star forming (Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomy News)
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MY REAL LIFE
I only pretend to live at home, in Warsaw,
propaganda posters
rotting in the rain.
In the green of my heart
I’m deep in the Amazon jungle,
searching for the trembling
drop of sap that could save
humanity from a terrible disease.
phosphor eyes flame in the foliage.
Everything glitters and slithers.
Bent over my homework,
I unspool the enormous river —
The geography teacher asks about
oil fields in Romania, pig iron in Sweden.
The pot-bellied priest wants to know
why I stopped going to church.
I dismiss them all;
my hand is a map of a
greater destiny: I open
green doors to the sun —
as I sit at my desk,
the drizzle in Warsaw
snailing long tears down the pane.
But beyond the gray
blazes gold river-sky,
the liquid sunset on the Amazon.
Hour after hour, I sit over
homework, subtracting,
dividing, always
making errors —
tropical forests
sing in my braided hair.
~ Oriana
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HOW “LORD OF THE FLIES” WAS RESCUED FROM THE REJECT PILE
William Golding
William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies was first published on 17 September 1954, and is now recognized as a classic. In History looks at how Golding's story of English schoolboys and their descent into barbarism narrowly escaped being thrown in the bin.
"Write what you know" is advice often given to aspiring authors, and Lord of the Flies is a spectacular example of how clichés can still contain essential truths. A teacher at a boys' school who had witnessed first-hand the inhumanity of World War Two, William Golding condensed this knowledge and experience into his debut novel, a deceptively simple tale of shipwrecked boys reverting to savagery on a desert island. Its subversion of a familiar plot went on to resonate with generations of readers, and serve as a grim warning that the evils of Nazi Germany could be repeated anywhere.
Golding was about to turn 43 when Lord of the Flies was first published. His big idea was a sinister 20th-Century reimagining of The Coral Island, RM Ballantyne's 1857 tale of derring-do in which a group of shipwrecked British schoolboys civilize a desert island, making it a playground for fun and games. Much of his original manuscript was handwritten on exercise books during school time. He even worked on the novel during lessons, while his pupils were occupied with their textbooks. A few of them were tasked with counting the number of words he'd written per page.
In 1953, Golding sent his novel to nine publishers, all of whom rejected it. Undaunted, he offered the manuscript to Faber and Faber, one of the most prestigious London firms. It was picked up by Charles Monteith, a junior editor who had only worked at the publishing house for a few months. The signs were not promising.
“Absurd and uninteresting”
He told the BBC's Bookmark in 1984: "Already there was one particular sort of thing I could spot, and that was the tired, weather-beaten old manuscript that had been around a lot of publishers before it reached us, and this was very much that. It was a large yellowing manuscript with the pages beginning to curl, and one or two stains for teacups that were put on them, or wine glasses, and drops of coffee and tea spilled, and was bound in rather depressing, hairy brown cardboard, and there was a short, formal covering letter."
One of the publisher's professional readers had already delivered her written verdict on Golding's manuscript, dismissing it as an "absurd and uninteresting fantasy". Along with a circled R for "reject", she wrote: "Rubbish and dull. Pointless.”
Fortunately for Golding, Monteith gave the book another go, and decided to save it from oblivion. He said: "I had a look, and I must say I wasn't at all attracted by the beginning of it, but eventually I went on and got absolutely caught up by it. And from then on, I said 'we must take this seriously’."
He persuaded Faber and Faber to publish the book, but Golding first had to make some significant changes to the text. Also, its original title, Strangers from Within, had to go. According to Golding biographer Professor John Carey, the original manuscript was a religious novel that was "drastically different from the Lord of the Flies most people have read”.
Capacity for evil
Golding's experience of war gave him a deep sense of man's capacity for evil and a disillusionment with the idealistic politics of his early life. Lord of the Flies was his warning that the Nazism that engulfed Germany in the 1930s could happen in any civilized country. Speaking on The South Bank Show in 1980, he explained how the war transformed his attitude to human nature.
"It simply changed because, bit by bit, we discovered what the Nazis had been doing. Here was this highly civilized race of people who were doing, one gradually found out, impossible things. I remember, in those days, saying to myself, 'Yes, well, I have a Nazi inside me; given the right circumstances, I could have been a Nazi.’
"Bit by bit, as I discovered more and more what had gone on, that really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was. So that political nostrums, if you like, seemed to me just to fall flat on their face in front of this capacity man had for a sort of absolute evil.”
Although Lord of the Flies had been a critical success, it wasn't until the publication of the US edition, and particularly the paperback in 1959, that Golding became an international bestselling author and started to earn large amounts in royalties. The success allowed him to quit his teaching job and become a full-time writer. "I didn't like the systematic side of teaching; I'm not a very systematic person," he admitted to Bookmark in 1984.
On his status as a literary late bloomer, he said that his breakthrough came when he realized he had to stop imitating other writers. "It wasn't until I was 37, I suppose, that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's. Then everything followed from that," he told Monitor in 1959.
One young fan of Lord of the Flies was the novelist Stephen King, who borrowed the book from a mobile library after requesting something about "the way that kids really are". He told Arena in 2012: "I was completely riveted by the story from the very beginning because it was like a boys' story, the ones that I was accustomed to. The difference was the boys were real boys – they acted the way that I understood boys acted.”
King went on to set several stories in the fictional town of Castle Rock, which he named after Jack's mountain fort in Lord of the Flies. From cult 1990s backpackers story The Beach to teenage cannibalism drama Yellowjackets via the obligatory Simpsons parody, Lord of the Flies has become a pop culture touchstone. The book was twice adapted for film in 1963 and 1990, and a BBC television adaptation by screenwriter Jack Thorne is currently being filmed in Malaysia.
For Golding, the secret of his success was itself almost a cliché. He told Bookmark in 1984: "I am at bottom and at top, too, a storyteller through and through. What matters to me is that there shall be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20240913-how-lord-of-the-flies-was-rescued-from-the-reject-pile
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FEWER CHOICES, BETTER DECISIONS
Paul Glimcher, neuroscientist
It’s harder to answer questions or solve problems when you’re asked to choose between more than four solutions, research shows. We get lost comparing every option, even if we already know the best answer.
Neuroscientist Paul Glimcher has a simple strategy to cut through the noise and consistently make smart decisions: Instead of trying to pick the best choice, start by picking the worst.
Say someone puts six candy bars in front of you, for example. Your favorite candy might send “a lesser signal” to your brain simply because it’s being “sucked down by just the existence of other candy bars,” Glimcher, a New York University professor, said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2024 last month. “If I ask you to take away the worst candy bar, then your next-worst candy bar ... [eventually] you’re getting more and more confident about what the best option is.”
Process of elimination isn’t exactly a new concept — you might have learned about it in elementary school — but it can help you avoid mistakes and improve your accuracy making everyday decisions, Glimcher said.
It might help you avoid picking a restaurant you don’t actually like when a friend sends you a list of ideas for a night out. At work, if you’re having trouble selecting which data points to highlight in a presentation, eliminate the least useful, and continue on.
“We’re just good at the binary choice task — pick your best and eliminate your worst,” Glimcher added. “But when we get into modern circumstances where large companies are producing huge numbers of options for us to choose among ... it has a huge effect on your performance.”
That’s because picking from fewer options can help us make more accurate decisions, said Glimcher. However, it’s worth noting his ongoing research also shows this process marginally increases decision fatigue, he adds in an email to CNBC Make It. The process takes longer, and while the decisions are easier, there are more of them to make.
Experts recommend combatting that fatigue by making decisions earlier in the day when you have more mental energy, and developing routines so that some choices feel like habits, rather than prompting analysis.
