Moth antenna; Igor Siminowicz*
AUTUMN CASSIOPEIA
The light of the hills. Every day
I go out to see that light.
That ripe sky when the peaks
glow like planets.
At night the full moon
paints the ground ghost-white,
as if gauzed with first snow.
I see Cassiopeia
and a thousand other constellations
seeding the rich dark.
A curtain of pale grass
shivers, a slender wind.
The oak leaves speak
an older language now.
Sage touches the tips of dusk.
Hiking Point Thorn, I press my palm
into a seashell print
in rock that was once a sea.
I lie down on the grass,
add my breath
to the rustles and shiftings.
I do not move.
I fall through the net of roots,
sink into the rock and wait
for another sea.
~ Oriana
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THE STORY OF PINOCCHIO TELLS NO LIES
The town of Collodi, Italy, about 45 miles west of Florence, is set on a slope behind a fabulous 17th-century villa. The garden, built as a kind of fantasy pleasure park for the Garzoni family and their noble guests, offers terraces, flower beds, grand staircases, splashing fountains and antique marble statues surrounding the Baroque villa. Walk through the tunnel under the villa and follow the path up the hill, and the stone houses of Collodi speak to a very different reality. Ascending its precipitously steep cobblestone main street, you come to a small piazza with communal sinks for laundry.
The town is older than the villa and was probably originally built on the hilltop for purposes of strategic defense. It is where the working-class people lived, the ones who tended the nobility’s villa and gardens. It’s hard to know what these laborers were thinking as they trudged back up the hill after a long day of working at the villa. It is probably fair to say they were tired.
Illustration from 1904 edition of 'The Adventures of Pinocchio
In the first half of the 19th century, a young boy named Carlo Lorenzini, originally from Florence, spent stretches of his childhood living here with relatives, and later, when he became a writer, he took Carlo Collodi as his pen name. He wrote political essays and satire for adults, and then, in his 50s, turned his attention to children. The Story of a Puppet first appeared in serial form, starting in 1881, in Giornale per i bambini, the Children’s Newspaper. Its opening paragraph was meant to undermine the traditional idea of a fairy tale—and also to send a political message:
Once upon a time there was...
“A king!” my little readers will no doubt say in a flash.
“No, kids. You got it wrong. Once upon a time there was...a piece of wood.”
That piece of wood, of course, became Pinocchio, and the story became the first internationally known work of Italian children’s literature. The Adventures of Pinocchio has been adapted for film 18 times, including two live-action movies starring Roberto Benigni. Disney and Netflix have both produced new versions. For most Americans, Pinocchio is synonymous with the 1940 animated Disney movie about a wooden puppet whose pointy nose grows every time he tells a lie. But the original Italian story is not primarily about lying. Yes, Pinocchio tells lies, but that’s just part of his general misbehavior; he’s selfish and unreliable. He’s a scamp, a brat, a kid who, as we might say today, makes a lot of poor choices. The moment Geppetto carves him out of the miraculous block of wood, Pinocchio runs away and refuses to go home. His antics lead to poor Geppetto’s arrest.
“Every time I teach Pinocchio to American undergraduates, I get at least two reactions,” says Maria Truglio, a professor of Italian and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State, and the author of Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity. The first reaction is “such surprise at how different it is from the Disney version—and how much they prefer the original version.” The second reaction is from students who find the book more complex than they’d expected. “These students will say, ‘I don’t really read a lot, and I don’t typically enjoy books, but I really enjoyed Pinocchio.’”
Anna Kraczyna, a university lecturer in Florence, was astonished by the narrative about 15 years ago when she was reading the book to her young son. “I couldn’t believe how rich the text is,” says Kraczyna, who was born in Italy to American expatriate artist parents. She made the case to John Hooper, a British journalist and the author of a 2015 book called The Italians, that it was time for a new English translation. He agreed. “The beauty of the language, the literary inventiveness of Collodi—he does things I’ve never seen any author do,” says Hooper. Their translation of The Adventures of Pinocchio, published in 2021, includes copious notes and an introduction exploring the story’s complexities.
In the Disney film, Geppetto is a maker of toys and cuckoo clocks living in a vaguely European half-timber house. But there’s nothing quaint about the 19th-century Italian poverty in the book, in which Geppetto is a struggling woodcarver. Pinocchio spends much of the story filled with anxiety about finding something to eat. On his very first day, after he has gotten Geppetto arrested, he experiences “a hunger so real it could be cut with a knife.”
When Geppetto returns home, he offers the hungry puppet the three pears he had intended for his own breakfast. Pinocchio promptly demands that they be peeled, but he ends up ravenously devouring the peels and cores, learning the lesson “We mustn’t be too finicky or dainty in our eating.”
There is also a certain risk of being eaten in a world where everyone is always hungry. Pinocchio narrowly escapes being thrown into the fire by a hungry puppeteer called Fire-Eater who needs wood to roast a ram for his dinner. Later, Pinocchio is coated in flour and almost fried in a pan along with an assortment of fish; the fisherman is looking forward to trying this new “puppet-fish.” In another episode, he is turned into a donkey and thrown into the sea to drown so that his owner can make a drum out of his hide; but helpful fishes eat off “that layer of donkey,” freeing the puppet again. And finally, he is actually eaten by a great shark and rescues Geppetto, who had been swallowed by the shark earlier in the story.
The fever that turns Pinocchio into a donkey is his punishment for skipping school and running off to Playland. He’d been warned by a talking cricket: “You poor little sucker! Don’t you know you’re bound to grow up to be an absolute donkey and that everyone will make a fool of you?” Kraczyna and Hooper explain that “donkey” had a double meaning in Collodi’s Italian. People who had to work hard were called donkeys; so were children who refused to apply themselves in school. “Collodi’s message to children, at a time when the life of an unskilled laborer was one of unremitting hardship,” they write, “was that if they insisted on being ‘donkeys’ at school, they risked living the life, and maybe dying the death, of a donkey.”
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On a glorious autumn day, Kraczyna and Hooper take me through the locales of Collodi’s life. Kraczyna points out that Florence’s narrow Via Taddea, where the author was born in 1826, is a very dark street and gets no morning sun—a dim lane originally home to servants who worked nearby. Carlo’s mother, Angiolina, was a seamstress from Collodi. Her father had managed the Garzoni family estate. When a Garzoni daughter married the Marquis Ginori of Florence, Angiolina had accompanied her as a seamstress and companion, and she married the cook, Domenico, and went to live with him on Via Taddea.
Carlo was the first of the couple’s ten children, and one of only four who survived to adulthood. Life was extremely hard; over four months beginning in December 1838, four of Carlo’s younger siblings died, ages 4 months to 6 years. The Lorenzini children spent a good deal of time in Collodi with their mother’s family; Carlo was there as early as 2, and spent much of the school year there when he was 10.
The streets of Collodi are generally too narrow for cars, so we parked above the center and walked down the hill on cobbled paths. The town is no longer known primarily for its proximity to the lavish villa. It’s known for Pinocchio. There are extensive souvenir stands, a Pizzeria Geppetto and a tavern named for Mangiafuoco, or Fire-Eater, the scary puppeteer.
There is also the Parco di Pinocchio, an outdoor attraction featuring one of the first sculpture parks for children anywhere in the world. Rolando Anzilotti, the mayor of the surrounding township, established the park back in the 1950s. He had, of course, grown up with the story. “Coming from this area especially, you’re born with it, you know places that are in the book,” says his daughter Cristina Anzilotti, the former director of Sarah Lawrence College in Florence.
Children all over Italy and even abroad sent tiny sums to help build the park. Walt Disney himself sent a hundred dollars. But the images in the park were much more avant-garde than the Disney cartoons. Emilio Greco, a Rome-based sculptor whose works are on display at London’s Tate Modern and St. Petersburg’s Hermitage, created a large bronze statue of Pinocchio and the Fairy, in an acrobatic, geometric stance.
Another artist, Venturino Venturi, designed a mosaic plaza illustrating the stories with bold, slightly abstract images. There were people in Italy who objected to these depictions, Anzilotti says, because the Pinocchio in their minds was so definitely the figure in the classic 19th-century artworks by artists like Florentine Enrico Mazzanti who illustrated the initial story. But the project went ahead and the park was inaugurated in 1956 with the president of Italy in attendance. In 1972 it was enlarged to include a network of walking trails. Designed by the leading Italian landscape designer Pietro Porcinai, they take visitors past more remarkable statues representing characters and scenes from the story. A fountain at the center of the park shows the giant sea creature who swallows Geppetto, its gaping mouth filled with teeth.
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The park grew to include more conventional children’s attractions, such as a carousel and puppet shows. When we visited, a woman gowned as the Blue-Haired Fairy was busy doing arts and crafts with children, while a Pinocchio greeted visitors and posed for photos. The park is managed by the Carlo Collodi Foundation, a national nonprofit dedicated to promoting the works and legacy of the writer.
Carlo’s education was paid for by the Ginori family, his parents’ employers; they intended for him to pursue a life as a Catholic priest. But in 1842 he left the seminary and transferred to the College of the Scolopi Fathers, in Florence, where his uncle supported him as he studied rhetoric and philosophy. When he graduated two years later, he went to work at a bookstore that was also a publishing house. There he met people who were engaged in the great cause of the moment: unifying the many independent political entities of Italy.
Carlo became a passionate believer in this cause: He volunteered as a soldier for Italian unification in 1848 and again in 1859.
Though Carlo had wanted the new country of Italy to be a republic, Italy was instead unified as a kingdom, in 1861. When Carlo was in his 20s—and still using the surname Lorenzini—he founded a satirical newspaper called Il Lampione, the Streetlamp. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany forced him to close it and he founded a second one called Lo Scaramuccia, the Controversy. Around 1860, he began using the pen name Carlo Collodi.
But it wasn’t until 1881 that the author began writing children’s stories about a mischievous wooden puppet. He debuted the character in the premiere issue of Giornale per i bambini, the first-ever publication for children across the newly unified Italy. The stories appeared at a key moment in the evolution of Italian identity and the Italian language, and helped shape both. In their translation, Hooper and Kraczyna explain that the puppet “speaks a correct but informal Italian”; their version tries to reflect this by, for instance, using words such as “bugged” where earlier translations used “annoyed” or “vexed.”
Along with educating the first generation of true Italians, Carlo Collodi wanted to send political messages to their parents. At one point, after Pinocchio is tricked out of his four gold coins by the Fox and the Cat, he takes his complaint to the courtroom. The author tells us that the judge, an ape, is “respected because of his honorable age, his white beard, and particularly his gold-rimmed glasses, which had no lenses.” The glasses are ostensibly because of an eye inflammation, but Hooper and Kraczyna suggest that is a pretext, and that the glasses are an empty show of wealth, serving no practical purpose.
The whole episode warns readers not to expect much of the justice system. Instead of having his grievance addressed, Pinocchio is thrown into jail because he has been the victim of a crime. Then, when a general amnesty is issued throughout the prison, he is told he is not eligible because he is not himself a criminal. He is released only when he convinces his jailers, “I’m a crook too.”
Throughout the book, Collodi satirizes corruption in business and government, and points to the absurdity of social class. When the scary puppeteer prepares to throw Pinocchio’s friend Harlequin into the flames, the puppet pleads:
“Get educated. Don’t let people pull your strings.”
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“Have pity, Mr. Fire-Eater!”
“There are no misters here,” replied the puppeteer sternly.
“Have pity, Mr. Knight!” “There are no knights here!”
“Have pity, Mr. Lord!” “There are no lords here!”
At last, Pinocchio says, “Have pity, Your Excellency!” Those are the obsequious words the puppeteer has been waiting to hear.
*
On the outskirts of Florence, Hooper and Kraczyna took me to Castello, a little town where many wealthy people built elaborate villas to escape the heat of Florence in a cooler, greener place. Carlo’s brother Paolo Lorenzini spent his summers there. Like Carlo, Paolo had been sent to Collodi during his childhood, before going to high school in Florence at the College of the Scolopi Fathers, where he’d been supported by the Ginori family. Paolo had gone on to become an accountant, and then the manager of the Ginori family’s porcelain factory.
In Castello, Paolo rented a place called the Villa Il Bel Riposo, or the Villa of the Beautiful Rest. Carlo lived and wrote in the tower of the villa, clearly visible from the road outside. There, he gained inspiration for Pinocchio’s adventures.
We traced the path of Carlo’s daily walk, setting out from the Villa Il Bel Riposo. Carlo would turn right and head down the hill toward the cigar shop. (According to the translators, Carlo bought his cigars at the same store as the Italian king.) Along the street, Carlo passed two different shops where artisans worked with wood, one a carpenter and the other more of a woodcarver. The two proprietors were good friends, but they were contentious fellows, and often got into fights.
On the first page of Pinocchio, the block of wood turns up in the workshop of an old carpenter known in older translations as Mr. Cherry, because of his red nose. Mr. Cherry discovers that the wood can speak when he tries to make it into a table leg, only to hear it protest against being struck or cut, and the shock turns the tip of his nose from red to blue. So in Chapter 2, he turns the wood over to his friend Geppetto, who wants to make himself a puppet, “but a wonderful puppet, one that can dance, and fence, and do flips.” With this wonderful puppet, Geppetto hopes, he will be able to earn “a crust of bread and a glass of wine.” The mischievous block of wood manages to provoke a violent fight between the two men, who are both irascible and probably based on the craftsmen whose workshops Collodi passed on the Castello street.
