. . .
I woke, and we were sailing on
As in a gentle weather:
'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high;
The dead men stood together.
All stood together on the deck,
For a charnel-dungeon fitter:
All fixed on me their stony eyes,
That in the Moon did glitter.
The pang, the curse, with which they died,
Had never passed away:
I could not draw my eyes from theirs,
Nor turn them up to pray.
. . .
'Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit said—
'And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest-brook along;
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf's young.'
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Here is another stanza which I’m posting simply because it’s beautiful:
The harbor-bay was clear as glass,
So smoothly it was strewn!
And on the bay the moonlight lay,
And the shadow of the Moon.
*
IF YOU THOUGHT COLERIDGE’S ANCIENT MARINER WAS FAR OUT . . .
On October 11, 1775, the whaling ship Herald was sailing the frigid waters off Greenland when it spotted a sailing ship.
As the crew approached the ship, they saw that the ship appeared to be in a state of disrepair, with its sails torn, tattered, and hanging from its poles. The captain of the Herald ordered his men aboard the newly discovered vessel, which they determined to be the Octavius, and discovered its crew dead and frozen. The ship's captain was found in his cabin, frozen at his desk with his pen still in his hand. He was found accompanied by a deceased woman and a child wrapped in a blanket. The ship's log showed that the ship had been afloat with its frozen crew aboard for over thirteen years.
*
When we don’t work, time flows by us, we don’t assimilate it through ourselves.
I’m moved by everything broken and crippled. Since that’s how we really are.
Plutarch: People learn to speak from people, to be silent — from the gods.”
~ from the notebook of Anna Kamieńska, a Polish poet, contemporary of Milosz (who thought that she was a decent human being, too concerned about the welfare of others to become a great poet)
*
ALEXANDER ILICHEVSKY ON KAFKA
I first picked up Kafka in my third year of college, at a rented dacha in Sheremetyevo. It was January, but I remember hearing those thawing drops drumming on my window sill; from time to time, cats screamed terribly. In the evenings, the owners drank vodka behind the wall and watched hypnosis sessions. At first, they looked in on me, to invite me to join them, but I was discouraged by my studies, although I passed my session early.
Outside the thawed window, branches of the garden were black and swayed in the breeze, the stars burned brightly between the clouds. Sometimes landing airplanes seemed to crush the dacha, everything in it danced and rattled like in a thunderstorm, and dust fell from elk antlers above the mantelpiece. I turned the last page of “The Trial” and realized that I had just finished reading a biblical text. That’s when it occurred to me that literature is something that is no less involved in the creation of the world than the Big Bang once was. This realization began with Kafka, probably because in him the power of creation of the literary universe is as clear as the tension of a string in a violin concerto.
After all, the novel “Amerika” was written on the basis not of personal experience but of an understanding of experience in general. Kafka is an impossible writer per se – because of the key, the hook on which he catches the reader – go to the root of the matter without pity for oneself and the world; he does not so much cheer one up as make it clear what the world really is: the bottom from which one can only push away. In other words – in Tsvetaeva’s words: “To your crazy world/There is only one answer – refusal.”
But Kafka goes further: he pushes himself away from the refusal itself and somehow manages to soar at the expense of the ritual of surprise. There was an episode in a German concentration camp. Jewish prisoners gathered to celebrate the Sabbath. But before beginning, they decided to discuss a vital question: Is there God or is there no God? And they concluded that there was no God.
And then there was a pause. No one knew what to do next. But somehow it happened by itself that everyone sighed and began to recite the Sabbath prayer… Isn’t the author of this story Kafka? Doesn’t Kafka give us something more than belief in a good or not-so-good ending? He gives us something more reliable than the world itself – an understanding of the world.
(Ilichevsky is a Russian writer who won the 2007 Russian Booker Prize)
https://eastwestliteraryforum.com/essays/alexander-ilichevsky-on-kafka/
KAFKA: A STORM
~ I am sitting on my bed. A storm is coming, appropriately. A storm is always appropriate. ~
Franz Kafka, from a diary entry written circa December 1919, featured in Diaries: 1910-1923
*
GIANT VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN THE 19TH CENTURY
Simushir Island in the northwest Pacific was the source of a previously unidentified 1831 eruption.
Researchers have finally pinpointed the location of a “mystery volcano” that erupted so violently it cooled Earth’s climate in 1831.
The
eruption, the most powerful of the 19th century, lofted so much sulfur
dioxide into the stratosphere that the annual average temperatures for
the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees
Fahrenheit).
An in-depth study of ice cores taken from
Greenland enabled researchers to look back across time and isolate
volcanic glass shards deposited nearly 200 years ago.
Analyzing and mapping the likely trajectory of the particles helped scientists zero in on the Zavaritskii
volcano on the remote and uninhabited Simushir Island, part of the
Kuril Islands archipelago disputed by Russia and Japan.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/04/science/kessler-syndrome-science-newsletter-wt/index.html
*
RUSSIA “WANTS RESPECT”
Yaroslav Mar: Another great post by Alfred Koch, my favorite Russian thinker and former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia who has been living in exile in Germany since 2014:
~ Two years and three hundred forty-one days of war have passed. Today, a Russian drone struck a residential building in Sumy. Once the search and rescue operations were completed, the grim toll was confirmed: nine civilians killed, fourteen wounded. I have run out of words to describe all this. Grief. Tragedy. Senseless, stupid, mindless evil. Evil without reason, without purpose. Pure, unadulterated evil. But never mind… It’s all meaningless.
Even Trump is bewildered at this point: what is the purpose of this senseless bloodbath? It has no real meaning beyond the fact that it simply is a bloodbath.
Okay, we understand—Putin started this because he desperately wanted to be respected. He wanted his interests to be acknowledged, for people to stop dismissing him like a bothersome fly. This is all a delusion, the product of a wounded ego, but we get it now: Putin suffers from a severe deficiency of respect.
This, in fact, is the great Russian question: “Do you respect me?” It is the core of every Russian dialogue and monologue. The Russian man is so obsessed with demanding respect that it’s obvious—he knows, deep down, that this is his greatest problem. No one respects him because there is nothing to respect.
“But I saved the world from fascism!” cries the Russian man.
To which he is told:
“First of all, not you, but your great-grandfathers. And second, they weren’t the only ones. Many others played a role in that victory. So don’t take too much credit for yourself.”
“What? So you mean… you don’t respect me?” he asks, stunned.
“No, I don’t respect you.”
“Ah, is that so?! Then I’ll force you to respect me!”
And so it begins…
Zelensky, on the other hand, suffers from a different deficiency — justice.
“If you refuse to give me justice, then Ukraine has no place in this world. It will find justice in the Kingdom of Heaven. So don’t expect us to stop. Without justice, we will keep marching to the slaughter. Without justice, we have nothing here.”
And the grim truth of life today is that neither of them will ever get what they so desperately seek. Putin will never receive respect, and Zelensky will never receive justice.
Why? Because that’s just the way the world works. And it’s about time they accepted it.
Speaking of which — Iulia Mendel (Zelensky’s former press secretary) published a piercing column in TIME Magazine. She openly writes that Ukraine urgently needs a pause, a ceasefire—practically on any terms. Even, perhaps, without justice. Because otherwise, Ukraine will simply cease to exist.
I understand that there is no way to bring Putin to reason anymore. Trying to convince him that Russia is more important than his personal respect is a lost cause. He has already said that he would rather send all Russians to paradise than live in a world where he is not respected. Everyone knows that he has long since equated himself with Russia. His latest claims—that banning negotiations with him personally means banning negotiations with Russia as a whole—are the clearest proof of this.
But maybe… just maybe… there is still a chance to convince Zelensky that Ukraine is more important than justice. Maybe I am deluding myself, but it seems to me that Zelensky is not yet as hopeless as Putin. Then again, with each passing day, hope fades. Fades—but has not yet disappeared. Hope, after all, is the last to die. ~ Alfred Koch, Quora
Michal Šturc:
The points about Russian and Ukrainian national characters are interesting, but the conclusion drawn from them is, in my opinion, self-contradictory.
One one hand, there is a statement that Russians will forever try to conquer their neighborhood to establish respect.
On the other hand, there is a statement that Ukrainians’ unwillingness to settle for substantial losses is unreasonable.
However, if we assume that the first statement is correct, then giving Russians a pause will just let them rearm for another war of conquest. Thus, Ukrainians accepting a ceasefire makes sense only if they will be able to rearm faster and mount a counteroffensive before Russians. Which is not the opinion I see in the post, although I’d like it to be the truth.
Pavel Assev:
That's why Ukraine needs both peace and reliable security guarantees from its allies (more binding and reliable than those of Budapest memorandum).
*
UKRAINIAN POWS RETURNING HOME VS RUSSIAN POWS RETURNING HOME
That’s the Ukrainians and Russians returning home from captivity. What do you notice?
The faces.
The smiles.
The eyes.
The expectations of what’s going to happen with them now.
Very, very different.
The latest Ukraine-Russia POW exchange brought back 150 Ukrainian defenders.
And returned back to Putin’s GULAG 150 serfs.
Tony Jazdec:
There are very few things scarier than being a Russian POW returning home from captivity.
They are aware that they will be severely punished for having been captured and not having died in service to (s)motherland; and will probably end up in a penal battalion sent on suicide attack against Ukrainian positions.
Elena Gold:
Yes, the returning prisoners (after interrogation by the FSB) are sent to penal units, “to wash off their shame with blood”.
Patric Cox:
The guys in the bottom picture know they’ll have a brief ‘holiday’ in a camp somewhere, and then be sent to join one of the ‘meat’ battalions and thrown back into the war.
Matt Wilson:
“In war the morale is to the physical as three to one.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
AD Kalonymos:
The contrast was evident to me since childhood…as we traveled many times from my hometown of Riga in occupied Latvia to Russia proper one thousand km east of Moscow in the 1980s. The difference was striking and was enough to put me off Russia and all things Russian for life — it was so different to what we were used to.
Petri Haikio:
Only one of the sides return to safety after being released…
John McCallum
That is pure revenge, sending those toilet-stealing turds back to their motherland.
James Urie:
I laugh when Putin insists that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. My wife and two step sons are Ukrainian and they are entirely different from my Russian neighbors who have lived here in California for 35 years! My wife used to go to Kursk from Sumy on business for her IT company and she always said that Russians have a different mentality.
Oriana:
I can’t really speak of the “Russian mentality” without remembering one particular story that my mother told me.
It was right after the official end of WW2, and Russian soldiers were returning home, with a number of watches (expensive back then) and other things they’d managed to loot. One returning soldier praised a town (was it in Czechia?) that he’d seen on the way. “Would you like to live there?” he was asked.
“Nyet,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no freedom there.”
My mother explained: “He meant the freedom to spit on the floor.”
*
Now, I’m not saying that all Russian are uncouth and spit on the floor. There are the educated, Westernized Russians who don’t differ much from Western Europeans — and then there are the uneducated Russians who usually have never been outside of Russia. That’s the main social divide: the educated and the uneducated.
I realize that this divide also exists elsewhere, but is perhaps not quite as sharp.
Another factor may be having grown up during a period in which private property wasn’t permitted. Without private property, you don’t learn how to take care of things. The habit of neatness, or lack of it, has a way of being transferred even to public property.
*
RUSSIAN PROPAGANDISTS ADMIT THE WAR AGAINST UKRAINE WAS A MISTAKE
SCREENSHOT — ROSSIYA 1 — FEB 06, 2025 — Artem Sheinin, a prominent Kremlin propagandist and staunch supporter of the war against Ukraine, recently shifted his rhetoric to acknowledge the severe losses the Russian army is suffering on the frontlines. In a fiery speech on state owned Channel One, Sheinin stated that Russia’s time is running out due to the enormous casualties sustained in the war.
This sudden change in tone is likely to be part of a broader, Kremlin approved strategy.
Sheinin’s remarks echo those made by other Russian propagandists who have started accusing the government of sending an unprepared military into Ukraine. Prominent Z propagandist Alexander Sladkov recently stated that Russian troops were poorly equipped, with some soldiers forced to buy their own uniforms and weapons or make do with outdated equipment.
Additionally, Russian authorities have been increasingly attempting to soften their narrative in preparation for a potential ceasefire. Tatiana Moskalkova, the Russian Federation’s human rights commissioner, recently praised Ukrainian forces for their treatment of civilians in the Kursk region, which may be an effort to shift public perception within Russia.
At the same time, Russian losses have prompted discussions about possible future negotiations or a truce, as propagandists begin to acknowledge the shortcomings of the Russian military and the challenges they face in sustaining the war effort. The rhetoric shift from “we will capture Kyiv in three days” to “we were not prepared for the invasion” reveals the extent of the Russian army’s failure and foreshadows a potential change in the Kremlin's approach to the conflict.
Oriana:
The sign on the screen says: “Into radioactive ash.” Nuclear blackmail remains Moscow’s favorite form of trying to heal the national ego. When was the last time the U.S. threatened to nuke anyone? Was it the Cuban missile crisis? Not according to Wikipedia: “President Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War if the Chinese refused to negotiate.”
*
PUTIN MAKES A RARE ADMISSION
Vladimir Putin has acknowledged that Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is proving “very difficult” for Moscow, as Kyiv’s forces push deeper into Russian territory.
Analysts suggest that Ukraine has expanded its incursion by approximately three miles this week, following a series of battalion-sized mechanized assaults in Kursk. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported that geolocated footage indicates significant advances by Ukrainian troops.
For months, Putin has largely dismissed the presence of Ukrainian forces on Russian soil. However, in a rare admission, he recently addressed the issue. According to a Kremlin transcript, Putin told Kursk’s acting governor, Alexander Khinshtein, that the situation in the region remains “very difficult.”
Charley:
Red Tsar Micro Midge discovered that his recent bowel movements have been “very difficult” since the outhouse door has been removed and repurposed into a North Korean tactical shield.
*
IS THERE A REASON FOR UKRAINE’S AVOIDANCE OF HITTING GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS IN MOSCOW?
Logistics, logistics, logistics.
In a nutshell there are far more important things to strike in Mordor than Chief Orcs. Striking Russian infrastructure which supports and props us the Russian war machine is far more disastrous for Orcistan. And far more advantageous to Ukraine.
Although Ukraine has actually been very affective at direct strikes on governmental officials already by targeting FSB agents, Commanders, Generals and other Russian high ranking officials. I’m thinking along the lines of an electric scooter for instance.
Russian command posts, air bases, military bases, as well as factories and trains containing and transporting Russian munitions and armaments. Russian gas and oil refineries are a major one too. These strikes are far more important and valuable to Ukraine.
