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VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE
Nothing about her trembles.
The gods are always
on her side.
She is the unstoppable
march, the wind of one
endless stride. Her hard
breasts forward, wings
in the applauding air,
she storms her heroic body
against the humbled space.
Mercifully,
she has no head.
We the defeated are spared
that helmet-straight
nose, that mouth
unstooping
to speech,
the pair of absolute
blind eyes.
~ Oriana
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HOW THE VICTORIAN WRITERS SHAPED THE MODERN NOVEL
~ Over 120 years since the Victorian era ended, its literature continues to have huge staying power in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world. We all have a clear idea of what “Dickensian” London looks like. We know what it means to be a Scrooge, or to be a bit Jekyll and Hyde. Most of us know the twist in Jane Eyre and what happens in Tess of the D’Urbervilles before we ever pick up the novels. We study Victorian books at school and university, adapt them for screen, write retellings. Just look at all the twenty-first-century reimaginings of the Sherlock Holmes stories: the films with Robert Downy Jr., BBC’s Sherlock, Elementary, Enola Holmes, and so many more.
There are particular cultural and social reasons—often not good ones—why a book might become a “classic” in the first place, while other books by other authors or from other times and places get forgotten. It’s impossible to separate the legacy of the Victorian period and its literature from the huge political and social power Britain exercised through its Empire and its concerted attacks on other cultures, both during the Victorian period and before and after.
When it comes to Victorian books themselves, some are easier to separate from this than others; you can’t read any Rudyard Kipling or much Arthur Conan Doyle without encountering imperialist and racist views; but for other Victorian authors, the Empire was something that influenced their world but that they rarely wrote about. Regardless, Victorian literature would certainly not be so widely read today were English not so widely spoken as a language, and that too is a legacy of imperialism.
However, while this goes some of the way to explaining why many Victorian books have become “canon,” it doesn’t really explain why we still love these books. And the fact is that a lot of us do. On my YouTube channel, Books and Things, I run the readathon Victober with a few fellow BookTubers. We dedicate the month of October each year to reading Victorian literature. It’s been running for over six years, and we now have thousands of enthusiastic participants from all over the world.
Of course, the Victorians didn’t just happen to write lots of amazing books. There is a specific context that led to the creation of their literature, and certain features that have given it its staying power.
At the start of the Victorian period, the novel was a relatively new form. The first novel in English is usually said to be Robinson Crusoe, published 118 years before Queen Victoria ascended to the throne; but in its first century, the novel was often not taken seriously. It was felt that serious people read non-fiction and poetry, while novels were frivolous: guilty pleasures that might even have detrimental effects on the moral character.
The peculiar technological and social circumstances of Victorian Britain gave writers the chance to redefine the novel. Improvements in printing technology meant that books, newspapers and periodicals were quicker and cheaper to produce, easier to buy. The publishing industry expanded—indeed, it became an industry—and grew more commercialized, making writing into a viable profession. Novels were serialized in journals, and everyone waited eagerly for the next installment.
Literacy rates increased dramatically in Victorian Britain, partly due to the growth of the middle classes, partly due to education acts making schooling more widely available. Parliamentary acts also cut down working hours in factories, and technological changes shortened the length of tasks both in and out of the home—which meant that, as the era went on, at least some Victorians had increasing amounts of leisure time.
All this gave novelists new audiences and new opportunities—and, with growing competition, more reason to experiment and try new things. This great hunger for literature is partly why Victorian authors were so prolific. Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels; Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote over eighty; Margaret Oliphant, now somewhat forgotten but hugely successful in her day, wrote nearly 100.
The new prominence of the novel also transformed how it was viewed. While some fiction continued to be looked down upon—such as the cheap, sensational “Penny Dreadfuls”—many novels became respectable. Novels grew to be perhaps the first form of mass entertainment, popular throughout a variety of social groups. People from all classes and walks of life enjoyed Charles Dickens, for example. Dickens is often considered to be the first real celebrity; he toured the UK and the USA extensively, reading extracts of his work live to massive audiences. In The Warden, Anthony Trollope created a satirical version of Dickens called “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” and the implication is clear: that Dickens was felt to speak for—and, indeed, shape the opinion of—the majority.
Novels could even be important tools for social criticism. Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy was written with the aim of exposing poor working conditions within textile mills, and its popularity played an important part in pressuring Parliament to pass the Factory Acts of the 1840s. Novels, and their authors, came to be taken seriously in a way they simply had not been before. One novelist, Benjamin Disraeli, even went on to become the Prime Minister.
The change in the novel’s status during the Victorian period, alongside the increasing variety and volume of novels, also gave birth to a lot of our modern genres and literary traditions. We all know that Sherlock Holmes gave us the modern detective, but Arthur Conan Doyle was also building on earlier Victorian detective figures like Sergeant Cuff from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Mr Bucket from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
Sensation novels—books like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne—blended domestic drama with pacy plots, family mysteries, secrets, and betrayals, bringing crime and deceit into the domestic sphere; in other words, they are the precursors to modern thrillers.
The era also gave us the beginnings of children’s literature, science fiction, and horror.
Victorian love stories, coming-of-age tales, and gothic works still appeal to us because they have the features we expect. One issue with reading Victorian books today is that they can sometimes appear clichéd—but this is often because they contain the seeds of what went on to become genre tropes.
It is not only Victorian genres that feel familiar to us: they also wrote about a lot of themes that still interest and concern us in the modern world. We think of the Victorians as patriarchal, hierarchical, imperialist, and narrow-minded, and it’s unquestionably true that these things can be found in their literature in abundance—again, there’s Rudyard Kipling—but we can also find passionate arguments against the social status quo.
Elizabeth Gaskell and George Gissing fought against prejudice and class boundaries in their books North and South and The Nether World. Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens’s criticisms of money, excess and corruption in books like The Way We Live Now and Our Mutual Friend still feel pertinent. The Moonstone feels problematic in places, but Wilkie Collins was trying to write an anti-imperialist novel, within the limitations of his time.
Victorian literature can be surprisingly proto-feminist, too: books like Margaret Oliphant’s Hester, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, and Amy Dillwyn’s Jill all challenged gender roles and social rules. Jude the Obscure was so radical in its condemnation of class and marriage as oppressive institutions that the response to it effectively ended Thomas Hardy’s career as a novel-writer.
The Victorians were also, like us, concerned about technology and its impacts. We often talk about the Victorian period as a homogenous era, but it was, in fact, sixty-four years of huge change. Like us, they lived in a time when technology was rapidly altering the world around them; they, like us, didn’t always know what to make of this. They worried about technological development taking away people’s jobs; they worried about pollution; they worried about whether technology would change society for the better or for the worse. In his novel Hard Times, Dickens explored technological and industrial change, and how these things were affecting social interaction and the way people thought. Dickens’s concern that technology was taking away people’s imagination and sense of joy does not feel far away from modern conversations about how the internet and social media affect how we think and interact.
The reason why the Victorian period still interests so many modern readers is because it is long ago but not too long ago. We find their world fascinating but recognizable enough to understand. We keep returning to the works of the Victorians because they wrote great novels, because they wrote so many of them, because they explored themes that still interest us today, because many of our foundational texts come from them. In short, the Victorian era is when modern English literature as we know it began. ~
https://lithub.com/how-the-victorians-created-the-modern-english-novel/?fbclid=IwAR2kM3ZzFIvMGa6kTRGc4IW87bulD3j_EU5ZqiZIcS52bK8bNtn060rGdoM
Mary:
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LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT RUSSIAN LITERATURE
~ Most iconic pieces of classical Russian literature were written in Western Europe, often its Mediterranean rim.
Idiot by Dostoyevsky in Milano, Florence and Geneva
War and Peace by Tolstoy in southern France (partly in Paris, too)
The Mother by Gorky in Capri, Italy.
Dead Souls by Gogol in Roma, Paris, and Lausanne
Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky in Wiesbaden, Germany
The Mediterranean sun and warm surf evoke powerful longing not only among our intellectuals and artists, but also the movers and shakers. It’s the spiritual womb of Russian civilization. Hence the pull of Crimea as a tribute to Paradise Lost, a sunny promise of escape from our cold, grey, far end of Eurasia.
Below, President Putin in classic Roman rendition by Pável Gréshnikov. The enduring glory of Imperial Rome has been a mighty inspiration for Russian rulers since the era of first Tsars (“Tsar” = “Caesar”). ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
Below, a bust of Putin as a Roman emperor, by Pável Gréshnikov commissioned by one of the Cossack associations in southern Russia:
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IN MOSCOW, SIGNS IN ENGLISH
~ Today I took a stroll down the street where I live in Moscow and realized that most of the business signs are in English. Even the signs that are in Russian have European words like “restaurant” or English words like “bloom” only spelled in Cyrillic. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Moscow, Prime Cafe
As my Orthodox Jewish boss in America taught me: “Always count money in English, not in Russian, because it’s more money.” I didn’t listen to his advice and that’s why I'm still poor. ~
Peter Tajtki:
The West is on the brink of bankruptcy!
And the East?
One step ahead!
(Oriana: This may be funny only to those who grew up with the propaganda that the Soviet Union is always “One step ahead” of the West in everything.)
Ian Parkinson:
“We hated America so much we copied everything they did.”
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EVALUATING KHRUSHCHEV (Dima Vorobiev)
~ The main legacy of Khrushchev as a Soviet leader is rather straightforward. He took the Bolshevik concept of international Communist expansion (i.e. revolutionary wars) off the Soviet agenda.
The pros and cons of his rule are all consequences of this fact.
The quasi permanent state of siege was relieved. Some resources were redistributed from the military-industrial complex into the civil sector, farmers got freedom of movement, some tensions with the West were defused. As the subsequent development showed, it was plain wrong. In a longer term, Communism seems to have a chance only in a state of heightened economic and social mobilization, and recurrent rotation of elites through large-scale purges. A gradual stagnation and decline followed, resulting in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
While from the Communist point of view, Khrushchev was a slow-working disaster, from the point of view of a common man, like myself, his rule was a good thing. He ended Stalin’s rule of never-ending terror. He was the first of Soviet leaders who gave precedence to making life better for Soviet people, ahead of advancing the cause of Socialism.
