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KYRIE
Around midnight he took the oxycodone
and listened to Arvo Pärt’s “I Am the True Vine”
over and over, the snow falling harder now.
He switched off the light and sat without dread
of the coming hours, quietly singing along;
he smoked any number of cigarettes without thinking
once about the horrifying consequence;
he was legibly told what to say and he wrote
with mounting excitement and pleasure,
and sent friendly e-mails to everyone, Lord
I had such a good time and I don’t regret anything —
What happened to the prayer that goes like that?
~ Franz Wright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCYSuwPAZ30
Arvo Part by Marco Ventura
Oriana:
I wouldn’t know how to answer this question about activities that might count as non-conventional prayer. The church didn’t teach us to pray: only to rattle off Our Father and Hail Mary. And yet it was only in Poland — and one time in the US — that I saw anyone “sunk in prayer.” There was a radiant beauty in their faces — not so much in the one American, who seemed to be undergoing some kind of psychological crisis.
Later I discovered that Buddhist (or any) meditation was also difficult for me, unless for a very brief period, when I can induce a transient feeling of bliss. Fortunately I discovered that something else was relatively easy and came naturally: hard work. It was my favorite activity! And there were results, generally rewarding.
Maybe some people are naturally “prayer people,” and others are “work people.”
Someone one said to me, “You don’t know what work is because you like to work.” A cousin said, “It runs in the family.”
But some things other than work are also important to me: beauty, affection, music. I realize that at some point in the future I may become incapable of working, and wonder if what remains will be worth living for. Usually I conclude that just one more sunset makes it worth it to go on.
Another problem is that prayers are supposed to be directed to an invisible supernatural being. Again, the belief in such a being seems to come naturally to some, while others can’t seem to force themselves to accept any kind of religion, even though they make enjoy studying mythology. (“What is mythology? Other people’s religion." ~ Joseph Campbell)
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THE VIKINGS WHO FOUNDED AND RULED KIEVAN RUS
~ The historical people known as Vikings, who hailed from Scandinavia in Northern Europe, are well-known today for their exploits in the west. But the merchant-warriors also made their way into Eastern Europe, where they helped found a medieval federation in territory now known as Belarus, Ukraine and part of Russia. Their loose federation of principalities called Kievan Rus survived for nearly 400 years, finally collapsing during the 13th-century Mongol invasion.
EARLY SCANDINAVIAN SETTLEMENTS IN THE EAST
Vikings founded Kievan Rus in the mid-9th century, but Scandanavian settlements in Eastern Europe actually date back to at least A.D. 750. This is when pre-Viking-Age Scandanavians likely settled the northwestern Russian town of Staraya Ladoga (or “Old Ladoga”), across Lake Ladoga from what is now Finland. One of the artifacts archaeologists have unearthed from the city is a talisman with the face of Odin, the Norse god of war.
“The early Scandinavians were particularly attracted to Ladoga by the appearance of Islamic silver coins or dirhams there,” writes scholar Thomas S. Noonan. “The regular flow of Islamic dirhams from Russia to Scandinavia via Ladoga began in the early ninth century and is further evidence of a Viking presence in Ladoga long before 840.”
PRINCE OLEG EXPANDS TERRITORY, MOVES CAPITAL TO KIEV
It was after 840 that Scandanavian Vikings—who were known in Eastern Europe as “Varangians” or “Rus”—established Viking rule over Slavic tribes in what came to be called Kievan Rus. At first, the region was divided between three noble brothers.
“The oldest, Rurik, located himself at Novgorod; the second, Sineus, at Beloozero; and the third, Truvor, in Izborsk,” recounts the Russian Primary Chronicle, a history of the region completed in the 12th century by Kievan monks. “On account of these Varangians, the district of Novgorod became known as the land of Rus.” (“Rus,” which is where the name “Russia” comes from, purportedly derives from an old Nordic word for “men who row.”)
Rurik’s brothers died within two years, so he claimed their territory and established Novgorod as the capital of his domain. After Rurik died, his successor Prince Oleg of Novgorod (or Oleg the Prophet) captured the city of Kiev in 882 and moved the capital from Novgorod to Kiev. In addition to capturing new territories to increase the size of Kievan Rus, Oleg also increased its wealth by negotiating a favorable trade deal with Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
ROYAL PAINS AFTER OLEG
Archaeological discoveries in the region support the Russian Primary Chronicle’s historical account of Vikings in the region—at least, in part. However, historians caution readers to approach the Chronicle narrative with a grain of salt, since some of its stories have an exaggerated, mythical quality.
One such story: how Oleg allegedly died. According to the Chronicle, a prophecy during his lifetime foretold that one of his horses would cause his death. To avoid his fate, Oleg never rode that horse. But after he successfully expanded Kievan Rus territory and trade, he got a little cocky and began to wonder if he could ride the horse after all. By then the animal had died, so Oleg found its bones and mockingly stomped on its skull; but, the story goes, a serpent slithered from underneath and bit Oleg, killing him.
After Oleg came a period of royal distress. His successor was Rurik’s son, Igor of Kiev, who married a woman named Olga. Like Oleg, Igor collected tribute from the people he had conquered; but unlike Oleg, his prices were so high that they prompted a tribe to assassinate him. When he died, his wife Olga assumed power.
What reportedly happened next with Olga is one of those stories that likely lives more on the mythical end of the spectrum. Olga was (understandably) furious with the early Slavic tribe of Drevlians that had killed her husband. So when Drevlian emissaries went to see Olga to discuss whether she would marry one of their princes, she supposedly tricked them into being buried alive. The chronicle also says she invited a bunch of Drevlian wise men to visit her, and then burned them alive inside a bathhouse.
END OF KIEVAN RUS
Kievan Rus was largely pagan until the late 10th century, when Vladimir [Valdemar?] the Great took power and introduced Christianity. The conversion actually resulted from a deal between Vladimir and the Byzantine Emperor. Vladimir agreed to convert to Christianity and send the emperor 6,000 soldiers to defend his throne; in exchange, Vladimir would marry the emperor’s sister.
The exchange of soldiers led to the establishment of the Varangian Guard, an elite unit of imperial bodyguards. In addition, the deal led to the spread of Byzantine culture within Kievan Rus. Vladimir built churches to spread Christianity and schools to spread literacy (and also probably Christianity). The economy flourished, and Kievan Rus continued to expand. This cultural and economic growth likely peaked under the rule of Vladimir’s son Yaroslav I (or Yaroslav the Wise), who began construction of St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod.
After this, the Kievan Rus federation was beset by royal fights for power. The Crusades brought further instability, so that by the time the Mongols invaded in the 13th century, Kievan Rus was weak and divided, and easily fell.
https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians-prince-oleg%20in%20Kievan%20rus.jpg)
Oriana:
My interest in this started when I pondered the name “Igor” and concluded that it wasn’t Slavic. I checked — it’s Old Norse for “warrior.” Queen Helga? Obviously Helga is a Nordic name. What about Olga and Oleg? They also stem from Helge, the Old Norse for “holy” (cf “heilig” in German).
So, should Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the homeland of the Vikings, demand, on historical grounds, that both Russia and Ukraine be restored to them? Come to think of it, that would really raise the standard of living in the "restored" territories.
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~ As I walk around Moscow, I often catch myself thinking that this country is a reincarnation of Tatar-Mongol khanate.
When on a move, it is a nihilistic force that overpowers and conquers everything and everyone in its path. In peacetime, however, it cannot deal proactively with entropy, and winds up turning everyone into either a servant or a master, both parties corrupted to the bone.
Any Western influence on Russia is like a faux-brick on the facade of the medieval house. It stays on the surface, never affecting deeply. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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PUTIN’S ROLE MODEL: TZAR ALEXANDER III
~ In his quest for historical legitimation, Putin has skipped over Russia’s revolutionary and republican era and zeroed in on the late imperial period. It is there that he seems to have found a role model – Tsar Alexander III (r. 1881-1894).
These days, modern-day Kremlin courtiers seem hell-bent on casting the Romanovs’ twilight years as a glorious period — a time when the empire was ruled by an assertive monarch who successfully managed to modernize a vast realm, while suppressing domestic dissent and keeping Western rivals at bay.