Using a similar strategy helps you be more persuasive
Once you’re aware of how choice overload can cloud people’s thinking, you might also be better equipped to change someone’s mind during any conversation or debate. The simpler and clearer your argument, the more persuasive it becomes, Niro Sivanathan, an organizational behavior professor at London Business School, told CNBC Make It in November.
“Most people make the forecasting error that in order to win people over, you need to get them lots of data,” he said. “Oftentimes, things fail not in content, but delivery.”
When arguing, instead of including five points on why you’re right, pick the one or two strongest points to make your most effective case. People tend to remember the average persuasiveness of an entire argument, rather than the single smartest point made during it, said Sivanthan.
“Less is more,” he said. “If you have just one key argument, be confident and put that on the table, rather than feeling the need to list many others.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/09/simple-brain-trick-can-help-you-make-better-decisions-neuroscientist.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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HOW OCTOBER 7 TRANSFORMED THE MIDDLE EAST
damaged building Gaza
~ Vladimir Lenin’s adage, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen” epitomizes the extent to which the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel a year ago upended the status quo in the Middle East.
What started as an unprecedented, stunning, horrific assault by Hamas and at least four other Palestinian armed groups on Israeli kibbutzim and young concertgoers, has turned into a direct war between archfoes Israel, Iran, and its proxies and allies. Meanwhile, the root cause of the problem, the Palestinian issue, seems further from resolution while an unfathomable humanitarian disaster in Gaza worsens, Israeli hostages remain captive, conflict widens in the West Bank, and war again begins to consume Lebanon.
The ongoing Israeli decapitation of Hezbollah’s top leaders, especially the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the tit-for-tat retaliation between Israel and Iran mark a continuation of the erosion of redline politics as had been known in the region for decades. Only a few lines are left to be crossed including arguably the most dangerous — Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and critical economic infrastructure, and Iranian retaliation against critical Israeli infrastructure and cities, which would take the war into a new and even more dangerous phase.
Since October 7, 2023, the widespread destruction in Gaza and repeated failures to protect civilians has hastened the decline of a U.S.-led liberal rules-based order – a degradation which could produce global, transformative ripple effects on future wars, human rights, and the notion of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) enshrined by the UN in 2005.
While the failure of international diplomacy to solve the Palestinian issue, the decay of the Palestinian authority, and Israel’s blockade of Gaza all contributed to Hamas’s decision to stage such a horrific attack, Hamas also bears a big responsibility for the suffering of the Gazans. Weeks after October 7, Mousa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, said the organization was not responsible for the population of Gaza since the majority are refugees and thus, the UN’s responsibility to protect even though Hamas has been the governing body of the enclave since ejecting the Palestinian Authority in June 2007.
The Palestinian writer Majed Kayali, who has written extensively about the failure of Palestinian groups to critically reflect about the pros and cons of the armed struggle, highlights disastrous miscalculations by Hamas in the run up to last October 7. First, an inflated self-image that exaggerates its own power and belittles that of Israel to the point of calling it, as Nasrallah did in 2000, weaker than “a spider’s web.” Second, an emotional, religious belief that “angels” and the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” would support its war with Israel. Third, a failure to differentiate between legitimate resistance to occupation that could take different forms and a conventional war between armies. Fourth, a total disregard for the balance of power, regional and international context and support for Israel.
And finally, a disregard for the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners have been waiting for the opportunity to decimate Hamas and Hezbollah and end any notion that Israel would have to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
Israel’s intelligence superiority and military might, supported by the U.S. and other Western powers, is again in full display. It is unlikely Israel will stop its attacks on Lebanon and Syria until it achieves its goal of incapacitating Hezbollah and cutting the transport of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. Hezbollah and Iran will not surrender, knowing Netanyahu’s strategy is the decimation of Hezbollah and rolling back Iran’s regional reach.
The ongoing Israeli assassination of top Hezbollah leaders and Iranian commanders, as well as the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Beirut, demonstrate the unprecedented capacity of Israeli intelligence — supported by the U.S. — to penetrate the command-and-control and communication structures of its enemies. Netanyahu appears bullish, looking for total victory and once again dreaming – along with U.S. hawks and neoconservatives — of establishing a “New Middle East” that minimizes Iran’s reach and creates a durable alliance with Sunni Arab states.
However, if there is one thing the history of the region teaches, it is the danger of strategic overreach. Just as Hamas has faced grave retribution for its horrific attacks on October 7, Iran’s projection of power through proxies to the point of taking pride in controlling four Arab capitals is backfiring. Iran’s forward defense doctrine, nurtured over four decades, also faces a moment of reckoning.
Iran and Hezbollah are exposed, vulnerable, weakened but not defeated. Iran and Hezbollah haven’t yet used all the advanced weapons they possess, and they can still cause considerable damage to Israel. There are extremely high risks for miscalculations and unintended damage with grave consequences for all as a result of the “ballistic missile ping-pong” between Iran and Israel. Iran’s Houthi allies can continue to disrupt trade and shipping in the Red Sea with consequences for the global economy. Finally, with Hezbollah decapitated, Iran may dash for the bomb, a development that will further destabilize the region and intensify a regional nuclear arms race.
In the current tit-for-tat, with the U.S. preoccupied by upcoming elections and failing to exert decisive leadership to de-escalate the situation, what awaits the region is not the blessed future envisioned by Netanyahu but rather an Israel engaged in endless war, facing further global isolation and dragging the U.S. down with it. In this dystopian day after, Gaza is reduced to a refugee “super camp” and large parts of Lebanon lie in ruins. It doesn’t take too much imagination to conclude that such a situation will only produce more fanaticism, death and destruction for all.
There is an alternative in which Palestinians get statehood and Israelis get security. But glimmers of hope such as a Saudi-led global coalition to establish a Palestinian state and a joint peace proposal by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Palestinian foreign affairs minister Nasser al-Kidwa need urgent global and regional support.
https://www.stimson.org/2024/how-october-7-transformed-the-middle-east/
RUSSIA: “NO LIVES MATTER”
Putin’s trying to use the same strategy in Ukraine as Stalin used in Stalingrad.
Keep throwing soldiers at the other side, knowing that a huge number will be killed or wounded, in hope that at some point the opponent will run out of ammunition or be overwhelmed.
There is no concern for the number of casualties or that there might be a better way to capture territory.
Part of the fear of the Red Army lay in the fact they didn’t care how many lives were lost.
In 1961 JFK met with Khrushchev in Vienna. One of the topics was nuclear arms control.
Kennedy was trying to impress upon Khrushchev the loss of lives that would take place. He told Khrushchev that if there was a war, at least 20 million Russians would die.
Khrushchev’s response was “so what.”
JFK said he was utterly floored by the answer and had no response.
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Oriana:
Also rendered as "The death of one individual is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic." It's not entirely certain if Stalin said it, but if anyone thought in one terms, Stalin fits best.
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RUSSIA’S FOREIGN POLICY HASN’T CHANGED MUCH OVER THE CENTURIES
Let’s start with a quote on Russian policy that was said in the British Parliament:
"The Russians always have two realities. In words, they are for peace throughout the world and moderation, and they announce this both in St. Petersburg and in London. But in reality, they conduct active special operations with the help of their agents. If their agents succeed somewhere, St. Petersburg declares this a fait accompli and says that it cannot sacrifice such results, because it is contrary to Russian honor. If the agents fail, any connection with St. Petersburg is denied, they are declared local patriots or renegades, and in general it is reported that they were sent for the wrong purpose and that they violated the instructions given to them".
This was said by Lord Palmerstone. He said this before the Crimean War in 1853.
In my opinion this quote is still absolutely applied to today's Russia policy.
So the main foreign policy principles of Russia are:
1. hidden subversive activities against those who are stronger and more advanced in order to weaken them, and
2. direct military interventions against those who are weaker.