He seemed to firmly believe in peaceful competition between Socialism and Capitalism. He introduced the buoyant optimism of the youthful 1960s, the happiest decade for at least two generations of Russians. For great many of us, this is not only the decade of Gagarin’s 1961 space triumph, but the time when millions of families got their first ever apartment they didn’t need to share with someone else. ~
Igor Gleb:
This phrase is fabulous: ”Communism seems to have a chance only in a state of heightened social, economic and social mobilization, and recurrent rotation of elites through large-scale purges.” One to show to young communists to be!
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WHAT IF TROTSKY INSTEAD OF STALIN HAD COME TO POWER?
The main difference between Trotsky and Stalin was in their central philosophy—Trotsky’s was “Permanent Revolution,” and Stalin’s was “Socialism in One Country.” To explain further:
Permanent Revolution was the doctrine that the Soviet state should endeavor at all times to further the spread of Communism to other parts of the world; to its advocates, Communism was basically a religion and they were its jihadists. This was already in evidence in the aftermath of World War I, where the Bolsheviks did all they could to help people like Bela Kun in Hungary and the Spartacists in Germany, and nearly established lasting Communist states in both places.
Trotsky was a firm believer in this idea, and was willing to countenance another war at any time to establish world Communism; he plainly said he didn’t care what kind of destruction it wreaked, or how many people died. He’d have had the whole world either Red or dead.
Socialism in One Country is the doctrine that the Soviet Union should first establish a working, functional Socialist USSR (true Communism requires a large number of nations, if not the world) before seeking to spread Communism elsewhere. Even at that, the main goal of the Soviets in establishing other Communist states wasn’t semi-religious fervor; when Stalin took over Eastern Europe and Communized it after WW2, he did so only to establish a massive buffer zone between the Soviet Union and any potential future enemies.
This is just the traditional Russian defensive mentality at work, not a desire to expand Communism; after Sigismund III, Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler had all devastated Russia after starting an invasion right from the border, Stalin wanted to make sure the next war started hundreds of kilometers from Russia.
With that out of the way, what if Trotsky had won the power struggle?
It wouldn’t have been pretty. First of all, Trotsky was as brutal in his ideas about forcibly imposing his philosophy and suppressing dissent as Stalin was, or as Robespierre was, if you want to go back further in history. There would have been a Soviet Terror under Trotsky just like there was with Stalin. Trotsky might not have cooked up a Ukrainian genocide just to solve a perceived ethnic problem, and he wouldn’t have listened to Trofim Lysenko’s crazy ideas, and he (probably) wouldn’t have killed off all his best generals—but he still would have been brutal.
But the biggest problem would have been the doctrine of Permanent Revolution. We have no reason to believe Trotsky was anything other than a “true believer” who would have done exactly as he said. At some point, likely between 1928 and 1932, he would have started a very different World War II, probably after fomenting one too many Communist uprisings overseas and pissing someone off too much, or simply by outright invading someone in the name of holy Communism.
I’ve already written about what I think might have happened, and it would have dramatically changed the historical perception of a very famous world leader, and not Trotsky. There was one leader of a Great Power state who fully expected the doctrine of Permanent Revolution to lead to an early World War II—Benito Mussolini. He had rearmed Italy with updated WW1 ordnance and equipment in the 1920s, planning to lead the struggle against a Trotskyite Soviet Union. Imagine, if you will, the alternative history scenario of the bombastic Benito Mussolini, the sage who was the only man to realize the danger to Western Civilization, and its defender from Communist tyranny!
Make Trotsky win the power struggle, and Mussolini is a hero and Churchill is a footnote to history.
It very well could have happened…
~ John Cate, Quora
Oriana:
It seems that some Leftist thinkers still delude themselves with the idea that the fall of communism is Stalin’s fault. If only Trotsky rather than Stalin came to power after Lenin’s death . . .
But Trotsky basically wasn’t interested in governing. He believed in Permanent Revolution. In practice, that might have turned out even more horrible than the Stalinist Terror.
The way Stalin made sure that Trotsky got assassinated, even though far from Moscow, in Mexico, was a preview of many more assassinations to come, and a proof that going abroad did not provide secure protection from Moscow’s lethal reach.
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LOOTING AS A MAJOR THEME IN THE WAR IN UKRAINE
~ The wild looting of Russian soldiers is one of the main motives for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. This does not cause any complaints from the Russian leadership. To the contrary. All looting has been encouraged in the Russian army from the top down. Any Ukrainian town is automatically considered a target for collective robbery.
Until 1996, in the Russian Federation theft by troops during hostilities or on the battlefield was punishable by law with imprisonment from 3 to 10 years or the death penalty.
But from 1995, amendments were made to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, according to which this offense was decriminalized. In the new edition of Russia’s Criminal Code, there is no reference to looting.
Since this amendment to the Code was introduced, looting has been officially allowed in Russia. The abolition of punishment concerns exclusively looting on the battlefield and the belongings of the dead and wounded. But at the time of this change in the law, Russian troops were engaged in the First Chechen War.
So, according to Russian law, servicemen who steal the property of Ukrainians killed on the battlefield are not criminals.
But the scale of the looting of the Russian army in Ukraine has gone even further than the Russian criminal legislation anticipated. There is confirmed evidence that the Russians take absolutely everything from the homes of Ukrainians – from washing machines, food blenders to underwear, and take away their loot with military vehicles.
Such actions by Russian troops can only take place with the consent of their commanders.
According to Russian troops taken prisoner in this war, when they enter a Ukrainian town, their commander allocates transport for loading the loot (or this transport is taken from local residents), and higher-level commanders who are not directly involved in attacks on settlements make orders and take tribute from the soldiers taking part in the looting. The Russian troops are then forced to take away from the civilian population not only for themselves, but also for their commanders.
Today, an organized armed force, addicted to looting, increasingly becomes useless and unsuitable for waging war. “Corrupted” by looting and robbery, Russian military units become at first poorly combat-ready due to the fact that their personnel are more interested in imported frying pans and household electrical equipment than in combat operations. These units then cease to perform the tasks required by their command.
What is happening in the occupied Ukrainian territories is not so much a war as a pirate raid.
The Russian troops who fight like this are not a regular army, but a rabble. Even in the Soviet and Third Reich armies they took steps to try to prevent looting. But in the Russian army, they apparently consider this as a way to additionally motivate personnel and attract new recruits from the Russian Federation.
This is not a traditional army, but a horde of marauders. When it comes to the goals that the Russians set for their army, there are only two. The ultimate goal is clear to everyone – the capture of Ukraine, but if that does not work out, then they must at least kill, rob, rape and destroy as many Ukrainians as possible.
When Putin ultimately departs the scene, Russia will need decades to clear up the criminalization of society that he has created.
His so-called “special military operation” was the final nail in the coffin of the Russian “armed forces”.
Putin’s international horde sent to Ukraine does not care about “patriotism”. The only incentive for them to fight is profit. The goal of the occupiers is to steal as many good things, household appliances, and alcohol as possible through robbery and terrorizing the civilian population.
The war in Ukraine has dispelled any doubts about who the grandfathers of the “victor’s people” were. If Putin’s bandit formation displays itself as the sole successor and custodian of the traditions of the Soviet army, then it will be clear that it is from the grandfathers of the Red Army that their terrorist grandchildren have inherited the looting gene. This hidden side of the criminal everyday life of the Red Army in Germany is well described in Vladimir Gelfand’s German Diaries for 1945-1946.
Now it is enough to recall only the shame of Marshal Zhukov. The scale of his looting – a trainload of 7 wagons of stolen furniture, works of art and other trophies – outraged even Stalin. Repeating the example of his idol, Putin may try to save his own skin by pinning the blame on his generals. But this will not change the reality of his catastrophic military defeat and the imminent collapse of his hated regime. ~
https://www.eupoliticalreport.eu/russia-is-a-country-of-marauders-and-murderers/
Oriana:
Of course there is no “looting gene.” But there can be a “looting wartime culture.” I think the most interesting paragraph here is the last one, about the outrageous scale of looting in which Marshal Zhukov, of WW2 fame, indulged. Stalin didn’t like it, and Marshal Zhukov found himself summarily retired.
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Mother of a killed soldier receives a pressure cooker.
Mary:
How strange and pitiful to see a bereaved mother being consoled for the loss of her son with a pressure cooker!! Is that how you measure the worth of a man?? Simply replace him with some small appliance?? Accept his loss if you gain the small luxury of a minor convenience??
In the same vein I remember reading that Isis recruited members with the promise of refrigerators. Recruits would desert as the refrigerators didn't show up. Pitiful and ludicrous. So you could hope for the martyr's reward of Paradise, or, a refrigerator here on earth. These kind of equivalencies devalue both parts of the exchange-the human life and the proffered reward — something desired despite the fact it would be useless where most of these people live...without electricity, without even the well stocked supermarket goods to fill the refrigerator or cook in the pressure cooker. The object becomes only a symbol of a life denied, its bestowal one more insult to endure.
Oriana:
And another sad thing is that the bereaved mother has been so imbued with propaganda that she doesn't understand it's Putin who's responsible for her son's death. No doubt she blames the Ukrainians. Putin's newest and most shameless lie is that it's Ukraine that attacked Russia. If you repeat a lie enough times, the Nazis wrote in their manuals, most people will eventually accept it as the truth. And the lie should not be some timid little lie. It might as well be a grand, ridiculous lie . . .
And why waste money on a substantial consolation gift when a pressure cooker will do? It seems like a joke in the worst possible taste, but who cares what the world thinks . . . Only the dictator's life has value -- until it's his turn to get tossed out a window, if we are so lucky.
Morality, Christianity . . . these are silly concepts that need to be swept aside. Hitler showed the way, while invoking "Providence" in his speeches. And at least Hitler's speeches were fiery, while Putin sounds like blah, blah, blah . . . Still, even Hitler's most dramatic speeches didn't in the end amount to anything but a heap of lies and tired "patriotic" clichés, and even the great military engineers and super-weapons that Hitler had -- and Putin doesn't -- could not prevail against the simple fact that evil doesn't triumph forever. It takes too many resources to keep a web of lies going. But there's still much struggle ahead, and terrible, terrible grief.
