want to belong to the club that will have you as a member. And its final effect can be seen in this proud, battered, manic sentence from a letter Baudelaire wrote toward the end of 1865: “no one has ever paid me, in esteem no more than in money, what I am DUE.”
And of course he was right. Humiliation was endless. So his true investigation into humiliation was the miniature theater of his writing. For if you write from life, if you write in this new confessional mode, then you very quickly discover how much it is possible to be humiliated. When Les Fleurs du Mal was on trial for obscenity, the prosecutor Pinard lamented, “[T]his unhealthy fever which induces writers to portray everything, to describe everything, to say everything.” If he hadn’t meant it as an insult, it would have been a neat description of Baudelaire’s new project. No humiliation would be too shameful to be documented.
But the fact that humiliation comes so naturally is therefore also a problem. It’s very easy for masochism in writing to deflate, and become only charming. It led Baudelaire into theatrics of exaggerated malice, of self-inculpation, like the repeated story of him praising the food in a restaurant as "as tender as the brains of a little child". He knew that there is nothing cuter than the display of one’s wounds. But the reason for his continuing value is that he also came up with a solution to this problem. For true self-exposure can never be in the choice of what one observes. It can never be in the things confessed. It is easy, in the end, to describe something that no one else has described before. No, Baudelaire’s example is so toxic and so intoxicating because he shows that the greater courage is in the risk a writer takes with tone.
He somehow invented an ironic method of not being ironic at all. And this is what explains the strange rhythm of his writing, where the most poignant truths are smuggled into footnotes, or improvised essays. The ultimate secret of his apparently flippant digressions and arabesques is that everywhere he is totally exposed.
But this requires a slow-motion replay. Zoom in, say, on 1865, around the same time as his desolate letter complaining of his neglect. Baudelaire was forty-four. It sounds young, but in fact he had only two more years to live. Harassed by the French state, banned, censored, nearly bankrupt, he was trying out new options in a new city. In Brussels he sat down and wrote a series of short texts in prose, one of which has a title that could roughly be translated as: “Let’s Batter the Poor!” This miniature begins with Baudelaire describing how, around sixteen or seventeen years ago—around 1848, the year of revolution in Paris—he holed up for a fortnight, reading fashionable books of utopian political theory: both the ones that advise the poor to make themselves into slaves, he writes, and the ones that persuade the poor that they are all dethroned kings.
Then he went out, with a deep desire for drink, “because a passionate taste for bad reading matter creates a proportionate need for open air and refreshment.” As he was about to go into a bar, a sixty-year-old beggar held out his hat, looking piteously at Baudelaire. So he paused there, hearing his good Angel or Demon whisper: “The only man who is the equal of another is the one who can prove it, and the only man who is worthy of liberty is the one who knows how to conquer it.” And with this revelation, Baudelaire began to savage the old beggar. He punched him in the eye, strangled him, beat his head against a wall; then he kicked him to the ground and began whipping him with a large branch: “and I beat him with the obstinate energy of a cook tenderizing a steak.”
But suddenly—“what a miracle! what delight for the philosopher who verifies the excellence of his theory!”—the old beggar stood up and “with a look of hatred that seemed to me to be a good sign” punched Baudelaire in both eyes, broke four of his teeth, and beat him with the very same tree-branch into pulp. When he was done, Baudelaire delightedly indicated that he considered their discussion to be over: “Monsieur, you are my equal! Please do me the honor of sharing my wallet; and remember, if you are truly philanthropic, that you must apply to every one of your comrades, when they demand money from you, the same theory which I have had the distress of trying out on your back.” And in his text’s last line, or punchline, Baudelaire writes: “He indeed promised that he had understood my theory, and that he would obey my advice.”
The effect of this mobile tone in Baudelaire’s work is that everywhere in his writing the surface is instantly porous. You read through his journals, and discover this isolated joke: “On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.” And you realize that the essence of this apparently casual joke is that both the schoolboy and the writer are proud of an imperfection that confirms their loss of innocence, their natural state of everyday corruption. This is not an isolated moment. This kind of fall happens constantly in Baudelaire’s writing. The investigation of tone in Baudelaire is an investigation into humiliation; and this humiliation, in Baudelaire’s theory, is the result of his conviction—to us, perhaps, counter-intuitive—that everything natural is corrupt.
Baudelaire begins his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life” with a general theory of Beauty. His idea is that Beauty has two elements: one is “eternal and invariable,” and the other is “a relative circumstantial element”—an element that goes by a series of aliases: “contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion.” As a theory, it does not amaze you immediately with its cool. But with this theory Baudelaire is doing something berserk to the history of aesthetics. The shift is in how he sketches the relationship between the two elements of beauty. It used to be that they happily existed beside each other, the eternal and the everyday. But no, he argues. If you want the eternal at all then the only route to it will be through the banal and ubiquitous quotidian, through the everyday dresses and make-up and sex lives of one’s era. This is the source of his strange uniqueness: this assertion that the only metaphysical art is a sketched picture of modern manners, as in the engravings of Constantin Guys, or in his own writing: all paintings of “the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal.” There is nothing more profound, in Baudelaire’s revolution, than surfaces. And the closest surface is the map of one’s own feelings. Humiliation, in other words, is the point at which Baudelaire discovers his own portal into the eternal. ~
https://newrepublic.com/article/112304/how-baudelaire-revolutionized-modern-literature-la-folie-baudelaire
Oriana:
I would add that Baudelaire is also the first urban poet, a poet of the city rather than of Arcadian landscapes. He recognized the mysteriouos energy of a great city. He is a poet of Paris as much as Dickens is a poet of Lodon. Baudelaire's Paris is a city of dreams as much as of the devastation of those dreams:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Still, he is at his best when he concentrates on a "narrow slice." This is one of my favorite poems by Baudelaire:
THE CRACKED BELL
On winter nights, it’s bitter and sweet
To listen, near the fire that crackles and smokes,
To the distant memories slowly surfacing
At the sound of carillons singing in the fog.
Happy the bell with the vigorous throat!
Despite its old age, strong and alert,
It faithfully sends forth its religious call
Like an old soldier standing sentinel.
But my soul is cracked, and when in its anguish
It wishes to fill the cold night air with its songs,
It often happens that its weakened voice
Is like the death rattle of a wounded man,
Forgotten on the edge of a lake of blood,
Dying, unable to move, under a pile of the dead.
~ Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867
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Oriana:
Speaking of cracked souls, this one was more harmful to others than thousands of ordinary criminals:
YAHIA SINWAR ELIMINATED
Yahia Sinwar, regarded as one of the masterminds behind October 7, is no more. Israel’s decapitaion of Hezbollah and Hamas has been amazing to watch. Now if only Putin could be captured and put on trial in the Hague . . .
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli forces in Gaza killed Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of last year’s attack on Israel that sparked the war, the military said Thursday. Troops appeared to have run across him unknowingly in a battle, only to discover afterwards that a body in the rubble was Israel’s most wanted man.
Israeli leaders celebrated his killing as a settling of scores, just over a year after Hamas-led militants surged out of Gaza into southern Israel in an attack that stunned the country. They also presented it as a moment for Hamas to surrender and release some 100 hostages it still holds captive.
Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Our war has not yet ended.” Besides seeking the release of hostages, Netanyahu has said Israel must keep long-term control over Gaza to ensure Hamas does not rearm — opening the possibility of continued fighting.
For Hamas, Sinwar’s death is a crippling blow, but it has continually proven resilient during the war. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of Sinwar’s death.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant addressed Hamas fighters, saying it “is time to go out, release the hostages, raise your hands, surrender.”
President Joe Biden called Sinwar’s death a “good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world,” comparing it to the feeling in the U.S. after the killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. He said he would talk with Netanyahu “to discuss the pathway for bringing the hostages home to their families, and for ending this war once and for all.”
Sinwar has been Hamas’ top leader inside the Gaza Strip for years, closely connected to its military wing while dramatically building up its capabilities. He was elevated to Hamas’ highest spot in July after his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran.
In the past months, Israel has eliminated a string of senior figures from Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah with airstrikes. Israel has claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.
But in Sinwar’s case, troops found him by chance.
An Israeli military official said that Sinwar “engaged in combat” with Israeli troops operating in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, and was spotted running into a building. The army struck the building with tank fire.
The army had suspected a number of top Hamas officials including Sinwar were in the vicinity, but Sinwar was not the target of that day’s specific operations, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity under military briefing rules.
Visiting the site of the killing, Israel’s army chief Herzi Halevi said that while the military had conducted “many special operations in this war where we had excellent information .... Here, we didn’t have that and the response was very, very strong.”
Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.
The military said three militants were killed in the operation. Police said one of them was confirmed as Sinwar by dental records and fingerprints, and DNA tests were ongoing. Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer – leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-lebanon-hezbollah-news-10-17-2024-d12ca71945313e601cf10876072f4182?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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~ Yahya
Sinwar spent the last hours of his life alone, in agony, with his right hand blown off. He died a miserable wretch, utterly humiliated by the
“Dhimmi” Jews he sought to annihilate. ~ World 365, Quora
more on the finding of Yahia Sinwar
Israeli troops patrol through the streets of a rubble-strewn Rafah in September 2024
Israeli troops had for more than a year hunted the leader of Hamas, who disappeared in Gaza soon after masterminding the 7 October attacks.
Yahya Sinwar, 61, was said to have spent much of his time hiding in the tunnels under the Strip, along with a cadre of bodyguards and a 'human shield' of hostages seized from Israel.
But ultimately, it appears he met his end in a chance encounter with an Israeli patrol in southern Gaza. His guard detail was small. No hostages were found.
Details are still emerging, but here's what we know so far about Sinwar's killing.
Routine patrol
The Israel Defense Forces says a unit from its 828th Bislamach Brigade was patrolling Tal al-Sultan, an area of Rafah, on Wednesday.
Three militants were identified and engaged by the Israeli troops — and all were eliminated.
At that stage nothing seemed particularly remarkable about the firefight and the soldiers did not return to the scene until Thursday morning.
It was then, as the dead were inspected, that one of the bodies was found to bear a striking resemblance to the leader of Hamas.
The corpse however remained in situ due to suspected booby traps and instead, part of a finger was removed and sent to Israel for testing.
His body was finally extracted and brought to Israel later that day as the area was made safe.
Daniel Hagari, the IDF's spokesman, said that his forces "didn't know he was there but we continued to operate".
He said that his troops had identified the three men running from house to house, and engaged them before they split up.
The man since identified as Sinwar "ran alone into one of the buildings" and was killed after being located with a drone.
None of the hostages Sinwar was believed to be using as a human shield were present and his small retinue suggests either he was trying to move unnoticed, or had lost many of those protecting him.
Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister, said: "Sinwar died while beaten, persecuted and on the run – he didn't die as a commander, but as someone who only cared for himself. This is a clear message to all of our enemies.”
Israel first announced that it was "investigating the possibility" that Sinwar had been killed in Gaza on Thursday afternoon local time.
Within minutes of the announcement, pictures posted to social media showed the body of a man with very similar features to the Hamas leader, who had suffered catastrophic head wounds. The images are too graphic to republish.
However, officials warned that "at this stage" the identity of any of the three men killed could not be confirmed.
It was not long after that Israeli sources told the BBC that leaders were "increasingly confident" that they had killed him. However, they said that all necessary tests must be carried out before the death could be confirmed.
Those tests did not take long. By Thursday evening, Israel had announced that they had been completed and that Sinwar was confirmed "eliminated".
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said that "evil" had been "dealt a blow", but warned that the Israeli war in Gaza had not been completed.”
A TIGHTENING NOOSE
While Sinwar was not killed during a targeted operation, the IDF said that it had for weeks been operating in areas where intelligence indicated his presence.
In short, Israeli forces had narrowed Sinwar's rough location to the southern city of Rafah, and were slowly moving in to get him.
Sinwar had been on the run for more than a year. He had undoubtedly felt the Israeli pressure growing as other Hamas leaders, such as Mohammad Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, were killed, and as Israel destroyed the infrastructure he had used to prosecute the atrocities of 7 October.
