Brutalist sculpture in former Yugoslavia
WATCHING THE ARMED FORCES PARADE
(Torrance, California, 1988)
And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Isaiah 2:4
Muddy-green trucks
clog the parking lot,
a line-up of buses and jeeps.
The library's closed,
I might as well watch:
the first tank rolls by.
The sign on its side
says YOUR NATIONAL GUARD,
and the soldier in the open turret,
like a jack in the box,
and the other one,
behind the long gun,
are waving at the crowd, but I watch
the ratchets grinding as the caterpillars
lumber under the dumb weight;
I can't help it, I begin to cry,
thinking this is how it is done,
thinking of Poland and Hungary
and Czechoslovakia;
thinking of the German
iron fist, of the deep
claws of Russia.
Helicopters fly over in formation;
rifle drills, sabers, tubas, applause.
Teenagers yelp, in Corona-Beer T-shirts.
mothers stick little flags
into babies' hands.
Daughters of the American Revolution
roll past in an antique car.
I am crying quietly.
a policeman directs me
to move more to the side.
Now a group in camouflage fatigues,
with a tuba and a big drum;
in front a black drum major
marches with a baton.
I stop crying because
he isn't marching, he's dancing:
rah-tah-tah-tum, he sways his hips,
chin high, a lilt to his knees.
The others pound the asphalt
stiffly, miserably; he
explodes the narrow rhythm –
wants it faster, wants to throw his baton
up into the sky,
and, never missing a beat,
catch it like a jeweled star –
for him this military jazz isn’t hot
enough. Looking at him I know
one day this will be
an archaic dance, a tribal performance.
Little boys will have to be told
what a rifle was;
a tank will be displayed
in a museum like a dinosaur.
It will be a part
of a history lesson,
nobody will be much interested.
~ Oriana
*
ON KING LEAR AND TYRANNY IN OUR TIMES
I had a remarkable freshman student who intuitively understood the modality of totalitarianism, and how it might be represented in literary form. In class she made the offhand comment that in King Lear, frivolous and deadly serious skirmishes follow upon one another without hierarchy or temporal markers. She said that chronological sense has to be removed to show that power, in the absence of sovereignty, exists primarily as pure bravado and as pure harm.
Look in on almost any moment in Lear and you cannot quite see how bad the situation is. This is what struck me, reading it years later. A historian’s warning: it’s hard to see history as it is happening. Albany barely understands Lear’s nasty tussles with his daughters. It’s just an ordinary day with the in-laws; how did things get so bad? Kent has shown up at Gloucester’s castle and runs into Goneril’s steward/henchman, Oswald. No one knows it’s Kent because he is disguised as a fellow named Caius in order to stay on as Lear’s servant and bodyguard and because Kent answers to Oswald as a member of Gloucester’s household.
We soon learn that Kent is too direct to be an effective hero and has other less-nameable flaws that disqualify him for the job of the bodyguard and messenger. Regan and Cornwall, who happen to be guests at Gloucester’s castle, do not recognize that it’s Kent who has gotten into a tussle with Oswald, but the disguise hardly helps him. Oswald blinks uncomprehendingly at Kent’s anger toward him. I don’t know you, stranger! he cries, why are you insulting me and delivering blows?
For these offenses Kent is put in the stocks. Does that seem unreasonable? Lear’s audiences often do not realize how bad Kent’s situation is, even when Regan arbitrarily extends Kent’s punishment. We’ll keep him like this till noon, says Cornwall. “Till noon?—till night, my lord, and all night too,” his wife replies. You hear, now, how eroticism and sadism share the same flippancy toward added time. It is a commonplace cruelty, like cats and dogs getting tied to a post somewhere and forgotten. And there Kent stays until…it’s hard to say.
From the director and producer’s standpoint, it’s not easy to convey how cruel this detention in the stocks really is. Kent can often just look foolish onstage, sitting there idling. It’s not torture, exactly. No screws are being applied. It’s the Fool who finally describes what we’re seeing, with reference to the spectacle of bear-baiting, then one of the most gruesome sports in Shakespeare’s England:
Look, ha, he wears cruel garters. Horses are tied by the
head, dogs and bears by th’ neck, monkeys by th’ loins, and men by the legs.
An arbitrary extension of immobility is hard to see. People can also be stoical in their sufferings, as Kent was. “Mak’st thou this shame thy pastime?” Lear asks Kent, still in the stocks. “No, my lord,” he replies. When he finally explains why he is where he is, the explanation sounds wordy, bizarre. I delivered your letters, and then another guy delivered letters, and then I was called forth, and he was too saucy….And then this small dumb thing happened, and then that small dumb thing happened, and then “your son and daughter found this trespass worth / The shame which here it suffers.”
The same problem occurs when Lear is locked out of Gloucester’s castle just as the weather turns bad. We’re still at Gloucester’s castle, where several unbelievable crimes happen. Kent being put in the stocks was just a foretaste, which Lear himself understood. You put my man in the stocks, and in someone else’s house? What will soon happen to me?
Gloucester himself will soon experience the cruelty that Regan and Cornwall are capable of. In between Kent and Gloucester’s torture we are shown a crime of negligence for which it is hard to determine fault. In this famous scene, Lear storms out after his bitter quarrel with his two daughters and their husbands, his train reduced to nothing, as no one will pay for the soldiers anymore. Perhaps twenty or thirty have trailed along, but they’re nowhere to be seen. Lo and behold, it starts to storm. None of his children or in-laws go after him. Gloucester also does not go after him, despite many misgivings.
It’s a bit of schoolyard cruelty on the children’s part: Father wants to be petulant? Well, he must be taught a lesson! “O, sir,” Regan says to Gloucester’s weak entreaty that they cannot send an old man out into this kind of weather, “to willful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors.”
Lear was not locked out, then. Rather, he leaves, and no one cares. “My Lord,” says Goneril to Gloucester, “entreat him by no means to stay.” Gloucester, a weak man, cannot decide what to do. “Shut up your doors,” he is sweetly commanded a second time, this time by Cornwall, “Come out of the storm.”
Lear’s characters never see the horrible thing coming because they’re always reacting to being newly deprived or somehow in trouble. It all happens so quickly, and the effects are felt so slowly. It’s stupidly slow, blindingly fast. The King of France shakes his head in disbelief at the precipitousness of the turn at the beginning of the play. “It is most strange,” he remarks, that Cordelia—so good and so clearly favored—can “in this trice of time…dismantle so many folds of disfavor.” In the blink of an eye she has incurred…such hatred?
There’s a horrible play on words in the plucking of Gloucester’s eyes—I never saw it coming—a truly shocking moment in Lear that always has to be handled delicately on the stage. It’s so extreme. Gloucester did not see that coming. We did not see that coming because we do not believe people capable of such things; but, even more so, it does not seem like things had been building up to this point, though of course they had.
From putting someone in the stocks to gouging out an old man’s eyes, one after the other? Regan and Cornwall’s capacity will seem out of the blue. But…you were my guests, cries Gloucester, finding himself bound in his own chair in his own hall. How could such a thing be possible? Though you know they are cruel, you really can’t guess what Regan and Goneril are capable of until you see what they do. Only the last step confirms your suspicions about the first steps.
In a Learian world, what people are capable of in the last instance can be glimpsed in the first instance, but you’d be hard pressed to recognize the first instance. Excessive flattery of a doting father—who could prosecute this? Copying one’s sister in excessive flattery of an irascible and needy father—on what charges can you arraign this individual, even in the private courts of human conversation?
Shakespeare made the title character someone who, like all fundamentally good people, never sees it coming. Lear is surprised by how it is that things can come to be this way, how people can do what they do, every single time, just as they’re surprised by his extremes, every single time. “Let them anatomize Regan,” he says, “see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness?” He just doesn’t get it, though it may largely be his fault.
“I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall”—this is how the play begins, remember?—in Kent’s confusion over his misplaced certainty in Lear’s judgment of character. He’s confused, the way people are confused when the bad are rewarded and the good punished, or when something really not right is happening.
Having to speak to Gloucester and Edmund, the bad and the worse, Kent is confused from the get-go that some comment or conspiracy seems expected of him. He remains kind and fair. It takes him a second to understand the fact that Edmund is an illegitimate child, but he is kind when he reacts; “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.” Even disguised as Caius, Kent is recognizably Kent. He is someone who strategizes for the good but can only ever react to wickedness. He is always, to some extent, surprised by sin.
*
You didn’t see it coming. In this trice of time you cannot ascertain the timing and execution of the prosecution of personal slip-ups. You’re always surprised by the phrase “patterns of misconduct.” This is because tyranny always catches you by surprise. The possibilities of what can be spoken have shifted away from you, and you find yourself muzzled, made dumb. You could never have seen it coming, because you could never have anticipated such changes to the rules of discourse.
Here is my grandfather, quickly sketching the atmosphere of 1958 in his memoir:
‘I didn’t wish to fall behind in this political atmosphere. Every day I was full of readiness to work, going to committee meetings and education sessions, writing and directing little performances, performing onstage, even while having to perform “Three Red Flags” in the streets. I worked day and night, sleeping four or five hours a day, and didn’t feel fatigue.’
At that time the newspapers daily reported the “satellite news”: “crop yield is twenty thousand kilograms”; “crop yield is thirty-six thousand kilograms”; “crop yield is one hundred twenty thousand kilograms.” The front-page news printed a photograph of a young child atop a hill of grain, making no dent in it at all, so you can appreciate the volume. The party reports in this way, who would dare to disbelieve.
And in any case, at that time, everyone had become a poet. Frictionlessly, the words leapt from mouths and spread through the land: “However brave man is, that’s how much the land will yield!” You “inflated,” he “inflated,” everyone became an exaggerator, and we all lived out meaningless lives amid this hot air.
Visceral fear of the ever-changing rules and punishments made people give up on description and causality. Language helped to keep the frogs in the pan, and it worked by exaggeration and underdescription, by making too much out of nothing, and describing monumental wrongs as a trifling matter. Being sent down into the countryside didn’t seem all that bad, and still doesn’t to those who conjure images of cheerful lakeside camps. Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside Movement: it’s almost romantic.
Even today anyone hearing about this period of history can just say, “What’s so bad about hard farm labor for a few years?” What could be so wrong about an extended, nonsimulated look at the reality of the laboring poor? Indeed, even to me that sounds like a good idea. Mao knew how to name things. Land Reform Movement. Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution. Three-Years Natural Disaster. Hundred Flowers Campaign. They sound like earnest, progressive movements punctuated by a small climate disaster. At most they sound like euphemisms for bland events, a talking up of small accomplishments.
Point your camera anywhere in China, as did photographer Marc Riboud traveling in China in the 1950s and ’60s, and you might not see anything amiss. Things seem strange but still well within the range of normal historical and cultural activity. How do you make sure you’re not overreacting or underreacting?
Westerners and even Chinese people themselves couldn’t gauge the severity of Maoist pranks. Being doused in ink and being made to wear a dunce cap? Is that a very big deal? I think about photographs from the Cultural Revolution that show the mass bullying of teachers and elders, corky arms bound and lifted behind corky bodies. The bodies are obviously uncomfortable but not under obvious torture. So what—they had some ink thrown on them? It’s just paint.
Mao had also fully grasped the natural suitability of photographic and filmic media for the broadcasting and cognitive technologies of totalitarianism. Posters and footage of bountiful plenty could be seen everywhere across a land that was actually ravaged by violent campaigns and manufactured famine.
Photography also enabled the precursor of the “deep fake.” A 1958 photograph of Chairman Mao taking part in volunteer labor at the construction site of the Ming Tombs Reservoir shows Secretary Peng Zeng by his side. By 1978, when this image was republished in one of Mao’s many hagiographies, Peng Zeng had disappeared. In every layer of this world and its self-reporting you have falsification and distortion, done out of malice and real love.
Westerners looking in also compounded the problem. At the official invitation of the People’s Republic of China, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni produced a documentary called Chung Kuo/Cina (Zhong guo/China). Chung Kuo hardly scratched the surface of what had happened in China up to 1972, when the film was made, as Antonioni had purposely avoided anything negative, at the behest of the Party. Almost no one knew what was happening to Westerners trapped inside China.
In 1968 a Jewish Dutch woman named Selma Vos was persecuted to death along with her husband, Cao Richang, an eminent psychologist who had helped found the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Cao Richang had been assigned to hard cleaning work two years prior after the couple had been spied on and turned in by other foreigners in China, including a writer and scholar named Sidney Rittenberg, the second foreigner to join the CPC. (In 1968 Rittenberg, who had helped the party victimize many, was himself subjected to ten years of solitary confinement).
Selma Vos’s story is particularly Learian. Her mother and other family members had been killed in the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. She and her father survived the Holocaust by hiding, like Anne Frank, in the attic of neighbors. How could she have anticipated such a second act? Vos even returned to the Netherlands briefly in 1966 and came back as a Chinese national, and therefore was unable to leave or seek amnesty during her incarceration, in part believing that things could not possibly come to that.
The crimes of the state, and of the people on the people, were drawn out, out in the open, socially normalized. Wang Bing’s 2018 Dead Souls, an eight-hour documentary of the prison-factories in Gansu that ran from the 1950s to the present, is protracted to make you feel the slowness of the terror. State officials are coming for a visit, pictures are taken, the labor camp’s demolition of human lives carries on in the background. Frightened protests are made to sound outlandish. There’s no time to think, and yet time passes so slowly.
Although people labeled “reactionaries” were certainly soon against the revolution, “reactionary” itself was a terrible misnomer for most of the people who were targeted for killing, dispossession, and humiliation. Intellectuals, merchants, artists, teachers, writers, and students killed or persecuted to oblivion were themselves liberal-progressive by mid- and early-twentieth-century Chinese standards and even by today’s standards.
They had fought for a uniquely Chinese but also globally inspired anti-Learian outcome for their country: an equal and fair society in which all women, and not just ladies of the bower or favored children, would have equal access to education and resources; a clear separation of power in Chinese government; a society in which the disabled and the elderly would thrive and contribute and be treated kindly, criminals would be given a fair chance, and the burden of social infrastructures would be shared by all. Ironically, “reactionary” became a perfect description of their predicaments. In Mao’s era they could, in fact, only ever react.