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HOW STALIN HELPED SHAPE TODAY’S RUSSIA (Dima Vorobiev)
~ No one else among our statesmen of the last 100 years influenced what Russia is today as much as Stalin.
1. Geography
Apart from Crimea, Russia’s modern borders were decided by Stalin.
Among the most important changes, he broke off Russia entire Kazakhstan in 1936 [Oriana: I can't find any confirmation of that; Kazakhstan was a very important Soviet Republic]. However, he added Eastern Prussia, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.
He also snatched from Finland parts of their territories, including Pechenga/Petsamo with much nickel ore and some fjords superb for hiding Soviet nuclear submarines. The little republic of Tuva was also annexed in 1944.
2. Military might
When President Putin so confidently punches above his weight in international matters, time after time, he does this thanks to the residual glory of Stalinism. Our nuclear might, the ferocious reputation of our army [this was written in 2017], the missile technology—all of these are Stalin’s babies.
3. Statism, 365/24/7
The tentpole role of the State in our civilization is as old as the walls of the Kremlin. But before Stalin, it was largely confined to the ruling elite. The rest of us lived our lives in the shadow of Tsarism as we saw fit.
Totalitarianism imposed by Stalin atomized the entire society and made all of us servants of the Communist state. To me as s child it seemed strange that in foreign countries some people work for other individuals and get paid privately. How medieval and impractical!
After the short chaos of the 1990s, working for the government, one way or another, made it back as a default career choice for the majority of Russians. Do you have a son climbing the ladder in a state-owned petroleum company? Or a daughter manning a desk in the tax or customs office? Nowadays, that’s who makes their Russian parents proud.
4. High priest of technocracy
Stalin made a hard-working, unassuming bureaucrat a role model for his successors. All more or less successful occupants of the Kremlin, including Putin, have been faithful to it. If some in the Kremlin tried their hand at charismatic flamboyance, like Khrushchev and Yeltsin, or grand unorthodox visions, like Gorbachev, the nation turned against them.
Putin’s power instincts, no matter what, dictate to him to never abandon the persona of a smart, perceptive, shy desk jokey. Like Stalin, he’s the perfect General Secretary. He feels no need to flash his power and wealth or decorate himself with bling and exquisite titles. Shapeshifting and blending with the scene is wiser than fireworks and grandstanding.
5. Language
Officialese predates the Communists. But you find little of it in the works of our pre-revolutionary authors, or speeches of imperial politicians.
The generation that grew between the world wars, the first one to become 100% literate, soaked the oblique, bloated, wooly vocabulary of Communist communique and Pravda editorials as their own. And they handed it down to us, their sons and grandsons.
Check out the language of the Kremlin and our Foreign office. This is the language we switch to when we talk to our State or sense its presence.
6. Republic of spies
Stalin himself distrusted spies. They were a creed who viewed the world the way he did himself and used the tools of power he knew best. The more useful they got the more dangerous they became.
But KGB/MGB/NKVD/GPU, the way the world knows them, is Stalin’s baby. It grew to an imposing beast that two decades ago filled the vacuum left by the Communists. They were the only ones who retained the skill set, the organization, the mutual trust needed to rein in the mess post-Soviet Russia became in the 1990s.
Putin is an anti-Communist, but he’s an unrepentant, proud alumnus of the Soviet-era secret police. Without Stalin, there would be no Putinism.
7. The War
Stalin presided over an epic, improbable victory over the best army of the 20th century in WW2. For lack of alternatives, this became a pinnacle of our civilization. That’s the best we could do over an entire millennium.
President Putin made the WW2 victory our national day, a centerpiece of our government-endorsed nationalism. “Denying”, “falsifying”, and “belittling” it is nowadays criminal offenses in Russia. The only allowed version of it is the one aligned with the story bequeathed to us by Stalin himself.
8. Economy
Our petroleum bonanza started after Stalin’s death. But it was Stalin’s economic policy in the previous decades that made it possible.
The major factor was his two waves of industrialization. The first, in the 1930s, was based on robbing private peasants, sale of national treasuries, and shrinking private consumption. It was highly successful and helped us outcompete Nazi Germany in the wartime economy. Staling also started the second one, in the late 1940s and 1950s, on the back of all technologies, plants, and equipment we confiscated from Germany and Japan in 1945. This gave us the space breakthrough and the nuclear triad.
Also, the epic colonization of Russian provinces by the means of slave labor in the Gulag project was indispensable. The oil and gas we pump up are situated so far and in so inhospitable places that we couldn’t access them unless Stalin’s generation did such heavy lifting for us.
9. Culture
The things people around the world typically associate with Russia are brought to us on Stalin’s watch. Uniformed army men singing in the choir and doing breakdance? Check. Furry Russian ushánka hats? Stalin was one of the first to wear it. Ruby stars atop the Kremlin towers? Stalin ordered them. The high marks of Russian fine art and literature—Bulgakov, Shostakovich, Prokofyev, Sholokhov? Happened under Stalin.
10. Demography
Russia is dying out. Many other developed countries are dying out too, but our demographic decline is largely caused by Stalinism.
The expedited collectivization of the late 1920s, early 1930s not only broke the back of our 100-million strong private peasantry. It triggered the mass exodus from the countryside and massive disruption of the traditional lifestyle. Birth rates dwindled much earlier than in other agricultural countries. Health care improved, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for the disappearance of the fountain of demographic abundance that was the old-time peasantry.
And then the cosmic blood-letting of WW2. Right now, we experience a new demographic trough as a far echo of WW2 losses. This catastrophic loss of human lives happened because of Stalin’s fateful decision to get a common border with Germany in 1939. Add to that his failed bet that Hitler wouldn’t be such an idiot to attack us in June 1941 so totally unprepared for a big, ugly, protracted war.
Below, a vision of Stalin in the modern world by Orthodox Stalinist Gennady Zhivotov.
As you can see, Stalin underwent an about-face transformation in Putinist Russia. He’s no longer a radical progressive making the world better by tirelessly promoting “peace and social progress” (our post-WW2 name for Marxist Socialist revolution).
Now, he does a “Rio Jesus the Redeemer” as an icon of deep Conservatism. Just like President Putin, he says: “Don’t listen to the progressives who stir trouble and call you to move along. In the name of God, everyone, just STOP!”
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HOW PUTIN DIFFERS FROM STALIN (Dima Vorobiev)
~ Stalin was a revolutionary, an internationalist. Putin is a conservative nationalist, a professed enemy of revolutions, and in recent years, reforms too.
Stalin was a Communist with a profound faith in the superiority of a classless society over Capitalism. Putin is a non-ideological pragmatist who believes in the superior power of money and unrelenting human self-interest.
Stalin was an imperialist. He had a vision for the perpetual expansion of Communism and prepared the country for a protracted armed confrontation with its Capitalist enemies until the Soviet power ultimately would prevail. Putin is a nationalist. He only wants a clear sphere of exclusive Russian interests around our borders and doesn’t mind other powers having their own spheres of interest, as long as they don’t mess with ours. He definitely doesn’t want any expansionist wars.
Stalin was an excellent strategist. His horizon was decades, not years. Putin is an exquisite tactician, who doesn’t believe that serious things in this world can be planned even for a year ahead. He is prepared to change his entire perspective if the considerations of retaining and consolidating his power dictate this.
Stalin was a hardcore Communist, prepared to kill as many as it takes to reach his goals. Putin is a consummate secret police operative who hates shooting, unnecessary murders, and high-profile scandals that defy his preferred policy of deniable plausibility.
Stalin despised the old Russia and had no qualms about destroying it. Putin feels a connection with his Russian roots. He uses the entire Russian history for legitimating his rule.
Stalin inspired his subjects with a vision of a bright future. Putin’s head is turned to the past. He promises to restore the Greater Russian State (“Russkaya Derzhava”) to all its former magnificence.
The attack on Ukraine was Putin’s huge misstep indeed. He expected a lightning remake of Crimea ‘14 but got a full-blown war. He doesn’t know how to fight wars. He is now fighting for his political survival. Otherwise, he’s the same good ol’ Putin, maybe somehow reduced by the onset of old age and long periods of self-isolation. ~
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WHAT YOUNG RUSSIANS ARE TAUGHT ABOUT STALIN
~ In 2017, almost half of young Russians younger than 24 years haven’t heard of Stalin’s purges. For them, he’s an mustachioed old man who took care of his Soviet business in a very confident manner, and crushed Hitler.
They also know that Stalin is not very popular among people in the West, because he was very decisive in defending Russia and scared a lot of them.
In the mind of Russian radical nationalists and Stalinists, Czar Nicholas II and Stalin are two great icons of our imperial state. The fact that Nicolas exiled Stalin to the icy hellhole of Turukhansk—while Stalin later was among the men who approved of the killing of the Czar and his family, along with hundreds of thousands of their subjects—is considered by them as an insignificant detail. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
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KHRUSHCHEV’S “SECRET SPEECH” WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF COMMUNISM
~ Khrushchev's secret speech was the 'beginning of the end' of the communist system. Khrushchev did not realize the consequences of this speech.
Having no competition, the Communist Party did not have a system for recruiting party activists, selecting new voices, and bringing new ideas.
The only method to rejuvenate the party was through physical elimination. Many Stalinist purges or Mao’s cultural revolution did exactly that thing.
From the moment Khrushchev told the party activists that the Stalinist purges were ending, the party's rejuvenation also stopped, the party ossified, the children of the party bosses became bosses, they stopped having contact with the base of the party, the proletarians, and finally, perestroika resulted.
It was the most traumatizing experience for thousands upon thousands of militants educated in the cult of Stalin to learn from world communism’s most authoritative voice that “he who had been the leader of progressive humanity, the inspiration of the world, the father of the Soviet people, the master of science and learning, the supreme military genius, and of course, the greatest genius in history was, in reality, a paranoiac torturer, a mass murderer, and a military ignoramus who had brought the Soviet state to the verge of disaster’’.
Khrushchev made sure to identify the year 1934, when Stalin engineered the assassination of his Politburo colleague and presumed rival, Sergei Kirov, as the beginning of the disaster.
