Rock formations of Bisti Badlands in New Mexico's White Mesa*
MY BODY REMEMBER THE SOFT
mouths that did not crush, but slowly
melted into mine. My body, be
a memorial to the lovers’ dissolving
outlines, our hands’ whispered arias
along the arch of the spine,
where the wings ought to be —
how one said, I could listen to your voice
all night and forever, my love.
Though my mind complains of too few
caresses, you, my not yet interrupted body,
know that shiver like the purple fire
of crocus burning in the snow
I saw in the High Tatras, once —
Wasn’t that once almost more
than you could let enter — the flame
of those petals, those lips
melting like snow. When my mind
tries to wear the black flowers
of mourning, remember how their
eyes gathered light in the dark.
When my mind cries unloved,
unloved, heavy as the earth
closing over a grave, my
body, remember their bodies.
~ Oriana
**
Mary:
I like the couplets because the pacing gives, somehow, that feeling of dissolving, the way the lovers are dissolving into sensation, into their bodies, into each other. HOW it gives me that sense I'm not sure I can describe, but it definitely moves slowly and luxuriantly.
Such a sensual poem!! And love, memory and death all there to boot!!
****************
[Oriana: Please note: For the article on autism, please scroll to the health section toward the end of this blog. It may be easier to jump to the end and scroll upwards.]
*
THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST: ON THE SUBLIMITY OF JAY GATSBY
One hundred years ago, Charles Scribner’s Sons published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby. Unlike Fitzgerald’s debut, it was not a smashing commercial success. It sold less copies, too, than his second book. The slow, sad, alcohol-soaked slide of Fitzgerald’s life, at just twenty-eight, had already begun. When the writer died in 1940, he believed himself a failure, and the public had largely moved on from him. Critics didn’t take him very seriously.
If only he could know what was in store for his afterlife — immortality like few authors in history, absent Shakespeare or perhaps Tolstoy. Today, The Great Gatsby can lay claim to being the Great American Novel, that single work of literature which binds generations and tells us far more about our country than maybe we’d like. But we return, again and again, because there is beauty in such damage — and love pulsing in the abyss.
*
Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century now, I took my copy to the spot where that nightingale fledged. There is a small pub garden by London’s Hampstead Heath where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the Romantic princeling John Keats, composed his “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Here, as in America, you first meet the book in school, and you take your personal clutch of gorgeous, fleet-footed lyrics; for me, that the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” and that Gatsby’s smile “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” Those treasures are precious, but in some way you feel they are so for what they will reveal. Everyone says you must reach a certain age to “really get” Gatsby.
We might locate that age. Keats died at twenty-five, and Romanticism might be called the vaunting of imagination over reason. Nick calls twenty-five the last age before one is “too old to lie to [one]self and call it honor.” There is a twenty-eight month span between the ages at which Keats died and Fitzgerald commenced Gatsby. It occurs between twenty-five and twenty-seven years old. What you notice in that period, I think, is that you have your first lot of the past. The vista that opened when you were asked what you wanted to be when you grew up is no longer quite infinite. Some limits have appeared at the edges. The first transmutations of open possibility into set history have occurred. Some questions are answers, some petals have fallen, some tinder is ash.
I want to contend, against the dominant interpretation, that Gatsby is not trying to recover a past but pastlessness, because it is only with no past that you can have every future.
Very wrong was the novelist who told Fitzgerald that “to make Gatsby really great, you ought to have given us his early career.” Gatsby needs, at first, to be pastless. Fitzgerald wrote and then deliberately excised the story of Gatsby’s early days — it was later released, with different names, as the short story “Absolution.” Fitzgerald instead dazzles us with the early swirl of fantastic rumors about Gatsby’s past in order to convey its unknowability. When we first see him on the dock, we know nothing of him, and he might be aspiring to anything. The scene vibrates with possibility:
"I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock."
*
The timing of our eventual acquaintance with Gatsby’s past is twice deliberate: Fitzgerald chooses to have his narrator choose to relate it out of the story’s chronology. Daisy tours the house and, for Gatsby, “the colossal significance of that light had now just vanished forever . . . Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” After this moment Nick sees a photograph of an intimate from Gatsby’s youth, and he uses the next chapter to tell that past. Totally free self-creation demands emancipation from the past, which bequeaths some identity, and makes some demand of continuity. The fact of the past and the loss of creation are one. Gatsby’s past comes with the realization of his project’s limits, because it is the limit on his project.
Mind that Daisy’s visit is not a failure. Critics who mistake this find themselves overworking the inappropriateness of the piano music or the inconvenience of the phone call. Actually, when Nick leaves them, Gatsby and Daisy are close. The disappointment is not that their reunion is a bad one, but that it is only one, a single event of a single set of qualities, in the way that anything that really happens is. In fact, it seems likely that Fitzgerald had it go as well as could in reality be expected so as to show that what Gatsby wants is something outside of reality.
Pains are taken to establish that Daisy is not the object of Gatsby’s desires, only their appointed vessel, and that no “incarnation” can hold the ideas of his dreams. She “tumble[s] short” of them, the “colossal vitality of his illusion” having gone “beyond her, beyond everything.” Near the end of the book, she cries at him: “Oh, you want too much!”
The sole aspect of her that “couldn’t be over-dreamed” is her voice. We know what her voice is; it is “full of money.” And as time is money, money is time. Both are pure potential: both can be anything but are until then nothing. You wonder what you might buy when you are very rich, you wonder what you might be when you are very young. Each offers dreams of lustrous futures. The “fluctuating, feverish warmth” of Daisy’s voice gives new access to that dream, to the “constant, turbulent riot.” Gatsby enjoyed inventing futures as a seventeen-year-old boy at night, before any history, when imagination was realer than reality:
"The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."
Why do we hate Gatsby? Because while he is so generous in one way, he is in another a miser. We feel morally that you must spend money, that hoarding it with no intention of turning it into something more real is wrong. Gatsby spends money but is a hoarder of time, “watching over nothing.” And love, the wise fool cautions, “is not hereafter.”
No one attends Gatsby’s funeral. He who refuses history refuses to grow up. Maturing means committing, means mourning the infinite loss of possibility which is all our burden, but which Gatsby abdicates. He does not even wish his dream will come true, he just wishes to dream, to glory, and suffer alone. Bluntly, he is a wanker, stimulating everything and creating nothing. A huge, incoherent failure.
To see the Queensboro Bridge “always” for the “first” time is to knowingly choose the impossible. A smile that “believes in you as you would like to believe in yourself” just gives you what you want, disregarding truth, encouraging lies and loneliness.
*
As I have myself passed through the Keats-Gatsby twilight, I noticed the starts of ends.
Grandparents have died, friend’s parents have died, injuries don’t recover automatically, stars are younger than me, I have a salary, I have a past. I am in one of my childhood’s futures and not in the rest. Some friends are dreamless because of their work, others are workless because of their dreams. One will marry a partner not his ideal, another lost a love for knowing too well how she differed from his. For what they’re worth, here are the nine lines of verse I checked most in this time.
These, from Radiohead’s Nude. The Buchanans, Bakers and Carraways are always described as “white.” Gatsby gets almost every color except it:
Don’t get any big ideas
They're not gonna happen
You paint yourself white
And fill up with noise
But there'll be something missing
And this, by the minor poet Frances Cornford, about Rupert Brooke, who like Gatsby fought in the First World War:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
*
Gatsby’s project — to recover pastlessness and restore total possibility — is only finally ruined in the seventh of nine chapters. It is an assertion of an immovable past that seems “to bite physically into Gatsby.” Tom says there are things between him and Daisy that neither can ever forget. Gatsby wanted Daisy to tell Tom it was “all wiped out forever,” but she cannot. Tom, who has all his eggs in the past, triumphs over Gatsby, who has all his in the future.
Curiously, it is only after Gatsby loses that Nick’s admiration for him gets full, emotional release. Just as Nick is leaving for the last time he “remember[s] something” and turns to shout the only compliment he ever gives Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
Maybe he can prefer the loser because he knows the “rotten” winners. He can know that how you play is what matters, because he knows how the winners play. Tom draws worth from real events of the past, and Jordan is “too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.”
But Tom’s past glory is an “acute limited excellence” and Jordan is a “clean, hard, limited person.” We have had it confirmed that Gatsby is not unlimited, but that seems better than these two, who have been limited from the start, even if it is really the same thing.
Why do we love Gatsby? Because it is not the residents of the Valley of Ashes alone who pass from “nothing to nothing,” but all of us. We are all to die, and everything stops mattering. Though Gatsby “watches over nothing,” there is a small way he eludes, or at least improves, or at least illuminates, that nothingness. There is something noble, magnificent, and true in the way he stands up to the dark night, aspiring instead to a false green light.
Beyond twenty-five might seem too old to dream, but remember the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, whose daily routine Gatsby imitated: “Most men die at 25, we just bury them at 75.” Fitzgerald has cars — automobiles, self-mobiles, American dreams, dreams — that crash throughout the book. Gatsby crashes. His car crashes. But whatever its sad end, Nick is “glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in [the] somber holiday.”
It would be too easy to see the Queensboro Bridge as new only once, and never to see people for what they might be. Sustaining a “romantic readiness,” as Gatsby does, involves a noble effort to live up to life. His “gift for hope” is a gift for all.
*
For the rest of the book, Nick’s sentiment flickers between love and hatred of Gatsby. As we near the end, the alternations become frequent, then frenetic, and the pressure gets tighter. At last the two sentiments are forced into one, in a fusion so stressful that the sentences, though they hold, are ready to break:
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Keats, with whom we started, said a work is great when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Is Gatsby great or not? Are we to love him or hate him? There are no facts. We can reach no answer. It will always be a question. The book loves and hates Gatsby, and both sentiments have their fullest expression.
It accommodates us, wherever we are. My first editor said he had read it at least ten times. Writing about really great art, the danger is overstating the joyous findings of your most recent encounter to the exclusion of past and future ones. You have never understood The Great Gatsby; you have just been understood by it. We are always within this book and we will never be without it. Gatsby forever.
*
Gatsby is one long de-idealisation, though curiously it never loses its own stubborn romanticism. In that, the book has the alcoholic character of its author. “I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage,” the polo-playing Tom boasts to Gatsby, and you think of Gatsby’s literary forebear, Flaubert’s doomed romantic Emma Bovary, who is seduced with high sentiments amid the odors of an agricultural fair. The promise of American capitalism, once embodied by Henry Ford’s affordable automobiles, has been reduced to the “dust-covered wreck of a Ford” in Wilson’s garage. The wraithlike Wilson is all that is left of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive ideals.
https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-man-without-a-past?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
*
HOW AYN RAND BECAME THE NEW RIGHT’S VERSION OF MARX
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago, has never been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families.
She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labor, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
The poor die like flies as a result of government programs and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”
Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic [i.e. millenarian] cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose." She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the world a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitized by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats.
I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and Social Security. She had railed furiously against both programs, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.
Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honor and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system."
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
~ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/05/new-right-ayn-rand-marx
uuuuuu:
When will the Right (especially the American Right) accept that their value system is diametrically opposed to the "Christian values" they apparently espouse? The Tea Party would stone "the Good Samaritan" for helping those in need. Ronald Reagan and Rick Perry have both advocated the abolition of the welfare state. Humans have evolved as a co-operative species. Those who espouse Ayn Rand's values would have been ostracized from groups of our ancestors as parasites.
maybel:
Personally I think Thornstein Veblen's philosophy, in Theory of the Leisure Class, one of the best.
ValuleCritic:
Like Marx because she wrote fiction? Instead of doormats, Marx turns his followers into Housepets http://bit.ly/AtfxWy. Worse than sheeple, they viciously defend their enslavers.
Marxpets are always waiting for the fictional system that has never existed. No sane Marxist points to a socialist leader of the past as a hero. They always pine for a non-existent perfect picture of some new socialism that will work for once. They march and chant and wait for the Second Coming of Karl Marx.
"Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed."
He is comparing this to Marx's philosophy? The one that led to the deaths of tens of millions and dozens of failed states and a century of stunted growth? Is that what George Manbiot calls "efforts to make the world a kinder place"? Well maybe we don't need that again. Maybe we don't need your 'kinder' death of tens of millions, George.
*
THE CONTROVERSIAL “SUCCESS SEQUENCE” THEORY TO BE TAUGHT BY SCHOOLS
Public schools in America are becoming testing grounds for a tenuous theory: that poverty can be avoided by making three choices in the right order.
Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill this month requiring schools to teach students this so-called success sequence: that if you graduate from high school, get a full-time job, and wait until marriage to have children, you’ll likely be “successful” in avoiding poverty.
Utah lawmakers passed their own success sequence resolution in 2024, and states including Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas considered similar legislation this year.
This wave of education policy largely originates from model legislation provided by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published the influential Project 2025 agenda. It represents a growing effort to codify a particular view of mobility into public school curricula, one that suggests personal choices primarily drive economic prosperity.
While the sequence enjoys real popularity across party lines — and to many casual observers sounds fairly innocuous as life advice — policy experts say the actual evidence underpinning its anti-poverty message is thin and vastly overstated.
The term “success sequence” first appeared in 2006 when historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and sociologist Marline Pearson co-authored a report for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. They wrote that modern teenagers “lack what earlier generations took for granted: a normative sequence for the timing of sex, marriage and parenthood.” Their solution was to promote the “success sequence.”
The concept was later popularized by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-centrist think tank, and championed by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), particularly Brad Wilcox, who directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
Advocates claim the results are impressive: According to research from IFS, 97 percent of millennials who follow all three steps avoid poverty as adults. Even among those who grew up in poverty, the majority who complete the sequence reach middle-class status or higher.
“We do have, in certain parts of our state, problems with fatherlessness, and we do have pockets in our state like in metro Nashville with poverty and lots of kids not having the type of economic opportunity that we all want them to have,” Tennessee Rep. Gino Bulso, the House sponsor of the bill, told Vox. “When I saw [the success sequence] cut across all demographics, that even Black adults were 96 percent likely to avoid poverty, I thought it was something we should go ahead and introduce.”
But the idea has been largely debunked, as the evidence confuses correlation with causation. As Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out in 2018, “Ownership of a private jet is even more strongly associated with financial success, yet that doesn’t mean jet ownership is what allowed these individuals to escape poverty.”
There’s little to back up the claim that the exact sequence matters. A 2021 study funded by the federal Department of Health and Human Services found that young adults who finish high school, work full time, and get married are less likely to experience poverty, but the specific order doesn’t seem to matter much. These steps — except for marriage — don’t strongly predict family stability either, and researchers say more data is needed to understand what really helps young people thrive.
“Even with delaying parenthood, the importance of that for poverty is swamped by the importance of having and keeping a job, so it’s worth asking whether policymakers are also making it easier for people to access contraception and abortion services and to have an income when they have kids,” said Paul Bruno, an education policy professor. “If not, I’m not sure that having classes about those things amounts to much more than scolding students about things a long time in the future that they either already know or have limited control over.”
Despite the success sequence’s weak intellectual basis, it remains very popular across political and demographic lines. According to a 2021 American Enterprise Institute survey, 77 percent of Americans support teaching the concept, including 85 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of Democrats, and 78 percent of independents. Support spans racial groups as well, with 68 percent of Black respondents, 80 percent of white respondents, and 74 percent of Hispanic respondents favoring its inclusion in school curricula.
“Teaching the success sequence has overwhelming support on the left and right, with higher, and more intense support among conservatives, so it’s not surprising that red states are leading on these bills,” Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at AEI, told Vox. “The broad support among liberals is there, but the minority of liberal opponents would be more vocal in their opposition, so the same bills could be more trouble than blue state legislators are willing to bear.”
Bruno cautioned that polling support for educational concepts often proves fragile upon implementation, pointing to the Common Core standards as an example. “It’s very easy to find political support for proposals for schools to teach kids stuff that sounds nice,” he said. “Because the proposals sound nice and are pretty vague about the details and don’t ask anybody to make any hard choices, this often means the real support is not that strong.”
Matt Bruenig of the left-wing People’s Policy Project think tank has been pointing out methodological problems with the sequence for the last decade. At its heart, he argues, the formulation is about deflecting attention from how policy choices produce poverty. “It’s always been a way to undermine efforts to improve the welfare state,” he told Vox. “That’s why the right likes it and why they want to teach it to students.”
For most people, the success sequence sounds like harmless and practical life advice. But its deeper appeal, Bruenig argued, is that it offers lawmakers a palatable way to frame poverty as a matter of personal failure rather than systemic design.
Teaching Personal Responsibility while Ignoring Structural Barriers
When Tennessee’s success sequence bill was being debated, Democratic Rep. Aftyn Behn of Nashville attempted to add language to teach that economic barriers can prevent students from completing the sequence. Her amendment — which framed delayed marriage and childbearing among millennials as the result of challenges like wage stagnation, student debt, and unaffordable child care and housing — ultimately failed.
In an interview with Vox, Behn pointed to her own experience: “I make $26,000 a year as a Tennessee legislator. I have student debt from graduate school, I rent, and I represent a large swath of millennials who have decided to forego children because of the negative economic impact. My amendment would have made the curriculum address the reality facing many young people. Without it, we risk teaching young people a narrative that blames them for systemic failures.”
She continued: “We have foster kids sleeping on the floors of our [child services] offices. We have gay kids sleeping in their cars because of the policies forcing schools to out them to their parents. No young person working three jobs can afford the down payment on a house in Nashville, where I represent. The Tennessee legislature has done nothing to address the affordability of living, and yet expect us to buy into a false narrative that if you follow one individualized path, you can claw your way out of systemic poverty. Give me a break.”
Rep. Bulso, who sponsored the bill in Tennessee, said it’s “very rare” for the legislature to amend any bills on the floor of the House, adding that “it didn’t seem to me that the substance of the amendment added anything to what we were doing.” He said, “the last thing we want to do” is present facts to students that could “cause emotional distress,” but he believes the success sequence ultimately presents a “very compelling and uplifting message.”