In a statement, the IDF said its operations in recent weeks in the south had "restricted Yahya Sinwar's operational movement as he was pursued by the forces and led to his elimination".
MAJOR GOAL, BUT NOT THE END
Killing Sinwar was a major goal for Israel, which marked him for death soon after the 7 October attacks. But his end does not end the war in Gaza.
While Netanyahu said that he had "settled the score”, he insisted the war would continue — not least to save the 101 hostages still held by Hamas.
"To the dear hostage families, I say: this is an important moment in the war. We will continue full force until all your loved ones, our loved ones, are home."
In Israel, families of hostages said they hoped that a ceasefire could now be reached that would bring home the captives.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czj9zzz8xm7o
Misha Iossel’s brief comment:
Will the ignominious death of one of the ugliest monsters ever to walk the earth cause his followers and sympathizers to wake up and accept the immutable reality of Jewish state's existence, recognize the fact that it is not going anywhere, that they cannot defeat it and their repeated attempts to do so will time after time result in their own defeat? Will they finally stop wallowing in hatred? Mass self-delusion is a great tragedy for those being indulged in it. Will things be different now?
Oriana:
A year after the horror of October 7, and the devastation of Gaza that followed, is the killing of Yahia Sinwar the beginning of the post-Hamas era, as Netanyahu announced? With Hezbollah’s having also sustained heavy losses, I assumed he meant “post-terrorist.” That would certainly be an excellent thing, a chance for both sides to live a normal life without constant warfare. But as long as Iran keeps on supplying weapons, is there any real chance for peace? As long as even preschool children are indoctrinated to hate Israel, is there a real hope that no new terrorist organization will arise?
This early indoctrination with hate is sadly reminiscent of Russia’s preschools and how those little children are dressed in small-size military uniforms and told they must be ready to fight against the evil West. Politics seems insanely incongruous with humanity’s achievements in science, technology, and medicine, with the myriad articles about colonizing Mars and the newest developments in artificial intelligence. For all the brilliance and the collective genius of humanity, we are still forced to watch the sad spectacle of nation attacking nation, of children losing their limbs to drones, of unspeakable barbarism committed in the name of an all-merciful deity. I used to be optimistic, but ever since October 7 optimism has been very difficult.
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Israel believes Hezbollah was planning an Oct. 7-style invasion
For Israel, the tunnels are evidence that Hezbollah planned what Israel says would be a bloody offensive against communities in the north.
“Hezbollah has openly declared that it plans to carry out its own Oct. 7 massacre on Israel’s northern border, on an even larger scale,” Israeli military spokesman Rear. Adm. Daniel Hagari said the day troops entered Lebanon.
Israel has not released evidence that any such attack was imminent but has expressed concern that one might be launched once residents return.
Former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel last month while in an underground bunker, had signaled in speeches that Hezbollah could launch an attack on northern Israel.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hezbollah-ground-invasion-tunnels-2f22d95269bdf3b5fa1304816f2fee81
A RAY OF HOPE: YOUNG PEOPLE LEAVING ISLAM
2017 Pew Research Center survey found that 24% of people raised Muslim have left Islam.
* * *
THE MYSTERY OF SUDDEN GENIUS
Diana de Avila was in her pool one day in 2017 when she was suddenly “dropped on the moon.” She had just gotten home from the hospital, where she had been treated for optic neuritis and vertigo, and she was trying to relax in the calm water. Suddenly, bright colors and shapes began to appear in front of her. Yellow took the form of a triangle; orange was shaped like a rectangle. She felt as if she could reach out and touch them. Most strongly, she felt a desire to create. “It felt like lightning,” de Avila says. “Like something turned on in a second. It was a mystery to me.”
She immediately began painting. She had no training in art. But her hands just knew what to do. “It was fulfilling to connect line and form. I let things be guided by intuition,” she says. Two hours later, the canvas was covered in splotches of teal, brown, and orange. She titled her first piece “Blobs and Boomerangs.”
Then the compulsion took over. She created five or six pieces a day, day after day. She’d get up in the middle of the night to make art. She played music, sometimes the same song on repeat, to quiet her manic mind. After a couple of months, she was exhausted. She did some research and found someone who might know what on earth was going on. “I wrote, ‘You don’t know me from Adam, but what’s happening to me?’”
De Avila was in the throes of an incredibly rare phenomenon—acquired savant syndrome. In these cases, an individual suddenly becomes a savant, demonstrating incredible talent in a specific domain—typically music, art, calendar calculating, mathematical and number skills, or mechanical or spatial skills, as well as astounding memory—for which there appears to be no precedent in their earlier life experience. It may materialize after injury, disease, stroke, dementia, or assault. Acquired savant syndrome is extremely rare: 32 cases were identified as of a 2015 report. Current estimates are slightly higher—and cases surely exist that haven’t been captured in the literature.
As few as 10 percent of savants have acquired savant syndrome, while the vast majority have congenital savant syndrome. To contextualize—congenital savant syndrome affects 10 percent of people with autism and less than 1 percent of people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. Fifty percent of people with savant syndrome have autism, while the rest generally have other developmental disorders. Male savants outnumber females by a ratio of six to one. The movie Rain Man, perhaps the most popular depiction of savant syndrome, tells the true story of Kim Peek, who could, among many other skills, read two pages of a book at the same time and memorize the material after a single read.
The coexistence of supreme talent with mental handicap in congenital savant syndrome is remarkable in its own right. But there’s something about acquired savant syndrome—the dichotomy of injury and growth, of tragedy and triumph—that boggles the mind.
*
One person fascinated by this phenomenon was Darold Treffert. As a newly minted psychiatrist in 1962, Treffert was tasked with beginning a children’s unit in Wisconsin’s Winnebago Mental Health Institute. He soon had 30 patients with severe mental challenges and disabilities. Yet four young boys stood out. One had memorized the entire Milwaukee bus system. One could glance at a 500-piece puzzle, picture side down, and seamlessly reconstruct it. One recited what happened on “this day in history” with encyclopedic memory. One made basketball free throws with machine-like precision and consistency.
“I was struck by these ‘Islands of Genius,’” wrote Treffert, “immersed and surrounded by a sea of otherwise permeating and severe mental handicap. How can that be?”
Treffert became the international authority on savant syndrome and corresponded with or met hundreds of savants throughout his life. The relationships he formed were transformative for many of them. Treffert died in 2020, having shaped the current understanding of savant syndrome.
*
No single theory can explain all cases of savant syndrome. But one leading hypothesis, especially for acquired savant syndrome, is that anomaly or damage in the left hemisphere essentially rewires the brain, recruiting new capacity or releasing dormant ability from the intact right hemisphere—much as a person with a broken leg relies more heavily on their opposing, functioning limb, thereby strengthening it.
The distinction between the two brain hemispheres is often oversimplified, but differences do exist: The left hemisphere specializes in logical, sequential, language-based processes, while the right specializes in creative and artistic processes. Acquired savant syndrome overwhelmingly involves left hemisphere damage and right hemisphere specialty skills. Injury, disease, or disability essentially “unlocks” the brain, leading a particular region to explode in functioning and flourishing. After a violent storm, lush, new vegetation blooms.
Research supports the role of hemispheric differences in savantism. Imaging research finds that for savants, some brain regions are bigger, concentrations of neurotransmitters higher, and connectivity stronger in the right hemisphere than in the left. “The electrical cabling is more robust,” says Neva Corrigan, a research scientist at the University of Washington. This aligns with research demonstrating that the right hemisphere uses more energy to generate more activity than the left, as measured by glucose and oxygen consumption. In acquired savant syndrome, “the left gets impaired, and the right gets freed up,” says Irem Onin of Istanbul Medipol University, co-author of a 2023 review article on savant syndrome.
Why are only some people with autism savants? Why do only some people with nervous system damage acquire savantism? The answer isn’t completely clear. It may involve individual neurological differences or where exactly the injury occurred. Biology may play a role, as greater testosterone in utero can alter left hemisphere development, which may explain why more men than women have autism and savantism. Genetics may play a role, as several genes have been implicated, and special abilities often appear in relatives of those with savant syndrome. But genetics alone aren’t enough to produce the phenomenon.
De Avila experienced a number of brain injuries over the years. As a preteen, she knew she wanted to serve in the military. The day she turned 18, she enlisted as military police. After only a few months in the service, she was in a motorcycle crash that damaged the left frontotemporal region of her brain.
Over her nine-month hospitalization, she prayed. She bargained with God. “I thought, ‘If you let me keep my legs, I’ll give my life to you,’” De Avila says. She made good on that promise; after being released from the hospital, she became a nun for seven years. In the convent, she dealt with multiple health challenges, in part due to chemical exposure from her time in the military. She left the convent and pursued a master’s in education, working for a brief time as a school psychologist, where she also taught herself how to code. Her medical challenges never fully dissipated, and she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001.
Sixteen years later, de Avila was in the hospital with optic neuritis—inflammation of the optic nerve that leads to vision problems—for which she was given an extremely high dose of steroids. Some alchemical combination of traumatic brain injury from the motorcycle crash, deterioration from multiple sclerosis, and arousal from the steroids unleashed the creative fury she experienced in the pool days after her hospital stay.
In Treffert’s response to de Avila’s outreach, he called her story “compelling, and your artwork amazing.” He noted articles, books, and videos that could shed light on her situation and asked if she’d like to be in his registry of savants.
As the two corresponded, de Avila drew comfort from the doctor. He understood and encouraged her. She felt like an imposter when people asked her to teach them how to paint—she knew how, but never learned how. Treffert reassured her that others struggled with imposter syndrome too. She grew as an artist, and as a savant, learning to manage the compulsive element that came with her gift.
*
Derek Amato grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He hated school and loved sports. On October 27, 2006, he went to his friend Bill’s house for a barbecue. They had a few beers and were playing around the pool, diving, flipping, and tossing a Nerf football. When Rick threw the ball across the water, Amato hurtled down the deck and dove in to catch it. His head struck the pool bottom. He remembers seeing Bill and his friends speak wordlessly—he couldn’t hear them. Then he collapsed.
At the hospital, doctors didn’t find any bleeding in the brain and sent him home the next morning. He slept for five days, and then, somewhat miraculously, returned to his life. He soon visited a friend who had a few musical instruments in his apartment.
“I sat down at the keyboard and all of a sudden my hands were flying around,” Amato says. He loved music and had played drums as a kid, but nothing more. As he played now, he saw black and white squares in his mind that composed the piece, a kind of musical synesthesia. “My first thought was, ‘Rick put acid in my beer!’” Then his thoughts shifted to: What’s happening right now? Is this going to stay? Will it be gone tomorrow?
Amato took his mom to a music store to show her. “My mom is my best friend so I didn’t need to say anything,” Amato says. “She cried and asked, ‘What’s happening?’” I said, “I don’t know.”
Amato quickly found Treffert and reached out. Treffert again provided information and testing, but most of all, he provided friendship during a period of complete confusion. “He was like a father figure to us weird circus people. He was the ringleader of this beautiful circle of giftedness,” Amato says. Amato’s talents continued to blossom, as did his career. He played and performed around the country, mentored other artists, and spoke out about his journey.
*
No two savants are the same. Savants may be capable of reciting pi to more than 20,000 decimal places or accurately making spatial measurements across vast distances with pinpoint precision. All forms of savantism have a memory component, but some entail near-perfect memories for encyclopedic facts.
George Logothetis was born in London, the oldest of four boys, to Greek parents who ran a small shipping business. At age two and a half, in 1977, he contracted bacterial meningitis, fell into a coma, and spent two weeks in the hospital. Logothetis recovered fully, to the amazement of the doctors and nurses who had cared for him, but he would endure years of pain and illness related to his depleted immune system.
From a young age, Logothetis took an interest in his father’s work, devouring the weekly shipping newsletter and analyzing the market. He soon took the helm, becoming CEO by age 19. He remembers every number, every quantity, every measurement, every price that passed through his ledger. “The East Cape, a ship we delivered in 1993, was 482,000 cubic feet, built in 1975, and leased for $416,000 a month,” Logothetis says. “It doesn’t require effort to retrieve this. It’s just there.”