What Khrushchev deplored was not the terror but its “distorted” application against the party activists. This was the main error of Khrushchev: the effort to rescue Leninism from any association with Stalinist anarchy and to rehabilitate only those victims of the Stalinist terror who had a conflict with the big boss. ~ Catalin Oltenau, Quora
Luke Hatherton:
Stalin dug the grave of communism before Khrushchev ascended to the top. He couldn’t live forever, and you can’t sustain that kind of exhausting terror state forever. In order to keep the kind of control he had, Stalin would have had to strangle economic and political reforms in their cradle while the Soviet Union consequently fell behind the USA even faster than it did in real life.
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FLOWERS FOR STALIN ON THE SEVENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
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THE HORRORS OF CHINA’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD
~ My country China has had thousands of years of history with many shameful events. Selecting from more recent history, I will say “The Great Leap Forward”.
Literally millions of people died……….
I mean MILLIONS.
The Great Leap Forward was a five-year economic plan executed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, begun in 1958 and abandoned in 1961.
The goal was to modernize the country's agricultural sector using communist economic ideologies.
Instead of stimulating the country's economy, The Great Leap Forward resulted in mass starvation and famine.
It is estimated that between 30 and 45 million Chinese citizens died due to famine, execution, and forced labor, along with massive economic and environmental destruction.
The Great Leap Forward remains the largest episode of non-wartime mass killing in human history, and a clear example of the failures of socialism and economic central planning.
In 1958, Mao announced his plan for the Great Leap Forward, which he laid out as a five-year plan to improve the economic prosperity of the People’s Republic of China. He devised the plan after touring China and concluding that he felt the Chinese people were capable of anything.
Overall, the plan was centered around two primary goals, collectivizing agriculture, and widespread industrialization, with two main targets, increasing grain and steel production.
Private plot farming was abolished and rural farmers were forced to work on collective farms where all production, resource allocation, and food distribution was centrally controlled by the Communist Party. Large-scale irrigation projects, with little input from trained engineers, were initiated, and experimental, unproven new agricultural techniques were quickly introduced around the country.
These innovations resulted in declining crop yields from failed experiments and improperly constructed water projects. A nationwide campaign to exterminate sparrows, which Mao believed (incorrectly) were a major pest on grain crops, resulted in massive locust swarms in the absence of natural predation by the sparrows. Grain production fell sharply, and hundreds of thousands died from forced labor and exposure to the elements on irrigation construction projects and communal farming.
Famine quickly spread across the countryside, resulting in millions more deaths. People resorted to eating tree bark and dirt, and in some areas to cannibalism. Farmers who failed to meet grain quotas, tried to get more food, or attempted to escape were tortured and killed along with their family members via beating, public mutilation, being buried alive, scalding with boiling water, and other methods.
Millions died from starvation, exposure, overwork, and execution in just a few years. It broke families apart, sending men, women, and children to different locations, and destroyed traditional communities and ways of life. Farmland was damaged by nonsensical agricultural practices and the landscape denuded of trees to fuel the steel furnaces.
Thirty to forty percent of the housing stock was demolished to obtain raw materials for collective projects. In industry, massive quantities of capital goods and raw materials were consumed in projects that yielded no additional output of final goods.
The Great Leap Forward was officially halted in Jan. 1961 after three brutal years of death and destruction. ~ Operator Jane, lives in the US since 2017, Quora
Oriana:
When asked about the greatest monsters in human history, we tend to say: Hitler and Stalin. We entirely forget the third monster: Mao. Yet it’s Mao who may have caused the highest body count of victims — certainly in the millions.
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HOW TO KNOW YOUR CORE VALUES
~ What are your values?
It’s an innocent question but the answer might make you a bit defensive. You probably think that you have values. Wait, you know you have values. You have lots of them — good ones. You just keep them to yourself, but when you say them out loud …
Well, there’s the problem.
When determining your values, one of two things usually happens. You say them but they sound incredibly vague (Wow. I believe in honesty...) because you haven’t really defined them. Or, when you explain them your rationale falls apart (I gave up playing all sports to spend time with my kids, but is that the best way to promote being active?).
So maybe it’s time for a tune-up, or to establish a core set of values. It’s a good thing to do. When it happens, life gets easier. Those stressful decisions, whether it’s moving for a job or letting someone merge, aren’t so stressful, because you’re not wondering if you did the right thing.
“It’s a way to live with fewer regrets,” says Rosemary Lloyd, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
But determining your values is not an intellectual exercise. It’s about taking those general ideals — loyalty, family, generosity, etc. — making them your own, and then putting them to use. Otherwise, it’s just a premise.
“A value doesn’t mean much if it isn’t attached to a behavior,” say Carol Landau, clinical professor emerita of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.
To get there, it starts with figuring out what matters, since, as Lloyd points out, “there are hundreds of values in the world.” You don’t need all of them — a top three usually helps — and your list can change over time and each value can shift in importance.
Some values may come quickly, but you may have forgotten others because, well, life gets hectic. What helps in determining your values is to ask yourself questions and see where the answers lead. The following can help.
1. When Was I Happiest In My Life?
It might have been something from the past like at summer camp or the weekly poker game, or something as recent as holding your child. The moment taps into you at your best, and you can tease out the elements to recapture, whether it’s traveling a little more often or just laughing really hard.
“If you know what makes you happy, don’t we want to maximize that in our lives?” Lloyd says.
2. When Was I Most Proud?
It could have been changing jobs at 30 years old or telling the truth at nine, but the commonality is that you faced a challenge and pushed through it. This kind of adversity often reveals what’s most important.
“It’s something you’re willing to fight for,” Lloyd says.
But, she adds, it’s also good to ask the converse question, like when you were saddest or least proud. Those low points offer motivation by giving you a choice: feel like this; never again like that.
“I’ll remember it for the next time,” she says.
3. How Am I Spending My Extra Time?
We get it — extra time? who has extra time? — and with everything you have to do, there doesn’t feel like you have any, but there are pockets. “That’s when you theoretically have freedom of choice,” Landau says.
Everyone needs distractions, but you want to examine if your YouTube break is five minutes or bleeds over into scrolling Twitter for 90, which leads into useless, online debates.
If it’s the latter, you then want to ask another question: Does it make me feel a little uncomfortable? It’s a gut check and it makes you realize that what you’re currently doing might be preventing you from spending time with your partner, reading, or anything else you profess to value.
4. Are We Where We Intended To Be?
This is a question to ask your partner because values are rarely solo endeavors. If you want to play weekend basketball, you need support to make it happen. And if it’s a family matter, you want to make sure you’re still in sync with what you’ve always talked about, Landau says.
But this is just an example of the need to reach out to others when trying to determine what matters. It could be a friend, relative or mentor, any person you trust and who knows you from different times in your life and can remind you of what has always made you happy.
“They’re out of the fray,” she says. “It gives you perspective.”
5. What Would Break Us Up?
Relationship-wise, that is. An affair is the quick answer but not always the complete one. Maybe it’s actually not being considered or seen as a priority. With any question, your goal is to get away from the first, and most obvious, response. Dedicating some attention gets you to the third or fourth where your answer lies, Lloyd says.
This kind of question also taps into family history, which is where most values originate from, and you might realize that being stoic and not talking about problems is actually a tradition that you no longer want to continue.
6. If I Could Start Over, How Would I Spend My Time?
You still live within the limits of your life, but this is a pretend do-over. It doesn’t mean complete upheaval, but based on what you know now, maybe you see spots where what you thought was urgent, e.g., repaying a loan immediately, can be stretched out without much downside. Whatever it is, you have a chance to course correct and refocus your energy.
“You feel better if you’re living according to your principles,” Landau says.
7. Why Am I Doing That?
It’s always good to examine your reason, from working late to buying used sports equipment. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe it needs to be tossed. But now you’re off autopilot and there’s more certainty and less mystery in your decisions.
“You’ll find out what’s driving you,” Landau says.
And it’s not an overly intense process. It can be five or 10 minutes of thought, sometimes not even that much because you’re certain that making people laugh or comfortable is always who you’ve been. It’s just the other values that are there but need a nudge to become more prevalent.
“You just go live your life, but maybe do it with a little more awareness,” Lloyd says. “It has you live a life worth living.”
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COSMIC VISION AND OUR MORAL UNIVERSE
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. ~ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Enlightenment philosophers were vexed that their expanding empirical science of the external, material world collided with long-standing religious and moral traditions premised solely on internal, a priori knowledge. But for Immanuel Kant, the ‘sensible world’ of appearances emerged from cognitive faculties of the human mind, constitutive of observations gained through human experience. ‘We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them,’ he wrote. Kant analogized his reframing of metaphysics to Copernicus’s heliocentrism, in which the astronomer’s observations made sense only when he placed the Sun, rather than Earth, at the center. ‘An object of the senses’ like a new planet observed from a telescope, wrote Kant, ‘conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition’, resolving the perceived discrepancy between the observable world and the mind’s contemplation of it.
The Enlightenment’s radical political philosophy, shifting Europeans’ governance from aristocratic absolutism to freedom gained through reason, dovetailed with Kant’s philosophy of science. Observations of a band of stars that appeared to encircle the sky led him to surmise that the solar system was shaped like a disc around the Sun. ‘Matter [is] … bound to certain laws, and when it is freely abandoned to those laws, it must necessarily bring forth beautiful combinations,’ he wrote in 1755. ‘There is a God just because nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.’ A reasoned universe and a reasoned mind operated together.
Kant’s ‘sensible world’ of the 18th century was Earth, the solar system and the stars in the sky. If Kant’s philosophy holds true, then anticipated astrophysical phenomena of the observable cosmos must continue to be integrated into humans’ self-emplacement in an ever-expanding internal universe as well. Increasingly sophisticated technologies of visual perception – from Galileo’s spyglass to ground- and then space-based telescopes – mediate our entwined expanding astrophysical and moral universes.
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Data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began returning images in July 2022, and is poised to deepen humans’ sensibility of the cosmos and ourselves. Astronomers expect that it will reveal novel astrophysical phenomena both one step beyond the familiar and the presently unimaginable. With its 6.5-meter gold-coated primary mirror and unprecedented sensitivity to long infrared wavelengths, the telescope’s deep field resolves distant star clusters in unparalleled detail. These images could help astronomers model the ‘cosmic spring’ that led to the formation of galaxies through gravitational mechanisms and life itself.
