Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back. ~ Marcus Aurelius (reigned from 161 to 180 CE)
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WASHING THE CORPSE
restlessly in the dark, the stranger
and since they knew nothing about his life,
dripping upon his face. The other stood
was trying to let them know he no longer thirsted.
And he did let them know. With a short cough,
shadows reeled and staggered as if bound in a net.
the night was pitiless. And one without a name
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Oriana:
Even a single reading of this poem is likely to make the reader remember forever this image:
dripping upon his face. The other stood
was trying to let them know he no longer thirsted.
And he did let them know.
Thus the attempt to treat the dead body as a thing by leaving a vinegar-soaked sponged on the dead person’s face brings about a kind of unspoken rebuke for this indignity. It is the lifeless body that still has the power to give commands.
The two women are also entangled in mortality:
. . . their thick
shadows reeled and staggered as if bound
in a net.
Thus the women are not in any way “superior” to the corpse by virtue of being still alive.
I wonder if there is here an indirect reference to Christ’s crucifixion: Jesus says that he thirsts, and a sponge soaked in vinegar instead of water is lifted to his mouth. But that’s at best a secondary association. In Rilke’s poem, the dead body is Everyman. It could be us. We feel the vinegar drip on our face. That’s why the image is so painful and unforgettable.
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RILKE AS A PERFORMER
We do, however, have a vivid description of Rilke as a performer. Here is Marie von Thurn and Taxis' account of a reading he gave at her home, Lautschin Castle, in Bohemia in July 1911:
Rilke read in a very characteristic manner, always standing up, in a voice capable of infinite modulations, which sometimes rose to an amazingly sonorous volume, in a strange, singing tone that strongly stressed the rhythm.
It was entirely different from anything one had ever heard -- startling at first, then wonderfully moving. I have never heard verse spoken more solemnly and, at the same time, with greater simplicity; one could have listened to him forever.
It was remarkable what long pauses he made. Then he would slowly bow his head, almost closing his heavy eyelids, and one could hear the silence, as one hears the pauses of a Beethoven sonata.
(My thanks to Kerry Shawn Keys)
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WHY WE ARE ATTRACTED TO SOME PEOPLE BUT NOT OTHERS
Sometimes life’s most meaningful relationships grow from the briefest of connections. Like when you go to a party and meet someone wearing your favorite band’s T-shirt, or who laughs at the same jokes as you, or who grabs that unpopular snack you alone (or so you thought) love. One small, shared interest sparks a conversation—that’s my favorite, too!—and blossoms into lasting affection.
This is called the similarity-attraction effect: we generally like people who are like us. Now, new findings from a Boston University researcher have uncovered one reason why.
In a series of studies, Charles Chu, a BU Questrom School of Business assistant professor of management and organizations, tested the conditions that shape whether we feel attracted to—or turned off by—each other. He found one crucial factor was what psychologists call self-essentialist reasoning, where people imagine they have some deep inner core or essence that shapes who they are.
Chu discovered that when someone believes an essence drives their interests, likes, and dislikes, they assume it’s the same for others, too; if they find someone with one matching interest, they reason that person will share their broader worldview. The findings were published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“If we had to come up with an image of our sense of self, it would be this nugget, an almost magical core inside that emanates out and causes what we can see and observe about people and ourselves,” says Chu, who published the paper with Brian S. Lowery of Stanford Graduate School of Business. “We argue that believing people have an underlying essence allows us to assume or infer that when we see someone who shares a single characteristic, they must share my entire deeply rooted essence as well.”
But Chu’s research suggests this rush to embrace an indefinable, fundamental similarity with someone because of one or two shared interests may be based on flawed thinking—and that it could restrict who we find a connection with. Working alongside the pull of the similarity-attraction effect is a countering push: we dislike those who we don’t think are like us, often because of one small thing—they like that politician, or band, or book, or TV show we loathe.
“We are all so complex,” says Chu. “But we only have full insight into our own thoughts and feelings, and the minds of others are often a mystery to us. What this work suggests is that we often fill in the blanks of others’ minds with our own sense of self and that can sometimes lead us into some unwarranted assumptions.”
Trying to Understand Other People
To examine why we’re attracted to some people and not to others, Chu set up four studies, each designed to tease out different aspects of how we make friends—or foes.
In the first study, participants were told about a fictional person, Jamie, who held either complementary or contradictory attitudes to them. After asking participants their views on one of five topics—abortion, capital punishment, gun ownership, animal testing, and physician-assisted suicide—Chu asked how they felt about Jamie, who either agreed or disagreed with them on the target issue. They were also quizzed about the roots of their identity to measure their affinity with self-essentialist reasoning.
Chu found the more a participant believed their view of the world was shaped by an essential core, the more they felt connected to the Jamie who shared their views on one issue.
In a second study, he looked at whether that effect persisted when the target topics were less substantive. Rather than digging into whether people agreed with Jamie on something as divisive as abortion, Chu asked participants to estimate the number of blue dots on a page, then categorized them—and the fictional Jamie—as over- or under-estimators. Even with this slim connection, the findings held: the more someone believed in an essential core, the closer they felt to Jamie as a fellow over- or under-estimator.
“I found that both with pretty meaningful dimensions of similarity as well as with arbitrary, minimal similarities, people who are higher in their belief that they have an essence are more likely to be attracted to these similar others as opposed to dissimilar others,” says Chu.
In two companion studies, Chu began disrupting this process of attraction, stripping out the influence of self-essentialist reasoning. In one experiment, he labeled attributes (such as liking a certain painting) as either essential or nonessential; in another, he told participants that using their essence to judge someone else could lead to an inaccurate assessment of others.
“It breaks this essentialist reasoning process, it cuts off people’s ability to assume that what they’re seeing is reflective of a deeper similarity,” says Chu. “One way I did that was to remind people that this dimension of similarity is actually not connected or related to your essence at all; the other way was by telling people that using their essence as a way to understand other people is not very effective.”
Negotiating Psychology—and Politics—at Work
Chu says there’s a key tension in his findings that shape their application in the real world. On the one hand, we’re all searching for our community—it’s fun to hang out with people who share our hobbies and interests, love the same music and books as us, don’t disagree with us on politics. “This type of thinking is a really useful, heuristic psychological strategy,” says Chu. “It allows people to see more of themselves in new people and strangers.” But it also excludes people, sets up divisions and boundaries—sometimes on the flimsiest of grounds.
“When you hear a single fact or opinion being expressed that you either agree or disagree with, it really warrants taking an additional breath and just slowing down,” he says. “Not necessarily taking that single piece of information and extrapolating on it, using this type of thinking to go to the very end, that this person is fundamentally good and like me or fundamentally bad and not like me.”
Chu, whose background mixes the study of organizational behavior and psychology, teaches classes on negotiation at Questrom and says his research has plenty of implications in the business world, particularly when it comes to making deals.
“I define negotiations as conversations, and agreements and disagreements, about how power and resources should be distributed between people,” he says. “What inferences do we make about the other people we’re having these conversations with? How do we experience and think about agreement versus disagreement? How do we interpret when someone gets more and someone else gets less? These are all really central questions to the process of negotiation.”
But in a time when political division has invaded just about every sphere of our lives, including workplaces, the applications of Chu’s findings go way beyond corporate horse trading. Managing staff, collaborating on projects, team bonding—all are shaped by the judgments we make about each other. Self-essentialist reasoning may even influence society’s distribution of resources, says Chu: who we consider worthy of support, who gets funds and who doesn’t, could be driven by “this belief that people’s outcomes are caused by something deep inside of them.” That’s why he advocates pushing pause before judging someone who, at first blush, doesn’t seem like you.
“There are ways for us to go through life and meet other people, and form impressions of other people, without constantly referencing ourselves,” he says. “If we’re constantly going around trying to figure out, who’s like me, who’s not like me? that’s not always the most productive way of trying to form impressions of other people. People are a lot more complex than we give them credit for.”
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/the-science-of-attraction-why-do-we-fall-in-love/
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CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS TELL A STORY ABOUT US
Last weekend we delighted in the annual ritual of preparing our home for the festive season. With a personal preference for understated elegance, I like to keep things simple. My go-to choices are classic fairy lights, ornaments, and baubles, all within a carefully curated color scheme of silver and purple. Yet, I soon realized this wasn’t going to cut it. My 4-year-old helper kept asking for inflatable snowmen and life-sized, twinkly reindeer!
While I haven’t (quite) given in just yet, my daughter’s demands led me to reflect on the importance of holiday decorations. Reviewing literature on the topic, I stumbled across an interesting study from 1989, which suggests that holiday decorations are far more than festive embellishments. Decorations may be sending quiet messages about the homeowners and provide insights into their personality and sociability.
Christmas decorations as social signals
In a psychology experiment about holiday decorations, researchers from the University of Utah asked 58 undergraduate students to evaluate a set of 16 photographs, depicting different American homes and front yards. Photos included homes with or without Christmas decorations and homes belonging to residents that had self-reported either low or high levels of social interactions with their neighbors. Participants were asked to rate the sociability of the homeowners based on the photos, noting cues like decorations, upkeep, and the overall "lived-in" look. They were also asked to provide open-ended comments explaining their impressions. The study produced some interesting findings.
Decorations as social cues. Participants consistently rated homes with Christmas decorations as more sociable and cohesive with their neighbors than undecorated ones. Decorations seemed to enhance the home's “warmth,” giving an impression of a family that values connection and community involvement.
A surprising twist: Unsociable homeowners shine brighter. Interestingly, homes belonging to less socially active residents were rated as more open and sociable when decorated than the homes of their more social counterparts. For these less sociable homeowners, decorations appeared to act as an invitation—a way to express a desire to connect with neighbors or signal openness despite limited interactions.
Additionally, it was found that participants’ impressions weren’t formed by decorations alone. Elements such as a home’s upkeep, its “lived-in” appearance (like visible footprints or open curtains), and its overall neatness played a significant role. Decorations amplified these impressions, but they were just one piece of a broader picture. A well-maintained home with thoughtfully placed decorations appeared welcoming, while a messy or neglected home didn’t benefit as much from festive flourishes.
Finally, one group of homeowners received particular attention in the study: so-called “residents in transition.” These were people who didn’t know many of their neighbours but expressed a desire to form connections. By decorating their homes, these individuals effectively communicated openness and an interest in neighbourhood integration. Their efforts didn’t go unnoticed—research participants consistently described their homes as more sociable and inviting than those of non-decorating, unsociable residents.
How to harness the power of holiday decorations
The study’s findings offer several practical insights for anyone looking to foster a sense of community through their home’s appearance this Christmas:
Deck the halls with purpose: Festive decorations signal sociability, but they work best when paired with thoughtful touches like an inviting entryway or neatly trimmed landscaping.
Keep it lived-in: Open curtains, visible signs of activity (like cars or lights), and personalized touches (such as wreaths or garden ornaments) can make a home feel approachable and warm.
Neatness counts: A clean, well-maintained exterior communicates care and attention, which observers link to friendliness.