Logothetis achieved tremendous success in the world of shipping and far beyond. He grew his father’s company and co-founded Libra Group in 2003 to diversify his business. It’s now an operation that includes renewable energy, aerospace, maritime, hotels and hospitality, real estate, and diversified investments—yielding billions of dollars in assets.
An autodidact, Logothetis was curious to understand and deepen his own knowledge. He once asked the top speed reader to teach him how to do it. After their training session, Logothetis picked up a book—and he read about 1,000 words a minute (research suggests the average is about 238 words a minute for fiction and 175–300 for nonfiction). The speed reader was both shocked and skeptical. “Test me!” said Logothetis, who then successfully recalled the content of the material.
In 2013, Logothetis took a sabbatical to spend time diving into new interests, an adventure he embarks on every five years. That year, some psychological topics were on the docket. This led him to Dr. Treffert. On a call, Treffert explained the concept of acquired savant syndrome, sharing stories of people who, following an accident, could suddenly draw beautiful pictures or write incredible music. It was then that Logothetis learned there were documented cases of individuals acquiring skills and talents following neural catastrophe—including a bout of meningitis.
“This was mind-bending for me,” Logothetis says. “I felt emotional, relieved. It explained how I saw things that others didn’t see, but I didn’t have to make an effort to see them.”
It changed his relationships. Before that, he was filled with frustration when others couldn’t easily cite relevant numbers, prices, or information. He had no idea that other brains didn’t work the way his did, that data from past decades didn’t instantly materialize. “No one ever said to me, ‘George, it’s not normal to know this,’” Logothetis says. “I was so much more tolerant after speaking to Treffert. My attitude became, “If you don’t know the numbers, that’s fine. Just bring your file with you.”
George Logothetis
Logothetis’s IQ was tested early and consistently by his parents, given their concerns about his cognitive health and recovery from meningitis. The score, says Logothetis, was 149—placing him in the 99.9th percentile of test-takers. Only 1 in 1,900 individuals score in this range. Logothetis’s exceedingly high cognitive ability no doubt contributes to his professional success. But his savant-like recall likely isn’t explained by high aptitude alone.
He was only two and a half when struck ill—would he have had these abilities in the absence of illness? There’s no definitive answer. But Treffert’s hunch, and unearthing how his mind operates differently from others, was the insight Logothetis needed. “I’m grateful to know,” Logothetis says. “Liberated to know.”
*
Treffert helped de Avila, Amato, Logothetis, and so many others. Toward the end of his life, he realized he needed to pass the baton to a successor. He found that man in psychiatrist Jeremy Chapman. The Treffert Center, located in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, provides mental health care, education, support groups, and other services to individuals with savant syndrome, autism, and other mental health conditions. Expanding this charter, Chapman opened Treffert Studios in February 2023.
The studio has purchased a vast array of creative tools—“musical instruments, cameras, paints and canvases, everything we can think of that would help somebody uncover, cultivate, and share a talent,” Chapman says. People can try as many outlets as possible. Let’s say a parent discovered their son was incredible at the piano because one day he walked to their living room and played it. But that family didn’t have a harp. Or a trombone. Is that child equally talented at other instruments or other skills? This studio, this incubator of talent, is just waiting for untapped genius. Like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the movie X-Men, each “pupil” may discover their mutant superpower.
Chapman wants to help savants harness their talent for the joy of it but also so they can support themselves on a practical and financial level. Individuals with congenital savant syndrome have autism or other developmental challenges. Some can’t speak or live independently. But their talent poses a possibility. Can they set up an Etsy shop to sell their paintings? Can they record a music podcast and make some money?
“We have one man who is a blind piano prodigy. He didn’t learn to speak until 14 or 15, and he learned through song. He went to Berklee, and his goal is to be a piano player on a cruise ship,” Chapman says. “We can help him. We can start a TikTok account where he shares his skills. His mother is in her 70s, and when she passes, maybe he’ll have a little bit of autonomy.”
Another goal of the center is academic: How can savantism be defined and measured? There’s a certain amount of subjectivity involved in the construct. How many digits of pi do you have to memorize to be a savant? 500? 5,000? There are no clear criteria, no DSM diagnosis to turn to.
“We’re developing tests and questions to better objectify and stratify certain patterns,” Chapman says. For example, calendar calculations are a common savant skill. To assess this, Chapman’s team is developing a consistent standardized list of questions, such as: How many years into the past and future can you go? Are you using mathematical calculations, visual imagery, or another strategy? Does speed ever hamper your accuracy?
More esoteric savant skills involve sensory perception—parsing microscopic differences in color shades or volumetric weight. To assess the latter, the team devised a test with plastic cups full of water that differed by 25 milliliters, 10 milliliters, and 3 milliliters.
Chapman is excited about the future, as he believes more and more savants will pour in. “It didn’t used to be the case that anyone could hop on video and demonstrate how their child plays the violin,” Chapman says. “More individuals will be uncovered.”
***
How many more savants will materialize? Does everyone have latent talent waiting to be tapped? What if instead of injuring part of the brain you could temporarily inhibit it? Would that unleash your secret superpower? “The evidence seems to suggest we all have the potential. We may have dormant skills that are getting buried or obscured,” Chapman says.
Treffert argued that latent savant-like powers exist due to “genetic memory”—that the blueprint for some knowledge and capacities is passed down from parent to child through their DNA. This may take the form of mathematical templates or perfect pitch, for example.
Everyone possesses some innate capacities, the theory goes, but they may quickly be lost due to disuse. Although some components of this theory are contentious, this is one explanation for how savants may possess skills they never learned.
Researchers have tried to stimulate such skills using neuromodulation, including repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), to temporarily inhibit a particular brain region and see how the rest of the brain responds. Much of this work has been conducted by Allan Snyder, a professor at the University of Sydney. In one study, magnetic pulses were directed to the left frontotemporal lobe of a small group of neurotypical individuals. This led some to change their drawing style and enhance their proofreading. In another study, using these pulses to inhibit the left anterior temporal lobe led 10 out of 12 participants to improve a numerical ability, the ability to accurately guess the number of items in a large collection.
“I have argued that the extraordinary skills of savants are latent in us all and that they can be induced artificially,” Snyder writes in a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. “My hypothesis is that savant skills are facilitated by privileged access to raw, less-processed sensory information, information that exists in all brains but is inaccessible owing to top-down inhibition.”
These implications are especially striking in the case of sudden savant syndrome—when no discernable disability or brain injury precedes the epiphany of genius. This is the rarest form of savant syndrome. In 2009, Treffert published a fascinating paper, documenting the known cases of sudden savant syndrome—just 11 people. A man in Israel walked by a piano in a mall, at 28 years old, and realized with a flash of clarity how to play with the skill of a virtuoso. A foreign journalist spent two years in Germany with a rudimentary grasp of the language. One day, at 31 years old, he was asked a question and perfect German effortlessly poured out of him. Not one of the 11 had experienced documented neurological turbulence on their way to brilliance.
***
De Avila continued to correspond with Treffert over the years, up until a month before his death. She created a picture of the “savant whisperer,” which now hangs in the Treffert Library. “I owe so much to him. His guidance, his kindness. Getting me off the ledge of craziness,” de Avila says.
Today, de Avila’s art explores digital media. “I do a lot of fractal work. I think of code and algorithms as my palette,” she says. She is a full-time artist and exhibits her work in a gallery in downtown Sarasota, Florida, where she lives—something she never could have imagined before. She began an acquired savant artist collective that flourished, although she’s since stepped back due to her health.
Her health is a challenge, one that has levied tremendous pain and tremendous talent. “One is lemonade and one is lemons,” de Avila says. “It’s in my nature to make lemonade out of lemons. I see it as a wonderful distraction from the hard parts of life, from brain injury, MS, and other things. Art is the healing thing.”
This paradox is inherent in each and every case of acquired savant syndrome. What first sparked Onin’s interest in savantism was a 19-year-old rehabilitation patient who got into a terrible car accident and was in a coma for three weeks. Upon waking, he was devastated and fell into a depression. But he also developed the ability to conduct complex calculations. When he realized that he had newfound mathematical skills—that some ability, however bounded, was improving rather than declining—he started investing more in his rehabilitation, getting better and better each week.
Is the experience of acquiring savant-like abilities a gift or a medical burden? The degree to which the two push, pull, and vie for dominance is different for each person and can shape their identity and trajectory. “It’s up to your philosophy, your social environment,” Onin says. “If people who acquire savant syndrome can turn it to their advantage, it’s a gift.”
“I know that my brain is atrophying. As my art is getting better, I’m losing more of my brain,” de Avila says. “It feels like an inverse relationship. Is it a bad thing? I don’t feel that I can change it. I’ll take it—and keep creating.”
Researchers have tried to stimulate such skills using neuromodulation, including repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), to temporarily inhibit a particular brain region and see how the rest of the brain responds. Much of this work has been conducted by Allan Snyder, a professor at the University of Sydney. In one study, magnetic pulses were directed to the left frontotemporal lobe of a small group of neurotypical individuals. This led some to change their drawing style and enhance their proofreading.
In another study, using these pulses to inhibit the left anterior temporal lobe led 10 out of 12 participants to improve a numerical ability, the ability to accurately guess the number of items in a large collection. “I have argued that the extraordinary skills of savants are latent in us all and that they can be induced artificially,” Snyder writes in a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. “My hypothesis is that savant skills are facilitated by privileged access to raw, less-processed sensory information, information that exists in all brains but is inaccessible owing to top-down inhibition.”
***
De Avila continued to correspond with Treffert over the years, up until a month before his death. She created a picture of the “savant whisperer,” which now hangs in the Treffert Library. “I owe so much to him. His guidance, his kindness. Getting me off the ledge of craziness,” de Avila says.
Today, de Avila’s art explores digital media. “I do a lot of fractal work. I think of code and algorithms as my palette,” she says. She is a full-time artist and exhibits her work in a gallery in downtown Sarasota, Florida, where she lives—something she never could have imagined before. She began an acquired savant artist collective that flourished, although she’s since stepped back due to her health.
Her health is a challenge, one that has levied tremendous pain and tremendous talent. “One is lemonade and one is lemons,” de Avila says. “It’s in my nature to make lemonade out of lemons. I see it as a wonderful distraction from the hard parts of life, from brain injury, MS, and other things. Art is the healing thing.”
This paradox is inherent in each and every case of acquired savant syndrome. What first sparked Onin’s interest in savantism was a 19-year-old rehabilitation patient who got into a terrible car accident and was in a coma for three weeks. Upon waking, he was devastated and fell into a depression. But he also developed the ability to conduct complex calculations. When he realized that he had newfound mathematical skills—that some ability, however bounded, was improving rather than declining—he started investing more in his rehabilitation, getting better and better each week.
Is the experience of acquiring savant-like abilities a gift or a medical burden? The degree to which the two push, pull, and vie for dominance is different for each person and can shape their identity and trajectory. “It’s up to your philosophy, your social environment,” Onin says. “If people who acquire savant syndrome can turn it to their advantage, it’s a gift.”
“I know that my brain is atrophying. As my art is getting better, I’m losing more of my brain,” de Avila says. “It feels like an inverse relationship. Is it a bad thing? I don’t feel that I can change it. I’ll take it—and keep creating.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202403/the-mystery-of-sudden-genius
Oriana:
Interestingly, there are no "savant" poets, though Yeats was said to have Asperger's syndrome, i.e. he was (perhaps) a high-functioning autistic. Adam Zagajewski, an eminent modern Polish poet, also showed some symptoms of Asperger's. But the pattern of Yeats's creativity does not fit the savant mode. We know that Yeats meticulously revised and revised his poems — they didn't just "flow" out of him. And effortlessness is a very significant component of savant-type creativity. No "writer's block," no forty revisions.
I suspect that the difference is that poetry and literature in general depend on the author's deeply felt knowledge of human life and emotions — not just a skillful manipulation of words and images. Ideally, poetry is a marriage of beauty and wisdom. Wisdom develops slowly — I suspect that is the main reason why there are no child prodigies in literature. To write moving love poems, for instance, the author must have first experienced falling in love and, maybe even more important, being destroyed by love. An encounter with mortality is also helpful, and perhaps even necessary.