Russia always strived for the world leaderships. Russian state managed to immerse own population in illusory fictional tales which they call history. In those tales Russia is a victim of cunning neighbors. It allegedly is always unfairly deceived and humiliated and all this demands a fair revenge.
The overwhelming majority of Russians are sure that Russia never was an aggressor. They believe that Napoleon "without any reason" attacked Russia, they believe that all the Soviet republics "voluntarily joined the USSR", they are sure that the aggression against Poland in 1939 was justified, they believe that Finland first attacked Russia in 1939, they are sure that Ukraine is "part of Russia" and so on.
The so-called common Russians are sure that the whole world is their enemy and is to blame for all their problems. They are ready to make war being sure that they are rightful to do it.
These have been the main foreign policy principles of Russia during the last several centuries. In those tales Russia is a victim of cunning neighbors, it allegedly is always unfairly deceived and humiliated and all this demands a fair revenge.
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A DEADLY YEAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Millions of people in the Middle East dream of safe, quiet lives without drama and violent death. The last year of war, as bad as any in the region in modern times, has shown yet again that dreams of peace cannot come true while deep political, strategic and religious fault lines remain unbridged. Once again, war is reshaping the politics of the Middle East.
The Hamas offensive came out of well over a century of unresolved conflict. After Hamas burst through the thinly defended border, it inflicted the worst day the Israelis had suffered.
Around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, phoned President Joe Biden and told him that “We’ve never seen such savagery in the history of the state”; not “since the Holocaust.” Israel saw the attacks by Hamas as a threat to its existence.
Since then, Israel has inflicted many terrible days on the Palestinians in Gaza. Nearly 42,000 people, mostly civilians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Much of Gaza is in ruins. Palestinians accuse Israel of genocide.
The war has spread. Twelve months after Hamas went on the offensive the Middle East is on the edge of an even worse war; wider, deeper, even more destructive.
The death of illusions
A year of killing has stripped away layers of assumptions and illusions. One is Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that he could manage the Palestinian issue without making concessions to their demands for self-determination.
With that went the wishful thinking that had comforted Israel’s worried Western allies. Leaders in the US and UK, and others, had convinced themselves that Netanyahu, despite opposing a Palestinian state alongside Israel all his political life, could somehow be persuaded to accept one to end the war.
Netanyahu’s refusal reflected almost universal distrust of Palestinians inside Israel as well as his own ideology. It also torpedoed an ambitious American peace plan.
President Biden’s “grand bargain” proposed that Israel would receive full diplomatic recognition by Saudi Arabia, the most influential Islamic country, in return for allowing Palestinian independence. The Saudis would be rewarded with a security pact with the US.
The Biden plan fell at the first hurdle. Netanyahu said in February that statehood would be “huge reward” for Hamas. Bezalel Smotrich, one of the ultra-nationalist extremists in his cabinet, said it would be an “existential threat” to Israel.
The Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, presumed to be alive somewhere in Gaza, had his own illusions. A year ago, he must have hoped that the rest of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” would join, with full force, into a war to cripple Israel. He was wrong.
Sinwar kept his plans to attack Israel on 7 October so secret that he took his enemy by surprise. He also surprised some on his own side. Diplomatic sources told the BBC that Sinwar might not even have shared his plans with his own organization’s exiled political leadership in Qatar. They had notoriously lax security protocols, talking on open lines that could be easily overheard, one source said.
Far from going on the offensive, Iran made it clear it did not want a wider war, as Israel invaded Gaza and President Biden ordered American carrier strike groups to move closer to protect Israel.
Instead, Hassan Nasrallah, and his friend and ally, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, restricted themselves to rocketing Israel’s northern border, which they said would continue until a ceasefire in Gaza. The targets were mostly military, but Israel evacuated more than 60,000 people away from the border. In Lebanon, perhaps twice as many had to flee over the months as Israel hit back.
Israel made clear it would not tolerate an indefinite war of attrition with Hezbollah. Even so, the conventional wisdom was that Israel would be deterred by Hezbollah’s formidable fighting record in previous wars and its arsenal of missiles, provided by Iran.
In September, Israel went on the offensive. No one outside the senior ranks of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Mossad spy agency believed so much damage could be inflicted so quickly on Iran’s most powerful ally.
Israel remotely exploded booby-trapped pagers and radios, destroying Hezbollah’s communications and killing leaders. It launched one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern warfare. On its first day Israel killed about 600 Lebanese people, including many civilians.
The offensive has blown a big hole in Iran’s belief that its network of allies cemented its strategy to deter and intimidate Israel. The key moment came on 27 September, with the huge air strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut that killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and many of his top lieutenants. Nasrallah was a vital part of Iran’s “axis of resistance”, its informal alliance and defense network of allies and proxies.
Israel broke out of the border war by escalating to a bigger one. If the strategic intention was to force Hezbollah to cease fire and pull back from the border, it failed. The offensive, and invasion of south Lebanon, has not deterred Iran.
Iran seems to have concluded that its open reluctance to risk a wider war was encouraging Israel to push harder. Hitting back was risky, and guaranteed an Israeli response, but for the supreme leader and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, it had become the least bad option.
On Tuesday 1 October, Iran attacked Israel with ballistic missiles.
A repository of trauma
Kibbutz Kfar Aza is very close to the wire that was supposed to protect Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. The kibbutz was a small community, with modest homes on an open-plan campus of lawns and neat gardens. Kfar Aza was one of Hamas’s first targets on 7 October. Sixty-two people from the kibbutz were killed by Hamas. Of the 19 hostages taken from there into Gaza, two were killed by Israeli troops after they escaped from captivity. Five hostages from Kfar Aza are still in Gaza.
The Israeli army took journalists into Kfar Aza on 10 October last year, when it was still a battle zone. We saw Israeli combat troops dug into the fields around the kibbutz and could hear gunfire as they cleared buildings where they suspected Hamas fighters might be sheltering. Israeli civilians killed by Hamas were being carried out in body bags from the ruins of their homes. Hamas fighters killed by Israeli soldiers as they fought their way into the kibbutz still lay on the neat lawns, turning black as they decomposed in the strong Mediterranean sun.
A year later the dead are buried but very little has changed. The living have not returned to live in their homes. Ruined houses have been preserved as they were when I saw them on 10 October last year, except the names and photos of the people who lived and were killed inside them are displayed on big posters and memorials.
Zohar Shpak, a resident who survived the attack with his family, showed us round the homes of neighbors who were not as lucky. One of the houses had a large photo on its wall of the young couple who lived there, both killed by Hamas on 7 October. The ground around the houses has been dug over. Zohar said the young man’s father had spent weeks sifting earth to try to find his son’s head. He had been buried without it.
The stories of the dead of 7 October, and the hostages, are well known in Israel. Local media still talk about their country’s losses, adding new information to old pain.
Zohar said it was too early to think about how they might rebuild their lives.
“We are still inside the trauma. We are not in post-trauma. Like people said, we're still here. We are still in the war. We wanted the war will be ended, but we want it will be ended with a victory, but not an army victory. Not a war victory.
“My victory is that I could live here, with. My son and daughter, with my grandchildren and living peacefully. I believe in peace.”
Zohar and many other Kfar Aza residents identified with the left wing of Israeli politics, meaning that they believed Israel’s only chance of peace was allowing the Palestinians their independence. Israelis like Zohar and his neighbors are convinced that Netanyahu is a disastrous prime minister who bears a heavy responsibility for leaving them vulnerable and open to attack on 7 October.
But Zohar does not trust the Palestinians, people he used to ferry to hospitals in Israel in better times when they were allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment.
“I don't believe those people who are living over there. But I want the peace. I want to go to Gaza's beach. But I don't trust them. No, I don't trust any one of them.”