The JWST could also pave the way to realize NASA scientists’ long-quested goal to detect extraterrestrial life, expanding beyond microbes on the surface of Mars or in the Venusian atmosphere, which would shore up a generalized theory of biology and evolution. The apprehension of biosignatures – indications of life in exoplanetary atmospheres – would demand a reordering, not only of how humans perceive the Universe, but of ourselves as living, if perhaps not lonely, beings within it.
The cosmos as Kant understood it and cosmos as astronomers today understand it differ. The latter is more anticipated and sensible, but together they are just two points in a series of ruptures in humans’ perception of conjoined physical and philosophical spacetimes.
These ruptures have unfolded chronologically and spatially in tandem. Each new scalar bound from the Earth – to the Moon, to the local solar system, to alien planets and galaxies, to the very fringes of the Universe – has prompted the reformation of our sense of being. To test how the discovery of nature orders the nature of discovery of ourselves, we time-hop to Renaissance Italy.
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Galileo Galilei improved on existing telescopes, and turned his spyglass to the heavens, writing of striking discoveries in his epochal treatise Sidereus Nuncius (1610), or ‘Starry Messenger’. Observing what a contemporary had dubbed the ‘strange spottednesse’ of the Moon, Galileo wrote that its surface was not ‘smooth, uniform, and precisely spherical’ but rather ‘uneven, rough, and full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the surface of the Earth.’ As the art historian Samuel Y Edgerton, Jr describes it, Galileo, disciplining his eyes and hand through artistic practices flowering in Florence, rendered the Moon in both soft sepia watercolours and dramatic chiaroscuro engravings.
Galileo’s Moon – an imperfect body rife with craggy geologies, pockmarked by ancient collisions – related familiar terrestrial to unfamiliar lunar features, and required a symbolic reordering. Because the Catholic Church’s Moon, upon which the Virgin Mary reigned, referenced the Immaculate Conception, Galileo’s depiction called into question the concept of the Moon – and therefore God’s universe – as perfect and pure. Galileo had corrupted Dante’s ‘eternal pearl’, and the new Moon’s representation came to enter religious frescoes – a tacit if wary acceptance of a morphing moral order.
Next, in careful logs over December 1609 and January 1610, Galileo reported curious pricks of light gamboling about Jupiter, ‘four planets never seen from the beginning of the world.’ Upon observing only two celestial bodies on the 11th night, Galileo ‘mov[ed] from doubt to astonishment’: he realized that the objects were not fixed, independent stars, but instead orbited at ‘marvelous speed around the star of Jupiter’.
We now know these objects as the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Calisto, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is planning to send a probe to Europa in 2024 to investigate the possibility of life in its watery oceans. But four centuries ago, Galileo hastened an insuperable fracture of entwined astrophysical and moral beliefs. Further substantiating Copernicus’ model, Galileo fatally destabilized the prevailing geocentrism that the Church had held for centuries.
This time, the Church met Galileo’s observations with explicit resistance, imperiling his carefully constructed position in nuanced Italian court politics. The historian of science Mario Biagioli describes how Galileo had, initially, ingeniously manipulated the tides of power in the Florentine court, leveraging his astronomical discoveries to fashion himself as a philosopher (not a mere mathematician of lower social grade). By dubbing the moons the ‘Medici planets’, he augmented that family’s supposedly God-given mythology.
But in 1633, the Roman Court found Galileo ‘vehemently suspected of heresy, namely for having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the Earth moves and is not the center of the world.’ Galileo was condemned to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Time-travel three centuries to the Harvard College Observatory in 1912, when the ‘computer’ Henrietta Swan Leavitt earned 30 cents an hour to determine stellar brightness, positions and movements over time. Although the observatory’s director Edward Pickering ‘chose his staff to work, not to think,’ Leavitt’s tedious labor afforded her intimate familiarity with the photographic plates. Partially deaf, her visual immersion let her track the stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (objects we now know to be dwarf galaxies, macerated and then regurgitated by the Milky Way). Leavitt formulated the relation between the length of a ‘Cepheid variable star’s’ brightening and dimming to precise time intervals, leading astronomers to calculate not only their distance from Earth but the scale of the galaxy.
By the 1920s, astronomers debated if the Milky Way galaxy contained the whole of the cosmos or if spiral nebulae were their own separate ‘island universes’ – a distinction that would define the scope of the cosmos. Edwin Hubble used the world’s most powerful telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles to study the Andromeda ‘spiral nebula’ in unprecedented resolution. In a now-famous image, Hubble crossed out the ‘N’ and replaced it with ‘VAR!’ as he realized that the ‘nova’ star was actually a ‘variable’ star; calculating its distance from Earth, he realized that Andromeda was too far away to be incorporated into the Milky Way. We might read Hubble’s ‘!’ as a punctuation of surprise as he too ‘mov[ed] from doubt to astonishment’: his galaxy was surely just one of many that populated a vast cosmos.
NASA honored Hubble decades later with the eponymous telescope that launched into outer space in 1990. Its grand mission was to research black holes, the solar system and, through its unparalleled sensitivity to visible wavelengths, the most distant galaxies in the Universe. But there was an issue: the telescope returned fuzzy images. After five missions to outer space, astronauts repaired the mirror, which NASA described as ‘fix[ing] the flaw much the same way a pair of glasses correct[s] the vision of a near-sighted person.’ In 1995, the now beloved and long-lived telescope returned spectacular ‘baby pictures’ of the Eagle Nebula’s ‘Pillars of Creation’ – billowing columns of gas and dust that are inchoate stars.
The Hubble Deep Field layered 342 separate exposures over 10 days in 1995 to show thousands of young galaxies 12 billion lightyears away. Astronomers confirmed that matter is evenly distributed at very large scales, further evidence of an expanding and cooling post-Big Bang universe. Though scientists had suspected the prevalence of black holes in the Universe, they learned from Hubble images that supermassive black holes cluster at the center of galaxies.
The Hubble telescope was also crucial to astronomers’ observations of distant supernovae in 1998 that revealed that the Universe is not only expanding, but accelerating. The mysterious ‘dark energy’ pushes spacetime to the unfathomable sublime, and accounts for about two-thirds of the Universe, forcing physicists to fundamentally rethink cosmological models.
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Galileo saw far-flung moons twirling and twinkling around Jupiter, further disrupting ancient cosmologies that placed Earth at the center of all things. Leavitt’s creation of a cosmic yardstick aided Hubble to evince the vastness of outer space. And astronomers’ use of the Hubble Telescope unveiled unsettling mysteries about the long future of the cosmos.
The meaningfulness of JWST data go beyond what new insights might be gained from the images alone. ‘While the images themselves are striking and allow us to look at new things in the Universe, it’s also about the introspective process,’ Walker told me. ‘It’s the fact that we’re part of a physical system, on a tiny planet, that can build a machine that allows us to see so deeply into the Universe that, to me, is the most profound feature of those images.’ Extended external ‘sensibility’ leads to new modes of human self-perception as intelligent, technological, self-conscious Earthlings that are imbricated with, and contributors to, our planet’s ‘acquired memory’. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/jwsts-cosmic-revelations-will-change-our-interior-lives-too?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3e6d1c6f39-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_03_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-ebc054fcb6-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
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GIANT SUPERCLUSTERS OF GALAXIES
~ In 2021, British PhD student Alexia Lopez was analyzing the light coming from distant quasars when she made a startling discovery.
She detected a giant, almost symmetrical arc of galaxies 9.3 billion light years away in the constellation of Boötes the Herdsman. Spanning a massive 3.3 billion light years across, the structure is a whopping 1/15th the radius of the observable Universe. If we could see it from Earth, it would be the size of 35 full moons displayed across the sky.
Known as the Giant Arc, the structure throws into question some of the basic assumptions about the Universe. According to the standard model of cosmology – the theory on which our understanding of the Universe is based – matter should be more-or-less evenly distributed across space. When scientists view the Universe on very large scales there should be no noticeable irregularities; everything should look the same in every direction.
Yet the Giant Arc isn't the only example of its kind. These gargantuan structures are now forcing scientists to reassess their theory of how the Universe evolved.
Lopez was studying for her Masters degree at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK when her supervisor suggested using a new method to analyze large scale structures in the Universe. She used quasars – distant galaxies that emit an extraordinary amount of light – to look for signs of ionized magnesium, a sure sign of gas clouds surrounding a galaxy. When light passes through this ionized magnesium, certain frequencies are absorbed, leaving unique light 'signatures' astronomers can detect.
"I looked into known and documented galaxy clusters, and then started plotting what these areas looked like in the Magnesium II method," says Lopez. "One cluster I looked at was very small, but when I plotted it in magnesium II there was this interesting dense band of magnesium absorption across the field of view. This is how I ended up discovering it. It was a happy accident and I was just lucky that it was me that found it.”
What Lopez' "happy accident" uncovered was astonishing. When looking towards the constellation Boötes, a cluster of between 45 to 50 gas clouds, each associated with at least one galaxy, seemed to arrange themselves in an arc 3.3 billion light years across. That is a considerable size given the observable Universe is 94 billion light years wide.
Boötes the Herdsman
According to Lopez's article, it is extremely unlikely (a probability of just 0.0003 per cent) that such a large structure could have arisen by chance. It suggests that it may have formed due to something in the natural physics of the Universe that we currently don't account for. Her findings directly challenge a central facet of the standard cosmological model – the best explanation we have for how the Universe started and evolved.
This facet, known as the cosmological principle, states that on a large scale, the Universe should look roughly the same everywhere, no matter your position or the direction in which you are looking. There should be no giant structures, rather space should be smooth and uniform. This is convenient, as it lets researchers draw conclusions about the whole Universe based only on what we see from our corner of it. However it also makes sense, as following the Big Bang the Universe expanded outwards, flinging matter in every direction simultaneously.
There is another problem. According to the standard model, structures like the Giant Arc simply wouldn't have had time to form.
"The current idea for how structures formed in the Universe is through a process known as gravitational instability," says Subir Sarkar, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford.
About a million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was expanding, tiny fluctuations in density led to bits of matter clumping together. Over billions of years, the pull of gravity eventually led these clumps to form stars and galaxies. However, there is a size limit to this process. Anything larger than about 1.2 billion light-years across simply wouldn't have had sufficient time to form.