True, inspiration, like insight, may come very suddenly and effortlessly (in fact, those tend to be the best poems), but in retrospect we can trace many preliminary steps that led to the moment of discovery or creation. One is an artist only for a moment, but one's whole life had to be a certain way to lead to that moment.
*
HOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ANYTHING
~ Success and being a lifelong learner are pretty much joined at the hip — without learning, it's almost impossible to adapt to the new demands of the market or world. But if you're already eating and sleeping right, writing notes longhand, taking time to ponder what you just read and all the other tricks we've figured out for learning and memory, how can you crunch even more information into your brain?
It turns out, one of the best ways to improve learning is to stop flitting about topics. Land on just one you have an interest in or need to know, and then just stay there a while (we're talking months here). According to neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, author of The Distracted Mind, your ability to perceive information, recall it and make choices with it all depends on the brain filtering what's relevant and what's not. The more non-relevant data you send your brain, the more interference there is, and the harder it is to retain what's really important.
To use an analogy, it's a little like a game of baseball or tennis. If there's just one ball coming at you, you can focus on it, make some quick subconscious calculations and smack the crap out of it with your bat or racket. If there are a hundred balls all coming at once, though, forget about hitting anything, and you're lucky to come off the court/field without being stressed out. And in the same way, a bunch of footballs, ping pong balls, dodgeballs, etc., scattered around the field can get in the way as you try to play, and putting each kind of ball away where it fits afterward (i.e., storing information in the brain for recall) is more complex and time consuming than if there were only one ball or a ball of just one type.
MAKING THE CONCEPT OF FOCUS WORK IN YOUR REGULAR DAY
Right now, most business leaders are bombarded with the ideas that they should seize every opportunity and be well-rounded, dabbling in as much as they can. But Gazzaley's assertion means you might be better off turning down or at least postponing opportunities, so there's less on your plate to stretch you too thin. This might mean, for example, taking on just one design or assignment quickly over a few months, rather than working on multiple projects and extending all their deadlines. Alternatively, it could mean trying to group classes from one domain together as you earn a degree.
Note that this doesn't change the amount of time you're putting in to each subject. If you spend 30 hours on something in a month, that's still the same as 30 hours over three months. You're just reorganizing and prioritizing such that nothing is cut into chunks. This is important to grasp, because psychologically, abandoning the multitasking or many-irons-in-the-fire model might make you feel like you're doing less, even if you aren’t.
How to Keep Your Focus for the Long Haul
Of course, the brain likes distractions to some degree. It's easily sucked in by what's novel. So if you're going to hone in on one thing for a while, you have to find ways to keep yourself motivated and not get bored. To up your mental endurance, you might want to:
Pay attention to and appreciate the process of what you're doing, rather than constantly measuring how close you are to being done.
Remind yourself of the bigger purpose behind whatever it is you're focusing on
Set up lots of tiny milestones and actionable steps you can reward yourself for so your brain gets plenty of pleasurable hits of dopamine.
Take spontaneous play breaks to let your brain rest and work in a different way for a bit.
Coordinate and communicate well with others so they can help you set and reinforce boundaries.
Make it as easy as possible to work. The more challenges or annoyances there are, the more turned off to continuing you'll be.
Share your information with others. Being a teacher or giving advice can help you feel confident and excited about what you're doing. At the same time, it reinforces the core concepts you're absorbing and guarantees that you've really understood them.
Find some cheerleaders!
Since this way of working is so different than the way most people go through their day, you might get some pushback from those who are used to pinging from one thing to the next. If that's the case, just be kind and clear with them about your rationale. When they see that you get great results from your method, they might warm up to the idea and even convert to it themselves.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/here-s-the-1-thing-you-need-to-do-to-learn-more-about-anything?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Oriana:
It’s interesting how this ties in with the preceding article on the “sudden genius.” It seems that the activity of some part of the brain needs to be suppressed in order for other brain regions to become active, uncovering previously unexpressed skills and talents.
It’s almost an extreme version of “you can’t have it all.” Professional pianists practice for 6-8 hours a day — going over and over the parts that give them the most trouble, not the ones they love most. Wouldn’t it be more fun to play with the dog in the park? Certainly. But the path to greatness leads through sacrifice.
*
*
RUSSIANS STILL CONFUSED BY THE WAR WITH UKRAINE
The Russians are infuriated with the Ukrainians, because they dared to fight back.
Just how great it all could be — Russia invades, Ukrainians quickly surrender, Putin accepts parade in Kyiv in 2 weeks.
Ukrainians get to become Russians and be plundered by Kadyrov and the FSB.
Get Russian passports and Russian TV, start despising NATO, America and the West.
Only some Ukrainians would be arrested, thrown in basements, tortured and killed — in Bucha, occupied by Russia for a month, 700 people were killed out of 36,000 — it’s not even 2%!
For 1.4 million city of Kharkiv it would be 28,000.
For 3 million city of Kyiv it would be 60,000.
Out of 44 million population of Ukraine — 880,000.
Why would Ukrainians object?
They could be living “peacefully”, locked from Europe and the rest of the world, but there are trips available to Iran and North Korea — what’s the difference?
And now, because of those pesky Ukrainians, who refuse to live under Putin and the FSB, good Russian people working at munitions factories (because no other jobs left) can’t go skiing in Alps or cruising Mediterranean. Can’t you see how unfair it is? Do these Europeans not realize that it doesn’t help to dethrone Putin? Why do they do it?
Why are Russians so unfairly viewed as bad people — what could they do? It weren’t them who ordered to start the war — and those who crossed the border to Ukraine on tanks, these soldiers had no option but to obey orders.
And these Russians who sign up to go to war in Ukraine, they only do it to pay out their debts or to buy a home — there are simply no other jobs in their destitute villages.
How is it their fault?
They had no other choice.
And why the Ukrainians don’t want Putin and his oligarch buddies to rule over Ukraine? Russians live like this, and it’s not that bad.
So, yes, Russians are genuinely annoyed with the Ukrainians. It’s the Ukrainians’ fault the war in Ukraine has been going on for nearly 3 years.
They just need to stop fighting — and then Russians and former Ukrainians (who too will become Russians) can be living peacefully and amicably again.
And the most horrifying thing about it, I’m not joking. That’s exactly what Russian citizens think of the war with Ukraine. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
JJM:
The Russian attitude towards Ukrainians and furious that they are fighting back, resulting in a costly war, is UKRAINE´S FAULT…hmmm.
Reminiscent of the German attitude in 1939–1941 with the invasions of Poland, France, Netherlands and USSR (the German population by and large was not affected much by the war during this period) … contrast that with the attitude in 1943–1944 after the shoe had been on the other foot for a while and the true meaning of war sunk in … on their doorsteps!
George N. Sharia:
100%. Perfect answer! thx… same thing here in Georgia — Russians complain, how dare Saakashvili respond to Putler’s invasion in 2008. They are confident that Georgians had the obligation to surrender…
Tony Jazdec:
Just like people in Nazi Germany.
Mihai:
This is exactly why Ukraine and the rest of the world cannot allow Russians to win. A country-wide, Russia-wide thuggish mindset that it’s better when the victim doesn’t fight back.
Drazen Zoric:
Yeah, unfortunately there will be no future with Russia.
Especially now when even children in kindergarten are brainwashed how west is evil (and Ukraine).
Kiyv
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WHICH HAIR COLOR INDUCES MOST PHYSICAL ATTRACTION
Startling new psychological research challenges previous thinking that hair color is merely about personal preference. Instead, a massive consensus appears to exist on which hair color is preferred, revealing such severe prejudice associated with the tint of your locks that the preference could border on racial discrimination.
For example, Nicolas Guéguen from the Université de Bretagne-Sud, in France, recently published a paper entitled "Hair Color and Courtship: Blond Women Received More Courtship Solicitations and Redhead Men Received More Refusals," in the academic journal Psychological Studies.
In the first study he conducted, female confederates of the experimenter, wearing blond, brown, black or red wigs, were observed while sitting in a nightclub. In a second study, male collaborators wearing different colored wigs asked women in a nightclub for a dance.
The study found that blond women were more frequently approached by men, whereas blond males did not receive more acceptances to their requests. However, in both conditions, red hair was associated with significantly less attractiveness.
Guéguen points out that previous surveys across the globe find that about 90 percent of people have dark hair, whereas only 2 percent of population are blond and 1 percent are redheaded. One theory had been that women who change their hair color, prefer less common tints, so as to increase their visibility and attract male attention.
Guéguen cites a previous study, in which blond female door-to-door fundraisers received more donations than their brunette counterparts. Another study found waitresses with blond hair got more tips. And in yet another previous study, female subject in their early twenties, were asked to hitchhike while wearing a blond, brown or black wig. Blond, compared to brown or black hair was associated with more male drivers stopping to offer rides. No effect from hair color was found on female drivers who stopped.
In Guéguen’s most recent research, a female confederate of the experimenter sat in a nightclub for one hour, while researchers monitored how many men approached her. The experiment was carried out on 16 different nights in a 4-week period. So each confederate tested four different wigs four times. Overall,127 men approached the women wearing blond wigs, 84 men approached women wearing brown wigs, 82 went up to women wearing black wigs but only 29 approached women with red wigs.
Guéguen cites previous research which found over 80 percent of those surveyed express a dislike for people with red hair. The study also showed that the skin color of most redheads was the most disliked of the eight skin colors presented.
Given that women are found to be less impressed with mere physical appearance when evaluating how attracted they are to men, the researchers ran the experiment, this time using male confederates. In the second phase of the experiment, while slow songs were played in the nightclubs, four 20-year-old male confederates were instructed to ask a woman for a dance.
27.5 percent of the women said yes to men wearing a blond wig, 30 percent accepted invitations from the men with brown wigs, 35 percent accepted invitations from men with black wigs and only 13.8 percent for men who donned a red wig.
Although psychologists argue that women are less interested in the physical characteristics of men when evaluating attractiveness, women were dramatically less responsive to courtship requests from redhaired men.
Viren Swami and Seishin Barrett, psychologists at the University of Westminster, have conducted a similar experiment. In their study the female confederate, a natural brunette, dyed her hair blond and red. She sat in various nightclubs over many weeks, and the experimenters observed and counted how many men approached her during a one-hour period. When she was blond, 60 men came up to her, while brunette the figure dropped to 42 and then when red, male interest languished at just 18 approaches.
Swami and Barrett also surveyed men in these same nightclubs probing them on attitude to female hair color, using pictures of the same female confederate with different hair colors. In the study entitled "British men’s hair color preferences: An assessment of courtship solicitation and stimulus ratings," when the subject was brunette, she was actually rated as more attractive than when she was blond or redheaded. So why did the men actually approach her more when she was blond?
One theory Swami and Barrett propose is based on the fact that their female confederate in the experiment was also rated as more ‘needy’ by men when she was a blond in the photographs, than when she was a brunette or redhead. The study has recently been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology and argues that because blonds are perceived as needier it may have encouraged men to make approaches, possibly because it induced a greater feelings of dominance or confidence, which in turn reduced their inhibition.
Perceptions of the blond confederate as being more needy may have reduced men’s fear of rejection or fear of a hostile response, which increased their chances of approaching her as a blond.
Interestingly men rated the brunette in the pictures as the most intelligent compared to the others, but also the most arrogant. The redhead was rated as the least shy, the most temperamental and the most sexually promiscuous of all hair colors.
While the study doesn't settle the controversy over who is preferred in the bedroom, there is some intriguing psychological research which finds a preference for redheads in the board room.
Margaret Takeda, Marilyn Helms and Natalia Romanova from the University of Tennessee and Dalton State College in the USA recently looked at the hair color of all 500 Chief Executive Officers of the London Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) top 500 companies by market capitalization.
