Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The Titanic liner skimmed the iceberg for 6.3 seconds when they collided in 1912. This was reported by Simon Benson, associate professor of naval architecture at the University of Newcastle, in an interview with ABC News.
He noted that thanks to new underwater scanning technology, which allows for a full picture of the ship's last moments, it is still possible to learn the details of the disaster that occurred more than 100 years ago. Scientists have conducted a detailed scan of the ship's wreckage and recreated its closest to real 3D model. Benson specified that 715,000 images of the liner's wreckage were scanned for the study.
"The level of detail we have achieved allows us to explore the wreckage as if we were walking through the ship itself. In fact, thanks to these simulations, we now know that the time it took the Titanic to hit the iceberg with a glancing blow was 6.3 seconds," the researcher noted.
Benson also mentioned the related documentary, Titanic: Digital Resurrection, which premiered April 11 on the National Geographic Channel.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on February 22, scientists also reported that the Titanic could disappear from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by 2050 due to bacteria corroding the liner's metal. According to experts, the impact of the Halomonas titanicae bacteria group causes some elements of the liner to completely disappear. At the same time, an underwater archaeologist from the University of Cadiz clarified that preserving the wreckage is a very difficult task, since it is located at a depth of 4,000 meters.
Mutant 59 - The Plastic Eaters
I think it was Grom who mentioned the book some time back.
Given the opportunity and enough time, bacteria can learn to eat pretty much anything, including plants, animals, and nasty stuff like the sulphides in mine runoff or organic acids.
It is a good thing they are slow moving. But they do still manage to get the drop on us sometimes.
This is a very sad description of Soviet times in the 1920s, with some obvious parallels with our current masters American censors. by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, at the end of March – beginning of April 1925, it became finally clear to Mikhail Bulgakov, an employee of the newspaper of the People's Commissariat of Railways, Gudok: the new science fiction story, Heart of a Dog, would not be published in the near or distant future – and perhaps never at all.
Until the very last moment, Mikhail Afanasyevich had hope that Glavlit (the preliminary censorship body) would perhaps allow publication in the cooperative almanac Nedra, which was printed in the NEPman publishing house Mospoligraf. After all, back then, in the interregnum that followed Lenin's death, the censor's scissors were not particularly zealous.
The Bolshevik leaders had more important matters to attend to - “the question of consolidation was at stake”: who would take the vacant place at the head of the party, and who would slide down the career ladder.
On January 2, 1925, at the same time as he was conceiving the story about Philipp Philippovich Preobrazhensky and Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, Bulgakov noted in his diary :
“(Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Alexei) Rykov got drunk after Lenin’s death for two reasons: firstly, out of grief, and secondly, out of joy.”
"Trotsky is now written as 'Troy' - the Central Committee has dropped out."
All these jokes were told to me by that sly, freckled fox Lezhnev in the evening, when I was sitting with my wife, drafting the text of the contract for the continuation of "The White Guard" in "Russia". My wife was sitting, reading Ehrenburg's novel... We didn't have a penny of money."
"The sly, freckled fox" — Zurich University graduate Isaiah Lezhnev — was the permanent editor of the Soviet magazine "Russia", "the first non-party organ", which, under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Party, was published for "fellow travelers", Smena Vekh members and other suspicious individuals. At the same time, Lezhnev wrote for the Paris-Berlin magazine "Smena Vekh" — something like that was still possible in Soviet Russia.
One of his fellow travelers, Bulgakov, wrote about his editor: “By the grace of God, he managed to publish (in the years 1922–1925!) a private thick magazine… on the outskirts of Moscow in a nice and dirty apartment.”
But it was not by God's grace that this happened. When in 1922 the head of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev demanded that the hotbed of sedition be closed, "Russia" was saved by Lenin's personal protection. The intelligentsia "specialists" still required a special approach, and they were entitled to "the final piece of paper, armor." This fantastic state of affairs continued even after the untimely death of the leader of the world proletariat. Thus, in 1925, in Red Moscow, Lezhnev's magazine published "The White Guard."
A NICE APARTMENT AND THE TERRIBLE FATE OF ITS INHABITANTS
From Bulgakov’s diary for January 4, 1925:
“All of Moscow was covered in thaw mud, and I spent the whole day traveling, inviting guests... I saw the lovely Lyamins and gave them a copy of Rossiya with the White Guard.”
The Bulgakovs (Mikhail Afanasyevich and his then wife Lyubov Belozerskaya ) were friends with the literary scholar Nikolai Lyamin and his wife, children's book illustrator Natalia Ushakova. It was here, in an apartment on Savelyevsky Lane near Prechistenka, that they held "Bulgakov readings." "Everything, or almost everything, that he wrote, he read at the Lyamins'," Belozerskaya recalled. Among other things, the writer brought drafts of "Heart of a Dog" here.