Certainly, the people of modern-day Castello believe that their ancestors appeared in Pinocchio, Kraczyna said, as we followed the slope of Via della Petraia, with small houses and shops on either side. We turned right at the corner, which put us on the street where two “shady characters” had lived, presumed to be the models for the story’s Fox and Cat, Hooper says. This was also the main road to Sesto, where the porcelain factory was located, and a carriage brought locals there.
Kraczyna told me that Carlo’s friend Giovanni Fattori, a Florentine artist, once painted the carriage driver in a way that brings to mind the coachman who takes Pinocchio on his ill-fated trip to Playland: “a little man wider than tall, soft and unctuous like a ball of butter, with a small face like a pink apple, a small mouth that was always laughing.”
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Rereading Pinocchio as an adult, I was struck by the dangerous world in which the puppet lived. The wooden boy survives being burned, hanged and thrown in the ocean. Pinocchio is certainly made of sturdier stuff than your average flesh-and-blood child.
Collodi didn’t always intend to be merciful to his protagonist. When Truglio’s students at Penn State reach the scene where Pinocchio is hanging from an oak tree, killed by two Assassins, she tells them, “That’s the end, that’s where he intended to finish it, but the journal editors and the readers wanted it to continue.” Her students are invariably surprised.
In Chapters 16 and 17, Pinocchio is saved by the Blue-Haired Fairy, who initially appears as the Little Girl with Blue Hair and is described as the ghost of a dead girl. There is evidence that the model for the Blue-Haired Fairy was Giovanna Ragionieri, the daughter of the gardener at Villa Il Bel Riposo. Kraczyna and Hooper speculate that Collodi’s description of the dead little girl may have echoes of the death of one of his sisters who died when he was about 12. In the course of the book, the Little Girl grows into a woman, as his sister never did.
After the Blue-Haired Fairy sends helpers to rescue Pinocchio from his hanging—a falcon to cut him down from his noose, a poodle dressed up as a coachman to drive him home—she realizes that Pinocchio has a high fever and pours him some medicine. The puppet, ever defiant, refuses to take the medicine because it would taste bitter. The Fairy bribes him with sugar, but he eats the sugar and still asserts, “I’d rather die than drink that nasty medicine.” Finally, four black rabbits arrive, carrying a coffin to take him away. That’s when Pinocchio grabs the medicine and swallows it down. It works immediately. “After a few minutes,” Collodi tells us, “Pinocchio jumped down off the bed completely recovered, because wooden puppets, you see, have the privilege of seldom falling ill and of getting well very quickly.”
As a pediatrician, I was curious about the medicine Pinocchio was so reluctant to take, so I consulted the notes that Hooper and Kraczyna provide and learned that the word in the Italian story is purgativo. Purgatives—both laxatives and emetics—were popular remedies in the 19th century and before, and were used in many different clinical situations, in hopes of purifying the body. They would not have been particularly effective in the case of fever or infection. In situations where someone was in danger of becoming dehydrated, they were downright dangerous.
Toward the end of the book, another child is brought back from the brink of death. After the puppet allows himself to be talked into playing hooky, another boy throws the massively heavy Treatise on Arithmetic at Pinocchio, but instead hits his friend Eugene, apparently killing him. The other boys run away, but Pinocchio stays with Eugene, imploring him in vain to open his eyes. He is interrupted by two carabinieri, who arrest Pinocchio and leave Eugene, rather casually, with some fishermen, but two chapters later, it turns out that Eugene has fully recovered.
After that incident, Pinocchio becomes an excellent student. But he has to face one last temptation: the ill-fated trip to Playland. He’s able to redeem himself by rescuing Geppetto from the belly of a great shark. Hooper and Kraczyna point out that Collodi’s own father had to be rescued from debt, and the word for predatory lenders—loan sharks—also exists in Florentine dialect: pescecani [sharks].
After Pinocchio saves Geppetto, he then works to provide for his father’s health and studies hard at night. In the end, he becomes a ragazzino per bene, a good little kid in this translation, also sometimes translated as a proper (or perhaps decent) boy. Accordingly, the wooden puppet is transformed into “a smart, lively, beautiful child with brown hair and blue eyes who was as happy and joyful as a spring lamb.”
Hooper sums up the book’s moral this way: “Get educated, get informed, don’t let other people pull your strings.” It’s also a book about the importance of caring for other people. “I think Collodi is saying that’s how you become a human being,” Hooper says. “There’s a message about socialization there that is absolutely fundamental.” Or, as Geppetto puts it, “When kids stop being bad and start being good, they also bring a new and joyous air into their families.”
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The commemorative sign on the building in Florence where it’s believed that Collodi was born does not describe him as an author, but rather as the padre di Pinocchio, the father of Pinocchio. That seems suitable, especially since Pinocchio is a book about an unusual way of becoming a father.
Collodi never had children of his own, though there were rumors of a daughter born out of wedlock. Not much is known about his love life; after he died, Paolo burned all his letters, fearing they “could have compromised ladies who were still alive and very well-known.” Perhaps Collodi simply never wanted to settle down. Or perhaps he didn’t want to start a family of his own because he’d watched six of his younger siblings die in childhood. It was only in the world of Pinocchio that he had the power to bring dead children back to life.
The apartment where Collodi died at the age of 63 is located above the Ginori porcelain shop in Florence that still exists today. There’s a plaque outside, praising Collodi for using his wit and artistic sensibilities to carry out his life’s true goal: “to educate the people of united Italy.” In the end, Collodi changed his country not by publishing adult polemics but by speaking directly to the nation’s children—as the plaque puts it, con tenera amara virile fantasia— with tender, bitter, virile imagination.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-real-story-of-pinocchio-tells-no-lies?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.” ~Benjamin Britten
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“NO ONE IS BORN EVIL”
Then, in September, they returned to the headlines following the release of a Netflix drama series and documentary about what happened. Now their case is under review because of new evidence that was not presented at their trial.
Last Monday, 28 years after their last courtroom appearance, the brothers teleconferenced into a hearing from prison, during which their aunt pleaded for their release. “I think it is time for them to go home,” she said.
Their uncle, meanwhile, has called the brothers "cold-blooded" and believes they belong behind bars for life.
What struck me, as I watched all of this unfold, were the opposing ways that different people, even their own family members, portrayed them. Are the Menendez brothers, to borrow the name of the Netflix drama, really “monsters”? Or is it possible that they have changed, as their aunt claims?
In my 30 years as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist working in psychiatric hospitals and prisons across the UK, including Broadmoor, I have spoken to hundreds of criminals who have committed terrible offenses in an attempt to help them take responsibility.
Some people assume that this is an impossible task. I've been asked: “But surely they can’t be helped? Aren’t they born that way?” The implication being that only an abnormal monster could inflict dreadful damage on another person – or that killers, from Ted Bundy and Rose West to Harold Shipman and the Menendez brothers, are somehow not human.
Certainly, when I first started working in this field, I assumed that people who have committed violent and murderous acts are very different from the rest of us.
But I no longer think this.
What I’ve learnt is that the real causes of violent minds – a subject I examine in The Reith Lectures, which are broadcast in four episodes on Radio 4 – aren’t depicted in true-crime dramas or courtroom transcripts.
The reality is far more complex than labeling someone as simply ‘evil’, as I discovered firsthand.
The vulnerable serial killer
In 1996, soon after I’d started at Broadmoor while completing my psychotherapy training, I took on a patient called Tony. He had killed three men and decapitated one of them.
I’d read a lot of lurid reports about serial killers but at the time there was little advice available on how to talk to one or offer them therapy, and part of me wondered if there was any point. How would we know if he was “better”?
He was 10 years into his sentence and had recently been stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush by three other prisoners. A suicide attempt had followed.
In our first session, there was silence. He folded his arms and avoided meeting my eyes. When he looked up, his eyes were so dark they appeared almost black. He was suffering from depression and nightmares. “I was thinking that it’s peaceful in here,” he said eventually, breaking the silence. “There’s a man in the room next to mine who keeps shouting in the night.”
It took him months to open up about his recurring nightmare. In it, he was strangling a young man who morphed into his father. It led us to discuss his offenses and his family and how, as a child, Tony had suffered violent abuse at the hands of his father; in turn, he began to bully others.
Later I learnt that the man “in the next room” who shouted at night was Tony himself. I suggested that perhaps he was shouting the things that he could not express. He dropped his face in his hands, muffling his voice. “No… I don’t want to,” he admitted. “I can’t be so weak.”
I worked with Tony for 18 months and came to feel compassion and respect for his honesty, even as I still held in mind the terrible trail of destruction he had caused. The fact he’d requested this therapy himself was also a sign that part of him was ready to be vulnerable.
That early experience taught me that no matter their history, if people – including serial killers – are able to be curious about their minds, there’s a chance that we can make meaning out of disorder.
Evil people vs evil minds
When it comes to serial killers it is generally assumed that they are psychopaths, but I wasn’t convinced that applied to Tony. Psychopaths are unlikely to request help as they don’t want to do anything they’d consider to be demeaning, so on that basis alone Tony wouldn’t have met the criteria, as he had asked for therapy.
The psychopaths I’ve encountered in my career have been neither exceptionally bright nor socially able, nor at all charming. They are usually so lacking in empathy that they cannot see the effect they have on others.
And contrary to common belief, very few killers are in fact psychopaths, especially domestic homicide perpetrators like the Menendez brothers.
Tony’s story also highlighted the role that childhood adversity can play in violent crime. The Menendez brothers argued that they were victims of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their father, a defense that was challenged in court before they were handed life sentences.
Yet a significant proportion of the population have experienced severe childhood trauma – as many as 10-12% of people in the UK according to some studies – but a far smaller number commit acts of criminal violence.
Which begs the question, what makes some people respond to childhood trauma with violence, while others do not? Could it be that those people are indeed “monsters”? Or, as some of my patients previously put it: “I have done evil things, but does that make me evil?”
There is no scientific evidence that people are born “evil”. And in my experience, there is no such a thing as an evil person – instead, there are evil states of mind.
So, typically, I begin my answer by telling them that it is possible for anyone to get into this state of mind, which is dominated by ordinary emotions of hatred, envy, greed and anger.
Deep down most of us have a capacity for cruelty but the risk factors that make some people act that out with extreme violence are specific. They are a little like the numbers in a bicycle lock. Just as all the numbers have to line up for the bicycle lock to open, multiple risk factors are usually in place before violence erupts.
The most common risk factors are being young and male (with higher rates of aggression and impulsivity); being intoxicated with drugs and alcohol; having a history of family conflict and breakdown; and a history of criminal rule-breaking. Being in a paranoid state of mind caused by mental illness can also be a risk factor, though this is more rare.
The most important risk factor for murder, however, is the nature of the relationship with the victim, especially a history of relationship conflict. It is well known that women are most commonly killed by male partners or family members, and most children are killed by their parents or step-parents. The killing of strangers is rare, and these tend to be cases where perpetrators are severely mentally unwell.
So the first two numbers that align in the bicycle lock could be sociopolitical, and the next two might be specific to the perpetrator.
The final number that causes the lock to spring open can be something that happens between the victim and the perpetrator – whether an offhand comment, an action perceived as a threat, or something as simple as a bad football result. (Domestic abuse soars by 38% when the England team lose, according to research by Lancaster University.)
When the bicycle lock clicks into place, what is unleashed is often a wave of overwhelming emotion that distorts how the person sees everything.
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The good news is that over the last 20 years there has been a fall in homicide rates in the UK and elsewhere, which is largely a result of changes in some of these bicycle lock factors.
“The decline of homicide rates since 2004 in the UK – which has also happened in the US, Spain, Italy, and Germany – is partly due to changes in lifestyles such as reductions in binge drinking and cannabis consumption among adolescents," says Professor Manuel Eisner, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.
"[It is also] partly the influence of technologies such as mobile phones and CCTV cameras, which add surveillance and opportunities to find help in situations of danger.”
In addition, he attributes the drop to wider shifts including the bolstering of cultural norms opposing bullying, and violence against women, girls and children.
And while there is a minority of people whose minds can’t be changed – who will always be a risk – by paying attention to distorted narratives in the majority of cases, we can find ways to change those violent minds for good.
Radical empathy: preventing violence
In 2004 I met a man called Jack who had killed his mother when he was in his 20s. He had been found to be suffering with paranoid schizophrenia at the time, so he was sent to hospital for treatment.
Later, he joined a therapy group that I was running at Broadmoor Hospital. In the hour-long sessions the group members, who had all killed family members while mentally unwell, would talk about how they could avoid violence in future. Jack didn’t always seem engaged but after a year or so, just after another member had talked about past regrets, he spoke abruptly.
“I wish I could say sorry to my mum for what I did,” he said. “I know I was mentally ill, but I wish I could say how sorry I was and that she could forgive me. I hope she understands how much I regret it.”
By seeing themselves in other offenders, some group members were able to learn how it had been possible to delude themselves into thinking that someone had to die; and how waves of anger, shame and fear could lead them to misinterpret actions and words.
Jack seemed more engaged after that day and his mental health improved enough for him to move to a less secure hospital for further rehabilitation.
Group therapy takes time, but afterwards many other men were also considered safe enough to move to less secure treatment facilities, which is a sign of improvement and something we only do if we determine that their risk of reoffending is negligible. Most importantly, they also learnt to take responsibility.
Jack helped me realize that people who kill are not mindless monsters who are born that way. He was an ordinary man who had done an extraordinary thing, as with many others.
None of this is an excuse for violence – and every violent crime is a tragedy for all who are involved – but monstering people is not helpful. It is simply one way to deal with rage and fear.