Of the 500 CEOs analyzed, 5 percent were blonds and 4 percent had red hair, but given that within the U.K. population, approximately 25 percent have blond hair and 1 percent have red hair, the researchers found blondes, who are perceived traditionally as incompetent but likable, were under-represented in positions of corporate leadership in the UK. Redheads, while normally a minute number in the U.K. population, were over-selected to run some of the most successful companies.
Stereotypically this would be expected, the authors of this study entitled "Hair Color Stereotyping and CEO Selection in the United Kingdom," argue that redheads are perceived to be competent, though not especially congenial.
Takeda and colleagues pose an interesting question in their paper published in 2006 in the academic periodical, Journal of Human Behaviour in the Social Environment – should hair color be included in anti-discrimination legislation? They point out that if the selection of corporate executives is partly based on hair color, as their research indicates, does it constitute discriminatory prejudice?
The authors note that in the United States, for example, color as currently defined in the statutory basis for non-discrimination in employment, refers to the shade of a person’s skin, and not race alone. This is because within a race, a variety of skin colors can exist. There is well-documented bias in favor of lighter skin, but, in the light of recent research, should they now also include hair color?
Incidentally while discussing discrimination, it might be important to note that in the Takeda study, only 2 of the 500 CEOs were women.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/slightly-blighty/201509/which-hair-color-induces-the-strongest-physical-attraction
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MISHA IOSSEL ON PUTIN AND TRUMP:
~ Putin, without a doubt, is the most dangerous man in the world right now. The greatest threat to the world. An international pariah, internationally adjudicated war criminal.
And Trump admires him for that. He would love to be viewed as the most dangerous man in the world himself, too. That, to a large extent, in addition to his desire to stay out of jail, is why he is running for the White House: to be like Putin, only even more globally dangerous, because the US is infinitely stronger than Russia.
There is no question about it: any modern-day Hitler, if he were to say a few flattering things about Trump and present him with some nice little gifts, grinning contemptuously inside, would turn Trump into his lap dog. ~
Oriana:
My first thought upon reading about Yahia Sinwar’s death was “Glory, glory, hallelujah." But then I remembered Christianity’s trail of blood. While there is no question that present-day Christianity is is not the blood-thirsty kind it was during the era of the Crusades, ultimately all organized religion needs to die out (or become marginal, essentially unimportant) so humanity can progress toward the the ideal of decency and justice, including women’s rights.
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HOW READING REWIRES YOUR BRAIN
Reading, science shows, doesn't just fill your brain with information; it actually changes the way your brain works for the better as well.
This can be short term. Different experts disagree on some of the finer details, but a growing body of scientific literature shows that reading is basically an empathy workout. By nudging us to take the perspective of characters very different from ourselves, it boosts our EQ. This effect can literally be seen in your brain waves when you read. If a character in your book is playing tennis, areas of your brain that would light up if you were physically out there on the court yourself are activated.
Another line of research shows that deep reading, the kind that happens when you curl up with a great book for an extended period of time, also builds up our ability to focus and grasp complex ideas. Studies show that the less you really read (skim reading from your phone doesn't count), the more these essential abilities wither.
But what about the long-term? What does all that time spent mastering your letters as an elementary school student do to your brain? A recent article by The WEIRDest People in the World author and Harvard professor Joseph Henrich sums up the answer to these questions nicely.
The whole piece offers an account of how the Protestant reformation led to a huge increase in literacy rates. You don't have to care about the historical details (the research is super interesting if you do) to find Henrich's explanation of how learning to read permanently rewires our brains fascinating:
This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain.
No one is going to quiz you on brain anatomy, so you probably don't need to memorize the specifics here. But the overarching picture is worth remembering.
Reading isn't just a way to cram facts into your brain. It's a way to rewire how your brain works in general. It strengthens your ability to imagine alternative paths, remember details, picture detailed scenes, and think through complex problems. In short, reading makes you not just more knowledgeable, but also functionally smarter. Which is why the only thing that everyone you admire can agree on is that you should read more.
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/reading-books-brain-chemistry.html
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WILL WE EVER FLY IN ELECTRIC PLANES?
Currently, the world is struggling to keep its carbon emissions from rising. But to reach the longer-term goals we have for stabilizing the climate, we’re going to have to do far more than roll out some renewable energy. Keeping the earth from warming by 2°C above preindustrial temperatures means a deep decarbonization of our energy use. Which means that we not only have to go fully carbon neutral in generating electricity, but we have to start using those emissions-free electrons to handle our heating and transportation needs.
For things like cars and buses, that process has already started. But there’s one weight-sensitive mode of transportation where batteries may not be able to bail us out: air travel. The relatively low energy density of batteries means that you need a lot of them—plus the weight and space they take up—to power an aircraft. For this reason, many people have decided that we’ll need biofuels to power air travel. Yet there are companies that are planning to develop electric passenger aircraft.
So who’s being realistic? To find out, an international team has done an evaluation of whether battery-powered electric aircraft can become viable and when it’s possible they’ll reach the market.
Better batteries
The researchers look at a set of related issues. One is whether batteries can reach an energy density sufficient to make using them for air travel possible. The other is whether doing so will be economical. In addition, they looked at whether battery-powered aircraft will help us with our emissions goals.
Most of these issues are more complicated than they seem. For example, airplanes don’t only generate warming through carbon emissions; their contrails also seed high-altitude clouds, which have an insulating effect. In addition, the degree to which batteries can avoid emissions is directly related to the amount of renewable energy available to charge them.
The scale of the problem, however, is easy to understand. The best lithium-ion batteries currently have energy densities of about 250 watt-hours per kilogram. It’s estimated that, for a viable battery-powered aircraft, we’d need at least three times that and possibly as much as eight times (2,000 W-h/kg). Historically, battery capacity has gone up by about three percent a year, meaning a doubling roughly every 25 years. That progress has accelerated as of late, but even if we assume faster progress, we’re still going to be waiting for at least the middle of this century before the batteries get to where we need them to be.
(It’s also not clear what chemistry might get us there. The authors note that there are lithium-air and lithium-sulfur designs that have higher energy density, but they might not be able to discharge fast enough to power energy-intensive takeoffs.)
Overall, the authors decided to model an 800 W-h/kg battery, which is considered the minimum needed for a 727-sized airliner. But they also consider a 1,200 W-h/kg tech as a more optimistic case. The low-end figure means that the weight taken up by batteries is about double that used by fuel, although this is offset by the fact that electric motors are far more efficient than combustion-driven ones. As a side bonus, the batteries can also power onboard systems, simplifying the aircraft’s design.
Will it cut carbon?
Assuming these electric aircraft could be built, would they actually lower emissions? At present, no. Given the average emissions involved with powering the US grid, the emissions involved with powering an electric aircraft (including losses during transmission) would be about 20 percent higher than those generated by a modern, efficient jet engine. That doesn’t mean they’d be entirely useless from a climate perspective, though. Once the additional warming effects of aircraft are taken into consideration, the electric aircraft comes out ahead by about 30 percent.
Future considerations complicate things pretty quickly, though. The price of renewable energy is expected to keep dropping, which will make renewables a larger part of the grid, lowering the emissions. The authors estimate that the vast majority of charging will take place during daylight hours—the peak of solar production—as well. Assuming future solar production leads to a discount on electric use during the day, it could help the economics of electric aircraft; currently, they only make sense economically with fuel at about $100/barrel.
How all of this would affect air travel is very sensitive to the capacity of future batteries. The authors estimate that an effective range of about 1,100 kilometers would allow electric aircraft to cover 15 percent of the total air miles (and corresponding fuel use) and nearly half the total flights. That would raise the total electricity demand by about one percent globally, although most of that would affect industrialized nations. Upping the range to 2,200 kilometers would allow 80 percent of the global flight total to be handled by electric aircraft.
So, overall, the technology appears to be on the edge of commercial viability, and it has the potential to limit the warming caused by air travel. Critically, however, both of these situations are likely to get better as renewable energy captures a larger share of the generating market. Unfortunately, the one thing that’s holding it back is technology, as batteries simply aren’t close to the needed capacities. While we can’t rule out a radical advance in battery chemistry, current rates of change mean we’ll have to wait for more than 30 years before air travel no longer means a roar of jet engines.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-will-electric-airliners-make-sense?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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WHY LITHIUM IS NOT RECYCLED
The imbalance of recycling is counterintuitive in terms of fresh material supply as well. Global sources of lithium amount to 89 million tons, most of which originate in South America, according to a recent United States Geological Survey report. In contrast, the global lead supply at 2 billion tons was 22 times higher than lithium.
Despite the smaller supply of lithium, a study earlier this year in the Journal of the Indian Institute of Science found that less than 1 percent of Lithium-ion batteries get recycled in the US and EU compared to 99 percent of lead-acid batteries, which are most often used in gas vehicles and power grids. According to the study, recycling challenges range from the constantly evolving battery technology to costly shipping of dangerous materials to inadequate government regulation.
Emma Nehrenheim, chief environmental officer at Northvolt batteries, said everyone expected lead to be phased out by now, but she attributes its continued economic success to high recycling rates.
“Every time you buy a battery for your car, you have to give the whole battery back, and then it goes into the recycling chain,” said Nikhil Gupta, lead author of the study and a professor of mechanical engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. This hasn’t worked for lithium batteries, partly because so many formats exist. “These batteries are all over the place in different sizes,” he said. A related challenge is that the technology for lithium batteries changes rapidly — every one to two years, he said.
But overcoming these recycling challenges is a must. Lithium-based batteries hold more energy in a smaller package when compared to lead-acid batteries. They’re crucial for decarbonizing transportation and enabling a widespread transition to renewable energy by helping ensure a predictable supply of power from otherwise intermittent wind and solar. Achieving these transitions on a global scale is a massive undertaking. “That would require us to make major advancements in battery technology,” Gupta said. “There's no doubt about it.”
Accordingly, global lithium consumption has increased 33 percent since 2020. If renewable energy goals sufficient to stop climate change are to be reached, then the demand for lithium is expected to grow 43-fold, according to the IEA. “What happens if we don’t have a lithium supply?” Gupta said. “There’s no good answer yet.”
Lithium isn’t the only material that may limit the use of these batteries. The anode and cathode of the batteries contain materials that are also subject to potential supply crunches, like cobalt and nickel. So, recycling could help solve multiple supply issues. “If you want to build a battery, an old battery contains exactly the same components,” Nehrenheim said.
A battery recycling boom
The USGS report noted that about two dozen companies in North America and Europe are recycling lithium batteries or have plans to—up from a single facility just a few years ago.
For the few facilities that can recover materials from lithium-ion batteries, traditional processes aren’t efficient enough to recover high-grade lithium to be used in remaking batteries. The pyrometallurgy method, for example, is easy to scale and works with any battery format, but it involves an energy-intensive process using high heat to incinerate the battery. While the ash will contain useful materials, pyrometallurgy can produce toxic fumes and limits the recovery of other valuable components. Other methods involve shredding the battery and then extracting materials using lengthy, complex chemical processes that vary depending on the battery technology used.
Recycling lithium
Direct recycling is an alternative that basically deconstructs the battery and retains the cathode and anode materials to be reconditioned. This method is in its early days, but it has the potential to be cheaper, safer, and more efficient. The process is made difficult by the need to manually break down a huge range of battery formats. A lithium battery pack contains modules that contain cells, and these cells are where the valuable metals are found. Manually getting to these cells is doable but tedious, and automation is needed to process high volumes.
“It's a bit more challenging to recycle these kinds of materials,” said Northvolt’s Nehrenheim. The Swedish battery manufacturer has multiple programs through an initiative it’s calling Revolt, including a pilot recycling plant that has been operating since late 2020. They are also in the process of developing Revolt Ett—Swedish for “one”—a full-scale recycling plant aiming for the capacity to recycle 125,000 tons of batteries per year, beginning in 2023.
Like most companies, Northvolt's process is not direct recycling. However, it dismantles the batteries down to the level of modules before beginning any crushing, shredding, or chemical processes. Last fall, Northvolt produced its first battery from using only recycled material. Northvolt has a robot it is fine-tuning at its pilot facility, and the company hopes to heavily automate most of the dismantling process in the future.