“To form structures you need particles to congregate close to each other so gravitational collapse can occur," says Sarkar. "Those particles would have to move in from outside the structure to get there. So, if your structure is 500 million light years across, light would take 500 million years to move from one end to the other. However, the particles we are talking about are moving much more slowly than light, so it would take billions of years to create a structure of this size, and the universe has only been around for about 14 billion years.”
The Giant Arc discovered by Lopez isn't the only large-scale structure discovered by astronomers.
There's the "Great Wall" (also called the CfA2 Great Wall) of galaxies discovered in 1989 by Margaret Geller and John Huchra. The wall is approximately 500 million light-years long, 300 million light years wide, and 15 million light years thick.
Even bigger is the Sloan Great Wall – a cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies, discovered in 2003 by J Richard Gott III and Mario Juric and their colleagues at Princeton University. That wall is nearly 1.5 billion light years in length.
In the last decade the discovery of these behemoths has accelerated even further. In 2014, scientists discovered the Laniakea supercluster, a collection of galaxies in which our own Milky Way resides. Lanaikea is 520 million light years across and contains roughly the mass of 100 million billion suns.
Then in 2016 the BOSS Great Wall – a complex of galaxies over one billion light years across – was uncovered. BOSS is made up of 830 separate galaxies that gravity has pulled into four superclusters. The galaxies are connected by long filaments of hot gas. In 2020 the South Pole Wall, which stretches 1.4 billion light-years across was also added to the list.
However the current record holder for the biggest of these structures is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. Discovered in 2013, it spans 10 billion light years – more than one-10th the size of the visible Universe.
Galaxies began to form about a million years after the Big Bang, as matter started to clump together.
"We calculated it and then realized, 'Uh oh, this is the biggest thing in the Universe'," says Jon Hakkila, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Their concern was justified. Both Hakkila and Lopez performed a range of statistical tests to try to prove that the results couldn't be down to chance. For the Giant Arc, the results have a confidence level of 99.9997%. In scientific research, the gold standard for statistical significance is known as 5- sigma, which equates to a probability of about 1 in 3.5 million that the results are down to chance. The Giant Arc reached a significance of 4.5 sigma, so there's still the possibility that the structure is a chance arrangement of stars.
"Our eyes are very good at seeing patterns. You might see initials in the clouds, but that's not a real structure, your mind is imposing a structure on what is actually random," explains Sarkar. "However, I don't think that is the case in this situation, I think it is a genuine physical chain of superclusters.”
If more structures like the Giant Arc and Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall are proven to exist, astronomers will be forced to rewrite – or at least revise – the standard model of cosmology.
It isn't the first time that the model will have had to have been adapted. In 1933, Caltech scientist Fritz Zwicky measured the mass of a cluster of galaxies, and found the number to be smaller than he expected. The mass was so small, in fact, that the galaxies should have flown apart and escaped the gravitational pull of the cluster. Something else, therefore, must hold the clusters of galaxies together.
This "something" is dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to make up 27% of the Universe. Then in 1998, the model was further adapted to include dark energy, after two independent teams of astronomers measured the expansion of the Universe, and found that it was speeding up.
Either way, we should know for sure within the next few years. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a planned 10-year survey of the southern sky, may provide astronomers with an unprecedented view of the Universe.
"It takes a lot to make a paradigm shift, especially when people have their lives and careers invested in it, but ultimately with science we have to see who is right," says Sarkar. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230302-the-giant-arcs-that-may-dwarf-everything-in-the-cosmos?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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ATHEIST NOT NIHILIST
I think spiritual not religious is a false distinction since spiritual and religious both imply that meaning emanates from the supernatural realm.
Whether you believe in a man with a white beard or a higher power rooting for love, it amounts to the same thing – a fine thing, a necessary thing perhaps to bring meaning to all of our mundane lives, but not by my estimation a real thing.
I'm atheist not nihilist. I think meaning is real but emerges locally within physical chemistry.
The most meaning I've found in life is from working with scientists on a the theory that explains how that happens. For me, meaning is real but has no foundational or ultimate meaning.
I'm no nihilist. Life is not meaningless, it's meaningful. But the meaning is local, not cosmic. ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
I don't see any evidence for a cosmic meaning. The universe just IS -- it just happens to be. It's pointless to ask why. At best, we can try to figure out the "how" of the various natural phenomena -- and this knowledge sometimes turns out useful (hence technology), and sometimes not, but so what? It's still satisfying to ponder the workings of nature. Unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions only deepen our sense of awe.
On the other hand, there can be such a thing as a personal meaning. A surgeon derives satisfaction from saving lives; a teacher from stimulating developing young minds. Scientists test hypotheses. Artists dream of creating works that will outlive them. For some people the most meaningful task is raising a family.
Human beings seem to be wired to enjoy being useful, of service to a greater good.
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MICROPLASTICS CONTAMINATE OUR FOOD
~ Microplastics have infiltrated every part of the planet. They have been found buried in Antarctic sea ice, within the guts of marine animals inhabiting the deepest ocean trenches, and in drinking water around the world. Plastic pollution has been found on beaches of remote, uninhabited islands and it shows up in sea water samples across the planet. One study estimated that there are around 24.4 trillion fragments of microplastics in the upper regions of the world's oceans.
But they aren't just ubiquitous in water – they are spread widely in soils on land too and can even end up in the food we eat. Unwittingly, we may be consuming tiny fragments of plastic with almost every bite we take.
In 2022, analysis by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental non-profit, found that sewage sludge has contaminated almost 20 million acres (80,937sq km) of US cropland with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called "forever chemicals", which are commonly found in plastic products and do not break down under normal environmental conditions.
Sewage sludge is the byproduct left behind after municipal wastewater is cleaned. Since it is expensive to dispose of and rich in nutrients, sludge is commonly used as organic fertilizer in the US and Europe. In the latter, this is in part due to EU directives promoting a circular waste economy. An estimated 8-10 million tons of sewage sludge is produced in Europe each year, and roughly 40% of this is spread on farmland.
Due to this practice, European farmland could be the biggest global reservoir of microplastics, according to a study by researchers at Cardiff University. This means between 31,000 and 42,000 tonnes of microplastics, or 86 trillion to 710 trillion microplastic particles, contaminate European farmland each year.
The researchers found that up to 650 million microplastic particles, measuring between 1mm and 5mm (0.04in-0.2in), entered one wastewater treatment plant in south Wales, in the UK, every day. All these particles ended up in the sewage sludge, making up roughly 1% of the total weight, rather than being released with the clean water.
The number of microplastics that end up on farmland "is probably an underestimation," says Catherine Wilson, one of the study's co-authors and deputy director of the Hydro-environmental Research Center at Cardiff University. "Microplastics are everywhere and [often] so tiny that we can't see them.”
And microplastics can stay there for a long time too. One recent study by soil scientists at Philipps-University Marburg found microplastics up to 90cm (35in) below the surface on two agricultural fields where sewage sludge had last been applied 34 years ago. Plowing also caused the plastic to spread into areas where the sludge had not been applied.
The microplastics' concentration on farmland soils in Europe is similar to the amount found in ocean surface waters, says James Lofty, the lead author of the Cardiff study and a PhD research student at the Hydro-environmental Research Center.
The UK has some of the highest concentrations of microplastics in Europe. Between 500 and 1,000 microplastic particles are spread on farmland there each year, according to Wilson and Lofty's research.
As well as creating a large reservoir of microplastics on land, the practice of using sewage sludge as fertilizer is also exacerbating the plastics crisis in our oceans, adds Lofty. Eventually the microplastics will end up in waterways, as rain washes the top layer of soil into rivers or washes them into groundwater. "The major source of [plastic] contamination in our rivers and oceans is from runoff," he says.
One study by researchers in Ontario, Canada, found that 99% of microplastics were transported away from where the sludge was initially dumped into aquatic environments.
Environmental contamination
Before they are washed away, however, microplastics can leach toxic chemicals into the soil. Not only are they made from potentially harmful chemicals that can be released into the environment as they break down, microplastics can also absorb other toxic substances, essentially allowing them to hitch a ride onto agricultural land where they can leach into the soil, according to Lofty.
A report by the UK's Environment Agency, which was subsequently revealed by the environmental campaign group Greenpeace, found that sewage waste destined for English farmland was contaminated with pollutants including dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at "levels that may present a risk to human health”.
A 2020 experiment by Kansas University agronomist Mary Beth Kirkham found that plastic serves as a vector for plant uptake of toxic chemicals such as cadmium. "In the plants where cadmium was in the soil with plastic, the wheat leaves had much, much more cadmium than in the plants that grew without plastic in the soil," Kirkham said at the time.
Research also shows that microplastics can stunt the growth of earthworms and cause them to lose weight. The reasons for this weight loss aren't fully understood, but one theory is that microplastics may obstructs earthworms' digestive tracts, limiting their ability to absorb nutrients and so limiting their growth. This has a negative impact on the wider environment, too, the researchers say, as earthworms play a vital role in maintaining soil health. Their burrowing activity aerates the soil, prevents erosion, improves water drainage and recycles nutrients.
Plastic particles can also contaminate food crops directly. A 2020 study found microplastics and nanoplastics in fruit and vegetables sold by supermarkets and in produce sold by local sellers in Catania in Sicily, Italy. Apples were the most contaminated fruit, and carrots had the highest levels of microplastics among the sampled vegetables.
According to research by Willie Peijnenburg, professor of environmental toxicology and biodiversity at Leiden University in the Netherlands, crops absorb nanoplastic particles – minuscule fragments measuring between 1-100nm in size, or about 1,000 to 100 times smaller than a human blood cell – from surrounding water and soil through tiny cracks in their roots.
Analysis revealed that most of the plastics accumulated in the plant roots, with only a very small amount traveling up to the shoots. "Concentrations in the leaves are well below 1%," says Peijnenburg. For leafy vegetables such as lettuces and cabbage, the concentrations of plastic would likely then be relatively low, but for root vegetables such as carrots, radishes and turnips, the risk of consuming microplastics would be greater, he warns.
Another study by Peijnenburg and his colleagues found that in both lettuce and wheat, the concentration of microplastics was 10 times lower than in the surrounding soil. "We found that only the smallest particles are taken up by the plants and the big ones are not," says Peijnenburg.