And we miss a chance to reduce and prevent violence if we write off everyone who has murdered or abused in that way.
It takes a radical kind of empathy to sit with a man who has decapitated his partner, or a woman who has stabbed a friend. But trying to comprehend them and gain new insights about ourselves requires going where they walk, and seeing what they see. And that is what ultimately leads to change. ~ Dr Gwen Adshead, Forensic psychiatrist and 2024 Reith Lecturer
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk1v20lrn2o
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IN THIS ELECTION, DEMOGRAPHICS DIDN’T DETERMINE THE OUTCOME
In the debate over whether demography is destiny, the 2024 presidential election showed clearly it is not.
Democrats long believed that the diversifying of the country would lead to their party's long-term success, but President-elect Trump was able to win over many of the voters Democrats believed they could rely on, showing identity is less important when people feel negatively toward the incumbent party on things like prices and immigration.
The demographic shifts seen in this election were pronounced in the swing states, with different groups mattering to different degrees in Trump's sweep, according to exit polls.
Here were some clear trends:
Democrats lost ground with voters under 30 in nearly every swing state – with the exception of Georgia, where Harris gained slightly, and Arizona, where support was the same. The decline was especially pronounced in the former Blue Wall states in the industrial Midwest, where younger voters moved in double-digits away from Democrats.
There was a seismic shift with Latino voters. In the last few elections, they have gradually declined in their support of the Democratic Party, and 2024 saw a dramatic swing to the right with them. In some states — like Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan — Latinos shifted right by more than 20 points.
Black voters also supported Democrats in lower numbers compared to previous elections in many places, but the shift was less dramatic than with Latino voters. There was one notable exception, however: Wisconsin, where Democrats saw steep decline with Black voters.
White voters were a higher share of the electorate and voted in large numbers for Trump. Trump's margin with white voters was essentially unchanged, but white voters making up larger shares of the electorate in key states helped fuel his victory.
There's a political realignment taking place, not just on education and race, but also by age. Older voters, for example, were once seen as a solid Republican voting bloc, but seniors shifted away from Trump in the majority of the swing states (North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia).
Trump increased his margin with white voters, who made up 6-in-10 of those who cast ballots. He also cut into Harris' margins with Latinos, won wider margins with voters 45 and older, and men made up a bigger share of the electorate than four years ago.
All of that helped him win the state despite Harris winning younger voters by more than Biden four years ago, the only swing state where that was the case. Black voters voted at about the same margin.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/22/nx-s1-5199119/2024-election-exit-polls-demographics-black-latino-voters
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MISHA IOSSEL ON WHY TRUMP WON
So, What the F#ck Happened?
I guess that is the question of the day and I have an answer. During the campaign I often compared Campaign 2024 to a collision of two mighty opposing forces. I called the Harris campaign a confederacy of smaller but still powerful forces: the Dobbs decision, more money, more technical competence, generational change and a “vibe” contrast; Ted Lasso vs Voldemort. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, greatly benefited from a mighty single force that it did not create but was propelling it forward. I described this force as a 100-mile-wide wall of molten lava, moving at a slow but unstoppable pace. This force was voter economic anger from inflation and a desire to make big political change, as evidenced by the 70% “wrong track” sentiment we were continually seeing in public opinion polls.
I should have stop talking right then, stuck with the wall of lava thing and predicted Trump.
Instead, like most pundits I overlooked these fundamentals — administrations facing a 70% wrong track electorate are toast — and instead fell into that venerable trap; thinking that this time, things might be different! The reason? The relentless, epic, and noisy short-comings of Donald J. Trump. So I ultimately blurted out on Hacks on Tap that I thought, with low to medium confidence, that Kamala Harris would win.
Whoops.
I should have known better. This was an ejector seat election. Push the Big Red Button and blow it all up. Dump them all. Send somebody in there the elites really hate, and make things like they were before stuff started costing too much. And give me my damn regular pro-nouns back!
To quote my Democratic friend Paul Begala, “inflation is particularly deadly to incumbent politicians because when prices keep going up, that’s the President’s fault. When your wages rise with inflation, that’s because you earned it as a good worker. Now that S.O.B. in the White House is burning up your hard earned raise.”
Of course Joe Biden’s selfishness made it all far worse. If ever a one-term Presidency was necessary, it was his. I do understand why Joe from Scranton chose to be such a tragic dead-ender. Climbing the mile high greasy pole to the Oval is a long, grim slog of endless rejection. You only prevail by never, ever, ever quitting. You never give up, just keep crawling forward over a bottomless desert of broken glass. So, after your scared body finally winds up in the Big Chair, any idea of giving up seems insane. (I even wrote about this phenomenon here, back in July of 2023, when Joe Biden so badly needed an honest friend.)
So, there the race wound up. A President the country badly wanted to fire, an awful debate, and soon thereafter a new candidate nominated at the last minute by a few telephone conference calls. No primary, no competition, no chance to actually beat somebody and win and create a strong image distance from Joe Biden. Or, get beaten by somebody and create a new star. A fresh start. A change.
But none of that happened. Instead, there was that Deadly Moment on the View where the essential question was asked and the wrong answer given. You could feel the indelible ink set instantly.
At that point Kamala Harris was Team Biden, ver 2.0. The Harris campaign’s vibe-driven nuanced change was a good try but it was not enough and was never going to work. Voters wanted a sledgehammer, not a tweak. And there was a big orange mallet within easy reach.
The Bias of the Bubble
One reason plenty of pundits and most political professionals expected a Harris victory, especially during the vibe-heavy last ten days of the race, is we exist in a bubble with two confirmation biases. Among the media, mostly well educated, secular, modern and center-left, there is a strong temptation to view the Presidential contest primarily through a simplifying lens of identity issues around race and gender. Since Trump is an anathema to modern views about those topics, it’s no surprise that a majority of Americans voting for Trump seems automatically improbable.
Second, in the small world of political consulting, we love, profit from, and know a lot about political campaigns. Naturally we believe in — and often over-estimate — the power of campaign technology. The clever ad, the nifty analytics and polling, even (though I’ve always been a contrarian skeptic myself) the endlessly cited and all-important “ground game.”
So, for a bunch of cynics, we hacks are quite easy marks for the idea that “this time, things are different” because we think we have discovered in our vast wisdom a new magic X factor.
I sure was a mark for it; I mean Trump must have a ceiling right? But deep down I knew enough about the fundamentals to be wary. I would tell friends that while my brain said Trump, but my gut said Harris.
Next time I’m going with my brain. Too much confirmation bias in the ol’ gut after so many years in politics. The argument that swayed my, and many other, political guts was that while the “wrong track” was indeed very high, part of that scream for a change was deep exhaustion with the dark tone of the Trump years. And Harris was not Biden! And she was generational change! And Dobbs anger had caused Democratic candidates to far over-perform in past elections, even in deep red states! The 2022 Red Wave had fizzled in the Congressional midterms because of it and Trump!
Plus, Harris had a mostly disciplined, if over-cautious, operation and a sane data-driven schedule! Not that crazy Trump flying to blue states and boring rally crowds with lunatic rambling and unleashing racist punk insult comics at creepy Bund-ish rallies in Madison Square Garden!!! That all had to mean something! And look at the Ann Seltzer poll in Iowa! This time, wrong track be damned, it would be different! Narrow, but different.
Whoops again.
Show Trials and One Electrifying Michigan Blunder
So now the Democratic Party, shocked and bruised, is going to stare in the mirror for a long while and squabble. I’ll just say that Harris did the best she could. I don’t fault her. She fought and worked. But the larger scene was set.
I give the Harris campaign a gentleman’s B. Not great, not awful. I do think they screwed up in vital Michigan by not responding to Trump’s relentless attacks on EV’s as Michigan auto job-killers (of course the opposite is true). A full report on that is here, complete with ads and a statewide poll of Michigan voters taken two weeks before the election.
Now the Democrats will slug their way through a classic battle between the party’s mathematicians and high priests.
The priests will say give ‘em the Old Testament from the Left, this mushy move to the center stuff is useless. The mathematicians will counter that the Democrats have lost working class and Latino voters on cultural issues, just check out Trump’s fabled Trans ad. Time to go back to DLC style centrism and nominate moderate white dudes who will not define the party with harebrained ideas like Defund the Police and Green New Deals.
This battle will rage on for a long while and frankly, I’m already bored by it. Others have about twenty million words to write on this, so I’ll leave it to them and just be happy I don’t live in DC anymore where endless insider chatter over all this, relentless Doom-casting and a muddy army of Trumpian Visigoths preening all around town is going to make life in that grim company town even more tiresome than usual.
So dear Democrats, have your good cry, but next week please snap out of it and start the hard work needed to win the goddamn midterms. Votes are still being counted in a few California House districts, but the odds are strong the MAGA GOP will soon gain control of the House.
I know, I know… nuts on the loose, but I said stop crying. Toss away the dream catchers. Stop watching Rachel and eating ice cream. You got dumped.
Now it’s time to seize the future.
It is inevitable — a word I hesitate to use in the current bizzarro world politics we endure, but this is about the best bet around — that the Trump administration will have a good dollop of, well, lunatic chaos to it. And with control of both Congressional chambers and the Presidency, the GOP will of course over-reach in their subtle MAGA way. A big tariff regime will create huge economic pain. Massive spending without offsetting revenue will sputter the economy.
Don’t forget that the party of the new President almost always faces a tough mid-term, especially in the House. Team Trump may well make that problem even worse. (Facebook)
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BONHOEFFER: “FOLLOWING CHRIST EVEN TO THE CROSS”
As a longtime pacifist myself, I will admit to being captivated by the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian, and avowed anti-Nazi dissident whose vocal opposition to Hitler's euthanasia program and genocide of Jews led to his 1943 arrest. Eventually, he was accused of being associated with the well known plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed on April 9, 1945 just as the Nazi regime was in its collapse.
Written and directed by Todd Komarnicki and released by Angel Studios, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin has already had its share of controversies (somewhat par for the course for Angel) and while I'd dispute some of the film's positions I can't help but also appreciate the film and its accomplishments.
I must also appreciate, I must say, Jonas Dassler's absolutely top-notch performance as Bonhoeffer.
It would be nearly impossible to watch the Bonhoeffer story without being deeply moved. By his mid-20's, Bonhoeffer had both a doctorate in theology and was an ordained Lutheran minister. It would be Hitler's rise to power and the spread of Nazism that would come to define his life, first as he staunchly defended the church against Hitler's political influence and further as he began actively aiding Jews and more. At an over two hour running time, Bonhoeffer is clearly aiming to cover the fullness of Bonhoeffer's life.
Komarnicki, perhaps best known for his writing of Clint Eastwood's Sully, takes the non-linear route and journeys, at times not so successfully, back-and-forth through a remarkable history that included attending Union Seminary in New York. The remarkable details of Hitler's ascent aren't often reported in favor of that ascension's more dramatic elements, however, Bonhoeffer leans into the Third Reich's heavy influence on the church and removal of the Jewish Bible and ritual in favor of a Nazi-tinged Bible that demanded adherence.
For those unfamiliar with Bonhoeffer, this film serves as a worthy introduction to the extraordinary man. Bonhoeffer's courage is unquestionable, his steadfast fight and outspoken ways remarkable at a time when there were so few being outspoken. Scenes of Bonhoeffer with fellow pastor Martin Niemoller (August Diehl) inspire tremendously as do scenes with Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Hans (Flula Borg). While Komarnicki can't possibly capture the true marvel that was Bonhoeffer's life, even with a 135-minute running time, Bonhoeffer gives up a deeper appreciation for a man whose faith was a faith worth dying for.
While Dassler is absolutely the stand-out here, he's joined by a wonderful ensemble cast including Diehl as Niemoller, David Jonsson as Frank Fisher, and a host of others. Lensing by John Mathieson is effective throughout, a powerful weaving together of inspiration and gut-check drama. John Beard's production design is also tremendously effective as is the costume design of Chouchane Tcherpachian.
While I have my quibbles with Bonhoeffer, it's yet another tremendously bold and impactful film from the folks at Angel Studios. Bonhoeffer lived a life worthy of closer examination and while this may not be the definitive piece on that life it's a remarkably effective and emotionally resonant introduction to a life powerfully lived and a faith that refused to compromise. Currently in theaters, Bonhoeffer is for sure a film best seen on the big screen.
https://theindependentcritic.com/bonhoeffer
from another source: Christian complicity and the fight against fascism
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis in 1945, two weeks before his fellow prisoners were liberated from the Flossenbürg concentration camp, which doesn’t do much for one’s sense of justice. Neither does the postscript to Todd Komarnicki’s “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin” informing us that the “German church” apologized after World War II for having deified Hitler. One of the things that this highly uneven but righteously indignant film has us pondering is who, in the future, will be issuing similar mea culpas.
The ostensible value of Third Reich stories and Holocaust films is their cautionary nature, which may be noble, but the fact is they are usually exploitative, unintentionally but unavoidably trivializing their subjects. This is true even when celebrating the period’s few heroes—Oskar Schindler, Miep Gies, Raoul Wallenberg and even Bonhoeffer, who used his pulpit to rail against the evils of Nazism when the church around him was acquiescing. (He became, with others, a founder of the schismatic Confessing Church.)
What separates “Bonhoeffer” from the myriad instructive Holocaust biographies and melodramas is its timing: American audiences have never before watched a movie about World War II-era Germany with the knowledge that a majority of their own electorate has voted in favor of fascism. It changes one’s entire outlook on the genre, never mind one’s fellow man.