Stay consistent: Decorations are most effective when they align with other cues, such as the home’s design and upkeep, to create a cohesive message of warmth and openness.
Beyond the lights: What this means for communities
While the findings stem from a relatively small piece of research published over 30 years ago, it is likely that the results still hold true today. Decorations appear to act as a bridge, fostering connections in neighborhoods where people might otherwise remain distant. For communities, encouraging festive traditions like coordinated street decorations might even strengthen bonds and create a sense of belonging.
For individuals, the message is clear: what you put on display matters. Whether it’s Christmas lights, a front porch swing, or simply a well-maintained yard, these visible signals help shape how others perceive you and your home’s role in the neighborhood. Christmas decorations don’t just bring joy; they tell a story about the people behind the door—a story of community, connection, and sometimes, the hope for more. So, as you hang your lights this year, consider the message they send and the connections they might help you build. I think I may just have to re-think my own approach to seasonal decorations and add a few additional twinkles to our front door.
Happy decorating—and happy holidays!
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/stretching-theory/202412/the-surprising-psychology-of-holiday-decorations
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THE MOUNTAIN OF BISON SKULLS
The photo of two men standing on a mountain of bison skulls is well known as a symbol of hunting during the colonization of the US. But there's a more sinister story behind it – with a surprising modern message.
Two men in black suits and bowler hats pose with a gravity-defying mound of bison skulls. The 19th-Century image is disturbing – thousands upon thousands of skulls piled in neat rows, towering towards the sky. But beneath the macabre first impression, the photo holds a darker secret still. These skulls aren't just the product of overzealous hunting in the US – and those men aren't hunters, either.
The skulls, experts say, are the evidence of an organized, carefully calculated campaign to eradicate the bison, deprive Native Americans of a vital resource, and drive the few communities that survived onto small reservations where they could be controlled by the newly arrived white settlers.
"This image is an example of colonial celebration of destruction," says Tasha Hubbard, a Cree filmmaker who is an associate professor at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Hubbard describes the extermination of the bison as a "strategic" part of colonial expansion.
The colonial mass slaughter of bison dealt a lasting blow to tribes that relied on the animal for sustenance. In the aftermath, nations reliant on bison fared measurably, permanently worse than nations that were never bison-reliant, for example suffering from higher child mortality than those other nations, according to a comparative study. The study concludes that the loss set the bison nations on a fundamentally different trajectory that continues to this day.
Native Americans had hunted bison for centuries. For bison nations, it was part of their primarily nomadic culture and the animals provided them with vital sustenance – meat for food, hides for shelter and clothing, and bones for tools. (In common parlance and historical sources, the animals are often referred to as buffalo, as that's what early settlers called them – though the two are in fact different.)
Indigenous peoples across North America relied on the animal, Hubbard says. "So to remove that keystone species was to weaponize starvation against indigenous peoples: to weaken us in order to control us and remove us from our territories.”
Despite the bisons' usefulness, estimates put the Native American hunters' take at less than 100,000 a year, hardly making a dent on the early 1800s population of between 30 and 60 million bison.
By 1 January 1889, there were just 456 pure-breed bison left in the US – and 256 of them were in captivity, protected in Yellowstone National Park and a handful of other sanctuaries.
The reasons for the mass bison slaughter are numerous: they include the building of three railway lines through the most populous bison areas, which brought new demand for the animal's hide and meat; modern rifles that made killing bison relatively easy; a lack of protective measures which could have curbed hunting. But there was also more sinister, targeted reason for the animals' decline than just an increased demand for bison products – more on this later. And even the settlers' seemingly practical need for bison meat and hide was ultimately intertwined with colonization and conquest, historians say.
"A desire for wealth and power in the form of land ownership, chattel slavery, the drive for unending growth and profit, and the commodification of natural resources is the reason for the intense overhunting of bison and the political and physical attacks on indigenous nationhood and humanity over five centuries," says Bethany Hughes, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and assistant professor at the University of Michigan's department of Native American studies.
"Colonialism and capitalism travel together," Hughes adds. "To benefit from and encourage the kind of economic success this company had processing bison bones, [which] were the byproduct of the sometimes-violent tactics of American settler colonial expansion, was to benefit from – and participate in – colonial projects that stripped Indigenous peoples of land, nationhood, and culture.
"This photo is not a bracing reminder of the harms of colonial pasts. It is an indictment on commercial consumption practices that obscure the material and ethical conditions that make luxuries like refined sugar readily available and seemingly benign.”
Killing bison was also part of military campaigns that used resource deprivation as a tactical move.
It has been well documented that Western army officials sent soldiers to kill bison as a way of depleting Native American resources during the colonization of the US. An analysis by historian Robert Wooster in his book The Military and United States Indian Policy acknowledges that General Phillip Sheridan, an army officer responsible for the "Total War" strategy against Southern Plains tribes,"recognized that eliminating the buffalo might be the best way to force Indians to change their nomadic habits”.
Sheridan was recorded telling legislators who were trying to pass laws to protect the dwindling herds: "[Hunters] are destroying the Indians' commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage…for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.”
Sheridan wrote in a letter to a fellow general in 1868: "The best way for the government is to now make [the tribes] poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.”
Another army official – Lieutenant Colonel Dodge – told a hunter: "Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
The Native American tribes knew what was happening. Satanta, chief of the Kiowas tribe, in the Great Plains,recognised that "to destroy the buffalo meant the destruction of the Indian" – as Billy Dixon, a bison hunter and frontiersman from Texas, recalled in his autobiography. "General Phil. Sheridan, to subdue and conquer the Plains tribes for all time, urged and practiced the very thing that Satanta was fearful might happen," Dixon added.
Depriving the Native Americans of their bison meant they were forced to move onto the new reservations the Western army had established for them, in order to grow food to survive.
The army's tactics worked. The Kiowa Tribe members were later driven onto a reservation in Oklahoma. Within one generation, the average height of Native Americans who had relied heavily on bison and so were most impacted by the slaughter dropped by more than an inch (2.5cm). By the early 20th Century, child mortality was 16% higher, and the income per capita among bison nations has remains 25% lower compared to nations that weren't so reliant on bison.
However there has been some debate over the years over the kill-off. How could hunters kill 30 to 60 million animals? That was the question posed by a 2018 study which offered a disease epidemic as the answer. Two diseases in the country at the time – anthrax in Nebraska and Texas tick fever in Montana – would have been "sufficiently deadly to wipe out tens of millions of animals", the study notes.
Regardless of the cause, the bison populations never fully recovered and the species is still listed as near-threatened. But in recent years efforts have been made to bring bison back to the Great Plains (they are incredibly important to the prairies ecosystem). In the US government's 2023 Inflation Reduction Act, $25m (£19.7m) was pledged to restore bison across the US.
Smaller efforts are already underway: 1,000 bison raised on reserves belonging to environmental non-profit The Nature Conservancy have been returned to their ancestral grazing lands. A restoration project in Montana aims to bring 5,000 bison back to the prairies and tribes have returned 250 bison to their land in a partnership with the National Wildlife Federation.
The message behind the striking mountain of bison skulls image has been lost over time, adds Hughes, who says the image carries a simplistic message that allows viewers to feel sadness about the past, but does not force them to confront "the ways that colonial and capitalist systems continue to negatively shape our environment and our lives.”
"More than that, this photo points to the ways that consumers of products are the engine that drives the colonial machine.
"If you dehumanize another person or objectify a living being as a 'natural resource' you have revealed your own lack of humanity and a misunderstanding of what it means to live in relationship with the world around you," Hughes says. "This is an important message to share with the public because this is an ongoing problem, not a historical one.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241203-the-bison-skulls-photo-revealing-americas-dark-history
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FORGET ABOUT SETTING GOALS. DO THIS INSTEAD.
Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals.
For many years, this was how I approached my habits too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.
If you’re a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice.
If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
If you’re a musician, your goal might be to play a new piece. Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor.
Now for the interesting question: if you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?
I think you would.
The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British Cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. I’ve slipped into this trap so many times I’ve lost count. For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy. I promised myself that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could finally relax.
Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.
A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.
Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.
Finally, a goal-oriented mind-set can create a “yo-yo” effect. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
Fall In Love With Systems
None of this is to say that goals are useless. However, I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.
Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually a well-designed system will always win. Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.
https://jamesclear.com/goals-systems
Oriana:
Nothing new here — just a somewhat different vocabulary. "Focus on the work, not the results" is how I remember my first exposure to this principle. 
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DECLINE IN CHURCH ATTENDANCE CONTINUES
Oriana: Yesterday something flashed across my computer screen that made me freeze in astonishment: only one third of Poles attend church. Remembering the packed churches of my childhood — no chance of getting a seat in a pew — I thought that perhaps I misread it: perhaps one third of Poles don’t attend church. But it turned out that only 28% of Poles currently attend church once a week, or nearly once a week (it should be noted that not going to church is regarded as a sin).
Since the US was once said to “have the religiosity of Mexico,” I looked up the percentage of church goers in America: 30%. In Mexico, it's 44%. Among the various U.S. congregations, Mormons leads with 67%, followed by Protestants (44%).
But let me quote the article:
~ Among religious groups, Catholics show one of the larger drops in attendance, from 45% to 33%, while there are slightly smaller decreases among Orthodox (nine percentage points) and Hindu followers (eight points). There is also a 24-point decline for “other” religious groups, generally those not large enough to report separately as their own group or those that are difficult to categorize based on respondents’ answers.
In contrast to most religious groups, Muslim and Jewish Americans have shown slight increases in religious service attendance over the past two decades. The 38% of Muslim adults who regularly attend mosque is up from 34% in 2000-2003, although lower than in 2011-2013 (46%). The increase in synagogue attendance among Jewish Americans has been steadier, moving from 15% two decades ago to 19% last decade and 22% currently.
Mormon adults show no meaningful change in church attendance compared with 2000-2003, but they did report higher attendance in 2011-2013 than they do now.
On any given weekend, about three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services, down from 42% two decades ago. Church attendance will likely continue to decline in the future, given younger Americans’ weaker attachments to religion.
Specifically, more 18- to 29-year-olds, 35%, say they have no religious preference than identify with any specific faith, such as Protestant/nondenominational Christian (32%) or Catholic (19%). Additionally, young adults, both those with and without a religious preference, are much less likely to attend religious services -- 22% attend regularly, eight points below the national average.
These trends are consistent with other Gallup indicators of religious beliefs and practices, including the importance of religion to Americans and formal membership in churches and other houses of worship.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
Oriana:
What about Mexico? Is it true that religiosity in the US resembles Mexico? It turns out that only 44% of Mexicans attend church at least once a week.
By contrast, in France only 12% of Catholics attend weekly, and a quarter of Protestants. Still, 15% of French Catholics see themselves as “practicing Catholics.” 