Part of the company’s plan for recycling success also involves calibration of the market, Nehrenheim said, to make sure that recycling is systemically integrated, which is supported by clear regulation. “If you build a recycling plant under UN or Scandinavian or European regulation right now, it's highly regulated,” she said. “You can get great support from the authorities and how to define a safe operation.”
De-manufacture
In 2015, Ryan Melsert went to work for Tesla just before development began on its Gigafactory outside of Reno, Nevada. While there, he and a small team worked to design the building, batteries, equipment, and every other element needed for the facility. Now, as CEO of American Battery Technology Company (ABTC), Melsert and his crew are working to do the opposite. “It really gave the fundamental understanding and learning of all of those individual manufacturing steps that is hard to gain otherwise.”
Their experience developing a lithium-ion car battery from start to finish, he said, helped him and his team intimately understand what would be needed to reverse the process to recycle effectively. A defect or end-of-life battery, he said, is just another resource that contains valuable metals.
“Much of recycling technologies today take the entire battery and simply drop it in a furnace and melt it or they drop it in a shredder and grind it,” he said. “What we do is back out and reverse order many of the manufacturing steps that we designed at Gigafactory to really remove the material in a much more strategic fashion to both lower costs and to increase recovery rates.” This automated “demanufacturing” makes the actual chemical extraction easier, he said.
Their two-part recycling process involves this disassembly, followed by a hydrometallurgical, or chemical, process. ABTC is currently building its first facility in northern Nevada, which has the potential, it says, to recover battery-grade materials in under three hours. The company expects it to be completed by the end of 2022 and have the ability to intake 20,000 metric tons of recyclable material per year. If achieved, that would amount to about a fifth of the total weight of raw lithium produced in 2021.
Despite rapid technology changes, the longer life span of lithium batteries provides room for recycling facilities to adjust. Most lithium batteries are in use for years before needing replacement, which can help companies like ABTC prepare for the next iteration in recycling. “There's that latency,” Melsert said. “We're able to see what's in the field long before it comes back.”
Building a circular battery economy
One way to make recycling ubiquitous is to get manufacturers to think about recyclability from the start. The idea has gained traction in recent years: manufacturers and recyclers work together to profit while creating as little waste as possible. In a linear economy, when a battery runs out of charge, it ends up in a landfill. In a circular economy, instead of going to waste, batteries start their life over as raw materials and go right back into the manufacturing chain. “Once these metals are mined once, you can essentially keep them in that loop indefinitely,” Melsert said. This means, in theory, all the companies involved could profit indefinitely while wasting little or no material.
But for a circular battery economy to work, recycling plants have to match the output of manufacturing plants. “The manufacturing side is growing extremely quickly, and there are still zero commercial scale recycling plants,” Melsert said.
This would ensure a consistent supply, reduce costs and possibly lower the environmental footprint compared to mining. Melsert thinks to achieve this goal, it’s key to develop partnerships at all points in the supply chain, from refineries to vehicle manufacturers to battery recyclers. To help this effort, ABTC won a $2 million contract last year from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium—made up of General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, and the Department of Energy. The award provides more than two years of funding to demonstrate that producing batteries from recycled materials is better for the environment and the economy. It also means ABTC will be working with a cathode producer and battery recycler, as well as a cell technology developer.
Of lessons to be learned from lead-acid batteries, Melsert said, “Anywhere you can buy one, you can return one.” Making the right choice the easiest choice has proven effective for lead-acid batteries, and something similar needs to follow for Lithium-ion.
Innovation for Lithium-ion batteries is still in its adolescence, with major developments happening in little more than the last decade, compared to half a century ago for lead-acid. While ABTC has an ambitious time frame, Gupta said it could be another decade before solutions truly meet the needed scale. Still, he is optimistic. “As a scientist, I would say we will always find solutions.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-of-money-so-why-arent-we-recycling-lithium-batteries/
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RUSSIA’S CONTINUING DECLINE
What happened with Russia in 2.5 years of the full-scale war is terrifying — the level of brutality, sadism, and ignorance in the society is accelerating at nightmarish rates.
The situation is reminiscent of what happened in the country after 1917 Bolsheviks’ October coup, with the undertones of Stalin’s 1937 purges.
The structure of the Russian society has changed — just like it changed in Nazi Germany in 1930s.
Mass repressions along with mass emigration and mass deaths of young men, with the role of the military, enforcers and secret services amplified disproportionally — and all of this amidst existing all-permeating corruption and increasing lawlessness.
Recently, the Russian media reported that a Russian woman gave birth at the airport of Antalya (Turkey) and left the baby to die in the toilet, while she and her mother rushed to the passport control to catch the flight to Moscow.
Miraculously, a cleaner found the baby just 12 minutes later, which saved his life — the baby was sent to a hospital for examination by doctors and is apparently in a good condition. The airport security managed to quickly track down the culprits.
The suspects, 18-year-old Ekaterina Burnashkina and her 47-year-old mother, were identified from CCTV footage. They were detained in the waiting room of a flight to Moscow.
In Russia itself, babies are found thrown in rubbish bins regularly (several cases every month), while the State Duma is discussing the tax on childless men and women, to boost plummeting birth rates.
The annual interest rate for home loans have reached 23% and banks are now demanding 50% deposit. The banks have reasons to worry: apartments in new developments cost 55% more on average than in the secondary market. Developers are worried as well, with the number of new developments plummeting and the percentage of unsold newly built housing stock on the rise.
Russia has become the first country in the world where murderers are offered to kill more people to get out of prison. Russian criminals now are offered the option to sign up for the war in Ukraine before they are even handed the guilty verdict — the case is simply closed on their signing of an army contract.
In fact, Russian criminals can now do whatever they want — the worst that can happen is that they would be sent to the Russian army in Ukraine, if caught. And there it’s only a matter of bribing commanders, to stay off the “meat assaults” and simply hang out in the territory of lawlessness of the occupied Donbas. The worst Russian thugs know how to stay alive while out of prison and in the army.
Add to this the fact that the Russian police can’t fill 153,000 vacancies — knowing that, even the chance to get caught for a criminal doesn’t look too bad. And they no longer have to worry about long prison terms for heinous crimes — leaving no witnesses may seem like a smarter option, knowing that it lowers their chances to get caught.
Meanwhile, the official head of a Russian region is publicly announcing “blood feud” with a senator from a nearby region, who in turn is publicly promised “full support” by the leader of his region.
Bloody shootouts with participation of the regional enforcers from Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia are erupting both in Moscow and the regions themselves; their top security officials are getting assassinated. The Kremlin is watching in silence.
Meanwhile, the Russian government is increasing official spending on state propaganda to a historical record — it’s getting more difficult and costly to explain to Russians that they live in the greatest country in the world.
Russia’s striving to destroy the rules-based world order resulted in destruction of rules in their own country, first of all.
There are very dark times coming for Russians. Mark my words. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Oriana:
What a dystopia: the head of state is a killer (window or tea?), the people around him lying and stealing. I was tempted to say, “The new normal,” but it’s actually the old normal, just made more more transparent. The Soviet Union was bursting with dark secrets. The new gangsters don’t even bother.
Back in the Soviet era, a Western journalist remarked that the Politburo looked like a police line-up. Still, at least there was a veneer of “struggle for peace.”
Bc Christiansen:
Growing up in the U.S. the Soviet Union was the “enemy,“ a secretive country with one goal: to take over the world. the only news was what the government would allow, So most of my opinions were formed by reading War and Peace, The Fiddler on the Roof and Dr.Zhivago. Then at 30 years old in 1989 my wife and i had volunteered to be ticket takers in Oshkosh Wisconsin at the EAA air show.one of the benefits was after our shift was done we were allowed access to the flightline where you could talk to pilots and look at the planes.the big news that year was a soviet cargo plane(the biggest in the world at the time) along with about 30 in the crew would be there.we were introduced to a few of them and it was just a magic time, they were just so happy to be there and were so excited about the future. The 2 we talked to most asked if we could get them a pair of levis blue jeans because at the time they told us they could sell them back home for a lot of money, so the next day when we met we gifted them 4 pairs, We both got huge hugs and many thanks. Anyway at that moment in time the future looked so bright, what a disappointment it still makes me sad.
Victoria Shyymlosky:
You have captured the true nature and state of Russia today. Russia is a dysfunctional dystopia and kleptocracy run by mafia clans, gangster Tzar Putin and his thuggish cronies.
Matthew L:
Not the first to recruit murderers, rapists, and other violent convicts. Dirlewanger did it for the Nazis in WW2. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are earlier historical examples.
It doesn’t make the practice any less despicable of course. Being comparable to the Dirlewanger Brigade is pretty much the depths of depravity.
In another contemporary example Hamas gets around the shortage of prisoners to recruit by training them from childhood. This strikes me as the most evil if all.
John Newey:
Trouble is these cockroaches and their insanity infect the whole world….
Shelley Higgins:
All I can think about is the fate of that baby, probably returned to a mother who left it to die.
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BOB WOODWARD: WHY PUTIN WILL LOSE IN UKRAINE
According to the book by American journalist Bob Woodward, Putin decided to invade Ukraine because of his delusional convictions.
The book describes a conversation between Vladimir Putin and CIA Director William Burns in the fall of 2021 in Moscow.
Burns didn’t meet Putin in person — the Russian “strongman” was too chicken to meet him in face-to-face. At the time, Putin demanded from everyone who met him to go through a 2-week quarantine.
Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser and former Russian ambassador to the U.S. Ushakov left Burns alone in an office near the Kremlin and told him to wait for the phone call.
Yuri UshakovPutin started with recalling Burns’s time as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow 14 years earlier.
Then he stopped and waited for Burns to deliver his message.
Putin already knew what Burns was going to say. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, already briefed him.
Burns spoke:
“We are alarmed that you are seriously considering a major invasion of Ukraine. That would be a mistake. If you do that, here’s what we’re going to do,” stated Burns.
He continued, as instructed by President Biden, detailing the intelligence the U.S. had on the movement of Russian troops. He also outlined the strong measures the U.S. was prepared to undertake in response.
“We are going to unite the West and impose tough, devastating economic sanctions. Ukraine is a sovereign state, and we will continue to support it. We are also adjusting our military posture in Europe. This is not a threat, but a statement of what we will do in response. You should know that the repercussions will far exceed those you faced in 2014. The United States will ensure that Russia is cut off from SWIFT, isolate you diplomatically, and help Ukraine defend itself.”
Putin waited until Burns finished — and then responded with a long story, reiterating the themes he repeated in his public speeches — without disputing Burns’ description of Russia’s preparations to invade.
“Ukraine is weak and divided. It’s not a real country. Russia’s interests demand that we control Ukraine’s choices,” Putin stated.
In Putin’s view, President Zelenskyy wasn’t a legitimate leader, the Ukrainian government wasn’t legitimate either. Putin alleged that Russians in Ukraine were discriminated against and persecuted.
Burns asked him: “With an army of 180,000 to 190,000, how do you plan to control a country of 44 million people who do not want to be ruled by Russia? How will you manage that?”
Putin did not respond to that.
We now know that the FSB department handling hybrid operations in Ukraine assured Putin that they had paid enough people in Ukraine to ensure that Ukrainians would surrender. But the FSB was stealing money like everyone else in Russia (maybe more): most operatives were simply submitting fake receipts and pocketing the cash allocated to paying assets.
To Burns, it seemed that Putin’s appetite for risk had grown and he truly believed what he was saying.
As Burns departed Russia, he sent a cable to President Biden from his plane, “I am left with a very strong impression that Putin has already decided to go to war.”
Putin believed he bought enough traitors in Ukraine to win, and he was convinced that Zelenskyy would evacuate as the Russian troops were approaching Kyiv — and if Zelenskyy didn’t run away, Putin was sending his best special forces unit to kill the Ukrainian president and other members of his government.
Putin would have run away.
Zelenskyy didn’t.
Putin believed his corrupt underlings and in his own corrupted worldview.
He still does.