This is reassuring, says Peijnenburg. However, many microplastics will slowly degrade and break down into nanoparticles, providing a "good source for plant uptake," he adds.
The uptake of the plastic particles did not seem to stunt the growth of the crops, according to Peijnenburg's research. But what effect this accumulation of plastic in our food has on our own health is less clear.
Further research is needed to understand this, says Peijnenburg, especially as the problem will only get bigger.
"It will take decades before plastics are fully removed from the environment," he says. "Even if the risk is currently not very high, it's not a good idea to have persistent chemicals [on farmland]. They will pile up and then they might form a risk."
Health impacts
While the impact of ingesting plastics on human health is not yet fully understood, there is already some research that suggests it could be harmful. Studies show that chemicals added during the production of plastics can disrupt the endocrine system and the hormones that regulate our growth and development.
Chemicals found in plastic have been linked to a range of other health problems including cancer, heart disease and poor fetal development. High levels of ingested microplastics may also cause cell damage which could lead to inflammation and allergic reactions, according to analysis by researchers at the University of Hull, in the UK.
The researchers reviewed 17 previous studies which looked at the toxicological impact of microplastics on human cells. The analysis compared the amount of microplastics that caused damage to cells in laboratory tests with the levels ingested by people through drinking water, seafood and salt. It found that the amounts being ingested approached those that could trigger cell death, but could also cause immune responses, including allergic reactions, damage to cell walls, and oxidative stress.
"Our research shows that we are ingesting microplastics at the levels consistent with harmful effects on cells, which are in many cases the initiating event for health effects," says Evangelos Danopoulos, lead author of the study and a researcher at Hull York Medical School. "We know that microplastics can cross the barriers of cells and also break them. We know they can also cause oxidative stress on cells, which is the start of tissue damage.”
There are two theories as to how microplastics lead to cell breakdown, says Danopoulos. Their sharp edges could rupture the cell wall or the chemicals in the microplastics could damage the cell, he says. The study found that irregularly-shaped microplastics were the most likely to cause cell death.
"What we now need to understand is how many microplastics remain in our body and what kind of size and shape is able to cross the cell barrier," says Danopoulos. If plastics were to accumulate to the levels at which they could become harmful over a period of time, this could pose an even greater risk to human health.
But even without these answers, Danopoulos questions whether more care is needed to ensure microplastics do not enter the food chain. "If we know that sludge is contaminated with microplastics and that plants have the ability to extract them from the soil, should we be using it as fertilizer?" he says.
Banning sewage sludge
Spreading sludge on farmland has been banned in the Netherlands since 1995. The country initially incinerated the sludge, but started exporting it to the UK, where it was used as fertilizer on farmland, after problems at an Amsterdam incineration plant.
Switzerland prohibited the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer in 2003 because it "comprises a whole range of harmful substances and pathogenic organisms produced by industry and private households". The US state Maine also banned the practice in April 2022 after environmental authorities found high levels of PFAS on farmland soil, crops and water. High PFAS levels were also detected in farmers' blood. The widespread contamination forced several farms to close.
The new Maine law bans the application, sale and distribution of compost containing sewage sludge, but does not forbid it from being exported.
But a total ban on using sewage sludge as fertilizer is not necessarily the best solution, says Cardiff University's Wilson. Instead, it could incentivize farmers to use more synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, made from natural gas, she says.
"[With sewage sludge], we're using a waste product in an efficient way, rather than producing endless fossil fuel fertilizers," says Wilson. The organic waste in sludge also helps return carbon to the soil and enriches it with nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which prevents soil degradation, she says.
"We need to quantify the microplastics in sewage sludge so that we can [determine] where the hot spots are and start managing it," says Wilson. In places with high levels of microplastics, sewage sludge could be incinerated to generate energy instead of used as fertilizer, she suggests. One way to prevent the contamination of farmland is to recover fats, oil and grease (which contain high levels of microplastics) at wastewater treatment plants and use this "surface scum" as biofuel, instead of mixing it with sludge, Wilson and her colleagues say.
Some European countries, such as Italy and Greece, dispose of sewage sludge in landfill sites, the researchers note, but they warn that there is a risk of microplastics leaching into the environment from these sites and contaminating surrounding land and water bodies.
Both Wilson and Danopoulos say much more research is needed to quantify the amount of microplastics on farmland and the possible environmental and health impacts.
"Microplastics are now on the cusp of changing from a contaminant to a pollutant," says Danopoulos. "A contaminant is something that is found where it shouldn't be. Microplastics shouldn't be in our water and soil. If we prove that [they have] adverse effects, that would make them a pollutant and [we] would have to bring in legislation and regulations.” ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230103-how-plastic-is-getting-into-our-food
Oriana:
This instantly reminded me of the widespread lead pollution before we have unleaded gas. Lead particles were everywhere -- in the air, in the water, soil, and so on. The blood levels of lead shot up to new highs, especially in children. The battle not to add lead to gasoline took decades.
Will we ever succeed in removing microplastics? First, there needs to be a public awareness of the problem. Perhaps a famous movie in which someone says, "There is only one word I want to say to you: microplastics."
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HEALTH BENEFITS OF ALLULOSE
~ Allulose is a rare sugar that occurs in small quantities in nature. It belongs to a group of simple sugars called monosaccharides, which includes fructose and glucose. However, allulose only contains 1/10 of the calories of these 2 sugars. It does, however, maintain a similar taste and texture.
Industrially, allulose is produced from fructose. It can be purchased as a sweetener to substitute sugar in the diet. (Internet is a reliable source.)
Due to its low calorie content, allulose may benefit people suffering from obesity, diabetes, and may promote overall weight loss. Additionally, it may have antioxidant properties and reduce inflammation.
Allulose has the same molecular formula as fructose and glucose (C6H12O6), but the placement of chemical groups is slightly different. The rearrangement of chemical groups is enough to change its physical and chemical properties.
Mechanism of action
Allulose is quickly flushed with the urine and cannot penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Therefore, direct action on the central nervous system is not possible.
Allulose acts mainly through the release of GLP-1 (Glucagon-Like Peptide-1). GLP-1 is produced by the large bowel. This hormone circulates in the blood and binds to receptors in the brain, pancreas, gut, and kidneys. GLP-1 is a satiety factor, leading to lower blood sugar.
Allulose lowers blood glucose by
Increasing insulin release in response to an after-meal glucose spike
Increasing the efficiency of glucose transport into the cells
Increasing insulin sensitivity
Suppressing glucagon release
Increasing the usage of glucose in the liver
Directly reducing the release of glucose into the bloodstream
Inhibiting intestinal alpha-glucosidase and delaying sucrose [table sugar] digestion
Allulose decreases the amount of body fat tissue by
Increasing the activity of three enzymes that break down fats: CPT1 (Carnitine palmitoyltransferase 2), CPT2, and beta-oxidase
Increasing the amount of a protein involved in energy use (uncoupling protein-1 or UCP1)
Blocking the enzymes that produce fatty molecules (fatty acid synthase and acetyl-CoA carboxylase-1)
Allulose decreases the amount of liver fat by reducing the levels of the enzymes required for fat production (fatty acid synthase and phosphatidate phosphatase).
Allulose promotes satiety by:
Increasing the release of GLP-1, which travels through the bloodstream to the brain. In the brain, GLP-1 receptors are located in the brainstem, hypothalamus, and parietal cortex. Their activation results in a reduction of appetite.
GLP-1 also blocks the digestive system from emptying out food (ileal brake mechanism). This sends a signal to the brain that results in less hunger.
Allulose is easily absorbable but has a very low glycemic index. This means that consuming allulose does not cause a rise in blood glucose levels.
Insulin resistance is a condition in which cells fail to respond to insulin, resulting in high blood glucose levels. The main symptom of this condition is high insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia). In animals with hyperinsulinemia, allulose decreased insulin levels and lowered insulin resistance
ALLULOSE AND WEIGHT LOSS
In a clinical trial on 121 overweight people, allulose significantly reduced body mass index and fat in the stomach and waist.
In another trial on 13 healthy, normal-weight people, allulose promoted fat burning after meals. This suggests that it could help maintain a healthy weight by promoting energy usage.
In multiple mouse studies, allulose decreased fatty tissue in both obese and leptin-deficient mice. This effect was mediated by the release of GLP-1. Allulose use also corrected diabetes, fatty liver disease, and overeating.
High-fat diet-fed mice supplemented with allulose had ~50% less fat in the belly area and body.
In mice, allulose increased the activity of enzymes responsible for fat breakdown (beta-oxidase, CPT1, CPT2) while reducing fat production (by blocking fatty acid synthase).
In mice fed a high-fat diet, allulose decreased fat synthesis and absorption in the small intestine. Additionally, it increased the removal of fats from the body (fecal excretion).
In cell studies, the direct application of allulose prevented fat cells from replicating.
Again, the results are promising but the evidence comes from 2 clinical trials and some research in animals and cells. More clinical trials are needed to support the use of allulose as a weight-loss aid.
REDUCING OXIDATIVE STRESS AND INFLAMMATION
In rats with testicular injury, allulose-infused water (2% allulose) given for 14 days prevented the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the progression of testicular damage.
Additionally, allulose increased the levels of antioxidant proteins (glutathione peroxidase 1 and 2, and glutaredoxin 1).
Type 2 diabetes is caused by a failure of beta-cells in the pancreas to respond to glucose levels. In rats with type 2 diabetes, oral allulose reduced the production of inflammatory molecules IL-6 and TNF-alpha. It also increased the production of glutathione (GSH), an antioxidant that plays a protective role in the body and helps alleviate cell damage.
In rats supplemented with 5% allulose solution for 12 weeks, total body weight and cholesterol levels were reduced. Additionally, allulose reduced the expression of inflammatory genes (fos, mmp3, Fgf21, and abcd2) and genes responsible for fat synthesis.
In a cell model of Parkinson’s disease (6-OHDA treated PC12 cells), allulose protected nerve cells from cell death. It also increased levels of glutathione.