From The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear by Nan Z. Da.
https://lithub.com/tyranny-as-tragedy-on-king-lear-maoist-china-and-the-unpredictable-nature-of-power/
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IS ISRAEL’S ATTACK ON IRAN THE START OF WW3?
Tel Aviv under Iranian attack
Do you mean a shootin’ war or a nukin’ war? If the former, who's going to assist the Iranians? Not Russia. They're borrowing soldiers from North Korea to fight their battle in Ukraine. China? How long does your Temu delivery from China take? China is 3,000 miles from Iran by air, 5,000 by water, even longer to Israel. It will take months for the Chinese to put together a strike force, diverting essential resources from their Taiwan project. Sorry, don't see it happening. The EU or Canada? The EU couldn't be bothered to get off its lazy ass to counter an actual genocide on its doorstep in Bosnia, you think they'll sacrifice their own manpower and wealth to assist Iran?Now, a nukin’ war? To be honest with you, that's what this whole attack was about, making sure the Iranians can't carry out a nuclear attack. Again, which country is willing to gamble on the Israeli response to a nuclear attack? That's why the virtue signalers of the West have been reluctant to attack Israel in the first place. They know whoever is first is going to have his nose broken and his teeth smashed. Just like the Iranians.
So the answer to your question is no, this regional conflict will not result in World War 3. However, don't let that stop you from preemptively accusing the Israelis of starting World War 3. In the eyes of the antisemitic West, Israel is already guilty of every possible crime, even the imaginary ones. Especially the imaginary ones. ~ Marc Clamage, Quora
Damaged building in Tel-Aviv after a retaliatory strike by Iran
Will there be a bigger war? Not sure. Hezbollah has been decimated, Hamas has been decimated, the Houthi’s bombed and Syria now has a government that’s unlikely to get involved one way or another with Assad out of the way. Last time Iran launched a massive wave of missiles on Israel, virtually every single rocket was taken down, many by Arab forces before even reaching Israeli airspace. I don’t predict much of a response beyond more angry but ultimately empty posturing. ~ posted by Michael Hutton, Quora, June 13, 25
Jean-Marie Valheur:
When one strike takes out the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a top general, a rear admiral and the head of the atomic agency as well as the head of the Iranian nuclear program then, yes, you can call the strike a resounding success.
It isn’t a strike — it is a declaration of war. This is the Hezbollah pager attack and the killing of Hassan Nasrallah on steroids.
This strike is the equivalent of a foreign adversary striking Washington, killing Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance and blowing up the Pentagon all in one hit. It’s a massive success, from a military perspective. But it’s also so incredibly humiliating that there is no chance Iran won’t commit to a massive retaliation. Otherwise, how can they save face?
Since America was seemingly way away and has been fortifying its bases in the region and evacuating non-essential embassy personnel prior to the attack, this seems to have been a strike many years in the making. Perhaps “negotiating with Iran” was a ruse all along. Interesting times we live in. And terrifying times, too, because even a weakened and battered Iran is still a formidable foe.
*
Israel is the Mini Super Power of the Middle East. Saudi may have the oil, but Israel has Mossad and several layers of tech that is the best in the world. ~ Henry Greenfield
*
'Thank you uncle Netanyahu': some Iranians praise Israeli strikes
Some Iranians expressed gratitude to Israel for assassinating military and political officials they viewed with contempt in video and voice messages sent to Iran International TV.
“I wanted to thank Israel and Uncle Netanyahu for what they did last night and to tell Iran: You are nothing. (You say you are) a power in the region, but three of your top commanders were killed in a single attack,” a viewer said in his message.
“I want people to get out [on the streets to protest] and be united with each other and to topple this blood thirsty government,” she added.
In another message, a viewer said he was pleased by the Israeli attack which, according to the Israeli military hit dozens of military and nuclear sites and eliminated some of the country's top military leadership in an open-ended campaign dubbed "Rising Lion" by Netanyahu.
Iran has confirmed the deaths of several top commanders including the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami, Chief of Staff of Armed Forces Mohammad Bagheri, and IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, and six nuclear scientists, including former chief of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency Fereydoun Abbasi.
There are also unconfirmed reports of the death of Ali Shamkhani, a top advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has vowed a “severe punishment” and a “harsh response.
Another Iran International viewer similarly thanked Israel but urged it not to forget to target Khamenei.
“No one approves of war, but I’m sure when it comes to the murderous and terrorist Islamic Republic, all the 80 or 90 million people in Iran approve of this attack,” she said.
“Now they will get the seriousness of the situation and will understand that although they may be able to bully the Iranian people and kill them on the streets, they can’t bully the world and the big powers,” she added.
In another message, a viewer expressed his happiness after realizing that the sound that woke him up was the sound of the explosion of Israeli bombs, not lightning.
“It was good news and a harbinger of freedom to all Iranians. Well done, Israel. You have avenged all those freedom-seeking youth who were torn apart and raped on the streets.”
An Israeli military official said in a Friday morning briefing that 200 fighter jets had been involved in the operation.
He said air defenses, ballistic missiles ready to launch to Israel and missile manufacturing sites and facilities were also targeted in the strikes. The operation came as Iran's nuclear program "is approaching the point of no return and is rapidly advancing toward obtaining a nuclear weapon", he told reporters.
"We struck their nuclear plan, and we struck military targets—before they had the ability to strike us with weapons of mass destruction, with nuclear weapons. We had no other choice, and we launched this operation now because this is the most appropriate time in light of this concrete threat. They have already obtained enough uranium for 15 nuclear weapons," he said.
Evan Dyck:
They were already at war. Hamas and Houthis are on Iran’s paycheck.
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IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES ARE DEEP UNDERGROUND
Benjamin Netanyahu has long signaled his desire to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, meaning Tehran has long prepared for any such attack.
From the very beginning, Israel targeted Iran’s air defenses. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has released multiple videos showing missile batteries being destroyed.
This afternoon, IDF spokesperson Effie Defrin says Israel has “air freedom all the way to Tehran.”
But air defenses are not the only thing protecting Iran’s extensive nuclear operations.
Many of Iran’s most important facilities are buried deep underground, protected by layers of earth and reinforced concrete.
The fuel enrichment plant at Fordow, for example, is thought to be around 80m (262ft) below the surface, while analysts say a new facility at Mt Kolang is even deeper.
Targeting sites like this requires specialist bombs, such as the GBU-57/B, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). Colloquially known as "bunker busters", this huge 30,000lb bomb is capable of destroying targets buried under about 60m of reinforced concrete.
But the US is not currently taking part in the strikes, and Israel does not possess the MOP.
As for what they do have, the most effective weapons they possess are the ROCKS or the Air LORA, air-launched ballistic missiles capable of destroying up to 6m of reinforced concrete.
According to Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), attacking a deep facility with these would require multiple precise strikes at the same point to "burrow down."
With each strike destroying around 6m of concrete, reaching sites like Fordow or Mt Kolang looks like a remote prospect.
According to Alon Pinkas, who advised two Israeli prime ministers, Israel simply does not possess the stocks of munitions for the task.
The more realistic option would be to target entry and exit tunnels, rendering the facilities unusable.
The issue with this strategy, according to the RUSI report, is that Iranian efforts to dig down to the facilities and re-establish access "would likely begin almost immediately". All of which serves to explain why Bronk and others say destroying Iran's nuclear program through military means is "not feasible." Undoubtedly it can be set back, especially through the extensive assassinations of top scientists, but as long as the regime survives, it will attempt to build back.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c93ydeqyq71t
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ESCALATION
This is likely to be a long campaign. And Israel is typically ambitious: yes, this is about attempting to hobble Iranian nuclear capability, but it is also a broader, more cosmic quest to force a regime change of its most hostile neighbor.
Netanyahu, Rajan Menon writes, seems to hope that Trump will feel compelled to jump to Israel’s side. Ideally, he would have launched this attack as a joint operation (increasing the remote chance that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would be truly destroyed). That didn’t happen. But now, following Iranian retaliation, Netanyahu may just have forced Washington’s hand.
damage in Tehran
In the early hours of Friday morning, Israel launched a full-scale campaign against Iran, as waves of air strikes targeted the Islamic regime’s nuclear program and military bases. The attack – known as Operation Rising Lion – was staggering in its scale and ambition.
It’s hard to overstate just how devastating Israel’s strikes have been for Iran’s already brittle leadership. Iranian state media has reported that the strikes killed Gen Hossein Salami, who, as head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was Iran’s most prominent military official, along with other top generals Mohammad Bagheri, the army chief of staff, and Gholamali Rashid, commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya joint forces headquarters.
Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said that the strikes killed most of the IRGC air force leadership, who were meeting together at the time of the attack. Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also oversees the nuclear program, was wounded, according to Iran’s state media.
Less clear is how significant the hit was to Iran’s nuclear program. The Israeli military says it hit Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, striking “infrastructure vital for the site’s continued operation and the advancement of Iran’s military nuclear project.” Half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists, including the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, were also targeted and killed.
Israel launched its attack less than 24 hours after the the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors declared that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations, and just 48 hours before Iranian officials were due to meet with US special envoy Steve Witkoff for another round of nuclear talks in Oman.
In a pre-recorded video statement released online, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that “for decades, the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly, openly called for Israel’s destruction. They backed up their genocidal rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons.” He also said: “The Jewish state refuses to be a victim of a nuclear Holocaust.”
It is a dramatic escalation in an ever widening conflict that has already brutalized Gaza, and expanded into Lebanon and been felt in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Even as Israel continued to strike, Iran retaliated, launching more than 100 drones at Israel. An IDF spokesman said in televised remarks on Friday morning that “Israel’s air defenses were already working to intercept the threats”. While further retaliation is certain – Khamenei has said that Israel “should anticipate a harsh punishment” – it’s unclear what form it will take.
Iran launched major ballistic missile and drone attacks on Israel two times last year, prompting the US, UK and other European allies to swarm to Israel’s defense (the vast majority of those missiles and drones were intercepted before they reached the country). Yet now, following Israel’s strikes, it’s unclear whether Iran is even able to launch a similar attack; Israel claims it has destroyed dozens of Iranian radars and missile launchers.
Iran could also respond with blocking shipping in the Persian Gulf, which would severely disrupt the movement of global oil supplies, or strikes on oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the UAE. (Oil prices have already spiked for this reason.) It’s clear that the US is already concerned about possible retaliation on US military bases in the region; earlier this week, the US made moves to partially evacuate its embassy in Iraq and authorized the voluntary departure of American military family members from the region.
After Friday’s strikes began, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, released a statement saying that Israel had taken “unilateral action”, that the US was “not involved” and that Iran “should not target US interests or personnel.” Donald Trump was slightly more colorful in his own statement, posting online that he “gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal” regarding its nuclear program, but “they just couldn’t get it done.” He also said “the next already-planned attacks” could be “even more brutal,” and warned that Tehran “must make a deal, before there is nothing left.”
It’s clear that Israel’s campaign against Iran isn’t over. Netanyahu, who has long wanted regime change in Iran, has said that the operation “will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat”. What’s less clear is whether the US can avoid becoming entangled in another Middle East conflict. Iran, with its neutered proxies and limping economy, has been seriously weakened in recent years.
Yet if it does respond to Israel’s attack by striking American bases or embassies in the region, Trump might be compelled to respond directly. Trump, who has long railed against America’s misbegotten “forever wars”, will not want to be drawn into an increasingly volatile conflict. But, if things continue to escalate, that might not matter. [Please note that this was written before the events in Tehran.]
https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2025/06/israel-strikes-iran-trump-escalation?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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HOW HERNAN CORTÉS MANAGED TO DEFEAT THE AZTECS
He was able to take advantage of the humongous flaw in the design of the Aztec empire: the fact that essentially every tributary nation hated them. That, coupled with the knowledge and experience of the Tlaxcalan army, the Aztecs were really the outnumbered ones. I think it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that the conquest of Mexico was really the Tlaxcalans vs. the Aztecs with the Tlaxcalans essentially using the Spaniards. That obviously backfired though.
Another factor was one of the worst epidemics in the history of mankind. I don’t think it can ever be overstated just how big a game changer small pox was in the Americas. The final assault against the Aztecs was pretty much against the walking dead. Even Montezuma’s successor was killed by disease.
While technology did play an important role, I think it is often overstated. Spanish armor was definitely effective as well as their guns, but it wasn’t as big a factor as some make it out to be. Horses however, now THAT was something that could change the tide of a battle. Even after the natives began to lose their fear of the horses, they were still very effective in several instances, particularly at the critical battle of Otumba.
Yet another factor was poor leadership by Montezuma. This may be debated, but I feel that Montezuma really dropped the ball hard. He was outplayed by Cortés at pretty much every turn. I hate playing the “what if” game, but who knows what could’ve happened if Cuauhtémoc had some how taken command earlier.
And last but not least, I definitely would not discount the balls and ingenuity of Hernán Cortés and his core officers. There were plenty of times where they had their asses handed to them, yet he pressed on and somehow had the charisma to hold his diverse band of fortune seekers together.
Hernán Cortés
Roger David Benham:
Plus the conquistadores were often the veterans of the fighting around the Spanish European empire, so rolling back a line or forming into tercios came very easily to them.
Otumba proves your point. IIRC, the gunpowder was wet, so the arquebusiers played little part in the battle as musketeers, but the cavalry concentrated on the Texcocan nobles and leaders, winning the battle.
Interestingly, the Tabascans tried to fool the cannons by throwing grass and earth into the air whenever one fired. While they still lost, I think it shows the intelligence and ingenuity of the native Mexicans!
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THE DARK SIDE OF RUSSIA
The dark side of Russia is grey, gloomy, and full of “patriotic” posters offering $20,000 and debt write-off to those willing to become killers of people in a neighboring country.
army recruiting posters
Last night, Russia hit a maternity hospital in Odesa, during a massive drone and missile strike on the Ukrainian cities.