And that’s why Russia will lose. ~ Elena Gold
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RUSSIAN DEMOGRAPHICS: NEWEST STATISTICS
Rosstat
published horrifying demographic statistics for August 2024: compared
to the same month of 2023, the number of births dropped by 12.2% from
123,000 to 108,000.
Russia's population is declining every year by 500-700 thousand people.
Hundreds of thousands of young men died at the war in Ukraine.
Over a million of young people left the country after the start of the war in Ukraine.
Every
third child is raised in a single-parent family consisting of a mother
and grandmother. The share of such single-parent families has increased
from 21% to 38.5% over 20 years of Putin's stability.
In August 2024, the birth rate in Russia broke 2005 anti-record and dropped to 1.3 children per woman.
So
what if the father gets mobilized and shipped to the war in Ukraine?
The women should be grateful they aren’t mobilized — yet. In North Korea
— the beacon of quality of life and personal happiness — women are
conscripted as well.
Although North Korean women only have to serve for 5 years, while men must do 10.
I’m sure the Russian lawmakers are already looking at the example of glorious nation of North Korea.
But for now, Russian lawmakers decided to introduce the tax on childlessness.
Yeah, this should fix it. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
*
HOW STRESS CAN CONTRIBUTE TO CANCER
Continuous stress is a modern malady that our bodies are unprepared for. It can lead to anxiety, neurosis, and depression. It can come in the form of a nasty boss, bloviating politicians, or existential climate change. And those are just the external stressors.
We also have internal stressors, including anxiety, poor health, and bad habits. The sum of our stressors is oppressive, but there is an even bleaker consequence: Stress can contribute to cancer.
A new study by Dr. Qing Li and her colleagues from Sichuan University found that stressed mice had reduced amounts of Lactobacillus bacteria. Lactobacillus is known to amp up the immune cells that target tumors. As a consequence of their loss, colonic tumors develop faster. In this way, Dr. Li found that stress can increase the odds of colon cancer.
This comports with a previous study this year from Yatrik Shah at the University of Michigan, which also found that stress reduces Lactobacillus and enhances colon tumor growth. In both studies, adding Lactobacillus as a supplement slowed the progression of the tumors.
Both studies were done in mice; much work is needed before human therapies are available. But there are some known techniques to improve your gut microbiome, and you can’t go wrong by following these three major guidelines.
DIET
We can’t change external stressors, but we have a surprising amount of control over our internal turbulence. Diet is an easy road to stress resilience. When you feed your good microbes, they produce substances called small-chain fatty acids that nourish and heal the cells lining the gut. That helps your gut fight off bad microbes, lowering inflammation. It also nurtures the Lactobacillus species that encourage your immune system to halt the growth of tumors. "Restoring beneficial bacteria in the gut, such as Lactobacillus, could strengthen the body's natural defenses against colorectal cancer," says Dr Li.
What kind of food do your beneficial microbes want? Fiber. This is a component of plants that gives them stiffness. Fiber is typically made with long chains of sugar molecules, and you can find it in veggies like onions, beans, and artichokes. Once again, your mom was right. Eat your veggies.
Polyphenols are also key to the health of your gut, and you can find them in foods like nuts, red grapes, and chocolate. Also eat fruits with both fiber and polyphenols like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.
Meat has no fiber, so although it is rich in nutrients, very few of them make it to the colon where the microbiome hangs out. "More plants, less meat" is a good mantra for stress control. (Oriana: At the same time, plants are the source of carbohydrates. The current popularity of the carnivore diet makes me wonder if there will be any vegans ten years from now.)
EXERCISE
Exercise increases your endorphins and makes you feel better. This attitude adjustment is a good antidote to stress. It doesn’t need to be strenuous either. Swimming, playing tennis, or a hike in the woods can do wonders to ease your mind. Exercise also helps to balance your gut microbes, keeping your gut lining robust against inflammatory pathogens.
If your only exercise today is lifting the remote control, start slowly. You risk injury if you rush it, and recovery time can destroy a good exercise program.
Do something that you enjoy. If you’re lucky, you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life.
Dancing, sports, or gardening are great exercises that can add some joy to the sweat. Get your friends to join in. The camaraderie makes it more fun, and a friend network makes you more serious about showing up.
ATTITUDE
Hans Selye was known as the father of stress research, positing that “It’s not stress that kills us; it is our reaction to it.” That means our attitudes count when it comes to coping with stress.
It shouldn’t surprise us: The gut-brain axis is a two-way street, and the brain can affect our gut microbes in many ways. Studies have shown that cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation can improve your microbiome.
Your attitude is merely a habit you’ve established. We tend to identify ourselves by these habits, but we shouldn’t. We aren’t insects with narrow goals and a limited repertoire. We are complex creatures that can change in a flash—if we want to.
This sounds almost inane, but try smiling. Your friends and colleagues will smile back. It’s contagious, and the pressure of the entire world diminishes ever so slightly.
Try to stay calm. Nervous agitation is not a helpful problem-solving framework. All of these guidelines, if followed together, add up. With a good diet and frequent exercise, it is much easier to moderate your emotions—and turn stress into a challenge that you can conquer.
As Dr. Li puts it, "When people are diagnosed with a malignant disease like colorectal cancer, it's natural for them to experience feelings of worry and concern. However, these emotions are not beneficial for their condition. Our findings suggest that patients should try to adjust their mindset as much as possible to avoid further exacerbation of their disease."
If you keep your gut in good shape, your odds of getting colon cancer are reduced. That is a pretty good reward for a little exercise, a better diet, and a few extra smiles.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mood-by-microbe/202410/how-stress-can-lead-to-cancer
*
CAN PSYCHEDELICS LEAD TO BELIEF IN GOD?
Lived experience has long told us that taking psychedelic substances like psilocybin, mescaline, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can result in feelings of religious or spiritual inspiration. Indeed, throughout history and across the world, various cultures have used peyote, ayahuasca, mushrooms, and other plants in ritual practices with the intent of achieving trance states, interacting with the spirit world, or communing with God. In modern times, the term “entheogen” (derived from the Greek word entheos meaning “the divine within”) was coined as an alternative to the word “hallucinogen” to describe substances that can give rise to such mystical experiences without implying that such experiences are psychotic in nature.
Over the past few decades, scientific inquiry has focused on validating the therapeutic and spiritual enhancing properties of psychedelic drugs, with its findings helping to shift public perception from dismissing them as recreational drugs to recognizing their potential medicinal and healing properties. The late Dr. Roland Griffiths—a Johns Hopkins University psychopharmacologist who passed away in the fall of 2023—was pivotal in using traditional research methodologies to increase awareness of psychedelics as entheogens.
In 2006, Griffith and his colleagues published a double-blind crossover study of psilocybin compared to methylphenidate (Ritalin) given to healthy volunteers over a single 8-hour session. Using questionnaires to measure psychiatric symptoms, mystical experiences, and quality of life, the study found that while on psilocybin—the psychedelic component of "magic mushrooms"—67 percent of subjects rated their experience as either the single most meaningful experience of their life or among the top five, on par with the birth of a first child or the death of a parent (only 8 percent reported such experiences on methylphenidate).
Seventy-nine percent of subjects rated that their psilocybin experience increased their sense of personal well-being or life satisfaction “moderately” or “very much” (compared to 21 percent after methylphenidate). Follow-up studies found that the profound meaningfulness of the experience, improved life satisfaction, and positive behavioral changes persisted at 14 months. Anecdotally, participants described their psilocybin experience as:
“The utter joy and freedom of letting go—without anxiety—without direction—beyond ego self.”
“The sense that all is One, that I experienced the essence of the Universe.”
“The complete and utter loss of self… the sense of unity was awesome… I now truly believe in God as an ultimate reality.”
In 2019, Griffiths and his colleagues described users of various psychedelics including psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) who experienced encounters with God involving extrasensory-telepathic and sensory experiences (for example, visions) and other communications that were rated as more real than everyday normal consciousness.4 Following such “God encounter experiences,” atheism in the survey sample decreased from 21 percent to 8 percent.
Notably however, while some reported interactions with “God” (that is, “the God of your understanding"), most described encounters with an “Ultimate Reality,” with a minority reporting encounters with a “Higher Power” or an “aspect of emissary of God.” Accordingly, identification with a “major monotheistic tradition” was low and decreased from 12 percent to 7 percent, whereas identification with some “other” religious perspective increased from 67 percent to 85 percent of the sample.
A similar 2023 survey found that belief in either God, Ultimate Reality, or a Higher Power increased from 29 percent to 59 percent after using psychedelics. Eighty-seven percent reported a change in their fundamental conception of reality with a substantial majority reporting belief in the following:
“Some aspect of me will continue to exist after the death of my physical body” (74 percent).
“There are hidden or deeper purposes to life and all of existence about which many people are unaware” (85 percent).
“There are hidden or deeper meanings to everyday events beyond both simple factual explanations and more complicated scientific explanations for understanding the world” (87 percent).
“Primary reality cannot be completely reduced to either the physical or the mind (and/or consciousness). They are not separate. Mind (and or consciousness) is fundamentally part of all matter” (71 percent).
“The universe is conscious” (80 percent).
And so, while psychedelic use can lead to God encounters that increase belief in God, such beliefs don't necessarily conform to Western monotheistic religious traditions. Rather, psychedelic use seems to result in a belief in a dissolution of the ego, the interconnectedness of all things both living and non-living, and belief in an Ultimate Reality that's equated with God and is associated with increased meaning and quality of life.
Other research by Griffiths has found that psychedelic experiences often result in greater attribution of consciousness to both living things and non-living objects and reduced fear of death.
Still, since only a small percentage of participants reported belief in monotheism before their psychedelic experience, there appears to be a sampling bias among participants in studies of psychedelic drugs. This raises a question about just how much psychedelic drugs really result in new beliefs about God or whether they strengthen or otherwise impact pre-existing beliefs.
In my next blog post, Revelation or Delusion? The Impact of Psychedelics on Belief, I’ll explore this question further and take a closer look at what psychedelic experiences tell us, if anything, about the true nature of Reality or God.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202410/can-psychedelics-lead-you-to-believe-in-god
*
REVELATION OF DELUSION?
Several studies based on cross-sectional survey data have found that psychedelic use can increase belief in God and decrease belief in atheism. However, such studies have also found that belief in monotheistic religious traditions can also decrease with psychedelic use in favor of spiritual beliefs about an “Ultimate Reality” rather than God per se.
Similar surveys have found that psychedelic use is associated with particular political perspectives, including a negative correlation with authoritarianism and a positive correlation with liberalism. Looking at before-and after-effects, a small clinical trial of psilocybin (the psychedelic constituent of “magic mushrooms”) for the treatment of major depression found that support of political authoritarianism decreased following two doses of psilocybin spaced a week apart and persisted up to 12 months later.
Other surveys have noted that psychedelic use is associated with “nature relatedness” (a subjective sense of connectedness to nature) that is, in turn, related to “pro-environmental behavior” (such as recycling, water conservation, and eco-friendly shopping)3 as well as objective knowledge about and concern about climate change.
In light of such findings, some have asked if psychedelic drugs can really “change your politics or religious beliefs” while claiming that the available evidence suggests that psilocybin does indeed “seem to make people more liberal” and that “the relationship could be causal.” And if that’s the case, this would pose a threat of harm to conservatives so that they might look even more disapprovingly on psychedelics than they already do.
Key points:
Research evidence suggests that psychedelic drugs can influence beliefs about religion and politics. However, the extent to which psychedelics can change people's thinking remains debated. Whether such beliefs represent insights or false impressions is unclear and likely depends on set (mindset) and setting.
In response, researchers who published some of the original studies finding that psychedelic use can lead to “God encounter experiences” that have the potential to make believers out of atheists have pushed back on this idea, concluding that the notion “that psychedelics prompt substantial change in political and religious beliefs or affiliations… is not supported by the current scientific data.”
They cite problems with inferring causality from associations—including the possibility of selection bias and reverse causality (for example, that liberals and those with non-traditional religious beliefs are more likely to use psychedelics in the first place)—while reminding us that only some people have “God encounter experiences” on psychedelics and that they are “in no way representative of the general public.” According to one of the researchers with considerable experience talking to hundreds of psilocybin study participants, despite reported changes in some religious beliefs and political attitudes, not a single one ever claimed any spontaneous change in political or religious affiliation.