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LENIN’S WARNING ABOUT STALIN
"Stalin is too crude (Stalin slishkom grub), and this fault, quite tolerable in the environment and in communications between us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to think about a way to remove Stalin from this position and appoint another person,” stated Lenin in his address to the Bolsheviks’ Congress. “Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, concentrated in his hands immense power, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use this power with sufficient caution,” warned Lenin. The warning came too late — Stalin ensured he kept the power and removed everyone who could challenge him. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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EMPEROR DOMITIAN’S BANQUET OF DEATH
It’s the year 89. A group of Roman senators has arrived at a banquet hosted by Emperor Domitian. Instead of a warm, convivial scene of free-flowing wine and comfortable couches, they find a totally black room, from the walls to the dishes. At each of their seats stands a personalized tombstone. Boys, naked and painted black, enter “like phantoms” and dance about the room. And the food? Not only is it black as well, but the menu consists of foods typically offered to the dead.
According to the third-century historian Dio Cassius, who provides the sole account of the dinner in his Roman History, the effect was pure terror. As they tucked into their meal, their host talked “only upon topics relating to death and slaughter.” Each senator, Dio writes, “feared and trembled and was kept in constant expectation of having his throat cut the next moment.”
Ever since I first wrote about this hellish banquet in 2021, I haven’t stopped thinking about the emperor’s macabre meal. I’m not the only one obsessed with the story. Mary Beard, a Cambridge professor and the author of SPQR, considers it one of her “favorite ancient anecdotes.” Food historian Jane Levi calls it “emblematic of Domitian’s dark status as a murderous Emperor.” And Classics expert Charles Leslie Murison describes it as “a classic illustration of autocratic sadism.”
But it’s almost too perfect. While everyone seems to agree that it’s a great story, few believe it actually went down as Dio Cassius describes. That’s why I embarked on a mission to investigate the dastardly dinner, its host, its historical context, and its possible menu. What would a Roman emperor serve to scare the hell out of his guests? How might palace cooks have colored these foods with that terrifying black hue? And what can the horror show of Domitian’s dinner tell us about the fears, social mores, and dining customs of first-century Roman elites?
To answer these questions, I teamed up with culinary archaeologist Farrell Monaco. Our journey took us from culinary-themed graves and excavated offerings in the cemeteries of Timgad and Pompeii to the banquet tables of other morbid Roman hosts to the pages of ancient cookbooks. We consulted historians, pored over the diaries and letters of Roman elites, stained our fingers with cuttlefish ink, and kneaded dark orbs of bread dough.
After a few months, I sat down to my own Black Banquet. With recipes by Monaco, the menu offered a night-hued spread of ancient loaves, roasted fish, sweet stuffed dates, and more—a meal fit for a macabre-minded ruler in first-century Rome.
But before we dig in, it’s only polite to meet our host.
Emperor DomitianOn the part of everybody but Domitian there was dead silence, as if they were already in the realms of the dead, and the emperor himself conversed only upon topics relating to death and slaughter. —Dio Cassius, Roman History
Titus Flavius Domitianus was the third member of his family to serve as the emperor of Rome. Rumors of cruelty swirled around him from the beginning of his reign: Although most accounts attribute the death of his older brother, Emperor Titus, to a natural illness, some have speculated that Domitian (the shortened name was his title after he came into power) may have played a role in hastening his demise.
From ancient Roman writers to modern historians, scholars have long portrayed Domitian as a vicious tyrant. Accounts have grouped him in with Rome’s “bad emperors,” a cast of villains that includes Nero, Caligula, and Commodus (the latter might sound familiar due to his appearance in Gladiator). In History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon calls him “timid, inhuman Domitian.” And an oft-repeated anecdote describes the emperor whiling away the hours in his room torturing flies. But recent scholarship has taken a new look at Domitian, praising him for his ambitious building programs, currency reform, and fairly compensating the army.
The reality of Domitian’s reign was somewhere in the middle. In his 1992 biography, The Emperor Domitian, historian Brian Jones casts the emperor as a “ruthless but efficient autocrat” who made some great strides, but ran afoul of the senate by regularly disregarding their counsel, severely punishing enemies, and draining the treasury. These tensions came to a head when members of Domitian’s own court assassinated him in the year 96.
Fae Amiro, a postdoc at Western University in Canada, extensively examined written and archaeological records surrounding Domitian after his assassination in her thesis, “The Post-Mortem Sanctions Against the Emperor Domitian.” As with many assassinated emperors, Amiro notes, there was a clear campaign to smear Domitian to justify the legitimacy of the new regime of his successor, Emperor Nerva.
“Often with the assassination of the previous emperor … you see the next group really try to distance themselves as far as possible from them and delegitimize the last reign. Because if Domitian was this popular, legitimate emperor and he was assassinated, and now you’ve taken over through the people who caused the assassination, that’s not a good look. The only acceptable story is that he was a tyrant,” explains Amiro.
Two writers who pushed this narrative were Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, both of whom covered the fallout after Domitian’s assassination with relish. (Pliny in particular writes of the “delight” of the crowds bringing Domitian’s statues down after his death.) However, neither writer mentions the Black Banquet of Dio’s later Roman History. Since both writers were not only critics but contemporaries of Domitian’s, it’s doubtful that they’d hold back on such a damning story. “There’s no reason why they wouldn’t include all the negative details if they had them,” Amiro says.
Instead, it’s Dio, writing in the early 200s and over a century after Domitian’s death, who provides the sole account of the death-themed dinner. Amiro notes this is part of a pattern in Dio’s work, where the writer tries to draw parallels between Domitian and the “bad” emperor of his own day, Commodus. A frustrated senator serving under Commodus, Dio likely saw a story like the Black Banquet as a powerful way to depict the tensions between tyrannical rulers and the aristocracy.
With these biases in mind, it’s possible that there never was a Black Banquet and this was simply a terrifying tale used to represent the sadistic theatrics of a tyrant. There’s just one problem with that theory: Encountering death at the dinner table was pretty normal for elites in ancient Rome.
An ancient Roman ceramic drinking cup dated to approximately the first century BC to the first century CE
And first he set beside each of them a slab shaped like a gravestone, bearing the guest’s name and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet. ~ Dio Cassius, Roman History
When Roman aristocrats sat to dine at the turn of the millennium, death was often nearby. Memento mori motifs ranged from skull-covered cups to dining-room mosaics of skeletons hoisting jugs to puppet-like skeletal party favors that danced when shaken. This contrast of death with convivial pleasures like feasting were meant to encourage diners to enjoy earthly joys while they could.
In an article in the Times Literary Supplement, Mary Beard points out that death-themed banquets even predated Dio’s account. She cites a letter written by the philosopher Seneca in the years before his death in 65, describing a senator known for hosting dinners that concluded with mock funerals for himself. The host, Seneca writes, would be “carried from the dining-room to his chamber, while eunuchs applauded and sang in Greek to a musical accompaniment: ‘He has lived his life, he has lived his life!’” In this portrait, the senator comes across as narcissistic, as Seneca questions his “debased motive” for the performance.
dancing skeleton
In The Satyricon, Trimalchio plays with a dancing skeleton like this one (c. 199 BCE–500 CE) during his banquet.
But the most well-known example of a mock-funerary feast comes from The Satyricon, Petronius’s satire of Roman decadence. Written during Nero’s reign (54–68), the novel tells the story of Trimalchio, an ostentatious freedman who concludes his banquet by playing with a skeleton figure, dictating what he’d like on his tombstone, and ordering a funeral march to be played.
In hosting his own death-focused feast, Domitian “seems here to have been simply carrying to extremes a fashion current for over a century,” historian Katherine Dunbabin writes in her book Roman Banquets. Although, she notes, as “the fashion vanishes from the literature” after this time, “Domitian may indeed already have been a little out of date.”
“Often when we’re reading a lot of these writers, it’s not so much that they’re making things up from whole cloth,” Amiro says. “But a lot of the time, it’s more that they take what was probably a normal, positive thing at the time, and they spin it in this more extreme way.” She compares the Black Banquet to the notorious story of Caligula making his horse a consul, which could’ve been rooted in an actual act that was blown out of proportion. “It’s possible that he had a negative relationship with the senate, and he was just trolling them. But instead he gets presented as doing it out of insanity as opposed to perhaps disdain.”
Other historians agree. In Rebellion and Reconstruction: Galba to Domitian, Charles Leslie Murison writes of the Black Banquet, “Dio has failed to understand the joke or has, perhaps, deliberately misrepresented the occasion in order to malign Domitian.” In his paper “The Character of Domitian,” historian K.H. Waters writes, “Dio is normally a somewhat humorless writer, but on this occasion he has surpassed himself.” And in her article, Beard posits that the dinner might not have been a prank, but rather a philosophical exercise in pondering mortality: “I fear that poor old Domitian may well have had his profound intentions ruined by a cynical historian, with a strong capacity for misinterpretation.”
Whether he was trolling, waxing philosophical, or just having a bit of fun, what kind of menu would an emperor serve to round out the funerary themes? Unfortunately, accounts of death-themed dinners omit details about the food, instead focusing on the performance and pomp surrounding the meal. To fill in these blanks, we must look beyond the banquet hall and venture into the necropolis.
All the things that are commonly offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits were likewise set before the guests, all of them black and in dishes of a similar color. —Dio Cassius, Roman History.
When I decided to recreate Domitian’s dinner, my first call was to Farrell Monaco. As a culinary archaeologist, Monaco uses a combination of archaeological, artistic, and textual evidence to reverse-engineer ancient Roman recipes. Her projects range from round loaves of panis quadratus bread to a Pompeiian pub menu to a sourdough starter fit for Pliny the Elder.
When it came to finding foods “offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits,” Monaco went looking for what archaeologists had unearthed from the cemeteries of the first-century Roman Empire. Families often ate—and offered—meals at the burial site right after the funeral, again nine days after the interment, and on subsequent anniversaries. Cemetery meals and offerings were so important that some mausoleums even came with built-in kitchens, and some interment gravesites featured pipes for pouring libations to those buried below.
A wall-painting from the Etruscan Tomb of the Lionesses at Tarquinia shows men reclining on cushions at a drinking party.
But what foods were these families offering? Monaco looked to Pompeii, which is not only a treasure trove for archaeological finds, but a particularly useful one for our purposes. Mount Vesuvius forever froze the city beneath volcanic ash in the year 79, a mere decade before Domitian’s alleged banquet. Monaco points to a 2008 paper in which archaeobotanists examined carbonized figs, grapes, bread, apples, dates, chickpeas, and walnut and hazelnut shells from a family’s burial plot in a necropolis on the city’s outskirts. The scientists concluded that the cemetery’s food offerings were burned intentionally before the volcanic eruption, “as part of the ritual, which took place in the funerary enclosure.”
Another noteworthy aspect of the offerings? Just how un-noteworthy they were. Rather than exceptional ceremonial dishes, the paper’s authors stated that the offerings were “the staple food of everyday life” and, with the exception of dates (which were likely imported from North Africa), all came from local crops.