On November 18, shortly after the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution was all but ignored by the Kremlin, President Putin made a quick trip to Crimea – the Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine – to unveil the monument to Alexander III. The opening ceremony occurred at the picturesque seaside resort of Livadia, where the tzar’s bronze four-meter-tall seated statue was placed on the grounds of the former imperial palace – the beloved summer retreat of several generations of the Romanovs.
Russian commentators were quick to note numerous similarities between the newest depiction of the famously nationalist Alexander III and an earlier monument to him created in the beginning of the 20th century by the Russo-Italian sculptor Pavel (Paolo) Trubetskoy. However, while Trubetskoy’s massive equestrian statue was a masterpiece that conveyed a sense of brute force to an extent that some members of the Romanov royal family believed the monument was a caricature of the late monarch, some observers characterize the Crimean bronze figure as banal glorification of a conservative-minded Russian autocrat, lacking in artistic value.
The Crimea monument’s creator, Andrei Kovalchuk, said that he took his inspiration largely from a recent biography of Alexander III penned by the historian Aleksandr Myasnikov. The book, which came out in 2016 in a popular series “Life of Remarkable Individuals” is a hagiographic account of the “Tsar-Peacemaker’s” 13-year reign. It is noteworthy that a foreword to the volume was written by Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), a Russian church leader who is rumored to have Putin’s ear, and who reputedly exerts considerable influence in top-level internal debates on how to define Russia’s official symbolic politics.
Putin’s short address at the Crimean ceremony was revealing: when the Kremlin leader was heaping praise on Russia’s next-to-last tsar, it seemed as if he was talking about his own tenure. Alexander III, Putin said, “always felt a tremendous personal responsibility for the country’s destiny,” and “did everything possible for the progress and strengthening of the nation, to protect it from turmoil, internal and external threats.”
Under this tsar, Russia’s influence and authority in the world was achieved “not by yielding but by a fair and unwavering firmness,” Putin added. Also, Putin commended Alexander III for his championing of Russian national traditions: the tsar believed “that it is crucial for a great nation to preserve its identity, whereas any movement forward is impossible without respect for one’s own history, culture and spiritual values.”
Some commentators have argued that Putin’s affinity for Alexander III is a relatively recent phenomenon – a move aimed to further strengthen the ideological foundations of Russia’s assertive international conduct and conservative domestic politics following Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, an event that greatly widened Russia’s rift with the West.
Yet the basic principles of Putin’s political philosophy have remained pretty consistent since the time they were first formulated in late December 1999 in what came to be known as the “Millennium Manifesto.”
In that programmatic document, Putin famously proclaimed the need to revive the sense of Russian patriotism and uphold the ideal of strong state. In addition, Putin asserted that Russia would never become a “second edition” of the United States or Great Britain, given the chasm between the two differing political traditions – Western liberalism and Russian étatisme. If anything, the core principles of “Putinism” appear to mesh nicely with one of Alexander III’s famous utterances: “We can have no policy except one that is purely Russian and national.”
Equestrian statue of Alexander III, by Paolo Troubetzkoy
In the sphere of Russian popular culture, the reign of Alexander III started coming into vogue also in the late 1990s with the release of Nikita Mikhalkov’s 1998 film The Barber of Siberia, in which the Kremlin-connected and national-minded director played the bear-like Russian autocrat.
The idea to commemorate Alexander III in Crimea appears to signify a symbolic victory of one Kremlin faction over the other. Until very recently the favored artistic project seemed to be the one promoted by Russian Minister of Culture and chairman of Russian Historical-Military Society Vladimir Medinsky, who was pushing for the erection, also in Crimea, of a “Monument of Reconciliation.” The latter was meant to symbolize the “spiritual healing” of Russian society that has finally managed to overcome deep divisions created by the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites.
Ironically, the “reconciliation monument” was commissioned to the same Andrei Kovalchuk who produced the tzar’s statue. Ultimately, however, the Kremlin leadership decided to avoid even a slightest reference to the 1917 political upheaval and subsequent civil strife, and chose to play it safe, opting for the seemingly uncontroversial monument to the Russian monarch who, in the words of the pro-Kremlin historian Vladimir Rudakov, “became the symbol of order, stability, and Russia’s economic and military might.” ~
https://eurasianet.org/the-royal-role-model-historical-revisionism-in-russia
Oriana:
Alexander III was a notoriously reactionary monarch, the opposite of the “good tzar” Alexander II, the liberator of the serfs and author of other progressive reforms. Unfortunately the “good tzar” got assassinated by extremists, and some of his reforms were reversed by his son.
His heir devoted himself to ruthless russification of regions such as Ukraine and eastern Poland. Russian was the only official language. Local cultures were basically to be suppressed. He also devoutly supported the Russian Orthodox religion, and absolute monarchy.
from Wiki: RUSSIA HAS ONLY TWO ALLIES: THE ARMY AND THE NAVY
~ In disposition, Alexander bore little resemblance to his soft-hearted, liberal father, and still less to his refined, philosophic, sentimental, chivalrous, yet cunning great-uncle Emperor Alexander I. Although an enthusiastic amateur musician and patron of the ballet, Alexander was seen as lacking refinement and elegance. Indeed, he rather relished the idea of being of the same rough texture as some of his subjects. His straightforward, abrupt manner savored sometimes of gruffness, while his direct, unadorned method of expressing himself harmonized well with his rough-hewn, immobile features and somewhat sluggish movements. His education was not such as to soften these peculiarities.
Alexander was 190.5 cm (six foot three inches) tall (this was very tall for the times)
Alexander was extremely strong. He tore packs of cards in half with his bare hands to entertain his children. When the Austrian ambassador in St. Petersburg said that Austria would mobilize two or three army corps against Russia, he twisted a silver fork into a knot and threw it onto the plate of the ambassador. He said, "That is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.”
An account from the memoirs of the artist Alexander Benois gives one impression of Alexander III:
After a performance of the ballet Tzar Kandavl at the Mariinsky Theatre, I first caught sight of the Emperor. I was struck by the size of the man, and although cumbersome and heavy, he was still a mighty figure. There was indeed something of the muzhik [Russian peasant] about him. The look of his bright eyes made quite an impression on me. As he passed where I was standing, he raised his head for a second, and to this day I can remember what I felt as our eyes met. It was a look as cold as steel, in which there was something threatening, even frightening, and it struck me like a blow. The Tzar's gaze! The look of a man who stood above all others, but who carried a monstrous burden and who every minute had to fear for his life.
On 13 March 1881 (N.S.) Alexander's father, Alexander II, was assassinated by members of the extremist organization Narodnaya Volya. As a result, he ascended to the Russian imperial throne in Nennal. He and Maria Feodorovna were officially crowned and anointed at the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow on 27 May 1883. Alexander's ascension to the throne was followed by an outbreak of anti-Jewish riots.
Alexander was hostile to Jews; his reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in the Jews' economic, social, and political condition. His policy was eagerly implemented by tzarist officials in the "May Laws" of 1882. These laws encouraged open anti-Jewish sentiment and dozens of pogroms across the western part of the empire. As a result, many Jews emigrated to Western Europe and the United States. They banned Jews from inhabiting rural areas and shtetls (even within the Pale of Settlement) and restricted the occupations in which they could engage.
Alexander III died of kidney disease at the age of 49, in Crimea.
On 18 November 2017, Vladimir Putin unveiled a bronze monument to Alexander III on the site of the former Maly Livadia Palace in Crimea. The four-meter monument by Russian sculptor Andrey Kovalchuk depicts Alexander III sitting on a stump, his stretched arms resting on a saber. An inscription repeats his saying "Russia has only two allies: the Army and the Navy."
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WHY RUSSIA CAN’T REFORM ITS MILITARY
~ Russia cannot implement reforms that will be effective — not unless there is a revolution. Russia’s military is a reflection of Russia’s culture, and reform efforts directed at the military alone will not address the fundamental cultural problems of Russia. Putin is trying the traditional solutions: purging generals and scapegoating the FSB, but replacing individuals won’t solve what ails Russia’s profoundly dysfunctional military.
Among the problems that plague Russia’s military are extraordinarily high levels of corruption in the procurement and maintenance of equipment, but corruption is endemic in Russia. This would require a massive cultural shift.