At the outset, when it is being purely biographical, “Bonhoeffer” is earnest, too solemn or too jolly, and transparent about its messaging—all mortal sins of cinema. Young Dietrich was precocious, a twin, a piano prodigy who lost his beloved older brother to World War I. He studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, was greatly influenced by the energy of African American spirituality and allied himself with the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Did he actually sit in with what looks suspiciously like Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five at Smalls Paradise in Harlem? Even if the scene actually happened, it’s a laughable misfire, a classic of Hollywood-style bowdlerized biography.
It is into this moral morass that Mr. Komarnicki (the film’s writer and one of its many producers) marches forthrightly, and with convincing arguments. Although he made his film well before this month’s elections—and it is, in the end, a period piece—there is little point in ignoring how it serves as a mirror to our own time and place. Will Evangelical America be apologizing in five years? Will high-ranking members of the Catholic clergy be seeking absolution for ignoring the designs of would-be despots, never mind their personal histories? “Bonhoeffer” may be more than a lesson. It may be an elegy.
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2024/11/22/bonhoeffer-film-249345
an example of a negative review:
It would be gratifying to write that Todd Komarnicki’s biographical film on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister who was such a committed opponent of Nazism that he was executed for involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was worthy of him. Unfortunately, it’s not. “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin” is earnest and strenuously edifying, but also stolid, simplistic and chronologically fractured, not nearly as nuanced a portrait as its subject deserves.
The film begins with a prologue set in 1914, with young Dietrich (Phileas Heyblom) playing around the family’s country home with his older brother Walter (Patrick Mölleken). But Walter is called away to serve in the German army during the Great War and is killed in battle, leaving the boy, along with his parents Karl (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Paula (Nadine Heidenreich) heartbroken. It then moves rather quickly to show the 39-year old Lutheran pastor (Jonas Dassler) in a concentration camp awaiting execution by hanging only weeks before the German surrender will end World War II in Europe.
Reversing the temporal course, the narrative turns to the young man’s sojourn at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31, during which he finds the official instruction laughable but is engaged by his introduction to African-American religion and culture by classmate Frank Fisher (David Jonsson), who takes him to a Harlem jazz club (where he melds his playing of a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier into an ensemble performance) and to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the emotional pull of the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. (Clarke Peters) makes the wide-eyed student aware of the sterility of traditional German practice. Fisher also makes a naïve Bonhoeffer aware of the depths of racial prejudice in America, a lesson he takes back with him when he witnesses the rise of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.
That leads him to oppose the established hierarchy’s acquiescence to the nationalization of the German Lutheran Church, complete with lionization of Hitler in a rewritten Bible, after his return to Germany in the thirties. The film depicts him as a leading voice in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church opposed to the officially sanctioned one, even agreeing to serve as rector of an underground seminary for it, where he meets the student, Eberhard Bethge (William Robinson), who will become not only a friend and confidant but, as an author, the keeper of his memory.
It also shows his work in England not only in enlisting support for that effort, but in spreading word of the dangers posed by the regime. This aspect of the script emphasizes Bonhoeffer’s relationship with fellow pastor Martin Niemöller (August Diehl), who initially argued that the Nazification of the church was a tolerable aberration but came to see it as an existential danger. (For dramatic effect Komarnicki repurposes Niemöller’s famous postwar “First they came for” formulation to a sermon he preaches to his congregation, ruffling the feathers of soldiers in attendance.)
Hovering over all this earlier material is the reality of Bonhoeffer’s fate after he became involved in helping to spirit Jews across the border to Switzerland and contributing to the resistance movement within the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, in which his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi (Flula Borg) was a major activist, and which culminated in several failed plots to kill Hitler. The degree of his actual participation in these endeavors is a matter of debate—he certainly acted as a courier, but whether it went any further is unclear; Komarnicki certainly stretches speculation about his direct involvement as far as he can for dramatic purposes.
In the process, unfortunately, the writer-director fails to illustrate the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s Chistocentric view of the individual believer’s life and how it related to the tension he felt between his pacifism and activism in the face of evil; these are issues that as a philosopher-theologian Bonhoeffer grappled with to the very end, and the film deals with them only in a relatively superficial fashion, portraying his final decisions in a fairly obvious, even simplistic way. Of course it’s asking a lot of a film to expect it to convey the intricacies in the internal debate of a man so committed to working through fundamental moral issues. But while his external actions are hardly insignificant, the workings of his mind are what really make Bonhoeffer fascinating.
In that respect while it may be dramatically satisfying to watch Bonhoeffer interacting with a conflicted German officer (Greg Kolpakchi) in the camp where he’s executed, perhaps the most telling episode is actually his conversation with Sigmund Rascher (James Flynn), an SS doctor who’d engaged in experiments as heinous as Mengele’s but been arrested for insulting Hitler. Their sparring, which pits the theologian desperate for certainty in his faith against the jabs of an amoral cynic, at least gets at the continuing struggle that marked Bonhoeffer’s life.
But if Komarnicki’s film falls short in conveying the richness of Bonhoeffer’s thought, it provides a depiction of his courage that many will find satisfying from a purely emotional perspective. And if Dassler’s performance matches Komarnicki’s approach in its bluntness, and the other performances are solid without being outstanding, they all get by. (A couple of caveats: Tim Hudson does one of the weakest impressions of Winston Churchill ever, and Marc Bessant’s Hitler is even worse: fortunately, both appear very briefly.)
On the technical side, one has to admire the look the behind-the-camera team—production designer John Beard, costumer Chouchanne Abello-Tcherpachian, cinematographer John Mathieson—have achieved on what was probably a limited budget, and the score by Antonio Pinto and Gabriel Ferreira is suitably morose. But Komarnicki’s pacing is ploddingly reverential, a quality exacerbated by Blu Murray’s slack editing.
One must also note that the film has engendered controversy, with descendants of Bonhoeffer and scholars of his work criticizing it for presenting Bonhoeffer’s life in a fashion that has allowed it to be embraced by Christian nationalists and authoritarians.
Though taken on its own it doesn’t come across as polemical in that regard, some aspects of the advertising campaign and the fact that the distributor adopted its subtitle from the popular 2010 biography of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, a strident right-wing political activist, can certainly be cited in support of the claim.
Whether or not you view it as propagandistic in that respect, however, the film’s flaws from a purely cinematic perspective are serious enough that those wishing to learn about Bonhoeffer might do better to seek out Martin Doblmeier’s solid 2003 documentary on him instead.
https://www.oneguysopinion.com/bonhoeffer-pastor-spy-assassin/
Let’s turn to a more positive review:
With “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” (“Bonhoeffer”), Angel continues to expand its reach beyond faith-based films with another uplifting and inspirational real-life biography. Although faith is a large component of the film, it is espionage (as the somewhat clunky full title lets on) that makes up the bulk of the narrative.
Born in the German kingdom of Prussia in 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Jonas Dassler) was the sixth of eight children of Karl (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Paula (Nadine Heidenreich) Bonhoeffer. He was a happy and precocious child whose attitude greatly shifted after the death of his eldest brother, Walter, in World War I.
The Death of a Brother
Walter’s last wish was for Paula to will Dietrich his Bible, which had the “good parts” underlined. From that point forward, Bonhoeffer dedicated his life to God, eventually becoming a pastor. In 1930, he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where a colleague exposed him to American jazz and gospel music; at one point, he played piano onstage with Louis Armstrong.
It was during this sojourn that Bonhoeffer crossed paths with and was influenced by the Harlem-based Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. (Clarke Peters). In one of the film’s most memorable passages, Powell deftly explains to Bonhoeffer the difference between one’s faith in God and belief in organized religion.
Upon returning to Germany in 1933, Bonhoeffer began sharing Powell’s teachings (and love of gospel music) to his initially reticent peers, and in particular his friend Martin Niemöller (August Diehl). Initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and an avowed anti-Semite, Niemöller bumps heads with Bonhoffer when Bonhoeffer very publicly calls out the Nazis.
Erasing Christianity
Niemöller’s opposition to the Nazis wasn’t so much because of the targeting of Jews, which Bonhoeffer also decried. It was more because the Third Reich took control of all German churches and replaced holy imagery with black and red swastikas, and Bibles with 12 Commandments. In addition to the original 10 was one that described Jesus Christ as an Aryan and another that declared Hitler the supreme deity. Along with Niemöller and a few others, Bonhoeffer co-founded the modern anti-fascist Confessing Church that vehemently opposed the Nazi regime.
By this point, Bonhoeffer had become a marked man. His association with the German counterintelligence agency “Abwehr” and British spy operatives only made him more of a target. Bonhoeffer pretended to support the regime. The Nazis saw right through his sudden Nazi “support” switch. The ruse was over.
Bonhoeffer’s working with multiple known anti-Nazi forces led to him being identified as a potential accomplice to a possible Hitler assassination, which isn’t entirely untrue. Bonhoeffer was now of a mind that ridding the world of Hitler surpassed all other concerns, including his own moral and spiritual beliefs.
What if you had the chance to kill or aid in the killing of Hitler after it was clear that he’d already started genocide and world domination on a mass scale? Some would say no, but many people would say yes. But what if you were a priest, a pastor, or some other religious person of the cloth? What would you do?
A similar quandary was explored in a superb, soul-searching 2002 episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled “Cradle of Darkness,” starring Katherine Heigl and James Remar. It’s readily available online.
In just his second effort as a director and writer, Todd Komarnicki (“Resistance,” 2003) takes on a mammoth task that most seasoned filmmakers wouldn’t dare to attempt, and he largely succeeds. He’s aided in this venture because most people with secular leanings have never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. To a degree, the same can be said about the title character in “Schindler’s List.”
Bonhoeffer and Oskar Schindler were both Christians and native Germans. Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party and an unapologetic capitalist who greatly profited from World War II. Both men had nothing to gain and everything to lose by going against the Nazi grain, yet both did so because of their underlying moral fiber.
My sole issue with “Bonhoeffer” was Komarnicki’s choice to present the narrative out of sequence. The story jumps from 1914 to 1945, then to 1918 to 1930 throughout the film. This certainly doesn’t help and sometimes hurts making the desired point. Bonhoeffer’s landing in a Nazi prison camp within the first 15 minutes removes a strong element of suspense; we already know where he’s headed. In my opinion, presenting Bonhoeffer’s story in chronological order would have resulted in a better movie.
That said, “Bonhoeffer” is still a towering achievement. It’s a movie that gives the majority of audiences yet another view of WWII they likely never had before. The film goes further in cementing the fact that Adolf Hitler is the most vile and loathsome person in the history of humanity
Oriana:
By coincidence, the day before I saw Bonhoeffer, I saw Bergman’s “Winter Light.” I was struck by a luminous similarity in how both of these movies ended. In Winter Light, the pastor who has lost his faith nevertheless decides to celebrate the Sunday service in an empty church. The church becomes gloriously lit, and the pastor’s words more filled with meaning than ever as he turns to face the empty pews and recites the words of the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy.
Bonhoeffer climbs the steps to the scaffold solemnly as if in a procession, his face radiant with the inner knowledge that he did obey the orders — orders coming from that which is the highest, higher by far than the head of the state.
He is not afraid. He knows he had the courage to behave like a true Christian, to “follow Christ even to the cross.” He is ready to meet his Guide face to face.
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And now a bit of a complaint. When it comes to biographical movies (I loathe the word “biopic”), I like a linear story, not a chaos of flashbacks. I would have preferred to follow Dietrich’s development into a heroic resistance fighter as an easy-to-follow narrative. (Barring that, it helps to read even a brief biography of Bonhoeffer before seeing the movie.)
I think that if I didn’t have to fight the feeling of confusion and make an effort to connect the dots in the plot, I would have left the theater much more moved by Bonhoeffer’s courage to “follow Christ even to the cross.”
I don’t think that this was in the movie, but reading about Bonhoeffer I found another quotation, to the effect that when we consider other humans we should think not only of what they did or didn’t do, but also about how much they have suffered. I think cultural awareness and judicial practice have moved toward greater consideration of the defendant’s background, such as such physical and/or sexual abuse he may have suffered in childhood.
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After having seen "Bonhoeffer," I appreciate all the more the courage of Russian dissidents. This is Alexei Gorinov. His sign says, "Do you still need this war?" He was sentenced to seven years.
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OLD-TIME CATHOLICISM: THE COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ GOES TO HEAVEN, BUT NOT THE JEWS WHO DIED THERE
In another video, not directly related to the movie, I found the statement that Rudolf Hoess, a Catholic and the commandant of Auschwitz, was given a chance to confess and obtain absolution of his sins before his execution — whereas, back in those days, the Catholic doctrine held that Jews, like all non-Catholics, ended up in hell for eternity. Fortunately this doctrine that only Catholics who happened to be in the state of grace at the time of their death could enter heaven was later changed, allowing good Jews and Protestants to enter heaven.
Hoess in heaven, his Jewish victims in hell — religion can certainly create absurd problems and logical conundrums.
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IS THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FALLING APART?
Today is a significant day. Shares of “the main national asset”, which used to be the most valuable company in Russia — the largest gas corporation in the world, which owns 17% of the world's gas reserves, are worth 15 times less today than in 2008. The price of Gasprom shares has fallen from $16 to $1.08.
That’s an astounding achievement of Putin and his gang of thugs.
Putin’s maniacal obsession with Ukraine and desire to become the emperor of Russian lands — all territories that the Russian empire ever controlled — brought Russia in political turmoil it hasn’t experienced since the times of the Cold War.