When it came to the upper class, the offerings were also the stuff of daily life. “Even in Etruscan settings like in the mortuary tombs in Tarquina, you still see items on the banqueting benches that are consumed in the everyday: sausages, grapes, eggs, bread. There aren’t any grand looking cakes or any foods that look out of the ordinary,” Monaco says.
The base of one Timgad stela depicts a symmetrical spread of foods.
As she mulled over ways to pull these findings together into a menu, Monaco came upon photos of a curious style of grave (or stela) located among the ruins of Timgad, an ancient Roman city in what is now Algeria. Each stela’s base, Monaco noticed, was engraved with images of full spreads of various dishes: small round loaves of bread (unmistakably the crisscross-topped panis quadratus), fish, eggs, and ambiguous sides (which Monaco says are likely beans, peas, cheese, or dates). Each food item sat inside depressions representing bowls or platters, alongside utensils. It was a meal fit for the dead—or, perhaps, a death-obsessed emperor.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-make-death-dinner-black-banquet?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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ISRAELI SOLDIERS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT IN GAZA
Every single person in his platoon knew someone who was killed. Yuval Green, 26, knew at least three. He was a reservist, a medic in the paratroops of the Israel Defense Forces, when he heard the first news of the 7 October Hamas attack.
“Israel is a small country. Everyone knows each other,” he says. In several days of violence, 1,200 people were killed, and 251 more abducted into Gaza. Ninety-seven hostages remain in Gaza, and around half of them are believed to be alive.
Yuval immediately answered his country’s call to arms. It was a mission to defend Israelis. He recalls the horror of entering devastated Jewish communities near the Gaza border. “You're seeing… dead bodies on the streets, seeing cars punctured by bullets.”
Yuval GreenBack then, there was no doubt about reporting for duty. The country was under attack. The hostages had to be brought home.
Then came the fighting in Gaza itself. Things seen that could not be unseen. Like the night he saw cats eating human remains in the roadway.
“Start to imagine, like an apocalypse. You look to your right, you look to your left, all you see is destroyed buildings, buildings that are damaged by fire, by missiles, everything. That's Gaza right now.”
One year on, the young man who reported for duty on 7 October is refusing to fight.
Yuval is the co-organizer of a public letter signed by more than 165 — at the latest count — Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) reservists, and a smaller number of permanent soldiers, refusing to serve, or threatening to refuse, unless the hostages are returned — something that would require a ceasefire deal with Hamas.
In a country still traumatized by the worst violence in its history, those refusing for reasons of conscience are a minority in a military that includes around 465,000 reservists.
There is another factor in play for some other IDF reservists: exhaustion.
According to Israeli media reports, a growing number are failing to report for duty. The Times of Israel newspaper and several other outlets quoted military sources as saying that there was a drop of between 15% to 25% of troops showing up, mainly due to burnout with the long periods of service required of them.
Even if there is not widespread public support for those refusing to serve because of reasons of conscience, there is evidence that some of the key demands of those who signed the refusal letter are shared by a growing number of Israelis.
A recent opinion poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) indicated that among Jewish Israelis 45% wanted the war to end with a ceasefire to bring the hostages home — against 43% who wanted the IDF to fight on to destroy Hamas.
Significantly, the IDI poll also suggests that the sense of solidarity which marked the opening days of the war as the country reeled from the trauma of 7 October has been overtaken by the revival of political divisions: only 26% of Israelis believe there is now a sense of togetherness, while 44% say there is not.
At least part of this has to do with a feeling often expressed, especially among those on the left of the political divide, that the war is being prolonged at the behest of far-right parties whose support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to remain in power.
Even the former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanhayu’s Likud Party, dismissed by the prime minister last month, cited the failure to return the hostages as one of the key disagreements with his boss.
“There is and will not be any atonement for abandoning the captives,” he said. “It will be a mark of Cain on the forehead of Israeli society and those leading this mistaken path.”
Netanyahu, who along with Gallant is facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, has repeatedly denied this and stressed his commitment to freeing the hostages.
The seeds of refusal
The seeds of Yuval’s refusal lie back in the days soon after the war began. Then the deputy speaker of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), Nissim Vaturi, called for the Gaza Strip to be “erased from the face of the Earth”. Prominent rabbi Eliyahu Mali, referring generally to Palestinians in Gaza, said: “If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you.” The rabbi stressed soldiers should only do what the army orders, and that the state law did not allow for the killing of the civilian population.
But the language — by no means restricted to the two examples above — worried Yuval.
“People were speaking about killing the entire population of Gaza, as if it was some type of an academic idea that makes sense… And with this atmosphere, soldiers are entering Gaza just a month after their friends were butchered, hearing about soldiers dying every day. And soldiers do a lot of things.”
There have been social media posts from soldiers in Gaza abusing prisoners, destroying property, and mocking Palestinians, including numerous examples of soldiers posing with people’s possessions — including women's dresses and underwear.
“I was trying to fight that at the time as much as I could,” says Yuval. “There was a lot of dehumanizing, a vengeful atmosphere.”
His personal turning point came with an order he could not obey.
“They told us to burn down a house, and I went to my commander and asked him: ‘Why are we doing that?’ And the answers he gave me were just not good enough. I wasn't willing to burn down a house without reasons that make sense, without knowing that this serves a certain military purpose, or any type of purpose. So I said no and left.”
That was his last day in Gaza.
In response, the IDF told me that its actions were “based on military necessity, and with accordance to international law” and said Hamas “unlawfully embed their military assets in civilian areas,”
Three of the refusers have spoken to the BBC. Two agreed to give their names, while a third requested anonymity because he feared repercussions. All stress that they love their country, but the experience of the war, the failure to reach a hostage deal led to a defining moral choice.
'People calmly talked about abuse or murder'
One soldier, who asked to remain anonymous, was at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport when news started coming in about the Hamas attacks. He recalls feeling shock at first. Then a ringing sensation in his ears. “I remember the drive home… The radio’s on and people [are] calling in, saying: ‘My dad was just kidnapped, help me. No-one's helping me.’ It was truly a living nightmare.”
This was the moment the IDF was made for, he felt. It wasn’t like making house raids in the occupied West Bank or chasing stone-throwing youths. “Probably for the first time I felt like I enlisted in true self-defense.”
But his view transformed as the war progressed. “I guess I no longer felt I could honestly say that this campaign was centered around securing the lives of Israelis.”
He says this was based on what he saw and heard among comrades. “I try to have empathy and say, ‘This is what happens to people who are torn apart by war…’ but it was hard to overlook how wide this discourse was.”
He recalls comrades boasting, even to their commanders, about beating “helpless Palestinians.” And he heard more chilling conversations. “People would pretty calmly talk about cases of abuse or even murder, as if it was a technicality, or with real serenity. That obviously shocked me.”
The soldier also says he witnessed prisoners being blindfolded and not allowed to move “for basically their entire stay… and given amounts of food that were shocking.”
When his first tour of duty ended he vowed not to return.
The IDF referred me to a statement from last May which said any abuse of detainees was strictly prohibited. It also said three meals a day were provided, “of quantity and variety approved by a qualified nutritionist”. It said handcuffing of detainees was only carried out “where the security risk requires it” and “every day an examination is carried out… to make sure that the handcuffs are not too tight.”
The UN has said reports of alleged torture and sexual violence by Israeli guards were “grossly illegal and revolting” and enabled by “absolute impunity”.
A FERTILE GROUND FOR FOSTERING BRUTALITY
Michael Ofer-Ziv, 29, knew two people from his village who were killed on 7 October, among them Shani Louk whose body was paraded through Gaza on the back of a pickup truck in what became one of the most widely shared images of the war. “That was hell,” he says.
Michael was already a committed left-winger who advocated political not military solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, like his comrades, he felt reporting for reserve duty was correct. “I knew that the military action was inevitable… and was justified in a way, but I was very worried about the shape it might take.”
His job was to work as an operations officer in a brigade war room, watching and directing action relayed back from drone cameras in Gaza. At times the physical reality of the war hit home.
“We went to get some paper from somewhere in the main command of the Gaza area,” he remembers. “And at some point we opened the window… and the stench was like a butchery… Like in the market, where it's not very clean.”
Again it was a remark heard during a discussion among comrades that helped push him towards action. “I think the most horrible sentence that I heard was someone who said to me that the kids that we spared in the last war in Gaza [2014] became the terrorists of October 7, which I bet is true for some cases… but definitely not all of them.”
Such extreme views existed among a minority of soldiers, he says, but the majority were “just indifferent towards the price… what's called ‘collateral damage’, or Palestinian lives”. He’s also dismayed by statements that Jewish settlements should be built in Gaza after the war — a stated aim of far-right government ministers, and even some members of Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Figures suggest there is a growing body of officers and troops within the IDF who come from what is called a ‘National Religious’ background: these are supporters of far-right Jewish nationalist parties who advocate settlement and annexation of Palestinian lands, and are firmly opposed to Palestinian statehood. According to research from the Israeli Center for Public Affairs, a non-governmental think tank, the number of such officers graduating from the military academy rose from 2.5% in 1990 to 40% in 2014.
Ten years ago, one of Israel’s leading authorities on the issue, Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, warned about what he called the ‘religification’ of the army'. “Within this context, messages about Jewish superiority and demonization of the enemy are fertile ground for fostering brutality and releasing soldiers from moral constraints.”
The decisive moment for Michael Ofer-Ziv came when the IDF shot three Israeli hostages in Gaza in December 2023. The three men approached the army stripped to the waist, and one held a stick with a white cloth. The IDF said a soldier had felt threatened and opened fire, killing two hostages. A third was wounded but then shot again and killed, when a soldier ignored his commander’s ceasefire order.
“I remember thinking to what level of moral corruption have we got… that this can happen. And I also remember thinking, there is just no way this is the first time [innocent people were shot]… It's just the first time that we are hearing about it, because they are hostages. If the victims were Palestinians, we just would never hear about it.”
The IDF has said that refusal to serve by reservists is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and Prime Minister Netanyahu insists it is “the most moral army in the world”. For most Israelis, the IDF is the guarantor of their security; it helped found Israel in 1948 and is an expression of the nation — every Israeli citizen over 18 who is Jewish (and also Druze and Circassian minorities) must serve.
The refusers have attracted some hostility. Some prominent politicians, like Miri Regev, a cabinet member and former IDF spokeswoman, have called for action. “Refusers should be arrested and prosecuted," she has said.
But the government has so far avoided tough action because, according to Yuval Green, “the military realized that it only draws attention to our actions, so they try to let us go quietly.”
For those starting their national service and who refuse, sanctions are tougher. Eight conscientious objectors — not part of the reservists group — due to begin their military service at 18 years old have served time in military prison.
The future character of the Jewish state
The soldiers I spoke with described a mix of anger, disappointment, pain or ‘radio silence’ from their former comrades.
“I strongly oppose them [the refusers],” says Major Sam Lipsky, 31, a reservist who fought in Gaza during the current war but is now based outside the Strip. He accuses the refusers' group of being “highly political” and focused on opposing the current government.