But, never fear, Ukraine will get to it at some stage. I’m almost sure of it.
They are just getting “warmed up” so to speak and will strike Mordor HQ in due time.
But realistically, Putin & Co are doing such a fantastic job of destroying Russia on their own from the inside of the Kremlin walls, that it is best to keep them in charge and alive for now to “finish the job.” ~ Frances Neil
Oriana:
Russian casualties are expected to pass one million before Fall of 2025. There is no guarantee that will will make a difference to a predatory country whose secret motto is “No Lives Matter.”
As for hitting the Red Square, one argument against it is that it's a distinctive historical landmark, a unique place that is part of the human cultural heritage. The argument for is that the psychological impact would be huge, and might possibly bring the war to an end.
Red Square is of course very well defended. I agree that Ukraine should concentrate on military targets such as oil refineries. Putin is financing this war with the oil money.
*
RUSSIA RETREATS AS NATO CLAIMS TWO SEAS
With Russian warships evacuating from Syria’s Tartus base, Moscow’s Mediterranean presence is vanishing—just as NATO strengthens control over the Baltic.
Russian Tartus base in Syria
*
WILL THINGS GET BETTER IN RUSSIA?
It will be worse than what Russia is now — and what Russia is now, it's 80% of the country in the state it was in 1985, just worse for wear.
Putin is destroying Russia — I’ve been saying it for 2.5 years, but it’s now obvious to anyone, and it was stated loud and clear by no one else than the President of the United States.
To the audience of billions.
Russian propagandists, who were so excited to promote Trump just a week ago, still haven’t grasped the inevitability of Russia’s failure.
They are still talking about Russia’s size, its resilience, and claim that sanctions, promised by Trump — if Putin refuses to come to the table — won’t be able to hurt Russia.
Which shows that Putin still doesn’t get it — the deal he’s been offered now is the best deal Russia can hope to get.
It can only get worse.
The ultimate result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will be the dissolution of the state that’s now called “the Russian Federation."
Putin could have prevented it, by stopping his war in Ukraine, but his ego won’t let him — so, Russia’s ultimate fate is now sealed. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Geoffrey Anderson:
Hubris I think the Greeks called it when someone got too big for their station in life. Colonel Putin was never a Zeus but he gave himself that distinction and may it come back to bite him severely on the bum. As for his gutless wonders the generals and oligarch kleptocrats who should have been the President, what a disgrace.
Oriana: re: "Colonel Putin: "Putin worked as a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. "
Mark Wilson:
Elena, please write a post on the state of the Russian rail network. The railways connect Russia to Moscow, but in my personal experience, Moscow and Russia are separate entities. (Oriana: “Russia starts where Moscow ends.”)
Mikola Banderachuk:
ryzzia is not a state — it is an empire and always was, and as you know all empires fail.
*
THE BALTIC STATES SWITCH AWAY FROM RUSSIAN POWER GRID
More than three decades after leaving the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have begun to unplug from Russia's electricity grid and join the EU's network.
The two-day process began on Saturday morning, with residents told to charge their devices, stock up on food and water, and prepare as if severe weather is forecast.
Many have been told not to use lifts while in some areas traffic lights will be turned off.
A giant, specially-made clock, will count down the final seconds before the transition at a landmark ceremony in Lithuania's capital on Sunday, attended by EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.
The three nations will then officially transition away from the grid that has connected them to Russia since the years after World War Two.
On high alert
The so-called Brell power grid — which stands for Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — is controlled almost entirely by Moscow and has long been seen as a vulnerability for the former Soviet republics, which are now Nato members.
Though none of them have purchased electricity from Russia since 2022, their connection to the Brell grid left them dependent on Moscow for energy flow.
After disconnecting on Saturday morning, the three countries will carry out frequency tests before integrating into the European grid via Poland on Sunday.
"We are now removing Russia's ability to use the electricity system as a tool of geopolitical blackmail," Lithuania's Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas told AFP news agency.
"It's the culmination of efforts over more than 10 years or 20 years, to reduce that energy dependence," Prof David Smith of the Baltic Research Unit at the University of Glasgow told the BBC.
"When the Baltic States joined the EU and Nato, everybody talked about them being an energy island that was still dependent on that joint electricity network with Belarus and Russia," said Smith. "That's been completely broken now."
Tensions between the Baltic States and Russia, which share a combined 543 mile-long (874km) border, have soared since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Since then, a spate of suspected sabotage incidents involving electricity cables and pipelines in the Baltic Sea have prompted fears that Moscow could retaliate against the shift towards EU energy.
The oil tanker Eagle S was seized by Finnish authorities on suspicion of damaging undersea cables
In the past 18 months, at least 11 cables running under the Baltic Sea have been damaged. In a recent case, a ship from Russia's "shadow fleet" of oil tankers was accused of damaging Estonia's main power link in the Gulf of Finland. The Kremlin declined to comment.
Nato has not accused Russia, but has responded by launching a new patrol mission of the region named Baltic Sentry.
"We cannot rule out some kind of provocation. That is why Latvian and foreign security authorities are on high alert," Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said on Wednesday.
"Clearly there are risks, we understand that very well," Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina echoed. "But the risks are identified and there is a contingency plan.”
‘Cyber-Attacks’
A spokesperson from the Nato Energy Security Center of Excellence told the BBC that in recent months, frequent emergency operation tests have been carried out to help prepare for potential targeted attacks on the energy system.
The head of Estonia's Cybersecurity Center, Gert Auvaart, told the BBC in a statement that Russia "may attempt to exploit this period to create uncertainty", but said that due to international co-operation, Estonia was "well-prepared even for worst-case scenarios."
He added that cyber-attacks against the country had surged following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and ranged from "hacktivist-driven DDoS attacks [Distributed Denial-Of-Service] to more sophisticated, targeted operations against government agencies and businesses".
The Baltic states will also be on watch for disinformation campaigns related to the transition.
Shortly after they notified Russia of their decision to withdraw from Brell in August 2024, campaigns emerged on social media falsely warning of supply failures and soaring prices if the countries were to leave the joint power grid.
*
CAN THE CURRENT CONFLICT IN UKRAINE LEAD TO WW3?
No. It’s pretty clear the conflict is burning itself out.
Russia is in no shape to fight the war for much longer. Their army has been shot up, recruitment centers have to offer increasingly ridiculous sign up bonuses and take everyone. Drunk, 61 years of age? Storm trooper. Nuclear maintenance technician? Storm trooper, no you don't get to choose. Make a will before you ship.
Russians exhausted their equipment potential and are increasingly reliant on improvised vehicles, from converted civilian models to welding together Frankensteinesque machines from what would otherwise be scrap. You can't fight a war like that.
Russian logistics is worse than ever, one of the world's foremost producers of hydrocarbons relies on horses and donkeys in some parts of the front line, because they don't require petrol. It's beyond catastrophic, and it has been for a while.
In this situation Russia can't move forward and can't hope to expand the front anywhere. Worse still, their financial situation is deteriorating fast. Russia is pouring money into the people to conceal the looming economic cataclysm, but in order to keep inflation down it makes banks pay exorbitant interest rates on deposits, to keep excess money out of the system. It then forces banks to loan this money at far lower interest rates to military industries, to finance the war.
Russia can't sustain this for a lot longer. Maybe until the end of this year, something along those lines. Then it's 1991 all over again, only with sanctions this time around. It might end up in a nuclear exchange, because if you're going down you might as well take others with you.
But those nuclear maintenance technicians earlier weren't a joke, so odds are they can't even do that any more, or won't be able to a year from now.
~ Tomaž Vargazon. Quora
Oriana:
It’s striking how the prompt end of this war has been predicted since the very beginning. But it keeps dragging on, and the most daring current forecast is “by the end of 2025.”
The pessimistic forecast is “as long as Putin is in power.” After all, it’s his war, and his ego (paradoxically inseparable from his inferiority complex) knows no limits.
Putin has the best doctors, but let’s not forget that he is mortal. He is of course terrified of a coup. He travels in an armored train. He won’t fly because an airplane can be shot down.
*
Massive Losses: 50,000 Russian Soldiers killed or seriously wounded, 230 Tanks, and 610 Armored Vehicles Lost in a Month (January 2025)
*
ANOTHER LOOK AT THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION
The Soviet Union didn’t collapse because things were bad. It ended because Gorbachev allowed truth to be told.
In 1985, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union picked Mikhail Gorbachev as its leader.
This happened after 2 other leaders died one after another, after just a short stint at the top job (both are rumored to have been eliminated by either KGB or other internal enemies) — Andropov and Chernenko.
Before that, in November 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, who was the leader of Russia since 1964, died after getting sick — apparently, he caught a cold, standing on the tribune at the Red Square, accepting parade on Nov.7.
We, regular people, didn’t know anything about the power struggle at the top.
After he became the leader in 1985, Gorbachev said the USSR under Brezhnev was in “stagnation” and announced Perestroika — restructuring and rebuilding. He also announced Glasnost — “openness”, granting more freedom to media and removing KGB censorship, and Uskorenie — “speeding up”. And speeding up it was — in only 6 years, the USSR ended.
Private entrepreneurship was allowed — which was absolutely banned in the past.
The restructuring of the system of Soviets (people’s councils) where more than 1 candidate could compete in elections on all levels was a major game changer — previously, only 1 KGB-vetted candidate stood for elections, you could vote for him or not vote for him. This was part of “democratization” — another aspect of Perestroika, announced by Gorbachev.
The ability to speak the truth and hear the truth was probably the main thing what destroyed the Soviet system from within.
So, the people didn’t feel like “things were falling apart” — on the contrary, things were getting right.
Leaders of Soviet republics were elected by people from several candidates. It is these newly elected leaders — 3 of them, leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — who decided between themselves that they were dropping out of the Soviet Union. Then leaders of other republics joined them.
In 2 weeks, Gorbachev was a president of a union that had no members in it.
The Soviet republics — now independent countries — all dropped out.
That’s how the Soviet Union ended. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Doug Thompson:
Sad that Russia became normal for just a moment. We could have been trading with and visiting Russia, it could have been flooded with tourists looking at all the Soviet past, hearing tales of bravery against that wicked Hitler. But instead it reverted to type.
KS Venkat:
I remember that day well. I was 7. My father used to make me read the headlines of articles in newspapers aloud on holidays and weekends. My Grandfather and father used to discuss world politics a lot those days. I remember reading something like “Gorbachev resigns” and “Soviet Union ceases to exist”. I asked them if there was an earthquake or a big flood. They stopped their discussion and stared at me in silence.
Frank Kulikauskas-Wurft
Not to forget, that the three Baltic republics — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania — dropped out much earlier. A major contribution for other “national” leaders to say “we're better off alone.”
Elena Gold:
I think it was possible for the USSR to survive if someone like Brezhnev was selected as the leader, after 2 weird deaths of leaders in 2 years. But I suppose they were scared to take the top job. There was an attempt of coup in August 1991, to get back to old USSR ways. But it only sped up the collapse.
*
STALIN’S PARANOIA AND BRUTALITY
Stalin as a Husband
Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Aliluyeva, gave Stalin a wayward insight into his bullying nature. At a dinner party in November 1932, when drunk and in a foul mood, Stalin began trying to flirt with a colleague’s wife in front of her. Stalin, reportedly, for Nadezhda’s not participating in a toast, threw a piece of bread or a cigarette butt at her. Rejected at the table, she went back to her room, and late in the night she shot herself.
Stalin’s response was cold. He showed no public signs of grief, kept away from her funeral.
Stalin as a Father
Stalin was as cruel to his family as he was to the rest of his country. His son Yakov was captured by the Germans during World War II. Stalin learned of the news, and famously said: “I have no son.” Later Yakov is believed to have killed himself in captivity, an act of defiance that Stalin admired.
Stalin did seem to have one soft spot: his daughter, Svetlana, and even she began to fear and resent him. Later, she defected to the United States in the 1950s after discovering her mother’s suicide was linked to Stalin.
Stalin’s Paranoia and Fear
As he became more powerful, Stalin became more paranoid. Yet he lived in constant fear of death, even if he didn’t hesitate to go forth and execute or imprison millions. The Doctor’s Plot was one of his final purges, which accused Jewish doctors of attempting to poison Soviet leaders. Stalin however died before the massive purge could start.
Stalin’s Death
Stalin’s life was as unsettling as his death in 1953. His guards were afraid to enter and found him in his dacha paralyzed and lying in his own urine. As Stalin lay dying, members of his inner circle were mocking and insulting him, lambasting state organs such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the NKVD. But by Stalin's opening of eyes and looking at them Beria fell to the floor, kissed his hand and implored forgiveness.
Stalin's last minutes were chilling, said his daughter Svetlana. On his death bed, he opened his eyes with an angry, terror stricken look, raised his arm as if to point, or curse those around him and died.
A Legacy of Fear and Cruelty
Publicly and in private, Stalin’s actions were brutal, paranoid and betraying. It was fittingly grim, the way he died, and he left behind a legacy of terror that defined the Soviet Union and the world for decades. ~ Mike John, Quora
Oriana:
Considering the fate of figures such as Navalny, “the more it changes, the more it’s the same.” Soviet terror is now Putin’s terror. If Putin dies, say he inexplicably falls out of a high window, his successor most likely will be another mafia boss, just as cruel and ruthless — or even more so, if that’s imaginable.
*
RUSSIA’S KURSK OFFENSIVE CRUMBLES AS NORTH KOREANS PULL BACK
North Korean forces withdrew after suffering heavy losses due to poor coordination with Russians, the language barrier, and inadequate adaptation to modern warfare, despite being well-equipped with advanced weapons.
With North Korean casualties skyrocketing due to these disadvantages, the intensity of their assaults had already significantly decreased, meaning that Ukrainians had to find a clever way to finish the job. Ukrainians did this by deploying special forces units to target positions held by the more poorly trained Russian soldiers to create a gap in the enemy line.
With Russians unable to call North Korean reinforcements for assistance due to the language barrier, these preliminary positions could be quickly cleared out by the Ukrainian special forces.
This then allowed the Ukrainians to gain an element of surprise to eliminate the numerically superior North Korean forces by assaulting them from behind, unaware that their flanks, which were held by weaker Russian units, were breached.
Russian commanders had planned to utilize the North Korean soldiers to achieve a breakthrough in the Ukrainian Kursk salient. With Russians running low on manpower, using North Korean soldiers would save their strength for a final push to claim victory for themselves. To achieve this, the North Korean forces were deployed as the vanguard of each assault, initiating the fight first and forming the primary waves of each assault meant to wear down the Ukrainian defenses. ~ Anna Magdalena, Quora
Billy Yank:
Makes me wonder if the North Koreans even knew it was the Ukrainians attacking them from behind, or if the thought it was the Russians.