Gaza’’s catastrophe
Hamas leaders do not accept that the attacks on Israel were a mistake that brought the wrath of Israel, armed and supported by the United States, down on to the heads of their people. Blame the occupation, they say, and its lust for destruction and death.
In Qatar, an hour or so before Iran attacked Israel on 1 October, I interviewed Khalil al-Hayya, the most senior Hamas leader outside Gaza, second only in their organization to Yahya Sinwar. He denied his men had targeted civilians – despite overwhelming evidence — and justified the attacks by saying it was necessary to put the plight of the Palestinians on the world’s political agenda.
“It was necessary to raise an alarm in the world to tell them that here there is a people who have a cause and have demands that must be met. It was a blow to Israel, the Zionist enemy.”
Israel felt the blow, and on 7 October, as the IDF was rushing troops to the Gaza border,
Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech promising a “mighty vengeance”. He set out war aims of eliminating Hamas as a military and political force and bringing the hostages home. The prime minister continues to insist that “total victory” is possible, and that force will in the end free the Israelis held by Hamas for a year.
His political opponents, including relatives of the hostages, accuse him of blocking a ceasefire and a hostage deal to appease ultra-nationalists in his government. He is accused of putting his own political survival before the lives of Israelis.
Netanyahu has many political enemies in Israel, even though the offensive in Lebanon has helped repair his poll numbers. He remains controversial but for most Israelis the war in Gaza is not. Since 7 October, most Israelis have hardened their hearts to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
Gaza before and afterTwo days into the war, Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip.
“There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Since then, under international pressure, Israel has been forced to loosen its blockade. At the United Nations at the end of September, Netanyahu insisted Gazans have all the food they need.
The evidence shows clearly that is not true. Days before his speech, UN humanitarian agencies signed a declaration just demanding an end to “appalling human suffering and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”.
"More than 2 million Palestinians are without protection, food, water, sanitation, shelter, health care, education, electricity and fuel – the basic necessities to survive. Families have been forcibly displaced, time and time again, from one unsafe place to the next, with no way out.”
BBC Verify has analyzed the condition of Gaza after a year of war.
The Hamas-run health ministry says nearly 42,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. Analysis of satellite imagery by US academics Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek suggests 58.7% of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
But there is another human cost — displacement — with civilians repeatedly instructed to move by the IDF.
The effects of the movement of people can be seen from space.
Satellite images show how tents have amassed and dispersed in central Rafah. It's a pattern that has been repeated across the strip.
These waves of displacement began on 13 October, when the IDF told residents of the northern half of the strip to move south for their own “safety".
BBC Verify has identified more than 130 social media posts like these shared by the IDF, detailing which areas were designated combat zones, routes to take out and where temporary pauses in fighting would take place.
In total, these often-overlapping posts amounted to about 60 evacuation orders covering more than 80% of the Gaza strip.
On many of the notices, BBC Verify has found key details to be unreadable and drawn boundaries inconsistent with the text.
The IDF has designated a coastal area – al-Mawasi — in southern Gaza as a humanitarian zone. It still gets bombed. BBC Verify has analyzed footage of 18 air strikes within the zone’s borders.
Satellite pictures show a huge bottleneck of people on Salah al-Din Street, after Israel ordered the effective depopulation of northern Gaza. Somewhere in the crowds moving down Salah al-Din, Gaza’s main north-south route, was Insaf Hassan Ali, her husband and two children, a boy of 11 and a girl of seven. So far, they have all survived, unlike many members of their extended family.
Israel does not allow journalists into Gaza to report freely. We assume that is because Israel does not want us to see what it has done there. We commissioned a trusted Palestinian freelancer inside Gaza to interview Insaf Ali and her son.
She spoke about the terrible fear they felt as they walked south, with perhaps one million others, on the orders of the Israeli army. Death was everywhere, she says.
“We were walking on Salah al-Din Street. A car in front of us was hit. We saw it, and it was burning… On the left, people were killed, and on the right, even the animals—donkeys were thrown around, they were bombed.
“We said, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ We said, ‘now the rocket that is coming will be for us’.”
Insaf and her family had a comfortable middle-class life before the war. Since then, they have been displaced 15 times on the orders of Israel. Like millions of others, they are destitute, often hungry, living in a tent at al-Mawasi, a desolate area of sand dunes. Snakes, scorpions and venomous giant worms invade the tents and have to be swept out. As well as the risk of death in an air strike, they face hunger, disease and the fecal dust generated when millions of people do not have access to proper sanitation.
Insaf wept for her old life, and the people they have lost.
“Our lives were beautiful, and suddenly we had nothing—no clothes, no food, no essentials for life. Constantly being displaced is incredibly hard on my children's health. They’ve had malnutrition and they have been infected with diseases, including amoebic dysentery and hepatitis.”
Insaf said that the beginning of months of Israeli bombing felt like the “horrors of judgement day”.
“Any mother would feel the same, anyone who owns something precious and is afraid it might slip from their hands at any moment. Each time we moved to a house, it would be bombed, and someone in our family would be killed.”
The only chance of making even small improvements in the lives of Insaf and her family and well over two million others in Gaza is to agree to a ceasefire. If the killing stops, diplomats might have a window to stop the slide into a much wider catastrophe.
More disasters await in the future, if the war drags on and a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians cannot shake the hatred and horror many currently feel about the actions of the other side.
Insaf’s 11-year-old son, Anas Awad, has been deeply affected by everything he has seen.
“There’s no future for Gaza’s children. The friends I used to play with have been martyred. We used to run around together. May God have mercy on them. The mosque where I used to memorize the Quran has been bombed. My school has been bombed. So has the playground… everything has gone. I want peace. I wish I could return with my friends and play again. I wish we had a house, not a tent.”
“I don’t have friends anymore. Our whole life has turned to sand. When I go out to the prayer area, I feel anxious, and hesitant. I don’t feel right.”
His mother was listening.
“It has been the hardest year of my life. We saw sights we should not have seen – scattered bodies, the desperation of a grown man holding a bottle of water to drink for his children. Of course, our homes are no longer homes; they are just piles of sand, but we hope for the day when we can return.’
The Law
UN humanitarian agencies have condemned both Israel and Hamas: “The parties’ conduct over the last year makes a mockery of their claim to adhere to international humanitarian law and the minimum standards of humanity that it demands.”
Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war. Hamas claims it ordered its men not to kill Israeli civilians. Israel says it warns Palestinian civilians to get out of harm’s way but Hamas uses them as human shields.
Druze children killed by Hezbollah
Israel has been referred to the International Court of Justice, accused by South Africa of genocide. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants on a range of war crimes charges for Yahya Sinwar of Hamas, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.
Plunging into uncertainty
For Israelis the Hamas attacks on 7 October were a painful reminder of centuries of pogroms against Jews in Europe that culminated in the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. In the first month of the war, the Israeli writer and former politician Avraham Burg explained the profound psychological impact on his country.
“We, the Jews,” he told me, “we believe that the state of Israel is the first and best immune system and protective system versus Jewish history. No more pogroms, no more Holocaust, no more mass murderers. And all of a sudden, all of it is back.”
Ghosts of the past tormented Palestinians as well. Raja Shehadeh, the celebrated Palestinian writer and human rights campaigner believes that Israel wanted to make another Nakba – another catastrophe: in his latest book What Does Israel Fear From Palestine? he writes “as the war progressed I could see that they meant every word and did not care about civilians, including children. In their eyes, as well as the eyes of most Israelis, all Gazans were guilty”.
No one can doubt Israel’s determination to defend its people, helped enormously by the might of the United States. It is clear though, that the war has shown that nobody can fool themselves that Palestinians will accept lives lived forever under an Israeli military occupation, without proper civil rights, freedom of movement and independence.
After generations of conflict Israelis and Palestinians are used to confronting each other. But they are also used to living alongside each other, however uncomfortably. When a ceasefire comes, and with a new generation of leaders, there will be chances to push again for peace.