“I don't have to be a Netanyahu fan in order to not appreciate people using the military, an institution we're all meant to rally behind, as political leverage.”
Maj Lipsky is a supporter of what he views as Israel’s mainstream right — not the far right represented by government figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister who has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting terrorism, and finance minister, Belazel Smotrich, who recently called for the population of Gaza to be halved by encouraging “voluntary migration”.
Maj Lipsky acknowledges the civilian suffering in Gaza and does not deny the imagery of dead and maimed women and children.
As we speak at his home in southern Israel, his two young children are sleeping in the next room. “There's no way to fight the war and to prosecute a military campaign without these images happening,” he says. He then uses an expression heard in the past from Israeli leaders: “You can't mow the lawn without grass flying up. It is not possible.”
He says the blame belongs to Hamas who went to “randomly slaughter as many Jews as possible, women, children, soldiers.”
The imperative of fighting the war has postponed a deepening struggle over the future character of the Jewish state. It is, in large part, a conflict between the secularist ideals held by people like Michael Ofer-Zif and Yuval Green, and the increasingly powerful religious right represented by the settlements movement, and their champions in Netanyahu’s cabinet, including figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Add to that the lingering, widespread anger over the government’s attempts to dilute the power of the country’s judiciary in 2023 — it led to mass demonstrations in the months before October 7 — and the stage is set for a turbulent politics long after the war ends.
On both sides it is not unusual to hear people talk of a struggle for the soul of Israel.
Maj Lipsky was packing to return to military duty on the evening I met him, sure of his duty and responsibility. No peace until Hamas was defeated.
Among the refusers I spoke with, there was a determination to stand by their principles. Michael Ofer-Ziv may leave Israel, unsure whether he can be happy in the country. “It just looks less and less likely that I will be able to hold the values that I hold, wanting the future that I want for my kids to live here, and that is very scary,” he says.
Yuval Green is training to become a doctor, and hopes that a settlement can be reached between peacemakers among the Israeli and Palestinian people. “I think in this conflict, there are only two sides, not the Israeli side and the Palestinian side. There is the side that supports violence and the side that supports, you know, finding better solutions.” There are many Israelis who would disagree with that analysis, but it won’t stop his mission. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yx56ep165o
Charles: THE MOST HORRIFYING LINE IN THIS BLOG
"Like the night he saw cats eating human remains in the roadway."
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SOURCES OF ANTI-SEMITISM IN GERMANY BEFORE WW2
Martin Luther was one of the key culprits, Christianity in general a second, German national myth third. The exact order is up for debate, all three were very relevant.
It’s no secret Jews in Europe were in a constant pickle. Disliked for not converting to Christianity, hated for being allowed to engage in business prohibited to Christians, doubly hated because that business was profitable, triply hated because they made good money in it … and worst of all they were visibly different. It was possible to identify a Jew by distinctive clothing perhaps, sometimes by looks, and certainly by the fact they weren’t attending Christian religious service.
Imperial and Weimar Germany were both offsprings of Prussia, a deeply Lutheran state, with strong supremacist traditions. You might think Nazis invented that “Uber/Untermench” nonsense about superiority of races, but that’s false. In 19th century Europe it was common to assign values to certain races, valuing the European type the most as a matter of course.
Prussians took this a few steps further and considered Germans as vastly superior to others, but especially Jews. It was a combination of religious hatred and feelings of ethnic superiority that were widespread in Germany for at least a couple of centuries before Nazis.
Hitler and Nazis didn’t really change Germany all that much. They just magnified some of the cultural aspects, the ones Germans liked the most, so they’d be popular. That’s how you get the absolutely insane levels of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. ~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Larry Maler:
Hatred of Jews predated Martin Luther. What sets him apart was that he wrote it down in graphic language, and also founded a branch of Christianity. He gave hatred of Jews a written justification in his religion.
Luther didn't invent hatred of Jews, but he certainly advanced it vigorously and in religious writing. Possibly more than anyone previous to him ever had.
Jan Krusat:
Initially Martin Luther though that the Jews were just dissatisfied with the Catholic church and tried to et them to convert to his new Protestant church. But when the Jews refused to do this, he went against them.
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HOW ORDINARY RUSSIANS FEEL ABOUT THE WAR
That’s the face of the Russian representative in the UN as a Ukrainian speaker was talking about the Russian missile killing a whole family in Lviv.
That’s how 86% of “ordinary Russians” feel about their mighty Mother Russia killing civilians who refused to obey orders of their FSB mafioso kingpin who wants to rule a giant “Russian empire from Vladivostok to Lisbon”.
They are gleefully excited about it.
Russia strong.
Putin awesome — shows these western weaklings their place.
They feel impunity.
They feel part of the greatness.
They feel righteous.
They want more.
~ Elena Gold, Quora
Oriana:
Is this really Putin? We know that Putin dislikes negative news, and that presumably includes the victims of his senseless war. Since Putin is also known for using doubles, it's possible that this photo shows one of these doubles.
David Peters:
He (the Russian UN representative) is probably quite a bright Russian but cannot stop his glee.
Russia is taking a terrible pounding which will be felt for decades.
It's economy is overheated by war production, the accumulated wealth of 20 years being spent on smoke and death.
Rich contract soldiers roam the streets, widows buy new cars. This is not prosperity, this is insanity
Robert Findley:
Most of them don’t know that Stalin murdered 9 million after WW2
Vidalia:
Maybe there will be auto-destruction of Russia, but I doubt it, so Russian will live in their 19th century dream for still a long time.
For Germany after WWI defeat and France after the defeat of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war , just " defeat" was not enough, it only created the need for revenge. Only occupation of France by the Nazis finally taught them that they weren't no different than the rest of us. The same for the Germans and Japanese occupied by the USA and its allies.
Monika Surman:
The Russians never had to acknowledge the crimes their country perpetrated on their neighbors throughout their history. There is NO AWARENESS of this whatsoever. They think they are civilized and civilizing…
Howard Nairn:
My take Elena is failure in Ukraine may help to erase the decades of anti-west propaganda. After 750k personnel losses, Russia occupies only 20% of Ukraine and have depleted their personnel. Even if they managed 80% occupation they face gorilla warfare for decades. It’s hard to see a winning outcome for Russia at this stage.
Rok Ružič:
They feel impunity.
They feel part of the greatness.
They feel righteous.
They want more.
And that is exactly why we absolutely must ensure that they are defeated and humiliated and made to pay, hopefully the payment will remind them of their deeds for several generations, so that the lesson can really sink in, as it did with the Germans and the Japanese.
If we don't do this, we are going to have to do it later for a bigger price, a much much bigger price. If we let them win, and they come back for more, the price in blood and treasure is going to be astronomical, whereas if we choose to tackle them now, we can pay the price quite comfortably.
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CAN TREES LIVE FOREVER?
Some recorded trees, such as the astonishing Gingko, are said to have lived thousands of years. But will we ever truly know if trees can be immortal?
When a team of researchers from China and the US studied the growth rings from a sample of Gingko biloba trees, they discovered something amazing. The older trees were just as healthy as the younger ones.
Some Gingko trees are said to have lived thousands of years!
Researchers studied a total of 34 Gingko biloba trees, ranging from three to 667 years old. They looked for age-related changes in the cambium, a layer of dividing cells beneath the trees’ bark that generates growth of stems and roots after the first season. They discovered that leaf size, photosynthetic ability, and seed quality – which are all indicators of health – didn’t worsen with age.
In an earlier study of nearly 700,000 trees, scientists found that a tree’s growth doesn’t slow down after hundreds of years. In fact, it speeds up. Over time, trees stopped getting taller but, like bodybuilders, they did get wider.
So, does all this mean that trees can live forever? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer.
Whilst a 667-year life span is incomprehensible to humans – and even more so for the delicate mayfly, which lives for only a day – it’s relatively young for a Gingko. Amazingly, they can live for thousands of years.
But while signs of deterioration from old age in trees might not be perceptible to humans in our lifetime, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re immortal. Stress and strain are likely to eventually take their toll, but studies would have to take place over hundreds – or thousands – of years to say for certain.
One possible sign of age-related deterioration was seen by the researchers studying the Gingkoes. They found that the older trees had thinner vascular tissue… but also concluded that the vascular cambium was capable of growth for hundreds of years, or millennia.
And so, saying for definite whether trees do or do not die from old age requires more data, and the problem with that is long-lived trees are pretty hard to come by.%20White%20Mountains%20Inyo%20County.jpg)
The Great Basin bristlecone pine is thought to be over 5,000 years old
The oldest individual tree (that we know about) is possibly a Great Basin bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains, which is thought to be over 5,000 years old. The unnamed tree was discovered and a core sample taken in the 1950s, but the sample was left in storage until another researcher dated it in 2010. However, the core sample has since gone missing at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, which throws some doubt on its status. What can be confirmed is that before then, another bristlecone pine, called Methuselah, took the “oldest known tree” title at over 4,800 years old.
There are also several clonal colonies which are much, much older. The Pando, or ‘trembling giant’, in central Utah is a colony made up of 40,000 trees, all of which are clones connected by a single root system. Some of the individual trees are estimated to be over 130 years old, but the root system is believed to be an astonishing 80,000 years old.
The Pando, or ‘trembling giant’, in central Utah is a colony made up of 40,000 trees, all of which are clones connected by a single root system.
So what is it about bristlecone pines that makes them so able to endure the slings and arrows of time? For one, they grow really slowly. By the age of 40, they will have barely reached 15cm (5.9 inches) in height! Another secret to their longevity is the harsh conditions in which they live. Cold temperatures and high winds – combined with their slow growth rate – encourages the growth of dense wood, which makes them very resistant to insects, rot, and erosion.
But if trees can indeed live forever, then why aren’t there any that are millions of years old, rather than thousands?
Whilst the researchers who studied the Gingko trees couldn’t definitively provide a response to whether trees are immortal, what they could say with more confidence was that they’re much more likely to die from an external incident, such as damage or disease, than they are to die of old age.
The longer a tree is around for, the more chances it has to encounter events that could kill it, such as storms, wildfires, or diseases. And whilst a tree can escape the Grim Reaper a number of times, the more it faces potentially life-threatening events the more likely it is to become vulnerable. For example, tree damage from a storm can make a tree more exposed to disease.
And then there’s human interference. Another bristlecone pine ‘Prometheus’, named after the Greek mythological figure, was cut down in 1964 after attempts to take a core sample went awry. It was only later that they discovered Prometheus was over 4,800 years old - the oldest recorded tree at that time.
And so, whether trees can avoid death from old age remains a bit of a mystery. But one thing we do know is that trees do not age in the same way we do. Not only can they far outlive us, but they also continue to inspire wonder within us as to whether — if left untouched — they could cheat death itself.
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/can-trees-really-live-forever
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SHOULD WE RE-USE SINGLE-USE PLASTICS?
Experts say no.