*
“WHEN PEOPLE ARE STARVING THEY DO NOT REBEL”
That is the genius of North Korea. Very little is said about the state of Russian agriculture. Like England and Ireland during the potato famine, Russia is a vast exporter of food stocks to raise revenue while the cost of domestic food soars. Food exports and oil exports raise hard currency.
Military sales have tanked. Russia has little “intellectual” and technology leadership to sell. The lack of investment in all sectors and the looting of the state by Putin and associates over so many years has hollowed out Russia where the only means of survival is to conquer better off neighbors. That now also is failing because even should Russia gain control of part or all of Ukraine, it lacks the resources to develop what it has destroyed.
The war in Ukraine must be continued indefinitely as Russia continues to be bled to death — Putin has finally realized NATO is defensive in name only. The great chess player has finally assessed there is no recovery from his blunder. China and India continue to rise while the great Russian Empire has become at best a cooperative venture with the junior partners openly talking back and dictating terms to Moscow. Moscow is no longer their leader. ~ Paul Post
Katelyn:
Alcoholism is actually a symptom of a bigger problem. Inability to trust and empathize with others is the real problem. Men who don't bond don't have any power in the relationship, because no one respects unkind people, so they turn to abuse in a desperate attempt to gain control.
Narcissistic men don't make good spouses. There's a reason why beating your wife and children continues to be legal in Russia — many Eastern European men have no other way to get their families to “respect” them.
Oriana:
The demand for “respect” is one of the most conspicuous features of the prison culture. Men who feel powerless — let’s face it, they are locked up — are likely to loudly demand “respect.”
*
MEANWHILE IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA
Suddenly, the train stopped abruptly and Westinghouse was thrown from his seat.
He looked out the window and saw the reason for the train's sudden stop: two freight trains had collided.
He asked the injured brakeman of the wrecked train how something like this could happen in broad daylight, when the train could be seen and stopped in time. The answer he got was that the brakes could be applied, but that the brakes would not work fast enough, since the brakemen had to go from car to car and apply the brakes manually.
It was this incident that prompted Westinghouse to look for a more effective braking system for trains.
When Westinghouse sent a letter to New York Central Railroad president Cornelius Vanderbilt outlining the advantages of the air brake and requesting financial support for his invention, Vanderbilt returned the letter, scribbling the following remark at the bottom:
"I have no time to waste with fools."
To overcome the general skepticism, the air brake needed to be tested, but railroad companies were largely reluctant to do so.
Next, Alexander J. Cassatt of the Pennsylvania Railroad approached, saw potential in the new brake, and gave Westinghouse money to continue developing his invention.
The test, conducted in April 1869 on the Pittsburgh-Steubenville line, was successful.
Word of the matter reached Vanderbilt, who immediately sent a letter to Westinghouse, inviting him to come and see him.
Westinghouse promptly responded:
"I have no time to waste with fools.”
~ Alessandro 13, Quora
Robert Gross:
Westinghouse also purchased the rights to Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC) system for electric power, the system that made it practical to locate power stations far away from the end users. Edison’s direct current (DC) system was not practical if the power station was more than a few miles away.
*
WHY MORE RETIREMENT-AGE AMERICANS KEEP WORKING
There are almost 3 million more older workers in the U.S. than there were 10 years ago.
When it came time for Diane Wetherington to consider retirement, reality quickly set in.
The 72-year-old debated devoting her time to crafting and doting over her grandkids and even gave full-time retirement a try. But she soon realized her Social Security checks, which were smaller than her peers’ due to time she spent out of the workforce while raising children, wouldn’t be enough to cover travel or rising insurance costs on top of basic needs.
Now, the Central Florida resident works part time as a remote contracting agent in local government. While she sometimes has to miss out on plans with fully retired friends, she said, continuing to work has kept her budget sound and her mind active.
“It’s just getting very hard to make ends meet,” Wetherington said. “The way the world is right now, everything’s going up, up, up.”
Wetherington is part of a growing body of Americans staying in the workforce past 65, once a traditional marker for retirement. This trend has buoyed the national labor market after years defined by pandemic-induced worker shortages and high quitting rates. It’s also changed the financial outlook for those who remain employed in some capacity, whether for personal satisfaction or monetary need.
This trend should be more apparent than ever in 2025, when more Americans are expected to turn 65 than in any past year, according to a widely read study from the Alliance for Lifetime Income. It dubbed a multiyear period in the late 2020s as the “Peak 65 zone.”
The number of employed Americans 65 and older ballooned more than 33% between 2015 and 2024, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By comparison, the labor force for all workers 16 or older has increased less than 9% during the same time period.
That growth has meant workers ages 65 and older accounted for 7% of the total workforce in 2024. That share is up from around 5.7% a decade ago.
“It’s really hard for many employers in many sectors to fill key workforce needs right now,” said Jim Malatras, strategy chief at FedCap, a nonprofit that helps train and place people in jobs. Tapping this age group “can help build key capacity where it’s desperately needed.”
An ‘anchor’ for retirement
While the swelling number of workers in this age bracket — more than 11 million in 2024 — has gained attention in recent years, the reasons for this outsized growth date back decades.
Chief among the drivers is the fact that America’s population is aging, according to Laura Quinby, an associate director at Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research.
But structural shifts in the retirement system have also encouraged working later in life, Quinby said. The transition in the private sector from employer-funded pensions to 401(k)s and other defined-contribution plans created a need for many workers to remain employed longer. Social Security reforms in the 1980s pushed the program’s “full retirement age” from 65 to 67.
“People really do use the Social Security full retirement age as an anchor in terms of when they should retire and claim benefits,” Quinby said. “That shift triggered a trend in people working longer.”
Longer life spans have pushed a growing chorus of voices to call for the age of retirement to move back even further, especially as financial uncertainties swirl around Social Security. BlackRock Chair Larry Fink, for instance, said in an annual letter that it’s “a bit crazy” that the expectation of retiring at 65 “originates from the time of the Ottoman Empire.”
Yet there are vastly different reasons and experiences for people of retirement age to continue working in some capacity, said Teresa Ghilarducci, director of The New School’s Retirement Equity Lab.
Some do retire, and some continue to work in jobs that they love out of passion alone. But she said about two-thirds of those still working do it “because they have to.” They can be in jobs with high physical or mental requirements, she said, but they see few alternatives, given that their Social Security checks can’t sustain them.
“I call it the tale of two retirements,” Ghilarducci said.
‘Vintage cars’
Employers of all kinds have tried to win and retain this growing base of talent.
Booking.com parent Booking Holdings offers 10 days off annually for so-called grandparent leave, which is separate from time offered to new parents and other paid days off. Grocery store chain Wegmans has a section of its part-time jobs page specifically targeted to seniors, advertising the opportunity to stay active and earn income during retirement.
Retirement-age workers can be seen working in gift shops or greeting restaurant guests for Xanterra, a travel company that owns properties in and around national parks. The company has a program called Helping Hands, which allows Xanterra to staff up during the peak tourist season by offering gigs that typically last a month and a half with 30-hour workweeks.
“The retirement community, or that older workforce, is really an integral part of our overall workforce planning strategy,” said Shannon Dierenbach, Xanterra’s human resources chief. “They certainly bring a level of expertise, wisdom, life skills, perspective that really enhances the overall experience.”
Despite these anecdotes, advocates say a pervasive culture of ageism has continued to hurt these Americans in the workforce. “They’re like vintage cars to us,” said FedCap’s Malatras. “They’re built to last, they’re full of value, but they’re treated often like high-mileage Pintos, and they don’t really have an opportunity to serve anymore.”
Employers hoping to better advertise to this community should look at job descriptions and pictures on their jobs pages to ensure there aren’t any subtle signs they favor younger applicants, according to Heather Tinsley-Fix, senior advisor for employer engagement at AARP. She often encourages employers looking for older workers to sign AARP’s pledge, in which businesses commit to measures supporting age equality.
Removing college degree requirements can also help gain the attention of this pool, she said, given that a smaller share completed higher education compared with younger generations. Working from home is a key component of flexibility that these older workers may need, Tinsley-Fix said.
Part of Tinsley-Fix’s argument for employers is the impending “tsunami” of retirements expected within the next decade. If companies don’t tap into groups they previously overlooked, she warned, they’ll struggle to stay at full staffing, as not enough people enter the workforce each year to replace those who left.
Her pitch isn’t all doom-and-gloom, however. Tinsley-Fix said there’s a silver lining: These workers tend to excel at soft skills and can provide mentorship to younger staffers. At Xanterra’s sites, for example, retirement-age workers interact particularly well with customers and stay calm under pressure, Dierenbach said.
“People talk about all kinds of spillover dividends from having older workers on their teams,” Tinsley-Fix said. “They really benefit from having those folks.”
‘The best thing that ever happened to me’
Those who remain employed do so for a variety of reasons. Multiple workers from this age group told CNBC that no matter the initial rationale — whether financial needs or personal preference — that got them to stay or return to the workforce, they’ve benefited physically and mentally.
“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Shari Nelson, who began working for nonprofit Vantage Aging through its government-supported job placement program and was hired to stay on after completing it.
The Ohio resident, who works part-time, said the paycheck allows her the financial security to be the kind of grandmother past generations in her family have been. Nelson’s role was previously full-time, but Vantage broke it up into two positions with fewer hours to better accommodate older workers.
Nonprofits were the most popular industry for workers in this age bracket at the end of 2024, with more than 1 out of every 12 in the sector, according to data from payroll platform Gusto. Among the small businesses using Gusto, the firm found the share of workers 65 or older has surged more than 50% since January 2019.
Government is another popular area, according to Gusto. That’s where Florida resident Anne Sallee, who was once a public official, found herself after she decided a full retirement wasn’t for her.
Sallee, who had a long career as a paralegal and now works as an economic development coordinator, said the return to in-person office work was a “shock” after more than a decade away. However, she said the personal benefits of having deadlines and a routine, as well as a passion for the role, keep her coming back.
“I don’t enjoy not having things I have to do,” Sallee said. “I never envisioned the ‘sit on the beach with your feet up and a cocktail’ kind of lifestyle.”
Still, Sallee said she’s taken some liberties that she may not have early in her career or when starting a new position. For instance, the 68-year-old avoids working overtime and takes a three-week vacation annually.
“If that ever becomes a problem,” she said of her yearly stretch of time off, “the vacation will take priority.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/02/why-more-retirement-age-americans-keep-working.html?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
HOW POLITICAL OPINIONS CHANGE
Our political opinions and attitudes are an important part of who we are and how we construct our identities. Hence, if I ask your opinion on health care, you will not only share it with me, but you will likely resist any of my attempts to persuade you of another point of view. Likewise, it would be odd for me to ask if you are sure that what you said actually was your opinion. If anything seems certain to us, it is our own attitudes. But what if this weren’t necessarily the case?
In one experiment, we showed it is possible to trick people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate. When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably more flexible than we think.
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content to fit our political preferences.
We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function. One study illustrates this very well: participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make people open their minds?
The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin with.
The experiment relies on a phenomenon known as choice blindness. Choice blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo. Using a clever trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo it had been switched to the person not chosen by the participant—the less attractive photo.
Remarkably, most participants accepted this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial decisions, and eye-witness testimony.
While it is remarkable that people can be fooled into picking an attractive photo or a sweet jam in the moment, we wondered whether it would be possible to use this false-feedback to alter political beliefs in a way that would stand the test of time.
In our experiment, we first gave false-feedback about their choices, but this time concerning actual political questions (e.g., climate taxes on consumer goods). Participants were then asked to state their views a second time that same day, and again one week later. The results were striking. Participants’ responses were shifted considerably in the direction of the manipulation. For instance, those who originally had favored higher taxes were more likely to be undecided or even opposed to it.
These effects lasted up to a week later. The changes in their opinions were also larger when they were asked to give an argument—or rationalization—for their new opinion. It seems that giving people the opportunity to reason reinforced the false-feedback and led them further away from their initial attitude.
Why do attitudes shift in our experiment? The difference is that when faced with the false-feedback people are free from the motives that normally lead them to defend themselves or their ideas from external criticism. Instead they can consider the benefits of the alternative position.
To understand this, imagine that you have picked out a pair of pants to wear later in the evening. Your partner comes in and criticizes your choice, saying you should have picked the blue ones rather than the red ones. You will likely become defensive about your choice and defend it—maybe even becoming more entrenched in your choice of hot red pants.
Now imagine instead that your partner switches the pants while you are distracted, instead of arguing with you. You turn around and discover that you had picked the blue pants. In this case, you need to reconcile the physical evidence of your preference (the pants on your bed) with whatever inside your brain normally makes you choose the red pants. Perhaps you made a mistake or had a shift in opinion that slipped you mind. But now that the pants were placed in front of you, it would be easy to slip them on and continue getting ready for the party. As you catch yourself in the mirror, you decide that these pants are quite flattering after all.
The very same thing happens in our experiment, which suggests that people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their political views once you strip away the things that normally make them defensive. Their results suggest that we need rethink what it means to hold an attitude. If we become aware that our political attitudes are not set in stone, it might become easier for us to seek out information that might change them.
There is no quick fix to the current polarization and inter-party conflict tearing apart this country and many others. But understanding and embracing the fluid nature of our beliefs, might reduce the temptation to grandstand about our political opinions. Instead humility might again find a place in our political lives.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-political-opinions-change?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
*
FOREIGN JOURNALISTS SPEAK ABOUT TRUMP
András Pethő, Direkt36 (Hungary)
Americans should stop telling themselves “this can never happen here.” You have to brace yourself for the worst scenarios, because anything can happen.
In the first couple of years of the Orbán regime, when they proposed curbing the powers of the constitutional court and they appointed a member of Fidesz, Orbán’s party, to the state audit office, which is very important in controlling how public money is spent, I thought: “This would never happen in a democracy.” And then we learned that actually anything can happen, because if they have the power, they can and will [do] whatever they want.
All these institutions, whether we are talking about governments or agencies or the press, are very, very fragile. It’s very easy to dismantle them.
The American news media scene is still much more vibrant and robust than Hungary’s, so I think it would be harder for Trump or whoever, to take it over. In Hungary, a pro-government investor bought up all the local newspapers – there were only about 19 of them. That won’t happen in the US, but of course, a media crackdown or the spread of propaganda can happen in different ways. It might happen through X or through Facebook – that’s something that I’m paying attention to.