Kyiv city was on fire.
That’s the city with 4 million population.
Ukraine has to survive Armageddon every night.
I don’t know how much longer Europe and NATO need to realize that killer drones flying from Russia towards the Ukrainian cities could be drones flying to European cities — and that Russia has more grievances against Europe than it ever had about Ukraine.
And if Ukraine falls to Russia, then it will be Europe next.
Because Russia is in a bad shape and the only working industry is the military industrial complex making killer drones and missiles.
Russia was making 500 large killer drones per month in 2022 — they are making 5,000 such drones per month now.
Countries of Europe near the Ukrainian border already had Russian drones and missiles flying in their air space.
Particularly, the Baltics are extremely vulnerable to an attack by Russia — both from the land and the Baltic Sea.
Belarus, while not supplying troops to Putin, is de facto occupied by Russia and aiding Putin in waging the war.
Putin also demonstratively announced installing the Russian nukes in Belarus.
Being a neighbor to Russia is a precarious fate.
But those who are not Russia’s neighbors, can’t just sit back and relax, in hopes that the Russians won’t target them.
Their cities may not burn in fires immediately, but Putin will demand their governments to bow to Russia politically and militarily.
I think in 3.5 years of the full scale war the Russians have demonstrated fully the dark side of Russia — a country built on brutal violence, corruption and lies. The violence, corruption and lies aren’t bugs of the system — they are the foundation.
And the majority of citizens of Russia resigned to their fate — “accepted the reality,” they call it — while the violent, sadistic minority gleefully embraced it, reveling in the ability to abuse others with impunity.
The power Putin and FSB have over the population and “elites” is based on kompromat and mandate to inflict violence (including most reprehensible acts, recorded for future kompromat). An arrest means not just being locked in a room with no way out, but torture by hunger, thirst, cold, and lack of sleep — that’s as a minimum. Add to that rotten food, beatings, systemic daily torture of all kinds (electrical shocks, plastic bags on the head with no ability to breathe — until convulsions; pulling off nails and teeth with pliers, and much more). All types of rape — all of it on camera.
That’s the basis of FSB power in Russia.
That’s why Russians don’t rebel.
Because rebels are thrown in jail, where they are tortured.
The whole society is split into abusers and abused. There is no one who is “blissfully unaware.” All of them know.
The darkness isn’t lurking in the shadows.
It has permeated Russia. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
Alan Kruza:
Elena Gold, What a nightmare country Russia is! Thanks for the updates. We don’t really get detailed updates here in the U.S. and I can see them becoming even fewer as we become more and more an autocracy.
Elena Gold:
20,000 anti-drone missiles contracted to Ukraine were sent by Trump to the Middle East — while Russian drones are raining on Ukrainian cities, killing civilians every night.
Oriana:
I remember reading a comment by a young professional Russian woman who managed to leave Russia: “I didn’t want my children to grow up in such a cynical country.”
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ANOTHER ASPECT OF THE DARK SIDE OF RUSSIA
a brutalist Soviet monument in Donetsk
One thing that deeply irks me about Russia is trying to fool the less developed world that they are anti-imperialists interested in the well-being of the so-called “Global South”, the downtrodden brown and black folk of the mundo. Coming from the pasty white, white-as-ghost Russian northerners. What a crock of sh!t. Like we’re a bunch of gullible dipsh!t morons who’ll do anything for a handout.
I am from a “Global South” country, almost all of my family is still there, and I am disgusted by Russia trying to lead a “Global South” initiative. Especially their propaganda and resource extraction efforts in Africa, in order to feed their hungry war machine. Why does Russia not welcome African immigration to their “storied” lands? After all, they need workers and their population is shrinking.
I researched academic articles on the countries with the worst records for racial discrimination against Blacks (with the help of AI to parse through the research), and # 1 was Libya (because of their modern day slave trade in Black Africans), and #2 was RUSSIA. On so many levels, F*CK YOU RUSSIA, GO AWAY.
What made me curious about Russian discrimination against Blacks is my own experiences with Russians. They’d be welcome in the KKK.
Just like the Ukrainians, we prefer Russia just stay in its borders and not bother the rest of the world. They are pests, don’t get the hint when they’re not welcome. I know from experience.
RUSSIA LOOKS DOWN ON EVERYONE SO THAT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO LOOK AT ITSELF.
Johnny Hamilton:
I agree with you.
It is tragic. The global south and the world's poor have been convinced that their lives will be better, if only hurt and harm can be caused to the west.
Ale Ale:
The funny thing is that while they present themselves as a leader of the south of the world, at the same time they present themselves as the protector of whiteness and Christianity (seen as conservative tradition more than a religion) in the north of the world, by actively financing extreme Right wing movements in all Europe and beyond.
How do people who buys to this narrative do not notice how Putin and Russia are the models of all the Fascist leaders and aspiring leaders in the EU and beyond?
Sam Kecal:
Russia looks down on everyone so that it doesn't have to look at itself.
*
The good times in Silicon Valley are over—at least as far as the current generation of coders is concerned. The software industry is shrinking and, since 2023, the tech industry has been hemorrhaging jobs at an astounding rate. Workers who would’ve been secure several years ago are now out on their asses. While the reasons for this are diverse (AI is often discussed as a potential culprit and the overall economy has had its ups and downs over the past several years), one potential driver could also be the tax cuts that Trump passed in 2017.
It turns out that a little-known provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 altered a longstanding loophole, known as Section 174, that allowed the tech industry to offload the cost of its research and development operations onto the federal government. Prior to the TCJA, tech companies could deduct 100 percent of the costs of R&D, allowing tech businesses the freedom to commit significant resources towards innovation. Bloomberg reports that, as Congress sought to find a way to offset the cost of giving big tax cuts to billionaires, one place where they discovered fat to trim was the tech industry’s R&D funding.
2017’s bill shifted the deduction from a full write-off to funding that would have to be parsed out over a period of several years. The provision that pared back the funding did not kick in until 2022, however. Not long after it went into effect, the tech industry began shedding jobs like nobody’s business.
Indeed, 2023 and 2024 were historically bad years for the tech industry, with major companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google booting workers by the thousands. Quartz took a deeper look at the ties between this policy shift and the tech industry’s troubles and now speculates that there is a positive correlation:
…the delayed change to a decades-old tax provision — buried deep in the 2017 tax law — has contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying, white-collar jobs. That’s the picture that emerges from a review of corporate filings, public financial data, analysis of timelines, and interviews with industry insiders. One accountant, working in-house at a tech company, described it as a “niche issue with broad impact,” echoing sentiments from venture capital investors also interviewed for this article. Some spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.
Quartz also notes that the policy change would have translated into a loss of income for a variety of positions:
The tax benefits of salaries for engineers, product and project managers, data scientists, and even some user experience and marketing staff — all of which had previously reduced taxable income in year one — now had to be spread out over five- or 15-year periods.
The reality of the government’s subsidization of Silicon Valley is particularly ironic given the rabid anti-government sentiment currently circulating in the industry. People like Marc Andreessen would have you believe that tech’s R&D can be funded through private money alone, despite no reputable track record of it happening.
Elon Musk’s DOGE, meanwhile, recently attacked the very parts of the government that have been responsible for helping companies like his own (Tesla) flourish. It’s yet another sign that America’s billionaires are so greed-addled that they’re willing to shoot a gift horse in the mouth and call it victory.
Not everybody in the tech industry is an idiot, however. There is currently a concerted effort to reestablish the government’s R&D subsidy. The American Innovation and R&D Competitiveness Act, which was introduced by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, would restore the full flow of federal dollars for tech’s development needs. Last month, representatives from major tech firms reportedly signaled to the Trump administration that they might pull back from previous pledges of U.S. investment if the full tax subsidy didn’t return.
DrEmilioLizardo:
Most people have no idea how much and in how many different ways they benefit from the federal government. This is going to be a very big FAFO moment for a lot of people. And they are somehow going to blame the Democrats.
Atlas Plugged:
These Romantic ideals of a libertarian utopia conveniently ignore some inconvenient facts. In the first place, they ignore the help anyone who is successful has received from the government to become successful. They like to think they’ve pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, but that is largely fantasy. It doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t work hard, make good decisions, and delay gratification now for a greater reward later. But luck plays a part, and, whether they like to admit it or not, somewhere along the line they benefitted from some form of government spending that they are now whining about.
Oh, they’ll claim they could have gotten by without it, and that they’d probably be even more successful without all the taxes and regulations. Some of them might even be right. But most of them are delusional. Somewhere out there is the owner of a car dealership just outside a military base, who spends his hours bemoaning wasteful government spending. But tell him there is a rumor the local military base will be closed because it isn’t needed, and he’ll be on the phone screaming at his congressman pretty quickly.
BCGeiger:
R&D tech jobs in the US are a bloodbath right now, but you can be sure that like the scientists and engineers that are losing grants and positions, the best and the brightest are being recruited to move to other countries. Once established there, most won’t be coming back, and won’t be teaching the next generation of American students.
Techweavers Techveavers:
This is all theater. Almost every coding, white collar or informational based job will be gone within the next few years. Anything that AI can do, it will be tasked to do. This might have started with a tax loophole, but AI doesn't sleep, it doesn't complain, it doesn't make tweets that are offensive and it doesn't get paid. The "soft costs" associated with employees are a lot more than people think. Employment insurance, pensions (Social Security this is 3x the employee contribution), sick time and taxes plus the costs associated to venue or office costs.
All of these go away with AI. Even the actual cost of AI is marginalized when you consider how many jobs one server running a decent AI construct can do. Blame the Democrats, blame the Republicans, it won't matter. Learn a job that AI cannot do. Maybe plumbing or electrician because your coding future is gone.
*
SCIENTISTS ARE CONSIDERING LEAVING THE U.S.
A Nature poll of more than 1,000 scientists revealed that 75% of them are considering leaving the United States due to the uncertainties caused by the Trump administration’s slashing of federal and university funding.
Since the second Trump term began, it has slashed research funding to universities and federal agencies purportedly in the name of efficiency, potentially hamstringing the country’s ability to move the needle on scientific discovery.
The recent poll indicates that the administration’s actions may also imperil the country’s standing as an oasis for scientists fleeing uncertain or outright hostile attitudes abroad—consider Nobel Prize winners Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi, among many other scientists who flocked to the United States as fascist governments rose across Europe in the early 20th century. As the recent poll shows, the chilling effect may cause a brain drain as researchers across fields seek greener pastures elsewhere.
According to Nature, the numbers looking to leave were even higher among researchers early in their career, such as PhD students and postgraduate researchers. As the poll shows, 548 of 690 (79.4%) of postdocs are thinking about leaving, and 255 of 340 (75%) are weighing the decision.
“Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation,” Nature says.
Many researchers who spoke to Nature indicated that they did not want to leave the U.S., but the administration’s attitudes made it clear that there would be better opportunities to conduct scientific research abroad.
Earlier this month, France’s Aix Marseille University said that several dozen scientists in the U.S. had responded to a call it put out offering safe harbor to Americans seeking to leave the country. The researchers who expressed interest were from institutions including Stanford, Yale, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, among others.
The second Trump administration has science objectives firmly in its crosshairs. Since January, the administration has reportedly laid off thousands of federal workers at agencies including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Park Service (NPS), and cut funding across a wider swath of institutions and programs.
Assuming best intentions—just as a thought experiment, so suspend your disbelief—the administration is attempting to streamline the government by reducing wasteful spending, making U.S. agencies and institutions as efficient as possible in their pursuit of discovery.
You can now relieve yourself of those optimistic musings. The government’s directives have wreaked havoc on the efficiency of these institutions, according to experts who spoke to Gizmodo, and risk undoing years of progress at home and abroad.
But some of the cuts are also done in line with Project 2025, a conservative movement that seeks to aggressively cut back on environmental protections in the name of liberty and personal freedoms. So while some of the layoffs are purportedly driven by the bottom line, they are also in lockstep with the ideological framework of the administration.
This month, the Trump administration is considering cutting funding to domestic HIV prevention efforts—walking back the frankly credible agenda Trump outlined in his first term to combat HIV, with a goal of eradicating the virus domestically by 2030. It’s not clear who on HIV’s side has sway with the Trump administration, but they evidently have infectious appeal.
The funding changes are happening in lockstep with cultural shifts urged by the administration, especially through the White House’s eagerness to dismantle programs and language advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which has become a lightning rod in conservative circles as a boogeyman representing the “woke” agenda.
Last week, NASA Watch first reported that NASA’s “DEI Sanitation Squad” had removed graphic novels from the agency website that told the fictional story of the first woman to walk on the Moon. No woman has ever walked on the Moon, though the Artemis missions will change that—though it’s now less clear if that’s an agency priority.
If the United States wants to retain its stature as a bastion of scientific discovery, it must show the bright and budding minds stateside that there is opportunity for them to build their careers and become leaders in their fields. Over the last few months, the Trump administration has dispelled them of that notion, and it looks like it will continue with its agenda, full steam ahead.
https://gizmodo.com/poll-finds-that-75-of-scientists-are-thinking-about-leaving-the-u-s-2000582743
Brian Anderson:
Frankly, considering his other agency appointments, I’m a little surprised he didn’t put a flat-earther in charge of NASA.
*
WHY IT’S EASIER TO BE NICER TO OTHERS THAN TO OURSELVES
A glaring omission from modern behavioral science is the study of the hand movements made by the singers of soulful ballads. For those with eyes to see, all of human life’s deepest truths are contained in the expressive gesticulations of divas. A perfect example — and a good place to inaugurate the formal discipline of what we may as well call hand-throw-pology — is the video for Toni Braxton’s 1996 hit “Un-Break My Heart.”
Sexily grieving for her sexy boyfriend (whom we see tragically, yet somehow still sexily, killed at the start, in a slow-motion motorcycle accident) by moping around her house, bumping into walls and refusing to put on some clothes, Braxton makes a number of hand gestures throughout that are equally revealing.