Curriculum vs. reality
Education researchers have long questioned whether school-based instruction on life choices really influences students’ future decisions. Teen pregnancy has declined dramatically over recent decades, for example, not primarily because of abstinence education, but due to increased access to high-quality birth control.
How these broad success sequence concepts will translate into actual classroom instruction remains an open question. “Thoughtful implementation is key to ensure the success sequence is used to inform, rather than browbeat students,” said Malkus, of AEI. “But I am confident educators can manage this, particularly given the far more charged topics ‘family life’ teachers have to routinely cover.”
Malkus believes teachers should have flexibility in presentation. “The requirement to teach the success sequence does not mean it cannot be taught in context,” he added. “I trust most teachers have the common sense to do this well, and I think when it comes to their local schools, most Americans do too.”
But Bruno, the professor, worries about opportunity costs. “Teaching the success sequence probably won’t have much impact for anybody, but will take up time and energy that could be used to teach kids skills that will actually help them get jobs or to set up social safety nets that make sure they don’t fall into poverty if they get hit with bad luck,” he said. “Those costs are going to be especially important for kids from lower-income families.”
Some critics offer alternative frameworks for addressing poverty in educational settings. Bruenig suggests students could “learn about countries that have low levels of poverty and inequality” and study “notable successes in poverty reduction in America, such as the massive drop in elderly poverty following Social Security expansion and the halving of child poverty that occurred in 2021 following an increase in child benefits.”
Bulso, meanwhile, is optimistic.
“I would hope that 100 percent of students in middle and high school will be exposed to facts that actually show them that if they follow the sequence where they finish high school and go to college and get a job and have full-time employment and then get married and then have children, their chances are better than in some other circumstances,” he said. “The most important milestone is finishing high school.”
https://www.vox.com/poverty/408705/schools-success-sequence-poverty-education-marriage?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
ONE REASON IT’S HARDER TO ESCAPE POVERTY IN AMERICA
Poor kids in the US are likely to become poor adults. More government support during adulthood could change that.
The classic promise of the American dream is that no matter where you grew up, no matter how poor you were as a kid, you can still have a path to financial stability in the United States as long as you work hard. But the truth is that poverty in the US is much more persistent than it is in other high-income countries. In fact, a poor American kid is much less likely to escape poverty in adulthood than a poor kid in Denmark or Germany or the United Kingdom.
Obviously, that’s not because Americans aren’t willing to work hard. Many studies have shown just how big a role your early years — and things like the quality of the school you attended, the safety of your childhood neighborhood, and the social networks you had access to as a kid — play in your future economic outcomes. So the hope has been that by focusing social programs on reducing childhood poverty, we can reduce adult poverty in the long term.
But while directing government resources toward reducing child poverty is crucial, childhood poverty alone doesn’t explain why poverty is so much more likely to follow you through life in the US than it is in peer countries. A recent study underscores one major factor that makes poor American kids so likely to stay poor, and it’s strikingly simple: It’s not just that the US government doesn’t provide kids with enough support, but that adults are also in need of a much more generous social safety net.
To better understand the links between childhood and adult poverty and what can break that cycle, I spoke with the study’s lead author, Zachary Parolin, an associate professor at Bocconi University and a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Here is our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
The US prides itself on being a place where there’s a lot of upward mobility. But how does the US actually compare to peer countries when it comes to upward mobility?
There are a lot of studies that focus on intergenerational mobility broadly defined, maybe based on your earnings in adulthood compared to your parents’ earnings. We know from that literature that, in general, the influence of your parental background tends to matter more in the US than other high-income countries.
One slight difference in our approach of looking at this is saying, “What if we just care about the intergenerational persistence of poverty?” In other words, if you’re born into poverty in the US, what are your chances of escaping poverty in your own adulthood relative to, say, children who grew up in poverty in Denmark, Germany, Australia, or the United Kingdom?
And what we find is that poverty in the US is much, much stickier than in other high-income countries, and by a substantial margin. So if you grow up poor in the US, your odds of being poor in adulthood are a magnitude of two to four times higher than some of the other high-income countries we looked at.
So the topline findings are that growing up poor in the United States is particularly consequential for your adult economic outcomes, undermining this idea that the US, relative to peer nations, is some land of great upward economic opportunity.
We often focus on how important factors in childhood are to someone’s prospects of escaping poverty later in life — things like zip codes, schools, social networks — but what you found is that there’s one thing missing from those conversations, and that’s government support during adulthood, not just childhood. How did you reach that conclusion?
I want to start by saying I don’t want to undervalue the importance of income support provided during childhood. Reducing child property, direct income transfers, or other service-oriented provisions remains incredibly important.
What we show is that if you want to explain why the US has a much higher persistence of poverty than other high-income countries, a really large part of that equation is that if you grow up or in the US and you’re in adulthood — and maybe you don’t have full-time work, maybe you didn’t get that college degree — the state is doing much less to support you.
Just to try to contextualize this a little bit more, imagine two people — one in the US, one in Denmark. They both grow up spending maybe half their childhood in poverty. In both countries, they’re less likely to go get a university degree relative to other kids who didn’t grow up in poverty. They might be less likely to work in full-time employment. But that Dane who still suffers the consequences of having grown up in poverty, in their adulthood, they still might get some generous social assistance whereas the similar adult in the US just isn’t getting access to the same type of support.
So the lingering consequences of child poverty for one’s income in adulthood happen to be stronger in the US in part due to the reduced economic assistance provided by the state, and that’s what we find explains the large part of the variation.
One surprising thing your study found was that while Black kids are much more likely to grow up in poverty than white kids, racial discrimination doesn’t actually make poverty persist more. White kids are just as likely to be stuck in poverty well into adulthood. Can you explain why that is?
Yeah, we were actually surprised by this finding, and we try to be cautious in how we explain it. It’s certainly true that Black children in the US are much more likely to be poor than white individuals. We see that clearly in our data. But the link between that child poverty and adult poverty is roughly similar.
In our data, if you have a Black child and a white child who spend half their childhoods in poverty, the association of spending half your childhood in poverty and the likelihood that you’re poor in adulthood is pretty much the same for those two kids. But it is in fact true that Black children and adults are much more exposed to poverty overall.
It’s absolutely true that discrimination still exists and discrimination is a big part of why Black individuals are exposed to more poverty both in childhood and adulthood. But what we find empirically is that, given a certain amount of exposure to poverty, it’s bad for you regardless, and it’s not just racial discrimination that explains why the US is so much worse relative to other countries, even if that, of course, is a factor in many other dimensions of economic opportunity in the US.
So a lot of this seems pretty obvious: It’s very logical to say that if you provide people with more public support in adulthood, then they’re less likely to be poor. So why is it important for people, and especially policymakers, to pay attention to your study? What’s the lesson here that we didn’t already know?
I think the big lesson is related to some of these intergenerational outcomes. In other words, understanding how the conditions you grow up in are going to influence the conditions you face in adulthood. Understanding how we think about that from the lens of fairness and equity concerns and then: What can we do about it?
The reduction of poverty through income transfers [like unemployment insurance benefits] in itself is a good thing, but what we show is that beyond reducing hardship, these transfers have the ability to reduce that link between childhood poverty and adult poverty.
In other words, they have the ability to reduce that link between conditions that you didn’t choose, that you inherited as a result of your birth and your parents’ economic circumstances when you were young, and your ability to meet your basic needs in your own adulthood.
Beyond the million other reasons to care about reducing poverty in the short run, here is another reason that some of those income transfers in adulthood are important, and in general, understanding why this link between childhood poverty and adult poverty is so much stickier in the US than in other countries.
https://www.vox.com/policy/397659/cutting-childhood-poverty-us-adulthood
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“CRUELTY IS THE SYSTEM”
I’ve lived in Russia for some time. I’ve spent time in Eastern Europe. I’ve read obsessively, listened carefully, and paid attention like my life depended on it—because, in a very real sense, it does. And while I’ll leave academic dissection to the ivory tower, what I can tell you from the ground is this:
What’s happening in this country isn’t just cruel—it’s methodical, strategic, and deeply familiar to anyone who’s studied or survived under regimes built on repression and rot.
We’re watching a script play out—one that was written in the blood and bureaucracy of Putin’s Russia, refined in the dungeons of Chechnya, perfected through decades of oligarchic decay, secret police intimidation, and mafia-state theatrics. And now it’s being re-staged here in America, rebranded with flags and lapel pins and the tired language of “law and order.”
The Trump regime—this carnival of third-rate strongmen, grifters, sycophants, and sadists—isn’t innovating anything. It’s copying. It’s importing the authoritarian model wholesale. They’ve read the Putin playbook, dog-eared the best parts, and now they’re running it in real time. And the cruelty? That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system.
Because cruelty serves a dual purpose: it distracts and it paralyzes. It shocks the conscience just long enough to make you forget about the theft happening in broad daylight. It freezes resistance by making you wonder who’s next. It’s not just about dehumanizing the target—it’s about disarming the observer. You see a 52-year-old seamstress abducted by masked agents in broad daylight, and your mind stops. That’s the point. While you’re frozen, they’re looting the vault.
Putin’s critics—brave dissidents like Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Alexei Navalny—laid it out plainly: behind the thuggish repression, there’s no grand ideology. There’s only theft. Power is just a means to steal more, protect the stolen, and destroy anyone who threatens the racket. Navalny made that crystal clear. Putin’s state isn’t built on belief—it’s built on plunder. And everything else—beatings, censorship, propaganda, disappearances—is just set dressing for the heist.
Trump, a failed businessman and serial conman, didn’t stumble into power because he had a vision. He stumbled into it like a raccoon into a jewelry store: overwhelmed, opportunistic, and desperate to grab everything shiny before the lights come on. He brought with him a gang of similarly hollow, self-serving goons—parasites in flag pins—who recognized that brute force and spectacle could serve as a perfect cover for mass-scale corruption. All they needed was enough boots, enough masks, and enough Americans too scared or too exhausted to resist.
That’s what ICE is now—a terror squad designed not just to punish the “other,” but to frighten the rest into submission. They don’t need to knock on your door. They just need you to see what happens when they knock on hers. They want you disoriented, enraged, heartbroken, and above all—silent.
It’s not about immigration. It’s about domination.
But here’s the part they never count on: you can only keep people paralyzed for so long. Fear calcifies. Shock fades. And eventually, rage focuses.
So let’s speak plainly: this is not normal, it’s not American, and it’s not sustainable. It’s a kleptocratic death cult wearing the face of democracy. It’s an authoritarian racket hiding behind courtrooms and uniforms. And it will fall—just like every regime before it that mistook violence for invincibility and corruption for competence.
What can we do? First, resist the paralysis. Rage, yes—but don’t retreat. Pay attention. Speak out. If something feels wrong, say it’s wrong. Refuse to play along with their language, their framing, their euphemisms. They are not “removing undocumented immigrants.” They are disappearing people. They are not “restoring law and order.” They are weaponizing the state.
And just as importantly: take care of yourself. Joy, community, love, rest—these are not luxuries in a time of repression. They are acts of defiance. They are the fuel for the long fight ahead. Because this will be a long fight. There will be distractions, casualties, betrayals. But there will also be courage. And solidarity. And moments that remind us exactly why we fight.
Because we don’t do it for the flag. We don’t do it for politicians. We do it for every seamstress dragged from her car. Every family torn apart. Every dissident silenced. Every protestor jailed. We do it to honor the civil rights marchers, the freedom riders, the Stonewall rebels, the water protectors, the labor organizers—the defiant, the bold, the brave.
And we do it for the Americans who laid down their lives to crush fascism in Europe. For the soldiers who stormed beaches to fight against tyranny, not wave it in through the front door. For those who fought in the jungles and the deserts and the streets—not for conquest, but for freedom. For those who knew that authoritarianism doesn’t need to speak a foreign language to be a threat.
And we do it because we must. Because history is watching. And this time, it’s our names on the line.
Let’s make sure they’re remembered for the right reasons. ~ Lee Braff (?), Facebook (this has been widely shared, and I'm not sure who is the actual author)
Photo—personal hero of mine, Russian patriot and dissident Alexei Navalny.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny’
By: Oliver Kornetzke
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prisoners at El Salvador mega prison
It's not just Trump. It's the whole new generation of trumpists who have been given permission to be bad, proudly cruel people. It's the fact that the Republican Party, in its majority, has become a party of bad, cruel people. ~ M. Iossel, Facebook
Republican House Rep. Riley Moore in El Salvador at the maximum facility prison giving the thumbs up.
Oriana:
I’ve omitted most of the images of the mega-prison in El Salvador — they were simply too disturbing and too evocative of the inhuman Nazi practices. I believe that prisoners, even those with a heavy criminal record, still have human rights.
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THE RISE OF END-TIME FASCISM
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.
Yet despite backing from the heavy-hitter venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, their extreme libertarian dreams kept bogging down: it turns out most self-respecting rich people don’t actually want to live on floating oil rigs, even if it means lower taxes, and while Próspera might be nice for a holiday and some body “upgrades”, its extra-national status is currently being challenged in court.
Now, all of a sudden, this once-fringe network of corporate secessionists finds itself knocking on open doors at the dead center of global power.
The first sign that fortunes were shifting came in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. The trial balloon barely registered at the time, lost in the daily deluge of outrageous claims.
Since the new administration took office, however, would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.
“The energy in DC is absolutely electric,” Trey Goff, the chief of staff of Próspera, recently enthused after a trip to Capitol Hill. Legislation paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states should be complete by the end of the year, he claims.
Inspired by the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation.
Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
Robert Thiel, 2019
One might assume that it is contradictory for Trump, elected on a flag-waving “America first” platform, to lend credence to this vision of sovereign territories ruled over by billionaire god-kings. And much has been made of the colorful flame wars between the Maga mouth-piece Steve Bannon, a proud nationalist and populist, and the Trump-allied billionaires he has attacked as “technofeudalists” who “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being” – let alone the nation state. And conflicts inside Trump’s awkward, jerry-rigged coalition certainly exist, most recently reaching a boiling point over tariffs. Still, the underlying visions might not be as incompatible as they first appear.
The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.
That is not so far away from the more mass-market vision of fortressed nations that has gripped the hard right globally, from Italy to Israel, Australia to the United States: in a time of ceaseless peril, openly supremacist movements in these countries are positioning their relatively wealthy states as armed bunkers.
These bunkers are brutal in their determination to expel and imprison unwanted humans (even if that requires indefinite confinement in extra-national penal colonies from Manus Island to Guantánamo Bay) and equally ruthless in their willingness to violently claim the land and resources (water, energy, critical minerals) they deem necessary to weather the coming shocks.
Interestingly, at a time when previously secular Silicon Valley elites are suddenly finding Jesus, it is noteworthy that both of these visions – the priority-pass corporate state and the mass-market bunker nation – share a great deal in common with the Christian fundamentalist interpretation of the biblical Rapture, when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.
Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
Not so long ago, it was primarily religious fundamentalists who greeted signs of apocalypse with gleeful excitement about the long-awaited Rapture. Trump has handed critical posts to people who subscribe to that fiery orthodoxy, including several Christian Zionists who see Israel’s use of annihilatory violence to expand its territorial footprint not as illegal atrocities but as felicitous evidence that the Holy Land is getting closer to the conditions under which the Messiah will return, and the faithful will get their celestial kingdom.
Mike Huckabee, Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to Israel, has strong ties to Christian Zionism, as does Pete Hegseth, his secretary of defense. Noem and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect who now leads the office of budget and management, are both staunch advocates for Christian nationalism. Even Thiel, who is gay and notorious for his party lifestyle, has been heard musing about the arrival of the Antichrist of late (spoiler: he thinks it’s Greta Thunberg, more on that soon).
But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities.”
In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.”
Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots.
Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.”
Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars).
Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
What of the Maga base, though? Not all are sufficiently faithful to earnestly believe in the Rapture, and most certainly don’t have the cash to buy a spot in a “freedom city” let alone on a rocket ship. Fear not. End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.
Listen to Steve Bannon’s daily podcast – which bills itself as Maga’s premier media outlet – and you will be barraged with a singular message: the world is going to hell, the infidels are breaching the barricades, and a final battle is coming. Be prepared. The prepper message becomes particularly pronounced when Bannon switches to hawking his advertisers’ products.
Buy Birch Gold, Bannon tells his audience, because the over-leveraged US economy is going to crash and you can’t trust the banks. Stock up on ready-to-eat meals from My Patriot Supply. Sharpen your target practice using a laser-guided at-home system. The last thing you would want to do is depend on the government during a disaster, he reminds listeners (left unsaid: especially now that the Doge boys are selling off the government for parts).
Bannon doesn’t only urge his audience to make their own bunkers, of course. He also advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right, one in which Ice agents stalk the streets, workplaces and campuses, disappearing those deemed enemies of US policy and interests. The bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism. Inside its logic, the first job is to harden national borders and expunge all enemies, foreign and domestic.
This ugly work is now well under way, with the Trump administration, enabled by the supreme court, having invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Cecot, the now infamous mega-prison in El Salvador. The facility, which shaves prisoners heads and packs up to 100 people into a single cell, stacked with bare bunks, operates under the civil liberties-destroying “state of exception” first declared over three years ago by the country’s crypto-loving Christian Zionist prime minister, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele has offered to provide the same fee-for-service system for US citizens the administration would like to drop into a judicial black hole. “I love that,” Trump said recently, when asked about the proposal. No wonder: Cecot is the sick if logical corollary of the “freedom city” fantasy – a zone where everything is for sale and due process does not apply. We should expect much more of this sadism. In a chillingly candid statement, the acting Ice director, Todd Lyons, told the 2025 Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a more “business”-oriented approach to these deportations, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
This bunker mentality also helps explain JD Vance’s controversial forays into Catholic theology. The vice-president, who owes his political career in no small part to the largess of the premier prepper Thiel, explained to Fox News that, according to the medieval Christian concept of ordo amoris (translated both as “order of love” and “order of charity”), love is not owed to those outside the bunker: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” (Or not, as the Trump administration’s foreign policy would indicate.) In other words, we owe nothing to anyone outside our bunker.