Glenda Gloria, Rappler (Philippines)
The campaign and outcome was very much like our 2022 presidential election. Leni Robredo and Kamala Harris decided late in the day to run, but when they did they galvanized a democratic base that we all thought had grown too cynical to be involved in any election.
But the narratives of [Bongbong] Marcos and Trump have had a head-start online, spreading so exponentially and viciously that no amount of groundwork could match them. Combine with a climate of fear and you can bend anything and anyone. We’ve seen that in the Duterte, years and we expect to see it – as we are beginning to – under Trump.
People who have a lot to lose and who once valued due process, freedom and accountability can easily do the bidding of authoritarian leaders. Institutions that once protected public interest can turn against it in an instant. America is in for a daily shock-to-the-system period. We know this from the Duterte years; the first two years were marked with disbelief – the daily attacks on media, the killings every night, the harassment of big business, the co-optation of the police and the military, the embrace of China despite intrusions into our territory. They seemed unreal.
Has our world gone mad? It has. We look at America now and joke: should we do workshops for our [journalism] colleagues? It’s utterly sad.
We’re paying close attention to how disinformation, and the networks that sustain it, will continue to prop up the Trump administration and Trumpism. That’s the belly of the beast. Because even the worst policies can be made right in a world of manufactured realities. How should US citizens counter or address that? We need to surface real-world experiences and initiatives that illustrate good citizenship. Islands of hope.
Carlos Dada, El Faro (El Salvador)
If you can draw any conclusions about Mr Trump from his first term, it is obvious that he has very little respect for institutions, and that his personality has an extraordinary weight over the exercise of the presidency. I don’t see anything that indicates his second term will be different.
In the case of El Salvador, Nayyib Bukele is exactly the kind of leader that Mr Trump loves. Trump embraces autocrats and derides democratic leaders, and Bukele is an autocrat. World leaders in the style of Mr Bukele – I’m talking about Orbán, Modi, Putin, of course — will just feel much more comfortable in their dismantling of democracy with Mr Trump and the presidency.
For Mr Trump, besides the personal affinities that he may have with Mr Bukele, his agenda for Central America is basically migration and security. That’s it. The traditional, post cold-war US agenda, which had a strong emphasis on democracy and human rights, is gone.
So I think as long as Mr Bukele is stopping migrants [from passing through El Salvador en route to the United States] and keeps the gangs effectively dismembered, then Washington won’t be an obstacle for Mr Bukele in his process of completely dismantling democracy and turning El Salvador into his own dictatorship.
Vinod K Jose, former editor of the Caravan and author of a forthcoming book on Indian democracy (India)
Trump’s strategy, like that of all strongmen autocrats, was to engage with voters at the level of emotion, not reason, and fiction, not facts. These are some rules in the playbook that autocratic leaders use all the time to get to power.
With Trump returning to White House, we are seeing a decisive moment in history. The third anti-democracy wave is here. The first two anti-democracy waves being the victory of Mussolini in the 1920s and Hitler coming to power in the 1930s culminating in the second world war, and the second anti-democracy wave in the 1960s with the rise of military juntas and the cold war bringing down elected governments. Now, with countries like India, Turkey and the Philippines already under anti-democracy forces, Trump’s victory empowers the hands of the autocrats world over.
Biden’s spell in office was the time given by the divine to systematically alter world history, [an opportunity] to look inward to see how Trumpism had so much support in 2016, [and to] fix the holes that drifted votes to Trump.
In that sense, the lost opportunity of the Biden years are comparable to the ten years that the Congress party had in India between the two spells of the Hindu right governments, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s (1998 and 2004) and Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014. The Congress party came to power in 2004 and did nothing to tackle the base of the right, or to win over the sympathetic fence-sitters, or to make cultural and social allies. The result? Modi, a leader who was even more radical than Vajpayee came to power, with more popular support. The 10 valuable years in history were lost.
I fear that 10, 20 years from now, people could turn back and say the Biden years did not achieve anything to stop Trump from returning.
Fernando Peinado, El Pais and author of Trumpistas: ¿Quién llevó a Trump al poder? (Spain)
A lot of coverage about the rise of Trump and the far-right elsewhere has focused on the economy, but I wonder if we are talking enough about a huge transformation that happened in the last decade – the earthquake within our media ecosystem.
In 2016, smartphones and social media played an outsized role as compared to previous elections. That accelerated everything. The news cycle turned into a news cyclone. That helped candidates who relied on viscerality.
Since that election we’ve seen wins by populists and far-right candidates elsewhere. In Spain, the far-right Vox emerged in 2018, having previously been very fringe. Something deep has changed and perhaps the US, and UK, with Brexit, were just two early examples of what was to come. The canaries in the coal mine.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of [Francisco] Franco’s death and the legacy of Franquismo is a very polarizing topic now. What’s new is how divisive the issue of Franco has become. For decades, there seemed to be a consensus that Francoism was a dark period for Spain. But now you have the [Conservative Partido Popular] unwilling to commemorate his death, and Vox is making an outspoken defense of his legacy.
Their statements in support of Franco haven’t damaged their approval rating, and that connects with all the weird things happening in the US – Trump doing unprecedented things that would have been taboo in a previous era.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/19/trump-democracy-orban-modi-franco
*
TRUMP IS A SOLIPSIST
The president delights in being attacked, since it keeps the focus on him. The press should handle him like parents with an ornery child
Two weeks into the Trump administration, I’m still being asked by foreigners about the new president’s “political vision.”
Some of them, especially the French and the British, might be excused for excessive politeness toward a country that in many respects they still envy and admire. But on most of the news programs and podcasts to which I’ve been invited, I’m still encountering earnest interviewers struggling to understand Trump from a conventional political perspective, no matter how contradictory, irrational, or stupid his statements and actions may be. How can this be and what does it augur?
The investigative psychiatrist Robert J Lifton once explained to me that Trump is a solipsist, as distinct from the narcissist that he’s often accused of being.
A narcissist, while deeply self-infatuated, nevertheless seeks the approval of others and will occasionally attempt seduction to get what he wants (I think of the French president, Emmanuel Macron). For Trump the solipsist, the only point of reference is himself, so he makes no attempt even at faking interest in other people, since he can’t really see them from his self-centered position.
Trump’s absence of external connection is self-evident: his treatment of the “other” – from his own family to his tenants, his political rivals, the victims of the Los Angeles fires or the displaced people of Gaza – displays not only a lack of empathy, but also an emotional blindness. How else could he tease out loud about dating his own daughter, Ivanka? How else could he so cruelly insult former president Biden in his inauguration address, with Biden seated just a short distance away?
Trump’s solipsistic character was on full display on 20 January in the Capitol Rotunda. After stating, absurdly, that houses had burned “tragically” in Los Angeles “without even a token of defense”, the president seemed to turn philosophical and then appeared to ad-lib: “Some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country … they don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.”
I suppose it’s better than his reaction to a 2018 fire in Trump Tower that killed a resident, Todd Brassner. Trump’s tweeted response: “Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!” No condolences for the dead man or his family. That’s also interesting.
None of this is to say that Trump’s policy directives don’t suggest disturbing political predilections that need to be discussed and challenged. He is the president, after all, not just a coldhearted landlord. His firing of 17 inspectors general, attempt to end birthright citizenship and temporary halt of “all federal financial assistance” are certainly causes for concern, and possibly alarm. So, also, are his threats to slap high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, friendly nations that normally are happy to kowtow to their vastly more powerful neighbor no matter who occupies the White House.
But this misses the point of Trump, malevolent though he may be. He delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage. What could be better for a solipsist than to be criticized across the full spectrum of America’s limited ideological bandwidth?
In an editorial, the New York Times denounced Trump’s “first assertions of executive power” that “blatantly exceed what is legally granted”. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ridiculed an unprovoked “trade war” that “will qualify as one of the dumbest in history.” Already, Trump has changed the script by “pausing” the tariff increases, but he got the Journal worked up enough to pay him a lot of attention. Federal judges blocked Trump’s two most obviously unconstitutional orders, but the Times still got into a dither about his threats to the constitution.
‘Humor, sarcasm and ridicule can be useful tools, though as we learned from Barack Obama’s famous roast of Trump in 2011, they can also motivate the target to run for president.’One can’t just ignore Trump’s blathering, but like parents dealing with an ornery child, editors, reporters and columnists need to temper reprimands and raised voices with self-restraint, calmness and even studied indifference. Humor, sarcasm and ridicule can be useful tools, though as we learned from Barack Obama’s famous roast of Trump in 2011, they can also motivate the target to run for president.
Covering Trump, like bringing up children, is an art, not a science.
Of course, none of Trump’s tariff actions or anti-immigrant edicts will bring factories back from Mexico (the cheap labor and investment protections under our current trade agreement with Mexico and Canada are too good for a rational businessman to pass up). Neither will they quickly raise wages for working-class citizens, since creating a labor shortage through deportations will take much longer to affect pay scales than if Congress simply raised the federal minimum wage, or legalized the “illegals”. Also, ironically, Trump’s tariff threats and military border bluster may backfire and encourage fentanyl production to move to the United States from south of the border.
However, it’s a fair bet that Trump the solipsist doesn’t care if his policies fail to help the ordinary people who voted for him, and we anti-Trumpers should fear his supporters’ rage if they conclude that they’ve been duped by their hero. The backlash is more likely to be felt by liberals than by Trump, who will retreat safely to Mar-a-Lago and resume cheating at golf.
While I do tend to mock, rather than fear, Trump’s sound and light show, I don’t mean to make light of his most reckless impulses. There’s always collateral damage when somebody starts a war.
On the eve of the inauguration, in the Watergate Hotel, I attended the “Coronation Ball”, where “populist” and royalist rightwingers packed the Moretti Grand Ballroom to drink and dine on French champagne and red wine, as well as Gallic cuisine that included amuse-bouches. I was there at the invitation of an open-minded business consultant, an unfanatical Trump partisan who may not have understood that I wanted to cover the event, though he knows the world of journalism.
It was indeed amusing to meet a guy wearing a Gen Douglas MacArthur button. So was hearing Steve Bannon’s rip-roaring speech, which flattered the black-tie and evening dress crowd as the “vanguard of a revolutionary movement” that was “just in the top of the first inning.”
Bannon warned his rightwing Jacobins not to “flinch” or “question” Trump’s mission of ending “any of these forever wars” and accomplishing “the deportation of all 15 million illegal aliens”.
And when Bannon called for “no mercy, no quarter, no prisoners”, he apparently was including Rupert Murdoch and Fox News: “Murdoch sent a memo: ‘We’re going to make [Trump] a non-person’ … and [Trump] knew it. And he still came back like Cincinnatus from the plow, who saved his country.” (Bannon might have mentioned that the Roman patrician, according to legend, was twice dictator of the Republic, but I quibble.)
It wasn’t all amuse-bouches, however. Later in the evening, when the jazz band took a break, the far-right personality Jack Posobiec launched a diatribe against the cliques surrounding the former presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, who, he said, would never return to power “because they’ll have to come through us.” Meanwhile, a lot of political prisoners would be freed, and not just the martyrs of January 6. “Derek Chauvin will be freed!” he declaimed.
Two guests in military dress uniforms standing nearby looked at me, laughing with incredulous astonishment. “You’re going to tell us who he is ?” one said. Once I found out from other journalists in the crowd that it was Posobiec – he of “stop the steal” fame and other conspiracy theories dear to Trump and Maga – I could better appreciate the foreign journalists’ difficulty understanding the president.
With no political vision, no long-range goals, it’s quite possible that it never occurred to Trump to pardon George Floyd’s murderer. But now that an influential courtier has serviced the monarch with a concrete idea – an idea guaranteed to slake a solipsist’s thirst for attention – we should all be worried about the short-term whims of the king.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/08/donald-trump-media-coverage
*
THE CASE AGAINST WORKING TOO MUCH
Mastering 'active rest' is far harder than it looks, but there are good reasons why we should keep working at it.
When I moved to Rome from Washington, DC, one sight struck me more than any ancient column or grand basilica: people doing nothing.
I’d frequently glimpse old women leaning out of their windows, watching people pass below, or families on their evening strolls, stopping every so often to greet friends. Even office life proved different. Forget the rushed desk-side sandwich. Come lunchtime, restaurants filled up with professionals tucking into proper meals.
Of course, ever since Grand Tourists began penning their observations in the seventeenth century, outsiders have stereotyped the idea of Italian ‘indolence’. And it isn’t the whole story. The same friends who headed home on their scooters for a leisurely lunch often returned to the office to work until 8pm.
Even so, the apparent belief in balancing hard work with il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing, always struck me. After all, doing nothing appears to be the opposite of being productive. And productivity, whether creative, intellectual or industrial, is the ultimate use of our time.
But as we fill our days with more and more ‘doing’, many of us are finding that non-stop activity isn’t the apotheosis of productivity. It is its adversary.
Researchers are learning that it doesn’t just mean that the work we produce at the end of a 14-hour day is of worse quality than when we’re fresh. This pattern of working also undermines our creativity and our cognition. Over time, it can make us feel physically sick – and even, ironically, as if we have no purpose.
Think of mental work as doing push-ups, says Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours. Say you want to do 10,000. The most ‘efficient’ way would be to do them all at once without a break. We know instinctively, though, that that is impossible. Instead, if we did just a few at a time, between other activities and stretched out over weeks, hitting 10,000 would become far more feasible.
“The brain is very much like a muscle in this respect,” Davis writes. “Set up the wrong conditions through constant work and we can accomplish little. Set up the right conditions and there is probably little we can’t do.”
Do or die
Many of us, though, tend to think of our brains not as muscles, but as a computer: a machine capable of constant work. Not only is that untrue, but pushing ourselves to work for hours without a break can be harmful, some experts say.
“The idea that you can indefinitely stretch out your deep focus and productivity time to these arbitrary limits is really wrong. It’s self-defeating,” says research scientist Andrew Smart, author of Autopilot. “If you’re constantly putting yourself into this cognitive debt, where your physiology is saying ‘I need a break’ but you keep pushing yourself, you get this low-level stress response that’s chronic – and, over time, extraordinarily dangerous.”
One meta-analysis found that long working hours increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% – almost as much as smoking (50%). Another found that people who worked long hours had a significantly higher risk of stroke, while people who worked more than 11 hours a day were almost 2.5 times more likely to have a major depressive episode than those who worked seven to eight.
In Japan, this has led to the disturbing trend of karoshi, or death by overwork.