The Russian banking system is staring into the abyss, the ruble is in free fall, demographics in crisis, construction industry is contracting, chronic workforce shortages exacerbated by the outflow of labor migrants due to falling ruble — it all looks like a house of cards.
And of course, there is the war and the constant news of strikes at Russia — drones, missiles, sabotage, the incursion by the Ukrainian troops into Russia — and the non-stop inflow of wooden boxes with disfigured rotten bodies. No amount of “patriotism” can block the feeling of chilling horror, which occupies a gloomy corner in the mind and heart of every Russian citizen.
The Russian Federation is imploding. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Nicholi Valentin:
Generally speaking, sanctions don't achieve political change. Look at Cuba, North Korea and Iran all have been under various sanctions for a combined total of 177 years. Their repressive regimes continue. I suspect that Russian sanctions will have a similar effect on Russian foreign policy. None. It will however cause a great deal of misery. Wealthy Russians will remain unaffected insulated by their money and power, the middle classes will shrink, miss western products and become steadily poorer. The poor and powerless will suffer, as they always do. Sanctions do however impact the ability of the Russian war machine to function effectively, for that reason alone I say squeeze until their eyes pop.
Daniel E6:
Ruble is now 113 to the dollar. So one Ruble is less than one American cent. Russia is sh*tting BRICS. Their import costs are now going through the roof.
Donald Adams:
What a shame, Russia could have been a major world economic player. The Russian people could be living a great middle class status had they had a leader focused on developing it's massive resources and focused on its citizens. Unfortunately many live in poverty and hide in alcohol because they have a power hungry narcissist that doesn't give a crap about his people!
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“WHITE TRASH”
The truth in any tense is often hurtful, and so is the truth about the origins of our language. Both the noun and the verb “trash” are recorded to have “obscure” beginnings in the Oxford English Dictionary, perhaps because nobody bothered to write down—or rather publish—this particular history.
Trash is a noun, but it is also a verb whose origins are obliterative. Along with the Swedish trasa, another probable ancestor of trash is the French verb trasier meaning “to draw a line through, strike out, efface.” I imagine all the lives that had already been effaced before trash entered the English lexicon in 1604—forever crowning and denigrating Bianca, the slut, the accused criminal, the patron saint of a certain class of erotic love.
The OED’s entry also mentions “field trash,” the dried leaves that remain around the base of sugarcanes after harvest. This kind of trash is also brutal: it has bloodied the hands of last century’s enslaved Africans and this century’s exploited farmworkers. In the dictionary’s discussion, the word trash can refer to worn-out shoes donned by tramps and vagrants.
Elsewhere in the word’s origin, chips fly from axes wielded in the rough hands of backwoods loggers, since trash also means that which is cast off from tree-felling. As one works through the etymology, one encounters all sorts of laborers trashed by exhausting work, filthy and ragged, thrashing through mire and dirt.
I learned these definitions in books and in dictionaries, like the one in which I found that one obsolete usage of the verb to trash means to hold back, restrain, or hinder. Everything that has trashed me over the years—not just my years, but the years that led up to me—the demeaning work, the name-calling, the looming threats of hunger and incarceration—held me back from something I can’t yet name, but that I am inching toward, slowly, the more I learn.
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The more I learn, the freer I become, but I also get angrier, uglier, and more critical. While completing my third college degree, fifteen years after my sophomore year of high school, I took a class from the great-grand-something of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famed abolitionist. My teacher, a carefully dressed, classically professorial sort of woman, took great pride in her literary lineage. She told us about her family’s legacy in the arts when she introduced herself on the first day.
Beecher Stowe, like my teacher, wrote many acclaimed books and essays in her lifetime. In them, she made impassioned arguments against slavery using vivid narrative techniques and thorough research. She also did it by railing against white trash people—scourge of the American South.
Beecher Stowe dedicated an entire chapter to my people, the garbage gang, when she wrote her second book, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1854. The chapter is entitled, simply, “Poor White Trash.” She writes, “These miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves.” This describes my ancestors, and, frankly, me and my contemporaries, we a whole trashy kingdom of despicable peasants.
Harriet Beecher Stowe blamed slavery for the creation of our mongrel class because of the way it concentrated wealth with plantation-owning elites, leaving poorer whites to languish on infertile, backwoods plots with no way to earn a proper living or get an education.
Other intellectuals in her time believed that poor white trash were their own race entirely, the result of bad blood poisoned by generations of immorality, inbreeding, or interracial relationships. Similarly, she described white trash as more “degraded and miserable” than even the enslaved people with whom they were ridiculed for associating.
My college teacher was deeply intelligent, quite accomplished, and mostly very kind. She taught her favorite works from the Western canon in an organized, passionate way. Her course was framed as one in which we students could read and discuss the greatest writers who ever lived. We were to read with an eye toward craft so that we might attempt to replicate some of what these great masters of the written word composed.
Like most works in the canon, all the books she chose for us were by or about wealthy people or those aspiring to be so. Their content was generally dismissive or abusive regarding women, the poor, and people of color. While reading Madame Bovary, I planted a yellow flag on each page that made direct reference to these groups in unflattering ways. In the end, my copy of the book was radiant with yellow strips, each one a warning against too much self-identification.
Another of the books we read was House of Mirth, which was about a woman who would rather die than be poor, who in fact did die because of it. Lily Bart was obsessed with dinginess, with avoiding the horrible, gray life of working-class girls. Like many of her modern-day counterparts, working a thankless job and living in a boarding house turned Lily Bart into a drug addict, then into a drug casualty. Emma Bovary also died from the fear of being poor; the possibility scared her to death.
I do not begrudge my teacher for choosing these texts, nor for having us read them in such an apolitical, white way. I believe she intended to help us be better artists. I am only saying that I was bored and a little hurt by yet another repetition of these same tired tropes.
White, good.
Money, good.
Servants and sluts, bad.
The repetition of these cultural truths even felt oddly affirming. Although they had a cruel way of showing it, the authors of these books knew how hard it was to be poor, especially poor and woman, and they put that truth in black ink on white paper. They saw me, and they described a near-version of my reality. Like Mirth’s Bart, I had worked menial jobs, lived in crowded, dark rooms, and spent money I didn’t have at fancy restaurants. I had taken too much alcohol and other analgesics to dull the soreness of my existence. I had dulled myself nearly to death. These authors knew that poor and dead have a close kinship.
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Poor and dead had also been kin in AP US History, where I finished reading a section about the Haymarket Massacre and the struggle for the eight-hour workday, then paused to stare at my reflection in the trash can of water next to my desk. I was careful not to get any of the liquid on my arms or head—Mr. Smith had warned us about the possibility of asbestos. As I stared at a slice of my face in the rippling water, I considered that many of our parents could not find jobs that offered full-time hours or paid a living wage. What use is an eight-hour workday when there is no workday to work, or when the wage on offer is a violation of one’s humanity? Living in a trash town, the prevailing feeling is nihilism.
In my headphones between classes, the Sex Pistols screamed, “When there’s no future, how can there be sin? We’re the flowers in the dustbin.” On the school bus home while meth labs and vacant lots slid in and out of view, Crass made a ruckus like banging hard and fast on trash can lids, singing “Do they owe us a living? ‘Course they fucking do!” On weekends, I went to punk shows and jumped into the mosh pit. All my losses, failures, and fears dissolved when I took the first elbow to the face. What went on outside the show ceased to matter, and I fell out of reality, into what the more monied parents might have called the wrong crowd.
We chugged wine from bags and Mad Dog 20/20 bottles. We smoked all kinds of stuff. We sucked dicks in the back seats of cars. We refused to bathe. We worked the jobs that would have us: fast food, mostly. Ugly, stinky jobs for ugly, stinky people who just wanted to earn enough to be able to buy gas, go to shows, and black out.
That same year, the school, in a budget crisis, asked us to bring in toilet and printer paper. We had run out. Piece of trash school, I thought, as I stuffed a couple of bargain toilet tissue rolls into my backpack to drop off at the front office. The bathroom stalls mostly had toilet paper that year, and we made do when the copies dried up. The roof never fell in, and I wasn’t fatally poisoned by asbestos. I moved away, and I went to college, but I could not shake the image of the trash can and me in my classroom.
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Later, I learned I could draw a line from my trash can and me in my classroom all the way back to 14th-century England. White trash was not a new idea when Beecher Stowe popularized it. Poor and trash, like poor and dead, had been related for centuries, in Shakespeare’s time and before, ever since colonial England needed exploitable labor to power its empire, and a linguistic ideology to buttress its mission.
British colonizers filled ships with thousands of the kingdom’s poor people—mostly Scots, Irish, and Welsh—to work as indentured servants in the so-called New World. These “waste people” were seen as unproductive vagrants, perfect for dumping into a short, brutal life of hard labor developing the land as it was cleared, by genocide, of indigenous Americans.
For a long time after, there were at least as many white trash as enslaved Africans in what is now the United States. The landed class used trash to divide the working class, and to create a separate, dingier world for whites who did not meet their standards of racial supremacy. The term made dehumanization easy and was, ultimately, effective.
The opposite of trash in Shakespeare’s 1604 was the nobility. The king and queen and the rest of the small class of royals held the money, waged the wars, and generally ran the show. The waste people at the bottom were the worst of the worst of the poor, who found themselves without food and shelter. Because their numbers had increased in the century prior, due in part to all the wealth the nobility hoarded, the royal family passed new Poor Laws to “assist” them, updating statues first codified in 1349. Workhouses and other institutions sprang up to corral, control, and extract labor from these “vagrants” and “helpless cases.” These laws included provisions such that any poor person found guilty of being able to do an honest day’s work but who chose not to, could be sentenced to death. Or, I suppose, they were indentured in the colonies.
My father’s elders were Okies on one side and Blacksmiths from Norway on the other. My mother’s lineage is more mongrel and mysterious—her origin story includes infidelity, adoptions, and run-aways—but my maternal great-grandma, who was Scots-Irish and Welsh, lived until I was in my twenties, and I suspect she hailed from England’s trash can classes.
Beecher Stowe would’ve called Granny white trash. Her kith and kin were musicians, drunks, and petty criminals. Not book-crackers, skull-crackers. Progeny of waste people, ignobles. She had babies with four different men, survived domestic violence, drank, smoked, and yelled. She hated anyone acting too big for their britches. She cooked with Crisco and shopped for clothes at St. Vincent de Paul. But she was also a white trash class traitor, according to Stowe’s definition, in that she refused to condemn other poor people, including Black people and migrant farm workers. Granny regularly cussed at the TV over anti-welfare rhetoric, slights against unions, or racist dog whistles—probably a rare quality in a white woman born in the 1920s. I believe that Granny believed that the working class were the true nobility. I believe she had confidence, that she was a glitch in the system, a queer element.
Granny’s real name was Hester Ann, but early in her life, she changed it to Anna Mae, for reasons I am unable to discover. My mom guesses Granny found the name Hester unattractive. I tell her that Hester Prynne was the chick from Scarlet Letter—a slut in the woods who was forced to wear the big fat A that marked her a dirty woman. Granny had only an eighth-grade education, so it is unlikely that she ever read Hawthorne. It still pleases me to think of her as part of a legacy of women who disturbed the order, who dragged the good name of women in the muck of sensuality, who trashed the rules, however imperfectly.
Today, when people say white trash, they are talking about white people who shop at Walmart, fix their own cars, and frequent drive-thru’s. They mean whites who live next door to Black and brown people, who work with them as security guards, janitors, clerks, and prep cooks. They mean jailhouse whites. They mean whites who do not speak the Queen’s English or Shakespeare’s English or anything close to it. They mean white people who are bad at being white.
White trash people are still generally understood to be lazy, fat, racist, abusive, alcoholic, dull, tacky, violent, backward, loud, Bible-thumping, and uneducated. Such stereotypes are kept alive by television, political policy, miseducation, and art.
https://lithub.com/how-a-legacy-of-poverty-and-systematic-exclusion-created-white-trash-in-america/
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THE BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN DREAM: HOW DEMOCRATS LOST FDR’S MIDDLE CLASS
Thomas Benton: The Workers of America
The great lesson of the election of 2024 is that, to a large extent, class has replaced race as the single most potent political dividing line.
In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office and began a great experiment. Was it, he asked, really possible to create a society where more than half of a democratic and capitalist nation could enjoy a middle-class lifestyle? On the day of his inauguration the best estimate is that only about 15 percent of Americans had reached that economic milestone.
Back at the founding of our republic, several philosophers and economists suggested it was possible for a majority-middle-class society to emerge on this continent. Adam Smith (of the 1776 Wealth of Nations fame) wrote a book Theory of Moral Sentiments arguing that if a nation were to intervene in the marketplace in “moral” ways that uplifted working class people, such a society could emerge.
Thomas Paine similarly argued in Agrarian Justice for a number of progressive reforms including what today we call Social Security, a guaranteed minimum income, free public education, and the inheritance tax.
But from the beginning of America until 1933 most of these dreams were unrealized.
As Smith had intimated in Theory, unregulated capitalism would always produce the outcome Charles Dickens later wrote about in the 19th century: A top 1% that owns about 80% of the nation’s wealth, a middle 3%-5% professional class (doctors, lawyers, small business owners), and around 95% of the people representing a desperate working class living in abject poverty.
(In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was the middle class; his company was so small it had only one single employee, Bob Cratchit, who represented the bottom 95%. The 1% don’t even show up in most of Dickens’ stories.)
FDR, though, with help from Francis Perkins, his wife Eleanor, and economist John Maynard Keynes thought he could tame capitalism and the capitalists themselves (he accusingly called them the “Economic Royalists”) and set out with his New Deal programs — legalizing unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, government subsidies for the working poor, etc. — to create a vast American middle class.