Related to this is the corruption and brutality of Russian military culture which is partly a result of the society’s broader corruption and partly an inheritance from serfdom — soldiers are just fodder for cannons. This attitude towards those serving under one is pervasive in Russian culture and isn’t going to change without a broader social Revolution.
Another problem is the lack of NCO’s and the centralization of decision making at high levels, slowing the response time of units in the field and leading to an inability to adapt to changing circumstances and to learn from past experiences. The centralization of power is a fundamental feature of Russian culture. Changing this would be revolutionary.
Related to the above is the utter lack of initiative exercised by Russian units on the battlefield. Even large units such as battalion tactical groups will not take advantage of opportunities that arise on the battlefield because they will seek guidance from higher command. This lack of individual initiative and lack of a willingness to take responsibility is characteristic of a centralized hierarchical authoritarian state. Changing this would be a fundamental change to the Russian character, a true cultural revolution.
The extraordinarily bad intelligence and the bizarre false narrative of what Ukraine was like and how they would respond to an invasion (welcoming the Russians as liberators, etc) is also characteristic of Russian society: don’t tell truth to power because you will be punished. Tell power what it wants to hear.
False narratives, a tradition of secrecy and a profound lack of respect for the common soldiers led to the troops not being told of the pending invasion and becoming demoralized upon finding out that the Ukrainians were not surrendering.
I could go on, but I think I’ve given enough evidence of my opinion that Russia’s military weaknesses are a result of fundamental characteristics of Russian society. To correct these weaknesses so the Russian military could compete with a western army would require Russia to change fundamental aspects of its society to more closely resemble the West, and that would be a revolutionary (and unlikely) change.
There is a myth of the Russian military being an invincible juggernaut that is a result of mythologizing the USSR’s victory in World War 2, but looked at impartially, the USSR’s victory was a pyrrhic one: the cost was far, far higher than it should have been, took far, far longer and would have been impossible without American economic and industrial support.
If the USSR had an effective military in 1941 the Germans should have been defeated in the first 2 months. Russia wasn’t receptive to learning from France and Britain’s mistakes in 1940 and did not prepare for the Blitzkrieg. They should have had an officer corp that wasn’t purged by political paranoia. They should’ve had an army that wasn’t ready to surrender (as many did at first) because Stalin was so brutal. They should’ve been prepared for the invasion the West warned them was coming. With their overwhelming superiority in numbers and equipment, they should have won. Like in Ukraine.
Russia lost its war against Japan in 1906.
Russia collapsed into revolution in World War 1.
The Soviet army was decimated by Finland in the Winter War of 1939.
The USSR lost in Afghanistan (but so has everyone!).
The Russians won in Chechnya but only after a decade of a grinding war of attrition — against a country the size of a postage stamp. Similarly the “liberation” of Ossetia in Georgia took far longer and at much higher cost than it should have — against a county-sized nation.
Russia is keeping Assad’s regime in Syria alive, but its merely fighting a ragtag militia, and its using the usual tactics Russia deploys to compensate for its poorly trained and undisciplined soldiers: long range artillery bombardment and completely flattening civilian areas to demoralize and break the population’s will to resist. This isn’t scalable to war against a large nation armed by the West and which has adopted Western military organization and tactics — a nation like Ukraine.
From World War 2 to the present day, Russia has relied on artillery and tanks to flatten everything in its path because it could not deftly maneuver or command its poorly trained soldiers and never mastered combined arms.
Russia has never fielded a great military. It was only by the brute application of power that Russia has won wars, but the enemies were very small, except World War 2 — and there the USSR paid an exorbitant price and had the support of the superpower that now sides with Russia’s adversary.
Russia would have to become a different country to field a different army. ~
George Miller, Quora
Daniel Law:
Just adding to the last bit — The Soviet Union / Stalin was considering agreeing a cease fire with the Reich in 1943/44 as the Red Army was bleeding out. The loss ratio was too great and the supply chain was fragile. The fighting in Normandy gave the Red army breathing space — if this had not happened the Soviets would have made a cease-fire arrangement with Germany enabling the Reich to regroup and produce PZ IV in mass production and hold on to Europe. Mass storming of defenses in depth was suicide but Stalin like Putin did not care one inch for his soldiers (see removal of disabled war veterans for Stalin’s 70th birthday).
Sean Cronin:
Remember, the Soviet Union won that war with massive US aid. Bullets, bandages, food, all the trucks and the fuel to run them. Fighter planes.
Michael Bechler:
“No, Russia cannot implement reforms that will be effective - not unless there is a revolution.”
They tried that in 1917 and tried a softer version in the ‘90s. Even that won’t save them.
“To correct these weaknesses so the Russian military could compete with a western army would require Russia to change fundamental aspects of its society to more closely resemble the West.”
According to some narratives, Russia aspires to be accepted as part of ‘the West’, but the West doesn’t want them, and considers them to be a brutish backwater. Peter the Great tried to reform Russia to that end, but his successors reverted to form and undid much of it.
Patrick McWilliams;
Were Russia to become a modern, free nation, purged of corruption, with a democratically elected government, it would no longer be at war with anyone, nor a threat to its neighbors.
George Miller:
Regarding Russia’s future: I speculate that the most likely scenario is that Russia becomes a vassal state of China. Russia will be economically dependent on China for a market for its raw material exports and as a source of finished goods and high tech imports. This will give China great influence over Russia’ foreign policy. An ironic outcome since Putin’s dream was to resurrect Russia as a great imperial power. China may even exercise a creeping annexation of Russia’s Far East, by economic control and gradual settlement.
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115 RUSSIAN NATIONAL GUARDSMEN FIRED FOR REFUSING TO FIGHT IN UKRAINE
~ More than 100 Russian national guardsmen have been fired for refusing to fight in Ukraine, court documents show, in what looks to be the clearest indication yet of dissent among some parts of security forces over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The cases of the 115 national guardsmen, a force also known as Rosgvardia, came to light on Wednesday, after a local Russian court rejected their collective lawsuit that challenged their earlier sacking.
According to the court’s decision, published on its website, the lawsuit was dismissed after the judge determined that the soldiers had been rightfully fired for “refusing to perform an official assignment” to fight in Ukraine and instead returned to a duty station.
The appeal took place in Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkarian republic in the Russian Caucasus, where the unit is based.
Since Moscow’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, its military has reportedly been plagued by poor morale, with reports of soldiers claiming they did not know they were going to war until they crossed into Ukraine.
The Pentagon said this month that it had seen “anecdotal reports” that “mid-grade officers at various levels, even up to the battalion level”, had “either refused to obey orders” or were not obeying them with the expected measure of “alacrity”.
Andrei Sabinin, the lawyer who represented the 115 soldiers, said the court’s decision was “unprecedentedly quick” given the complexity of the case.
According to Sabinin, the commanders of the Rosgvardia unit offered the soldiers the option not to fight and their dismissal was illegal.
Russia created Rosgvardia, a militarized force separate from the army, in 2016 to fight terrorism and maintain public order. Since its inception, members of Rosgvardia, which is often referred to as Vladimir Putin’s “private army”, have mostly been involved in crackdowns on peaceful anti-government protests.
Military analysts have linked Russia’s heavy use of Rosgvardia soldiers in Ukraine to Moscow’s strategic aims of capturing and holding major Ukrainian cities, including Kharkiv and the capital, Kyiv. These plans failed, while Rosgvardia units suffered heavy casualties after Ukrainian cities remained battlegrounds rather than being captured by Russia, which left Rosgvardia units exposed to Ukrainian attacks.
Documents acquired by the Guardian on Friday from a separate criminal case against a Siberian journalist further reveal Rosgvardia’s role in Ukraine.
Mikhail Afanasyev, the chief editor of Novy Fokus in the Russian region of Khakassia, was arrested by security forces last month over the website’s reporting on a separate Rosgvardia unit that also refused deployment to Ukraine.
Court testimonies given by members of the Rosgvardia unit mentioned in Afanasyev’s reporting confirm earlier reports that 11 Rosgvardia from Khakassia refused to fight.
The testimonies also give weight to suggestions that the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine was intended initially as a blitzkrieg attack on Kyiv with the aim of capturing the capital.