“Don’t leave me alone in the rain…,” she sings while clutching her own upper arms in her wispy black mourning negligée. “Uncry these tears…,” she pleads as she first presses her palms together, then caresses her hairline in the shower. “Undo this hurt that you caused when you walked out the door…,” she demands, on stage now and with a few more clothes on, bringing it home and purposefully placing both hands over her still un-unbroken heart.
These are all classic chanteuse maneuvers to be sure. But according to actual, peer-reviewed research, they’re also power moves in the application of psychological self-compassion. For many of us, they might even prove potent weapons in combating a particularly unhelpful quirk in our natures: The fact that most of us find it easy to be kind to others when they’re in need of emotional support, yet will act like callous shitbags when it comes to reflecting on our own personal crises and failings.
The good news is that while singers’ hand-choreography isn’t yet the object of scientific investigation, this odd dearth of self-compassion is — and progress is being made. Having, in 2003, come up with what is now the definitive scale psychologists use to quantify and measure people’s self-compassion, Kristin Neff is the leader in this emerging field. And per a recent study of hers, fully three-quarters of us are habitually “significantly” nicer to others than we are to ourselves. While the rest, she finds, will show kindness to themselves and others in equal amounts, Neff estimates that only “maybe five percent are more compassionate to themselves than others. I haven’t studied them yet; I don’t know if they’re narcissists, but they’re really weird!”
She has studied the vast majority who seem prone to self-disdain, though, and Neff, who is associate professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas at Austin — has found that self-comforting hand movements are one surprisingly effective way to avoid our unfortunate tendency to do ourselves down. “We use physical touch as a really useful [technique] because it happens at the preverbal level. We help people find the type of touch that feels supportive. For some people, it’s hands on heart; other people, cradling their face; some people, holding their own hand.”
For T. Braxon circa 1996, as we’ve seen, it was all three.
As co-founder of the educational non-profit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, Neff also teaches other methods of self-support, including the regular habit of talking to yourself, whether out loud or in your head, in warm, encouraging terms. We’ll come on to exactly why these tactics might prove so successful in bolstering our mental health — and the explanation gets right to the heart of the weird duality that’s at work when we’re doling out our sympathies. But first it’s worth outlining what Neff and other psychologists who study it mean by self-compassion, and why they think it’s such an important trait to acquire.
“When you go into battle, who do you want for your side — an ally or an enemy?” asks Neff. “With self-compassion, it’s like you’ve got your own back.” It’s much stronger, she says, “to have an ally inside your head than an enemy who’s cutting you down and saying, ‘You can’t do it,’ and ‘You’re not good enough.’”
She draws a distinction between this cheerleader approach to self-worth and the perhaps more familiar notion of self-esteem, which she characterizes more in Mean Girls terms, as “a fair-weather friend” and believes is nowhere near as helpful to our overall well-being. “Self-esteem, if you think of it just as a positive judgement of oneself, can sometimes work and sometimes not. So when we fail, our self-esteem takes a huge hit, right when we need it the most. Our self-esteem deserts us.”
What’s Self-Love Got To Do with It?
As a mental-health insurance policy, actively being kind to yourself, compared to merely investing pride in yourself, comes with a range of added protections. “The research is clear that people who lack self-compassion tend to have trouble in many important areas of human flourishing,” says Taylor Kreiss, an L.A.-based life-coach and speaker who draws on positive psychology and philosophy to advise clients on “the art and science of a happy life.”
“People who lack self-compassion,” he continues, “tend to experience more stress, less motivation toward valued goals, diminished resilience, maladaptive perfectionism, isolation and insecurity.” For men in particular, he thinks a reluctance to offer yourself support can pose a “devastating hazard,” in that “a lack of self-compassion impedes our ability to live authentically; to become the men we want to be.”
If the practice of self-compassion is the answer, though, cradling yourself in soothing hands and softly giving yourself pep talks might not seem like the guy-est thing to do.
“Unfortunately,” says Kreiss, “many men tend to think it’s weak or woo-woo bullshit to engage in the elements of self-compassion.” Instead, inherited, baked-in ideas of heterosexual masculinity will very often prevail: “Many men have been culturally conditioned to berate themselves with brutal self-criticism when they find imperfection or weakness. They have your stereotypical angry football coach or the gunnery sergeant from Full Metal Jacket in their head, just waiting to curse them out whenever they mess up.”
It’s an apt analogy. In addressing the idea that the habits of self-compassion might come across as a sign of weakness, Kristin Neff points to a study led by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which assessed levels of post-traumatic stress disorder among combat troops who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their paper, published in April 2015, the researchers said they’d “found a negative association between self-compassion and PTSD symptom severity at baseline and 12-month follow-up.” Which means, explains Neff, “those soldiers who were kinder and more supportive about what they had experienced toward themselves were actually less likely to get PTSD.”
Evidently at least some men, then, even in as towel-snappingly masculine an environment as the military, are routinely giving themselves a break. “The barriers to self-compassion are akin to the barriers that keep men out of therapy,” says Kreiss. But while “they often come up in coaching male clients and in everyday life,” he says, “thankfully as a society we’re trying to overcome many of these characteristics of toxic masculinity.”
Clearly, though, it’s not just emotionally inhibited men who struggle with bestowing appropriate levels of kindness on themselves. Neff suggests that cultural norms, particularly in the U.S., mean many might associate self-care with other frowned-upon “selfies” like self-indulgence and selfishness. “We use the whip with ourselves because we assume that that’s the most effective way to motivate ourselves,” she says. “It kind of works but it has all these unintended consequences, like to make you depressed and ashamed; it can give you performance anxiety; it can make you afraid of failure.”
You Are the Wind Beneath Your Wings
According to positive psychologists, developing a healthy self-compassionate disposition is closely associated with mindfulness, a word that might cause more than a few to flinch at the self-help hype and Buddhist mystique surrounding it. While, according to Neff, being mindful of your suffering is an essential ingredient in any act of self-compassion — because you can’t extend a helping hand to yourself if you aren’t first aware that you need it — she insists you don’t need to be an eighth-level bodhisattva to get the benefit. “You don’t have to practice mindfulness meditation to do self-compassion; you can just be aware. And you’ve done the practice your whole life, probably — where people learn how to be a good friend and how to be a support to someone. You can fall back on that.”
Getting practical, Kreiss suggests cultivating kindness by “searching for a thought you had earlier in the day that was overly critical, writing it down, then turning your criticism into a statement of self-compassion.” His top recommendation is “to set a series of alarms on your phone, so that eight times a day a message pops up on your screen reminding you to “Practice self compassion.” “Try this for two weeks,” he says, “and see if you don’t find your spontaneous natural reactions becoming more self-compassionate.” Alternatively, of course, you could schedule eight internal choruses of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” and let your hands do the talking.
Another of the central aspects of Neff’s concept of self-compassion is one we should all be able to relate to. To be truly kind to yourself, she argues, is to realize that whatever shame, embarrassment, disappointment, sorrow or anxiety you might be experiencing, those feelings are being shared, somewhere, by someone else. Because they’re all inescapable aspects of being biological humans dealing with our universal human shit. And it’s this element, waking up to what Neff calls our “common humanity,” that helps explain why some 75 percent of us are emotionally generous with friends but are continually short-changing ourselves.
Our emotional asymmetry, she says, springs from the fact “that self-criticism and self-compassion tap in to two different physiological systems.” When we self-criticize, explains Neff, it’s often a trigger for our body’s fight-or-flight stress response, which is controlled by a neurological network known, slightly confusingly, as the sympathetic nervous system.
Evolved in our hunter-gatherer past to put us in a state of high alertness and heart-thumping readiness for action, it’s a system that’s all too quick to activate whenever we feel threatened. When the threat arises from ourselves, “because we’ve failed or we aren’t good enough,” says Neff, “then we try to fight ourselves, control ourselves, so we can be safe. But when my friend fails, I’m not directly threatened. So I don’t have to go into that fight, flight or freeze mode.”
“The thing we have to remember,” she says, is that our aggressive reaction toward ourselves “is all about wanting to be safe.” But it turns out our bodies have a second mechanism for helping us do that. This parasympathetic nervous system is “a later thing evolutionarily — the mammalian care system,” says Neff, which regulates the heart rate and our levels of “feel-good” hormones such as oxytocin. This system helps mammals bond with each other “in the context of warmth, care, kindness, touch and gentle sounds. That’s what motivates children to be near their parents and motivates parents to take care of their children.” But compared to the fight-or-flight path to feeling secure, this system “doesn’t come online as quickly and it takes a little extra effort.”
“So all we’re doing with self-compassion,” says Neff, “is we’re teaching people to use this other safety system — the care system — for themselves, to help them feel safe. It’s very doable. That’s the crazy thing: It’s not that hard for people to do. Because they already have it!”
Which makes sense of why the mannerisms of being nice to yourself — those kind words and ballad-singer heart-pressing and head-caressing — might actually have a great deal of merit in fortifying our mental defenses. “I don’t want to make self-compassion sound like some sort of tonic for all of life’s ills,” says Kreiss, “but the research suggests it’s a learnable skill that unlocks many of the most sought-after goods of life.”
It’s just as Whitney Houston once sang while lightly tapping on her chest: “Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.” (See? Diva hands: All of life’s truths. Someone really should get on this.)
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-is-it-so-much-harder-to-be-nice-to-ourselves-than-to-other-people?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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THE JOY OF LIVING ALONE
Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (c. 1817) captures the beauty of solitude
From spending time by yourself to making the most of being single, flying solo can be fulfilling – a philosophy championed by a new wave of books.
In Wim Wenders' recent film Perfect Days, the main character, a Tokyo toilet cleaner, spends many of his hours in solitude; watering plants, contemplating, listening to music and reading. While more characters are introduced as the film develops, for many viewers its earlier moments are, indeed, perfect; described by the BBC's own Nicholas Barber as a "meditation on the serenity of an existence stripped to its essentials", it really struck a chord. No wonder.
Wim Wenders's 2023 film Perfect Days was praised for its meditative study of a man's solitary but content existence
Thoughtful and positive outlooks on solitude have been taking up more and more space on our screens, bookshelves and smartphones, from podcasts to viral TikToks. Seemingly, there's never been a better time to be alone.
In the past couple of years, several titles on the topic have been released, with a few more in the works. Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, and Solo: Building a Remarkable Life of Your Own hit the shelves in 2024, and Nicola Slawson's Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms was published in February. Then last month saw the release of Emma Gannon's much-anticipated novel Table For One; having made her name with non-fiction books questioning traditional ideas of success and productivity, Gannon is now reconsidering modern relationships, in a love story focusing on a young woman finding joy in being alone, rather than with a partner.
Later this year, two more self-help guides, The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World and The Joy of Sleeping Alone, are coming out, as well as a paperback, English translation of Daniel Schreiber's Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living, which originally came out in Germany in 2023.
A shift in attitudes
Packed with keen observations and helpful tips, this new wave of books aims not only to destigmatize solitude, but also to make a case for its benefits and pleasures. Such a powerful stream of publications might come as a surprise, at first, to everyone who has lived through the pandemic and inevitably heard of – or got a bitter taste of – the so-called "loneliness epidemic", a term popularized in 2023 by then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. "Post pandemic, there [was] a huge focus on loneliness, for a really good reason," says Robert Coplan, a professor in psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa and author of The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World. But because of the concerns about the effects of loneliness, he says, solitude ended up "with a bit of a bad reputation – throwing the baby out with the bath water, so to speak.”
Now, though, the discourse is course-correcting itself. The distinction between loneliness and solitude, according to Coplan, is an important one, and many writers echo this sentiment. "While loneliness is a serious and harmful problem for some people, it is a subjective state very different from solitude, that someone has [actively] chosen for positive reasons," says journalist Heather Hansen. In 2024, she co-authored the aforementioned Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone with Netta Weinstein and Thuy-vy T Nguyen. Hansen had watched the media telling us we're very lonely for a while; but as a counter to this narrative, she says, "people are reflecting on their own lives and recognizing that they are choosing solitude for various reasons that benefit them.”
"I have a theory that since the pandemic we've been able to clearly understand the difference between loneliness and solitude, and chosen solitude," says Emma Gannon, who is also a big proponent of "slow living." The extremes of the pandemic – being cooped up with all your loved ones, or, contrastingly, going for months without human contact – had prepared us, Gannon says, "to have nuanced conversations about the differences between isolation and joyful alone time.”
Nestled cosily within these timely conversations is Gen Z-ers and millennials' re-evaluation of romantic relationships and enthusiastic embracing of single life, alongside a careful reassessment of interpersonal relationships in general. Gannon's new novel might be a fictional depiction of a young woman reinvesting in a relationship with herself, but it will ring true to many readers who grapple with what are increasingly seen as outdated societal expectations to "settle down". According to a 2023 US survey, two out of five Gen Z-ers and millennials think marriage is an outdated tradition, and in the UK only just over half of Gen Z men and women are predicted to marry, according to the Office of National Statistics.
In April, a viral TikTok, with over one million likes and close to 37,000 comments, showcased one man's perspective on dating women who live alone, and like it this way. Many women deemed the analysis "spot on" and related eagerly. Nicola Slawson, who based Single: Living a Complete Life on Your Own Terms on her popular Substack The Single Supplement, isn't surprised. "The number of people living alone in the UK has been steadily increasing over the last decade or so," Slawson points out, with this fueling a cultural shift towards the acceptance of single people, and putting a focus on "freedom and independence, and especially a rejection of domesticity, as women are realizing they don't have to put up with things they might have been expected to in previous generations.”
Having said that, our cultural fascination with being alone is deeply rooted. Capturing the beauty of solitude has been a focus for numerous artists over the centuries – from German romanticist Caspar David Friedrich, whose great works include Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, (c. 1817), which can be seen in the Hamburger Kunsthalle art museum's collection in Germany, to the revered 20th-Century US artist Edward Hopper, and his paintings of solo city dwellers.
A New Yorker review of the 2022 Hopper retrospective at the city's Whitney museum noted, "Everything about the urban life he shows us is isolated, uncommunal – and yet his images of apparent loneliness seem somehow anything but grim, rather proudly self-reliant."