As research on chemical exposure from plastics pollution has advanced in the last decade, scientists are “now finding it in pretty much every kind of food you can look at,” said Sherri Mason, plastic pollution researcher and director of Project NePTWNE at Gannon University.
“There is a real significant potential human health impact that is associated with reusing plastics, whether you’re talking about beverages or food,” Mason said. Children and people of reproductive age face the highest risks, she added.
“We really believe that reducing plastics reuse is the best possible approach,” said Megan Liu, science and policy manager at the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future.
Though plastic is found throughout our homes and everyday lives, there are a few ways you can reduce your exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Here’s what you should know about reusing single-use plastics.
The risk from single-use plastics
Single-use plastics leach chemicals and shed microplastics into your environment. Though studies have not directly compared single-use and reusable plastic, experts say they are more concerned about single-use plastic because of how they’re made.
“I like to compare it to our skin constantly shedding skin cells,” Mason said.
That means a single-use plastic water bottle sheds micro- and nanoplastics into your water when you refill it, and a takeout container or frozen meal tray sheds these particles into your food.
Scientists have shown that plastic water bottles shed hundreds of thousands of plastic particles into the water, many of which are nanoplastics, which measure less than one micrometer, less than one-seventieth the width of a human hair.
There are about 16,000 chemicals found in plastic, Mason said, over 4,200 of which are considered “highly hazardous.”
Because many chemicals are not bound to the plastic, those compounds can migrate into your food or drink. Known carcinogens like styrene have also been found in plastics.
Chemical exposure increases if plastic is heated, typically in a microwave, a dishwasher or even by placing hot food in a takeout container. When heat is applied, molecules move faster, meaning it could be easier for some of these particles to make their way into your food.
The danger of heating your plastic also applies to reusable plastic, like sturdier plastic water bottles, baby bottles and plastic storage containers, according to Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics.
Black plastic poses specific dangers, said Liu, who published a study on the topic. The research found that black plastic in sushi trays, cooking utensils and other objects contain high levels of flame retardants. These toxic chemicals have been linked to hormone disruption, reproductive complications and elevated cancer risk.
“What we found is that they could be contaminated with flame retardants, likely as a result of electronic waste recycling,” Liu said.
The International Bottled Water Association said that it does not recommend reusing single-use beverage containers because of the “potential health risks due to bacteria growth and contamination.”
How to use plastic in your home
Concerns with chemicals and microplastics primarily apply to food and beverages, experts said, because you are swallowing them. Reusing single-use plastics like grocery bags is not a major concern, they added.
The impact of microplastics probably depends on how old you are, Mason said, with her biggest concern being “kids and people of reproductive age” given the link with declines in fertility and the disproportionate presence of microplastics in young children.
The most important thing you should do is avoid subjecting your plastic to heat, experts agreed.
“A pretty hard-and-fast rule is to never microwave plastic,” Enck said. “And there’s also a recommendation not to put plastic into the dishwasher if it’s on a hot cycle.”
If you order takeout, it’s best to transfer the food to a nonplastic dish as soon as possible, and you should use a plate when microwaving your food.
Glass and metal water bottles are safer than reusable plastic ones, so make sure to bring them along when you travel or leave your house for errands.
Although it would be ideal to switch out all the plastic found in your kitchen, Liu recommends focusing on your cooking utensils and opting for glass or metal storage containers. Cleaning helps, too, she added.
“Keeping your home well-ventilated and making sure to dust, mop and vacuum on a regular basis can also help reduce the buildup of harmful chemicals in your environment.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/reusing-plastic-water-bottles-to-go-containers-scientists-say-that-s-a-bad-idea?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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IS BEING A CYNIC BAD FOR YOU?
I don’t have much faith in the future. But a psychology professor says cynicism doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
I would never describe myself as cynical. Yes, I have little faith in the likelihood of our coming together as a species to solve the climate crisis, make housing affordable or vote for the non-criminal presidential candidate.
But that’s based on evidence. Who could reflect on current events and feel optimistic about the future?
That’s what I might have argued before I read Jamil Zaki’s new book, Hope for Cynics. Afterwards, I felt humbled: I might be part of the problem.
Zaki – a professor of psychology, and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab – paints a confronting picture of cynicism’s hold on us, and its negative impacts for the future and our individual lives.
Over the last 50 years, we’ve lost trust not only in institutions, but also in each other. In 2018, only 32% of Americans surveyed said that “most people can be trusted”, compared with nearly 50% in 1972. A global study in 2022 uncovered the same tendency towards distrust in 24 of 28 nations.
As trust has waned, cynicism has taken root as a response to global instability, mounting threats and falling living standards.
But, Zaki argues, it’s an own goal: believing things can only get worse all but guarantees that they will, by further eroding our social fabric and discouraging us from taking action against corruption and injustice.
Expecting the worst also harms our chances of finding happiness in the now. Studies show that cynics are more depressed, drink more alcohol, earn less money and even die younger than non-cynics.
But the popular belief that cynicism is just smarter and more realistic isn’t necessarily justifiable, Zaki points out: cynics perform worse at cognitive tests and are less effective at identifying untrustworthy people and lies than non-cynics.
“By never trusting, cynics never lose,” he writes. “They also never win.”
Zaki admits that for many years – even while professionally engaged in the study of kindness and empathy, and publicly preaching their importance – he, too, was a secret cynic.
He set out to write the book partly to understand that incongruity: “They say research is me-search,” Zaki laughs.
What he found was that cynicism doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Our tendency to focus on potential problems did evolve for a reason: “200,000 years ago, the person worrying about the predator on the horizon probably did better than their friend blissed out by the sunset”, he says.
But now those instincts for self-protection can lead us to fixate on the negative and overestimate the chances of frightening but rare events.
Cynics might pride themselves on seeing the world as it really is, but humans are generally terrible at accounting for our biases and at amending our beliefs in line with evidence. “One of the central messages of psychology over the last century has been that we are much less objective than we think we are,” Zaki says.
In 2022, Zaki conducted a study of Stanford students, comparing their experiences on campus with their perceptions of the average Stanford student. Their self-reports described a warm, supportive community. But the “imagined” Stanford student was relatively hostile.
“They saw that imaginary person as much pricklier, more judgmental and less warm than anyone they actually knew,” Zaki says. The same discrepancy between real and imagined proved consistent in his surveys of school systems, government departments and private companies.
It reflects our warped view of humanity, “like an unfun fun-house mirror”, he writes: “We perceive our species to be crueller, more callous and less caring than it really is.”
FALSE POLARIZATION
In fact, there is plenty of consensus, even with people we’d identify as our opponents, says Zaki.
“Dozens” of studies have shown that Democrats and Republicans have an inaccurate picture of each other, imagining their rivals as richer, more different from them and more extreme in their views than they really are.
Yet the 2021 Common Ground survey found nearly 150 issues on which Democrats and Republicans agreed. They weren’t small fry, either: two-thirds of both parties endorsed tax incentives to promote clean energy, for example.
It speaks to the “false polarisation” of society “keeping us from each other, and understanding how much we share”, says Zaki. If you knew that your views were shared by two-thirds of the population, “you’d feel much more empowered”.
While some may see optimists as naive and blindly accepting of the status quo, cynicism breeds its own kind of “dark complacency,” Zaki says.
Though we’re not necessarily wrong to distrust politicians, by writing them off, we disengage ourselves. “Autocrats love a cynical population, because a group of people that don’t trust each other are easier to control.”
The widespread decline in social trust has in fact been ascribed to increasing inequality, as populations turn against each other in response to scarcity. We might even feel a “grim satisfaction” when our low expectations of humanity are proved right, Zaki says.
But that overlooks our own part in perpetuating them. “We imagine that we’re passive observers, but in fact our beliefs shape our personal versions of the world, the actions that we take and the cultures we create,” says Zaki.
“We have these toxic self-fulfilling prophecies – when we expect little of others, they notice and we get their worst.”
People often have good reasons for retreating into cynicism, Zaki says. It is, after all, a self-protective strategy: if we don’t expect too much, we can’t be disappointed. But over time, he says, it reaffirms our sense of passivity, and “withers us from the inside out”.
What makes cynicism so seductive – and also so hard to give up – is that it relieves us of personal responsibility. It’s easier to believe that we are simply victims of the world than it is to reckon with our own part in making it better, for ourselves and others.
We may be relatively powerless over systemic issues, but “we can absolutely tend our social backyards”, says Zaki. The way we treat others and engage with the world can radiate outwards, and “turn those vicious cycles into virtuous ones.”
The counter to cynicism is not optimism, Zaki continues: it’s hope, “the idea that the future could turn out well – not that it will.” With hope, “there is room for our actions to matter.” That’s what makes it feel so daunting, he says: “Hope is hard because it demands something of us.”
As a self-described “recovering cynic”, the changes that Zaki has made in his own life have been small but powerful.
First, he has become more conscious of cynical thoughts, noticing when he is coming to “unnecessarily bleak conclusions” and interrupting them with facts. Tellingly, Zaki has noticed that this is most common when he’s sleep-deprived or stressed: cynicism is a defining trait of burnout.
He also makes a point of taking more social risks, such as asking for help and talking to new people. It doesn’t come naturally, but the result has been life-affirming. “Just last night, I struck up a conversation with a stranger that was so fulfilling,” he says.
Zaki also practices what he calls “positive gossip”: spreading word, within his circles, of acts of generosity or kindness. He describes it as “personal counter-programming” to cynicism.
“It feels safer to shut down,” Zaki says. “It’s hard to take chances, to try and keep an open mind or stay connected.”
But when we give up on each other or a better future, “we actually make the bleakest, grimmest outcomes much more likely to pass”, Zaki says.
Living in a small town, I’m already in the habit of talking to strangers, and Zaki is right: it never fails to remind me that the world is a friendlier, more cooperative place than I’d believe from scrolling X or the day’s headlines.
The key to resisting cynicism, for me, is balancing between those two seemingly contradictory visions of the world. There’s the one that’s unfair, hostile, falling apart at the seams – and the one I navigate day-to-day, where I can disagree politically with my neighbor, but still have trust that I can turn to her for help. Maybe there is more I could be doing to bring those realities into alignment, or at least closer together.
I’m somewhat chastened to recognize my own actions in Zaki’s description of cynicism as a “warm blanket” beneath which one seeks shelter from the world. But I also feel grateful to him for pointing out that it’s full of holes.
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/oct/02/optimist-cynicism-faith
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TONGUE COLOR AND HEALTH
Bright red color: A bright red tongue, sometimes known as “strawberry tongue” if it’s accompanied by a bumpy texture, could signal a number of conditions, including allergies, Kawasaki disease, toxic shock syndrome, scarlet fever and a vitamin B12 deficiency.
White patches: Depending on their texture, white patches on the tongue could signal different conditions. Milky white patches that feel painful to brush or scrape could be a sign of oral thrush, says Scannapieco. This is a kind of yeast infection which is more common in babies, infants, people over 65 and those with weakened immune systems. It’s treated with antifungal medications.