In one testimony, a Roskgvardia soldier told the court that his commander instructed his unit three days prior to the invasion that they would be sent to Ukraine to “patrol the streets and intersections of Kyiv”.
“The commander explained that all employees of the national guard and the Russian armed forces were assigned specific tasks during the special operation in Ukraine. The task of our detachment and for all the other detachments that were stationed with us was to guard the streets and intersections of Kyiv,” said the testimony, seen by the Guardian.
The content of the court documents was first reported by the regional independent outlet Tayga.info.
A month into the war, Moscow was forced to switch its offensive to more limited objectives after running into fierce Ukrainian resistance, with the army prioritizing what it calls the “liberation” of the Donbas region.
But despite a recent string of military successes in the Donbas, the Kremlin this week was confronted with two incidents of rare public dissent from Russian officials.
On Wednesday, Boris Bondarev, a career diplomat posted to the Russian mission to the UN in Geneva, became the highest-level Russian diplomat to denounce the war, publishing a scathing letter in which he wrote that he was “ashamed” of his country and called the invasion a “disaster.” And on Friday, two communist lawmakers from the Khabarovsky Krai in the far east of Siberia urged Putin to end the Ukraine conflict.
“If our country does not halt the military operation then there will be even more orphans in our country,” lawmaker Leonid Vasyukevich said, according to a video of the meeting.
“During a military operation, people become disabled. These are young people who could be of great use to our country,” he added. “We demand an immediate withdrawal of the Russian troops.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/27/115-russian-national-guard-soldiers-sacked-for-refusing-to-fight-in-ukraine
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WHAT WILL PUTIN GAIN IF HE EVENTUALLY WINS THE WAR?
~ He'll have a European version of North Korea, which just incorporated 40 million brand new citizens who hate his guts.
I really fail to see how he comes out if this in a better position than he went in.
Frankly, I fail to see how he comes out of this alive. ~ Mats Andersson, Quora
AGF:
Even the Russian speakers now hate him. He’s messed up big time and the longer this goes on, the fewer of the remaining allies will be with him. China will be getting pretty nervous about one of the biggest suppliers of grain being bombed out of existence.
The effects of that alone could be catastrophic.
Kim Marcus:
Putin will not win the Ukraine War. Sure, he can take major cities, but in so doing what he’ll actually gain is an all-out vicious guerilla war that will be supported by NATO. Russia will lose the occupation like it did in Afghanistan 40 years ago.
Julian Randall:
Communism was never about politics, but about making people obey, however much they hate you. The more they hate you, the more gratifying, in fact.
North Korea was the laboratory in which the science of how to oppress millions in total subjugation has been worked out, and how an absolute, hereditary monarchy can still get away with calling itself a democratic socialist republic.
That is absolutely Putin's aim, for all the former Warsaw Pact.
Once you have the machinery of power, you no longer need the pretense of ideology. Once the ideology is dropped, the original motive is revealed, but by then it’s too late to oppose it.
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WHY DOESN’T PUTIN ORDER MASS MOBILIZATION?
~ There is the distinct possibility that any orders for mobilization and mass conscription would face mass resistance and draft dodging and pushback that would make things orders of magnitude worse for Putin.
Putin might be a dictator, but he doesn’t have the actual authority — and sufficiently repressive machinery of state — to compel obedience like Stalin had with the NKVD and Communist Party enforcers. Russian kids today aren’t Russian kids of 1941, indoctrinated since childhood with party dogma force fed them by a state that has a monopoly on information. Putin’s regime pushes a lot of propaganda, but it’s nowhere close to the scale and effectiveness of Soviet propaganda in Stalin’s era.
And that’s aside from the most obvious difference: even without propaganda, the necessity of fighting in 1941 was obvious to all, since it was a clear-cut defensive war after they’d been invaded by savage barbarians who were committing tons of atrocities and wanted to kill or enslave everybody. The necessity of going to war in Ukraine today by contrast, an attack on a foreign country instead of defending the Motherland, isn’t that clear.
Russia has a form of limited conscription today, but its dragnet tends to concentrate on the poorest and most disadvantaged kids - the ones without the savvy or connections/ means to avoid it. Trying to extend it en masse to the rest could prove problematic.
While many or perhaps most Russian kids will toe the line, a significant number of them, who grew up on the internet and YouTube and social media and have at least some inkling about notions like individuality and rights, will tell Putin to fuck off when they get their draft letters. Once such mass open defiance starts, things could quickly cascade in a wrong direction for Putin’s regime.
One of the key lessons officers are taught — at least in the US — is to not issue orders if there’s a reasonable chance that they won’t be obeyed. Because bad things can happen once the aura of control and authority is dispelled. Putin probably instinctively knows that concept. ~ Khalid Elkhassan, Quora
Geoff Caplan:
The internet-savvy urbanites understand what is going on in Ukraine and oppose it. Those are the people who were chanting “F*** the war” in St Petersburg the other night. They are well connected and play a central day-to-day role in running the economy. They will resit a mass conscription, or flee the country to avoid it as many have done already.
Another problematic source of recruits are the ethnic minorities in the east. They make up a majority of the regular army as they are driven to enlist by lack of economic opportunity. They are taking a disproportionate proportion of the casualties and their communities are becoming increasingly restless. Things could really brew up in the Caucuses and in Siberia if Putin gives the separatists a cause to rally round.
But a conscription that focused on working class Slavs would also be resented.
Plus they don’t have the resources to train and equip them properly, even if they can force them to sign up.
It’s hard to see where Russia can go from here.
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NIKOLAI PATRUSHEV, THE HEIR APPARENT
He’s a member of Putin's inner circle and the head of the FSB since 1999. It is well known in Russia that a journalist's phone doesn't get tapped, or a dissident poisoned, without his order. He has for a long time been considered the second most powerful man in Russia, and a possible successor to Putin.
But lately, his name has been thrown around for different reasons. With many unanswered questions about Vladimir Putin's physical and mental health, and the invasion of Ukraine a horrific human rights atrocity and an unneeded economic catastrophe at home, many people, at least outside of Russia are openly discussing who will come next.
One of the only people that could possibly be considered an equal, Patrushev's background mirrors Putin's own. Born in Leningrad in 1951, he began working for the KGB in 1975. Rising through the ranks, he would eventually become the head of the anti-smuggling and corruption unit of the Leningrad KGB.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he was then sent to the Republic of Kerala [??? Karelia?] to become the Head of Security under the new President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, who would soon recall him to Moscow to become head of the Deputy Director of the new FSK, better known today as the FSB.
In 1999, A decree by President Yeltsin promoted him to Director, replacing his close friend Vladimir Putin.
So what has he been doing the past +20 years? According to the intelligence agencies of The UK and The US, his fingerprints are all over every assassination plot, failed poisonings and separatist coup since.
In 2008, he became the Secretary of The Security Council of Russia, which is similar to The Chief of staff in the US, where it has been business as usual.
A known war hawk and hardliner, a former Soviet spy, security official and Communist Party member, and a Bond Villain in his own right. He is probably the worst person to lead a post-Putin Russia by far.
Having signed off on almost all of the many crimes and violations of human rights of the Russian Federation, one can argue that an increasingly frail, frustrated and paranoid Putin, may be better for Russia and the world as a whole. ~ Robbie Destin-Rose, Quora
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CAN RUSSIA EVER BE A RESPECTABLE NATION AGAIN? WILL IT FALL APART LIKE THE FORMER USSR?
~ Russia can not recover. The brand Russia is forever soiled. It is not only associated with evil. It is also not trustworthy. Anyone who makes a contract with Russia will be considered a fool. Because you can not trust Russia.
It means that the boycott will be self sustainable. Companies will avoid Russia because:
It is considered immoral to do business with Russia
Companies who do business with Russia are in danger of being boycotted themselves.
People who trust Russia are considered idiots.
The boycott will last. Russia will not. ~ Stephen Hill, Quora
Andrei Vamesu:
Let Russia rot in hell, free Europe from fear!
John Dewar Gleissner:
It seems that ethnic minorities are over-represented on Putin’s cannon fodder troops and that all the very different regions did not leave when the USSR folded. When dead soldiers return home, those coffins or urns will be concentrated in provinces more likely to break away.