FATTY LIVER DISEASE
In mice fed high-fat diets, allulose decreased the amount of fat buildup in the liver when given for 16 weeks. The sugar reduced the activity of enzymes responsible for fat synthesis (fatty-acid synthase, acetyl-CoA carboxylase 1, and phosphatidate phosphatase) while increasing fat breakdown (beta-oxidation).
In obese mice, allulose decreased the liver triglyceride levels after 5 weeks of supplementation.
ENHANCING ANTIBIOTIC EFFECT
In cells, the antibiotic metronidazole was more efficient in stopping the growth of a protozoa that affects cats and cattle (Tritrichomonas foetus) when combined with allulose than metronidazole alone. This suggests allulose may prove useful in overcoming antibiotic resistance to metronidazole.
The FDA recommends doses below 35 g/day to avoid stomach discomfort. You can use allulose in place of sugar in your everyday food and drink. For all recipes that call for a certain amount of sugar, you can substitute the same amount of allulose instead.
https://supplements.selfdecode.com/blog/allulose/
from a popular source
WHY BELLIES MELT
Most sweeteners, both natural and fake, trigger blood sugar issues that lead to poor health and rapid weight gain. Allulose does the opposite: it triggers sugar to burn better and faster. One study found that adding it to a meal keeps blood sugar lower than if you skipped the sweetener.
Plus, there is evidence that allulose improves insulin sensitivity. As levels of blood sugar and insulin improve, it tells your body to stop storing belly fat and start burning it.
Allulose also feeds the belly-flattening bacteria in our gut and boosts a tummy-flattening hormone called adiponectin.
Oriana:
I've been using allulose for several months now. One easy way to add it to your diet is to use it to sweeten plain yogurt. And of course it takes the bitterness out of coffee -- experimenting with the dose is everything when it comes to coffee.
An easy way to make chocolate mousse is to blend cocoa powder with heavy whipping cream (or coconut milk) and allulose. This is probably fine if you are on a strict keto diet; otherwise you must practice "portion control" (also known as "restraint"). You need also remember that too much fat is an irritant, and may cause diarrhea. Still, assuming you can exercise restraint, here is your sugar-free supertreat.
And if you need any more encouragement: allulose doesn't cause dental decay. So you don't have to worry about the calories, you don't have to worry about cavities . . . More important, you don't have to worry about your blood sugar, a major predictor of life expectancy.
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AIR POLLUTION IS IMPAIRING OUR SENSE OF SMELL
~ For many people, a bout of Covid-19 gave a first taste (or rather a lack of it) of what it is like to lose their sense of smell. Known as "anosmia", loss of smell can have a substantial effect on our overall wellbeing and quality of life. But while a sudden respiratory infection might lead to a temporary loss of this important sense, your sense of smell may well have been gradually eroding away for years due to something else – air pollution.
Exposure to PM2.5 – the collective name for small airborne pollution particles, largely from the combustion of fuels in vehicles, power stations and our homes – has previously been linked with "olfactory dysfunction", but typically only in occupational or industrial settings. But new research is now starting to reveal the true scale – and the potential damage caused by – the pollution we breathe in every day. And their findings have relevance for us all.
On the underside of our brains, just above our nasal cavities, lies the olfactory bulb. This sensitive bit of tissue bristles with nerve endings and is essential for the enormously varied picture of the world we get from our sense of smell. It's also our first line of defence against viruses and pollutants entering the brain. But, with repeated exposure, these defenses slowly get worn down – or breached.
"Our data show there's a 1.6 to 1.7-fold increased [risk of] developing anosmia with sustained particulate pollution," says Murugappan Ramanathan Jr, a rhinologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore. He has become one of the few experts in this field after he started to wonder if there was a link between the large numbers of patients he was seeing with anosmia and the environmental conditions where they lived.
The simple question he wanted to answer was this: were a disproportionate number of anosmia patients living in areas of higher PM2.5 pollution? Until recently, the little scientific research on this topic included one Mexican study in 2006, which used strong coffee and orange odors to show that residents of Mexico City – which often struggles with air pollution – tended to have a poorer sense of smell on average than people living in rural areas of the country.
With the help of colleagues – including environmental epidemiologist Zhenyu Zhang who created a map of historic air pollution data in the Baltimore area – Ramanathan set up a case-control study of data from 2,690 patients who had attended Johns Hopkins Hospital over a four year period. Around 20% had anosmia and most didn't smoke – a habit that is known to affect the sense of smell.
Sure enough, the levels of PM2.5 were found to be "significantly higher" in the neighborhoods where patients with anosmia lived compared to healthy control participants. Even when adjusted for age, sex, race/ethnicity, body mass index, alcohol or tobacco use, the findings came up the same: "Even small increases in ambient PM2.5 exposure may be associated with anosmia”.
The finding has been echoed in other parts of the world in studies published this year. One recent study in Brescia, northern Italy, for example, found the noses of teenagers and young adults became less sensitive to smells the more nitrogen dioxide – another pollutant produced when fossil fuels are burned, in particular from vehicle engines – they were exposed to. Another year-long study in São Paulo, Brazil, also indicated that people living in areas with higher particulate pollution had an impaired sense of smell.
But exactly how is pollution wrecking our ability to smell?
According to Ramanathan there are two potential routes. One is that some of the pollution particles are passing through the olfactory bulb and getting directly into the brain, causing inflammation. "Olfactory nerves are in the brain but they have little holes at the base of skull where little fibers go into the nose, [looking] almost like little pieces of angel hair pasta," says Ramanathan. "They are exposed.”
In 2016, a team of British researchers found tiny metal particles in human brain tissue that appeared to have passed through the olfactory bulb. Barbara Maher, a professor of environmental science at Lancaster University in the UK who led the study, said at the time that the particles were "strikingly similar" to those found in airborne pollution next to busy roads (domestic fireplaces and log stoves were another possible source). Maher's study suggests that these nanoscale metal particles could, once in the brain, become toxic, contributing to oxidative brain damage that damages the neural pathways, although it still remains a theory.
The other potential mechanism, says Ramanathan, may not even require pollution particles getting into the brain. By hitting the olfactory bulb on an almost daily basis, the particles cause inflammation and damage to the nerves directly, slowly wearing them away. Think of it almost like coastal erosion, where sandy, salty waves eat away at the shoreline; substitute waves with pollution-filled air, and shoreline with our nasal nerves.
Unsurprisingly then, anosmia disproportionately affects older people, whose noses have been assaulted by air pollution for longer. More surprisingly, none of the Johns Hopkins patients lived in areas with excessively high air pollution – many lived in leafy areas of Maryland, and none were from pollution hotspots. It suggests that even low levels of air pollution could cause problems over a long enough period.
A similar recent study has separately been carried out by the Aging Research Center at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm. Postdoctoral researcher Ingrid Ekström was puzzled by findings from the early 2000s that showed more than 5.8% of adults in Sweden had anosmia, and 19.1% had some form of olfactory dysfunction.
Knowing that anosmia rates were higher in older people, Ekström and colleagues designed a study using 3,363 patients aged 60 and over. Using strongly scented "sniffing sticks" of 16 common household smells, participants received a score depending on the number they could correctly identify. As with the Baltimore study, the participants' home addresses were mapped and analyzed according to municipal air pollution readings. And as in Baltimore, there was a strong correlation between higher pollution levels and poorer smelling ability.
"They have been subjected to pollution throughout their lives," says Ekström. "We don't know exactly when their olfactory impairments started to decline.” But she is “confident” that long-term exposure to pollution was the cause, even at low levels.
In 2021, The World Health Organization (WHO) changed its health-based guidelines for a maximum annual average exposure to PM2.5, reducing it from 10 to 5 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3). Stockholm, Sweden's capital, is one of the few major cities in the world that manages to stay below this level with an annual average of 4.2µg/m3. By comparison, Islamabad, in Pakistan, has an annual average PM2.5 levels of 41.1µg/m3 while it is 42.3µg/m3 in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
This arguably makes the Stockholm findings even more relevant – if even Stockholm residents are having their senses eroded by low levels of pollution, then how much worse will it be in regions with high levels?
It is also a reminder of how highly localized pollution can be, both outdoors and indoors. People's cooking methods and heating choices may be exposing them to higher levels than their neighbors.)
Meanwhile modern combustion methods from vehicle engines to the latest 'eco' wood stoves can create nanoparticles so fine that they barely register on PM2.5 readings, but are small enough to directly enter our bloodstream and brain tissue.
Air pollution is known to cause a quarter of all deaths from heart disease and stroke, and nearly half of all deaths from lung disease. By comparison, perhaps, our sense of smell seems low down the list of concerns. But both Ramanathan and Ekström warn that we underestimate the importance of smell at our peril.
Ekström's research speciality is dementia. And anosmia may be an early warning sign.
"With dementia and especially with Alzheimer's Disease, we assume that [the] disease progression is actually starting several decades before we can see the first symptoms," says Ekström.
Anosmia is one of the first symptoms. By the time Alzheimer's is diagnosed, "almost 90% of patients have anosmia", says Ekström. The exact link remains unknown, but one theory is that “environmental toxins enter the central nervous system via the olfactory bulb and cause damage, triggering this cascade effect that may ultimately lead to neuro-degeneration”. The Maher Lancaster study, for example, found that metal nanoparticles were directly associated with the formation of 'senile plaques' – lesions on the brain and one of the neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
Despite such strong links, Ekström argues it is only recently that researchers have “opened their eyes to the olfactory sense” and its role in disease. ~
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230220-is-air-pollution-causing-us-to-lose-our-sense-of-smell
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ending on beauty:
THE ANGEL IN SAN FRANCISCO
for Sutton Breiding
In San Francisco an angel
bears a fluted holy water conch —
a marble smile, celestial.
The Golden Gate Bridge
departs into fog, a harp of bones
of builders and suicides.
Cloud-eaten hills,
views of Alcatraz;
drunks grinning to themselves
in Victorian doorways.
Angel, you smile as if you knew
beauty is the sole excuse.
The city rises, half-dream, half-fog,
here on the slippery
ledge of the continent.
Seagulls blur with white sails.
At the Palace of Fine Arts,
a bronze Perseus lifts
the head of the Medusa,
though he himself is headless.
But you, mild angel, bless
all who enter the dim vestibule.
At the tomb of a dead god,
you change stone into hope.
~ Oriana
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