If you’re wondering if this means that you might want to consider taking that long-overdue holiday, the answer may be yes. One study of businessmen in Helsinki found that over 26 years, executives and businessmen who took fewer holidays in midlife had both earlier deaths and worse health in old age.
Holidays also can literally pay off. One study of more than 5,000 full-time American workers found that people who took fewer than 10 of their paid holiday days a year had a little more than a one-in-three chance of getting a pay rise or a bonus over three years. People who took more than 10 days? A two in three chance.
Productivity provenance
It’s easy to think that efficiency and productivity is an entirely new obsession. But philosopher Bertrand Russell would have disagreed.
“It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the 24,” Russell wrote in 1932, adding, “it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
That said, some of the world’s most creative, productive people realized the importance of doing less. They had a strong work ethic – but also remained dedicated to rest and play.
“Work on one thing at a time until finished,” wrote artist and writer Henry Miller in his 11 commandments on writing. “Stop at the appointed time!... Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.”
Even US founding father, Benjamin Franklin, a model of industriousness, devoted large swathes of his time to being idle. Every day he had a two-hour lunch break, free evenings and a full night’s sleep. Instead of working non-stop at his career as a printer, which paid the bills, he spent “huge amounts of time” on hobbies and socializing. “In fact, the very interests that took him away from his primary profession led to so many of the wonderful things he’s known for, like inventing the Franklin stove and the lightning rod,” writes Davis.
Even on a global level, there is no clear correlation between a country’s productivity and average working hours. With a 38.6-hour work week, for example, the average US employee works 4.6 hours a week longer than a Norwegian. But by GDP, Norway’s workers contribute the equivalent of $78.70 per hour – compared to the US’s $69.60.
As for Italy, that home of il dolce far niente? With an average 35.5-hour work week, it produces almost 40% more per hour than Turkey, where people work an average of 47.9 hours per week. It even edges the United Kingdom, where people work 36.5 hours.
All of those coffee breaks, it seems, may not be so bad.
*
The reason we have eight-hour work days at all was because companies found that cutting employees’ hours had the reverse effect they expected: it upped their productivity.
During the Industrial Revolution, 10-to-16-hour days were normal. Ford was the first company to experiment with an eight-hour day – and found its workers were more productive not only per hour, but overall. Within two years, their profit margins doubled.
If eight-hour days are better than 10-hour ones, could even shorter working hours be even better? Perhaps. For people over 40, research found that a 25-hour work week may be optimal for cognition, while when Sweden recently experimented with six-hour work days, it found that employees had better health and productivity.
This seems borne out by how people behave during the working day. One survey of almost 2,000 full-time office workers in the UK found that people were only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes out of an eight-hour day. The rest of the time was spent checking social media, reading the news, having non-work-related chats with colleagues, eating – and even searching for new jobs.
We can focus for an even shorter period of time when we’re pushing ourselves to the edge of our capabilities. Researchers like Stockholm University psychologist K Anders Ericsson have found that when engaging in the kind of ‘deliberate practice’ necessary to truly master any skill, we need more breaks than we think. Most people can only handle an hour without taking a rest. And many at the top, like elite musicians, authors and athletes, never dedicate more than five hours a day consistently to their craft.
The other practice they share? Their “increased tendency to take recuperative naps,” Ericsson writes – one way, of course, to rest both brain and body.
Other studies have also found that taking short breaks from a task helped participants maintain their focus and continue performing at a high level. Not taking breaks made their performance worse.
Active rest
But ‘rest’, as some researchers point out, isn’t necessarily the best word for what we’re doing when we think we’re doing nothing.
As we’ve written about before, the part of the brain that activates when you’re doing ‘nothing’, known as the default-mode network (DMN), plays a crucial role in memory consolidation and envisioning the future. It’s also the area of the brain that activates when people are watching others, thinking about themselves, making a moral judgment or processing other people’s emotions.
In other words, if this network were switched off, we might struggle to remember, foresee consequences, grasp social interactions, understand ourselves, act ethically or empathize with others – all of the things that make us not only functional in the workplace, but in life.
“It helps you recognize the deeper importance of situations. It helps you make meaning out of things. When you’re not making meaning out of things, you’re just reacting and acting in the moment, and you’re subject to many kinds of cognitive and emotional maladaptive behaviors and beliefs,” says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and researcher at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute.
We also wouldn’t be able to come up with new ideas or connections. The birthplace of creativity, the DMN lights up when you’re making associations between seemingly unrelated subjects or coming up with original ideas. It is also the place where your ‘ah-ha’ moments lurk – which means if, like Archimedes, you got your last good idea while in the bath or on a stroll, you have your biology to thank.
Perhaps most importantly of all, if we don’t take time to turn our attention inward, we lose a crucial element of happiness.
“We’re just doing things without making meaning out of it a lot of the time,” Immordino-Yang says. “When you don’t have the ability to embed your actions into a broader cause, they feel purposeless over time, and empty, and not connected to your broader sense of self. And we know that not having a purpose over time is connected to not having optimal psychological and physiological health.”
Monkey mind
But as anyone who has tried meditation knows, doing nothing is surprisingly difficult. How many of us, after 30 seconds of downtime, reach for our phones?
In fact, it makes us so uncomfortable that we’d rather hurt ourselves. Literally. Across 11 different studies, researchers found that participants would rather do anything – even administer themselves electric shocks – instead of nothing. And it wasn’t as if they were asked to sit still for long: between six and 15 minutes.
The good news is that you don’t have to do absolutely nothing to reap benefits. It’s true that rest is important. But so is active reflection, chewing through an issue you have or thinking about an idea.
In fact, anything that requires visualizing hypothetical outcomes or imagined scenarios – like discussing a problem with friends, or getting lost in a good book – also helps, Immordino-Yang says. If you’re purposeful, you even can engage your DMN if you’re looking at social media.
“If you’re just looking at a pretty photo, it’s de-activated. But if you’re pausing and allowing yourself to internally riff on the broader story of why that person in the photo is feeling that way, crafting a narrative around it, then you may very well be activating those networks,” she says.
It also doesn’t take much time to undo the detrimental effects of constant activity. When both adults and children were sent outdoors, without their devices, for four days, their performance on a task that measured both creativity and problem-solving improved by 50%. Even taking just one walk, preferably outside, has been proven to significantly increase creativity.
Another highly effective method of repairing the damage is meditation: as little as a week of practice for subjects who never meditated before, or a single session for experienced practitioners, can improve creativity, mood, memory and focus.
Any other tasks that don’t require 100% concentration also can help, like knitting or doodling. As Virginia Woolf wrote in a Room of One’s Own: “Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Time out
Whether it’s walking away from your desk for 15 minutes or logging out of your inbox for the night, part of our struggle is control – the fear that if we relax a grip for a moment, everything will come crashing down.
That’s all wrong, says poet, entrepreneur and life coach Janne Robinson. “The metaphor I like to use is of a fire. We start a business, and then after a year, it’s like, when can we take a week off, or hire someone to come in? Most of us don’t trust someone to come in for us. We’re like, ‘The fire will go out’,” she says.
“What if we just trusted that those embers are so hot, we can walk away, someone can throw a log on and it’ll burst into flames?”
That isn’t easy for those of us who feel like we have to constantly ‘do’. But in order to do more, it seems, we may have to become comfortable with doing less.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20171204-the-compelling-case-for-working-a-lot-less
*
BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a left political party in an affluent Western country. It dominates in urban areas but struggles elsewhere; its working-class voter base has splintered with deindustrialization and more progressive, college-educated factions have emerged. As the nation becomes more multicultural, the party gets increasingly attuned to cultural and identitarian politics, but this doesn’t seem to bring in enough new voters. Meanwhile, a housing crisis rages in its own metropolitan centers of power as its once-influential urban development program founders.
This is not the story of the US Democratic party — it’s the Communist Party of France, or PCF. In the years after World War II into the 1970s and ’80s, the PCF was a powerful force of municipal policymaking, dominating Paris’ close-in suburbs, or banlieues. There, a tight community of party-affiliated architects designed social housing and other public buildings at the behest of local mayors.
In A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, University of Pennsylvania architectural historian Vanessa Grossman explores how this group tested the limits of both formal innovation and the usefulness of urban design as an explicitly political tool. The first major architectural history of this time and place, the book takes readers into what looks like to be an alternate reality, where the suburbs of the country’s biggest city are known for radical class struggle and norm-shattering architecture instead of social homogeneity and tract homes.
The political factions and animating ideologies are very different from those found in the US, but the urban crisis that emerged in Communist-governed French cities decades ago is surreally similar to the one gripping many American ones today.
French Communists found considerable electoral success immediately after World War II and remained “the most important left-wing party in France until the late 1970s,” Grossman says. But because Marshall Plan aid was contingent on avoiding Communist governance, the PCF was never part of the coalition managing French parliamentary democracy. “Excluded from the national level of government for most of its history, the PCF has never been able to take full advantage of the state apparatus,” Grossman says. “Nor has it ever had the support of most businessmen and industrialists.”
Instead, the party exerted power through the built environment, at the local level. The municipal budgets managed by the Communist mayors that dominated the banlieues meant they could grant public commissions to architects like Renée Gailhoustet (the rare woman architect), Jean Renaudie, Paul Chemetov, Jean Prouvé and Brazilian political exile Oscar Niemeyer. Support for this urban development program came from a network of party-allied nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets and construction companies.
“Their sphere of power was really limited to the local sphere, and they made a difference,” says Grossman.
Modernism was the party line of the day, and beton brut — the austere and occasionally sculptural forms of Brutalism — became the signature of PCF architecture. But in many ways, the party’s commitment to social housing was clarified and defined by the French state’s solution to its postwar housing crunch. From the 1950s to the ’80s, the national government built housing projects called grands ensembles across the Paris suburbs — often mega-scaled high-rises that seemed suspiciously similar to Le Corbusier’s 1925 plan to raze much of the city and replace it with 18 implacable and silent cruciform towers.
Residents of such projects typically found themselves isolated and stigmatized, and the grands ensembles were soon pathologized as dens of crime and dysfunction — a pattern recognizable to anyone familiar with American public housing projects such as St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe complex.
PCF-affiliated architects were certain they could do better. Instead of purely utilitarian mass-produced expediency, Communist architects turned modernism toward vernacular forms and materials that celebrated the handicraft traditions of the French working class.
One example, also completed in 1962 in Vigneux-sur-Seine, is the Briques Rouge housing project. There, architects Paul Chemetov and Jean Deroche used wood, pebbles and bricks alongside beton brut, and even included (heretically, for some modernists) pitched roofs. There was a sense that these buildings (with one-tenth the units of Croix-Blanche) were handmade, and not the product of an omnipotent or unfeeling bureaucracy. Croix-Blanches has since been demolished and remodeled; Briques Rouges still stands.
In time, this architecture evolved in more formally expressive and experimental ways that critiqued modernist tradition. This happened at a time when Communism and modernism were both in crisis, which meant that breaking up rigid political and design ideologies happened at the same time and place. In working-class Paris suburbs like Ivry-sur-Seine, which this year is marking 100 years of Communist local governance, architects found local leaders willing to take risks on wildly inventive projects.
Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet designed the mixed-use complex at Ivry-sur-Seine, seen here under construction in the early 1970s.
Conceived as a rebuke of modernism’s minimalism and urban monotony, Gailhoustet and Renaudie’s master plan for Ivry’s town center is a jagged and diffuse pile of triangular volumes that leveled the unity of the superblock into a mosaic of ramps, rooftop terraces and gardens, suffusing them with enough light and air to approximate single-family-home living.
Initially, not even the French government could deny the project’s success. “Despite being the achievement of a Communist-managed municipality, these star-shaped apartments became one of the standards for the state policy of architectural innovation,” says Grossman.
Other marquee projects of the party also defied tropes about modernist ideology and Communist living conditions. Niemeyer’s Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, for example, is curvilinear and romantic; a domed luxury forum with a ceiling clad in shimmering aluminum blades. It’s now rented out for luxury fashion photos shoots and is a popular office space for graphic design firms.
Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the swoopy French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris was not fully completed until 1980.
Under the dome, the aluminum-clad assembly room of the PCF headquarters remains a striking interior.
Producing Communist architecture in capitalist France often meant making compromises. When funding to finish apartment projects ran out, clients would sometimes sell units to individual buyers, a concession to the free market that was regarded as “antithetical to the French Communist project,” says Grossman.
The tide of mass consumerism eventually obligated these architects to design a mall, albeit a Brutalist one decorated with vaguely anti-consumerist pop art riffs. The Grand’Place shopping center, which opened between Grenoble and Échirolles in 1975, integrated offices and a contemporary art center with services like a post office and a library. The project also included open spaces and some very on-brand public art: One section of a mural depicts a raft made of steak inhabited by starved sailors on an ocean of French fries, a reference to Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa that offers an extremely French sense of intellectualized ambiguity.
The architects “wanted to subvert the mall, to make it something civic,” Grossman says. “It shows how they had to deal with contributing to the French Communist project and the specifics of Western Communism.”
The mass housing complexes in Grenoble later became known for crime and concentrated poverty.
A massive complex of 1,800 housing units in the French Alps, the Arlequin buildings were arranged around an intensely walkable network of footbridges and squares that connected residents to commercial, educational, social and cultural spaces. Bright pop-art colors balanced the acres of concrete, with pedestrian streets moving through the complex and into the buildings themselves. Le Nouvel Observateur described it as a self-contained nesting doll of urbanism: “We take the street, and we place it inside the house. We take the house, and we place it inside the school, the school inside the theater, the theater inside the library.”
But, as in the US, residents of large mass housing facilities soon suffered from a lack of maintenance and investment. (The Arlequin complex is now set to undergo a series of partial demolitions and rehabilitation.) “These projects could have had a different fate and succeeded, but they faced a hostile political and socio-economic environment,” Grossman says. “As with Pruitt-Igoe, I would point out that these housing projects were largely defunded throughout the 1970s and 1980s.”
The party’s building program suffered self-inflicted wounds as well, Grossman notes: When deindustrialization sapped their traditional working-class base, the PCF failed to embrace the recent immigrants that replaced them as their natural constituency. “The PCF's message did not resonate with the immigrants who took their place in the banlieues after the factories closed,” she says. “They failed to adapt their policies to the immigrants. That is also the social crisis of what France is today.”
Ultimately, a weakened PCF that was being denounced as authoritarian — alongside modernist architecture itself — made an alliance in 1972 with François Mitterrand’s new Socialist Party, which supplanted it as the premier left party in France. While the PCF remains a player in French politics, especially at the local level, its days of organizing its political program through high-profile acts of architecture and urbanism are behind it.