Russia will weaken significantly and probably default on its debts, go bankrupt or have major financial upheavals as the old USSR/new Russia did in the 1990s. We helped them back then because they said they were going to be democratic. Then under Putin they turned into a dictatorship. This time around, we will need stronger guarantees of Russia’s good conduct just to let Russia out of its doghouse.
Putin destroyed in two weeks what took 25 years to build, namely good commercial, diplomatic, trade, banking, and investment ties.
Mr. Spock:
The Russians never got the Socialist Revolution they fought and died for. Just like George Orwell predicted, the Pigs took over and the peasants continued working for The Man.
If they had devolved the power, and just Coordinated it from the Center, then innovation and development would have flourished. But keeping people captive, coerced and controlled was never going to work.
Oriana:
Let me quote the words of the retired Russian Colonel Mikhail Khodarenok: “The situation cannot be considered normal when against us, there is a coalition of 42 countries and when our resources, military-political and military-technical, are limited.”
Wars are very, very expensive. They consume the resources that might otherwise be invested in improving the infrastructure, education, medical care. As the colonel observed, “It can only get worse.” 
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IS THE WEST TRYING TO “CANCEL” RUSSIA?
~ Putin is expressing his frustration over the fact that Russia has become irrelevant.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been chronically incapable of producing competent consumer products, quality civilian vehicles, luxury brands, premium technology, cultural, scientific or economic leadership, anything that the world market would want.
Its exports are those of a third world country, gas, oil, minerals, wheat. Russian space and military technology, his crown jewels, are from the Soviet era, perhaps slightly modernized. All he has left are machismo and military force, and those have proven hollow in the past month.
And he would so much like to lead a superpower that the world would take seriously. ~
Markku Herd, Quora
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Oriana:
This is not to say that the US doesn’t have some huge problems. Here Joel and Lynne from Austin, Texas, proudly display their immense firearm collection
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../TOM-LEONARD-Shockingly...
Mary:
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THE DUKE: A HEART-WARMING MOVIE WE BADLY NEED
~ The Brits make the most interesting criminals. From Jack the Ripper to John Christie, the fiend who murdered scores of girls and sealed them in the walls of his row house at 10 Rillington Place, the creeps and cretins in the files of Scotland Yard have us beat for movie material, ten to one. The crime committed so cleverly in 1961 by Kempton Bunton, the crotchety old cab driver who remains the only thief in history to successfully steal a work of art from the National Gallery in London, is not so much heinous as it is heroic.
Applause-worthy enough, in fact, to inspire the delightful new movie The Duke, with the wonderful British character actor Jim Broadbent as the funny, scheming miscreant who believes crime is justified if it serves a greater purpose, and the great Helen Mirren as his endlessly exasperated wife. Theirs is a charming, understated and completely enjoyable frolic about how ordinary people can do extraordinary things that seems doubly startling because, while seeming implausible, it also happens to be absolutely true.
Mr. Bunton, a long-time crusader for the rights of senior citizens, was especially incensed by a U.K. government license requirement that forced the elderly to pay a fee in order to own a TV set. When he read about the National Gallery’s acquisition of a Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington worth 140,000 pounds, he launched a campaign to get free TV for elderly citizens like himself and hatched a plan to travel from his banal flat in Newcastle, a dreary, working-class northern city, to the world-famous and (supposedly) impenetrable art gallery, steal the Goya, and hold it hostage until the ransom money from the purloined painting pressured the government into making the telly a privilege, free for all.
How he did the deed against impossible odds and almost got away with it forms the most interesting section of the film as it chronicles the heist, the arrest, the trial and the lives of all involved, including his son Jacky (Fionn Whitehead), who helps him hide the priceless work of art in a closet, his elder son Kenny (Jack Bandeira), and Kenny’s brash girlfriend Pammy (Charlotte Spencer), who throws a kink into the mission by finding the masterpiece hidden in the wardrobe and demanding to split the reward.
But the person most affected in myriad ways is Bunton’s grouchy, cynical and long-suffering wife Dorothy, played by the always startling Helen Mirren. Renowned for playing distinguished royals and women of aristocratic breeding, she is, in this incarnation, a scrubwoman with wrinkles, liver spots and principles, dedicated to keeping her poverty-stricken family solvent—and honest.
Follow her every move and you’ll believe you’re really inside the humble Bunton family residence, watching them eat her meals of cabbage and crusts, served with naturalism and punctuated by the lively, tuneful music hall ditties of the time, unaware that her husband is sending notes to the various newspapers on Fleet Street. Mr. Broadbent is haughty, awkward and funny at the same time playing a wannabe media star, and Ms. Mirren matches every move in her frustrated attempts to sort out the British class differences. Example: When Kenny brings home vulgar girlfriend Pammy, Dorothy raises an eyebrow:
“So, Pamela, what is your current domestic situation?”
“Give it a rest, Mum.”
“It is wrong for the two of you to be living in sin under our roof.”
“What’s gotten into you? You’ll be voting Tory next.”
When his eventual arrest becomes inevitable, the tabloids follow him to court, where his eccentricity charms the press, the prosecutors, the jury and even the judge. With a logic that makes some kind of cockeyed sense, he makes everyone think twice, including the government (“Every time an old pensioner is cut off from the British populace, the nation grows smaller in stature,” he says on the witness stand, adding that with the 400,000 pounds they’re paying for the painting of the Duke, they “could pay for 3,500 TV licenses a year and re-connect with all those old-timers”. “No further questions,” says the defense attorney.
The Duke is the final film of director Roger Michell (Notting Hill), working from a script by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. He specialized in civilized films of grace and good humor as only the British can make them, and died a few short weeks after this one was completed. Sadly, he never saw the finished print. Neither did the real Kempton Bunton live to see his outlandish plan result in a law making TV free to everyone in England over the age of 75. Who says crime does not pay? ~
Oriana:
This is a charming, healing movie we badly need in our dark times. There is a marvelous surprise in the plot which it would be a crime to reveal. The surprise works. Everything here works: the great acting, the settings, the humor, the enjoyable eccentricities we expect from the British.
Both the audiences and critics love this movie, with the single exception of one critic who found it “old-fashioned.” If this kind of excellence is old-fashioned, let’s have more of it.
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WHY WOMEN INITIATE DIVORCE MORE THAN MEN
~ The decision to end a marriage is often difficult, and couples may spend months, or even years, soul-searching before calling it quits. But when it comes to initiating a split, there’s a clear pattern in who makes the final call. In Western heterosexual relationships, women catalyze an enormous proportion of divorces.
In the US specifically, where no-fault divorce is legal in all 50 sates, some estimates put the figure at 70%; this rises to a staggering 90% when women are college educated. In the UK, ONS statistics showed women petitioned for 62% of divorces in England and Wales in 2019.
Now, in some Western countries, divorce is becoming easier; the UK, for instance, recently legalized no-fault divorces, which means couples now have a quicker and more straightforward route to break up. This change in rules could open the door for even more women – who might have been hesitant before – to file for divorce.
Why, though, are women disproportionately choosing to divorce in the first place? For some, the answer lies in how partners do – or don’t – meet their emotional needs in marriage. Yet for others, things are more complicated – and there may be more nuance to these statistics than it seems.
The importance of independence
In most societies, divorce has been a relatively recent phenomenon.
In the UK, divorce was extremely uncommon before 1914, with just one divorce in every 450 marriages in the first decade of the 20th Century. Now, more than 100,000 couples in the UK get divorced every year, and in the US, around half of marriages end in divorce.
As Heidi Kar, a psychologist and expert on domestic violence at the US-based Education Development Center, explains, it’s no coincidence that the rise of divorce has coincided with women’s liberation.
“Because economic independence is an imperative before a woman can attempt to leave a marriage, either alone or with children to support, it’s extremely difficult for women to leave a marriage unless they have some way to make money on their own,” she says. “Also, because gender roles become more complicated as women start to gain financial independence, more marital conflict naturally arises.”
In other words, women’s entry into the workforce enabled them to leave unhappy marriages for the first time – they were no longer financially bound to remain in abusive partnerships or relationships where their needs were not being met, and women thus began to initiate divorces at greater scale.
This also helps explain why women with university-level education are so much more likely to end a marriage. “Across cultures and geographies, women who are economically able to take care of themselves – which usually is tied to higher education levels – are more likely to initiate divorce than women who are unable to economically sustain themselves and their children,” adds Kar.