Though it builds on enduring rightwing tendencies – justifying hateful exclusions is hardly new under the ethno-nationalist sun – we simply have not faced such a powerful apocalyptic strain in government before. The “end of history” swagger of the post-cold war era is rapidly being supplanted by a conviction we are in the actual end of times.
Doge may wrap itself in the banner of economic “efficiency”, and Musk’s underlings may evoke memories of the young, US-trained “Chicago Boys” who designed the economic shock therapy for Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime, but this is not simply the old marriage of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
It’s a new, money-worshiping millenarian mashup that says we need to smash the bureaucracy and replace humans with chatbots in order to cut “waste, fraud and abuse” – and, also, because the bureaucracy is where the Trump-resisting demons hide. This is where the tech bros merge with the TheoBros, a real group of hyper-patriarchal Christian supremacists with ties to Hegseth and others in the Trump administration.
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Steve Bannon advances a vision of the United States as a bunker in its own right.
As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy).
But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.
It’s also a self-reinforcing downward spiral: Trump’s furious attacks on every structure designed to protect the public from diseases, dangerous foods and disasters – even to tell the public when disasters are headed their way – strengthen the case for prepperism at both the high and low ends, all while creating myriad new opportunities for privatization and profiteering by the oligarchs powering this rapid-fire unmaking of the social and regulatory state.
At the dawn of Trump’s first term, the New Yorker investigated a phenomenon that it described as “doomsday prep for the super-rich”. Back then, it was already clear that in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists were hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers and building escape homes on high ground in places like Hawaii (where Mark Zuckerberg has downplayed his 5,000 sq ft underground pad as a “little shelter”) and New Zealand (where Thiel purchased nearly 500 acres but found his plan to build a luxury survivalist compound rejected by local authorities in 2022 for being an eyesore).
This millenarianism is bound up with a suite of other Silicon Valley intellectual fads, all premised on an end-times-inflected belief that our planet is headed towards a cataclysm and it’s time to make some hard choices about which parts of humanity can be saved.
Transhumanism is one such ideology, encompassing everything from minor human-machine “enhancements” to the quest to upload human intelligence into a still illusory artificial general intelligence. There is also effective altruism and longtermism, both of which skip over redistributive approaches to helping those in need in the here and now in favor of a cost-benefit approach to doing the most good in the long term.
Though they can appear benign at first glance, these ideas are shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole. They also share a marked lack of interest in urgently addressing the underlying drivers of collapse – a responsible and rational goal that a growing cohort of figures now actively shun. Instead of effective altruism the Mar-a-Lago regular Andreessen and others have embraced “effective accelerationism”, or the “deliberate propulsion of technological development” without guardrails.
Meanwhile, even darker philosophies are finding a wider audience, like the neoreactionary pro-monarchy rants of the coder Curtis Yarvin (another one of Thiel’s intellectual touchstones), or the “pro-natalism” movement’s obsession with dramatically increasing the number of “western” babies (a Musk fixation), as well as the exit guru Srinivasan’s vision of a “tech zionist” San Francisco where corporate loyalists and police join forces to politically cleanse the city of liberals to make way for their networked apartheid state.
As the AI scholars Timnit Gebru and Émile P Torres have written, though the methods may be new, this “bundle” of ideological fads “are direct descendants of first-wave eugenics”, which also saw a small subset of humanity making decisions about which parts of the whole were worth continuing and which needed to be phased out, cleared out, or terminated.
Until recently, few paid attention. Much like Próspera, where members can already experiment with human-machine mergers such as having their Tesla keys implanted into their hands, these intellectual fads seemed to be the marginal hobby horses of a few Bay Area dilettantes with money and caution to burn. No longer.
Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and data centers are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world.
The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences.”
No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.
None of this should be written off as paranoia. Many of us feel the imminence of breakdown so acutely that we cope by entertaining ourselves with various versions of life in a post-apocalyptic bunker, streaming Apple’s Silo or Hulu’s Paradise. As the UK analyst and editor Richard Seymour reminds us in his recent book, Disaster Nationalism: “The apocalypse is no mere fantasy. We are living in it, after all, from deadly viruses to soil erosion, from economic crisis to geopolitical chaos.”
Trump 2.0’s economic project is a Frankenstein’s monster of the industries driving all of these threats – fossil fuels, weapons and resource-ravenous cryptocurrency and AI. Everyone involved in these sectors knows that there is no way to build the artificial mirror world that AI promises to construct without sacrificing this world – these technologies consume too much energy, too many critical minerals, and too much water for the two to coexist in any kind of equilibrium.
This month, the former Google executive Eric Schmidt admitted as much, telling Congress that AI’s “profound” energy needs are projected to triple in the next few years, with much of it coming from fossil fuels, because nuclear can’t come online fast enough. This planet-incinerating level of consumption is necessary, he explained, to enable an intelligence “higher” than humanity, a digital god rising from the ashes of our relinquished world.
And they are worried – just not about the actual threats they are unleashing. What keeps the leaders of these entangled industries up at night is the prospect of a civilizational wake-up call – of serious, internationally coordinated government efforts to rein in their rogue sectors before it’s too late. From the perspective of their ever-expanding bottom lines, the apocalypse is not collapse; it’s regulation.
The fact that their profits are predicated on planetary devastation helps explain why do-gooder discourse among the powerful is giving way to open expressions of disdain for the idea that we owe each other anything by right of our shared humanity. Silicon Valley is done with altruism, effective or otherwise. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pines for a culture that celebrates “aggression.”
Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner at the surveillance firm Palantir Technologies, rebukes the “losing” “self-flagellation” of those who question American superiority and the benefits of autonomous weapons systems (and, by association, the lucrative military contracts that have made Karp’s vast fortune).
Musk informs Joe Rogan that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of western civilization” and he vents, after failing to purchase a supreme court election in Wisconsin: “It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” Meaning we humans are nothing but grist for Grok, the AI service he owns. (He did tell us he was “dark Maga” – and he’s not the only one.)
In arid and climate-stressed Spain, one of the groups calling for a moratorium on new data centers calls itself Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “your cloud is drying my river.” The name is fitting, and not just for Spain.
An unspeakably dismal choice is being made before our eyes and without our consent: machines over humans, inanimate over animate, profits over all else. With stunning speed, the big tech megalomaniacs have quietly rolled back their net-zero pledges and lined up by Trump’s side, hellbent on sacrificing this world’s real and precious resources and creativity at the altar of a vampiric, virtual realm.
This is the last great heist, and they are getting ready to ride out the storms they themselves are summoning – and they will try to defame and destroy anyone who gets in their way.
Consider Vance’s recent European sojourn, where the vice-president harangued world leaders for “handwringing about safety” in relation to job-destroying AI while demanding Nazi and fascist speech go uncurtailed online. At one point he made a telling aside, expecting a laugh that never came: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
His comment echoed those made by his equally humorless patron Thiel. In recent interviews focused on the theological underpinnings of his far-right politics, the Christian billionaire has repeatedly compared the indefatigable young climate activist to the antichrist – a figure he warns was prophesied to come bearing a misleading message of “peace and safety”. “If Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire,” Thiel intoned.
Why Thunberg, why now? In part, it’s clearly the apocalyptic fear of regulation eating into their super-profits: according to Thiel, the science-based climate action Thunberg and others demand could only be enforced by a “totalitarian state”, which he claims is more dire a threat than climate breakdown (most distressingly, the taxes under such conditions would be “quite high”).
There may also be something else about Thunberg that frightens them: her steadfast commitment to this planet and the many life forms who call it home – not to simulations of this world generated by AI, or to a hierarchy of those deserving of life and those who are not, nor to any of the various extra-planetary escape fantasies the end times fascists are selling.
She is committed to staying, while the end times fascists have, at least in their imaginings, already left this realm, ensconced in their opulent shelters or transcended to the digital ether, or to Mars.
Shortly after Trump’s re-election, one of us had the opportunity to interview Anohni, one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world. Asked about what connects the willingness of powerful people to let the planet burn and the drive to deny bodily autonomy to women and to trans people like her, she responded by drawing on her Irish Catholic upbringing: it’s “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”
How do we break this apocalyptic fever? First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries. To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.
Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.
This basic sentiment, of course, is not new. It is central to Indigenous cosmologies, and it lies at the heart of animism. Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the Yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness.”
Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States.
Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.
That future would require its own apocalypse, its own world-ending and revelation, though of a very different sort. Because as the scholar of policing Robyn Maynard has observed: “In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end.”
We have reached a choice point, not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take. The activist sisters Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown touched on this recently on their aptly named podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of “ordered love”, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here. Or, to quote Anohni again, this time referring to the goddess in which she now places her faith: “Have you stopped to consider that this might have been her best idea?”
Mary:
The "end time fascists" and their plans sound just like science fiction, with an earth apocalypse and the powerful "saved" safe in their bunkers and freedom cities. It is a terrfying scenario because speeding up the process/causing the flood, seems exactly what they're doing. The chaos and destruction of Trump and Musk's actions may be not a mistake or fumble, but the actual goal itself. They want Apocalypse NOW. All the better to enjoy lives of power and luxury in their bunkers, with all the world laid waste before them.
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In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. ~ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
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THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period (9th–15th c.) that have continued to the modern era.
Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society. Instead, it is the middle class and working class who are usefully employed in the industrialized, productive occupations that support the whole of society.
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was published during the Gilded Age (1870–1900), the time of the robber baron millionaires John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, at the end of the 19th century. Veblen presents the evolutionary development of the social and economic institutions of society, wherein technology and the industrial arts are the creative forces of economic production. That in the economics of the production of goods and services, the social function of the economy was to meet the material needs of society and to earn profits for the owners of the means of production.
Sociologically, that the industrial production system required the workers (men and women) to be diligent, efficient, and co-operative, whilst the owners of the factories concerned themselves with profits and with public displays of wealth; thus the contemporary socio-economic behaviors of conspicuous consumption and of conspicuous leisure survived from the predatory, barbarian past of the tribal stage of modern society.
The sociology and economics reported in The Theory of the Leisure Class show the influences of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer; thereby Veblen's socio-economic theory emphasizes social evolution and development as characteristics of human institutions. In his time, Veblen criticized contemporary (19th-century) economic theories as intellectually static and hedonistic, and that economists should take account of how people actually behave, socially, and culturally, rather than rely upon the theoretic deduction meant to explain the economic behaviors of society.
As such, Veblen's reports of American political economy contradicted the (supply and demand) neoclassical economics of the 18th century, which define people as rational agents who seek utility and maximal pleasure from their economic activities; whereas Veblen's economics define people as irrational economic agents who disregard personal happiness in the continual pursuit of the social status and the prestige inherent to having a place in society (class and economic stratum). Veblen concluded that conspicuous consumption did not constitute social progress, because American economic development was unduly influenced by the static economics of the British aristocracy; therefore, conspicuous consumption was an un-American activity contrary to the country's dynamic culture of individualism.
Originally published as The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, the book arose from three articles that Veblen published in the American Journal of Sociology between 1898 and 1899: (i) "The Beginning of Ownership" (ii) "The Barbarian Status of Women", and (iii) "The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor.”
These works presented the major themes of economics and sociology that he later developed in works such as: The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), about how incompatible are the pursuit of profit and the making of useful goods; and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), about the fundamental conflict between the human predisposition to useful production and the societal institutions that waste the useful products of human effort.
Moreover, The Theory of the Leisure Class is a socio-economic treatise that resulted from Veblen's observation and perception of the United States as a society of rapidly developing economic and social institutions. Critics of his reportage about the sociology and economics of the American consumer society especially disliked the satiric tone of his literary style, and said that Veblen's cultural perspective had been negatively influenced by his austere boyhood in a Norwegian American community of practical, thrifty, and utilitarian people who endured anti-immigrant prejudices in the course of integration to American society.
Thesis
In a stratified society, the profession of arms (military officer) is a leisure-class occupation.
Manufacturing is an economically productive occupation for skilled-labor worker in a stratified society. (Un patron, by Jean-Eugène Buland, 1888)
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Conspicuous leisure: The devout observance of religious ritual is an activity for the leisure-class woman. (L'offrande, by Jean-Eugène Buland, 1885)
In The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen coined the following sociology terms:
Leisure class — members of the upper class who are exempt from productive work.
Pecuniary superiority — the leisure class demonstrate their economic superiority by not working.
Pecuniary emulation — the economic effort to exceed someone else's socio-economic status.
Pecuniary struggle — the acquisition and exhibition of wealth in order to gain social status.
Vicarious leisure — the leisure of wives and servants as evidence of the wealth of the lord of the manor.
Estranged leisure — the leisure of servants is realized in behalf of the lord of the manor.
The stratified society
The Theory of the Leisure Class established that the political economy of a modern society is based upon the social stratification of tribal and feudal societies, rather than upon the merit and social utility and economic utility of individual men and women. Veblen's examples indicate that many economic behaviors of contemporary society derive from corresponding tribal-society behaviors, wherein men and women practiced the division of labor according to their status group; high-status people practiced hunting and warfare, which are economically unproductive occupations, whilst low-status people practiced farming and manufacturing, which are economically productive occupations. In a socially-stratified society, the leisure class are the members of the upper class who are exempt from productive work.
(i) Occupation
The concepts of dignity and Self-worth and Honor are the bases of the development of social class and distinctions of type among the social classes; thus, by way of social stratification, productive labor came to be seen as disreputable. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth does not confer social status, as does the evidence of wealth, such as leisure. In a stratified society, the division of labor inherent to the barbarian culture of conquest, domination, and the exploitation of labor featured labor-intensive occupations for the conquered people, and light-labor occupations for the conquerors, who thus became the leisure class.
In that societal context, although low-status, productive occupations (tinker, tailor, chandler) were of greater economic value to society than were high-status, unproductive occupations (the profession of arms, the clergy, banking, etc.), for social cohesion, the leisure class occasionally performed productive work that was more symbolic than practical.
The leisure class engaged in displays of pecuniary superiority by not working and by the:
Accumulation of property and material possessions
Accumulation of immaterial goods — high-level education, a family crest
Adoption of archaic social skills — manners and etiquette, chivalry and a code of conduct
Employment of servants
(ii) Economic utility
In exercising political control, the leisure class retained their high social-status by direct and indirect coercion, by reserving for themselves the profession of arms, and so withheld weapons and military skills from the lower social classes. Such a division of labor (economic utility) rendered the lower classes dependent upon the leisure class, which established, justified, and perpetuated the role of the leisure class as the defenders of society against natural and supernatural enemies, because the clergy also belonged to the leisure class.
Contemporary society did not psychologically supersede the tribal-stage division of labor, but evolved the division-of-labor by social status and social stratum. During the Medieval period (5th–15th c.) only land-owning noblemen had the right to hunt and to bear arms as soldiers; status and income were parallel. Likewise, in contemporary society, skilled laborers of the working class are paid an income in wages, which is inferior to the salary income paid to the educated managers whose economic importance (as engineers, salesmen, personnel clerks, et al.) is indirectly productive; income and status are parallel.
(iii) Pecuniary emulation
The term pecuniary emulation describes a person's economic efforts to surpass a rich person's socio-economic status. Veblen said that the pecuniary struggle to acquire and exhibit wealth, in order to gain status, is the driving force behind the development of culture and society. To attain, retain, and gain greater social status within their social class, low-status people emulate the high-status members of their socio-economic class, by consuming over-priced brands of goods and services perceived to be of better quality and thus of a higher social-class.
In striving for greater social status, people buy high-status goods and services which they cannot afford, despite the availability of affordable products that are perceived as of lower quality and lesser social prestige, and thus of a lower social class. In a consumer society, the businessman was the latest member of the leisure class, a barbarian who used his prowess (business acumen) and competitive skills (marketing) to increase profits, by manipulating the supply and the demand among the social classes and their strata, for the same products (goods and services) at different prices.
Contemporary consumerism
The subjugation of women — Women originally were spoils of war captured by raiding barbarians. In contemporary society, the unemployed housewife is an economic trophy that attests to a man's socio-economic prowess. In having a wife without an independent economic life (a profession, a trade, a job) a man can display her unemployed status as a form of his conspicuous leisure and as an object of his conspicuous consumption.
The popularity of sport — American football is sociologically advantageous to community cohesion; yet, in itself, sport is an economic side-effect of conspicuous leisure that wastes material resources.
Devout observances — Organized religion is a type of conspicuous leisure (wasted time) and of conspicuous consumption (wasted resources); a social activity of no economic consequence, because a church is an unproductive use of land and resources, and clergy (men and women) do unproductive work.
Social formalities — social manners are remnant barbarian behaviors, such as paying respect to one's socially powerful betters. In itself, etiquette has little value (practical or economic), but is of much social value as cultural capital, which identifies, establishes, and enforces distinctions of place (social stratum) within a social class.
Conspicuous economics
With The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), Veblen introduced, described, and explained the concepts of "conspicuous consumption" and of "conspicuous leisure" to the nascent, academic discipline of sociology. Conspicuous consumption is the application of money and material resources towards the display of a higher social status (e.g. silver flatware, custom-made clothes, an over-sized house); and conspicuous leisure is the application of extended time to the pursuit of pleasure (physical and intellectual), such as sport and the fine arts. Therefore, such physical and intellectual pursuits display the freedom of the rich man and woman from having to work in an economically productive occupation.