But architects still strive to weld design to a social mandate with an explicitly political ideology. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the emergence of the Design Justice movement have fueled a push to re-politicize the field, and architects have launched unionization efforts and drawn attention to abusive labor practices on construction sites.
Pursuing any sort of pure public-sector-led mass housing solution remains a perilous political project, but the PCF’s experience demonstrates how far local control can take social housing programs, even when the federal government was not aboard. Grossman’s account may have lessons for frustrated public-sector architects in deep-blue cities who see their support and funding disappear at the edge of town.
“Today, many architects and designers around the world seek to work with marginalized communities, to address the issue of housing affordability, or simply to engage locally with a particular community or environment or biome,” Grossman says. “They can make a human connection that transcends the professional realm, through scales of intervention that are more tangible and give them the means to create something small and more grassroots. The phenomenon I analyze in the book may resonate with these approaches to architecture.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-01/new-book-explores-brutalist-architecture-of-france-s-communist-party?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
*
THE GRADUAL DISAPPEARANCE OF GOD IN THE BIBLE (repost)
“God disappears in the Bible. Both religious and non-religious leaders find this impressive and intriguing. Speaking for myself, I find it astonishing.
The Bible begins with a world in which God is actively and visibly involved, but it does not end that way. Gradually through the course of the Hebrew Bible, the deity appears less and less to humans, speaks less and less.
Miracles, angels, and all other signs of divine presence become rarer and finally cease.
In the last portion of the Hebrew Bible, God is not present in the well-known ways apparent in the earlier books. Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be” (Deut 31:17, 18; Deut 32:20). By the end of the story, God does just that. The consequences and development of this phenomenon in the New Testament and in the post-biblical Judaism are extraordinary as well.
As the people settle in their promised land, the remaining signs of divine presence and communication begin to diminish gradually. In the book of Joshua, the column of cloud and fire is no longer present, the glory of Yahweh no longer appears, and the text notes that the manna ceases on the day after the people first eat naturally grown food in the land.
In the book of Judges, the judge Gideon says, “If Yahweh is with us, then . . . where are all His miracles that our fathers told us about? (Judg 6:13) Gideon in fact gets his miracle, but miracles are fewer and farther between after this. . . . The diminishing apparent presence of God continues and even accelerates from this point. [Elijah on Mount Carmel] is the end of public miracles in the Hebrew Bible.
From a review:
“Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God and the growing up of humankind — so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge?”
(Oriana): This is an excellent question. Why has there been hardly any comment on the diminishment of god’s presence not only in modern times, but in fact in biblical times? Is it only now that we are bold enough to see what has always been in plain sight?
The first part of Friedman’s book, “The Disappearance of God,” is by far the best. Of course he isn’t the only biblical scholar to have noticed the initial high involvement and then the gradual disappearance of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, but he writes in an accessible manner reminiscent of Jack Miles, who notes the same phenomenon in his prize-winning “God: A Biography.”
Still, the speculation on the causes of this disappearance is rather disappointing: yes, we can trace the narrative of how humans take more and more responsibility for themselves and are moving toward a “loyalty to the species” as the basis of morality, but the mechanism remains unclear. I think only Julian Jaynes was bold enough to offer an answer, which makes perfect sense to some (e.g. the lack of “mentalistic” vocabulary in the first five books of the Hebrew bible).
And then there is the disquieting statement by Yahweh himself: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” What kind of deity would behave in this way? One who satisfies his own curiosity with no regard for human suffering?
We are finally utterly on our own ~ Nietzsche. Humanity has to rely on itself. But hasn't this always been reflected in sayings such as, "God helps those who help themselves"? And haven't military pointed out, "Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition," and "God is on the side of whoever has more battalions”?
The more civilization advances, the more religion becomes a denial of reality. Every century, the gap keeps growing. The fight against reality becomes more and more desperate — or else the clergy try to change the dogma, which has been true of non-fundamentalist Christianity. Yet another accommodation is the disappearance of god. This is usually called secularization.
This is easy enough to see in modern times. Friedman’s achievement is documenting this happening already in the Hebrew bible. “In the Book of Esther, God is never mentioned” — this simple sentence says it all.
Blake: Adam and Eve
If we take the point of view that god is a human creation, then more and more humans cease creating him as the culture evolves. And indeed we see the growing importance of secular laws and, as greatest love object, our partner and children and pets (pets are not trivial here). But the lethal developments within Islam point to more entanglements between religion and power than we understand.
Also, there is Nietzsche's own surprise: "What? Two thousand years, and not a single new god?" Nietzsche perfectly understood that gods evolve and die, and the vengeful old Yahweh is dead, at least in the West (Islam is similar to ancient Orthodox Judaism). But where is a new cult that would be the equivalent of emerging Christianity? — unless of course that cycle is exhausted by now, and babies and pets satisfy the need for devotion, being love objects that the snarly, uncuddly Yahweh could never be (arguably, Jesus remedied this situation for Christians, as long as they cherry-picked the text; I call this “sanitizing Jesus” to fit with our more advanced ethical principles, in effect making him more Christian than he was).
Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel: Noah’s family disembarking after the Flood
I wasn’t the only child who was unnerved by the perception that at the beginning god used to walk and talk and do things — then less and less — then nothing. One brave little boy actually asked the catechism nun how come god used to talk to people, and now he doesn’t. I’ll never forget the sad smile when she slowly replied: “Times were different back then . . .” Did she also say, “People were different”? I can’t swear to it, but later that became my understanding: We have moved far away from the mythologizing archaic mentality. True: new cults are still periodically born, but they don't spread as they used to. Some are downright tiny. Perhaps people are finally more able to see that they are being sold a bill of goods, and cult leaders are charlatans, expert manipulators, and are often mentally ill, making it up as they go along? (I'm thinking of Scientology in particular.)
One hypothesis about the disappearance of an active god is the Julian Jaynes theory of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. There is a notable lack of "mentalistic" terms (like think, believe, imagine) in the early stages of a language. Thoughts were experienced as voices, Jaynes claims. Later only the prophets had that kind of consciousness (suggestive of schizophrenia, and some certainly were, e.g. Ezekiel is a classic schizophrenic).It's been said that Jaynes is either a looney or a genius. Perhaps we'll never know.
Anthropologists studying tribes did report a different mentality, but their very presence was contaminating that mentality. We can't even define consciousness, much less describe how it evolved. The closest is child development studies. But children are influenced by parents, who say things like, "That was only a dream." "No, that didn't happen; you imagined it." However, implanting false memories is notoriously easy, even in adults. Perhaps that's one clue about how mythologies arose. Note also that it's preliterate societies that were most prolific mythologizers. Once writing enters, enforcing slowness and reflectiveness as opposed to spontaneous flow, thinking is never the same.
By the way, Joseph Campbell was also asked how come humanity went through an era of producing rich, complex mythologies, and then it all ceased (or got reclassified as fiction, but ours is not a great age of fiction). Campbell replied that mythologies are collectively created when conditions are right, and conditions have not been right for the creation of new mythologies for a long time now.
I suspect the very nature of consciousness has evolved as culture has evolved, including information technology. Another factor is that as we become less helpless we have less need of a parent or ruler in the sky —“fear creates gods.” But the fact that god becomes less and less active already in the course of the bible (using the Hebrew arrangement) should already give us a pause. The first five books, where god is active, reflect a different mentality than the later books. Even some Orthodox rabbis admit that the Torah is mythology. But that mythology apparently comes from the Bronze Age. After that, you don't have the kind of mythology creation that was once prevalent.
from another source:
~ In this bold and illuminating new work, Richard Elliott Friedman probes a chain of mysteries that concern the presence or absence of God. He begins with a fresh, insightful reading of the Hebrew Bible, revealing the profound mystery and significance of the disappearance of God there.
Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God - and the growing up of humankind - so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge? Friedman then investigates this phenomenon's place in the formation of Judaism and Christianity.
But this is not only the study of an ancient concept. Friedman turns to the forms this feeling of the disappearance of God has taken in recent times. Here, too, he focuses on a mystery: an eerie connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, who each independently developed the idea of the death of God.
Friedman then relates all of this to a contemporary spiritual and moral ambivalence. He notes the current interest in linking discoveries in modern physics and astronomy to God and creation, reflecting a yearning for concrete answers in an age of divine hiddenness. And here the focus is on another mystery, intriguing parallels between Big Bang cosmology and the mysticism of the Kabbalah, which points to a territory in which religion and science are complementary rather than antagonistic.
This inspiring work is grounded in learned research. It is a brilliantly original exploration of the Bible that also shows how the Bible is much more than "ancient history." In the Bible the hiding of the face of God is a literary and theological development, but in the twentieth century it is a spiritual crisis, and Friedman aims to apply solutions to this quandary. Moving through rich and provocative examinations of world literature, history, theology, and physics, The Disappearance of God is as readable and exciting as a good detective story, with a conclusion that offers real hope in a time of spiritual longing. ~ Goodreads
THE LAST ANGEL
Friedman points out that even angels cease to appear in the course of the Hebrew bible. The last appearance of an angel is in the story of Elijah.
(Yes, the “correct” title should be “The Last Angel to Appear in the Hebrew Bible.” But the older I get, the more shameless I become — a phenomenon widely noted in women, the rise of the shameless old ladies. “The Last Angel” sounds more dramatic.)
Elijah and the Angel by Godfrey Kneller, 1672
“THE IDEA THAT ANY BOOK WAS INSPIRED BY THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE IS POISON — intellectually, ethically, and politically. And nowhere is this poison currently doing more harm than in Muslim communities, East and West. Despite all the obvious barbarism in the Old Testament, and the dangerous eschatology of the New, it is relatively easy for Jews and Christians to divorce religion from politics and secular ethics.
A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy. The Koran contains a few lines that could be equally potent—for instance, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)—but these sparks of tolerance are easily snuffed out. Transforming Islam into a truly benign faith will require a miracle of re-interpretation. And a few intrepid reformers, such as Maajid Nawaz, are doing their best to accomplish it.”
“Religion produces a perverse solidarity that we must find some way to undercut. It causes in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths. [Oriana: Will the kind of religion that proclaims it's the only true religion be eventually seen in the same category as racism?]
We can build strong communities and enjoy deeply moral and spiritual lives, without believing any divisive nonsense about the divine origin of specific books.”
“But it remains taboo in most societies to criticize a person’s religious beliefs. Even atheists tend to observe this taboo, and enforce it on others, because they believe that religion is necessary for many people. After all, life is difficult—and faith is a balm.
Most people imagine that Iron Age philosophy represents the only available vessel for their spiritual hopes and existential concerns. This is an enduring problem for the forces of reason, because the most transformative experiences people have—bliss, devotion, self-transcendence—are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.”
“More British Muslims have joined the ranks of ISIS than have volunteered to serve in the British armed forces. In fact, this group has managed to attract thousands of recruits from free societies throughout the world to help build a paradise of repression and sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq. This is an astonishing phenomenon, and it reveals some very uncomfortable truths about the failures of multiculturalism, the inherent vulnerability of open societies, and the TERRIFYING POWER OF BAD IDEAS.
No doubt many enlightened concerns will come flooding into the reader’s mind at this point. I would not want to create the impression that most Muslims support ISIS, nor would I want to give any shelter or inspiration to the hatred of Muslims as people. In drawing a connection between the doctrine of Islam and jihadist violence, I am talking about ideas and their consequences, not about 1.5 billion nominal Muslims, many of whom do not take their religion very seriously.
But a belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world. These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith. That is why the popular Saudi cleric Mohammad Al-Areefi sounds like the ISIS army chaplain. The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, you should probably consult a neurologist.
Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture.
A HATRED OF INFIDELS IS ARGUABLY THE CENTRAL MESSAGE OF THE KORAN. THE REALITY OF MARTYRDOM AND THE SANCTITY OF ARMED JIHAD ARE ABOUT AS CONTROVERSIAL UNDER ISLAM AS THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS IS UNDER CHRISTIANITY.
It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.
~ Sam Harris, “Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon”
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armageddon
*
GOD’S WILL THAT WOMEN SHOULD SUFFER DURING CHILDBIRTH VERSUS CHLOROFORM
On November 4, 1847, Scottish physician James Young Simpson and his friends, who were familiar with the euphoria caused by substances such as ether and laughing gas (the common name for nitrous oxide), decided to try new sensations by inhaling chloroform: after an initial moment of hilarity, they all fell into a deep sleep.
"This is much better than ether," Simpson commented upon awakening. (A year earlier, William Morton in Boston had introduced the use of ether as an anesthetic.)
Four days later, Simpson successfully delivered a mother, anesthetizing the new mother with chloroform.
Over the course of a month, he used the substance on more than 50 patients, one of whom was so pleased with it that she named her newborn daughter Anesthesia.
The procedure was, however, risky, and in 1848 there was the first case of death attributed to the use of chloroform: the death of young Hannah Green was most likely caused by the improper administration of the anesthetic.
This death and the opposition of the Scottish Calvinist Church to the use of any anesthetic during childbirth (God had punished Eve's descendants by wanting all women to suffer during childbirth) cast a shadow over the use of chloroform.
Things changed in 1853 when Queen Victoria agreed to be anesthetized for the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold: her doctor, Dr. John Snow, had her inhale chloroform from a handkerchief that was soaked in it.
The queen was so pleased that she requested chloroform for the next birth as well, which is why this substance has gone down in history as the "queen's anaesthetic”.
The queen's approval meant that all doubts about chloroform vanished.
One day, Simpson, entering the classroom (he was a professor of obstetrics at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh), wanted to announce to his students the great honor that had been given to him by the queen, appointing him her personal physician.
Then the students all stood up and sang in chorus the anthem:
"God save the Queen!”.
~ Alessandro 13, Quora
Make Brown:
Chloroform also has the unwanted effect of causing sudden cardiac death even in fit subjects, which cannot help but be concerning; had it done so in the case of the Queen, the consequences would have been horrible to contemplate.
*
HEALTH TIPS
Walk downstairs as much as possible (it's better for you than going up)
One of the best ways to get the most out of any workout is to make it ‘eccentric’. You might think that running up a hill is better for you than jogging down it, or that climbing a flight of stairs is going to challenge your muscles more than walking down, but in fact, the opposite is true. It seems crazy, but this is the new science of ‘eccentric exercise’.
The name comes from the fact that contracting your muscles (to climb stairs or lift weights) is called ‘concentric exercise’, but any work that goes into those muscles while they are stretched and elongated (as you go downstairs or lower the weights) is known as ‘eccentric exercise’ (pronounced ‘ee-centric’).