Emotional and social factors
Still, increased economic independence alone doesn’t explain why women have become so much more likely to initiate divorce than their husbands. Yet, the percentage of women initiating divorces has continued to rise –- and the reasons are manifold.
For many women, the expectations they have when they enter marriage may fail to match up to reality. Experts say that they often have a higher expectation of how a partner will meet their emotional needs than men, which can lead to disappointment post-wedding.
Gilza Fort-Martinez, a Florida, US-based licensed couples’ therapist, who specializes in conflict resolution, says because men are usually socialized to have lower emotional intelligence than women, this can lead to female partners feeling unsupported and doing much of the emotional labor in the relationship.
This emotional intelligence also means women are more finely attuned to problems and relationship “red-flags”, and their tendency to be the primary communicators and empathizers means that they may also be the first to raise issues – perhaps ultimately resulting in separation or divorce.
Women also tend to gain fewer emotional benefits from marriage, which could make single life seem more appealing. While married men experience multiple perks – including living longer and earning more money – women don’t usually benefit from their relationships in the same way. Instead, they bear the brunt of household and child-rearing labor, which can leave working women “overwhelmed and stressed”, says Fort-Martinez.
Women also tend to have more close friends than men (in fact, in the US, 15% of men say they have no close friendships at all), meaning they have a better support system both to discuss any marital issues as well as to ease the transition back into single life. It’s also possible these friendships make divorce seem like a more plausible option – research suggests that if a close friend gets divorced, people’s own chances of divorcing rise by 75%.
Add this to the fact that women get primary custody of children in the vast majority of divorce cases, so women may feel they have less to lose when filing for divorce compared to men. And in some ways, they are right – evidence shows men’s well-being tends to drop much more dramatically immediately following a divorce.
But in reality, this effect can be short-lived. “In the short-term after divorce, men’s overall well-being decreases more, and they report higher levels of loneliness,” says Kar. “But over time that evens out, and women continue to suffer from more chronic, long-term effects including the loss of home ownership, reduced financial means, and increased stress from life as a single parent.”
This doesn’t mean that these women have more regrets, however. In spite of these downsides, only 27% of women say they regret getting a divorce, compared to 39% of men, showing that for most women divorce-related hardships are preferable to staying in an unhappy marriage.
Seeking resolution
Of course, filing for divorce isn't the same as ending a marriage. While research shows women in heterosexual marriages are more likely to initiate the break-up, there are also women who didn't choose to end their relationship, but want or need to formalize the split nonetheless.
“Women tend to be more motivated than men to resolve their marital status,” says Katie Spooner, partner and head of family law at Winckworth Sherwood, London. She says, based on her client record, most men are happy to remain separated, unless there is a new relationship or particular imperative to sort their finances.
For women, however, the need for a divorce can be much more pressing. “It remains a requirement for divorce to be filed in order to make a financial application,” says Spooner, referring to the legally-binding process of sorting finances out after a split. “Historically, women have had a greater need to do this due to their weaker financial position, or their role as primary caregiver.”
In other words, married women tend to earn much less than their husbands, and are significantly more likely to have given up work or reduced their hours to care for children – even if they were the higher earner to begin with.
This means women who are separated from their husbands without a divorce agreement risk financial hardship, because they may not have a legal right to marital assets or financial support until a formal divorce agreement is in place. Filing for divorce might be their only choice to secure assets, even if they did not choose to end the relationship in the first place.
Spooner points out a big turning point for women initiating divorce in the UK was 1996, when being a “homemaker” was recognized as a contribution to the marriage, meaning women became entitled to a fairer share of assets. Before this, the less-wealthy spouse (usually the woman, especially if she’d given up her career) was only given financial support for basic needs, rather than how their domestic labor had contributed to the marriage. This arrangement is now common in many other countries, meaning fewer women risk poverty post-divorce, and are more motivated to push for a divorce over a separation to get their fair share of marital assets.
As for the new UK law, Spooner says there has been an early rush to file no-fault divorces, suggesting many people had been waiting for the law to change. However, it’s too early to know exactly how patterns will shift until the law has been in place for a while; Spooner herself believes there could be a “slight drop” in female-driven divorces, since it’s the first time couples can issue joint applications.
Whatever happens in the UK, ultimately, divorces – like marriages – tend to be complex and nuanced. In some cases, filing for divorce is an agonizing decision based on years of unhappiness. For others, filing is more of a practical move, based on the need to reach a financial settlement. What’s clear, however, is that certain factors – women’s improved earning power, men and women’s mismatched emotional needs within marriage and ongoing inequalities in household labor – mean that divorce is likely to remain deeply gendered. ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220511-why-women-file-for-divorce-more-than-men?utm_source=bbc-news&utm_medium=must-see
Oriana:
I remember (on Facebook, I think), a long post by a man who kept bragging about rich he was -- "and yet she left me." I also remember the brief reply: "Money isn't everything, you know. She's probably much happier without you."
And consider this: "We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness." ~ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
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STRANGE “BLOBS” DEEP INSIDE THE EARTH
~ In 1970, the Soviet Union embarked on what was arguably one of the most ambitious exploration projects in human history – they attempted to drill as far as possible into the Earth's crust. This solid layer of rock, which sits above the mostly solid mantle and, eventually, the Earth's partially molten core, is the only part of the planet that has ever been seen by human eyes. No one knew what would happen if they tried to get through it.
By August 1994, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, set amidst a bleak expanse of Arctic tundra in northeastern Russia, had reached staggering depths – stretching some around 12,260m (40,230ft) underground. But then the drill got stuck.
When they started, the team running the project made predictions about what they expected to find – specifically that the Earth would get one degree warmer for every 100m (328ft) that they traveled towards its center. But it soon become clear that this was not the case – in the mid-1980s, when they reached 10km (6.2 miles), it was already 180C (356F), nearly double that expected.
In these extreme conditions, the granite eventually ceased to be drillable – it was behaving more like plastic than rock. The experiment was halted, and no one has managed to pass the crust's threshold to this day. The only remaining hint of the Kola borehole's existence is a rusty metal cap embedded in the ground.
"We really know much less about the Earth's mantle than about outer space where we can look with telescopes, because everything we know is very, very indirect," says Steinberger.
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Though the mantle was previously thought of as a homogenous layer, geologists detected two colossal regions inside it, one that straddles Africa and one below the Pacific Ocean, where earthquake waves encounter resistance and slow down. Just as with the Earth's core, these areas are clearly different from the rest of the mantle – in fact, they represent some of the largest features on the planet.
These are the large low-shear-velocity provinces, or LLSVPs. It's tricky to find any familiar analogue for their peculiar forms – they could be described as unusually bulbous mountains or mounds, though Lekić wouldn't use those words himself. "They're bigger than continents," he explains.
Intriguingly, the structures seem to have a closer resemblance to colossal piles of sand – one study found that they had sharp slopes in places, as well as shallow ones and even a few overhangs. Amidst the debate about their appearance, the features have come to be known as blobs.
It's thought that the blobs must have a different chemical makeup to the surrounding rock – perhaps they're composed of minerals that are unusually rich in something heavy, like iron or nickel. "But there are different ideas of how this comes about," says Steinberger. And this is where it gets interesting.
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It’s a little-known fact that there are actually three celestial bodies in our little patch of the Solar System – the Earth, the Moon, and Theia. Today, the latter is little more than a ghost, after smashing into our planet 4.5 billion years ago. For decades, it was thought that when this small Mars-sized planet collided with the infant Earth, the resulting debris – mostly from the other planet itself – coalesced to form the Moon.
But there are problems with this idea, such as the fact that the Earth and the Moon share similar chemical signatures – as though they were created out of the same material.
Instead, the researchers have suggested an alternative. After slamming into the early Earth, Theia became mixed up with its inner contents, forming part of the mantle. Meanwhile, the Moon formed not from the extra-terrestrial planet itself, but the shards of the earth that were blasted out.
The twist is that Theia didn't mix into the Earth in its entirety. Most of it was so dense that it wasn't affected by the currents within the mantle – in fact, the foreign planet exists as lumps inside the earth to this day. It's possible that these are the LLSVPs, and there are fragments of an alien world lurking deep beneath our feet.