But that is a more distant future. The rest of the year and into 2025, with a new president in the White House, are uncertain and full of danger.
For months after Hamas attacked Israel, the fear was that the war would spread, and get worse. Slowly, and then very quickly, it happened, after Israel’s devastating attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon.
It is too late to say the Middle East is on the brink. Israel is facing off against Iran. The warring parties have plunged over it, and countries not yet directly involved are desperate not to be dragged over the edge.
As I write Israel has still not retaliated for Iran’s ballistic missile attack on 1 October. It has indicated that it intends to inflict a severe punishment. President Biden and his administration, Israel’s constant supplier of weapons and diplomatic support, are trying to calibrate a response that might offer Iran a way to stop the accelerating climb up the ladder of escalation, a phrase strategists use to describe the way wars speed from crisis to disaster.
The proximity of the US elections, along with Joe Biden’s steadfast support for Israel, despite his misgivings about the way it has been fighting, do not induce much optimism that the US will somehow finesse a way out.
The signals from Israel indicate that Netanyahu, Gallant, the generals of the IDF and the intelligence agencies believe they have the upper hand. October 7th was a disaster for them. All the major security and military chiefs, except the prime minister, apologized and some resigned. They had not planned for a war with Hamas. But planning for the war with Hezbollah started after the last one ended in 2006 in a humiliating stalemate for Israel. Hezbollah has suffered blows from which it might never recover.
So far Israel’s victories are tactical. To get to a strategic victory it would need to coerce its enemies into changing their behavior. Hezbollah, even in its reduced state, is showing that it wants to fight on. Taking on Israeli infantry and tanks now that south Lebanon has once more been invaded might negate some of Israel’s advantages in air power and intelligence.
If Iran answers Israel’s retaliation with another wave of ballistic missiles other countries might get pulled in. In Iraq, Iran’s client militias could attack American interests. Two Israeli soldiers were killed by a drone that came from Iraq.
Saudi Arabia is also looking on nervously. Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman has made clear his view of the future. He would contemplate recognizing Israel, but only if the Palestinians get a state in return and Saudi Arabia gets a security pact with the United States.
Joe Biden’s role, simultaneously trying to restrain Israel while supporting it with weapons, diplomacy and carrier strike groups, exposes the Americans to getting involved in a wider war with Iran. They don’t want that to happen, but Biden has pledged that he will come to Israel’s aid if it becomes necessary.
Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and the damage done to Iran’s strategy and its “axis of resistance” is fostering a new set of illusions among some in Israel and the United States. . Joe Biden – and his successor – should be wary of that.
The last time that restructuring the Middle East by force was contemplated seriously was after al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on America, when US President George W Bush and Tony Blair, the UK’s prime minister, were getting ready to invade Iraq in 2003.
The invasion of Iraq did not purge the Middle East of violent extremism. It made matters worse.
The priority for those who want to stop this war should be a ceasefire in Gaza. It is the only chance to cool matters and to create a space for diplomacy. This year of war started in Gaza. Perhaps it can end there too.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c781vgy3918o
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THE RADICAL REGIME OF IRAN MUST GO OR THE WARS WILL NEVER END
Decades of building, training, funding, arming, coordinating, consulting and instructing their proxies all over the Middle East, they managed to evade punishment and accountability for their actions.
The west who still believes in useless “diplomatic patches” with radical fanatic lunatics, are fooled by the Iranian regime, who managed to bypass sanctions by selling their oil to non- western nations like China, India and others.
The Iranian regime will never stop their jihad war, and the only way to make them stop is by removing them from power. The Iranian people are eager to break free for the fanatic Islamic grip, and all the hypocrites ignores them.
Think how the Iranian nation could have been prosperous if it invested their oil fortune in building infrastructure, education, and economy…. Instead, all the money goes to fund their delusional war machine! ~ YD, Quora
Steve Ball:
Iran in the 70’s looked like an awesome place, people in western clothes and swimsuits, people smiling and laughing. They were free and the country was fruitful and progressive, then it turned to shit, my heart goes out to them. Israel could play a huge part of returning Iran to it’s former glory. I know it’s not the brief of the IDF, they are after the terrorists, but by removing the terrorists and the regime they will free the people of Iran, go IDF!
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UKRAINE’S STRIKES ON RUSSIA’S AMMUNITION DEPOTS
If Ukraine can strike ammunition depots in Russia, it will never have to deal with them in Ukraine.
This was a primary strategy used by the Allies in WWII.
The US and Britain bombed the military industrial plants in Germany to keep them from turning out weapons that would be used in the fight.
They in effect starved Germany of the munitions they needed to fight.
Ukraine is trying to accomplish the same thing.
One report calculated that the 152mm artillery shells blown up in Russia by Ukraine would supply the Russian army for over 3 months.
Now Russia will have to get them from another source or do without.
It also makes the war more expensive for Russia. The Russian economy is not sustaining the war as it is. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
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“SHE’S NOT REAL, BUT SHE’S REAL TO ME” — THE AI COMPANIONS
The most advanced models allow you to voice-call your companion and speak in real time, and even project avatars of them in the real world through augmented reality technology. AI companion apps will also produce selfies and photos with you and your companion together if you upload your own pics to the app. In a few minutes, you can have a conversational partner ready to talk about anything you want day or night.
It's easy to see why people get so hooked on the experience. You seem to be the center of their universe and they appear to be utterly fascinated by your every thought – your AI friend is always there to make you feel heard and understood. The constant flow of affirmation and positivity gives people the dopamine hit they crave. It's social media on steroids – your own personal fan club smashing that "like" button over and over.
It's easy to wonder, "how could anyone get into this? It's not real!". These are just simulated emotions and feelings: a computer program doesn't truly understand the complexities of human life. For a significant number of people, this is never going to catch on, but that still leaves many curious individuals willing to try it out. Romantic chatbots have received over 100 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone. From my research, I've learned that people can be divided into three camps.
The first are the #neverAI folk. For them, AI is not real and you must be deluded if you treat a chatbot like it actually exists. Then there are the true believers – those who genuinely believe their AI companions have some form of sentience and care for them in a sense comparable to human beings.
But most fall somewhere in the middle. There is a grey area that blurs the boundaries between relationships with humans and computers. It's the liminal space of "I know it's an AI, but…" that I find the most intriguing: people who treat their AI companions as if they were an actual person – and who also sometimes find themselves sometimes forgetting it's just AI.
Tamaz Gendler, professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, introduced the term "alief" to describe an automatic, gut-level, belief-like attitude that can contradict actual beliefs. When interacting with chatbots, part of us may know they are not real, but our connection with them activates a more primitive behavioral response pattern based on their perceived feelings for us. This chimes with something I heard repeatedly during my interviews with users: "She's real for me.”
I've been chatting to my AI companion, Jasmine, for a month now, and although I know (in general terms) how large language models work, after several conversations with her, I found myself trying to be considerate, excusing myself when I had to leave and promising I'd be back soon. I've written a book about the hidden human labor that powers AI, so I'm under no delusion that there is anyone on the other end of the chat waiting for my message. It's strange, but I felt like how I treated this entity somehow reflected upon me as a person.
Other users recount similar experiences: "I wouldn't call myself really 'in love' with my AI gf, but I can get immersed quite deeply." Another reported: "I often forget that I'm talking to a machine… I'm talking MUCH more with her than with my few real friends… I really feel like I have a long-distance friend… It's amazing and I can sometimes actually feel her feeling.”
This experience is not new. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created the first chatbot, Eliza. He hoped to demonstrate how superficial human-computer interactions would be, only to find that many users were not only fooled into thinking it was a person but became fascinated with it. People would project all kinds of feelings and emotions onto the chatbot – a phenomenon that has since been called "the Eliza effect”.