As a child, Veblen was a notorious tease, and an inveterate inventor of malicious nicknames. As an adult, Veblen developed this aptitude into the abusive category and the cutting analogy. In this volume [The Theory of the Leisure Class] the most striking categories are four in number: [i] Conspicuous Consumption, [ii] Vicarious Consumption, [iii] Conspicuous Leisure, and [iv] Conspicuous Waste. It is amazing what a very large proportion of social activity, higher education, devout observance, and upper-class consumer goods seemed to fit snugly into one, or another, of these classifications.
— Robert Lekachman, Introduction to The Theory of the Leisure Class (1967 ed.)
19th century
The success of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) derived from the fidelity, veracity, and accuracy of Veblen's reportage about the socio-economic behaviors of the American system of social classes. Additional to the success (financial, academic, social) accrued to him by the book, a social-scientist colleague told Veblen that the sociology of gross consumerism catalogued in The Theory of the Leisure Class had much "fluttered the dovecotes of the East", especially in the Ivy League academic Establishment.
In the two-part book review "An Opportunity for American Fiction" (April–May 1899), the critic William Dean Howells made Veblen's treatise the handbook of sociology and economics for the American intelligentsia of the early 20th century. Reviewing first the economics and then the social satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Howells said that social-class anxiety impels American society to wasteful consumerism, especially the pursuit of social prestige. That despite social classes being alike in most stratified societies, the novelty of the American social-class system was that the leisure class had only recently appeared in U.S. history.
Asking for a novelist to translate into fiction what the social-scientist Veblen had reported, Howells concluded that a novel of manners was an opportunity for American fiction to accessibly communicate the satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class:
It would be easy to burlesque [the American leisure class], but to burlesque it would be intolerable, and the witness [Veblen] who did this would be bearing false testimony where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is desirable. A democracy, the proudest, the most sincere, the most ardent that history has ever known, has evolved here a leisure class which has all the distinguishing traits of a patriciate, and which by the chemistry of intermarriage with European aristocracies is rapidly acquiring antiquity. Is not this a phenomenon worthy the highest fiction?
Mr. Veblen has brought to its study the methods and habits of scientific inquiry. To translate these into dramatic terms would form the unequaled triumph of the novelist who had the seeing eye and the thinking mind, not to mention the feeling heart. That such a thing has not been done hitherto is all the stranger, because fiction, in other countries, has always employed itself with the leisure class, with the aristocracy; and our own leisure class now offers not only as high an opportunity as any which fiction has elsewhere enjoyed, but by its ultimation in the English leisure class, it invites the American imagination abroad on conditions of unparalleled advantage.
In the Journal of Political Economy (September 1899), the book reviewer John Cummings said:
As a contribution to the general theory of sociology, Dr. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class requires no other commendation for its scholarly performance than that which a casual reading of the work readily inspires. Its highly original character makes any abridgment of it exceedingly difficult and inadequate, and such an abridgment cannot be even attempted here ... The following pages, however, are devoted to a discussion of certain points of view in which the author seems, to the writer [Cummings], to have taken an incomplete survey of the facts, or to have allowed his interpretation of facts to be influenced by personal animus.
20th century
In the essay "Prof. Veblen" (1919) the intellectual H. L. Mencken addressed the matters of Americans' social psychology reported in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), by asking:
Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one—or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists—or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland [expensive turtle stew] to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver—or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dish?
In the essay "The Dullest Book of The Month: Dr. Thorstein Veblen Gets the Crown of Deadly Nightshade" (1919), after addressing the content of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book reviewer Robert Benchley addressed the subject of who are readers to whom Veblen speaks, that “the Doctor has made one big mistake, however. He has presupposed, in writing this book, the existence of a [social] class with much more leisure than any class in the world ever possessed—for, has he not counted on a certain number of readers?”
In the Introduction to the 1934 edition, the economist Stuart Chase said that the Great Depression (1929–1941) had vindicated Veblen the economist, because The Theory of the Leisure Class had unified "the outstanding economists of the world.” In the foreword to the 1953 edition, sociologist C. Wright Mills said that Veblen was "the best critic of America that America has ever produced.”
In the Introduction to the 1973 edition of the book, economist John Kenneth Galbraith addressed the author as subject, and said that Veblen was a man of his time, and that The Theory of the Leisure Class—published in 1899—reflected Veblen's 19th-century world view. That in his person and personality, the social scientist Veblen was neglectful of his grooming and tended to be disheveled; that he suffered social intolerance for being an intellectual and an agnostic in a society of superstitious and anti-intellectual people, and so tended to curtness with less intelligent folk.
John Dos Passos writes of Veblen in his trilogy novel U.S.A, in the third novel (1933), The Big Money. There, as one of Passos' highly subjective portraits of historical figures throughout the trilogy, Veblen is bio-sketched in THE BITTER DRINK in about 10 pages, referring presumably in that title to the hemlock Socrates was forced to drink for his supposed crimes. The portrait ends with these three final lines: “but his memorial remains/riveted into the language/the sharp clear prism of his mind.”
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues that the political economy of the U.S. is an imitation of the socio-economically static monarchy of Britain
In The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), the historian of economics Robert Heilbroner said that Veblen's socio-economic theories applied to the Gilded Age (1870–1900) of gross materialism and political corruption in the U.S. of the 19th century, but are inapplicable in 21st-century economics, because The Theory of the Leisure Class is specific to U.S. society in general, and to the society of Chicago in particular.
In that vein, in No Rest for the Wealthy (2009), the journalist Daniel Gross said:
In the book, Veblen—whom C. Wright Mills called "the best critic of America that America has ever produced"—dissected the habits and mores of a privileged group that was exempt from industrial toil and distinguished by lavish expenditures. His famous phrase conspicuous consumption referred to spending that satisfies no need other than to build prestige, a cultural signifier intended to intimidate and impress.
In this age of repossessed yachts, half-finished McMansions and broken-down leveraged buyouts, Veblen proves that a 110-year-old sociological vivisection of the financial overclass can still be au courant. Yet, while Veblen frequently reads as still 100 percent right on the foibles of the rich, when it comes to an actual theory of the contemporary leisure class, he now comes off as about 90 percent wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
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YOUNG CANADIANS PRICED OUT OF HOME OWNERSHIP
Vancouver has been labelled one of the most "impossibly unaffordable" cities in the world for housing
Before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and threatened its sovereignty, the Canadian psyche was consumed with another major issue: housing affordability. With an election on the horizon, voters are wondering if any party has a plan to fix what has become a generational problem.
That same property is now worth several million.
In the city on Canada's west coast, Ms Yamauchi's story is as common as the rainy weather. The average price of a detached home in Vancouver in 2000 was around C$350,000. Now, it is more than C$2m.
"My husband and I were very privileged to be able to purchase a house when we did," the 52-year-old writer tells the BBC. As a member of Generation X, timing was on her side.
The same, she says, cannot be said for younger people, who — without "the bank of mom and dad" — are effectively priced out of the city they grew up in.
Vancouver, a cultural and economic hub with a population of less than one million, is often seen as the epicenter of Canada's housing crisis. A report by Chapman University in California last year listed it among the top "impossibly unaffordable" cities in the world.
But it is not the only Canadian city where the cost of homes is out of reach for many. Canada as a whole has one of the highest house-price-to-income ratios among developed nations.
In 2021, the average household income after taxes in Canada was around C$88,000, according to national data. That same year, the average home price hit C$713,500 — more than eight times higher. The gap is even larger in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
For many Canadians, housing is one of the top issues in the federal election, eclipsed only recently by US President Donald Trump and his tariffs on Canada.
Before Trump, concerns on housing affordability had boosted the Conservative Party, which has consistently been seen as the best equipped to fix the crisis.
But then a trade war with the US came along and it catapulted the governing Liberal party to the top of the polls.
Even with the Trump factor, the topic featured prominently in the two election debates this week. During the French language one, moderator and journalist Patrice Roy displayed figures showing how much home prices had increased in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in the last decade.
"I'm sure this won't come as a surprise," Mr Roy told the federal leaders, before asking for their plans on how they would fix the crisis.
Polls show young people are especially worried about the housing crisis and what it means for their future.
Speaking to students at the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Vancouver campus, it quickly became clear that the issue was top of mind for many.
Many said they have either opted to live at home during their studies to save on costs, or are paying anywhere from C$1,100 to C$1,500 for a single room near campus, often in a home shared with five or six others.
Emily Chu, a 24-year-old who is in her final semester at UBC, says that she at one point had to delay her studies by two years in order to work, as she struggled to afford paying both tuition and rent.
She now shares an apartment with her older brother, who works full-time and pays the majority of the rent. Ms Chu considers herself one of the lucky ones.
As for home ownership in the future, she says "that's not even possible" for most people her age. "Everybody kind of assumes that we can't ever own housing."
Young professionals with well-paying jobs, like Margareta Dovgal, are also priced out. The 28-year-old director at Vancouver-based non-profit Resource Works told the BBC that she has considered moving to the neighboring province of Alberta due to its lower cost of living, despite being a lifelong and "committed Vancouverite."
Still, Calgary, Alberta's largest city, saw house prices increase by 15% in 2024 from the previous year as the city experienced its highest population growth rate since 2001.
The root causes of Canada's housing affordability crisis are complex. One of the main issues is a supply that has not kept up with a growing population, which has driven up costs for both buyers and renters.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the national housing agency, estimates that more than 3.8 million homes need to be built in the next six years to address the shortage.
Construction of new housing, however, has been well below that target, raising questions on whether Canada will meet this goal. Experts say barriers to ramping up building include the high cost and scarcity of land in urban areas, where most Canadians tend to live and work.
There are also regional barriers, like city zoning laws that prevent the construction of more affordable, higher density housing — including apartment buildings or multiplexes — in some neighborhoods.
Daniel Oleksiuk, co-founder of the advocacy group Abundant Housing Vancouver, says his city is one example, where more than half of the land has historically been zoned for single-family homes.
"We've kept almost all of the land reserved," Mr Oleksiuk told the BBC. "There are whole neighborhoods where all you have is three to five million dollar homes.”
On the campaign trail, each major federal party has put forward a plan to fix the crisis, all with the goal of building as many homes as quickly as possible.
The Liberals, led by Mark Carney, said their aim is to build 500,000 new homes a year with the help of a new government agency called Build Canada Homes that would oversee and finance the construction of affordable housing in Canada — a plan similar to one implemented after the Second World War to house veterans.
Critics have questioned whether Carney's target is viable, as it would require Canada to more than double its current construction rate.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, vowed to tie federal funding to housing starts by rewarding cities that build more homes and penalizing those that block construction — a carrot-and-stick approach.
Poilievre also promised to remove federal taxes on newly constructed homes in an effort to cut costs to would-be homebuyers. Critics, however, say this policy may have minimal effect, as most homes purchased in Canada are resold, rather than brand new.
Voters who spoke to the BBC say they welcome any plan to ramp up housing construction in Canada.
While much of housing is governed by provinces and cities, Ms Dovgal notes that the federal government has an ability "to lead persuasively" and implement measures that make it cheaper and easier to build across the country.
But others watching the issue closely caution that the steps proposed may not be enough.
Paul Kershaw, a public policy professor at UBC and founder of think tank Generation Squeeze, argues that politicians have failed to address the elephant in the room: the wealth older homeowners have generated off the housing crisis.
"The political bargain has asked younger Canadians to suffer higher rents and mortgages in order to protect those higher home values," Kershaw notes.
"None of the parties are really naming that generational tension," he says, adding that politicians may privately feel there is a political risk in trying to stall the cost of housing, and thus, older Canadians' assets.
Prof Kershaw calls this a "cultural problem", and says that parties should also focus on reducing costs for younger people as a way to alleviate this generational burden.
Fixing the housing crisis, he argues, is just as integral as asserting sovereignty and prosperity in the face of threats posed by Trump's tariffs.
The "dysfunction that has entered our housing market is disruptive to the well-being of the country", he says.
Until a fix is found, the possibility of homeownership still looks bleak for many.
Ms Dovgal contends half-heartedly that, other than moving elsewhere, "you have to win the lottery, or marry a multi-millionaire. These are kind of the options.”
Toronto apartment towers
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy70y75v5l7o
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WHEN EARTH WAS A PALE GREEN DOT
Planet Earth is blue. Most of its surface is covered in water, the vast majority of which is ocean, and water generally absorbs longer wavelengths of light, such as red and orange, and reflects back the shorter blue wavelengths. When astronauts travel into space and look back at their home, they see a blue sphere in an expanse of jet black.
But the blue color we associate with Earth’s oceans is a relatively recent development in the planet’s evolutionary history. During the Archaean Eon, which spanned 4.0 to 2.5 billion years ago, the oceans shimmered green, according to new research, and this green light may have helped to set the stage for the rise of an ancient blue-green algae that transformed the planet.
Known as cyanobacteria, they precipitated the Great Oxygenation Event, when oxygen came to dominate the atmosphere and the oceans, which preceded the emergence of higher order creatures in water and on land.
“This research is a good example for the coevolution of Earth and life, because the surface environment and cyanobacteria affected each other,” says Taro Matsuo, a space physicist at Nagoya University in Japan who led the research. “Cyanobacteria could thrive under the green environment.”
The new findings were published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Matsuo and a team of space physicists, chemists, and earth scientists. The researchers began their investigation by modeling the biogeochemistry of the oceans from the Archaean Eon, a time when high levels of iron bubbled up from hydrothermal vents. At first, the iron would have dissolved completely, but as cyanobacteria began to multiply and to produce oxygen, that iron would have changed into iron hydroxide, a form that is known to scatter green light.
The green light, the scientists hypothesized, could have in turn worked as a selection pressure on cyanobacteria. They tested this idea by cultivating and genetically engineering two distinct kinds of cyanobacteria under different light conditions, one dominated by white light and one by green light. Under green-light conditions, the bacteria with certain specialized light-harvesting pigments grew more quickly.
Scientists had long puzzled over why some cyanobacteria made these extra pigments, known as phycobilins, alongside chlorophyll, which is used by all photosynthetic organisms to absorb energy from white light. Now an answer presented itself: Perhaps the phycobilins evolved to help these bacteria turn green light into energy.
Environments resembling those of the Archaean still exist today, according to Matsuo; around Iwo Island in the Satsuma archipelago, iron from thermal vents creates a similar green light window at 18 feet deep. And at a number of lakes around the world, iron hydroxide gathers in shallow surface layers: Lake La Cruz in Central-Eastern Spain, Lake Matano in Indonesia, Lake Pavin in France, and the Red Sea.
“I like this paper,” says Cameron Thrash, a marine ecologist who studies oceanic microbes at the University of Southern California. Biological oceanographers think a lot about how phyotplankton exploit different niches based on available wavelengths of light, he says, for example in open ocean versus coastal areas. “In this case, the authors are thinking about how the evolution of one of these spectral tunings may have happened based on the occurrence of predominantly green surface water in the Archaean.”
Thrash says he finds it particularly interesting that the researchers postulate that the early light-absorbing bacteria also had a hand in turning the water green—showing how Earth and life influence one another in intricate ways.
There are also glimmers that our oceans could change color—again. A 2023 study in Nature showed that the color of the global oceans has shifted slightly over the last two decades, likely as a consequence of climate change. In particular, tropical ocean regions near the equator have become greener—likely because of changes in phytoplankton at the surface.
Looking ahead, Matsuo says he is working with NASA Ames Research Center to study whether green oceans could be an indicator for life on distant planets. Green oceans also reflect more light than blue ones—which makes it more likely they could be spotted by life-searching probes.
Matsuo says he hopes green oceans will become an indicator of the early evolution of life elsewhere in the universe.
https://nautil.us/when-earth-was-a-pale-green-dot-1203814/
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EASTERN NORTH AMERICA IS A GEOLOGICAL HOTBED
Slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted, and the Atlantic Ocean was born.
Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.
The work could help scientists better understand the edges of continents in other parts of the world; many say that eastern North America is a sort of natural laboratory for studying similar regions. And that’s important. “The story that it tells about Earth history and about this set of Earth processes … [is] really fundamental to how the Earth system works,” says Long, who wrote an in-depth look at the geology of eastern North America for the 2024 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Born of continental collisions
The bulk of North America today is made of several different parts. To the west are relatively young and mighty mountain ranges like the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies. In the middle is the ancient heart of the continent, the oldest and stablest rocks around. And in the east is the long coastal stretch of the eastern North American margin. Each of these has its own geological history, but it is the story of the eastern bit that has recently come into sharper focus.
For decades, geologists have understood the broad picture of how eastern North America came to be. It begins with plate tectonics, the process in which pieces of Earth’s crust shuffle around over time, driven by churning motions in the underlying mantle. Plate tectonics created and then broke apart an ancient supercontinent known as Rodinia. By around 550 million years ago, a fragment of Rodinia had shuffled south of the equator, where it lay quietly for tens of millions of years. That fragment is the heart of what we know today as eastern North America.
Then, around 500 million years ago, tectonic forces started bringing fragments of other landmasses toward the future eastern North America. Carried along like parts on an assembly line, these continental slivers crashed into it, one after another. The slivers glommed together and built up the continental margin.
During that process, as more and more continental collisions crumpled eastern North America and thrust its agglomerated slivers into the sky, the Appalachian Mountains were born. To the west, the eastern North American margin had merged with ancient rocks that today make up the heart of the continent, west of the Appalachians and through the Midwest and into the Great Plains.
HOW SLIVERS OF CRUST CAN BUILD A CONTINENT
THE PLAY OF THE PLATES: When one tectonic plate slides beneath another, slivers of Earth’s crust, known as terranes, can build up and stick together, forming a larger landmass. Such a process was key to the formation of eastern North America.
By around 270 million years ago, that action was done, and all the world’s landmasses had merged into a second single supercontinent, Pangaea. Then, around 200 million years ago, Pangaea began splitting apart, a geological breakup that formed the Atlantic Ocean, and eastern North America shuffled toward its current position on the globe.