Daniel Schreiber believes the correlation between people living alone, sans partner, and being lonely has traditionally been overestimated. "Society understands better now that romantic love is not the only model to live by, or something to wish for," he adds. "There are different ways of life, and it's not as necessary to be in a traditional romantic relationship."
In Solo: Building a Remarkable Life of Your Own, Peter McGraw, a self-titled "bachelor", and professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado, makes a similar point, with gusto. "There's a lot of mythology around single living, and a failure to understand the reasons marriage was invented – mostly as a business arrangement," he says. "Frankly, the message of rom-coms, love songs and Jane Austen novels" – that we need a partner to be fulfilled – "isn't backed by data," he says. Many studies cited in Solo show that even if personal happiness spikes around marriage, it doesn't last.
Even within a relationship, traditional routines can be upended to allow for more alone time, as advocated in The Joy of Sleeping Alone. Its author, yoga and meditation teacher Cynthia Zak, noticed that many women prefer sleeping alone to sleeping in the same bed as their partners, and decided to write the book, originally in Spanish, in order to advocate for "more space to express what we need and feel, more opportunities to let go of fears and limiting beliefs, and more freedom to choose."
How to be alone well
If being, and doing things, alone is increasingly widespread – and stigma-free – then how to make the most of it? A couple of key factors everyone agrees on are finding a healthy balance between solo time and communing with others – and having the ability to choose solitude, rather than being forced to experience it. "The greatest indication of success in time alone is that a person has chosen that space believing that there is something important and meaningful there," says Hansen, adding that solitude is a "neutral blob of sculpting clay; it can be whatever we mold it into."
Fittingly, according to McGraw it's perhaps best to not mould said blob into "lying in bed, vaping and ordering Uber Eats". Rather, he suggests channeling alone time into creative pursuits and pastimes that tend to blossom in solitude; a walk or a run, people-watching at a cafe, going to a museum and "taking it all in, as fast or slow as you can". Or how about "sitting in a bath listening to Vivaldi", he adds more specifically, or taking an online course?
For those who are single, leaning into potentially blissful solitude – instead of waiting for it to be over – is advised, Slawson says. "I used to find myself putting off doing things until I 'settled down' or until I found a partner, but you need to live the life you have got and squeeze as much joy as possible from it instead of feeling like you're in a waiting room, waiting for your life to start," she says. And when societal pressure builds? "Don't default to any type of thinking or a script," McGraw suggests. "The nice thing is, that there's now an alternative script."
More broadly, alone time is full of potential and possibilities. "I think solitude inspires a wonderful sense of creativity, it gets the juices flowing and encourages problem solving," Gannon says. She suggests treating solitude as an adventure – or a chance to reconnect with yourself, through journaling or reveling in your senses: "The soft blanket, the sound of music, the taste of your food. What can you see, smell, touch and sense when you are alone?"
Further turning inward, says Zak, can deepen one's understanding of solitude; she suggests paying attention to moments of solitude, and turning these moments into recurring rituals that aid relaxation and reflection by practice. "Ask yourself, what is the thing that you most enjoy being alone with? Make a jewel of the moment you choose and give yourself the task to cherish this specific space more and more," she says.
And most importantly, if obviously? It's about mixing things up. "Humans do need social interaction – but I would also say that humans need solitude," says Coplan. "It's finding the right balance that is the key to happiness and wellbeing. Everyone has a different balance that's going to work for them."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250609-how-being-alone-can-make-you-happier
*
I WAS THE POSTER GIRL FOR OCD. THEN I QUESTIONED EVERYTHING I’D BEEN TOLD ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS.
When I sought help for crippling invasive thoughts, I was told I had a disease like any other. But I wasn’t able to recover until I understood the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare.
Jorm Sangsorn The story had started when, aged 15, I was suddenly bombarded by relentless, maddening doubts about core aspects of my identity: my capacity for violence and abuse, my physical appearance, my sexuality, whether I could trust my bones not to break. Graphic, unbearable thoughts and images started looping in my mind, thousands of times a day. I had no language for my devastating anxiety, or for my shame, so I kept it all a secret for 12 years.
The scene we were filming that day was based on the euphoric moment in my 20s when I first discovered that my thoughts were typical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and that there were others out there battling this common enemy. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Fuck. It’s OCD. I’ve got OCD!” said actor Charly Clive as she read a list of symptoms from the medical textbook in her hands, giving voice to the astonishing clarity and relief that diagnosis can bring in a bewildering mental-health landscape.
Regardless of the labels I’d been given over the years (I’d previously been diagnosed with depression and anxiety), doctors had always framed it in the same way: illness. This was due to the received wisdom that mental disorders are diseases of the brain with with organic, biological root causes; and to the medical language that infused charity campaigns and the media.
It was also due to the ideas explicitly promoted by professionals who treated me. One of my CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) therapists said that OCD is primarily caused by a misfiring amygdala, a structure in the temporal lobe of the brain. Another said that their trademarked therapy could “rewire my brain” in six weeks.
In 2013, I finally shared the story of my struggle with OCD in an article that became a book, Pure, that was adapted into the TV show of the same name. Soon followed invitations to write more articles, endorse charities, speak at conferences and guest on TV magazine shows. I had become the poster girl for OCD.
And I co-opted the language of medical professionals who treated me. “Mental illness can happen to any of us,” I wrote in Vice in 2014, “like a cold or a cancer.” I broadcast messages I’d been told were facts: the root cause of mental illnesses are biological abnormalities in the brain; mental illnesses are illnesses like any other.
Sitting on the staircase in that library in 2018, watching the TV show being made, should have been an affectionate look back on the pivotal diagnosis that led to my recovery. A chance to celebrate the turning-point moment when I’d first seen my secret inner reality reflected back at me. Charly wept in front of the camera while I wept behind it as we rolled another take.
But as our tale of hope was making its way to the screens of millions of people, in private I was growing more hopeless. I knew what no one else knew, that the relief of being diagnosed had been brutally short. That not only had the terrifying intrusive thoughts now returned, but I had begun to question almost everything I thought I knew about mental health.
*
The turning point came a few months before filming, when I visited Trinity College Dublin to interview neuroscientist Prof Claire Gillan for a mental health charity podcast. Gillan was studying feelings and behaviors across a variety of psychiatric diagnoses. I was accustomed to softball media engagements about fighting stigma, and expected more of the same. I asked what she had discovered.
“OCD is not a biological reality,” Gillan said, very matter of factly. “That’s what the data increasingly shows.”
A lump rose in my throat. I fumbled for a response. Hadn’t researchers proved that OCD brains are different biologically? (Some neuroimaging studies show increased activity in various cortices.) “Abnormalities in these regions are by no means exclusive to OCD,” Gillan said. “A great many disorders show the same kinds of brain changes.”
I didn’t know this. I thought my brain shared the same abnormalities as everyone else with OCD and that these were the root causes of our obsessions; that we had brains that were measurably different from the brains of people with, say, ADHD or anorexia. I thought this was the definition of “official” diagnosis. Gillan explained that, on the contrary, psychiatric diagnoses are not based on biomarkers; they are subjective constructs.
I felt torn with nerves for the rest of the interview. I wanted to dismiss what I’d heard, and yet felt compelled to learn more. Afterwards, I started reading, and was incredulous to discover innumerable similar assessments. Apparently, Prof Allen Frances, who literally wrote the book on diagnosis as the lead editor of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the handbook widely used by doctors), had said psychiatric diagnosis was “bullshit”. As he told Wired magazine in 2010, “These concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.”
As I dived deeper, I encountered ideas that shook me and my message at the foundations: decades of criticism, not just of diagnosis but of the entire medical model. Evidence that exposure to environmental stress is the leading determinant of common mental health problems like anxiety, depression and OCD, seemed to be overwhelming, whereas evidence that organic brain dysfunction or genetics are the leading causes of such conditions seemed to be comparatively scant. I put down my laptop, lay down on the sofa and cried. This felt like an attack on my identity, like I was being told my suffering wasn’t serious. If my thoughts weren’t illness, did that mean they were “me”? Did I want the shit in my head? Did I choose this?
I would later come to understand that to question the medical model is not to question whether mental health problems exist: they are real and devastating. I would learn that, yes, there are brain changes that correlate with poor mental health, changes that entrench and compound distress. But neuroscience is far from being able to understand these correlations, much less categorize them into discrete conditions, or explain why brains start to become disordered in the first place. Mental health is far more complex and mysterious than any doctor had ever admitted.
But, for now, I was resistant. How could my illness be like any other, but not definable or testable? It was in this cognitive dissonance that I found myself on a TV shoot, sitting halfway up a spiral staircase, caught between fact and fiction. As I watched my old story being enacted around me, the pressure of a new and much scarier story was starting to build. If illness wasn’t the root cause of my suffering, what was?
*
Epiphanies are less a sudden bolt of novelty, more an arrival at a place where a part of you has been waiting for a long time. After Pure came out, the village that had sprung up around me, in which there was always something to do, some engagement to make, disappeared, and I reached rock bottom. It’d been 18 years since my intrusive thoughts had started. My entire adult life. I was so dissociated from the pain of this reality that I was self-harming again.
Having read about promising findings from research into psychedelics, and figuring I had nothing to lose if I lost my mind, I went to the home of a couple of hippies in Amsterdam and did a big dose of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms. (The psychological risks of doing this are serious; I recommend careful research.)
At the peak of the trip, I saw a terrifying vision of my mother getting pulled into a colossal black hole in the sky. An image that I then realized represented the cosmic loss I’d felt throughout childhood, as I’d countless times watched her getting dragged off to psychiatric hospital, or drugged into catatonia. When I came round, I was not “cured”, but I had new perspectives. There was never anything wrong with my brain; a fear of separation lay at the core of my problems. An internal stuckness that had never changed, even as I appeared to be flourishing.
The following year, with my intrusive thoughts still gnawing, I landed a job as a writer on a Netflix sci-fi series, a role refreshingly removed from my life of mental health advocacy. “What happened here?” a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
“I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. “Really?”
“Really,” I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – “I was mentally ill” – no longer felt right. I was relieved when we were interrupted by another colleague.
In that silence I felt the absence of the medical paradigm I’d dismissed, which, for all its faults and its mischaracterization of my brain as diseased, had provided an easy way to communicate. So I set out on a mission to draw a new map, interviewing experts in neuroscience, psychedelics, Buddhism and trauma. I did loads of MDMA (ecstasy), both casually and in underground therapy. I meditated. Slowly, a new sense of meaning started to emerge. Having not long ago felt so disconnected that I hurt myself to feel alive, a realization started to dawn: I am not separate from the world.
*
The obvious insight that my ego had been protecting me from was that my mental health was not separate from my family’s; Mom’s depression was not separate from our financial hardship, which was not separate from decades of industrial privatizations that devastated the Midlands. And none of this is separate from my inscrutably complex neurobiology, which itself is a co-evolving story with everything around me.
This is what I think is wrong with the medical model: a failure to understand mental health in context. An assumption that a disorder is a “thing” that an individual has, that can be measured, independent of subjective experience. The trauma model can be just as reductive, turning healing into an individual consumer journey and ignoring the environmental conditions in which wounds form.
This has empowered professionals to decontextualize distress from the lives of those who experience it; to create pseudo-specific taxonomies of mental disorders. Diagnostic manuals have for decades been giving well-meaning psychiatrists and psychologists the illusion of explaining the suffering of the patient sitting in front of them. This system has hurt none more than those facing social adversity: financial deprivation, poor education, racial discrimination and so on, who are pathologized as though their reactive stress, and not the things to which they’re reacting, were the problem.
Mom’s hospital admissions were cyclical, happening annually for a run of several years. Once, when I visited her in late December, I struggled to contain my emotions on seeing the bittersweet Christmas cards that the patients had made and stuck to the wall.
There was a phrase I heard Mom say to doctors during those visits: “I can’t cope.” It was taken as symptomatic of the illness they said she had: bipolar disorder. It was never taken at face value, as a rational statement from a person who saw their struggles clearly.
Many are saying something similar. In 2024, millions of British people are lonely. In Europe, antidepressant use has doubled in 20 years. Globally, someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds.
“I’m troubled that we’re telling people who’ve got genuinely difficult lives that the problem is inside their brain rather than outside in the world,” I said to Canadian doctor Gabor Maté when I interviewed him.
“It’s poor kids and kids of color who are most likely to be diagnosed and medicated,” he replied. “This is trying to deal pharmacologically with what is essentially a social problem … All those years, when you were told that you had a biological disorder, did anybody ever tell you that your brain is shaped by the environment?”
“No,” I replied.
“That’s what the science has shown for decades.”
*
So why wasn’t I told? The answer to that is complex, and I’m suspicious of cartoonish portrayals of psychs pushing biomedical agendas for profit. Those I’ve interviewed have largely been compassionate and nuanced. But many are also badly incentivized and reluctant to scrutinize their practice.
In academia, psychiatrists will claim that criticizing the biomedical model is knocking down a straw man, since they long ago started considering psychological and social factors (what they call a biopsychosocial model). But I’ve seen little evidence of this shift. In England, we’re still five times more likely to be prescribed psych meds than therapy. And the discredited chemical imbalance theory (that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin) is still listed on half of all antidepressant leaflets.
Meanwhile, in clinic, patients’ opinions routinely matter less than those of doctors. Once, when Mom told her psychiatrist that therapy wasn’t helping, he scoffed: “Maybe the problem is your attitude?” I wanted her to stop being stubborn and do what the man with the qualifications said.
The medical model is insidious – it gets into people’s relationships, influencing the way we frame those we love. The rational bit of me knows that I was a kid and couldn’t have understood these things; the emotional bit of me feels I let her down.
I would become familiar with this power asymmetry in my own interactions with doctors, where subjective descriptions of my problems were repeatedly, often grandiosely, presented to me as objective explanations. One hallmark feature of mental illness is mistaking our models of reality for reality itself. Interesting that it’s also a hallmark feature of our mental healthcare.