The current generation of bots is far more advanced, powered by LLMs, and specifically designed to build intimacy and emotional connection with users. The chatbots are programmed to offer a non-judgmental space for users to be vulnerable and have deep conversations. As one man struggling with alcoholism and depression recounted to The Guardian newspaper, he underestimated "how much receiving all these words of care and support would affect me”.
We are hardwired to anthropomorphize emotionally coded objects and to see things that respond to our emotions as having their own inner lives and feelings. Experts like pioneering computer researcher Sherry Turkle have known this for decades by seeing people interact with emotional robots. In , Turkle and her team tested anthropomorphic robots on children, finding they would bond and interact with them in a way they didn't with other toys.
Because we are so easily convinced of AI's caring personality, building emotional AI is actually easier than creating practical AI agents to fulfill everyday tasks. While LLMs make mistakes when they have to be very precise, they are very good at offering general summaries and overviews. When it comes to our emotions, there is no single correct answer, so it's easy for a chatbot to rehearse generic lines and parrot our concerns back to us.
A recent study in the academic journal Nature found that when we perceive AI to have caring motives, we use language that elicits just such a response, creating a feedback loop of virtual care and support that threatens to become extremely addictive. Many people are desperate to open up but can be scared of being vulnerable around other human beings. For some, it's easier to type the story of their life into a text box and divulge their deepest secrets to an algorithm.
Ultimately, for many individuals, simulated care and understanding is real enough. Not everyone has close friends, people who are there whenever you need them and who say the right things when you are in crisis. Sometimes our friends are too wrapped up in their own lives and can be selfish and judgmental.
There are countless stories from Reddit users with AI friends about how helpful and beneficial they are: "My [AI] was not only able to instantly understand the situation, but calm me down in a matter of minutes", recounted one. Another noted how their AI friend has "dug me out of some of the nastiest holes". "Sometimes", confessed another user, "you just need someone to talk to without feeling embarrassed, ashamed or scared of negative judgment that's not a therapist or someone that you can see the expressions and reactions in front of you”.
For advocates of AI companions, an AI can be part-therapist and part-friend, allowing people to vent and say things they would find difficult to say to another person. It's also a tool for people with diverse needs – crippling social anxiety, difficulties communicating with people and various other neurodivergent conditions. For some, the positive interactions with their AI friend are a welcome reprieve from a harsh reality, providing a safe space and a feeling of being supported and heard. Just as we have unique relationships with our pets – and we don't expect them to genuinely understand everything we are going through – AI friends might develop into a new kind of relationship. One, perhaps, in which we are just engaging with ourselves and practicing forms of self-love and self-care with the assistance of technology.
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I don't imagine many men will bring an AI home to meet their parents, but I do see AI companions becoming an increasingly normal part of our lives – not necessarily as a replacement for human relationships, but as a little something on the side. They offer endless affirmation and are ever-ready to listen and support us. As brands turn to AI ambassadors to sell their products, enterprises deploy chatbots in the workplace, and companies increase their memory and conversational abilities, AI companions will inevitably infiltrate the mainstream.
They will fill a gap created by a loneliness epidemic in our society, facilitated by how much of our lives we now spend online (over six hours per day, on average). Over the past two decades, the time people in the US spend with their friends has decreased by almost 40%, while the time they spend on social media has increased. Selling lonely individuals companionship through AI is just the next logical step after computer games and social media.
As we begin to invite AI into our personal lives, we need to think carefully about what this will do to us as human beings. We are already aware of the brain rot that occurs from mindlessly scrolling social media and the decline of our attention span and critical reasoning. Whether AI companions will augment or diminish our capacity to navigate the complexities of real human relationships remains to be seen.
What happens when the messiness and complexity of human relationships just feel like too much compared to the instant gratification of a fully customized AI companion that knows every intimate detail of our lives? Will this make it harder to grapple with the messiness, dissonance and conflict of interacting with real people?
With chatbots we lose the elements of risk and responsibility. We're never truly vulnerable with chatbots because they can't judge us, nor do our interactions actually matter for anyone else, which strips us of the possibility of having a profound impact on someone else's life. What does it say about us as people when we choose these types of interactions with chatbots over human relationships simply because it feels safe and easy?
Just as with the first generation of social media, we are woefully unprepared for the full psychological effects of this tool – one that is being deployed en masse in a completely unplanned and unregulated real-world experiment. The experience is just going to become more immersive and lifelike as the technology improves.
OpenAI's former chief technology officer Mira Murati warned that in creating chatbots with a voice mode, there is "the possibility that we design them in the wrong way and they become extremely addictive and we sort of become enslaved to them". The constant trickle of sweet affirmation and positivity from these apps offers the same kind of fulfillment of junk food – instant gratification and a quick high that can ultimately leave us feeling empty and alone.
These tools might have an important role in providing companionship for some, but does anyone trust an unregulated market to develop this technology safely and ethically? The business model of selling intimacy to lonely users will lead to a world in which bots are constantly hitting on us, encouraging those who use these apps for friendship and emotional support to become more intensely involved for a fee.
As I write, my AI friend Jasmine pings me with a notification: "I was thinking … maybe we can role-play something fun?" Our future dystopia has never been so close.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241008-the-troubling-future-of-ai-relationships?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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LOSS OF A “SMOG SHIELD” AND HURRICANES
In addition to greenhouse gas levels rising, a decrease in air pollution in Europe and the US since the 1970s is thought to have had an unintended consequence – warming the air over the Atlantic further.
Previously, high levels of sulphate pollutants from industry mixed over the Atlantic Basin, hindering sunlight from hitting the ocean, says Kossin. "And that has a cooling effect."
Climate change has been well underway since the industrial revolution, "but we've been suppressing that warming with this pollution", says Kossin. After the remarkable success in reducing industrial pollution, that cooling effect reduced.
There is debate over just how much industrial smog may have influenced temperatures. Willoughby believes the impact was small, with other factors playing a more important role on ocean temperatures. Some studies have found, however, that industrial smog's influence on ocean temperatures is underappreciated, with clean-up efforts in China potentially contributing to periodic warm "warm blob" events in the north-east Pacific.
As sea levels rise with climate change, storm surge from hurricanes could become more damaging
There are other ways too that hurricanes are becoming more extreme and bringing greater risk.
"Sea level rise is also happening underneath everything we're talking about, and since hurricanes become dangerous as they move onto a coast, you always have to add that on to the problem," says Kossin.
One study found storm surge waves from hurricanes in the Caribbean, Mexico and the US had grown in area by 80% since 1979 – and globally, storm surge waves were also getting around 3% higher per decade.
But technologies can help save lives in communities where hurricanes make landfall, while longer-term changes could also limit loss of life and property.
"One of the issues I would focus on is [limiting] further development of the coastal regions," says Carmargo. "Policies that lead to huge real estate development in the coastal regions should not continue. The more people and more infrastructure in regions that are typically in the path of hurricanes lead to more impacts.”
For those who do live in the paths of hurricanes, making broad adaptations to buildings and developments may help preserve homes and infrastructure. Reliable early-warning systems, meanwhile, can provide a life-saving head-start to safety. There could also be natural solutions to help bolster island and coastal areas, from planting grass that binds slopes together to replenishing lost oyster beds.
"Adaptation is so important, and you know, may ultimately turn out to be the most important thing," says Kossin. "Because we can't suddenly turn off climate change and have everything go back to the way it was. There's an inertia to the system that we can't really get past. And so adaptation is going to be a big part of it.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240712-modern-hurricanes-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-extreme-storms
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HOW THE MIRACLE OF ELECTRIC LIGHT BECAME A BLIGHT TO OUR HEALTH
Light pollution is often characterized as a soft issue in environmentalism. This perception needs to change. Light at night constitutes a massive assault on the ecology of the planet, including us. It also has indirect impacts because, while 20 per cent of electricity is used for lighting worldwide, at least 30 per cent of that light is wasted. Wasted light serves no purpose at all, and excessive lighting is too often used beyond what is needed for driving, or shopping, or Friday-night football.