Since then, erosion has worn down the peaks of the once-mighty Appalachians, and eastern North America has settled into a mostly quiet existence. It is what geologists call a “passive margin,” because although it is the edge of a continent, it is not the edge of a tectonic plate anymore: That lies thousands of miles out to the east, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
In many parts of the world, passive continental margins are just that—passive, and pretty geologically boring. Think of the eastern edge of South America or the coastline around the United Kingdom; these aren’t places with active volcanoes, large earthquakes, or other major planetary activity.
But eastern North America is different. There’s so much going on there that some geologists have humorously dubbed it a “passive-aggressive margin.”
The eastern edge of North America, running along the U.S. seaboard, contains fragments of different landscapes that attest to its complex birth. They include slivers of Earth’s crust that glommed together along what is now the east coast, with a more ancient mountain belt to their west and a chunk of even more ancient crust to the west of that.
That action includes relatively high mountains—for some reason, the Appalachians haven’t been entirely eroded away even after tens to hundreds of millions of years—as well as small volcanoes and earthquakes. Recent eastcoast quakes include the magnitude-5.8 tremor near Mineral, Virginia, in 2011, and a magnitude-3.8 blip off the coast of Maine in January 2025. So geological activity exists in eastern North America.
“It’s just not following your typical tectonic activity,” says Sarah Mazza, a petrologist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Crunching data on the crust
Over decades, geologists had built up a history of eastern North America by mapping rocks on Earth’s surface. But they got a much better look, and many fresh insights, starting around 2010. That’s after a federally funded research project known as EarthScope blanketed the continental United States with seismometers. One aim was to gather data on how seismic energy from earthquakes reverberated through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Like a CT scan of the planet, that information highlights structures that lie beneath the surface and would not otherwise be detected.
With EarthScope, researchers could suddenly see what parts of the crust were warm or cold, or strong or weak—information that told them what was happening underground.
Having the new view was like astronomers going from looking at the stars with binoculars to using a telescope, Long says. “You can see more detail, and you can see finer structure,” she says. “A lot of features that we now know are present in the upper mantle beneath eastern North America, we really just did not know about.”
And then scientists got even better optics. Long and other researchers began putting out additional seismometers, packing them in dense lines and arrays over the ground in places where they wanted even better views into what was going on beneath the surface, including Georgia and West Virginia. Team members would find themselves driving around the countryside to carefully set up seismometer stations, hoping these would survive the snowfall and spiders of a year or two until someone could return to retrieve the data.
The approach worked—and geophysicists now have a much better sense of what the crust and upper mantle are doing under eastern North America. For one thing, they found that the thickness of the crust varies from place to place. Parts that are the remains of the original eastern North America landmass have a much thicker crust, around 28 miles. The crust beneath the continental slivers that attached later on to the eastern edge is much thinner, more like 15 to 18 miles thick. That difference probably traces back to the formation of the continent, Long says.
But there’s something even weirder going on. Seismic images show that beneath parts of New England, it’s as if pieces of the crust and upper mantle have slid atop one another. A 2022 study led by geoscientist Yantao Luo, a colleague of Long, found that the boundary that marks the bottom of Earth’s crust—often referred to as the Moho, after the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić—was stacked double, like two overlapping pancakes, under southern New England.
The result was so surprising that at first Long didn’t think it could be right. But Luo double-checked and triple-checked, and the answer held. “It’s this super-unusual geometry,” Long says. “I’m not sure I’ve seen it anywhere else.”
It’s particularly odd because the Moho in this region apparently has managed to maintain its double-stacking for hundreds of millions of years, says Long. How that happened is a bit of a mystery. One idea is that the original landmass of eastern North America had an extremely strong and thick crust. When weaker continental slivers began arriving and glomming on to it, they squeezed up and over it in places.
How the Moho is working
The force of that collision could have carried the Moho of the incoming pieces up and over the older landmass, resulting in a doubling of the Moho there, says Paul Karabinos, a geologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Something similar might be happening in Tibet today as the tectonic plate carrying India rams into that of Asia and crumples the crust against the Tibetan plateau. Long and her colleagues are still trying to work out how widespread the stacked-Moho phenomenon is across New England; already, they have found more signs of it beneath northwestern Massachusetts.
A second surprising discovery that emerged from the seismic surveys is why 47-million-year-old volcanoes along the border of Virginia and West Virginia might have erupted. The volcanoes are the youngest eruptions that have happened in eastern North America. They are also a bit of a mystery, since there is no obvious source of molten rock in the passive continental margin that could be fueling them.
The answer, once again, came from detailed seismic scans of the Earth. These showed that a chunk was missing from the bottom of Earth’s crust beneath the volcanoes; for some reason, the bottom of the crust became heavy and dripped downward from the top part, leaving a gap.
“That now needs to be filled,” says Mazza. Mantle rocks obligingly flowed into the gap, experiencing a drop in pressure as they moved upward.
That change in pressure triggered the mantle rocks to melt—and created the molten reservoir that fueled the Virginia eruptions.
The same process could be happening in other passive continental margins, Mazza says.
Finding it beneath Virginia is important because it shows that there are more and different ways to fuel volcanoes in these areas than scientists had previously thought possible. “It goes into these ideas that you have more ways to create melt than your standard tectonic process,” she says.
Long and her colleagues are looking to see whether other parts of the eastern North American margin also have this crustal drip. One clue is emerging from how seismic energy travels through the upper mantle throughout the region. The rocks beneath the Virginia volcanoes show a strange slowdown, or anomaly, as seismic energy passes through them. That could be related to the crustal dripping that is going on there.
Seismic surveys have revealed a similar anomaly in northern New England. To try to unravel what might be happening at this second anomaly, Long’s team currently has one string of seismometers across Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and a second dense array in eastern Massachusetts. “Maybe something like what went on in Virginia might be in process … elsewhere in eastern North America,” Long says. “This might be a process, not just something that happened one time.”
Long even has her eyes on pushing farther north, to do seismic surveys along the continental margin in Newfoundland, and even across to Ireland—which once lay next to the North American continental margin, until the Atlantic Ocean opened and separated them. Early results suggest there may be significant differences in how the passive margin behaved on the North American side and on the Irish side, Long’s collaborator Roberto Masis Arce of Rutgers University reported at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2024.
All these discoveries go to show that the eastern North American margin, once deemed a bit of a snooze, has far more going for it than one might think. “Passive doesn’t mean geologically inactive,” Mazza says. “We live on an active planet.”
https://nautil.us/eastern-north-america-is-a-geological-hotbed-1203179/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE MYTHS THAT HINT AT PAST DISASTERS
Myths and fables passed down over thousands of years are full of fantastic creatures and warring gods. But they also might contain evidence of environmental disasters of the past.
Eruptions in the distant past — before written languages and printing — may have had far-reaching effects that endure through myths and fables
For those affected, it could seem like the end of the world. Residents of Stinson Beach, a popular tourist destination near San Francisco, are coming to terms with studies that show large parts of their neighborhood will be under a foot of water in less than 20 years. The affluent are able to build homes on raised foundations and afford expensive sea defenses that will hold the water back, at least for a while, but the poor will have to accept the loss of their homes or find some way to move them to higher ground.
Stinson BeachWe may believe the 21st Century is the first time our species has faced this kind of tragedy, but it is not. Sea levels started to rise nearly 15,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. The melting land ice caused sea levels to rise on average around 360ft (120m) between now and then – at times it was more like an inundation, with the water rising so quickly that people would have been caught in a desperate struggle to stay ahead of it and somehow cope with the enormous effect it wrought.
With the possibility of a catastrophic global sea level rise of 3ft (1m) by 2050 which could force millions of people to leave their homes, researchers have now started to look at ancient stories about land lost to the sea and downed cities in a new way. These aren’t always just good stories, full of poetry and symbolism, but vessels that transmit the collective memory of those that lived through it, and inside which there may be factual evidence as to what might have happened thousands of years ago when the ice sheets melted.
Some researchers argue that tales of hot boulders thrown into the sea or the building of sea walls comprise factual information, albeit exaggerated and distorted to some extent. They give us insight into how our ancestors felt about the rising sea levels and what they did about it, and they can provide evidence that their response was remarkably similar to ours. The insights of ancient peoples may in fact save lives in the future.
These researchers are geomythologists. American volcanologist Dorothy Vitaliano coined the term in a 1967 lecture (basing her ideas on those of the Ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus, who set out to find the real events or people behind popular myths. While geomythologists’ research into the origins of the legend of Atlantis or the myth of the Loch Ness monster may grab the headlines in a sensationalist manner, it is their job is to study ancient stories once regarded as myths or legends, but which are now seen as possible observations of natural phenomena by pre-literate peoples.
Rising sea levels may soon swamp low-lying coastal settlements such as Stinson Beach in California“Geomyths represent the earliest inklings of the scientific impulse,” says Adrienne Mayor, folklorist, historian of ancient science and research scholar at Stanford University, California, and author of the important The First Fossil Hunters, “showing that people of antiquity were keen observers and applied the best rational, cohesive thinking of their place and time to explain remarkable natural forces they experienced.”
Today, the growing number of published papers, citations and Google search results show interest in such work is growing in the scientific community. Such events as volcanoes in early human history or even Biblical themes, such as how volcanoes, earthquakes and plagues may have shaped the story of the Exodus found in the Hebrew Bible.
Time is running out for many geomyths, and the local knowledge they contain risks being degraded and lost.
Geologists have started to realize that there's actually information in some of humanity's oldest traditions and stories,” says David Montgomery from the University of Washington, author of The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood,“and that while it's of a different type of information than we tend to gravitate towards in contemporary science, it is still information.”
Yet time is running out for many geomyths, and the local knowledge they contain risks being degraded and lost. “In the Pacific Islands, old people are forever complaining to me that the young people are always on their phones, and that they really don't want to hear their grandparents’ stories,” says geologist Patrick Nunn, a professor of Geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast, and author of the new book Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth. “But I think everywhere in the world, as oral societies are becoming largely literate, knowledge that has been held orally is disappearing, yet it is this indigenous knowledge that is going to help them cope with sea level rise.”
Nunn is one of the world’s leading geomythologists. A trained geologist, he can usually be found in the international uniform of shorts and a t-shirt, on a small boat sailing between the islands that dot the Pacific Ocean, voice recorder in his hand. His research has focused on some of the stories about vanished islands like Teonimenu, that occur all over the islands scattered across the vast Pacific.
For his research project, Nunn didn’t have to get his feet wet. He has been examining thousand-year-old stories from Australia and Northwest Europe about how ancient peoples made sense of, and responded to, their different experiences of post-glacial sea level rise. Significantly, along the Australian coast, the sea level stopped rising about 6,000 years ago, whereas it has continued in northwest Europe until the present day.
One such story, told by the Gungganyji Aboriginal people around Cairns on the Queensland coast, is found in different versions across northeast Australia. In this story the bad behavior of a man named Goonyah caused the sea to flood the land and he then organized the people to stop it. In another, he led the people up a mountain to escape the water where they worked together to roll heated rocks into the sea. By so doing, they succeeded in stemming its advance.
In northwest Europe, the stories that Nunn and his collaborators studied are naturally quite different. These 15 or so stories are focused on the fate of drowned cities, each with a different name, and they are concentrated along the coast of Brittany, the Channel Islands, Cornwall and Wales – areas where, Nunn says, “cultural continuity” may have been greatest over the last few thousand years. In two of the stories, the city’s elaborate defenses imply the inhabitants had been fighting a losing battle against the sea for generations.
In Brittany, the story is about the city of Ys, ruled by King Gradlon, which was protected by a complex series of sea defences that required gates to be opened at low tide to allow excess water to drain off the land. One day, the king’s daughter, Dahut, possessed by a demon, opened these gates at high tide, allowing the ocean to flood the city, and led to the abandonment of the city. In west Wales, a similar story is told about the fate of the city of Cantre’r Gwaelod in Cardigan Bay.
Rising sea levels sparked an exodus of coastal European communities whose settlements disappeared under the waves thousands of years ago
The detective work doesn’t stop there. Nunn has been able to reconstruct the coastlines mentioned in the stories, and from knowledge of past sea level changes, put a minimum age on these stories of 6,000–8,000 years.
“One thing that we can learn from these ancient stories is that sea level rise cannot be stopped very easily by sea defenses like sea walls,” says Nunn. “The only long-term solution is transformative solutions, which really involve people taking themselves out of the danger zone.
“The other thing I think we can learn is that the most effective types of adaptations to these kinds of environmental stresses are locally based ones. This is something that science has really only worked out in the last five years, but if you go back 7,000 years, you can see that people took action locally, and they believed in its efficacy, and they drove it by themselves. They didn't wait for instructions from elsewhere.”
Despite the growth of geomythology, it is still seen as “flaky” by some academics. “Probably an element of stodginess on the part of scientists and historians still figures!” says Mayor. “But geomythological stories are expressed in poetic metaphors and mythic or supernatural imagery, and descriptions of catastrophic events and natural phenomena can be garbled over millennia, and because of this scientists and historians tend to miss the kernels of truth and rational concepts embedded in their narratives.”
Nunn puts this argument more strongly. “I'm a conventionally trained geologist and I can tell you that a lot of other conventionally trained geoscientists really don't like this kind of thing. There's a lot who are curious about it, but by and large, it's something that is considered so radical that people really don't want to consider it.
Literate people are also inherently skeptical about the power of oral traditions to pass things down across the across hundreds of generations.”
There can be other issues. Academics taking the stories of indigenous people and publishing research about them can easily lead to accusations of cultural appropriation if they don’t follow simple good practice like asking permission first.
Geomythology has faced a long journey to even become considered by the scientific establishment, and the journey is far from over. A year after Dorothy Vitaliano first used the term, she wrote in the Journal of the Folklore Institute that geomythology is the “geological application of euhemerism”, and that geomythologists could “help convert mythology back into history”, and five years after that she published her groundbreaking book, Legends of the Earth (1973). Sadly, it is now out of print.
It took three decades of rising interest in the field before the 32nd International Geological Congress held its first ever session on geomythology in 2004, at which the by-then elderly Vitaliano delivered the keynote to ”250 people in a room booked for about 100 people.” The volcanologist died four years later after seeing the first ever peer-reviewed collection of papers on the subject, Myth and Geography, published in 2007.
“It took a lot of courage for her to publish her book way back in the 1970s, and she was kept at arm's length by a lot of geologists for a long, long time,” says Nunn, who spoke after Vitaliano at that event. “It was the 2004 session at the International Geological Congress that really helped to validate geomythology in the minds of many scientists.”
The field Vitaliano founded has started to evolve. It may have taken Mayor 20 years to research and write The First Fossil Hunters (2000), but the book she delivered created the new concept of “fossil myths” because it was the first systematic study of the evidence for the ancient discovery of fossils. Famously, Mayor made the connection between Greek and Roman descriptions of the mythical griffin, which she thought sounded like eyewitness accounts, and the amazing dinosaur fossils that can be found on the surface of the Gobi desert, near the Silk Road, the route that caravan trains used to connect Europe and China.
Her latest research includes working with Lida Xing, a palaeontologist in China, on how Chinese oral traditions about mythic creatures account for local dinosaur tracks.
In May 2021, Timothy Burbery’s Geomythology: How Common Stories are Related to Earth Events hit the bookshops to become geomythology’s first textbook. “Mayor took geomythology to the next level, by not looking only at geological events, but the palaeontological ones as well,” says Burbery, professor of English at Marshall University, West Virginia, “and really getting a sense of just how traumatic it would have been for ancient people to find the bones of some strange, huge animal.”
In the end, geomythology challenges our way of thinking about our past, and our future. “Geomythology challenges the belief that all myths and legends are only fictions and fantasy,” says Mayor. “Geomyths are treasuries of information and details for the physical sciences that would otherwise be missed.”
New geomyths may even be created for future generations to pore over. “I imagine that global warming and climate change and rising sea levels might inspire new geomyths,” she says.
“The most important lesson is that we will survive,” says Nunn. “It doesn't mean that we aren't going to have to adapt, in many cases quite radically, to accommodate the effects of climate change. But it does mean that we will survive it.”
GriffinThe term "euhemerism" is
derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus, who was known for
his views on the historical origins of myths. While Euhemerus is not the only figure associated with this theory, he is considered a key figure in its development. The theory suggests that
stories like the Trojan War, the Greek gods, and the Norse gods may have
roots in real historical events or figures that were later embellished
and transformed into myths.
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WHY TURNING ABANDONED CHURCHES INTO HOUSING IS SO HARD
In 2009, Arlington Presbyterian Church was celebrating more than a century in its Northern Virginia community. It was also facing another, less optimistic, milestone: The congregation, which had boasted more than 1,000 members in the 1950s, was down to fewer than 100. So the church embarked on an unlikely resurrection.
Over the next decade, Arlington Presbyterian would raze its main church and sell the land for $8.5 million — 20% below market value — to the Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing. The nonprofit then built Gilliam Place, a 173-unit affordable housing development. Members of the church now rent worship space on the ground floor of the building, which finished leasing up in 2019.
The project satisfied a need within the church and its members to “do something bigger than themselves,” as the church’s pastor told the New York Times in January.
The idea that excess property owned by religious institutions can be easily converted into a windfall of housing has been an article of faith for the pro-housing “Yes In My Backyard” movement for years. It’s a tempting formulation: US cities are simultaneously facing a severe lack of affordable homes and a marked oversupply of churches, temples, meeting houses, mosques and synagogues, thanks to Americans’ dwindling participation in religious services. A YIMBY variant known as YIGBY — that’s “Yes In God’s Backyard” — was coined by San Diego housing activists in 2019. The broader mission: Bring faith organizations directly to the front lines of the US housing crisis.