I’ve fallen in love with a metaphor that gives me a balm for some of this. Writer Charles Foster says that true skeptical science embraces mystery. It is, he says, prismatic. “It takes a prism to show that white light is anything but white: that it’s composed of many colors.” If we’re to overcome our mental health crisis, we need to think prismatically. We need to resist simplifications and be inspired by the certainty that we are missing some richer shades of complexity on the side of the prism we can’t see.
If the medical model is willing to examine its assumptions, it may admit that its research is often a repackaging of knowledge that the west has forgotten or destroyed. Every year, studies are published “proving” that things like nature, creativity, exercise and community make us happier, framing them as prescriptions for ills rather than age-old preventives.
If the trauma model does the same. It may admit that searching for causal agents in the past can facilitate dissociation from normalized dysfunction in the present; from the miseries of consumerism and the 40-hour working week; from the fact that many of us live without meaningful relationships in what psychiatrist Bruce Perry chillingly calls “relational poverty.”
“In Tanzania, everything is communal,” said healer Euphrasia Nyaki when I told her my story. “If my mother was taken away, my aunts and grandmother would take over. Grandma used to live next door. Mama is the only mama, but at least you would have some resource to help you cope. That’s a big difference between the western culture and indigenous communal culture.”
I’ve heard it said that modern society, having forgotten it broke people into pieces long ago, now sits scratching its head wondering how to put them back together. But in that head-scratching, perhaps there’s an opportunity for change.
*
I’m going to throw up, I thought, as I took my last mouthful of mushrooms. It was 2023 and I was at a psychedelics retreat. I’d already done two years’ therapy with an underground guide, working with MDMA, alone and in combination with psilocybin. I was already feeling a lot better. My sleep had improved. Incredibly, my intrusive thoughts were mostly gone. I could be uplifted by the eye contact, voices and touch of others. My nervous system felt alive. But a part of me still felt stuck and I wanted to understand why.
When the trip began, with astonishing intensity, I met a part of me I never knew existed. A little free-school-meals kid with a bowl-cut fringe, who had insisted on staying in the past for 25 years because she was waiting to find out if Mom was coming home from mental hospital.
With its Gordian knot of doubts, OCD had attempted to distract me from this worry, or contain it, or otherwise put a story to it; to locate the source of uncertainty in myself, which I could control, rather than in the outside world, which I couldn’t.
Growing up, I was sold the idea that the only way to get people to take your mental struggles seriously is to call them illness. Paradoxically, it was only when I abandoned this idea that I reached a deeper appreciation of the seriousness of my suffering and could understand: my thoughts are not “me”, it wasn’t my fault. My disorder was not a disease or an enemy to be fought, but it was real. It was the part of me who always knew I was worth protecting.
To deconstruct my definition of suffering as mental illness was also to deconstruct my definition of getting better. If healing doesn’t mean a reduction in symptoms, what does it look like? I wasn’t going to find out by tripping or reading books or having therapy, but by stepping away from it all and living.
The medical model had taught me everything about being ill, and almost nothing about being a healthy, well-adjusted grownup, who has a sense of agency and accomplishment, whose relationships are infused with trust that reaches right down to the bones, heart, lungs, tummy.
I started to feel like that grownup only after I’d brought the youngest, most vulnerable parts of my psyche into the light.
I felt it last Christmas, sat next to Mom on the sofa. She was laughing at some silly thing my brother was saying. I hadn’t had any intrusive thoughts. Not a single one all day. In their place were small, new experiences of connection that’d always been there: the warmth of her hand, the vibration of voices in my chest.
Oriana: My own struggles taught me two important things, among many smaller insights. First, the twelve steps wisdom was right: at the core of the suffering was the assumption: "I am separate, different, and superior." The discovery that I was acting like a typical codependent was humiliating, but in a healing way. My love object couldn't bear the thought that he behaved like a typical alcoholic; unfortunately, he chose suicide over accepting that he was "typical" in any way.
But as a matter of fact, we are more similar to others than the modern cult of personal uniqueness would allow us to realize. Nor does it make us less mysterious and interesting to admit that we are simply human. I was also a typical survivor, not just a typical depressive.
The second central insight was discovering that external focus was healing. In spite of all the pleas to "look within," it was when I looked outside, at the world, at other people, at plants and animals that I was able to feel much better, and slowly regained access to positive memories and began again to take pleasure in my work and interactions with others. For me, looking within was a dead end; I needed to look outside, at the difficult but beautiful world out there. Besides, my plants needed watering. In no time, they rewarded me with blossoms.
*
WHY IT’S SO HARD TO BRING MANUFACTURING BACK
That train already left. Actually it went 45 years ago with Reaganomics and Neoliberalism.
Back in the 1970s, USA was in a kind of problems with stagflation — stagnated economy with inflation, and the Chicago school of economics, Milton Friedman leading, insisted Neoliberalism is the solution. By making the rich even richer, he insisted, the investments would turn to rise, and new jobs be created. He also insisted on the Joseph Schumpeter and his theories of “creative destruction.” Let the old jobs and industries go, insisted Schumpeter; they will be replaced with new ones.
So the globalization began and outsourcing the manufacturing sector became a thing. By outsourcing the manufacturing to countries where labor laws were nonexistent and salaries low, the profitability of the American industries skyrocketed.
And so did the unemployment, the income gap and the social injustices — just like they did in the Gilded Age. The creative destruction wasn’t really creative — only destructive.
Meanwhile Europe followed, except Germany. Germans never got enthusiastic about Neoliberalism, but instead made sure their manufacturing sector stayed in Germany by all means.
Okay. Any fool can see Neoliberalism is based on magical thinking. It was just as hogwash in the time of Reagan as it was in the time of Harding, but Reagan did not let it disturb. The basic assumption of Reaganomics was that the nation is imagined to be a giant body with two parts: a top, which must be fed, and a bottom, which must be punished.
The role of the top part of the body is taken by the rich, and the fantasy is the familiar “trickle-down theory”— that if the rich are fed, the poor might somehow benefit. It is the same fantasy expressed by the primitive Anyi of Africa, when they used to say as they brought gifts to their king and his court in time of trouble, “When the king’s breasts are full of milk, it is his people who drink.”
All supply-side economics is based on this magical fantasy, whether carried out by David Stockman in the 1980s or Andrew Mellon in the 1920s. What we wanted was to “let the hogs feed,” as Stockman phrased it, to make the rich fatter, under the delusion that we were all infants dependent upon their maternal breasts for our sustenance.
That the “supply side” argument for feeding the rich—supposedly as a way to increase investment—was thoroughly irrational was revealed by studies made by the Federal Reserve Bank, Business Week and others, which showed that America’s investment rate was actually at its highest in decades, that there existed “a record $80 billion pile of ready cash” available for investing whenever the demand existed, and that money shifted to the wealthier part of the nation at the expense of everyone else would only dry up demand further and produce lower, not higher, in-vestment.
Few were surprised, then, when, as the Reagan plan took effect, investment plunged rather than rose. “Supply side” tax cuts for business and the wealthy had only felt right; few claimed it could be demonstrated as right. As Senator Howard Baker admitted when he passed the program, “What we’re doing is really a river boat gamble. We’re gambling that this new economics will work.”
Didn’t quite happen. At the late 1970s and early 1980s Europe and Japan had finally began to recover from the destruction in the WW2, and European and Japanese products — which were both superior in quality and cheaper in price — began to compete in the US markets. American automobile industry collapsed, as did the steel industry — and what was previously known as the Manufacturing Belt became now known as the Rust Belt.
The result was a catastrophic wave of deindustrialization, outsourcing and bankruptcies. Unemployment skyrocketed, and cities began to wither and dilapidate. The jobs which were created instead were those of precariat — badly paying, having bad working conditions, stressful and uncertain.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that which was the enemy that Reaganomics was designed to defeat — it was the era of the societal liberation of the three previous decades. The enemy — working class, women, youth, minorities — had become empowered, and they had to be punished.
What the Hippies had attained had to be taken away. The sexual revolution had to be crushed. It is no coincidence that the bible of Reaganomics, George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty, was written by a man who had become famous writing anti-feminist books opposing the sexual revolution, saying that men have been “cuckolded by the compassionate state” which had encouraged women’s sexual and career independence to such an extent that a man could “no longer feel manly in his own home.”
The destruction of the American manufacturing sector was essentially a sacrificial ritual — whose intent was to coddle the ‘top’ of the society (by making the already rich even richer) and to spank the ‘bottom’ of the society (by punishing the poor, the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised).
Reagan also terminated the program on USA converting to SI [standard international system] weights and measurements system and integrating better in the world community.
Meanwhile, the transfer of the remaining American industry to abroad helped immensely those countries to industrialize, innovate and grow wealthier. They provided jobs and income, and while the work laws in many countries still reflected those in the era of Upton Sinclair, USA ceased to be an industrial power and instead became a service-based economy.
There is no coming back. There is no “reset” button in the real life. You really cannot rollback the catastrophes which once have happened in the course of the cultural evolution, but only conform to on what has happened. The same manufacturing infrastructure and the supply chain which existed in the 1970s and 1980, does not exist in the US any more. Other countries often just do things better. They have access to better and cheaper resources, they have the required infrastructure already in place, and most importantly, they have generations of expertise at making things that Americans either never made, or haven’t made for generations.
The salary thing is a big one. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, one American industrial worker was able to support a family with solely his pay. Today he would have to compete with foreigners who do the same work at a fraction of the pay. No matter how low the American wages get, building up that kind of expertise and deep skill set is not something that will happen, not speaking about the infrastructure and societal requirements to support it. Reagan’s sacrifice ritual went horribly right. The capitalists won and the working class lost. [Oriana: in spite of Marx's prediction that the working class would eliminate the capitalists.]
Moreover, even making education too costly for the working class children or even mandating a caste society will not bring the lost blue collar jobs back. You can’t defund education for decades and then expect to have a robust base of skilled, educated manufacturing workers. You can’t prohibit using automation, robotics and CIM on the assembly lines. You can’t bust the unions and revoke the workers’ rights, and then expect everyone to beat down your door looking for a highly demanding but low-paid job with no pension and no healthcare benefits.
You can’t cut infrastructure expenses to the bone and then expect high tech manufacturing companies to come and deliver their goods to market over crumbling roads and bridges. Like Bruce Springsteen said, those jobs are gone, boys, and they ain’t coming back to your hometown.
Germany never really got enthusiastic about similar economic sacrificial ritual. First, they had way too bitter memories of the Third Reich and the mass carnage, and they welcomed the liberalization of the society with open arms. Conservatism in Germany has always meant pragmatism, not being retrograde, as in the US. Second, they did not have any such “good old days” to memorize as the American conservatives did — only bad old days, and they did not want to try any ideologies anymore — only things found to be working.
And third, there was no similar class society as in the UK or a caste society as in the US in Germany — there was no similar juxtaposition of haves and have-nots. And most of all, the threat of Communism was real. DDR was real. Germans simply did not want to induce any societal catastrophe in their country which could trigger a Communist commotion and takeover.
Germany kept its manufacturing sector, and with perfect 20/20 hindsight, they were correct. While Germany has had its issues and problems, they kept their industries competitive.
*
WHY TRUMP GOT RE-ELECTED: RESENTMENT, ANGER, AND FEAR
Fei-fei, Seattle:
It’s not that voters are stupid. It’s not even that they’re ignorant. Blaming conservative voters for being dumb is how we got here in the first place. It gave liberals a sense of intellectual superiority, and we rode that self-satisfaction all the way to defeat.
No. It wasn’t stupidity. It was anger and fear.
Because emotion is easier to manipulate than logic.
Democrats campaign on “everyone gets better together.” We assume that if people’s lives improve, they’ll vote accordingly.
But Trump, and the Republican machine behind him, understood something uglier and more effective: “I’ll hurt the people you hate” is a stronger message than “I’ll help you.”
We’ll give billionaires a tax cut while raising your taxes, but we’ll hurt the people you resent.
We’ll gut your healthcare, but we’ll round up immigrants and put them in cages.
We’ll destroy your air and water, but we’ll make women suffer.
We’ll raise the cost of everything, but you’ll get to watch trans folks lose their rights.
We’ll make you suffer, but we’ll make the people you hate suffer more.
That’s the real platform. That’s how they won. Not by promising hope, but by weaponizing hate. Not by lifting people up, but by giving them someone to step on.
People say, “The cruelty is the point.” But it’s more than that. The cruelty is the promise, the spectacle, the method, the means, and the end.
When America re-elected Donald Trump, we didn’t just make a mistake. We revealed our character. We told the world: We would rather suffer ourselves as long as we get to hurt someone else. We would rather burn the country down than share it.
And no, I didn’t vote for Trump, not in 2016, not in 2024. But I’m not here to exonerate myself.
Because individual virtue doesn’t matter in a collective collapse.
I was talking to an old friend, and he said: “If America survives the next four years, we’ll need to do some serious soul searching.”
I laughed.
“My dear friend… Americans haven’t soul-searched since they landed on Plymouth Rock and took someone else’s land.”
When I reflect on how China handled the Cultural Revolution, and I say this as a Chinese immigrant, I see at least an acknowledgement of suffering. We admitted it happened. We didn’t pretend it was “a golden age.”
But America?
America wraps itself in exceptionalism, prays to the “manifest destiny,” mutters something about rugged individualism, and pretends nothing happened.
Maybe this time, we’ll finally pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
(And if you didn’t know: that saying is a joke. You can’t pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That’s the whole point.)
I’ve received multiple comments arguing that conservatives are not evil. Here’s the thing, though, people instinctively moralize what is actually structural. When I describe cruelty as a mechanism of power, you hear it as a moral accusation. This happens on both sides, whether conservatives or liberals, we happily take the moral high ground and condemn the other side, when the problem is hierarchy as the organized principle of oppression.
So let me put this argument to rest: No. I’m not saying Trump voters are all “evil people.” That framing misses the point entirely. Oppression does not require villains twirling mustaches. It just requires a system that says: “You’ll feel powerful if someone else suffers.” And enough people go along with it, not because they are monsters, but because it feels good to be on top of a hierarchy, even if it builds on other people’s backs.