True to that claim, a recently published prospective longitudinal study of 657 participants who had a psilocybin experience outside a laboratory setting found that while many had increases in beliefs about non-human living things, inanimate objects, or the universe being capable of consciousness, none of them experienced a change in their religious status as either an atheist or believer after their psychedelic experience.
I have my own anecdote about a close friend and colleague who recently experimented with psilocybin that matches these findings. He had a sustained psychedelic experience—lasting for hours while he remained awake but with his eyes closed—of being immersed in a kind of “netherworld” or “in-between world” that he likened to the Matrix, but with biological features reminiscent of an interconnected mycelium rather than having any digital or technological trappings.
He experienced synesthesia, including feeling sounds and feeling as if he and the music he was listening to were one, as well as other kinds of “ego dissolution” experiences that have been well-described with psychedelic use. In one of his most memorable such experiences, he saw an image of a fish eating a bug on the surface of a pond but felt amusement because though they seemed like distinct objects on a visual level, he experienced the feeling or knowing that the fish and bug were, in fact, one and that there was actually no distinction between the fish, the bug, or himself.
Despite these experiences, he didn’t come away feeling as if he’d gained any new revelation about the world. That is, he didn’t feel like his psychedelic experience necessarily revealed anything about the true nature of the universe or reality itself.
It should come as little surprise that psychedelic experiences don’t always change people’s fundamental beliefs about the world. Many drug-induced beliefs—like feeling paranoid on methamphetamines or believing that you can fly when you’re high on phencyclidine (PCP)—thankfully dissipate when you’re no longer intoxicated.
Just so, there’s ample evidence that psychedelics are as likely to contribute to fantasies and false beliefs as they are to insights or revelations. For example, a recent study found an association between psychedelic use and conspiracy mentality (assessed based on endorsing statements like “I think that events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities” or “I think that there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions”).
Indeed, some researchers continue to question the premise that psychedelics can really change beliefs and challenge the notion that they can influence anything beyond weakly held beliefs. Another viewpoint holds that psychedelics may influence beliefs by altering the process of inference, defined as “the best explanation of sensory data based on the sum of prior beliefs.” When the perceptual phenomena caused by psychedelic drugs lead to “Eureka moments” that are experienced as insights, they can give rise to feelings and inferences of truth independent of what is actually true.
The recently proposed False Insight and Beliefs Under Psychedelics (FIBUS) model provides a more detailed explanation of how psychedelics can give rise to false beliefs through such mechanisms, leading to the conclusion that “psychedelics may… act as an amplifier for beliefs that enhance existing pathologies or even create new ones.” With such potential, a clearer understanding of the impact of psychedelic experiences on beliefs is warranted if we are to better understand the clinical and ethical risks of psychedelics when developed and implemented as therapeutic interventions.
In the meantime, the novel experiences made possible by psychedelic use do appear to influence and potentially modify what we believe, including profound beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. Whether such experiences result in insightful revelations, fantasies, or delusions remains to be seen and, as psychedelic researchers have long told us, likely depends on both “setting” (the physical surroundings and environmental context of use) and “set” (that is, a user’s individual mindset).
In other words, as the standard disclaimer goes, when it comes to psychedelic use and its impact on our beliefs, “individual results may vary.” ~ Joseph Pierre, MD, Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of California, San Francisco.
Mary:
I never took any hallucinogen, and yet recall having experiences very like those reported in the article. It was usually in an emotional turn, sometimes quite sudden, from a depressive state. There were no “visions”— but an overwhelming sense of the seamless connection of all things...that the solitude of objects was an illusion, beyond which lived their essential and universal connection. Everything shimmered with life. There was a sustained sense of joy and calm, a quietude without conflict, worry or strife. I didn't feel it as knowledge of any kind of personification of god. It was beyond that...the universe didn't need a creator...it was in the process of becoming conscious, aware of itself, and I was part of that process, like every other organization of atoms and energy, from stone to star. There was no striving — it was all already absolutely Enough.
*
ON BEING A LITERARY ATHEIST — YAHWEH VERSUS YODA
Though I could easily call myself a gnostic atheist (one who *knows* that god doesn’t exist), I prefer the label “literary atheist.” This is a person who believes in the power of fiction. A character like Superman is invented, and cult behavior follows. “Star Wars” is an even better example, with Yoda as a spiritual guide and the master of “The Force.” Or even Harry Potter. Having supernatural powers is a big part of the appeal of those characters that become cultural icons.
A literary atheist regards a god, including the Abrahamic god, as a fictional character. Perhaps “mythological” would be a more precise label, but “fictional” covers more ground. Just because a character is fictional doesn’t mean that he or she doesn’t “exist.” A fictional character can have a vivid neural existence, having become an indelible part of our psyche, along with the main narratives. A literary atheist is a gnostic atheist, but with a subtle difference: she recognizes that a fictional character can be very powerful part of our lives, often more powerful than an actual person. The human brain doesn’t strictly separate reality from imagination.
It’s not just young children who confuse “imaginary” and “real” characters and events; adults show the same tendency, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of false memory. In a way, all characters (including ourselves and our friends) are “imaginary.” So in a way it’s fine that Yahweh is a fictional character. The distressing part is that he’s not a well-written one. This is not surprising, given that the bible was written and edited over a long time by many men. He’s not the creation of a single literary genius; he’s a collective creation.
And then there is the question of selective reading and shifting interpretation over the centuries that followed. Given that, it’s remarkable how, for all the efforts to soften him, Yahweh remains an obnoxious character —“not a swell dude,” as someone recently put it. But a character doesn’t have to be likable to be powerful — literature is full of villains and good guys, as well as more complex villains who now and then have a gracious moment.
But let’s face it, between Yahweh and Yoda, Yoda is wiser and more endearing by far.
Perhaps the crucial factor is that Yoda is non-punitive. Punishment, temper tantrums, craving for praise — that simply wouldn't be wise.
*
AN ANTI-SEIZURE DRUG MAY LOWER THE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S
Past research shows that for many people mild cognitive impairment can be the first sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
About one-third of people who have mild cognitive impairment because of Alzheimer’s disease progresses to dementia within 5 years.
“Our studies have shown that patients with mild cognitive impairment, in addition to having amyloid and tau pathology, also show hyperactivity in an area of the brain called the hippocampus which is a structure critical for creating and retrieving memories,” Michela Gallagher, PhD, CEO and founder of AgeneBio, and Krieger Eisenhower Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University explained to Medical News Today.
“The hyperactivity in this brain region contributes to the memory impairment these patients are experiencing and likely contributes to the disease progressing,” she explained.
Researchers found this new drug — which is an extended release form of the epilepsy medication levetiracetam — helped slow brain atrophy progression in people with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease who are not carriers of the APoE4 allele, a genetic variant that linked to increased Alzheimer’s disease risk.
Currently, levetiracetam is the first and only therapeutic to our knowledge being investigated to target hippocampal overactivity to slow progression and delay the onset of AD dementia.
The dose of the drug is typically 1/12 of the dose used to prevent epileptic seizures.
Main source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-a-once-daily-pill-for-seizures-also-treat-alzheimers-disease#Seizure-drug-reduces-atrophy-in-brain-region-linked-to-memory
Oriana:
At this point, we should perhaps focus on preventing dementia. Once it’s underway, then the best we can hope for is slowing down the progress of brain atrophy — raising an ethical question: what is the point of prolonging suffering?
However, each year we seem to pick up crumbs of knowledge. For instance, we know that physical exercise and socializing lower the risk of dementia. Preventing serious infections of any sort (flu, herpes, pneumococcal pneumonia, gum disease, hepatitis, and more) also shows a preventive effect. When it comes to dementia, vaccines against infectious diseases may turn out to be an underutilized tool for risk reduction.
Another interesting bit of knowledge I had no idea was involved in dementia: that it’s the overactivity of the memory-related brain region that may be the source of trouble. I meant hippocampal hyperactivity, a condition that can be associated with dementia and is a potential therapeutic target. Note that in this case it is hyperactive brain that’s causing trouble, and not, as might be imagined, an underactive, quiescent brain. Antiepileptic drugs like levetiracetam can reduce hippocampal hyperactivity and improve memory performance — which is not surprising, given that epilepsy involves too much neural activity.
The Buddhist-like idea of the “quiet brain” may indeed be applicable here also. Yes, this immediately makes people think of meditation, but I wonder if a walk in nature might actually be more powerful.
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Gino Severini: Expansion of Light
*
MEDITATION AND PREVENTION OF DEMENTIA
Meditation could protect older people against dementia, according to new research.
The ancient relaxation technique boosts brainpower in over 65s, say scientists, specifically attention, awareness and emotional health.
The findings shed fresh light on how the disease works and open the door to better therapies. They add to evidence mindfulness reduces symptoms and even helps ward them off.
French participants assigned to an 18-month meditation course did better than those given English lessons instead to keep their brains busy.
Corresponding author Dr Gael Chetelat, of the University of Caen-Normandy, said: “Meditation was superior to non-native language training on changing a global composite score and two of its subscores reflecting attention regulation and socio-emotional capacities.
“The attention regulation subscore increased after meditation only.
“In the context of meditation practices, this capacity allows a heightened awareness and monitoring of the contents of experience without becoming absorbed by them.
“Socio-emotional capacities decreased substantially after non-native language training, suggesting the difference observed may be due to maintenance of skills by meditation.”
The study included 137 men and women split into three groups. Meditation and English classes included two-hour weekly sessions.
Participants also did home practice of at least 20 minutes a day. A control set carried on living their lives as normal, with no intervention.
Dr Chetelat added: “Meditation was superior to non-native language training on 18-month changes in a global composite score capturing attention regulation, socio-emotional and self-knowledge capacities.
“The study findings confirm the feasibility of meditation and non-native language training in elderly individuals, with high adherence and very low attrition.”
Meditation has become increasingly popular over recent years. It has helped people quit smoking, cope with cancer and even prevent psoriasis, a skin condition.
Dr Chetelat said: “Could meditation, a mental training approach toward attention and emotion regulation, preserve brain structure and function in cognitively unimpaired older adults?
“Future analyses on secondary outcomes will determine the measures most sensitive to meditation training and the factors associated with responsiveness to the intervention.”
Previous research has suggested it slows onset by helping people to stay focused and boosting happiness.
Dr Chetelat said: “Strategies to prevent dementia are urgently needed. Mental training that targets stress and attention regulation has the potential to improve both cognitive and emotional aspects of aging.
“Previous studies have shown mindfulness meditation improves cognition, specifically in older adults across multiple domains including attention, executive functions and self-awareness or meta-cognition.
“Mindfulness meditation can also reduce stress, anxiety and depression — including in older adults.”
The number of dementia cases worldwide will triple to more than 150 million by 2050. With no cure in sight there is an increasing focus on lifestyle factors that are protective.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which combines meditation with orthodox “thought training”, is already recommended for depression in Britain and is available on the NHS.
Dr Chetelat said: “Meditation appears to be a promising approach to preserve brain structure and function as well as cognition and thus to reduce dementia risk by directly targeting psycho-affective factors.”
The study is in the journal JAMA Neurology.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/meditation-dementia-causes-mindfulness-study-b2200022.html
Oriana:
The most advanced neural function, acquired last, is inhibition. It’s possible that inhibition is a form of brain exercise the way lifting weights exercises the body.
Ending on beauty:
MYTHS OF THE KITCHEN
The bud mouth of a legendary April.
Streets silver avenues of light.
Noons of copper and iron,
bronze evenings deepening on lilacs.
Summers: dusky stone,
green bridges carved in the air.
Long boulevards of white pavement,
trees making lakes of shade.
Soft pools of golden gingko leaves
on an autumn morning.
Winter’s white fur,
lips of frost.
Cities awash in sepia,
petrified in the nerves.
The sun painting
the dozens of small panes.
A still life with books
in a room off the old kitchen
where I lived alone,
listening.
~ Sutton Breiding
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