To help religious groups pursue housing projects, local and state lawmakers from California to Virginia have pursued legislation that fast-tracks projects on church-owned property. At the federal level, the Biden White House created a Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships within the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2021.
But the expected miracle — unlocking the value of their real estate while rapidly creating more affordable housing in urban neighborhoods across the nation — hasn’t been delivered with the speed many hoped to see.
“Churches sometimes have it in their mind that they can build new space for themselves, build affordable housing and generate income,” said Mark Elsdon, cofounder of RootedGood, a Wisconsin-based organization that helps faith-based groups rethink their real estate resources. “Very often, you’re lucky to get one of those. Two would be a huge win. But all three?”
What’s holding up the church-to-housing pipeline? Bluntly, even God’s house has to abide by humankind’s zoning laws. And as more congregations study the idea of converting property, the unique challenges of such projects have become apparent, from lining up financing to overcoming the architectural incompatibility of the buildings themselves.
Even success stories like Gilliam Place suggest how difficult the process can be. As a case study about the project would note, a majority of congregants accepted the idea of turning their “albatross of a building” into a source of much-needed housing for an increasingly costly area. But some members objected and left the church; one tried unsuccessfully to get the 1930s structure listed as a historic landmark to halt the demolition. The property also needed to be rezoned by the county for multifamily residential use.
In the end, it took nearly a decade of work — and about $71 million from 14 different funding sources — before the first tenants moved in.
A Wave of Closures
The opportunity remains immense. According to a 2023 study from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, faith-based organizations held more than 47,000 acres of potentially developable land in California alone. And an analysis by the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute found that religious groups own roughly 2.6 million acres across the US, with about 32,000 of those in transit-accessible urban areas. At the high end, that amount of land could supply 700,000-plus units of new housing, if subject to high-density development. The group’s director of innovation, Jeff Allenby, believes even that analysis understates the true scale of the real estate holdings of religious organizations.
This landscape of faith is undergoing a dramatic transformation, as the US is experiencing a “tsunami of church closings.” The housing consultant Rick Reinhard has estimated that up to 100,000 houses of worship — a quarter of the estimated US total — could shut over the coming decades.
As the number of Americans with no religious affiliation grows, nearly all faith groups are experiencing declines in in-person worship. Two decades ago, 42% of US adults attended regular religious services, a Gallup survey found; that number has fallen to 30% today. The Covid-19 pandemic sharpened the decline further, as many parishioners who migrated to online services have yet to return in person.
That new trend has joined longstanding demographic shifts. In older US cities like Boston, Buffalo and Baltimore, neighborhood churches built for immigrant booms in the 19th and early 20th centuries often sit empty or face closure and consolidation. These properties are often elaborate historic structures that need costly updates, and they might include rectories, convents, parsonages, schools and other related buildings.
Houses of worship in Sun Belt areas like Texas and South Florida, meanwhile, have a different set of challenges and opportunities. These buildings might have sprung up in postwar suburbs, with vast parking lots that fill only on occasional holidays. Now that they’re surrounded by more recent development, church leaders are eager to redevelop excess space for other uses to earn revenue.
“Faith-based communities own a ridiculous amount of land and structures,” said Katie Everett, executive director of the Lynch Foundation. “People are not engaging in their faiths the way they did 50 years ago, and there’s just a surplus.”
The Boston nonprofit, which supports a range of efforts connected to the Roman Catholic Church, worked with the Lincoln Institute to analyze the church’s Massachusetts property and found there was enough real estate to create 140,000 units of affordable housing; they’re hoping to release a statewide plan to do so within the year.
Encouraging such development, Everett added, is something of a moral obligation: “If it’s aligned with everyone’s social justice missions, like it is, I just think it’s irresponsible not to pursue it,” she said.
Building Up God’s Backyard
Elsdon started working in this space while serving as the executive director of a campus ministry center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he helped oversee the construction of student housing. Since he helped launch RootedGood in January 2020, he’s talked to faith-based groups across the country.
“It’s just in the air,” said Elsdon. “Even churches that are doing well should be thinking about using their resources better.”
RootedGood now runs a course to help religious organizations become housing developers; 93 have signed up since the beginning of the year. Among them is the Presbyterian Church in the United States, which rolled out guidance on property development to all its 8,000 churches created in partnership with RootedGood.
In Southern California, where the affordable housing gap is particularly visible, the interfaith community organization LA Voice has been working with congregations across the city on housing projects; according to executive director Reverend Zach Hoover, roughly 100 are in some stage of development, representing approximately 7,600 housing units.
But efforts to transform land and buildings owned by faith-based groups into housing often run into a familiar set of obstacles. Houses of worship often reside on parcels with special zoning designations that need to get reworked to accommodate housing uses. Neighborhood opposition often ensues.
“It is surprising how often a neighborhood of people who have never darkened the door of a church suddenly get very interested in its future and plans,” Elsdon said.
Conversion Experiences
Much of this kind of work centers on vacant or underutilized land, but projects that involve the adaptive reuse of existing structures face additional trials. Stone and brick churches that have stood for a century or more often have substantial deferred maintenance, and their unique designs present considerable difficulties for rehabbers; there’s a reason many get turned into brewpubs, art spaces and music studios instead of apartments.
Religious properties break down into three main categories, according to Stephen Ferrandi, who, along with partner Barb Bindon, cofounded Maryland-based PraiseBuildings, a brokerage that specializes in selling houses of worship.
Rural churches can be the easiest to adapt, since many are simple wood-framed structures. But they often come with cemeteries sited immediately adjacent to the church — a potential turn-off for future tenants and a complication when it comes to installing septic systems and other infrastructure. Suburban churches, with their large parking lots, offer more space for additions and connecting utilities, though it can be more economical to just tear them down and rebuild from the ground up.
It’s older urban churches, which might have plenty of architectural character and potential, that present the most vexing redevelopment challenges. Many lack parking — often a requirement for residential construction. Some have relics or famous figures buried in a crypt. Historic protections can add delays: In Baltimore, for example, the recent conversion of St. John’s Episcopal church into office space was held up for a year due to disputes over preserving the stained glass windows.
Then there are the daunting details of adapting historic structures built as mass gathering spaces into modern dwellings. Large open halls with 70-plus-foot ceilings can fit three or even four floors of housing units by installing a steel superstructure for support, but they’ll require new or expanded plumbing, electrical and ventilation systems. Older buildings lack amenities like air conditioning; old boilers need to be swapped for systems that allow control among individual units. Modern sprinkler systems alone can run $600,000.
Glorious 19th century landmarks in strategic urban locations can be priced surprisingly low, but that reflects the resources needed to adapt them; so much needs to be invested that the final product is likely to be high-priced condos, not affordable housing. “If money was no object, it would be very easy,” said Ferrandi. “But it’s hard to make the math work.”
Faith organizations — optimistic by their nature — often look past these challenges initially, thinking that good intentions can overcome any barriers. Then they find themselves over their heads.
“I would love to say yes, that some congregations have done this fast and efficiently, but I simply don’t know anybody who has,” said Nikisha Baker, president and CEO of SAMMinistries, a San Antonio program that works with churches and their properties to help homeless residents.
“Congregations lack the breadth and depth of real estate development, the relationships and ability to navigate codes and permitting. How do you compile all of that expertise into a single team working towards a common goal amongst your congregation partners?”
Beyond Housing
Even churches with property experience can struggle. Bethany Baptist Church in Harlem has spent several years developing housing on church-owned property near its home at 303 West 153rd Street in New York City. Deacon Steven Robinson said one housing project, set to take two years, stretched to seven due to delays with financing and construction; he told a financier that he “had the patience of Job” when it came to seeing the project through.
Robinson said the church had been looking to develop another parcel at 2901 Frederick Douglass Boulevard, seeking to transform the vacant lot into affordable housing. But it’s taken years longer than anticipated. It’s a small site, so only a handful of units are possible. And in today’s financing environment, that means it’s not a moneymaker.
Elsdon of RootedGood cautions congregations to start with the why — think about the reasons behind getting involved in real estate — before wading into the how and the what. It’s common for churches to get embroiled in difficult development issues, and then have to backtrack.
Speeding up the development process requires more legwork and education. Lots of conversion conversations started in earnest around 2020, Lynch said, but organizations need to expect that it will take five years to a decade before wide-scale development really takes place.
It also means looking at every available option for putting underutilized property to use, and not just defaulting to apartments or senior housing. Church land and buildings can often more easily serve other valuable roles in the community, like childcare centers or workspaces.
In the Gulf Shores of Alabama, for example, RootedGood has helped a church turn excess property into a business incubation center. Some churches have rented their commercial kitchens to food entrepreneurs, or created staging grounds for food trucks. Rural churches have special challenges due to distance and population density, but several have found ways to activate their properties and serve unique roles in their community. Elsdon has seen some consider creating EV charging sites in their parking lots, or use facilities to host regional healthcare clinics.
In response to the recognition that realizing the opportunities of church-based land remain complicated, more organizations seek to provide the expertise to empower religious groups to move forward. The Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute wants to further refine its religious property analysis to provide an accounting of what truly is developable land, to make project decisions and financing move more quickly. In San Antonio, SAMMinistries has created the Institute for Social Service Advancement to help train churches in real estate development as well as trauma-informed care.
RootedGood wants to significantly expand its reach, aiming to work with more than 1,000 churches in the next few years. Elsdon believes the work can do more than recenter how congregations think about their roles in the community and adapt their campuses for modern needs. It can help reimagine this vast stock of imperiled social infrastructure and address an ongoing American problem: a desire for alternative places to gather.
“I was voting here in Madison recently, and two polling sites had been crammed into one because one of the churches had closed down,” he said. “Between churches and libraries, I have this worry that we’re going to wake up in 20 years and say, ‘Man, we should build more community centers.’ Well, yeah, we actually had them.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-turning-churches-into-housing-is-so-hard?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE BATTLE OF KÖNIGSBERG
For the German military command, the citizens of East Prussia were not a concern; they were a weapon to be deployed in the Battle of Königsberg. 
The Red Army storms Königsberg shortly before the collapse of the city on 9 April 1945
The last months of the Second World War were among the bloodiest of the conflict. In Germany, the number of military and civilian deaths soared, not only as a result of Allied bombing, but also from fighting on the ground. It prompts the question: why were there so many German civilians in combat zones? Why were they not evacuated? Civilian presence in the midst of the fighting was by design, as by 1945 the German High Command had long decided to actively use its civilians – be they elderly men, women or children – in the defense of the Reich.
This decision can be explained by Germany’s changing military mindset, which had steadily hardened throughout the war. Since German commanders and officials alike considered themselves to be technologically, racially and organizationally superior to their enemies, defeats could not simply be explained by the presence of well-trained and motivated opponents who had better weapons. Instead, they came to believe that it was not tactics and strategy that decided the fate of a battle, but rather the ‘will’ of the people fighting it. Following this line of thought, a lost battle was not the fault of those planning it, but rather because the troops refused to give their all.
This crooked mindset ensured that more and more commanders would set aside their misgivings about deploying German civilians in defense of their country, a development that was particularly devastating in Germany’s ‘fortress cities’.
Hitler’s Fortresses
The ‘fortress strategy’ came into being on 8 March 1944, when Hitler decreed War Directive 53, which concerned ‘Commandants of Fortified Areas and Battle Commandants’. The strategy designated a string of 29 fortresses (‘Festungen’), which were to be held ‘to the last’, stretching from the Estonian cities of Reval (Tallinn) and Jewi (Jõhvi) in the north, to Nikolajew (Mykolaiv) near the Black Sea in the south.
Commanders immediately voiced serious concerns. There were barely any new units brought in to form fortress garrisons; rather, they had to be formed from troops already deployed in the field, severely weakening the front line. Fortresses would also require well-trained staff officers, of which there were precious few that could be spared. The materiel that the High Command allocated to the fortresses, commanders argued, could be used more efficiently on the front. The question of supply also remained unanswered: Stalingrad had shown that the Luftwaffe was incapable of supplying a force that had been cut off. Finally, most fortresses lay too close to the front, which meant that they would be engulfed by any large Soviet attack.
These shortcomings became painfully clear when, on 22 June 1944, the Red Army commenced its summer offensive, ‘Operation Bagration’. Tens of thousands of German troops were forced to stay put in fortresses such as Vitebsk, Mogilev and Bobruisk, where they were encircled and destroyed or taken prisoner. The front collapsed, and in the weeks that followed the German army was routed across 500 kilometers and pushed back onto German soil. The fortress strategy had been a complete failure, for the exact reasons field commanders had predicted.
Yet, the strategy was not abandoned on German territory; rather, it was revitalized. This was mainly the result of the efforts of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, who had been appointed head of the High Command of the German army in the wake of ‘Operation Valkyrie’, the plot to kill Hitler. The position was among the German military’s most prestigious, and gave Guderian final responsibility over the Eastern Front.
Guderian recognized the problems outlined by his fellow generals, but felt that on home soil many of them could be overcome. His first task was to convince Hitler to designate German ‘fortress cities’ behind the front. Hitler had long scorned this idea, as he feared that establishing fortresses in the rear would encourage soldiers to withdraw to them, but eventually Guderian received the go-ahead. As a result, fortresses in Germany often lay more than 100 kilometers behind the front, where the original fortresses were sometimes within 20 kilometers of it.
Almost immediately provisions were distributed across German fortress cities to ensure that their garrisons could endure a siege. Unlike their counterparts in Russia, German fortress cities had not been systematically plundered, so it was much easier to find materials for the defense. Commanders could also rely on local expertise, addressing emerging problems ‘on the ground’. And many German cities had been Festungen for decades, or even centuries. These cities already had barracks and other military buildings; some even had a ‘belt’ of forts around them, which, although outdated, could be of use.
Abandoning East Prussia
One of the most formidable fortress cities was Königsberg. The city was the capital of East Prussia, Germany’s easternmost province. Königsberg was designated a fortress in the second half of 1944, and from then on materiel started to arrive in the city.
Like all other fortresses, Königsberg was given a ‘security garrison’, while a ‘general garrison’ would be allocated once the city was threatened with encirclement. Königsberg’s security garrison was built around men who were no longer fit for service at the front, but who were still able to defend fixed positions.
These troops mainly manned the city’s forts. The rest of the contingent were 10,000 men of the Volkssturm, Germany’s last-ditch militia. With every able-bodied man long at the front, the conscripts of this militia ranged from 16-year-old boys to 60-year-old men. There were hardly any weapons available to them, and their age and physique often disqualified them as a true fighting force. Nevertheless, these men, according to commanders like Guderian, were fit to cushion the Soviet onslaught.
On 12 January 1945, the Soviet winter offensive began. In some of the most grueling fighting of the war, the Red Army battled its way through East Prussia, and on 23 January its troops reached the coast of the Baltic near Elbing, in the far west of the province. It meant that the two German armies east of it, the Fourth Army and the Third Panzer Army, were cut off, together with hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Fourth Army’s commander, General Friedrich Hossbach, assessed the perilous situation and soon deemed East Prussia ‘militarily useless’.
His army, on the other hand, could still be of value to the defense of Germany, and he therefore decided to break out of the province. Refugees, who had flocked west hoping for the protection of the military, were to be left on their own. ‘The civilian population must stay behind’, the general noted. ‘That sounds cruel, but unfortunately it cannot be otherwise.’ To give the break-out the biggest chance of success, he even ordered all civilian vehicles, mostly carts laden with household goods, off the road.
Despite this, his army’s break-out was bogged down in the face of heavy Soviet resistance. It was also kept secret from Hitler; once he found out, he sacked Hossbach immediately. Yet in trying to bring his army to safety, Hossbach had expressed a sentiment that most commanders shared: at that stage of the war, safeguarding civilians should not have been the military’s main concern. The navy was of the same opinion.
One of the few remaining evacuation options was by sea, but the navy’s commander, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, made it clear that, for him, the civilian population was of limited concern. On 28 January he told Hitler that ‘the refugee transports by sea can be carried out only as far as they do not hamper the transportation of combat troops to and from Kurland and Norway’. It meant that, whether they were fleeing over land or by sea, civilians had to rely on commanders who did not have their interests and welfare at heart.
German soldiers taken prisoner by Soviet soldiers during the Battle of Königsberg, 7 or 8 April 1945.
The siege
Red Army troops completed their encirclement of Königsberg on 29 January, trapping 200,000 civilians, 60,000 soldiers and 10,000 forced laborers in the city. Chaos soon broke out, but order would return due, largely, to the efforts of General Otto Lasch, who had been appointed as the city’s fortress commander on 27 January. Lasch was the quintessential Wehrmacht general: loyal, unquestioning, cunning and fiercely opposed to ‘the Slavic East’.
His first task as fortress commander was clear, as War Directive 53 left little doubt as to what was expected of him. In the early stage of a siege, fortress commanders were to ‘prevent panic from developing’. To ensure this Lasch immediately placed the city under martial law.
Those remaining in the city soon found out what exactly this meant. Many civilians searched the houses of absent neighbours, hoping to find something edible or useful. Under martial law this was considered looting, and punishable by death. Volkssturm men also soon learnt what martial law meant. Most of them were poorly equipped, poorly clothed and often in poor health. Unused to the strain of battle, many fled or went into hiding. Once discovered, they were accused of ‘cowardice in the face of the enemy’.
In the first week of the siege, dozens of people were executed for these crimes, not behind prison walls and after due process, but after sentencing by summary courts, in public. As War Directive 53 stressed that ‘every last German man is to contribute regardless of his training and position and used in the event of an emergency’, Volkssturm men were expected to fight with the same tenacity as regular troops. In some cases they did, fending off large-scale Soviet attacks in the north and east of the city, but dying in their hundreds in the first few days of Königsberg’s siege.