It doesn’t make it OK. It doesn’t make it benign.
It just means the cruelty isn’t about individual morality. It is about structure, structure, and the illusion of superiority.
Agares Tretiak:
If you look at the economy, at the underlying way our system works, at how it crushes and grinds people down… every average voter, hell most citizens in general know they are being royally screwed over by someone or something. The Democrats have routinely ignored the plight average workers have faced for roughly thirty years, relying on the educated, middle class metropolitan workers to carry the way and advanced policies that were built around securing votes from this base, while once a while touching very skirtingly on labor and workers rights and issues.
During that time, the Republicans spent their time building resentment, fear, and distractions into their core messaging, constantly reminding people they should be angry. About something. Anything. Immigrants are taking your jobs! Muslims threaten your values! Guns make you free, not laws! Abortion is killing us off! Etc, etc, ad nauseam, for decades. Be angry! Be afraid! You can feel you are being screwed over, so don't think about it, here's who you should be angry at.
And with the milquetoast messaging and general neglect towards the “working class” from the liberals, slowly, people got more angry, more afraid, and thought less about things. It's hard enough making ends meet, and you want me to worry about what thing happening to other people? Nope, no time for that, my problems are about making payments on my car, paying rent, getting my kid through school, I don't have time for answers that don't take the load off my shoulders.
That's what Donald Trump tapped into. He went out and said “Yeah, you're being screwed over… but it's the Dems, libs, the gays, Mexicans, the Chinese, the trans kids, that are to blame. Be angry at them, because they've been taking everything from you. Your jobs, your money, your taxes, your healthcare. They get special treatment from these stupid bleeding heart liberals or worse still, are actively part of a leftist conspiracy to make you into Soviet worker drones.”
Trump points the finger at everyone but the billionaires that back him, the investors he wants to help make him more rich and avoid prosecution. And his voters accept this, because at least it looks like he's doing something about it.
And there is a truth to what they feel. We are all getting royally f***ed, but it's not a trans kid or a black guy or an undocumented migrant at a meat packing plant. It is the elites, just not Jews or secret pizzeria pedophile rings. It's companies, corrupt politicians, militarized cops, underfunded services, lax regulations, crappy worker’s rights, and no breathing room in a world running at a pace dictated by a ruling oligarchy that spans the political spectrum and is backed by both parties.
Dems could cut the billionaires out of the loop, but refuse because they see those fat SuperPAC dollar signs and don't want to have to contemplate a platform that doesn't cater to them. The GOP want the same thing, but also distract voters from how they're turning the nation into a fascist oligarchy in very real ways. Both are complicit to some greater or lesser degree. And people got tired of half measures and lip service from the Dems.
Eric Widdison:
The point isn't the actual results. It's the spectacle. It's the performative cruelty.
NRiley:
Outrage sells. Outrage gets views, clicks, and other engagement. Facts are harder to get right, and they don’t get the same payoff. It’s always going to be easier for news media (and social media) to be on the side of hate.
Timothy DiGiuseppe:
“No. It wasn’t stupidity. It was anger and fear.”
Exactly. And not only in recent (2016 and 2024) memory. In one form or another as you cited, those factors have motivated constituencies and their respective candidates for years.
Monica:
Spot on. Truly sad. Hate is powerful to the powerless.
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MIRACLES AND WONDERS by Elaine Pagels
Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, Édouard Manet
In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He restores the blind to sight, exorcises demons, and calms the sea. The same gospels also describe Jesus as a terrifying prophet, driving out the market sellers in the Temple and wielding a whip on his enemies. Other scriptural accounts suggest Jesus is an insane wanderer, a source of embarrassment, even, to his relatives, ‘possessed by Beelzebub’. Speaking of family, who is Jesus’ father? Why is this young Jewish man referred to only as ‘Mary’s son’ by his neighbors? It is this same man who boldly proclaims: ‘It is I who am the all’ ?
In Miracles and Wonder Elaine Pagels attempts to provide some answers to what appear relatively simple questions: ‘Was Jesus actually a historical person? If so, what kind of a person?’
The sources which describe his life are confusing, contradictory, and often overshadowed by authorial motive. Fortunately, the reader is in excellent hands. Pagels has been studying religion for more than 50 years. Her breakthrough book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), remains a landmark work for its analysis of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. She has since written widely on gnosticism, early Christianity, and the origins of Christian antisemitism.
Miracles and Wonder begins with an unvarnished account of the author’s own religious journey: her decision to join (and later abandon) an evangelical church, and the college applications that led to her life’s work, investigating the history of religion. Pagels then undertakes a systematic appraisal of the New Testament gospels, the Nag Hammadi library, and Roman and Jewish sources.
Those sources are both fascinating and frustrating. Truth – and its manipulation – is a recurring theme. Devoted believers such as Matthew and Luke wrote to publicize Jesus’ message and attract followers, not to report historical fact. Often they felt the need to explain ‘embarrassments’ concerning their Messiah’s life, one of which was the identity of Jesus’ real father.
Rumors abounded that Jesus was a bastard. Pagels tests their validity and demonstrates that Jesus’ father may have been a Roman. Mary was a peasant girl living in Judea at a time when Roman soldiers often ‘targeted local women with sexual violence’. Even the gospel writers agree that Joseph was not Jesus’ biological father and, as Pagels suggests, felt the need to transform Jesus’ birth from a shameful secret into a miracle.
Pagels’ claim that Mary may have been raped has attracted controversy, but Judea under Roman rule was an incredibly violent place. The gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke could well be categorized as ‘war literature’.
The Romans were careful to suppress anyone who might challenge their authority, including popular prophets and their followers. Crucifixion – a tortuous and very public death – was reserved for seditionists; the gospel writers wanted to avoid the same fate for themselves. Pagels explains how this motivation led John in particular to effectively pin Jesus’ death on ‘the Jews’, casting them as ‘agents of Satan’ to illustrate how Jesus was falsely charged and wrongly crucified.
John’s attempt to protect himself and his fellow Christians from Roman occupiers is understandable, but it has had the consequence of spurring animosity between Jews and Christians for thousands of years since.
But the gospels have also meant that Jesus has survived for more than 2,000 years. Attempts to answer questions about his life cannot tell us exactly who he was, but they do show us other things: the very human motivations which informed how the Messiah’s life was recorded and the bloody context of war and violence that has always driven history.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/miracles-and-wonder-elaine-pagels-review
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A FEW EXAMPLES OF WHY THE BIBLE IS NOT HISTORICAL CHRONICLE
There never was a perfect Garden of Eden, which means “original sin” and the “fall” are ancient nonsense. We know trillions of animals suffered and died before human beings existed, thus Eve cannot be blamed for suffering and death entering the world.
There never was a global flood that covered the highest mountains, so the Noah’s ark story is another myth.
Historians and archeologists have confirmed that there was no large-scale enslavement of Israelites in Egypt, no mass Exodus, and no military takeover of Canaan at the time of Moses, Joshua and Caleb.
The core story of the first five book of the bible is myth, not fact. [Oriana: Even some Orthodox rabbi hold that view.]
King David and his son Solomon never ruled a large, powerful nation. Their kingdom of Judea was tiny and didn’t have enough people to be a great military power.
There is no contemporary evidence from his alleged lifetime that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived, and there is certainly no evidence outside the bible that he performed miracles that would have astounded everyone if they were true.
Many people have believed the bible, but many people have believed things in error.
~ Michael Burch, Quora
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THE MYSTERIES OF SPERM
How do sperm swim? How do they navigate? What is sperm made of? What does a World War Two codebreaker have to do with it all? The BBC untangles why we know so little about this mysterious cell.
With every heartbeat, a man can produce around 1,000 sperm – and during intercourse, more than 50 million of the intrepid swimmers set out to fertilize an egg. Only a few make it to the final destination, before a single sperm wins the race and penetrates the egg.
But much about this epic journey – and the microscopic explorers themselves – remains a mystery to science.
"How does a sperm swim? How does it find the egg? How does it fertilize the egg?" asks Sarah Martins da Silva, clinical reader of diabetes endocrinology and reproductive biology at the University of Dundee in the UK. Almost 350 years on from the discovery of sperm, many of these questions remain surprisingly open to debate.
Using newly developed methods, scientists are now following sperm on their migration – from their genesis in the testes all the way to the fertilization of the egg in the female body. The results are leading to groundbreaking new discoveries, from how sperm really swim to the surprisingly big changes that occur to them when they reach the female body.
"Sperm – or spermatozoa – are 'very, very different' from all other cells on Earth," says Martins da Silva. "They don't handle energy in the same way. They don't have the same sort of cellular metabolism and mechanisms that we would expect to find in all other cells."
Due to the huge range of functions demanded of spermatozoa, they require more energy than other cells. Plus sperm need to be flexible, to be able to respond to environmental cues and varying energetic demands during ejaculation and the journey along the female tract, right up until fertilization.
Sperm are also the only human cells which can survive outside the body, Martins da Silva adds. "For that reason, they are extraordinarily specialized." However, due to their size these tiny cells are very difficult to study, she says. "There's a lot we know about reproduction – but there's a huge amount that we don't understand.”
One fundamental question that remained unanswered over almost 350 years of research: what exactly are sperm?
"The sperm is incredibly well-packaged," says Adam Watkins, associate professor in reproductive and developmental physiology at Nottingham University in the UK. "We typically thought of the sperm as a bag of DNA on a tail. But as we've started to realize, it's quite a complex cell – there's a lot of [other] genetic information in there."
The science of sperm began in 1677, when Dutch microbiologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek looked through one of his 500 homemade microscopes and saw what he called "semen animals". He concluded, in 1683, that it wasn't the egg that contained the miniature and entire human, as previously believed, but that man comes "from an animalcule in the masculine seed." By 1685, he had decided that each spermatozoon contains an entire miniature person, complete with its own "living soul."
Almost 200 years later, in 1869, Johannes Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss physician and biologist, was studying human white blood cells collected from pus left on soiled hospital bandages when he discovered what he called "nuclein" inside the nuclei. The term "nuclein" was later changed to “nucleic acid” and eventually became “deoxyribonucleic acid" – or “DNA.”
Aiming to further his studies of DNA, Miescher turned to sperm as his source. Salmon sperm, in particular, were "an excellent and more pleasant source of nuclear material" due to their particularly large nuclei. He worked in freezing temperatures, keeping laboratory windows open, in order to avoid deterioration of salmon sperm. In 1874, he identified a basic component of the sperm cell that he called "protamine". It was the first glimpse of the proteins that make up sperm cells. It took another 150 years, however, for scientists to identify the full protein contents of sperm.
Since then, our understanding of sperm has moved on leaps and bounds. But much still remains a mystery, says Watkins. As scientists have started to better understand early embryonic development, he adds, they are realizing that sperm doesn't just pass the father's chromosomes on, but also epigenetic information, an extra layer of information that affects how and when the genes should be used. "It can really influence how the embryo develops and potentially the lifelong trajectory of the offspring that those sperm generate," says Watkins.
Sperm cells begin to form from puberty onwards, made in vessels within the testicles called seminiferous tubules.
"If you look inside the testes where the sperm are made, it starts as just a round cell that looks pretty much like anything else," says Watkins. "Then it undergoes this dramatic change where it becomes a sperm head with a tail. No other cell within the body changes its structure, its shape, in such a unique way."
It takes sperm about nine weeks to reach maturity within the male body. Unejaculated sperm cells eventually die and are reabsorbed into the body. But the lucky ones are ejaculated – and then the adventure begins.
After ejaculation, each of these tiny cells must propel themselves forward (alongside their 50 million competitors) using their tail-like appendages to swim for the egg. And while you may have seen plenty of videos of tadpole-like sperm swimming around, in fact scientists are only just beginning to understand how sperm really swim.
17th-Century Dutch microbiologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek believed a tiny but complete human existed within spermatozoa
It was previously thought that the sperm's tail – or flagellum – moved side to side like that of a tadpole. But in 2023, researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK found that sperm tails follow the same template for pattern formation discovered by mathematician and World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing.
In 1952, Turing realized that chemical reactions can create patterns. He proposed that two biological chemicals moving and reacting with each other could be used to explain some of nature's most intriguing biological pattern formations – including those found in fingerprints, feathers, leaves and ripples in sand – an idea known as his "reaction-diffusion" theory.
Using 3D microscopy, the Bristol researchers discovered that a sperm's tail – or flagellum – undulates, generating waves that travel along the tail to drive it forward. This is significant as understanding how sperm move can help scientists to understand male fertility.
So, now the sperm are on the move. They travel through the cervix, into the womb and up the oviducts – tubes that eggs travel down to reach the womb, known as the fallopian tubes in human females – in search of the egg. But here we hit another gap in knowledge, because scientists don't fully understand how sperm actually find their way to the egg.
Spermatozoa which are healthy and take the right route are rare. Many take a wrong turn in the maze that is the female body – and never even make it near the goal line. For the ones that do find their way to the fallopian tubes, scientists think that they may be guided by chemical signals emitted by the egg. One recent theory is that sperm may use taste receptors to "taste" their way to the egg.
Once the sperm find the egg, the challenge is not over. The egg is surrounded by a triplicate coat of armor: the corona radiata, an array of cells; the zona pellucida, a jelly-like cushion made of protein; and finally the egg plasma membrane. The sperm cells have to fight their way through all the layers, using chemicals contained in their acrosome, a cap-like structure on the head of a sperm cell containing enzymes that digest the egg cell coating. However, what prompts the release of these enzymes remains a mystery.
Next the sperm use a spike on their "head" to try and break their way in to the egg, thrashing their tails to force themselves forwards. Finally, if one sperm makes contact with the egg membrane, it is engulfed and can complete fertilization.
Human cells are diploid. This means they contain two complete sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. If more than one sperm were to fuse with the egg, a condition called polyspermy would arise. Nondiploid cells – ones with the incorrect number of chromosomes – would develop, a condition lethal to a growing embryo.