This was the beginning of the modern Democratic Party, and the middle class was its great accomplishment; by the time Reagan took office about two-thirds of us were in that group with a single paycheck earning enough to buy a house, a car, take an annual vacation, put the kids through school, and retire with dignity.
Reagan broke with FDR’s policies that he’d once supported (in exchange for the promise of riches and a career from his second wife’s father), and took a meataxe to the New Deal. He busted unions, cut the top income tax bracket from 74% to 25%, and embraced free trade, allowing American manufacturing companies to go offshore in search of cheaper labor.
The result is that only 43% of us are in the middle class today. Adding insult to injury, it takes two full-time workers to get where a single paycheck could in 1980.
This was the beginning of the downfall of today’s Democratic Party, which has been buffeted by the twin winds of Reagan’s neoliberalism from the right and so-called “woke” identity politics on the left.
Trump and his Republican buddies cynically attacked Democrats for their embrace of Reagan’s policies, claiming that the shrinking of the middle class was because Black people and women were competing with white men for all those good jobs and Hispanics were diluting the labor market. At the same time, they argued, Democrats had gone too far in embracing marginalized minorities, particularly (in this election) the Trans community.
Ironically, Kamala Harris never once mentioned the Trans community while campaigning over the past three months, but Trump and the GOP relentlessly beat her over the head with a Willie Horton-like ad about giving free surgeries to Trans immigrants in prison. In this regard, the group using identity politics for political purposes was the Republican Party.
But the biggest lesson of this election is that class has supplanted race and other identity markers as the issue that motivated voters. Working class people in or aspiring to the middle class — including Hispanics, young white men, and to a smaller extent African American men — rejected economic policy (like Harris laid out) and racial, gender, or age cohort identity in exchange for the promise of good jobs and lower prices.
Sure, there was still a lot of identity politics at work: Trump’s anti-Trans ads are the best example, along with his relentless insistence that our nation’s immigrant population are mostly murderers, rapists, and thieves. And it may have been decisive on the margins.
But at its core, what we’re seeing in America is a realignment around class (its own form of identity politics). The middle class and its aspirants that had been supporters of the Democratic Party since the 1930s are now in the pocket of Republicans.
Part of this is the result of a massive, 40-year-long propaganda effort by billionaire-built media empires including talk radio (also in Spanish), three rightwing TV networks, Sinclair radio and TV, social media, and tending-right newspapers. Part is because in 2010 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized billionaires owning politicians and overwhelming elections with the “free speech” of their money.
But most substantially, as Bernie Sanders pointed out last week, it’s the result of the timeless class struggle between working people and what the GOP calls “the elites” (college-educated, upper-income professionals). The former broke big for Trump, the latter for Harris. And millions of minorities, particularly Hispanic men, rejected identity politics for the GOP’s class struggle pitch.
This dynamic is almost identical to the class struggle that brought FDR into power in 1933 and got him elected four times to the presidency, except that the party labels are now — hopefully temporarily — reversed.
The challenge for Democrats is to engage in their own class warfare, particularly since a good chunk of the Party (like the so-called “Problem Solvers Caucus”) are still on the take from big corporations and billionaires.
In this, the Congressional Progressive Caucus can be a great force to reclaim working people, rejecting both Reaganism’s hold on the Democratic Party (both Clinton and Obama embraced neoliberalism, and Biden’s rejection of it is largely unknown) and the notion that voters will always respond to race and gender rather than class.
If Democrats are to regain the working class as a solid and permanent constituency (which they owned from the 1930s to the 1990s), in other words, they must amplify Biden’s and Harris’ fights for higher taxes on billionaires and lower taxes on working people, universal healthcare and free college, reasonably priced housing, raising the federal minimum wage, protecting the right to organize, increase Social Security, and turn billionaires and greedy CEOs into an identifiable group voters can rightfully loathe. Attacking Republicans on the Supreme Court and their Citizens United decision is also vital.
As Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear wrote for The New York Times: “I won re-election 12 months ago by five points in a state that Donald Trump just carried by 30 points. … The focus of the Democratic Party must return to creating better jobs, more affordable and accessible health care, safer roads and bridges, the best education for our children and communities where people aren’t just safer but also feel safer.“
This doesn’t mean Democrats have to abandon allies representing racial, religious, and gender minorities as some are suggesting; that would be both a betrayal and political suicide.
But it’s way past time for a significant recalibration, particularly at the grassroots/working class level. As Pete Davis writes in The Nation:
“Instead of funding itself primarily through membership dues, the [Democratic] party offers fancy events for the wealthy and ceaseless, disrespectful texts for the rest of us. Parasocial relationships with celebrities and famous politicians are emphasized over real relationships with fellow neighbors and local chapter leaders.
“When you go to Democrats.org, clicking ‘Take Action’ does not direct you to a page with your local Democratic committee’s meeting times and locations. The bolded call-to-action button on the party homepage is ‘DONATE,’ not ‘JOIN.’”
Thus, as Trump rolls out his cabinet and policies — which will primarily benefit the morbidly rich and giant predatory corporations — Democrats must pound on the class warfare aspect of what the GOP is really up to.
The Democratic Party has done it before and held power for half a century; they need to do it again. With gusto!
https://hartmannreport.com/p/betrayal-of-the-american-dream-how-0e7?utm_campaign=post (My thanks to Kerry)
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THE MORE YOU TRY TO AVOID SUFFERING, THE MORE YOU SUFFER
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THE PITFALLS OF A.I.
A radio station in Poland fired its on-air talent and brought in A.I.-generated presenters. An outcry over a purported chat with a Nobel laureate quickly ended that experiment.
When a state-funded Polish radio station canceled a weekly show featuring interviews with theater directors and writers, the host of the program went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture.
But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a “unique interview” with an icon of Polish culture, Wislawa Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The terminated radio host, Lukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Ms. Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012.
The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones.
Mr. Zaleski conceded that the computer-generated version of the poet’s distinctive voice was convincing. “It was very, very good,” he said, but “I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead.”
The technology-enabled resurrection of the dead poet was part of a novel experiment by Off Radio Krakow, an arm of Poland’s public broadcasting system in the southern city of Krakow. The aim was to test whether A.I. could revive a moribund local station that had “close to zero” listeners, according to the head of public radio in Krakow.
The station also planned from-the-grave interviews with other dead people, including Jozef Pilsudski, Poland’s leader when it regained its independence in 1918.
Novelty value — and a storm of public outrage — worked to bolster Off Radio Krakow’s audience, which the head of Radio Krakow said grew to 8,000 overnight from just a handful of people after the introduction of three A.I.-generated Generation Z presenters — Emilia, 20, Jakub, 22, and Alex, 23, each of whom had a computer-generated photograph and biography on the station’s website.
Less welcome than the audience surge, however, has been a barrage of abuse directed at the public broadcasting system and accusations that it was sacrificing humans on the altar of technology.
“I have been turned into a job-killing monster who wants to replace real people with avatars,” said Mariusz Marcin Pulit, the editor in chief of Radio Krakow and of niche stations operating under its umbrella, like Off Radio Krakow.
He insisted that it was never his intention to replace people with machines, and that his only goal was to revive Off Radio Krakow, make it more appealing to younger listeners and stir debate about A.I. as Poland’s Parliament discusses new legislation to regulate its use.
The technology used to generate the fake interview with Ms. Szymborska and other programing, he added, has been widely used: Open AI’s ChatGPT, speech synthesis software developed by ElevenLabs, and the image-generating programs of Leonardo.Ai.
But his assurances have done nothing to calm public anger — and alarm that humans are being written out of the script.
Among those outraged by Mr. Pulit’s experiment was Jaroslaw Juszkiewicz, a radio journalist whose voice was used for more than a decade to guide drivers using the Polish version of Google Maps. His replacement by a metallic computer-generated voice in 2020 stirred fury on social media, prompting Google to restore Mr. Juszkiewicz, at least for a time.
He announced recently that he had been yanked again, lamenting that A.I. was “sweeping through the world of human voice work like a giant steamroller. And I can, in my own human voice, say, probably for the last time: ‘Smile beautifully and head south.’”
In a Facebook post, he said the use of A.I. to fake an interview with the dead Nobel Prize winner had left him speechless. “If that is not a breach of journalistic ethics,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”
The National Radio and Television Council, a regulatory body stacked with supporters of Poland’s previous right-wing government, assailed Mr. Pulit, who was appointed by a new center-left administration formed in December. He was “eliminating the human factor” and forcing media to obey “unethical commands and ideas serving, for example, strictly political interests,” a council member, Marzena Paczuska, wrote in a letter to the culture minister.
A member of the government also expressed alarm. The minister of digitalization, Krzysztof Gawkowski, complained on the social media platform X that “although I am a fan of A.I. development, I believe that certain boundaries are being crossed more and more.” He added: “The widespread use of A.I. must be done for people, not against them!”
Tired of being accused of wanting to make humans redundant, Mr. Pulit, the head of Radio Krakow, recently pulled the plug on his A.I. experiment.
“We are pioneers, and the fate of pioneers can be difficult,” he said in a recent message to staff members announcing an abrupt termination of A.I. presenters and their replacement by music created and performed by humans.
Among the A.I. presenters removed from Off Radio Krakow was Alex Szulc, a nonexistent person who had been presented as a nonbinary progressive “full of social commitment.” A biography on the station’s website was later rewritten to delete any mention of the presenter’s sexual orientation after angry complaints from L.G.B.T.Q. activists that they needed a real person to speak for them, not a computer-generated one.
Also gone is Emilia Nowak, the station’s computer-generated “pop culture expert,” who conducted the “interview” with the dead poet. The station first announced the conversation as if it were a real interview, but later clarified that it had been fabricated by a machine.
Michal Rusinek, the head of a foundation that manages the late Nobel Prize winner’s literary estate, said he had given Off Radio Krakow permission to use Ms. Szymborska’s voice for the segment because the poet “had a sense of humor and would have found it funny.”
Felix Simon, the author of a report published in February on the effect of A.I. on journalism, said the Polish experiment had not altered his view that technology “aids news workers rather than replaces them.” For the moment, he added, “there is still reason to believe it will not bring the big jobs wipeout some people fear.”
For the many in Poland who criticize Off Radio Krakow’s flirtation with A.I., the station’s use of computer-generated presenters, though now suspended, has highlighted a grave and immediate danger.
An online petition drafted by Mr. Zaleski, the terminated culture show host, and Mateusz Demski, a fellow presenter who also lost his job, warned that “the case of Off Radio Krakow is an important reminder for the entire industry” and a “dangerous precedent that hits us all.”
The use of A.I.-generated presenters, the petition warned, “is opening the door to a world in which experienced employees associated for years with the media and people employed in creative industries will be replaced by machines.”
Mr. Pulit, the editor in chief, dismissed that as “fake news,” noting that none of the people who had lost their jobs at the radio were full-time employees.
Mr. Zaleski said most of his income had always come from work as a theater director, so he was not particularly upset when he lost his weekly slot on Off Radio Krakow, which paid only $62 per show.
But he said he was appalled at being replaced by a machine-generated substitute. “I was very angry that real, deep talks and real interviews with real people were replaced with something totally fake.”
The cemetery where Szymborska is buried
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/world/europe/poland-radio-station-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dU4.GphB.aQ8KalLf-bcU&smid=em-share
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P.K. DICK ON A WRITER'S JOB: TO BUILD A UNIVERSE THAT DOESN’T FALL APART TWO DAYS LATER
Philip K. Dick is as well-known today for his era-defining science fiction as he is for the series of unusual experiences he had in the spring of 1974, which he dubbed his “exegesis.” [
Occupying the intersection of the scientific, the philosophical, and the mystical, the exegesis shaped Dick’s work for the remainder of his life as he contemplated the grandest and most granular building blocks of existence.
In a 1978 speech titled “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” found in the altogether mind-bending 1995 anthology The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Dick turns his exegesis-driven inquiry to the nature of reality, the mechanisms of media manipulation, and the most steadfast — the only — defense we have against the indignities of manufactured pseudo-reality.’
He begins at the very beginning, by examining what reality actually is:
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.
This, however, is where things get particularly interesting: Dick argues that reality becomes less real the moment we begin discussing it, for the discussion itself precipitates a dynamic manufacturing of what we perceive to be real, rather than a static contemplation of what is, producing a series of “pseudo-realities” that in turn produce pseudo-humans:
“As soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin talk to nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the “theory of limits”). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume’s point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren’t taking what they said seriously.
But I consider that the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.”
In a statement with which Mark Twain would enthusiastically nod in agreement and George Orwell would second, Dick admonishes against the way media manipulators deliberately create pseudo-realities by engineering words:
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer.
TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An electroencephalogram (EEG) of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is so little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located.
Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/ audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labeling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label… you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn’t if he himself does not know. ~
PK Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
THE QUIET REFUSALS
Ultimately, the only antidote to reality-manipulation is good old-fashioned human heroism, that timeless vaccine of courage and resistance, of freedom from fear, of tirelessly enacting “the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer” — in other words, of moral wisdom:
“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”
https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/09/06/how-to-build-a-universe-philip-k-dick/
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LENIN, THE MACHIAVELLIAN MARXIST
Lenin's modified Rolls-Royce
Vladimir Lenin, after a decade in exile, stepped onto the platform at the Finland Railway Station in Petrograd around midnight on 3 April 1917. He did so as a man convinced that he had finally arrived at a meeting with destiny. Certain that it was the beginning of the end of capitalism, he could now lead both Russia and eventually Europe to the promised land of communism, much as Moses had done with the ancient Israelites. This would be the most important moment in human history and he was in the vanguard.