Tony Kay is professor of biomechanics at the University of Northampton. He explains that all forms of exercise create microscopic damage to the muscles. This stimulates the release of hormones which trigger your cells to rebuild that muscle stronger than before. Concentric exercises (such as bicep curls or squats) recruit and fatigue many different muscle fibers.
Although the eccentric part of the exercise (as we lower the weight, or sink down into a squat) recruits fewer fibers, it does so with a load that is up to four times higher. This, says Kay, creates far greater microscopic damage to those cells and fibers.
Eat more protein to lose weight
As you have probably noticed, in the world of diets there is an ongoing battle between fans of low-fat foods and those who prefer to embrace a low-carb lifestyle. Yet as I discovered when I began researching my latest book, The Fast 800 Keto, the biggest driver of appetite is that other macronutrient: protein.
Eggs, fish, meat and tofu are all rich in protein and help build muscles, enzymes and much of the infrastructure of our bodies; eating enough of it is absolutely vital for growth and repair. And as two leading Australian academics,Prof David Raubenheimer and Prof Steve Simpson, argue, lack of protein is one of the major drivers of the current obesity epidemic.
If you don’t get enough protein in your diet, then you will develop cravings and overeat in a largely unconscious attempt to hit critical protein targets. They say that we need to consume around 15 to 20 per cent of our daily calories in the form of protein. This amounts to around 100 grams of protein, if you are eating the normal 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day.
Balance on one foot
A common New Year’s resolution is to get fitter. Although people determinedly heave weights or run, they often forget the importance of working on their balance. Worldwide, falls are the most common cause of accidental death after road traffic accidents, and unless you do something about it, your balance will deteriorate as you get older. And having good balance is a powerful predictor of how long and how healthily you will live.
A good test of your balance is to see how long you can stand on one leg, first with your eyes open and then closed. Take your shoes off, put your hands on your hips and stand on one leg. See how long you last. The test is over as soon as you shift your planted foot or put your raised foot down on the ground. Best of three. Then repeat, with your eyes closed.
You will be dismayed by how quickly you start to fall over. Here are the targets that different age groups should be able to manage:
Under 40:45 seconds with eyes open, 15 seconds with eyes closed.
Aged 40-49:42 seconds open, 13 seconds closed.
Aged 50-59:41 seconds open, 8 seconds closed.
Aged 60-69:32 seconds open, 4 seconds closed.
Aged 70-79:22 seconds open, 3 seconds closed.
Practice deep breathing
One of the things that has made a big difference to my life, and which is very simple to do, is to practice a bit of deep breathing. When I feel stressed or when I’m awake in the middle of the night and struggling to go back to sleep, which is quite common, I do a breathing exercise called 4-2-4.
I breathe in for a count of four, hold it for two, then breathe out to a count of four.
Deep breathing switches on your parasympathetic nervous system, which acts like a brake, calming your body down. Long, deep breaths will slow your heart and also reduce your blood pressure. That way it reduces anxiety. [Oriana: It's the long EXHALE that matters most.]
Deep breathing can also be an effective way of dealing with pain. Chronic pain is closely linked to stress and learning how to do ‘controlled breathing’ is an important part of treatment for managing both.
Take cold showers
One of the most popular episodes from the first series of Just One Thing explored the risks and benefits of cold water immersion. For this episode I started having cold showers every morning, starting with a brief burst of hot water, followed by 45 seconds or so of an icy cold blast.
It certainly perks you up, but is there anything more to it than that? Well, there was a Dutch study published in 2016 in the journalPLOS One where they recruited 3,018 people online and then randomly allocated them to having a cold shower every morning for a month, or to a control group who continued as normal. Those having the cold shower were further divided into those asked to do it for 30 seconds, 60 seconds or 90 seconds.
Over the following winter there was an outbreak of flu and it turned out that those people having cold showers were 30 per cent less likely to take time off for sickness than those in a control group, though it didn’t matter whether you were in the 30-second group or either of the longer groups.
Eat plenty of beetroot and garlic to keep your blood pressure down
An ideal healthy systolic blood pressure is between 90 and 120mmHg, so what can you do if your blood pressure is slightly too high? Well, losing a bit of weight, exercising more and stopping smoking will all help, but so can consuming certain foods – or at least that is what we discovered on Trust Me, I’m A Doctor, when we did a small experiment with Dr Andy Webb at King’s College, London, a few years ago.
We wanted to test the claims that beetroot, garlic and watermelon could lower blood pressure. All three foods are said to work by boosting levels of nitric oxide in the body, which in turn causes blood vessels to open up and blood pressure to fall.
So what happened? Well the average systolic blood pressure of the volunteers at the start was 133.6mmHg. On the beetroot diet, this went down to 128.7mmHg. Consuming two cloves of garlic a day gave a similar result (129.3mmHg).
A fall in blood pressure of around 5mmHg doesn’t sound a lot, but studies suggest that if was maintained it would translate into a reduction of the risk of stroke and heart attack of around 10 per cent.
I love garlic and I am happy to pile my plate with beetroot and other nitrate-rich veg, such as rocket, spinach, chard and broccoli.
CAFFEINE has health benefits
Apart from the flavor, what I love about tea and coffee is that they’re stimulants, rich with the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug, caffeine. A white, crystalline powder, it’s produced by plants to protect them against insect attack.
Not only do tea and coffee perk me up in the mornings, but there is strong evidence that caffeine consumers enjoy a range of other health benefits, with the benefits being clearer for coffee than tea.
A massive review of studies, ‘Coffee consumption and health: umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes’, published in theBritish Medical Journal, which looked at more than 220 studies, found that drinking coffee was associated with a significantly lower risk of heart disease and cancer, possibly because it’s rich in antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory compounds. Coffee drinking was also associated with a lower rate of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/michael-mosleys-health-advice
*
FREQUENT NIGHTMARES MAY PREDICT DEMENTIA
Dreams are normal occurrences for everyone, and most people report having occasional nightmares. However, the frequency of your nightmares, and how old you are when you experience them, might reveal information about your risk for dementia.
Research shows that experiencing frequent distressing dreams and nightmares ― meaning, specifically, frightening dreams that cause you to wake up ― may be linked with a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.
A 2023 analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine concluded that sleep disturbances should be considered when evaluating someone at risk for dementia. Previous research has discovered a possible link between distressing dreams and a higher risk of dementia in people with Parkinson’s disease. And a 2022 study published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine found that some associations may also exist in the general population.
The 2022 study, authored by Dr. Abidemi Otaiku, a clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, evaluated 605 middle-aged adults at a cognitively normal baseline over a maximum of 13 years. Researchers also examined 2,600 older adults, with a mean age of 83, at a dementia-free baseline for a maximum of seven years.
The data suggested that the group of middle-aged adults who reported a higher frequency of nightmares ― classified as once a week or more ― were associated with having a higher risk of cognitive decline. Likewise, for the older adults, the study found that more nightmares were linked to higher risks of “all-cause dementia,” meaning the syndrome can be caused by a number of different diseases.
Middle-aged adults who reported having weekly nightmares, compared to those who reported having none, were 4 times as likely to be at risk for experiencing cognitive decline. Older adults with frequent distressing dreams were about twice as likely to be at risk for dementia.
The cognitive function of the middle-aged participants was determined by using five cognitive tests. The older participants were evaluated for dementia by a doctor.
But there were some limitations of the study, such as the lack of racial diversity among the participants, who were mostly white, and a possible underestimation of associations between nightmares and dementia among the female participants. The associations in the findings between distressing dreams and risks of cognitive decline and dementia were only significant among the men who were evaluated, not the women.
Furthermore, the questionnaire given to participants didn’t clearly distinguish between “bad dreams” and “nightmares,” which may have affected the responses. “Bad dreams” don’t cause you to awaken, whereas nightmares can jolt you out of sleep.
In an article published at The Conversation, Otaiku wrote that the results of the study could lead to two theories: one, that frequent nightmares may be one of the earliest signs of dementia, especially in men; and two, that regular nightmares might be a cause of dementia themselves.
“Given the nature of this study, it is not possible to be certain which of these theories is correct (though I suspect it is the former),” Otaiku wrote. He added that the research could, nonetheless, provide new opportunities for earlier diagnoses and “possibly earlier interventions.”
More than 55 million people around the world have dementia. With so many ongoing conversations about sleep health and dementia diagnoses, it’s important to be aware of any new information about early detection, and things you can do to lower your risk.
How to reduce your dementia risk
Research has shown that regular exercise and physical activity, staying social, and refraining from smoking are among the ways you can reduce your risk of dementia.
Dr. Zaldy Tan, director of the Memory and Healthy Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai, previously told HuffPost that one key tip for improving brain health is to avoid social isolation.
“As social beings, the human brain thrives on interacting with others ... When this does not happen, our memory and cognition can decline over time,” Tan said. “It is important to keep engaged and connected with others.”
Adequate sleep is also key to reducing your risk. However, that can be challenging if you’re someone who experiences nightmares or bad dreams.
If you find you’re having frequent disruptive dreams or nightmares, talk to your doctor about your symptoms. There are no tests routinely done to diagnose a nightmare disorder, which is a pattern of repeated frightening dreams that cause significant distress. But your doctor may explore whether other conditions or factors are contributing to the nightmares.
According to the Sleep Foundation, people can also seek out various kinds of therapeutic treatment, such as psychotherapy, that can address nightmares.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dementia-early-sign-risk-sleep_l_67363c7ce4b0958bad3e95c0
*
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT IN YOUR BRAIN IS WHAT CREATES CONSCIOUSNESS
For the past 30 years, scientists have investigated whether the human brain might require quantum processes to achieve cognition.
A new study from Shanghai University uses mathematical models to suggest that certain fatty structures (which sheath the nerve cell’s axon) could potentially produce quantum entangled biphoton pairs, potentially aiding in synchronization across neurons.
It has long been argued that the human brain is similar to a computer. But in reality, that’s selling the brain pretty short. While comparing neurons and transistors is a convenient metaphor (and not completely out of left field), the brain is ultra-efficient, its energy is renewable, and it’s capable of computational feats that even the most advanced computer can’t pull off. In many ways, the inner workings of the human brain make up an unknown computational frontier.
Although your brain is superior to your laptop—or even the world’s most advanced supercomputer—these machines run on classical physics. But there’s another kind of a computer out there: a quantum one.
The idea that the human brain contains quantum properties isn’t new. In fact, the British physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff first suggested the controversial concept back in the 90s, with their “orchestrated objective reduction” model of a consciousness. Since then, many pieces of evidence have at least hinted that, while the brain may not be a full-fledged quantum computer, some quantum properties may in fact help generate consciousness.
Now, a new study from Shanghai University submits yet another piece of evidence to the neurological court—that one particular process of the human brain exhibits behavior akin to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon when two particles (usually photons) become inextricably linked even across vast distances. This phenomenon confounded even the most brilliant of minds, including Albert Einstein, who called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance.”
The study, published this month in the journal Physics Review E, suggests that a fatty material called myelin that surrounding the nerve cell’s axon—the fiber that transmits electrical impulses to other nerves or body tissues—provides an environment in which the entanglement of photons is possible. This could potentially explain the rise of cognition, and especially synchronization, which is essential for information processing and rapid response.
“Consciousness within the brain hinges on the synchronized activities of millions of neurons, but the mechanism responsible for orchestrating such synchronization remains elusive,” the paper reads. “The results indicate that the cylindrical cavity formed by a myelin sheath can facilitate spontaneous photon emission from the vibrational modes and generate a significant number of entangled photon pairs.”
The team built mathematical models detailing how infrared photons could impact the myelin sheath and impart energy to chemical bonds—specifically, carbon-hydrogen bonds embedded in this fatty tissue. This, in turn, could spur biphoton generation with many pairs exhibiting entanglement, and serve as a type of “quantum communication resource” within the nervous system.
“When a brain is active, millions of neurons fire simultaneously,” Yong-Cong Chen, a co-author of the study, told New Scientist. “If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role.”
If you’re sensing some “woah, if true” quality to this research, you’re not alone. For one, this phenomenon would need to be seen in a biological setting (likely in the brain of a mouse) before scientists get too excited about the brain’s newfound “quantum communication resource.” And that’s a process that the authors readily admit would be difficult.
Additionally, the idea of quantum entanglement playing a role in consciousness isn’t a mainstream one—Hameroff, one the leading minds behind the idea that quantum phenomena could drive aspects of cognition, even told New Scientist months ago that “it was very popular to bash us” after the publication of their consciousness model.
But science is in the business of hypothesis and rigorous testing to discern the true nature of existence. And, as history has shown, what once seemed liked “spooky action a distance” can quickly become the cornerstone of the quantum world.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61854962/quantum-entanglement-consciousness/
*
WHY EXERCISE BENEFITS YOUR MICROBIOME
The rich microbiota flourishing inside us may play a far greater role in the way exercise improves our health than previously thought.
Our guts are bustling with life. Jostling for space and food inside our gastrointestinal tract are about 100 trillion bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other single-celled organisms such as archaea and protozoa. Their roles vary from helping to ferment dietary fiber from our meals, to synthesizing vitamins and regulating our fat metabolism. They also help to protect us from unwanted invaders, interacting with our immune system and influencing the extent of inflammation in our guts and elsewhere in our bodies.
A lower diversity of these gut residents has been seen in patients suffering from obesity, cardiometabolic diseases as well as autoimmune conditions. Certain diseases have been associated with too many or too few of particular species of bacteria in our gut. Lower than normal levels of one of the most abundant bacteria in the guts of healthy adults, a rod-shaped bacterium called Fecalibacterium prausnitzii, has been associated with inflammatory diseases.
Numerous factors – including our genes, the types of medication we take, the stress we are under, if we smoke and what we eat – can all interplay to alter the balance of microorganisms in our gut. The make-up of this internal community is, in fact, highly dynamic.
But just as simple lifestyle choices can alter our gut microbes, so can we make choices that will help them flourish in a healthier way. Eating a diverse diet consisting of more than 30 different plant foods per week can help. A good night’s sleep and lower levels of stress can also be beneficial. Surprisingly, spending time in nature might also have a positive effect.
It is perhaps more surprising still, however, that exercise can also influence our gut bacteria. While we all know how beneficial exercise is for our physical and mental health, could a post-work jog also be just what we need to keep our gut microbes in shape too?