If the white patches are thick and cannot be scraped off, it may be a sign of leukoplakia, which is sometimes considered a precancerous condition, says Ren.
Yellowish color: “If someone is accumulating a yellowish green debris on their tongue, that could indicate poor oral hygiene,” says Lim. This color of debris also tends to build up more in patients who smoke, she adds.
Red patches with a raised, white border: This is known as “geographic tongue”, because these spots tend to move around, appearing in different areas from one day to the next. It’s common – Ren estimates that roughly 30% of the population will experience it at some point. It’s also painless, benign and incurable. “We don’t know what causes geographic tongue,” says Lim. She says some literature points to it being an autoimmune condition, and for some of her patients, it seems to be associated with higher levels of stress.
Small sores: Small sores on the tongue or the soft tissue of the mouth are probably canker sores. These can be caused by mouth injuries (biting your own tongue, for example, or irritation from braces), stress, hormonal shifts and some allergies and food sensitivities, according to the Mayo Clinic. They may also be a sign of certain autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s disease or celiac disease.
Black color: Tongues can appear black or dark brown if the papillae aren’t shed regularly and grow longer than usual, allowing them to trap bacteria and debris in the mouth. This can cause a condition called “black hairy tongue”. It’s more commonly seen in patients who are immunocompromised, says Lim. In patients with HIV whose CD4 white blood cells are low, for example, their bodies may not be able to fight off everyday bacteria or fungi that then accumulate in the mouth.
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THE BRAIN MICROBIOME
Long thought to be sterile, our brains are now believed to harbor all sorts of micro-organisms, from bacteria to fungi. How big a part do they play in Alzheimer’s and similar diseases?
Nine years ago, Nikki Schultek, an active and healthy woman in her early 30s, experienced a sudden cascade of debilitating and agonizing symptoms – including cognitive and breathing problems and heart arrhythmia – and was investigated for multiple sclerosis. But three brain scans and numerous X-rays later, there was still no diagnosis or treatment plan. “It was like living in a nightmare, imagining not watching my children – three and five years old – grow up,” says Schultek.
Now, speaking on a video call from North Carolina, she is as bright as a button and shows no signs of degenerative brain disease. It turned out she had multiple chronic infections, including Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria, which causes Lyme disease and which had stealthily reached her brain. Antibiotics restored her health, but B burgdorferi is hard to eradicate once in the brain. She may need maintenance treatment to keep the disease at bay.
Schultek is not the only person whose neurological disorder turned out to be caused by microbes in the brain. A recent paper she jointly lead-authored, published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, compiled a long list of case reports where infectious disease was discovered to be the primary cause of dementia, meaning that, in many cases, the dementia was reversible. A few of the patients died, but most survived and saw significant improvements in cognitive function, including a man in his 70s who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease after his swift cognitive decline saw him unable to drive or, eventually, leave the house alone. A sample of his cerebrospinal fluid was taken and revealed a fungal infection caused by Cryptococcus neoformans. Within two years of taking antifungal medication, he was driving again and back at work as a gardener.
Richard Lathe, a professor of infectious medicine at the University of Edinburgh and another lead author of the paper, says these patients “were by accident found to be suffering from various fungal, bacterial or viral infections, and when they treated the patient with antifungals, antivirals or antibiotics, the dementia went away." He, among others, has been investigating the possibility that, like the gut, the brain hosts a community of microbes – an area of largely scientifically uncharted waters, but with huge life-saving potential.
A common infection among the dementia cases was what the gardener had: C neoformans, a fungus often found in plants and animals, the spores of which are easily inhaled. The dominant bacterial infection was Borrelia. Only a few viruses were reported, among them herpes simplex and herpes zoster (which causes shingles).
Lathe is part of an international group of scientists collaborating on the Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative, which is led by Schultek, as executive director and founder. (“Pathobiome” refers to the pathogenic – disease-causing – microbes and the host’s susceptibility to them.) She has brought together scientists from different fields – including microbiologists, immunologists, gerontologists and neurologists – to better understand the role of microbes in the brain, to devise ways to diagnose and treat brain infections that might ordinarily fly under the medical radar, and to identify useful preventive measures, from vaccines to lifestyle factors.
First and foremost, though, says Lathe, is establishing what percentage of dementias are caused by infections that could be treated: “We know there are some. We know it’s unlikely to be 100%, but our guess is that probably half or more could potentially be treated.”
It used to be widely assumed that the brain was the last bastion of sterility in the human body – it has a blood-brain barrier, for one, which microbes were thought to be too big to pass through – but it turns out that microbes flourish in the brain. The brain microbiome is hard to study, though, because we can’t just take a sample as we would for the gut, or swab it like a vagina or a nose.
That said, the notion that microbial infection has a role in dementia goes back to Alois Alzheimer who, in 1906, discovered the disease that now bears his name, and Oskar Fischer, who also identified it a year later. Both had suspected that microbes were involved, “but weren’t able to follow this up”, says Lathe. There is a now a raft of research supporting those early hunches. In Denmark, Janet Janbek “has shown that people with multiple infections are at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and conversely that people with Alzheimer’s have an increased risk of infections of all kinds”, says Lathe. Other researchers, such as Luis Carrasco in Madrid, have been discovering infections in the brain and nervous system.
When Lathe started looking for evidence of microbial life in samples from brains left to medical science, a clearer picture emerged. His paper, The Remarkable Complexity of the Brain Microbiome in Health and Disease, looked at brains of people who didn’t have dementia and compared them with Alzheimer’s brains. It found that, while there was a remarkable diversity of species in the control brains, there were often overgrowths of certain bugs in Alzheimer’s brains. In the control brains, microbes differed between brain regions and individuals, hosting mainly fungi, bacteria and chloroplastida (algae-related species). The virus adenovirus type C – a common culprit for respiratory infections – was often present, but there weren’t many viruses represented.
In many – but not all – of the Alzheimer’s brains, says Lathe: “We saw an overabundance of several microbes – the major ones are species such as Streptococcus and Staphylococcus in the bacteria, and in the yeasts it’s things like Candida and Cryptococcus, which are all well known to cause diverse pathologies in humans.” There was also a mysterious algae-related species, but it hasn’t been studied much in relation to human health. “It could be very important, but we don’t know anything about it.”
This paper was completed in 2023 and submitted to a journal, says Lathe, that wanted independent confirmation of the results before publishing, “which is fair enough”. Three research centers in the US have been continuing this line of inquiry. David Corry, a specialist in asthma at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, has been taking brain samples and plating them directly on agar, says Lathe. “He’s seen some very interesting microbes coming up. This is just looking at what grows.”
Next up is Brian Balin at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, who “has been arguing that not all the microbes you see in human pathologies will grow in agar”, says Lathe. They need very specialized “media” to grow in – or, even better, human cells. “So he’s been plating the same brain samples on to human monocytes [a type of white blood cell] in tissue culture, and he sees additional organisms coming up that weren’t previously reported.”
Finally, Garth Ehrlich at Drexel University College of Medicine, also in Philadelphia, is using a sophisticated gene amplification method to confirm the identities of microbes in the brain; he is finding similar clustering of microbes in samples from Alzheimer’s patients.
In the gut, we know that there are good microbes and bad microbes, with a healthy and diverse biome working to keep potential pathogens at bay. “Is the same true in the brain?” asks Lathe. “We don’t know – we’ll only find out when we do the analysis in more detail.” (Based on what we know so far, there won’t be the same diversity as in the gut.) But there are still doubters and the notion remains controversial. While it is hard to get any skeptics to go on the record, says Lathe, “if you submit your grant to various places, you get anonymous comments: ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘This is impossible.’ To this day, it’s very, very hard to get funding because of the … we call them dinosaurs.”
While microbes are found in brains of all ages, more pathogens get through at ages when immunity is weaker, such as babies under one and older adults, as the body’s defenses weaken and infections and inflammation seep around it more easily. So, is there anything we can do to keep our brain microbiomes healthy?
The BCG vaccine was originally used against tuberculosis, but it is also often part of a treatment program for bladder cancer. “It stimulates the immune system,” says Lathe. A team of researchers in Jerusalem, he says, decided to look at patients who survived bladder cancer and compare dementia prevalence among patients treated with BCG and those who weren’t. “Do they differ in the rate at which they get Alzheimer’s disease?”
The answer is yes – the BCG group appeared to get 75% protection against Alzheimer’s. A number of studies have now found varying levels of protection from BCG, with an average, according to one meta‑analysis, of 45%.
THE SHINGLES VACCINE
A raft of other vaccines have been investigated. This year, says Lathe, “there was a paper out on shingles – the zoster vaccine”. This protects against the chickenpox virus, which presents as shingles in adulthood, “which is very debilitating, particularly in elderly people, so there is now a [UK] government policy for people in their 70s to receive a zoster vaccine”. In individuals who had that vaccine, there was also a reduction in Alzheimer’s. “We did a complete list of all the vaccines … diphtheria, hepatitis, zoster, influenza, pneumococcus, typhoid. They all, to a greater or lesser extent, are protective against Alzheimer’s disease. Boost your immune system!”
BCG, meanwhile, has been shown to ward off a host of age‑related conditions, including skin infections and pneumonias. “One of the ways in which we would like to take this forward is to recommend routine vaccination of different types of elderly people to prevent not just Alzheimer’s disease, but also age-related morbidities.”
Being aware of and treating infections around the body in a timely way could also help – although at present, says Schultek, it would be rare for a clinician to test for brain infections, even at the onset of cognitive problems. Until new diagnostic tests are developed, they would need to access cerebrospinal fluid, which feeds and cleans the brain, to look for signs of brain infection. This requires a lumbar puncture – a needle going into the lower back – and while the procedure is routine in hospitals, it is not without risks and side-effects (such as headaches) and it can take a few days to recover. Of course, if you have Alzheimer’s, the possibility of discovering you have a treatable version would make it worth the risk.
If you have recurring herpes infections anywhere on your body, Schultek recommends treating, or preventing recurrence, with antiviral medication such as Aciclovir or Valaciclovir, which are available on the NHS. It may be worth being screened for Lyme disease, too, she says, “if you’re in an endemic area”, because the sooner you treat it, the better.
Good hygiene, such as hand-washing, may do more than stop you catching a cold or the flu. A newly published paper by members of the Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative explores how “microbes invade the sensory systems of the head and neck to exploit the brain”, says Schultek. “This pertains to viruses and bacteria that can enter through the nose, like Covid, as well as microbes that enter via the mouth, eyes and ears.” These senses often become defective as Alzheimer’s develops, “and the evidence suggests part of this might be due to these infections impacting our ability to smell, but then also impacting the brain itself”.
The nose is an increasingly well‑established route for microbes to reach the brain. “A research team at Griffith University in Australia found that you could infect mice with Chlamydia pneumoniae, which can cause pneumonia or a cold, and you could cause the mice to develop an Alzheimer’s-like pathology in the brain,” says Schultek. “And this is not the only group that has shown it. Dr Balin was the first one to show this and demonstrate that this organism is able to get through the nose and enter the brain.” This triggered a flurry of media reports that avoiding picking one’s nose could help lower dementia risk. However, Schultek says there is no evidence that this is the case and that this research by members of her team was taken out of context.