Few shared Lenin’s messianic belief in his destiny, because few had even heard of him. Beyond the inner circle of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, which he led, this austere, unprepossessing, middle-aged, middle-class Marxist intellectual was little known in Russia, where he had been absent for ten years. He had played no part in the failed revolution of 1905 and was abroad during the events of February 1917. Yet by the end of the year he would be leading not only the party, but Russia itself and implementing the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx in the world’s first socialist state, whose official and exclusive ideology would become Marxism-Leninism.
In Petrograd in 1917, theory and practice converged in the person of Lenin, the pilot who guided Russia to socialism.
Although he was a lawyer by training, Lenin rarely practiced law. He did not need to, as he was supported by income from family estates, just as the exiled Marx survived on handouts from his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, a wealthy factory owner. Marx and Lenin were able to live as full-time intellectuals and political activists thanks to the hard work of Russian peasants and English workers. Lenin had the zeal of a religious fanatic, who looked on the theories of Marx as holy writ. According to Marx, communism is the ‘riddle of history solved’ and Lenin credited him with revealing this truth, which illuminated the road leading to emancipation. Lenin saw advancing humanity’s progress along this path as his mission. Against Marx’s expectations, it had begun in Russia.
"death to world imperialism"
Lenin was at the radical end of the spectrum of Russian Marxism. He advocated armed insurrection against the Provisional Government that had been established after the February Revolution, which was dominated by liberals and moderate socialists. He viewed it as a sham and a betrayal of the Revolution. But the Bolsheviks, his own party, were opposed to insurrection against the new government and, after Lenin’s tireless campaign to change their minds, only voted for open rebellion in October. He played a decisive role in pushing his reluctant party towards an uncompromising policy of opposition to the Provisional Government, which was inherently weak, torn by divisions and wracked by crises.
Lenin followed the advice of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘That which is falling should also be pushed.’ As soon as he arrived in the capital, Lenin published his ‘April Theses’ in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, urging ‘no support’ for the government and calling for soviets (workers’ councils) to take power from the Duma. ‘All power to the soviets!’, he demanded, even though the Bolsheviks were still a minority within them.
The government would probably have collapsed even in Lenin’s absence. It was already fatally wounded when the Bolsheviks pounced on it, which is why the October Revolution was relatively bloodless. As the historian Adam Ulam has written: ‘The Bolsheviks did not seize power in this year of revolutions. They picked it up.’ Lenin’s historical significance lies in his picking up of power and his use of it to establish a new socialist state, rather than bringing down the government. He had shaped a determined, centralized, disciplined, ideologically committed party of militant Marxist radicals, ready to strike at the decisive moment. ‘It is not in the maker of the revolution that we can see Lenin’s genius in its fullest’, Ulam writes of October 1917. ‘Far greater is his achievement as its conqueror.’
Lenin was an idealist in his goals and a Machiavellian in his political tactics, for whom the use of force was an essential element of effective statecraft. He hated ‘sentimentalism’ in politics, which he believed required a cold, flinty detachment of the kind practiced by Maximilien Robespierre during the most violent phase of the French Revolution. Lenin admired Robespierre’s fanaticism and willingness to shed blood for the revolutionary cause without flinching; he referred to the Bolsheviks as the ‘Jacobins of the 20th century’.
In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli observes that successful rulers combine the cunning of a fox, which astutely discerns the key moment to act, with the courage of a lion, which is able to act boldly and ruthlessly on that knowledge. These dual qualities served Lenin particularly well in October 1917. He was a Machiavellian Marxist in the mold of an ‘armed prophet’, praised as the highest form of statesmanship in The Prince.
Central to Lenin’s view of revolutionary political agency is the idea of a vanguard party. It is one of his most important and controversial contributions to Marxist theory. Although Marx had written that the ‘emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’, Lenin thought that it was unrealistic to expect them to spontaneously rise up against their oppressors, given the forces deployed against them. He assigned, therefore, a pivotal role to a small, radical vanguard party to provide the working class with the leadership needed to galvanize latent discontent and steer the revolution along the right path. This vanguard of the proletariat would be a small cadre of totally committed, full-time activists and Marxist intellectuals, who would harness and direct the revolutionary energy of the workers.
Lenin himself was the epitome of the activist intellectual. The Bolsheviks under his leadership were the perfect vehicle for this elite to fulfill its historical role as the spearhead of revolution. When Russia’s Provisional Government fell and a political vacuum opened up in Petrograd in October 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were ready and able to fill it. Having ‘picked up’ the state, Lenin set about reconstituting it according to Marxist principles, thereby shaping so much of the political character of the 20th century.
Lenin was accused by some of his critics of setting up a party state, substituting the elite, mostly bourgeois, vanguard party for the actual working class, an expedient denounced by his political opponents as ‘substitutionism’. The Bolsheviks, renamed the Communist Party in 1919, eventually became the only legally sanctioned party in Russia under Lenin. The short-lived Constituent Assembly (the successor to the Duma) was dismissed in 1918, after the Bolsheviks won only 25 per cent of the votes in the November elections. In reply, Lenin would say that this was both necessary to eventually achieve communism and consistent with the doctrines of Marx, which called for dictatorship.
Marx believed that the failure of capitalism was inevitable; it would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions, leading to revolution. A ‘battle for democracy’ would then follow in its wake, where the working class would seize the bourgeois state and make it a workers’ state that would use its power to destroy the remnants of capitalism and abolish class. Marx called this necessary interim stage on the path to true communism the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Only when its destructive work was complete would it be possible to progress to pure communism: a form of classless society where spontaneous cooperation and fellowship would eliminate the need for a state, since force is unnecessary in the absence of class conflict. When class disappeared the state would simply ‘wither away’ into irrelevance. But for Marx and Lenin, there could only be one route to a stateless communist society: dictatorship.
Marx said little more than this about the path to communism in the thousands of pages of his writings. Lenin, by contrast, wrote extensively about the dictatorship of the proletariat and gave it a centrality lacking in Marx’s writings, calling it ‘the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested’. His most important book of political theory, The State and Revolution (1917), grew out of a debate he had with his fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin over the existence of the state after a proletarian revolution.
Bukharin chose to emphasize the idealistic ‘withering away’ aspect, whereas Lenin focused on the necessity of a dictatorial, post-revolutionary state to forcibly ‘suppress the oppressors’ and ‘expropriate the expropriators’. After the real Revolution (the Great October Revolution of 1917), much destructive work remained to be done to dismantle the capitalist system, which could only be achieved by means of a dictatorship. As Lenin’s Bolshevik colleague Leon Trotsky said in defense of the Marxist regime established after October 1917: ‘We have trampled the principles of democracy for the sake of the loftier principles of a social revolution.’
The Marxist state that Lenin established in 1917 was not, and was never intended to be, communist, since communism would have no state. Like Marx, he had an entirely negative view of the state, which he defined as ‘an organization of violence for the suppression of some class’. Where class existed, a state must exist as the enforcing arm of the dominant class to oppress subordinate classes; that is its purpose. Just as the capitalist state is a tool for oppressing the working class, the post-revolutionary workers’ state would suppress the capitalists until both they and the remains of their system had been eradicated. Only then would humanity be ready to move to pure communism.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was the transitional stage between capitalism and communism that Marx and Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thereafter the practical problem for Marxist-Leninist theory was that the Soviet state, far from gradually ‘withering away’, persisted for decades and only grew in power and scope, until it finally collapsed completely in 1989, much as the tsarist regime had done seven decades earlier.
Marx never specified how long the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat should last, leaving Soviet leaders, starting with Lenin, free to invoke his concept to justify the persistence of the powerful state that they controlled on behalf of the workers.
The institution of dictatorship first arose in republican Rome, where provision was made under special circumstances for a ruler to wield absolute power temporarily in emergencies, when only an unchecked executive authority could respond effectively to urgent threats, such as wars, natural disasters and plagues.
When Lenin died in 1924, the Soviet state that he had established was still in its infancy; it would last a further six decades. The longer it lasted, the more awkward and pressing became the question: how long should a ‘temporary’ dictatorship last? And why was ‘pure communism’ nowhere in sight?
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/lenin-machiavellian-marxist?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=07101bc3bb-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-07101bc3bb-1214148&mc_cid=07101bc3bb
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THE LION AND THE FOX
A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.
The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, "Hello, there, old top.”
Acquaintance with evil blinds us to its dangers.
The Lion and the Fox, by Frederick Stuart Church, c. 1878.
https://read.gov/aesop/071.html
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THE SEGOVIA AQUEDUCT
Here is the Segovia Aqueduct, located in Spain, a marvel of Roman engineering built during the reign of Emperor Trajan between 98 and 117 AD.
This aqueduct extends 2,388 feet and rises with 165 arches, each more than 30 feet high, and is built entirely from 24,000 blocks of dark granite from Guadarrama, without the use of mortar.
This construction technique showcases the precision and durability of ancient Roman engineering.
After many studies of the Segovia Aqueduct by specialists, some information has been confirmed, including that the aqueduct is connected to a spring 17 kilometers away from the city called Fuenfria, and it has 166 arches with a height of about 28 meters.
It is made of giant rocks, and there is no type of cement to strengthen the structure between the bricks.
The aqueduct fought time and weather without anything connecting the giant “bricks," so the people of Segovia consider that the aqueduct was not built by humans, and that it is in itself a miracle. Currently, a statue of the Virgin has been placed in the depths of the aqueduct.
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THE “MONKEY TYPING SHAKESPEARE” ARGUMENT AGAINST EVOLUTION
If the monkey strikes 1 million keys per second at random (it’s a really fast monkey and a really, really good typewriter okay?) you expect the monkey to type the phrase "to be or not to be" once in about 1 trillion years. This is all without punctuation, no possibility of hitting numbers and no upper/lowercase. It gets rapidly worse if we include those.
But what if, hear me out, what if once the monkey hits a “t”, that is preserved. All other input is erased, until the monkey hits an “o”. Then “to” is preserved, until it hits the spacebar. How does that change the estimate?
Well, then the estimate to get it right once is 26*18, or just 468 keystrokes. At one keystrike strike per second it should be done in about 8 minutes. We slowed the monkey down by a factor of 1 million and the time needed to write the phrase went from almost 80 times the age of the universe to about the time needed to write this answer. That’s quite an improvement. If the correct input was always preserved and incorrect input always discarded a single monkey could conceivably write down all of Shakespeares’ works in about six years of typing non-stop.
This is how evolution works. It preserves small changes that are beneficial and discards the ones that aren’t. An eye just evolving from nothing by sheer random chance is essentially impossible. But the eye did not appear out of nothing. It evolved from earlier, simpler forms. Useful improvements were preserved, useless or harmful ones discarded, until we got to the pretty decent seeing apparatus we have now. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Andrew Forrest:
It’s funny how they seem to always miss the “by means of natural selection” part.
Witold Ferenz:
It is a constant source of confusion for anti-evolution people, that they apparently know that mutations are random — but are missing a crucial second part, that selection is NOT random… far from it.
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THE QUEEN AND THE COSMONAUT
Queen Elizabeth II met Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at a reception in Buckingham Palace. Gagarin, a simple man unaccustomed to the elaborate protocol of court, was offered tea with lemon.
After having drank the tea, Gagarin fished out the lemon with his spoon and… ate it. The members of court and diplomats there gathered were aghast — such “bad manners”, eating lemon slices after having consumed the tea. Queen Elizabeth, however, did not bat an eye. Noting Gagarin’s discomfort she, too, took out the lemon and ate it, with a smile.
The Queen had a way of putting people at ease. She wasn’t as rigid, stern and strict as people often make her out to be — she was remarkably human, and sensitive to her surroundings. She adhered to strict principle but was unafraid of breaking or bending rules when she saw fit.
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FEE REQUIRED FOR SEEING MARX’S TOMB
It’s ironic that the founder of marxism, Karl Marx — the fervent fighter for abolishing private property — was buried at a private cemetery where one has to pay a fee to visit.
Ticket prices are £14 ($ 18) for adults, £6 ($8) for children ages 8–17.
Marx purchased the site for his grave while he was still alive.
He declined a free public burial site and instead paid to be buried in the prestigious Highgate Cemetery in London. So, even in death, Marx is surrounded by rich, powerful, and famous people.
Entry to see Lenin’s body is technically free, but in reality, you probably won’t get in, unless you purchase a tour of the Red Square, priced at 700 rub. ($7), as the mausoleum is only open for a few hours a day on certain days.
The country that worships a 100-year-old mummy of a murderer of millions at its shrine on the central square. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Jan Krusat:
The mausoleum was Stalin’s idea. Lenin wanted to be buried beside his mother.
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MOSCOW AS A POTEMKIN VILLAGE
I took this photo the other day in central Moscow, the most developed area of Russia. At the entrance to Sklifosofskyy Hospital, a woman is pushing a patient in a wheelchair up the ramp.
There’s no railing and the grade is too steep to be able to climb up on their own so somebody has to accompany patients in wheel chairs.
To the right is a yellow taxi cab of Moskvich brand. It’s a Chinese JAC Motors model pretending to be a Russian made car.
It is the same deal for the legendary Moscow Metro with its beautiful stations. You have to call up a special squad to carry you up and down the stairs and escalators (there are no elevators) as you contemplate bronze statues, chandeliers, and amazing mosaics on the wall.