To prevent this from happening, once a sperm cell has made contact with it, the egg quickly employs two mechanisms. First, its plasma membrane rapidly depolarizes – meaning it creates an electrical barrier that further sperm cannot cross. However, this only lasts a short time before returning to normal. This is where the cortical reaction comes in. A sudden release of calcium causes the zona pellucida – the egg's "extracellular coat" – to become hardened, creating an impenetrable barrier.
So, of millions of sperm that set out on the journey, only one – at most – gets to do its job. The sperm's epic journey culminates in its fusion with the egg. Today, researchers are still attempting to uncover the identity and role of cell surface proteins that could be responsible for sperm-egg recognition, binding and fusion. In recent years, several proteins have been identified – albeit in mice and fish – as being crucial for this process, but many of the molecules involved remain unknown. So, for now, how the sperm and egg recognize each other, and how they fuse are yet more mysteries that remain unsolved.
One way researchers are hoping to shed light on sperm is by studying species other than our own, says Scott Pitnick, a professor of biology at Syracuse University in New York. Human sperm cells are microscopic, so we can't see them with the naked eye. But some fruit fly species produce sperm cells 20 times their own body length. That would be like a man producing sperm the length of a 40m (130ft) python.
Pitnick engineers the heads of fruit fly sperm so that they glow. This means he can watch them as they travel through dissected female fly reproductive tracts, revealing new details about fertilization at the molecular level.
"Why do males in some species make a few giant sperm?" asks Pitnick. "The answer, it turns out, is because females have evolved reproductive tracts that favor them." That's "not really much of an answer", he adds, because it's just the redirects the question: why have females evolved this way? “We still don't understand that at all.”
But it does teach us that sperm as they exist in the male body is only half the story, says Pitnick. "There's a massive sex bias historically in science. There's been this obscenely biased male focus on male traits. But it turns out that what's driving the system is female evolution – and males are just trying to keep up."
Sperm, Pitnick says, are the most diverse and rapidly evolving cell type on Earth. Why sperm have undergone such dramatic evolution is a mystery that has stumped biologists for more than a century.
"It turns out the female reproductive tract is this incredibly, rapidly evolving environment," says Pitnick, "and we don't know much about what sperm do inside the female. That is the big, hidden world. I think the female reproductive tract is the greatest unexplored frontier for sexual selection, theory and speciation [the process by which new species are formed]."
The fruit fly's long-tailed sperm, suggests Pitnick, could be considered an ornament – much like a deer's antlers or a peacock's tail.
Ornaments are a "sort of a weapon in evolution", explains Pitnick. More than just a defense from predators, ornaments like antlers and horns often have two roles to play. "A lot of these weapons are about sex, and usually male-male competition. The [fruit fly's] long sperm flagellum really meets the definitional criteria of an ornament. We think the female tract has traits that bias fertilization in favor of some sperm phenotypes over others.”
We know a lot about pre-mating sexual selection, Pitnick says. "Say, it's prairie chickens dancing out on a grassland, or a bird of paradise displaying in a rainforest. It's motion, it's color, it's smells?" Processing this sensory input, explains Pitnick, leads to decision making – whether the pair mate or not.
But, Pitnick says, the sexual selection that goes on inside the female after mating – and how this drives the evolution of sperm – largely remains a mystery. "We still understand very little about the genetics of ornaments and preferences," he says.
To fully understand sperm, we need to think about how the entire lifecycle of the sperm – and the female body, explains Pitnick, plays a huge role in the sperm's development. "Sperm are not mature when they finish developing in the testes, they're not done developing." Complex – and critical – interactions occur between the sperm and the female reproductive tract, he says. "We're now spending a lot of time studying what we call post-ejaculatory modifications to sperm across the whole animal kingdom."
Even as scientists are unravelling the many and varied processes a sperm goes through in order to achieve fertilization, other research is leading to real concern about the current state of human sperm. Men produce close to a trillion sperm during one lifetime, so it might be hard to imagine that sperm are in trouble. But research suggests sperm counts – the number of sperm in a sample of semen – are tumbling globally and the decline appears to be accelerating.
According to a 2023 report published by the World Health Organization (WHO), around one in six adults worldwide experience infertility – and male infertility contributes to roughly half of all cases. (It's also worth noting that many people around the world are not having as many children as they want for other reasons too, such as the prohibitive cost of parenthood, as a recent United Nation population Fund report highlighted).
Pollution, smoking, alcohol, poor diet, lack of exercise and stress are all thought to impact male infertility. Yet for the majority of men with fertility problems, the cause remains unexplained.
"With all those moving parts, there are so many things that could go wrong," says Hannah Morgan, a post-doctoral research associate in maternal and fetal health at the University of Manchester, UK. "It could be a mechanism: it doesn't swim very well, so it can't get to the egg. Or it could be something more intricate within the head of the sperm, or other regions of the sperm. It's so specialized in so many different ways, that lots of little things can go wrong."
One way to see if a man may be infertile is to look inside the sperm, says Morgan. "How does the DNA look? How is it packaged? How fragmented is it? To break open the sperm, there's a whole range of stuff you could look at. But what is a good or bad measurement? We don't actually know."
Perhaps by unraveling the mystery of sperm and how they function, Morgan says, we might begin to understand male infertility too.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250613-untangling-the-mysteries-of-what-we-dont-know-about-sperm
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FOUR HEALTH BENEFITS OF RIBOFLAVIN (VITAMIN B2)
B2 is one of eight B-complex vitamins. These vitamins work together to change carbohydrates from foods into fuel for your body. Vitamin B2 also helps release energy from proteins.
“Riboflavin is an essential micronutrient that helps cells develop and work well,” says registered dietitian Kayla Kopp, RD, LD. “Healthy bacteria in your gut microbiome make small amounts of riboflavin. But your body needs more to function. That’s why it’s important to get enough of this B vitamin in your diet every day.”
Your body needs vitamin B2 (riboflavin) to break down carbohydrates from foods. This process helps your cells get the energy they need to function.
Studies suggest vitamin B2 also offers these four health benefits:
Prevents migraines
Researchers believe there may be a link between riboflavin, mitochondrial cell function and migraines. Mitochondria are your body’s energy makers. Riboflavin may also ease stress and minimize nerve inflammation that contributes to migraines.
In one study, people who took 400 milligrams of vitamin B2 every day for three months had fewer migraines each month than those who took a placebo. A different study found similar effects in children. Even better, the children saw a decrease in migraine pain for up to 18 months after they stopped taking riboflavin supplements.
Based on findings like these, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Headache Society say people with chronic migraines may benefit from taking daily riboflavin supplements as a preventive measure.
May lower your risk of cancer
Some experts believe that riboflavin prevents cancer-causing substances called carcinogens from damaging cells. But research findings are mixed.
A Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study found that participants who got more riboflavin in their diets had a lower risk of colorectal cancer. But other studies haven’t shown a link between the two.
Another study investigated the effect of riboflavin on the risk of lung cancer in people who smoke. But the findings were inconclusive, and the researchers said the results needed more investigation.
Protects your vision
A diet rich in vitamin B2 and other B-complex vitamins may lower your risk of cataracts. These cloudy areas on your eye lenses cause vision problems, such as blurred or double vision. People with severe, prolonged vitamin B2 deficiency are most at risk for developing cataracts.
Prevents anemia
Riboflavin helps your body absorb iron. Not getting enough riboflavin puts you at risk for iron-deficiency anemia.
“People with anemia may feel extremely tired, look pale and bruise easily. They don’t have enough iron to make healthy red blood cells,” explains Kopp. “Red blood cells carry oxygen throughout your body.” Pregnant women and children are most at risk for anemia due to riboflavin deficiency.
Cracks at the corners of the mouth are a common sign of B2 deficiency.
FOOD SOURCES OF RIBOFLAVIN
You can get riboflavin from:
Beef, pork, chicken, and organ meats
Milk, yogurt, and cheese
Fish
Legumes
Spinach
Mushrooms
Almonds and other nuts
Fortified cereal and cereal products (bread)
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Riboflavin, especially from supplements, turns your pee bright yellow. “Flavin” is a variation of the Latin word “flavous,” which means yellow. “Ribo” means “having five” — for instance, “ribose” is a simple sugar whose molecules contain five carbon atoms.
Ribose is an example of a pentose sugar, while glucose is a hexose — its molecule contains six carbon atoms.
. . . and this brings us to
THE BENEFITS OF RIBOSE (AI overview)
Ribose, a naturally occurring carbohydrate, offers several potential benefits, primarily related to energy production and post-exercise recovery. It plays a role in producing ATP (adenosine triphosphate), the body's primary energy source, and may support heart and muscle health. Some studies suggest it can aid in exercise recovery, reduce muscle fatigue, and improve endurance. Additionally, ribose may offer benefits for individuals with heart conditions and those experiencing fatigue or chronic pain.
Here's a more detailed look at the potential benefits:
Energy Production and Recovery:
Ribose is a key component in the production of ATP, the main energy carrier in cells. ATP levels decline with aging.
Exercise Recovery:
Some studies suggest ribose can speed up recovery after strenuous exercise, potentially reducing muscle soreness and fatigue.
Ribose may help improve endurance by supporting energy levels during exercise.
Heart Health:
Heart Failure:
Some evidence suggests ribose may help improve breathing in heart failure patients, potentially indicating better blood pumping to the heart.
1. Ischemic Threshold:
Studies have shown ribose supplementation may improve the heart's tolerance to ischemia, a condition where blood flow to the heart is reduced.
2. ATP Levels:
Ribose can aid in restoring ATP levels in heart cells, which may be beneficial for individuals with heart conditions.
3. Muscle Health and Fatigue Reduction:
Muscle Soreness: Ribose may help reduce muscle soreness after intense workouts.
Muscle Fatigue: Studies have shown ribose can potentially reduce muscle fatigue.
Glycogen Replenishment: Ribose may help replenish glycogen stores, which are used by muscles for energy.
4. Potential Benefits for Fatigue and Chronic Pain: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia
CHRONIC FATIGE AND FIBROMYALGIA:
Some studies suggest ribose may improve energy levels, mental clarity, and sleep in individuals with these conditions.
In one study, individuals with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome reported improvements in subjective pain intensity after taking ribose.
5. Other Potential Benefits:
SKIN HEALTH
Ribose may improve collagen and elastin production, potentially leading to firmer and smoother skin.
DNA and RNA Replication:
.
Ribose is a building block of RNA and a precursor for DNA, playing a role in cell growth and repair.
FIVE EMERGING BENEFITS OF RIBOSE
D-ribose supplements can offer health benefits for those with certain conditions like heart disease, fibromyalgia, or myoadenylate deaminase deficiency (MAD). More research is needed, but emerging studies look promising.
D-ribose is a critically important sugar molecule.
It’s part of your DNA — the genetic material that contains information for all the proteins produced in your body — and also makes up part of your cells’ primary energy source, adenosine triphosphate (ATP).
Though your body naturally produces ribose, some believe that D-ribose supplements can improve health or exercise performance.
May Improve Heart Function in People With Heart Disease
Evidence suggests that D-ribose may improve energy production in heart muscle, as it’s essential for ATP production.
Some evidence shows benefits of D-ribose supplements for those with low blood flow to the heart muscle, as seen in conditions like coronary artery disease. This is likely due to the role of D-ribose in producing cellular energy.
MAY BE OF BENEFIT IN FIBROMYALGIA
D-ribose could be beneficial for treating certain pain disorders, such as fibromyalgia. However, research in this area is limited.
MAY IMPROVE MUSCLE FUNCTION
The genetic disorder myoadenylate deaminase deficiency (MAD) — or AMP deaminase deficiency — causes fatigue, muscle pain, or cramps after physical activity.
Interestingly, the prevalence of MAD varies substantially by race. It’s the most common genetic muscular disorder in Caucasians but much less common in other groups.
Some research has examined whether D-ribose can improve function in people with this condition.
Moreover, several case studies have reported improvements in muscle function and well-being in people with this disorder.
Similarly, a small study found that people with MAD experienced less post-exercise stiffness and cramps after taking D-ribose.
However, other case studies have failed to find any benefit of the supplement in people with this condition.
Limited research has reported mixed results regarding the ability of D-ribose supplements to improve muscle function and well-being in people with the genetic disorder myoadenylate deaminase deficiency (MAD).
Food sources of ribose: (Note: food provides only low doses of ribose)
oats
yogurt
milk
beef
clams
almonds
Swiss cheese
mushrooms
Ribose deficiency is rare, since the body makes it from glucose. Ribose is a vital part of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the cells’ source of energy. Theoretically, the more ribose you have in your body, the more ATP you can produce, and the more energy you will have. Levels of ATP decrease with aging. 
There is no standard recommended dosage of D-ribose. The most common doses, and those used in scientific studies, are typically between 5 g and 15 g per day.
Summary:
The elderly can potentially benefit from ribose supplements, particularly those experiencing fatigue or muscle issues. Ribose plays a role in cellular energy production and may help improve exercise recovery and reduce muscle soreness. Some studies suggest it could be helpful for managing fatigue in conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and may even aid in improving diastolic function in heart failure patients.
Warning:
Scientific evidence suggests people with diabetes have higher levels of not only glucose, but also D-ribose, which can be associated with diabetic nephropathy and diabetic encephalopathy. Diabetics should not use ribose.
Ribose is not recommended for pregnant women or children.
(various sources, including https://www.verywellhealth.com/health-benefits-of-ribose-supplements-89505)
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ending on beauty:
WILD IRIS
Here’s what slipped into my heart:
that crested yellow tongue
down the runway of parched truth:
and those petals’ pulsing blue,
the excitable color of now:
like coming on a meadow of wild iris.
Long ago in dank woods,
I blundered on a dell
of lilies-of-the valley:
white lovers palm to palm
between leaves. That’s why God
must be forgiven, and why Dante puts
those who weep when they should
rejoice in a muddy pocket of hell
near the wood of suicides. After youth’s
‘love is pain’, that blue-purple flight.
On Non-Judgment Day,
in the Meadow
of Saved Moments,
I will bloom, the wildest iris.
~ Oriana