"Exercise seems to be affecting our gut microbes, by increasing bacterial communities that produce short chain fatty acids (SCFAs)", says Jeffrey Woods, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and who studies the effects of exercise on the human body.
"Short chain fatty acids are a type of fatty acids that are primarily produced by microbes and have been shown to modify our metabolism, immunity and other physiological processes," adds Jacob Allen, an assistant professor of exercise physiology at the University of Illinois who works alongside Woods.
Over the past 10 years, research looking at both animals and humans has helped reveal just how powerful this link between exercise and changes in the gut microbial community is. More importantly, it has shed light on how it might actually benefit us.
Some of the first clues can be found in studies of animals. Mice, for example, that were allowed to voluntarily run on a wheel when they wanted were found to have significantly lower numbers of a particular bacteria called Turicibacter. The presence of these bacteria is associated with an increased risk of bowel disease, say Woods and Allen, who led the study. Mice that were sedentary or given some gentle prodding to encourage them to run had far higher numbers of these bacteria. (It is thought that forcing the mice to run caused the animals chronic stress that may counteract the benefits of the exercise.)
The gut microbes in rats also seem to benefit from voluntary running on a wheel. Researchers have found that the exercise also seems to lead to higher levels of a particular short-chain fatty acid called butyrate, which is produced by bacteria in the gut through the fermentation of fiber and has been linked to numerous health benefits. Butyrate itself plays a number of roles in the body – it is the primary fuel for our gut cells, helps to control the gut barrier function and regulates inflammation and the immune cells within our gut.
The gut microbe Fecalibacterium prausnitzii is considered to be one of the main bacteria responsible for the production of butyrate. Butyrate-producing bacteria have been associated with beneficial effects on metabolism in both mice and humans. In particular, the reduction in numbers of Fecalibacterium Prausnitzii has been linked to inflammatory bowel diseases, its presence being needed for anti-inflammatory actions. A number of recent animal studies have indicated that exercise can increase the abundance of this bacteria in the guts of mice.
In 2018, researchers in the US also found that if they transplanted the gut microbes from exercise-trained mice to germ-free mice, it could reduce the amount of inflammation in the guts of those mice that received the microbes.
But while these studies in animals provide some clues as to how exercise can alter the balance of gut microbes for the better, we are not mice. So what do human studies tell us?
There is certainly no shortage of studies in humans that show doing moderate to vigorous exercise such as running, cycling and resistance training may potentially increase the diversity of bacteria in the guts. This has been linked to better physical and mental health. Doing aerobic exercises for as little as 18-32 minutes, coupled with resistance training three times a week, for a total of eight weeks could make a difference.
Athletes also tend to have increased gut microbial diversity compared to sedentary people, although some of this could be due to the specialized diets that competitors often have too. But a number of studies have shown that the combination of exercise and diet can boost Fecalibacterium prausnitzii numbers and the production of butyrate in active women, often with improved gut function.
"Some, but not all, studies have shown exercise to increase Fecalibacterium," says Woods. People with low levels of this type of bacteria appear to be more at risk of suffering inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and depression, he adds.
Studies by Woods and Allen have have highlighted that going for a 30-60 minute run or bout on the treadmill at the gym can have an impact on the abundance of butyrate-producing bacteria such as Fecalibacterium in the gut. In one study involving 20 women and 12 men with various body mass indexes (BMI), Woods and his colleagues set out to determine whether doing aerobic exercise for six weeks can change the gut microbes in previously sedentary human adults. They asked the participants to do three moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic exercise sessions a week, either by running on a treadmill or cycling for 30-60 minutes. Stool and blood samples were collected throughout the study, with three-day dietary controls to ensure their diet remained consistent before each collection to limit the changes caused by diet on gut microbes.
Their findings showed that "butyrate producers" increased in abundance with exercise training irrespective of body mass index. Accompanying the change in the microbe community, the lean participants showed an increase in short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate in their stool samples. Interestingly, when those taking part in the study returned to their sedentary lifestyle over the following six weeks, the researchers found the participants' gut microbes returned to their initial state. It suggests that while exercise can improve the health of the microbial community in our guts, these changes are both transient and reversible.
Another small study, published in 2019 by a team led by Jarna Hannukainen, an adjunct professor in the department of clinical medicine at the University of Turku in Finland, noticed more specific changes to the microorganisms in the guts of 18 sedentary participants who had been either diagnosed with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. The participants either did high-intensity interval training (bursts of 30 seconds of cycling with four minute recovery between four, then five and then six bouts) or moderate continuous training (40-60 minutes of cycling), three times per week over a two-week period.
The researchers noticed that both training modes increased Bacteroidetes bacteria.
Bacteroidetes are a critical group of gut bacteria that play a role in breaking down sugars and proteins, and induce the immune system into producing anti-inflammatory molecules inside the gut. Reduced levels of these bacteria have been associated with obesity, and irritable bowel syndrome.
The training also decreased levels of Clostridium and Blautia bacteria, which are thought to aggravate parts of the immune system at high levels and so increase inflammation. Indeed, Hannukainen and her team saw significantly lower levels of molecules that indicate inflammation in the blood and intestines in participants that had been exercising. In particular there were lower levels of inflammatory markers known to bind to lipopolysaccharides – components found in the cell walls of gut bacteria. These are known to cause low-grade inflammation around the body, as well as playing a role in insulin resistance and the development of atherosclerosis, which in turn increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Hannukainen and her colleagues say their work has also shown that exercise specifically reduced gut bacteria that have been associated with obesity.
But it is still not clear exactly how exercise leads to changes in the community of microorganisms living in our guts, although there are several theories, says Woods.
"Lactate is produced when we exercise, and this could be serving as fuel for certain bacterial species," he says. Another potential mechanism, he explains, could be through exercise-induced alterations in the immune system, especially the gut immune system, as our gut microbes are in direct contact with the gut's immune cells.
Exercising also causes changes in blood flow to the gut, which could affect the cells lining the gut wall and in turn lead to microbial changes. Hormonal changes caused by exercise could also cause changes in gut bacteria. But none of these potential mechanisms "have been definitively tested", says Woods.
Some elite athletes often suffer from exercise-induced stress due to the high-intensity training they do. As many as 20-60% of athletes suffer from stress due to overtraining and inadequate recovery, according to some estimates. But the bacteria in our guts could help control the release of hormones triggered by exercise-related stress, while also potentially helping to release molecules that improve mood. They can also help athletes with some of the gut problems they experience. Further research is however needed in this field.
But there is still much more we can learn about how our physical activity affects the creatures living inside our guts, such as how different types of exercise and its duration might alter the microbial community. It may also differ from individual to individual, based on their existing gut residents as well as BMI and other lifestyle factors, such as their diet, stress levels and sleep.
As scientists continue to tease out more of the secrets hidden within our gastrointestinal tracts, we may find new ways to improve our health through the bustling and diverse communities of organisms that call us their home.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220825-how-exercise-can-give-your-gut-microbes-a-boost
*
LOCUS CERULEUS: THE “BLUE SPOT” IN THE BRAIN THAT CONTROLS SLEEP
The locus coeruleus is emerging as a major new area of research interest, with many important functions such as regulating our attention and sleep.
Anyone with insomnia knows the impatience and frustration that accompanies sleeplessness, as you struggle to turn out the lights in your head and mute its inner voice. You long for a button or dial that could instantly dampen all that mental activity.
The idea of a mental dimmer switch is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. Most neuroscientists now agree that our wakefulness exists on a kind of continuum. It is coordinated by a complex network of brain regions, at the heart of which lies a tiny bundle of neurons known as the "locus ceruleus", Latin for "blue dot”.
It is a literal description: the neurons in the locus ceruleus are dyed the color of sapphire from the production of a particular neurotransmitter, called norepinephrine. This is also a clue to the blue dot's function, since norepinephrine controls our physiological and psychological arousal.
For a long time, scientists assumed that the locus ceruleus was dormant during sleep, but it is now becoming clear that it is never completely quiet, with low levels of intermittent activity that may regulate the depths of our slumbers. A better understanding of this process may help to treat the disturbed sleep associated with conditions like anxiety.
In sleeping mice, the onset of REM sleep is linked to lower activity in the locus ceruleus
The brain's gear system
The locus ceruleus lies in the brain stem, just above the back of the neck – and contains around 50,000 cells, a tiny portion of the 86 billion neurons in the average central nervous system.
Marie Antoinette's physician Félix Vicq d'Azyr was the first to note its existence in the late 18th Century – but for a long time, it failed to attract any further attention.
That began to change in the 20th Century, when it became clear that the locus ceruleus' blue pigment played a key role in brain signaling. Norepinephrine (also known as noradrenaline) raises the chance that a neuron will "spike" with an electric current. When they become active, cells in the locus ceruleus pass bundles of this neurotransmitter along their projections to other regions of the brain – enhancing the communication between the neurons in that area.
There are nuances to this process. Depending on the types of receptors they have, some neurons are more sensitive to smaller amounts of norepinephrine, while others only respond to higher thresholds. This means that, as the locus ceruleus activity rises, it will start to affect some brain areas more than others, which can have dramatic effects on things like our focus, concentration and creativity.
In her book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, the neuroscience researcher and writer Mithu Storoni describes the locus ceruleus, and its control over norepinephrine signaling, as the brain's gearbox, with different modes that are best suited to certain kinds of activities.
Gear 1: very gentle activity in the blue dot. The low levels of norepinephrine mean that our attention is diffuse and our mind wanders from thought to thought.
Gear 2: moderate firing in the blue dot, accompanied by occasional spikes in response to the most relevant stimuli. The prefrontal cortex, which is involved in self-control and abstract thinking, is most sensitive to this concentration of norepinephrine. We may find it easier to stay focused on intellectual tasks in this brain state.
Gear 3: constantly high firing in the blue dot, which releases high levels of norepinephrine. This begins to trigger activity in brain regions associated with the "fight or flight response," while the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down. Thanks to the increased communication between neurons, you are extremely sensitive to your environment, but it can be hard to separate signal from noise. It becomes harder to focus, and you may begin to feel overwhelmed.
Many different factors determine which gear we are in, including the time of day, since the blue dot's activity shifts with our circadian rhythm. It tends to be low when we first wake up, rises during the day and falls in the evening.
Nocturnal vigilance
Given the blue dot's role in arousal, it makes sense that it would be quietest at night during sleep. It is not entirely silent, however, but fires sporadically – and recent research by Anita Lüthi at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland suggests that this activity may determine the quality of our slumbers.
Across the night, we alternate between different sleep stages. There is "rapid eye movement" (REM) sleep, which – as the name suggests – is marked by the flickering of our eyeballs. It is associated with vivid dreaming and is thought to be crucial for processing and consolidating memories. Much of our rest, however, is spent in non-REM (NREM) sleep, during which the brain may engage in a deep cleaning, clearing away cellular waste that may lead to neuronal dysfunction if it is allowed to accumulate.
Measuring brain activity in dozing mice, Lüthi found that NREM sleep was associated with temporary bursts of locus ceruleus activity every 50 seconds. This seemed to galvanize the thalami, a pair of egg-shaped regions which lie in the middle of the brain and are involved in sensory processing. As a result, the animal was more sensitive to outside stimuli, like noises – without fully waking. "It's generating this state of enhanced vigilance," Lüthi says. "It really gives you this idea that wakefulness can be graded in the brain.”
Lüthi suggests that these regular periods of increased vigilance to potential threats would be essential for survival in the wild. "Sleep is so fundamentally important, but it has to supplement itself with a mechanism that allows for a certain degree of wakefulness," she says. "You need to remain reactive to the environment.”
The onset of REM sleep was almost always associated with low locus ceruleus activity, suggesting that it also plays a central role in transitioning to this dream-filled state of being. "That transition to REM sleep has to be very well controlled," says Lüthi, "because in REM sleep, we have atonia". That's the temporary paralysis of our body, which prevents us from physically acting out our dreams. "We are completely disconnected from the environment.”
Lüthi emphasizes that her experiments were conducted in rodents, so we still need to confirm that the blue dot plays a similar role in human sleep. If so, she suspects that altered locus ceruleus activity could be implicated in conditions such as anxiety that may contribute to disordered sleep. She found that exposing her laboratory mice to mild sources of stress – such as knocking on their cage – raised the blue dot's activity and increased their vigilance throughout the night, resulting in fragmented sleep.
Finding mental calm
A burgeoning understanding of this neural pathway is leading some scientists to investigate whether different kinds of brain stimulation can calm the blue dot to improve sleep. A team in South Korea, for instance, have recently tested a headset that runs a small electrical current over one of the nerves in the forehead that is connected to the blue dot to temporarily damp down its activity – though it is not yet whether this reduces insomnia.
For now, we can try to think a bit more carefully about our behavior in the evening, and avoid over-stimulation just before we go to sleep. "If you force yourself to keep going when you are tired, your brain copes by cranking its gear up to provide maximum horsepower for its struggling machinery – so much so that it almost 'gets stuck' at a high setting," writes Storoni in Hyperefficient. Simply letting our minds relax before bedtime – without TV, phones, or tablets – has long been considered good "sleep hygiene".
We may also take advantage of the two-way traffic between the locus ceruleus and the body. The blue dot is part of the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious physiological functions such as breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure. This is divided into two arms: the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for triggering a stress response, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which sets the body for rest and relaxation. And it seems that we can selectively activate each arm with different physical activities.
Moderate to intense exercise – walking, running, rowing, cycling, or boxing – is likely to kick the sympathetic arm into action, accelerating the blue dot's activity and increasing our mental arousal. That's great news if you're feeling groggy in the morning and need to wake up, but less useful when you're trying to calm your mind after a hard day's toil. You may think that physical exertion will tire you out, but if you're already having trouble sleeping, late-night gym visits are a bad idea.
Gentle stretching, on the other hand, can promote a relaxation response in the parasympathetic nervous system that simultaneously calms our thoughts and feelings. Controlled breathing exercises, such as pranayama – an ancient breathing technique that stems from yogic practices – appear to do the same job, with slower respiratory rhythms reducing overall arousal.
We can use this to our advantage as we wind down at night. Various trials suggest that meditation and mindful movements can reduce the time it takes to get to sleep, and improve our overall sleep quality, over and above the standard treatments for insomnia.
We do not quite have a physical switch that can turn down our mental activity at will. By managing our daily routine, however, and harnessing the mind-body connection, we will have a much better chance of getting the deep rest that we need.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250131-how-the-brains-blue-dot-regulates-your-sleep
*
ending on beauty:
A PRAYER THAT WILL BE ANSWERED
~ Anna Kamieńska
No comments:
Post a Comment