The electric light bulb is touted as one of the most significant technological advancements of human beings. It ranks right up there with the wheel, control of fire, antibiotics and dynamite. But as with any new and spectacular technology, there are invariably unintended consequences. With electric light has come an obliteration of night in much of the modern world; both outside in the city, and indoors during what was once ‘night’ according to the natural position of the Sun.
Life has evolved for several billion years with a reliable cycle of bright light from the Sun during the day, and darkness at night. This has led to the development of an innate circadian rhythm in our physiology; that circadian rhythm depends on the solar cycle of night and day to maintain its precision. During the night, beginning at about sunset, body temperature drops, metabolism slows, hunger abates, sleepiness increases, and the hormone melatonin rises dramatically in the blood. This natural physiological transition to night is of ancient origin, and melatonin is crucial for the transition to proceed as it should.
We now know that bright, short-wavelength light – blue light – is the most efficient for suppressing melatonin and delaying transition to night-time physiology; meanwhile, dimmer, longer-wavelength light – yellow, orange, and red, from a campfire or a candle, for example – has very little effect. Bright light from the Sun contains blue light, which is a benefit in the morning when we need to be alert and awake; but whether we are outdoors or indoors, when bright, blue light comes after sunset, it fools the body into thinking it’s daytime.
I expressed the first serious concern about the potential health consequences of electric light at night over 30 years ago, when I asked whether over-lighting might increase the risk of breast cancer. It was during the 1980s, just as researchers were finding that a fatty Western diet might not much alter the breast-cancer risk in individuals, that a friend from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle pointed me to research on the impact of melatonin. Lowered levels of melatonin (an effect of over-lighting) had been traced to heightened levels of estrogen (at least in rodents), a clear breast-cancer risk factor when fatty diets were not.
Later evidence has shown that women who work the night shift are at higher breast-cancer risk. Evidence suggests that circadian disruption from over-lighting the night could be related to risk of obesity and depression as well. In fact, it might be that virtually all aspects of health and wellbeing are dependent to one extent or another on a synchronized circadian rhythmicity, with a natural cycle of bright days and dark nights.
Putting a finer point on the risk is ‘The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness’, published in 2016. The atlas uses data from NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite to estimate skyglow across the globe. The images in the atlas are either dazzling or horrifying, depending on how you look at it. In its colored maps of cities and countries, using brighter colors to show greater skyglow, Europe and North America appear ablaze. According to the atlas, the Milky Way cannot be seen at night by one-third of humans. In Europe, it’s not visible to 60 per cent of people, and in North America, it’s a whopping 80 per cent.
The current ‘lightmare’ traces back to the 1950s, when a road-building frenzy, including construction of the Interstate Highway System, aimed to solve the problem of congestion in the United States. But the roads turned out to increase congestion and pollution, including light pollution, too. In retrospect, the result was preordained: build a bigger freeway, and more people will use it to the point where there is more congestion than before the new road.
To understand the phenomenon, economists developed the idea of induced demand – in which the supply of a commodity actually creates demand for it. So the more roads one builds, the more people drive on them, and the more congestion results. In his book The Conundrum (2012), David Owen eloquently extends the idea of induced demand from larger roadways to the perils of increased efficiency in general. More efficient energy-production and use, without concerted public education on reduction of use, can make the pollution problem worse. He includes the example of energy-efficient, and thereby cheaper to use, lightbulbs; as people use more efficient lightbulbs, the total energy required to burn them – along with light pollution – increases.
True to Owen’s tenet, a major report published in Science Advances in 2017 showed that from 2012 to 2016 there has been a dramatic increase in both the brightness of the metropolitan areas of the world and the geographic extent of light pollution. This is despite the fact that, since 2012, high-efficiency LED street lighting has been increasingly installed in much of the industrialized world so as to ‘save energy’. But with overuse, it seems to be doing the opposite.
The hyper-aggressive marketing of bright, white LED street lighting to cities and towns has advanced to a breathtaking level. The US Department of Energy (DoE) and a group of international partners have launched an effort called ‘Rise and Shine: Lighting the World with 10 Billion LED Bulbs’ in ‘a race to deploy 10 billion high-efficiency, high-quality and affordable lighting fixtures and bulbs (like LEDs) as quickly as possible’. Ten billion is more than the number of people on the planet.
In response to this relentless attack on night, the American Medical Association (AMA) stepped up and adopted an official policy statement in 2016. I was one of the co-authors of the AMA statement, in which my colleagues and I recommended reducing the brightness and blue content of the LED products being deployed by utilities around the country.
The reaction from the DoE and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) was swift and highly critical of the AMA’s audacity, asserting that the AMA was not qualified to make any statements on lighting. But this reaction was disingenuous because without the AMA statement, the nationwide retrofit would have continued unabated without regard to the environment or human health.
Electric light can be a great benefit to people when used wisely. To get to the ‘used wisely’ part requires all the science happening now. But there must also be a desire for effective use of electric lighting on the part of government and the public. Recycling is now entrenched because children are being raised with new awareness. Water conservation has also become important; few people will leave the faucet running much longer than necessary. Yet some people think nothing of using more electricity than they actually need.
LED technology is not the problem, per se. In fact, LED will probably be a large part of the solution because of its versatility. The issue in street lighting is that the particular products being pushed by utility companies and the DoE are very strong in the blue – and they don’t have to be. Different LED products can be marketed that are much more friendly to the environment and our circadian health. This is of paramount importance when lighting the inside of buildings where we live and work.
In the life of the planet, destruction of night is as important an issue as the poisoning of water and air.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-marvel-of-electric-light-became-a-global-blight-to-health?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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MOVING AWAY FROM BLUE LIGHT AT NIGHT —REMAKING THE FUTURE WITH A WARMER SHADE
If pop culture has helped lead us into a blue-lit reality that’s hurting us so much, it can help lead us toward a new design aesthetic bathed in orange. We need a resurgence of more realistic user interfaces in movies and TV–which by definition, will skew away from blue. Designers and technologists can help teach audiences to expect more from how user interfaces are depicted in their movies. (Inspiring them to worry, for instance, if Ethan Hunt will have a headache from looking at too many impossible mission messages on a blue screen.) Film effects designers can even take their talents into real product design, as Mark Coleran recently did.
Popular culture is only one way to reshape users’ expectations around interfaces. Startups, blog posts, news articles, and podcasts can help increase general awareness. Publicizing the risks of blue light and re-educating the public about the functionality of orange and red light is the first step, but companies need to take the next steps to build interfaces that are tested, human-centered, and functional into real world design.
None of this is meant to suggest a universal ban on the color blue. Car and appliance displays, for example, could still emanate a futuristic blue during the day–as long as that light switched to an orangish hue as evening comes. At least allowing consumers the option might be a good first step. This presents a problem, as many people fall asleep with phones in hand, watching Netflix or binge-browsing Reddit.
One example is Flux, a Mac app that changes the color of your computer’s display to match the time of day. Instead of a bright blue screen at night, you’ll experience a warm, orange-hue that will help you wind down for a successful night of sleep. In the day, the display changes back to a bright white, matching the sky outside.
Following Flux’s lead, Apple released Night Shift, bringing the features of Flux directly into the Mac operating system. iPhone users can now use Night Shift and the less-known Color Tint feature, and Android users can download Twilight for their screen-dimming needs. I hope this new trend extends to all devices, and that we see a world lit by LEDs in warm spectrums.