There’s a shortage of spare parts due to the departure of all the car brands and insurance companies are legally permitted to repair cars with used parts without the client's consent regardless of its quality.
Therefore it makes more sense not to insure your car and conduct repairs at your expense by trying to get hold of new car parts.
Potemkin ramps and Potemkin import substitute cars and Potemkin car parts allow Russians to inflate egos and remain hostile to outside world that has nothing to offer that people here don’t already have or cannot get.
I think below this veneer of self-importance lies deep insecurity from the common knowledge that Russia cannot develop material culture outside of the Western civilization and remains dependent on it regardless if it’s friendly or hostile towards them.
Through my window I often watch soldiers on rotation from the battlefront in Ukraine. At the beginning of the war, they wore worn out uniforms and looked like hobos.
Nowadays, they are decked out in brand new camouflage pants and shirts, knockoffs of US Army and walk around with airs of self-importance as someones who are standing up to mighty NATO. They’re always in the company of some random dudes or, in this case, a city maintenance worker.
They make enough money from the war to be shielded from rampant inflation and live in a bubble that there’s not going to be any consequences for their actions. ~ Misha Firer (“Brutalski”), Quora
Leonid R:
Putin is extremely disappointed in “the ungrateful elites” and decided to create a new “upper class” in Russia — patriotic SMO veterans. New city mayors, governors and other “professional” politicians will be veterans, regardless of their leadership qualifications.
Erin Jeffrey:
The question is how do they GET DOWN those wheelchair ramps? So steep you can die there.
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WHY RELIGION HASN’T WITHERED AWAY
In 1966, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’.
Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularization as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy.
Then something closer to the opposite happened.
Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularization, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.
To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. Census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia.
Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularization thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief. The percentage of atheists in the US in 2017 was at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularization thesis.
Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularization – that science would be a secularizing force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods.
A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’
The story of science and secularization becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernization. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularization. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularizing agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.
Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic. As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political program, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.
The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centers on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.
In brief, global secularization is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularization’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularization turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?
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Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.
The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.
Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa.
Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularize science.
The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularization, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularization theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice.
Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.
So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.
Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-religion-is-not-going-away-and-science-will-not-destroy-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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A SEA CREATURE THAT CAN REVERSE ITS AGE
comb jellyWhen you look in the mirror and wish you were a decade younger, what you’re really asking for is reverse development, or reverse aging. Though most animals, including humans, are born, age, and eventually die, some species can break away from this traditional lifecycle: they seemingly defy age and revert to younger versions of themselves.
Turritopsis dohrnii, dubbed the immortal jellyfish, is the best-known of such species. A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, has revealed a new member of this exclusive club with extraordinary abilities: the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, also called the comb jelly. Now, scientists are wondering how many more “time-traveler” species there might really be.
“The work challenges our understanding of early animal development and body plans, opening new avenues for the study of life cycle plasticity and rejuvenation. The fact that we have found a new species that uses this peculiar ‘time-travel machine’ raises fascinating questions about how spread this capacity is across the animal tree of life,” Joan J. Soto-Angel, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen who co-wrote the study, said in a statement.
An unintentional discovery is at the origin of this study. Soto-Angel began investigating the topic after a larval ctenophore suddenly appeared in the place of an adult ctenophore in a tank in his lab. As it turned out, however, it was the same individual. Soto-Angel and his colleagues consequently began trying to reproduce the scenario that might trigger reverse development and discovered that an adult ctenophore can, in fact, revert to a larval stage when experiencing extreme stress.
“Witnessing how they slowly transition to a typical cydippid larva as if they were going back in time, was simply fascinating,” Soto-Angel explained. “Over several weeks, they not only reshaped their morphological features, but also had a completely different feeding behavior, typical of a cydippid larva.”
Comb jellies are ancient animals—in fact, some research suggests that they might be the first animal to have ever existed, emerging roughly 700 million years ago—leading the researchers to suggest that reverse development might be a primordial ability.
“This is a very exciting time for us,” Paul Burkhardt, a researcher at the University of Bergen who also co-wrote the study, said in the statement. “This fascinating finding will open the door for many important discoveries. It will be interesting to reveal the molecular mechanism driving reverse development, and what happens to the animal’s nerve net during this process.”
The two researchers suggest that life cycle plasticity—an organism’s ability to change aspects of its biology when it experiences specific environmental stimuli—might be more present among animals than scientists realized, according to the statement. As for humans, unfortunately, all the creams and products in the world have yet to achieve such enviable anti-aging results. However, future research in developmental biology and aging now has a new example in the animal kingdom to draw inspiration from.
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-accidentally-discover-a-sea-creature-that-can-reverse-its-age-2000521598?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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LIFE EXPECTANCY IN THE U.S. CORRELATES WITH ETHNICITY AND WHERE YOU LIVE
Life expectancy in the United States varies by more than 20 years depending on your race and ethnicity and where you live, according to new research. The authors call the level of health disparities "truly alarming.”
In the study, published Thursday in The Lancet, researchers analyzed death records from the National Vital Statistics System and population estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics from 2000 to 2021.
Large disparities in life expectancy were apparent throughout the study period but grew more substantial over time, particularly during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors noted.
"The extent and magnitude of health disparities in American society are truly alarming in a country with the wealth and resources of the USA," senior author Christopher J.L. Murray said in a news release. "These disparities reflect the unequal and unjust distribution of resources and opportunities that have profound consequences on well-being and longevity, especially in marginalized populations.”
In 2000, life expectancy ranged from an average of 70.5 years for Americans at the lowest end to 83.1 years for those in the highest group — a difference of 12.6 years. The gap widened to 13.9 years in 2010, jumped to 18.9 years in 2020, and now in the latest data, 20.4 years in 2021.
During those two decades, the study says, "US life expectancy has shifted in the wrong direction, falling further behind that of most other peer wealthy nations.”
In 2000, the groups with the lowest average life expectancy included Black Americans in non-metropolitan and low-income counties in the South, as well as in highly segregated metropolitan areas; and American Indian or Alaska Native individuals in the West. The group with the highest average life expectancy was Asian Americans. 
Japanese grandmother and grandchild
Between 2000 and 2010, life expectancy increased for all groups except for American Indian or Alaska Native individuals in the West, who saw a about a 1-year decline. For White and Latino populations, outcomes varied depending on the locations where they lived. For example, White Americans in low-income counties in Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi Valley had lower life expectancies than those in other areas.
By 2021, after the impacts of the pandemic, the gaps grew substantially wider, with Asian American life expectancy averaging 84 years while American Indian or Alaska Native people in the West averaged 63.6 years.
Life expectancy among non-Hispanic Black Americans fell to 71.0 years, from 74.8 just two years earlier, with significant variations depending on where they lived.
"During the COVID-19 pandemic, historically marginalized populations experienced the highest mortality rates and horrific losses in life expectancy," the authors wrote.
To help address these disparities, Murray said, "Policymakers must take collective action to invest in equitable health care, education, and employment opportunities and challenge the systemic barriers that create and perpetuate these inequities so that all Americans can live long, healthy lives regardless of where they live and their race, ethnicity, or income.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/life-expectancy-gap-20-years/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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OPTIMAL WAYS TO EXERCISE
Regular exercise is among the most important things a person can do to maintain good health and increase longevity. This is a real bummer for people like me, who are both innately unathletic and have sedentary jobs.
When you don’t include exercise as part of your routine, it’s hard to know how to start. Fortunately, researchers are increasingly understanding how exercise affects the body, and, in doing so, finding smarter ways for people to exercise smarter. Whether you’re trying to get back into a regular exercise habit after a pandemic lull or getting started for the first time...ever, here’s what experts say about the optimal ways to exercise.
How much exercise should adults get every week?
The CDC recommends adults accumulate 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity every week. In addition, the CDC recommends two days of muscle-strengthening activity.
These recommendations echo the World Health Organization’s guidelines, which suggest at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity a week or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity a week; or roughly equivalent combinations of moderate and vigorous exercise. The WHO also suggests two days of muscle-strengthening activity every week.
What type of exercise is best for maintaining good health?
Stephen Ball, a professor of physical therapy at the University of Missouri, tells Inverse that he knows some people might feel like those recommendations require lots of time in the gym. And that might not be appealing to everyone.
“The good news is that many alternatives to structured exercise help reap these same health benefits. Research consistently demonstrates that [physical activity], basically any large bodily movement, whether it is structured or not, is beneficial,” Ball says. “The human body doesn’t know if you are performing ‘exercise’ or if you are mowing the grass. The body knows the energy requirement has increased. Many activities of daily living can substitute for exercise if the intensity is high enough.”
To determine if the activity in question puts you in the moderate zone, Ball recommends the “talk test.” If you are performing an activity of moderate intensity, you will be able to have a conversation during the exercise but won’t be able to sing a song.
Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity, lifestyle, and population health at the University of Sydney, tells Inverse that the most recent research he and his colleagues published “suggests that vigorous-intensity physical activity, in particular, is very potent, even when [it] is done as part of daily living, and in very brief bursts lasting 1 to 2 minutes or less, what we call ‘vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity.’”
Don’t sleep on the strength-promoting exercise, Stamatakis says. He was one of the authors of a 2018 study the WHO used when developing their guidelines. That study “concluded that meeting the strength promoting exercise guideline is as important as meeting the aerobic physical activity guidelines,” Stamatakis says.
What is more important: exercise frequency or duration?
Ken Nosaka, Director of Exercise and Sports Science at Edith Cowan University in Australia’s School of Medicine and Sports Science, tells Inverse that his research suggests it’s better to do “more frequent exercises than doing a large volume of exercise once a week,” he says. “Our study showed that even six ‘eccentric’ contractions of the elbow flexors a day increased muscle strength when it is performed five days a week for four weeks.”
“The human body doesn’t know if you are performing ‘exercise’ or if you are mowing the grass. The body knows the energy requirement has increased. Many activities of daily living can substitute for exercise if the intensity is high enough.”
“Eccentric” exercises, Nosaka explains, activate and lengthen muscles, often through slow, controlled movements. For example, if you’re holding a weight to do a bicep curl when you lift the weight towards your chest, that’s a concentric contraction. An eccentric contraction is when you slowly lower the weight to your side. These are excellent for building muscle strength, and Nosaka’s work suggests relatively few repetitions of these exercises throughout the day can result in significant gains in muscle strength.
These may be especially useful to people with sedentary jobs, Nosaka says, as there are ways to incorporate eccentric exercises into their workday.
He suggests standing up every 30 minutes or hour and moving for 30 seconds to one minute. “When you go to the toilet, it’s the best time for exercise!” he says.
Strength training is only part of the equation, however. Ball says incorporating aerobic exercise, in which heart rate and respiration are increased for a sustained period of time, as happens with exercises or swimming laps, or anaerobic exercise, in which respiration and heart rate are elevated in short bursts, like when a person is sprinting, into your schedule three to five days a week is a great start. When it comes to duration, consider the intensity of the exercise. “For higher intensity exercise, shorten the duration and vice versa,” he says.
Ideally, Stamatakis says, people should aim to be active every day or nearly every day. “Some benefits of physical activity may be compromised for people who move very little during the week and try to do a long session on the weekend,” he says. “Of course, doing this would still be much better than being sedentary on the weekend as well.”
For people with sedentary jobs or who may have gotten out of the habit of regular exercise, Stamatakis advises trying to become “movement-aware” and creating as many opportunities as possible to move more in daily life. Then set realistic targets.
For example, he says, someone who sits all day and doesn’t do any physical activity could start with a goal of taking a brisk, 10-minute walk every day.
“Once this becomes a habit, try to increase to 15 minutes a day and add two to three short bursts of vigorous-intensity activity a day, such as choosing stairs instead of [elevators] or carrying heavy shopping [bags] for 100 meters [about 0.62 miles] or so,” he says. “By this time, the total amount of physical activity would be very close to meeting WHO’s lower recommendations. Anything above this would be a bonus.”
The fundamental principle is to incorporate whatever physical activity you can into your daily routine and turn it into a long-term habit. From there, you can set more ambitious goals.
What are some of the most effective exercises?
Ball says that high-intensity interval training, which consists of short bursts of intense exercise interspersed with low-intensity recovery, may be the most efficient for busy people. Strictly speaking, it gives people the most bang for their buck: Because it’s high-intensity, you can get more physical benefits in a shorter amount of time.
“As a rule of thumb, activities that employ large muscle groups that raise the heart rate or make breathing harder are better,” Stamatakis says.
“These are physiological signs of higher-intensity movement, provided that occur frequently and regularly, meaning that the body is preparing to adapt to such physical demands by becoming fitter.”
High-intensity interval training, which consists of short bursts of intense exercise interspersed with low-intensity recovery, may be the most efficient for busy people.
Still, if that doesn’t sound appealing or intimidating, the experts say something is definitely better than nothing.
“All types of incidental physical activity and exercise have their merit and play a role in maintaining good health,” Stamatakis says.
Ball agrees, adding, “modest amounts of moderate activity can improve health. Activity comes in many forms and doesn’t have to be structured exercise.”
More important than any specific type of exercise, Stamatakis says, is finding something you can incorporate into your daily routine and keep doing it long term.
In other words, the best way to exercise is to find something that you’d be willing to do on a regular basis, and then do it.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/does-the-best-workout-exist-exercise-scientists-all-agree-on-one-thing?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
ending on beauty:
VISITATION
I would stare for hours,
then, at these visitors.
from somewhere beyond
the rainbow’s end.
Less seer now, I see they are birds,
and I am the Visitor.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