Whatever they're made of, there's a growing consensus that the Earth's strange blobs, as distant as they seem, are affecting life at the surface in tangible ways.
For a start, they may be influencing how volcanoes are distributed.
Most of the world's most famous geological flashpoints – such as the Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile-long (40,233km) chain of volcanoes circling the Pacific Ocean – are found above the places where tectonic plates meet and jostle for space. But oddly, some highly active areas don't follow this pattern. The Hawaiian Islands, in the North Pacific Ocean, are home to six active volcanoes, as well as extensive lava fields and some places where magma bubbles up almost continuously. This is despite the fact that they sit safely in the middle of the Pacific Plate, thousands of miles from any others.
One explanation is so-called "mantle plumes", theoretical hotspots in the Earth's lower mantle where rock is that's hotter than its surroundings rises up, forming tree-like networks of vertical channels all the way to the crust. They begin in the layer directly around the core, the interior of which can reach the same temperature as the surface of the Sun.
"Basically, they form because the core is relatively hot compared to the overlying mantle, so thermal instabilities develop" says Steinberger. He compares it to boiling a pan of water on the stove – it's never heated entirely evenly, so you get bubbles forming in some places and not others.
Wherever these blistering zones seem to meet the surface of the Earth, you can usually find volcanoes.
There is a catch, however. The concept of mantle plumes was first proposed as far back as the 1970s, and they remain almost as mysterious as the LLSVPs. "In recent years the evidence [for their being real] from seismic tomography has been getting stronger and stronger," says Steinberger. "So there's hardly anybody who has doubts about their existence. But then, of course, there are many things that are not so sure about them," he says.
Today it's possible to make basic maps of mantle plumes using seismology. And back in 2008, geologists discovered something intriguing: they're almost all located at the edges of the Earth blobs.
This has led to a chicken-and-egg – or rather, blob-and-volcanic hotspot – scenario. Are these regions more geologically active because the blobs are there already? Or are the blobs located where they are because the hotspot activity is somehow pushing them into these positions?
It might happen something like this. Ocean plates which sink into the Earth's depths eventually end up near the bottom of the mantle, where they form the blobs – oddly, at these depths they're more dense than the surrounding rock. These form a kind of insulating blanket above the core, preventing the super-hot regions in that give rise to mantle plumes from developing beneath them. So they form around the edges instead. In this way, you end up with mantle plumes 2,891 km (1,796 miles) above the borders of the blobs, in our own earthly realm. It looks like the LLSVPS are encouraging them to develop at particular locations.
If this is the case, it suggests that these peculiar hidden structures are having a profound impact on our planet – effectively dictating where certain groupings of volcanoes occur, as well as the island chains that they create. The Hawaiian archipelago wouldn't exist without them – and neither would China's Hainan Island.
And the LLSVPs may have an even wider remit. Scientists have long wondered why the Earth spins on its axis at the angle that it does – in other words, why is the North Pole in the Arctic, and not somewhere else? While many factors are thought to contribute to minor "wobbles" either way, including climate change, the earth's axis has remained broadly stable for billions of years.
One intriguing observation is that the Earth blobs sit neatly on either side of the axis – hinting that either they migrated there because of the earth spinning, or they are influencing the way it does it.
So, though the deep-Earth blobs are still as baffling as ever, they're already set to reveal some of our planet's secrets – and possibly even some from a long-lost alien world. Perhaps one day we'll find an even better way to peer inside the Earth to see them. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220510-why-are-there-continent-sized-blobs-in-the-deep-earth
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Jeremy Sherman:
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Oriana:
"Prayers pass the buck to an imaginary being." Perfect.
On the other hand, I remember seeing exactly one man (in his late thirties, maybe) in the US look as if he was really praying. Or at least that's the look that I saw in Poland, growing up — I saw people (mostly women, but not exclusively) "sunk in prayer." They were in a different reality for a time — sometimes a relatively long time. And there was often a beauty to those faces, a radiance. In the US, I didn't have much experience going to church (both Catholic and various Protestant churches I sampled), but insofar as I did, no one struck me as what I'd call as pious, as really praying — until that one man, in late 2007, in Our Lady of the Rosary church (Little Italy). Yes, so unusual and astonishing to me (a man at that! All studies show that church-going is not popular with men), that I have remembered it since.
Sure, a lot of people go through the motions of praying, but where are their thoughts? I remember how difficult it was for me to stay focused, and not thinking about school, the great flowers at the altar (church floral displays were always impressive, even magnificent), something someone said to me and I finally had a reply, and so on. Perhaps true prayer, the kind that made one’s face look beautiful, was for the mystics.
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IN THE INVENTION OF PETER, GEORGE DEMACOPOULOS ARGUES THAT PETER NEVER VISITED THE CITY OF ROME, NEVER FOUNDED A CHURCH THERE, AND WAS NOT THE FIRST POPE
~ In fact, the very idea of Peter as the Supreme Pontiff and leader of a worldwide church is a much later idea that took its rise in the ecclesial politics of the fifth century.
The evidence for Peter visiting—much less dying in—Rome is pretty thin on the ground. It simply never comes up in the New Testament: the Acts of the Apostles, our first history of the Jesus movement, never mentions Peter journeying to Rome. And when Paul nervously greets the Christian community there in his Letter to the Romans, he never refers to Peter’s presence in the city. In the two letters attributed to Peter in the New Testament the author is said to be writing “from Babylon.” Babylon could be a euphemism for Rome or it could just be a metaphor for imagined exile.
While papal discourse starts to heat up over the second and third centuries, no one appealed to Peter as the rock of the church or the holder of the keys of heaven until the fourth. There was a bishop of Rome, to be sure, but there was no Supreme Pontiff, and it is difficult to concretely tie the legacy of these bishops back to Peter himself.
Generations of Catholic schoolchildren may have learned that Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 16, but early Christians didn’t give the passage second thought until the fourth century. It was only with Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century that the Bishop of Rome started to cite Matthew 16 as proof of Papal supremacy, and characterize himself as the “heir” of Peter.
from comments:
Paul's theology was quite different from what became Catholic theology. For instance, Paul had no concept of a Trinity, of Original Sin or as Jesus being identical to Yahweh, among other things.
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What? The origins of Christianity and of Catholicism are grounded on myth? Is that supposed to be a revelation?
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Roman Catholics are discouraged from studying the history of their church (and, truth be told, reading the Bible.) I know an ex-Jesuit who says that the most liberating thing that any Catholic can do is study church history.
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Why not believe Peter was in Rome and is buried in the cathedral? Christians believe in the resurrection, miracles, walking on water, in devils and angels and exorcism and more, so why not that Peter was in Rome and was the first Pope and that John Paul II and John XX III are Saints? It is religion, all about believing.
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Most Christians are oblivious to the political history of their own religion believing instead in the "sacred holiness" of things determined by a bunch of guys sitting around Nicea in 325 AD.
The above comments from the Daily Beast. Here is a paragraph from the laconic and cool-headed official website:
On the first anniversary of his election to the papacy, Leo the Great stood before the assembly of bishops convening in Rome and forcefully asserted his privileged position as the heir of Peter the Apostle. This declaration marked the beginning of a powerful tradition: the Bishop of Rome would henceforth leverage the cult of St. Peter, and the popular association of St. Peter with the city itself, to his advantage. In The Invention of Peter, George E. Demacopoulos examines this Petrine discourse, revealing how the link between the historic Peter and the Roman Church strengthened, shifted, and evolved during the papacies of two of the most creative and dynamic popes of late antiquity, ultimately shaping medieval Christianity as we now know it.
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INSULIN: A NEW SUSPECT IN ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
~ In 2020, Johnson and Johnson announced that it was halting a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer’s drug after safety issues emerged. This latest failure adds to the dozens of large, costly clinical trials that have shown no effect in treating this devastating disease.
The growing list of failures should give us pause for thought – have we got the causes of Alzheimer’s all wrong?
In the first analysis of the disease, the German physician, Alois Alzheimer, noted odd changes in the brain of a patient who died of the condition. Alzheimer identified two kinds of protein aggregates that are not found in younger brains: plaques that are found between brain cells and tangles that are found inside brain cells.