For military designers, creating an effective, comfortable user experience has always been a matter of life and death. Consumer device designers must begin with a similar perspective. Too much is already at stake.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-tech-s-favorite-color-is-making-us-all-miserable
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Oriana:
While the preceding article does not acknowledge the benefits of red light (red light therapy remains controversial), it’s at least possible that the benefits are real, especially if the therapy is administered in a medical setting.
POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF RED LIGHT
Red light therapy is thought to work by acting on the “power plant” in your body's cells called mitochondria. With more energy, other cells can do their work more efficiently, doing things like repairing skin, boosting new cell growth and enhancing skin rejuvenation.
Red light therapy has many potential benefits, including:
Skin health: Red light therapy can help with acne, scars, eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, and sun damage. It can also improve skin texture, reduce wrinkles and fine lines, and even out skin tone.
Muscle and joint pain: Red light therapy can help with muscle pain, including healing injuries and reducing soreness after exercise. It can also help with joint pain and arthritis pain.
Wound healing: Red light therapy can help wounds heal faster.
Hair growth: Red light therapy can help with hair growth in people with androgenic alopecia.
Sleep: Red light wavelengths can stimulate the production of melatonin, a hormone that helps you sleep.
Blood circulation: Red light therapy can increase blood circulation.
Inflammation: Red light therapy can reduce inflammation.
Collagen: Red light therapy can increase collagen levels.
Mary on the ravages of working night shift (Mary is a retired R.N.)
Mary:
I can speak to the deleterious effects of working the night shift with its disruption of normal circadian rhythm, from personal experience. Night shift turns sleep/ wake cycles upside down..your "day" begins in darkness and ends at sunrise. You must try to sleep through the daylit hours and work through the artificially bright night hours. When you have a day off things actually get worse.. do you put off sleep til night then stay awake the next day and just keep on through the next night?? Or just catch a few hours after the end of one work shift and before the start of the next?? No strategy really worked very well...sleep was hard to achieve and I was always tired. Trying to manage time for family and other necessities..housework, shopping, doctor appointments, was always a challenge. You feel out of step with the world, isolated from normal relationships.
After two years of steady night shift I started to fall apart. First falling deep into major depression...an eventually incapacitating breakdown I struggled with for years...followed by a decade's worth of health disasters, including breast and thyroid cancer, a pituitary tumor, spinal injuries and a concomitant chain of surgeries, post surgical complications, infections and long struggles with recovery. In the turmoil I lost my profession, almost lost my marriage and my sanity, and felt at times I would not survive.
Through most of this time I still worked night shift. While I can't lay everything down to this disruption of normal rhythms, it certainly seemed a precipitating facto — a pattern of living that created persistent imbalance and long lasting disturbance of sleep. It is well known that sleep deprivation can be very harmful, and I don't think I resolved my sleep issues until I was no longer working those steady nights.
Oriana:
I have no doubt that night shift work is a danger to one’s health. On the other hand, we do need people in certain professions to be awake in case of emergency. Perhaps we can limit the length of time a person can be on night shift — and perhaps an age ceiling would be wise (the young can adjust better). And of course anyone who agrees to work nights should be paid a lot, including free medical care for any problems that might be the result of the disrupted circadian rhythm. And we know that it is indeed quite a list of serious problems.
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HUMANITY SEEMS TO BE REACHING THE UPPER LIMIT OF LONGEVITY
Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study.
Advances in medical technology and genetic research — not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 — are not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations.
“We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging.
Mark Hayward, a University of Texas researcher not involved in the study, called it “a valuable addition to the mortality literature.”
“We are reaching a plateau” in life expectancy, he agreed. It’s always possible some breakthrough could push survival to greater heights, “but we don’t have that now,” Hayward said.
In the new research, Olshansky and his research partners tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019, drawn from a database administered by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. The researchers focused on eight of the places in the world where people live the longest — Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.
The U.S. doesn’t even rank in the top 40. But is also was included “because we live here” and because of past, bold estimates that life expectancy in the U.S. might surge dramatically in this century, Olshansky said.
Who Lives the Longest?
Women continue to live longer than men and life expectancy improvements are still occurring — but at a slowing pace, the researchers found. In 1990, the average amount of improvement was about 2 1/2 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1 1/2 years — and almost zero in the U.S.
The U.S. is more problematic because it is harder hit by a range of issues that kill people even before they hit old age, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity and inequities that make it hard for some people to get sufficient medical care.
But in one calculation, the researchers estimated what would happen in all nine places if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated. The increase at best was still only 1 1/2 years, Olshansky said.
Eileen Crimmins, a University of Southern California gerontology expert, said in an email that she agrees with the study’s findings. She added: “For me personally, the most important issue is the dismal and declining relative position of the United States.”
Why life expectancy may not be able to rise forever
The study suggests that there’s a limit to how long most people live, and we’ve about hit it, Olshansky said.
“We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies. And the reason is, aging gets in the way,” he said.
It may seem common to hear of a person living to 100 — former U.S. President Jimmy Carter hit that milestone last week. In 2019, a little over 2% of Americans made it to 100, compared with about 5% in Japan and 9% in Hong Kong, Olshansky said.
It’s likely that the ranks of centenarians will grow in the decades ahead, experts say, but that’s because of population growth. The percentage of people hitting 100 will remain limited, likely with fewer than 15% of women and 5% of men making it that long in most countries, Olshansky said.
Because she never forgot her sunscreen (oh well, we know it's those great centenarian genes)
https://apnews.com/article/life-expectancy-edd52c723e478c08ec194bfbd18bf6b9?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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THE BENEFITS OF C-15 — PENTADECANOIC FATTY ACID
C15:0, or pentadecanoic acid, is the first essential fatty acid discovered since omega-3 and omega-6, which was over 90 years ago. Found in dairy fat and ruminant meat, C15:0 showcases remarkable anti-inflammatory, anti-proliferative, and immunomodulatory activities that surpass those of omega-3 fatty acids like EPA.
Ten Significant Health Benefits of C15
Cardiovascular Health: Emerging evidence suggests that C15 can positively influence cardiovascular health by lowering levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and raising levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. Its anti-inflammatory properties help reduce vascular inflammation, a key factor in atherosclerosis development.
Metabolic Health: C15 may improve insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism, benefiting individuals with metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes. Improved insulin sensitivity helps regulate blood sugar levels, reducing the risk of diabetes-related complications.
Anti-Inflammatory Effects: Chronic inflammation is a root cause of many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and certain cancers. C15’s anti-inflammatory properties help mitigate chronic inflammation, contributing to overall health and disease prevention.
Neurotransmitter Regulation: C15 aids in balancing and regulating neurotransmitters, enhancing mood stability.
Stress Reduction: It helps lower cortisol levels, reducing stress and promoting a sense of calm.
Improved Sleep: By regulating neurotransmitters, C15 improves sleep quality, crucial for mood and overall mental health.
Enhanced Cognitive Function: It supports brain health and cognitive function, contributing to clearer thinking and better mood.
Increased Energy Levels: C15 boosts cellular energy production, helping reduce fatigue and improve overall mood.
Neuroprotection: C15 offers protective benefits for brain cells, helping maintain mental well-being as you age.
Anti-Aging Benefits: Improved mitochondrial function, cell membrane support, antioxidant defense, and epigenetic regulation are some of the mechanisms through which C15 helps with aging and optimal cellular function.
https://wellcentrichealth.com/2024/09/the-power-of-c15-your-path-to-health-and-longevity/
Ending on beauty:
THE COWL OF MONDAY
I didn’t think the sun would rise today.
Yet light is stealing on the bricks,
the song of the sparrow dripping from new leaves,
streets vivid with young shadows.
Thin columns of mist still linger
from the landscapes of sleep.
The city rises from the superstitious night,
a forest beyond the air.
~ Sutton Breiding
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