Good oral health is a must. Gum disease has long been associated with dementia risk and “it has been demonstrated that certain organisms like periodontal bacteria (Porphyromonas gingivalis) may actually increase blood-brain barrier permeability – not a good thing”, says Schultek.
While she readily acknowledges that we are nowhere near to having a fully formed set of recommendations, “the best immune-boosting advice we can glean from the literature includes good diet, exercise and good general health, watching things as we age like blood sugar and cholesterol, and implementing what is mostly common sense.” This includes avoiding an ultra-processed diet, which, she says, “not only helps with inflammation, but may also help to enhance immune function.” Exercise is another evidenced way to support immune function.
This is key, because we can’t completely avoid exposure to germs. Apart from anything else, we would become exceedingly lonely. “To quote one of my mentors,” says Schultek of the doctor who saved her: “You can’t slide pizza under the door and hide.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/dec/01/the-brain-microbiome-could-understanding-it-help-prevent-dementia
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FOUR MINUTES OF DAILY EXERTION CAN HALVE HEART ATTACK RISK IN WOMEN
Bursts of intense movement such as climbing stairs can make big difference to health, finds UK Biobank research
Less than five minutes of brief bouts of exertion in everyday life could have a significant effect on heart health, reducing the risk of serious cardiovascular events, researchers found. The results were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Experts not involved with the study said the findings were clear evidence that getting your body moving and raising your heart rate even just for a few minutes daily can really make a difference to having a healthy heart.
Longer bouts of high-intensity physical activity are well-known to be associated with significantly lower risks of cardiovascular disease.
But until now it was unclear if much shorter bursts of this type of activity, which are often part of a daily routine, may also be effective at boosting heart health, and if so, what the minimum threshold for measurable effects might be.
The researchers said this was particularly important for women who don’t or can’t exercise regularly, for whatever reason, because women tended to have a lower level of cardiorespiratory fitness than men at any given age.
In the study, researchers examined the effect of “vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity” on heart health in women and men.
The benefits of these bursts of effort, which could include walking quickly for the bus, for example, were pronounced in women – with 1.5 to four minutes a day leading to “substantially lower risks” of heart problems.
Researchers suggested they could act as “a promising physical activity target”, particularly for women who are unable or unwilling to exercise.
The study used data from 81,052 middle-aged people taking part in the UK Biobank study, who wore an activity tracker for seven days between 2013 and 2015. Among them, 22,368 people reported doing no regular exercise or if they did only went for a walk once a week.
Their heart health was tracked until the end of November 2022.
Women who recorded a daily average of 3.4 minutes of intense activity, but reported no formal exercise, were 45% less likely to have a heart attack, stroke or heart failure compared with women who did not manage any activity.
Specifically, the risk of a heart attack was 51% lower, and the risk of developing heart failure was 67% lower.
The associations were less clear and less significant in men. Men who managed 5.6 minutes of these activity bursts a day, but no formal exercise, cut their risk of heart attacks, strokes and heart failure by 16%.
Regina Giblin, a senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, who was not involved with the study, said: “We know already that any amount of exercise is beneficial when trying to lower your risk of heart attacks and strokes. This large study is evidence that getting your body moving and raising your heart rate even just for a few minutes daily can really make a difference to having a healthy heart.
“The study showed even just a few minutes of vigorous activity per day can significantly lower the risk of overall cardiovascular events for middle aged women, who do not do regular exercise.”
However, for people able to exercise, the recommendation remained that you should aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week, Giblin said.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/03/women-high-intensity-routine-four-minutes-daily-halve-heart-attack-risk-uk-biobank-study
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208 MILLON AMERICANS ARE OVERWEIGHT OR OBESE
Nearly half of adolescents and three-quarters of adults in the U.S. were classified as being clinically overweight or obese in 2021. The rates have more than doubled compared with 1990.
Without urgent intervention, our study forecasts that more than 80% of adults and close to 60% of adolescents will be classified as overweight or obese by 2050. These are the key findings of our recent study, published in the journal The Lancet.
Synthesizing body mass index data from 132 unique sources in the U.S., including national and state-representative surveys, we examined the historical trend of obesity and the condition of being overweight from 1990 to 2021 and forecast estimates through 2050.
For people 18 and older, the condition health researchers refer to as “overweight” was defined as having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) to less than 30 kg/m² and obesity as a BMI of 30 kg/m² or higher. For those younger than 18, we based definitions on the International Obesity Task Force criteria.
This study was conducted by the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 U.S. Obesity Forecasting Collaborator Group, which comprises over 300 experts and researchers specializing in obesity.
The U.S. already has one of the highest rates of obesity and people who are overweight globally. Our study estimated that in 2021, a total of 208 million people in the U.S. were medically classified as overweight or obese.
Obesity has slowed health improvements and life expectancy in the U.S. compared with other high-income nations. Previous research showed that obesity accounted for 335,000 deaths in 2021 alone and is one of the most dominant and fastest-growing risk factors for poor health and early death. Obesity increases the risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer and mental health disorders.
The economic implications of obesity are also profound. A report by Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, published in 2024, predicted that obesity-related health care costs will rise to US$9.1 trillion over the next decade.
The rise in childhood and adolescent obesity is particularly concerning, with the rate of obesity more than doubling among adolescents ages 15 to 24 since 1990. Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey revealed that nearly 20% of children and adolescents in the U.S. ages 2 to 19 live with obesity.
By 2050, our forecast results suggest that 1 in 5 children and 1 in 3 adolescents will experience obesity. The increase in obesity among children and adolescents not only triggers the early onset of chronic diseases but also negatively affects mental health, social interactions and physical functioning.
Our research highlighted substantial geographical disparities in overweight and obesity prevalence across states, with southern U.S. states observing some of the highest rates.
Other studies on obesity in the United States have also underscored significant socioeconomic, racial and ethnic disparities. Previous studies suggest that Black and Hispanic populations exhibit higher obesity rates compared with their white counterparts. These disparities are further exacerbated by systemic barriers, including discrimination, unequal access to education, health care and economic inequities.
Another active area of research involves identifying effective obesity interventions, including a recent study in Seattle demonstrating that taxation on sweetened beverages reduced average body mass index among children. Various community-based studies also investigated initiatives aimed at increasing access to physical activity and healthy foods, particularly in underserved areas.
Nearly half of adolescents and three-quarters of adults in the U.S. were classified as being clinically overweight or obese in 2021. The rates have more than doubled compared with 1990.
Without urgent intervention, our study forecasts that more than 80% of adults and close to 60% of adolescents will be classified as overweight or obese by 2050. These are the key findings of our recent study, published in the journal The Lancet.
Synthesizing body mass index data from 132 unique sources in the U.S., including national and state-representative surveys, we examined the historical trend of obesity and the condition of being overweight from 1990 to 2021 and forecast estimates through 2050.
For people 18 and older, the condition health researchers refer to as “overweight” was defined as having a body mass index, or BMI, of 25 kilograms per square meter (kg/m²) to less than 30 kg/m² and obesity as a BMI of 30 kg/m² or higher. For those younger than 18, we based definitions on the International Obesity Task Force criteria.
This study was conducted by the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 U.S. Obesity Forecasting Collaborator Group, which comprises over 300 experts and researchers specializing in obesity.
There are ways to combat the trends, such as making activity fun and leading by example.
What’s next
Our study forecasts trends in overweight and obesity prevalence over the next three decades, from 2022 to 2050, assuming no action is taken.
With the advent of new-generation anti-obesity medications, obesity management could change substantially. However, the extent of this impact will depend on factors such as cost, accessibility, coverage, long-term efficacy and variability in individual responses. Future research will need to leverage the most up-to-date evidence.
https://theconversation.com/208-million-americans-are-classified-as-obese-or-overweight-according-to-new-study-synthesizing-132-data-sources-244185
Mary:
Here is my poem about washing the dead.
Dark Matter
At work I washed the bodies
of the newly dead
inert and motionless as stone-
empty as that tabernacle
behind the altar..
All the force
there just moments ago
whether afraid or in agony
or simply tired, like a child
after a long day, is suddenly
and absolutely gone.
The mouth shut
on whatever black answer
they have discovered,
their final meal still
undigested, blood beginning
to seep into dependent
flesh, cold and dense
without the soft
impermanence of life
that yields to touch.
I washed that flesh,
turned bodies to change
the linens, removed the probes
and tubes, meeting no resistance
but the pull of gravity
on matter without sense,
never able to see past
that last secret
held behind the lips and tongues
that will not speak again.
+++++
I always felt it was a very solemn and respectful act, so close to the mystery of death...the absoluteness of that change, utterly convincing...that "last secret" of the body.
Two topics in the blog resonated for me. The function of holiday decorations in a community makes a lot of sense. Always my favorite part of the celebration--all those lights! Whether in community spaces or outside private homes..these are a gift of beauty to all who see and enjoy them. Often these decorations require considerable work...that ultimately becomes a gift of joy to neighbors and strangers..a fine act of generosity without the expectation of anything more than shared enjoyment. A good part of my frustration and disappointment right now is that I can't do my usual decorating.
The other idea I found fascinating and alarming is the idea of a brain biome...of bacterial or fungal presence in the brain tissue itself, and what effects that may have. It seems the theory of such a biome is still in its infancy, but being considered as a possible factor in neurodegenerative diseases like Altzheimers, Parkinsons, ALS, Huntingtons and MS. If these organisms are contributing to these most intractable and heartbreaking diseases, there may be the possibility of intervention or prevention, always considering that most antibiotics, antivirals and antifungals also would have to breach the blood brain barrier. The diseases we know that infect neural tissue--polio, rabies, herpes, Ebola, West Nile, HIV--are among the most deadly and most difficult to control, contain or ameliorate. HIV is among these, a success story, in that over the last 50 years it has been taken from a death sentence to a chronic and manageable illness. Viruses are strange in their very nature, and we have very few "antivirals.". ..our best weapons have been not "treatments" but vaccines.
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Ending on beauty:
Sometimes I wish I had children, but other times not. For one thing, I’d rather not explain Jesus.
But I do love going to the old churches. One favorite has a brand-new candle dispenser.
I took a video of my sister buying a candle. Then she took a video of me.
Oh wow, I said, as the machine gently lifted the candle, moved it over and set it down. The little door opened, and the candle was mine.
Wow, I said again, which I say a lot, always remembering my dad who had only a few words left after a stroke.
I placed my candle at the statue of St. Joseph in honor of my dad. Also, because I always imagine St. Joseph a little bewildered. Relatable.
And I left it there to burn, unattended, just fine, all night and into the next day and for who knows how long, because, like it or not, that’s how it works.
~ Mary Ann Samyn, Votive
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