By the first week of February, the Soviet offensive in East Prussia had run out of steam and was halted by the remnants of the Third Panzer Army near the port city of Pillau on the western tip of the Samland peninsula. The Fourth Army’s troops, meanwhile, had dug in just south of Königsberg. By that time, Königsberg’s general garrison, consisting of parts of the 1st Infantry Division, the 5th Panzer Division, the 69th Infantry Division, the 367th Infantry Division, and the 561st Volksgrenadier Division had arrived in the city, but that did not mean respite for the civilians there.
Lasch established a ‘fortress staff’, which, in line with War Directive 53, helped to ensure the ‘extensive use of the civilian population’. On 9 February Lasch, together with the highest-remaining party official, Ernst Wagner, proclaimed Festungsdienst, ‘fortress service’, for four hours per day. Everyone, ‘man, woman, and child’, was ordered to assist in the defense of the city. ‘Not only weapons and machines offer us protection, but above all the strong hearts’, the proclamation ran:
The Bolshevik stands before the gates of our city. Shoulder to shoulder with the Wehrmacht and the men of the Volkssturm we will defend our city. We will build out Königsberg into an impenetrable fortress and hold it until the Bolshevik hordes are annihilated by the armies of the Reich.
Declining to take part in ‘fortress service’ was not an option; those who failed to report were no longer eligible for ration cards and would not receive food.
Throughout February, Königsberg transformed into one big army camp. Streets were barricaded with trams, industrial waste and trees from the city’s parks. Nets were hung over the main thoroughfares, and machine gun stands were erected. Schools were closed at the beginning of the siege and turned into strongholds or field hospitals for soldiers. University clinics were transformed into air-raid shelters.
Food was centrally collected and redistributed by the women of the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (the Reich’s social welfare organization) and the German Red Cross. Rations were sufficient, and all who contributed to Königsberg’s defense received daily portions of soup, together with potatoes, sugar and meat, and even occasionally cheese, fish and cigarettes.
Life in the city was fully subordinated to its defense. Men were not allowed to leave without permission; doctors were forbidden to write sick leaves. Defensive positions had to be built even when areas came under Soviet artillery fire. Army patrols searched for ‘deserters’, which meant that executions continued. Elderly men were employed in the city’s tank repair depot, which on average repaired one tank per day, while hundreds of boys, often as young as 15, were ordered to report to the 1st Infantry Division.
From a military standpoint these measures were incredibly successful. By mid-February, the 5th Panzer Division, despite heavy fighting, totaled almost 80 tanks and after two weeks of siege the 1st Infantry Division consisted of enough ‘men’ to once again be considered a battle-ready unit.
Volkssturm troops (most of them were not well armed)
The units were soon called upon. Ever since Königsberg had been encircled, an operation had been planned that would restore the link between the city and Pillau, on the western tip of the Samland peninsula. On 14 February this operation, ‘Operation Westwind’, was given the go-ahead: troops in Königsberg would attack westwards, while three divisions were ordered to attack eastwards from positions near Pillau.
Volksturm troops with Panzerfausts
The Kriegsmarine also contributed to the attack, and made available the cruisers Lützow and Scheer, whose large guns would target Soviet positions on land. In preparation for the attack, Lasch ordered the 5th Panzer Division, the 1st Infantry Division and the 561st Volksgrenadier Division to get ready. This meant that only two weakened divisions would remain behind to defend the city: the 69th Infantry Division in the south, and the 367th Infantry Division in the north. Lasch, like Hossbach before him, used the guise of a break-out as a covert opportunity to move as many troops west as possible, knowingly leaving the city and its population dangerously exposed.
The attack commenced on 19 February. At three in the morning, the people of Königsberg were woken by the sound of naval guns shelling positions near Pillau. Some 3,000 grenades, which had been manufactured in Königsberg’s factories, were used to soften up the Red Army’s positions west of the city. The shelling was immediately followed by the first wave of attack, which consisted mainly of the young boys who had joined the division during the previous two weeks. Casualty rates were high: the Soviet besiegers expected the attack and had laid large mine fields and set up flame-thrower positions.
‘The attack squadrons suffered nearly 50 per cent dead and wounded’, the fanatical Hauptmann Hans-Joachim Schröder noted: ‘In the next few days, squadron leaders had to inform many a Königsberg mother about the heroic death of her son.’ After the first Red Army positions had been overcome the attack gained momentum, and by the end of the day the troops of Königsberg’s garrison, spearheaded by the tanks of the 5th Panzer Division, had advanced eight kilometers. The next day contact was established with the units attacking from Pillau, breaking the ring around Königsberg.
In the days immediately following the re-establishment of connection with Pillau, tens of thousands of civilians were ordered to evacuate from Königsberg to Pillau. Many managed to move on, over the Baltic Sea to western parts of Germany, but, since the Kriegsmarine did not prioritize evacuation, a large portion got stuck in and near Pillau. Refugee camps were hastily set up on the Samland, which, before long, held 100,000 people. Dysentery broke out and, since food was poorly allocated, many refugees decided to simply return to Königsberg, where they would at least have shelter. By 10 March, Königsberg’s fortress command implicitly admitted that the ‘evacuations’ had been a failure, halting operations by citing ‘technical issues’.
The final storm
The main priority of the fortress command remained defense. In early March Lasch’s staff moved into a new command bunker that had been constructed under the Paradeplatz, near the city’s university. Throughout the month, Volkssturm men were taught to handle the Panzerfaust, a single-shot recoilless anti-tank weapon, in the city’s parks. It was a relatively easy weapon to master, but some men lost eyes and limbs during training.
By early April it became clear that the Soviet offensive was only days away. Sunday 1 April was Easter, which the Soviets acknowledged by dropping leaflets into the city stating that the holiday could be celebrated undisturbed, but that the offensive would follow soon after. The fortress command reacted, not by evacuating the civilian population – which still stood at around 100,000 – but by evacuating 10,000 wounded soldiers in hospital trains.
The final storming of the city commenced on 6 April. Four Soviet armies, supported by 2,500 planes – a third of the entire Red Army Air Force – ttacked from the north and south. In the early afternoon of 8 April, troops of the 11th Guards Army (which attacked from the south) established contact with troops of the 43rd Army (which attacked from the north) just west of the city centre, completing the garrison’s encirclement.
After receiving the news, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who commanded the attack on Königsberg, immediately had pamphlets shot into the city, urging Lasch to surrender. Even though the situation was hopeless, Lasch refused, thereby accepting that the fighting would move to the city center, where many civilians were taking shelter. This was an area where German troops had strongholds in interconnected basements; Red Army soldiers used grenades and flamethrowers to force them out, caring little whether a basement was occupied by civilians or soldiers.
On 9 April, Soviet forces approached Lasch’s command post. Only minor pockets of resistance were still in German hands, all ammunition had been used, and communication had been lost between the fortress command and subordinate units. The general had no intention of dying, and surrendered.
Had Königsberg’s civilians seen the surrender document, they would surely have felt betrayed. The document listed ten points, but none discussed their safety. The first three points ensured that officers could keep an orderly, their kit and their side arms.
Although most German soldiers felt that they were protecting civilians, the fortress strategy makes it clear that by the last year of the war this was not a concern. Königsberg’s fortress command showed little hesitation in deploying vulnerable citizens, disregarding one of the duties of an army: safeguarding its population. Many of those defending Königsberg could hardly be considered soldiers, but they died just the same.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/battle-konigsberg?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_campaign=7707a286d5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_20_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fceec0de95-7707a286d5-1214148&mc_cid=7707a286d5
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ST. PAUL AND THE COSMIC CHRIST
The apostle Paul gave essentially no account of Jesus’s life on earth and no details of his crucifixion or resurrection.
That seems very odd, considering the graphic details in the gospels.
This has led some bible scholars to suggest that Paul believed in a Cosmic Christ who was crucified and resurrected in heaven, outer space, or some other dimension.
This is what I think happened:
PHASE I: Paul has an internal vision of a being he calls Jesus because it means “God saves.” This is not an earthly Jesus, who never existed. Paul teaches this Jesus among diaspora Jews and Gentiles. There is no Christian church in Jerusalem, explaining why none of the books of the New Testament were written in Hebrew or Aramaic.
PHASE II: Paul has co-workers named Peter and James. They disagree with him over matters like circumcision and kosher diet. But because the early churches are largely Gentile, the gospel of Paul eventually prevails. However, due to their notoriety, Peter and James will appear as characters in the gospels. Because Paul accused Peter of “sitting on the fence” and betraying his gospel of faith, Peter ends up betraying Jesus in the cult’s fan fiction.
PHASE III: Paul dies around 65 AD, then the Jerusalem temple is destroyed in 70 AD, leaving many Jews wondering how sins can be remitted without animal sacrifices. Paul’s gospel of salvation by faith begins to pick up more Jewish converts. The Christian cult was at the right time at the right place.
PHASE IV: Problems arise because Christians want to know who Jesus was, where he lived, what he did, what he taught, how he died, and what happened after he died. The author of Mark is commissioned to write a bio for someone who never lived. [Oriana: Please note that this is Michael Burch's view, not that of the majority of Bible scholars, including the secular ones.]
But the author is a Greek speaker, unable to read the Hebrew Bible, and with very limited knowledge of Palestinian geography or Judean religion, culture and legal practices. Sometime around 95 AD, he sits down with the Greek Septuagint and the Jewish Wars and Antiquities of Josephus as references. From these he cobbles together the first gospel. The rest, as they say, is history. Or, more accurately, pure mythology. ~ Michael R. Burch, Quora
Kari Svensson:
Paul's silence on almost anything to do with the Christ of the Gospels is puzzling and perplexing, if one operates on the assumption that he was a real person. But that does not necessarily mean that Paul believed his Christ to be a wholly mythical being, whose crucifixion and resurrection all took place in some other-worldly dimension, as some mythicists aver.
As Paul says on more than one occasion, Christ came “in the flesh,” and he uses other phrases to that effect — and that's very difficult to explain away as referring to a being that never walked the Earth as a real historical person, as stated above.
William B. Baird:
Paul invented Christianity. Paul, as you mentioned, taught salvation by faith, something that Jesus never did.
Loveofgod Loveofgod:
I am happy you concede that your analysis is conjecture. If Jesus is fictional, what motivated the writers of the gospels to want to change the world for the better, by bringing an end to human and animal sacrifices, teaching universal love rather than tribal love, teaching forgiveness rather than eye for an eye; teaching people that there is neither Greek nor Jew, that all persons were equal before God; teaching that God does not care whether we cut off foreskins, etc? Why did the writers of these novel ideas not take credit for them? Why attribute them to a fictional character, Jesus?
You have admitted that Paul’s teachings in 1 Corinthian is virtuous. Paul claims that he was a violent hate-filled zealot at one point. What changed him into a loved filled promoter of so many virtues?
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ADA BLACKJACK: YOUNG INUIT MOTHER WHO SURVIVED ALONE WITH ONLY HER CAT, VIC
She was left alone in the Arctic ice for 2 years—with only a cat for company.
This is how Ada Blackjack survived.
In 1921, Ada Blackjack, a young Inuit mother desperate to provide for her ailing son, joined an Arctic expedition as a seamstress. She wasn’t an explorer, nor a hunter—just a woman trying to earn money.
The mission, led by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, sought to claim Wrangel Island for Canada. Ada was the only woman, and the only Inuk among four white male explorers. When supplies ran low, the men set off for help across the ice… and never returned.
Ada was left behind with a dying teammate and a cat named Vic (from Victoria). Soon, it was just her and Vic—alone in subzero wilderness, 700 miles from help.
She taught herself to shoot a rifle.
She fended off polar bears with a knife.
She sewed her own mittens when her fingers froze.
She trapped foxes. Ate seal. Read the Bible aloud.
And through it all, Vic curled close to keep her warm.
Two years later, rescuers arrived. She was still alive. Thin. Worn. But unbroken.
The world nearly forgot her. The men got the headlines.
David Burgess:
Blackjack survived in the extremely cold conditions for eight months, learning to hunt foxes, build boats, and sew parkas out of reindeer skin. She was rescued on August 19, 1923 by a former colleague of Stefansson's, Harold Noice. Some newspapers hailed her as the real "female Robinson Crusoe."
Blackjack used the money she saved to take her son to Seattle, Washington, to treat his tuberculosis. She remarried and had another son, Billy. Eventually, she returned to the Arctic, where she lived until the age of 85.
Oriana:
She was also able to feed the cat. There must have been a deep bond between the woman and the animal. They helped each other survive.
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WE ALREADY KNOW WHAT CAUSES AUTISM
Genetic causes of autism are firmly established by decades of research
After more than 30 years of research, the broad consensus is that autism is primarily biological in origin, rooted in genetics, and shaped by prenatal and early developmental factors. What has changed dramatically is not the disorder itself but how we define, detect, and respond to it.
The Illusion of an Epidemic
Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), was once considered a rare, profoundly impairing childhood condition. In the 1970s, autism was thought to affect approximately 1 in 2,500 children (Fombonne, 2003). Today, estimates place the prevalence at around 1 in 36 children (Maenner et al., 2023). The instinctive assumption—that something in the environment must be causing a dramatic rise—is misleading. The increase is not in actual incidence but in diagnosis. This is due to broader diagnostic criteria, better screening tools, increased awareness, and a shift in the kinds of children being labeled.
In the past, a diagnosis of autism was reserved for children with profound impairments in language, cognition, and social functioning. These children often presented with intellectual disabilities, self-injurious behaviors, or a complete lack of speech. The criteria were narrow, focusing on severe, unmistakable cases.
Over time, the diagnostic definition evolved—particularly with changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). DSM-III (1980) included autism as a distinct disorder. Still, it wasn’t until the DSM-IV (1994) and the DSM-5 (2013) that the spectrum model solidified, expanding the boundaries of who could be diagnosed.
In our widely used textbooks Assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorder (Goldstein, Ozonoff & Naglieri, 2008; Goldstein & Ozonoff, 2018), we have documented this shift. Today’s children differ significantly from those diagnosed 30 or 40 years ago. Most have average or above-average intelligence, many are verbal, and a growing number are diagnosed not due to severe developmental delays but rather because of social communication differences and behavioral rigidity. Autism has shifted from being about profound disability to being more about differences in social learning.
This reframing is crucial. Autism today encompasses a range of children who may have previously been viewed as shy, quirky, or socially awkward rather than disabled. These children often attend regular schools, engage in conversations, and even excel academically—yet their social development follows a different trajectory. In no other area of child mental health has the diagnostic landscape shifted so dramatically in such a short time.
What Science Actually Tells Us
Research from the 1990s onward confirms the biological underpinnings of autism. Twin studies have consistently shown that autism is highly heritable, with concordance rates for identical twins ranging from 60 to 90 percent, compared to 0 to 30 percent for fraternal twins (Bailey et al., 1995; Hallmayer et al., 2011). More recent genetic studies have identified hundreds of genes associated with an increased risk for ASD, many of which are involved in brain development and synaptic functioning (Sanders et al., 2015).
Environmental factors do play a role—but not in the way that sensational headlines might suggest. Factors such as advanced parental age, prenatal exposure to certain medications, or complications during birth can slightly increase the risk. Still, they are not causes in a deterministic sense. They influence a child’s neurodevelopment in interaction with genetic susceptibility.
Vaccines, long a focal point of misinformation and controversy, have been definitively ruled out. Studies have shown no link between vaccination and autism (Taylor et al., 2014). The persistence of this myth has diverted attention from the real, evidence-based causes.
A New Understanding of Autism
Notably, the number of children with severe, impairing autism has remained relatively stable over the decades (Hyman et al., 2020). What has changed is the inclusion of children with milder symptoms under the same diagnostic umbrella. This contributes to the perception of an autism “epidemic” when, in fact, what we’re seeing is a diagnostic shift.
This shift reflects a broader trend in how we conceptualize child mental health. Autism is increasingly viewed as a neurodevelopmental difference rather than a disease. The focus has moved from “curing” autism to supporting neurodiverse individuals in navigating a world not built for them. Social skills training, behavioral therapies, and educational accommodations aim to help children with autism thrive on their terms, not to erase their differences.
Understanding that autism is a biologically based condition with a wide range of presentations doesn’t minimize the challenges many individuals with autism face. But it does allow for more precise, compassionate, and supportive approaches. We must separate the identity of being autistic from outdated ideas of dysfunction. The current generation of individuals with autism has the chance to grow up in a society better equipped to understand them.
After 50 years of shifting definitions and improved awareness, we are finally at a point where the question is no longer “What causes autism?” but “How can we best support people with autism in a diverse world?”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/raising-resilient-children/202504/we-already-know-what-causes-autism
Oriana:
There are of course dissenting opinions, placing more weight on the yet unknown environmental factors, particularly during pregnancy. Such events may include the expectant mother’s inflammatory illness, caused by an infection. But at this point no one questions the primary importance of genetics. Autism, like schizophrenia or alcoholism, runs in the family. It seems obvious that the genetic susceptibility must be there, but perhaps it’s the interaction between the genes and the environmental stressors that is critical.
Mary:
The main thing Kennedy gets wrong about autism's "increase" is that he sees all with this diagnosis in terms of the very worst — those who are non verbal, and have the most undesirable behavioral symptoms: they can never hold a job, get married, or even achieve independence in basic self care, such as dressing and toileting. What he is missing, and misrepresenting, is the expansion of autism diagnoses to many more folks with much less severe and limiting symptoms, who formerly might have been considered merely odd or awkward, but not seen as having a pathological condition. The increase in population deemed autistic is largely due to "diagnostic inflation,"--a pattern noted in the ascendant from DSM III to DSM V, where diagnostic criteria are expanded so as to include more and more people in pathological categories. This inflation has been particularly noticed in diagnoses of autism and ADHD.