Later research identified the proteins that made up the plaques as amyloid and those that form the tangles as tau. What these structures actually do is still under debate.
ALOIS ALZHEIMER’S UNHEEDED WARNING
Alzheimer advised scientists not to jump to the conclusion that these proteins caused the disease. Unfortunately, his caution was ignored, and over the years it has become gospel that the build up of these proteins causes Alzheimer’s disease.
One problem is that it’s not possible to test, in a scientific experiment, if this theory is correct. Only in recent years has technology been developed that can test what these proteins do, and it is clearly not what scientists previously assumed. For example, genetically engineered mice that accumulate human amyloid in their brains show only mild impairment. But the pharmaceutical industry made up its mind a long time ago that amyloid is the culprit, and this has been the target for Alzheimer’s drugs ever since.
The aim of these drugs is to reduce the levels of amyloid in the brain, either by slowing down the formation of amyloid or by removing it from the brain. Both approaches have been tested many times now using different techniques and drug types. None of these trials have shown any effects, and some large drug companies, including Pfizer, have abandoned this area of research altogether.
The continued failure of new drugs to make a difference has to be interpreted as evidence that the amyloid protein is not the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Some companies have changed their target to the tau protein. But again, drugs companies are assuming that a single protein is the cause of the disease.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the disease altogether. One approach is to look for genes that increase the risk of developing the disease. The problem with this approach is that there are surprisingly few of these genes, and they are rare. Alzheimer’s does not appear to be driven by gene mutations, so this approach does not shed new light on the underlying processes.
Another option is to look at the risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s. One of these is type 2 diabetes. Clearly, diabetes is very different from Alzheimer’s disease, so what’s the connection?
In diabetes, insulin becomes less effective at controlling blood sugar levels. But insulin does a lot more than just control blood sugar; it is a “growth factor”. Neurons (brain cells) are very dependent on growth factors, and if they don’t get enough, they die.
The loss of insulin’s growth factor effects in the brain appear to make neurons vulnerable to stress and reduce the brain’s ability to repair damage that accumulates over time. (Neurons live as long as we do, so there is a lot of time for damage to accrue.)
When looking at brain tissue taken from deceased Alzheimer’s patients, researchers found that insulin lost its effectiveness as a growth factor, even in people who were not diabetic. This observation suggests that diabetes drugs might be an effective treatment for people with Alzheimer’s. Some experiments showed impressive results in animal studies, and several clinical trials have started.
Testing these drugs in animal models of another neurodegenerative disorder, Parkinson’s disease, also showed impressive effects, and two clinical trials in Parkinson’s patients showed good protective effects. In one of the trials – a pilot study – the patients who received the diabetes drug did not get any worse for two years while the control group, who received a standard treatment for Parkinson’s, deteriorated significantly. The other trial, a larger trial with a placebo control, confirmed this result and showed no deterioration in the drug group during the 12 months of study.
To see any protective effect in the brain in a clinical trial is completely new, and it supports the new theory that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are caused, at least in part, by a lack of growth factor activity in the brain. These new theories bring a fresh view on how these diseases develop and increase the likelihood of developing a drug treatment that makes a difference. ~
Dr. Alois Alzheimer
Oriana:
Since diabetes is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s, to the point that Alzheimer’s is sometimes called “Type III diabetes,” it certainly makes sense to see if the most common anti-diabetes and longevity drug, metformin, may have an effect on the dreaded disease. I found a small pilot study of metformin:
~ Epidemiological studies have identified a robust association between Type II Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and neurobiological studies have suggested the presence of central nervous system (CNS) insulin resistance in individuals with AD. (. . . ) Metformin was associated with improved executive functioning, and trends suggested improvement in learning/memory and attention. ~
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5476214/
Oriana:
I suspect that past a certain age it would make sense for everyone to take metformin or equivalent. Fortunately such an equivalent exists. It’s called BERBERINE. Its benefits include a drop in blood sugar and in LDL cholesterol.
Other studies have confirmed the effectiveness of metformin and other anti-diabetic drugs in the prevention of Alzheimer’s. You’d think that this breakthrough would receive wide attention, rather than remaining relatively unknown.
As one MD told me long ago, “It’s not enough that a cure exists. Someone also has to be able to get very rich off it.” Here we don’t speak of a cure, but of a significant lowering of the risk of Alzheimer’s (and probably other neurological diseases of aging). It’s worth knowing about the connection between Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and anti-diabetes drugs and supplements (and yes, diet and exercise, it’s all connected). 
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RESEARCHERS FOUND 14 BIOMARKERS CAN ACCURATELY PREDICT DEATH WITHIN 5–10 YEARS
~ Using a “well-standardized metabolomics platform,” the team began with 226 metabolic biomakers, discovering 136 that show an association with all-cause mortality. They eventually landed on 14, including blood sugar levels; inflammation markers; HDL, a common cholesterol marker; albumin, a protein produced by your liver that clues you in on kidney or liver problems; acetoacetate, a beta-keto acid normally used to test diabetics for ketoacidosis (as well as monitoring people on ketogenic diets); and isoleucine, an amino acid that can ultimately lead to damaged brain cells and death. [NOTE: ONLY AN EXCESS OF ISOLEUCINE CAN LEAD TO HEALTH PROBLEMS. If your diet is moderate in protein, you shouldn't worry.)
Of the initial population sample, 5,512 died during the testing period. Using the biomarkers for another survey, the team predicted death rates from a participant pool of 7,603 Finnish people initially tested in 1997. They were able to predict with 83 percent accuracy who would die over the five to 10 year period. One caveat: when testing those over 60 years of age, the prediction rate dropped to 72 percent. Another: the pool was entirely comprised of Finns. Extrapolating to apply to the global population raises eyebrows.
Still, given that this test includes popular and broadly applied biomarker tests for cardiovascular, cancer, and inflammation issues, all of which are known causes of mortality regardless of ethnicity, using this blood profile could clue doctors in on the expected longevity of their patients.
While aware of the study’s limitations, the team feels it provides a potentially useful platform for determining overall health. ~
https://bigthink.com/health/blood-test-death/
*metabolomics refers to the study of metabolites
Oriana:
I am not surprised that blood glucose level was mentioned first, and then HDL. Fortunately, there is a supplement that improves both: BERBERINE. Its advantage over metformin, a proven life-extension drug, is that it improves the cholesterol profile, in addition to lowering blood glucose.
Excess isoleucine reportedly makes the urine smell like maple syrup. I don’t have any personal experience with that. On the other hand, I’ve watched the trend away from high protein diet to emphasis on broccoli and spinach and other non-starchy vegetables (though resistant starch is desirable -- more on this in a future blog). The intake of protein should be moderate at best. By the way, excess protein is converted to glucose, so you end up with elevated blood sugar, a marker of aging.
Most aminoacids are glucogenic — but not lysine. There may be a special place for lysine (great against the herpes virus) in the anti-aging arsenal.
As for lowering inflammation, personally I discovered that OMAX curcumin seems to work. I normally refrain from giving brand names, but in this case I wish to spare readers wasting endless money on useless turmeric extracts.
So yes, we can definitely do something to slow down aging and extend “health span.” But it takes motivation, and motivation to live longer is related to having something to live for. And that’s a different problem, which can’t be solved by berberine or lysine.
(As for the supposed problem with the study subjects being Finns, let's remember that most studies are done on mice and rats.)
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CHANGING DIRECTION WHILE YOU'RE MOVING APPEARS TO BENEFIT BONES.
~ When researchers reviewed bone strength in the hips of a variety of athletes, they found that those who played sports such as soccer and squash, which involve rapid turns and start-and-stop actions, had bone strength similar to those who did high-impact sports, like triple jumpers and high jumpers—and they all had greater bone density than long-distance runners. ~ Harvard Medical School Newsletter
ending on beauty:
JUDGMENT DAY
Today I saved a dragonfly,
with a canopy pole I hoisted him up
from the pool. Without pausing to dry
the stained glass of bronze-veined wings,
he took to the air, a weightless shimmer
zigzagging across the dazzled yard.
Perhaps this brilliant buoyancy
will save me on Judgment Day –
on one scale, my heart
heavy with darkness;
on the other, like the Egyptian
Feather of Truth,
a translucent dragonfly wing.
~ Oriana
dragonfly caught in amber