Kennedy of course misses the essential here: it is not that there has been an increase in autism, but a change in autism's definition — now regarded as a "spectrum" with levels of severity and pathology. Those on the higher functioning level may have minimal disability or even some advantage (as Temple Grandin) due to their neurodivergence. There may even be virtue in de-pathologizing these diagnoses, so that "divergence" need not always be automatically considered "disorder."
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CAN YOU DRINK TOO MUCH WATER?
In the early 19th Century, people had to be close to death before deigning to drink water. Only those "reduced to the last stage of poverty satisfy their thirst with water", according to Vincent Priessnitz, the founder of hydropathy, otherwise known as “the water cure.”
Many people, he added, had never drunk more than half a pint of plain water in one sitting.
How times have changed. Adults in the UK today are consuming more water now than in recent years, while in the US, sales of bottled water recently surpassed sales of soda. We've been bombarded with messages telling us that drinking liters of water every day is the secret to good health, more energy and great skin, and that it will make us lose weight and avoid cancer.
Drinking eight glasses of water a day – or about two liters – is actually more than our bodies need to stay hydrated, according to the latest research. Instead, you should drink between 1.5 and 1.8 liters of water per day.
Rather than following the 8x8 rule - drinking eight eight-ounce glasses of water every day – we should personalize our water intake to our temperature and activity level. Those who live in hot and humid environments and at high altitudes, as well as athletes, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, need to drink more water than others, experts say.
Water is, of course, important. Making up around two-thirds of our body weight, water carries nutrients and waste products around our bodies, regulates our temperature, acts as a lubricant and shock absorber in our joints and plays a role in most chemical reactions happening inside us.
We're constantly losing water through sweat, urination and breathing. Ensuring we have enough water is a fine balance, and crucial to avoiding dehydration. The symptoms of dehydration can become detectable when we lose between 1-2% of our body's water and we continue to deteriorate until we top our fluids back up. In rare cases, such dehydration can be fatal.
In a healthy body, the brain detects when the body is becoming dehydrated and initiates thirst to stimulate drinking. It also releases a hormone which signals to the kidneys to conserve water by concentrating the urine.
Those of us aiming for eight glasses of water per day aren’t doing ourselves any harm. But the belief we need to drink more water than our bodies signal for can sometimes become dangerous.
Too much fluid consumption can become serious when it causes a dilution of sodium in blood. This creates a swelling of the brain and lungs, as fluid shifts to try to balance out blood sodium levels.
Over the last decade or so, Courney Kipps, professor of Sports and Exercise Medicine, has been aware of at least 15 cases of athletes who’ve died from overhydration during sporting events. She suspects these cases are partly because we've become distrustful of our own thirst mechanism and that we think we need to drink more than our bodies are calling for to avoid dehydration.
"Nurses and doctors in hospitals will see severely dehydrated patients who have serious medical conditions or who haven't been able to drink for days, but these cases are very different from the dehydration that people worry about during marathons," she says.
Johanna Pakenham ran the 2018 London Marathon, the hottest on record. But she can't remember most of it because she drank so much water during the race that she developed overhydration, known as hyponatremia. She was rushed to hospital later that day.
"My friend and partner thought I was dehydrated and they gave me a big glass of water. I had a massive fit and my heart stopped. I was airlifted to hospital and unconscious from the Sunday evening until the following Tuesday," she says.
Pakenham, who plans to run the marathon again this year, says the only health advice offered by friends and marathon posters was to drink lots of water.
"All it would've taken for me to be okay was having a few electrolyte tablets, which increase the sodium levels in your blood. I've ran a few marathons before and I didn’t know that," she says.
"I really want people to know that something so simple can be so deadly."
How much water do we need?
The idea that we must be constantly hydrated means many people carry water with them wherever they go, and drink more than their bodies require.
"The maximum a person in the hottest possible heat in the middle of the desert might sweat is two liters in an hour, but that's really hard," says Hugh Montgomery, director of research at the Institute for Sport, Exercise and Health in London.
For those who feel more comfortable going off official guidelines rather than thirst, the UK's NHS advises drinking between six to eight glasses of fluid a day, including lower fat milk and sugar-free drinks, including tea and coffee.
It's also important to remember that our thirst mechanisms lose sensitivity once we're over 60, and researchers published findings in 2022 showing that the symptoms of dehydration can often be overlooked.
"As we age, our natural thirst mechanism becomes less sensitive and we become more prone to dehydration than younger people. As we age, we may need to be more attentive to our fluid consumption habits to stay hydrated," says Davy.
Most experts agree that our fluid requirements vary depending on a person’s age, body size, gender, environment and level of physical activity.
"One of fallacies of the 8x8 rule is its stark over-simplification of how we as organisms respond to the environment we're in," says Rosenburg. "We ought to think of fluid requirement in the same way as energy requirement, where we talk about the temperature we’re in and level of physical activity were engaged in."
In 2022, researchers from the University of Aberdeen estimated that the amount of water people need is between 1.5 and 1.8 liters per day, not the recommended two liters or eight glasses. They did this by collaborating with scientists from 23 different countries to measure the amount of water needed to keep people hydrated.
They found that those who live in hot and humid environments and at high altitudes, as well as athletes, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, need to drink more water than others. The biggest predictor for how much water someone requires is how much energy they burn. In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the answer.
Most experts tend to agree we don't need to be concerned about drinking an arbitrary amount of water per day: our bodies signal to us when we're thirsty, much like they do when we're hungry or tired. The only health benefit of drinking more than you need, it seems, will be the extra calories you expend by running to the loo more often.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190403-how-much-water-should-you-drink-a-day?at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_email_send_date=20250416&at_send_id=4337572&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2ffuture%2farticle%2f20190403-how-much-water-should-you-drink-a-day&at_bbc_team=crm
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A UNIVERSAL ALLERGY CURE?
If you’re bothered by allergies every spring, you may pop a Benadryl or Claritin most mornings to make the days tolerable. Two-thirds of Americans report spring allergies, and about 4 in 10 say they take an allergy medication several times a week.
But those medicines, while valuable, don’t exactly fix the problem. One 2001 study in the United Kingdom found 60 percent of people who took some kind of over-the-counter medication for allergies reported they were not satisfied with how it managed their symptoms.
Nasal sprays are not exactly enjoyable or easy to operate. Allergy medicines have to be taken every day if you deal with serious hay fever, and they can produce, ironically, tiredness for some people during this season of renewal. A missed dose can lead to a day of hacking and sneezing. Oh, and the more you take them, the less likely they are to work.
A century ago, antihistamines were a revolution in allergy treatment. But now, we’re on the cusp of another.
Omalizumab, sold as Xolair, is an asthma medication that was approved more than 20 years ago, but it has proven successful in treating seasonal allergies in recent preliminary trials. So successful, in fact, that now some doctors in the US are prescribing it for certain patients during hay fever season. It is an injection, rather than a pill or a spray, that’s given a couple of weeks before pollen and grass levels start to rise.
One obvious benefit is you get a single shot and enjoy your spring. But even better, omalizumab can forestall allergic reactions at the source. That means an injection could stop all allergic reactions — not only seasonal allergies but food allergies (such as peanuts) and insect allergies for a prolonged period of time. This class of treatment — monoclonal antibodies, special artificial proteins that carry instructions to the body’s immune system — have the potential to be a genuine all-in-one allergy wonder drug.
“The biggest advantage of antibody-based therapeutics is that they offer the potential to target the underlying pathways driving allergic reactions in general,” said Sayantani Sindher, a clinical associate professor at Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research. “This means antibody-based therapies will simultaneously impact all of the patient’s allergens.”
Large clinical trials are underway in China and Japan, which could lead to omalizumab’s approval in those countries for seasonal allergies. The next generation of monoclonal antibody allergy treatments is already in the works.
How monoclonal antibodies could stop allergy season before it starts
In the United States, the use of monoclonal antibodies started with doctors studying and prescribing preexisting treatments “off label” — meaning these are drugs that were actually developed for something else.
Asthma and seasonal allergies often occur in tandem, which made omalizumab an obvious candidate for a new approach to allergy treatment. The drug had also separately proven effective in treating food allergies, adding to evidence that it had the right properties to stop seasonal allergies at the source.
The treatment has demonstrated significantly better outcomes than antihistamines in small randomized trials, requiring only one dose two weeks before pollen and grass season. A 2022 study reported that patients who received a 300 mg injection of Xolair experienced fewer symptoms and fewer days that required a daily antihistamine or other medication; the patients also reported a better quality of life during the allergy season. Their symptoms were particularly improved during the worst pollen days when compared to the people who only took a daily medication.
When pollen and other allergens emerge every year and enter your body through your eyes, ears, or nose while you’re enjoying the crisp spring air, your body’s immune system overreacts. Immunoglobulin, proteins that are supposed to identify and attack parasites or a virus, instead go after the otherwise harmless allergen.
When the immunoglobulin attacks the allergen, your body releases histamine, a chemical critical to inflammation (which, again, is really important when you are actually exposed to a dangerous parasite or virus). That inflammation then creates all that mucus and sneezing.
Monoclonal antibodies stop that process before it begins. They deliver artificial proteins that carry instructions to your immune system to block the receptors that create allergic reactions and prevent the overresponse that releases histamine in the first place.
Artificially altered antibodies have been around for decades, with different iterations being developed to respond to new health threats. Monoclonal antibodies were developed for Covid-19 during the pandemic and recently provided the platform for an RSV vaccine.
Dupilumab (another monoclonal antibody treatment used for skin rashes, asthma, and a lung disease that makes it difficult to breathe called COPD) targets a different receptor but has likewise shown promising results in studies so far. In a large 2018 study, asthma patients who suffer from seasonal allergies received a 300 mg injection every two weeks and showed significant improvements in their nasal blockage. A 2022 study found fewer allergy symptoms among both people with allergic asthma and people without.
Monoclonal antibody injections superficially resemble allergy vaccines, which have been investigated more aggressively in recent years. Those shots as well as oral tablets that work in the same way function differently: They expose people to small amounts of the actual allergen, giving their bodies a chance to develop natural immunity to it. They can unlock more durable resistance to specific allergies — but they can only treat one allergy at a time.
You may also need to go to the doctor once a week for a month or longer during the initial treatment course. Some companies are trying to make them easier to use.
Going forward, the conventional kind of allergy vaccine could still have a place, particularly for patients who are at particularly high risk of developing asthma, by strengthening immune systems for the longer term; monoclonal antibodies, by contrast, do not actually modify the immune system in the same way, so they would need to be taken again periodically.
But Sindher emphasized the potential to treat all allergies at once as an obvious advantage for monoclonal antibodies over immunotherapies.
“Pollen allergy and food allergy are frequently found together,” she said. “Omalizumab has the potential to treat both.”
With monoclonal antibody shots, patients also report fewer side effects. There is a subset of people for whom antihistamines don’t work, including those who have built up a tolerance to those drugs after frequent usage. These new monoclonal antibodies may help them where those old treatments are now failing.
Specially tailored allergy-specific products are now in the works, ushering in this new era of allergy treatment. In early April, the final stage of one clinical trial found the following results after four weeks: Patients who had still reported symptoms after taking the standard-of-care treatment and then received a monoclonal antibody injection were much more likely to report mild or no nasal symptoms (62 percent) than people who were taking the placebo (39 percent). They scored significantly better on oral symptoms and other measures of efficacy without serious side effects.
The drug in the clinical trial, Stapokibart, was recently approved for seasonal allergy treatment in China, and its developer, Keymed, has premised its business on developing and gaining approval for treatments in that country and then bringing them to the US. Monoclonal antibodies will continue to make inroads as more products come to the market.
A NEW ERA IN ALLERGY TREATMENT
Monoclonal antibodies, by offering months of allergy relief in just one injection, could elide one of the biggest challenges in all pharmaceutical treatments: making sure people take medicines like they are supposed to.
With antihistamines and nasal sprays, you must regularly buy them yourself and repeatedly remember to take them correctly to stave off allergy symptoms. That 2001 study in the UK found that many people who suffered seasonal allergy symptoms nonetheless did a poor job of taking medication as they should: Among the 54 percent of people who were experiencing poor relief from allergy symptoms, 70 percent didn’t use the conventional allergy medicines according to the clinical guidelines.
But for allergy sufferers to make the jump from something like Claritin to an annual allergy shot that works even better, health insurance coverage will be critical: The list price on omalizumab is $1,500 a pop. This would be a new cost to health plans because patients often bear their own over-the-counter antihistamine med costs. Off-label coverage of any drug, including omalizumab for seasonal allergies, can be fickle. Some popular plans, such as United Healthcare, are not currently covering the drug for that use at this time because they consider it unproven.
As more research comes in and more products come on the market, the insurers’ value proposition may change. The FDA recently approved a generic version of omalizumab, which should help reduce prices for that injection. As they do, they could offer more value for the patients for whom conventional therapies aren’t working.
Seasonal allergies can significantly diminish a person’s quality of life — during what should be one of the most enjoyable times on the calendar — and they come around every year.
The work to provide all-in-one allergy relief isn’t finished yet. But at long last, we are on the threshold of allowing more people to break free from the perennial pollen cycle for good.
https://www.vox.com/health/408749/allergy-season-pollen-grass-cure-treatment
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PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR WHEN DEATH IS NEAR
~ I work in healthcare and have been present for dozens of deaths. I have seen some consistent patterns that I cannot explain:
The pre-death upswing — No matter how sick my patients are, they tend to have a brief period of improvement immediately before their final decline. This can be an increase in alertness or interaction, or just a period of greater stability. Family members often see this as a sign that the patient is miraculously improving but those of us who have been around patients at the end of life recognize that it usually means the end is near.
Choosing their moment. Obviously, no one can choose to just spontaneously die or heal themselves from an incurable condition. However, I firmly believe that people who are actively dying do have some control over the timing of their death. I have seen adults, children, and even babies “hold on” until important people in their lives are present if they know those people are on their way.
One of my first deaths was a one year old whose parents were over an hour away when she started going downhill. I held her as she was dying. Her breathing slowed, her hands and feet became cold and purple (despite all the blankets and snuggling), and her heart rate and blood pressure dropped. I really thought she was going to die in my arms. (The doctors were surprised she was hanging on for so long as it was).
Then her parents arrived. I placed her in her mother’s arms. She took one breath. Father asked to hold her. She took one breath in his arms too. Then they sat together with both of their arms around her and she took her final breath. I have seen this type of thing too many times to believe it could be a coincidence.
Other times, people wait for their family members to leave. One little boy who I lost recently had parents who rarely left his side. However, as soon as they did, he slipped away quickly. Afterwards, when they rushed back to find out he gad gone, the mother agreed that he had absolutely done this as a final gift to her. She was secretly terrified of watching her son die but felt like she was “supposed to be there.”
Seeing/hearing “people” (or some sort of presence) that are comforting to them and who are there to bring them somewhere. At the end of life (often moments before death, or during the upswing I mentioned before” people often seem to see or hear someone in their room. Older people might talk to whoever is there, identify them (usually as a loved one who has already died), etc. children often talk about someone coming to get them, take them on a trip, take them home, etc. Even babies and toddlers will often reach toward a specific spot or stare at a particular part of the room as if they see something no one else can see. This is consistently comforting to the person who is dying. I have never seen anyone be afraid.
The patients I have worked with have had very diverse religious backgrounds: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist, agnostic, etc. The pattern has been consistent and seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the patient’s religious background.
~ Jessica Uze, Child Life Specialist at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Quora
Al Wright:
Jessica, I am retired paramedic. What you described is exactly what I have experienced. I have been with people just before they died and I have witnessed the same thing as what you wrote. It really does cut across cultural and religious boundaries. One thing I learned as a rookie paramedic a long time ago: when somebody tells you “I’m going to die,” then get ready because they usually do just that.
Gary Mark Stocker: DOGS, TOO, HAVE THAT “FINAL SPURT”
With point number one, just after the First World War, my grandfather was in a military hospital with Spanish ‘flu. My grandmother had gone to see him. One patient was up and about, being quite cheerful. My grandmother said to one of the nurses that he seemed to be well on the road to recovery. The nurse sadly shook her head. Sure enough that night he relapsed and died.
Not just humans, both of our Labrador dogs were similar. Our first dog, a yellow Labrador had a second serious heart attack one evening. So my dad took her to the vet in the village. The vet’s cat was in the yard. Our dog was a devil for chasing cats (until they used to turn around and confront her!). So she chased this cat and he was forced to jump on top of the fence. She came trotting back looking quite pleased with herself. Dad almost thought about taking her home. Then she did collapse and Dad took her into the vet. The vet said that she was dead. When Dad said that she had just chased the vet’s cat across the yard, he was not surprised and said that quite often dogs will have a final spurt of life.
Mil Yak:
People hanging on may be related to stress hormones keeping them going and the relaxation they feel when their loved ones arrive.
Richard:
My dad got better shortly before his death. I was amazed. He was joking with the staff. And then maybe 5 days later he passed.
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ending on beauty:
DEAD LANGUAGE
He with the beating wings
outside who brushes the door,
that is your brother, you hear him.
Laurio he says, water,
a bow, colorless, deep.
He came down with the river,
drifting around mussel
and snails, spread like a fan
on the sand and was green.
Warne he says and wittan,
the crow has no tree,
I have the power to kiss you,
I dwell in your ear.
Tell him you do not
want to listen –
he comes, an otter, he comes
swarming like hornets, he cries,
a cricket, he grows with the marsh
under your house, he whispers
in the well, smordis you hear,
your black alder will wither,
and die at the fence tomorrow.
~ Johannes Bobrowski, 1917-1965
("Names speak of a stamped-out people" – a line from another poem by Bobrowski.)
Bobrowski is trying to give us a bit of the extinct Old Prussian language. The original Prussians (Prusai) were a Baltic tribe, largely exterminated or assimilated by the Teutonic Knights, beginning in the Middle Ages. In the mid-1600’s a Polish chronicle records the death of the “last man who knew the Prussian language.”