On the other hand, not only the "dear Lyamins" themselves, but also their apartment, house and surrounding courtyards played the role of co-authors of Bulgakov's books. In the "enormous, extremely neglected hallway" there was a huge chest - this iron-clad chest would later materialize on the pages of "The Master and Margarita", in the scene of Ivan Bezdomny chasing Woland.
In the early 1930s, Lyamin spent a "funny" two weeks under arrest - the police arrested him on suspicion of possessing currency. Why not use this curious episode for the story of the house manager Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy?
Natalya Ushakova, with an artist's eye, suggested in which gateway with an "iron grate swaying in the wind" (between houses No. 6 and No. 8 on Prechistenka) Professor Preobrazhensky could have fed sausage to the "unknown incognito dog prince" - the dog Sharik. And this gateway was written into the book.
Bulgakov, as a joke for his own people, left in the text of "Heart of a Dog", as they would say now, an Easter egg. This episode was not included in the final version of the story, but, by the way, was included in the script of Vladimir Bortko's film.
Remember the scene in which an aging lady comes to Professor Preobrazhensky "for rejuvenation", to whom Philip Philipovich promises to transplant monkey ovaries? The lady complains about her young lover:
"I swear, Professor, this Moritz... He is my only passion. He is a card sharper. All of Moscow knows him. He cannot miss a single vile milliner! After all, he is so devilishly young!"
Nikolai Lyamin's first wife, a fashion designer, left him for a mutual friend, Vladimir Emilievich Moritz, who was, of course, not a card sharper, but a theater critic and translator known to all of intelligentsia Moscow.
Natalya Ushakova outlived her husband by almost half a century and, already during perestroika, she told about the “Bulgakov readings” and how Mikhail Afanasyevich hoped that “Heart of a Dog” could be read in Soviet newspapers (or rather, magazines).
After all, as was said, the times were fantastic. And the story about Professor Preobrazhensky, on the contrary, was almost documentary.
"WELLS' HEROES ARE NONSENSE COMPARED TO YOU!"
In 1923, the London Strand Magazine published Arthur Conan Doyle's story " The Man on All Fours ". Sherlock Holmes investigates the reasons for the strange behavior of anthropologist Professor Presbury and finds out: the professor decided to "rejuvenate" himself before marrying a young lady, injected himself with "monkey serum" and got so carried away that he almost turned into a wild beast.
But don't rush to suspect Bulgakov of plagiarism. Professor Presbury and Professor Preobrazhensky - and, perhaps, Professor Persikov from "The Fatal Eggs" - had a real, not literary prototype. It is also possible that the then king of science fiction, Herbert Wells, copied his crazy geniuses from him. Mentioned, by the way, in both "The Fatal Eggs" and in the film based on "Heart of a Dog".
This prototype is a French surgeon, Dr. Serge Voronoff, aka Sergei (née Samuil) Abramovich Voronov, a native of the Russian Empire. Since the late 1890s, he has been developing xenotransplantation — the transplantation of animal organs into humans.
The Russian illustrated magazine Iskra (not to be confused with the Bolshevik publication) wrote in July 1914:
"At the French Medical Academy, our compatriot, Doctor Sergei Voronov, made a sensational report about an operation he had performed in his clinic on a 14-year-old idiot boy... Voronov gave this boy an inoculation of a monkey's thymus gland. The success exceeded expectations. The boy's eyes came alive, and his mental abilities appeared."
The medical community, to which Dr. Bulgakov belonged, knew about Dr. Voronoff's work "Life; a study of means of restoring vital energy and prolonging life" published in New York in 1920. And immediately before the idea for "Heart of a Dog" appeared, in 1924, Voronoff published an article "Forty-three transplants from ape to man" and was preparing another book on the same topic.
"2 PRIESTS AND 15 EMPLOYEES WERE REJUVENATED"
The Franco-Russian "magician and wizard" had followers in Soviet Russia, with curious surnames.
The Krestyanskaya Gazeta newspaper wrote in its issue of January 12, 1924, that in Tver there were those who continued the work of Voronov and the pioneer of European sexology, the Austrian Eugen Steinach, who tried to achieve the effect of rejuvenation from vasectomy. These were a certain "Professor Voskresensky and Doctor Uspensky" - Professor Preobrazhensky, we note, also has a "priestly" surname, after all, he is the son of the cathedral archpriest.
Doctors Voskresensky and Uspensky “rejuvenated 10 workers, 5 doctors, 2 priests, 1 merchant and more than 15 Soviet employees in a year and a half; the monkey nursery provided the material for the operations,” reported the Krestyanskaya Gazeta.
Correspondence from Moscow could well have appeared nearby: " A child who plays the violin was recently born in Obukhovsky Lane. Only with the help of modern medical means was he able to come into this world. In our photo, Professor F. F. Preobrazhensky...".
But let us note that the experimental physiologist Leonid Voskresensky and the surgeon Vasily Uspensky were real people. Voskresensky later became the first director of the Sukhumi monkey nursery, Uspensky developed surgery in his native Kalinin (Tver), during the war he headed an evacuation hospital and, it is possible, became the prototype of one of the heroes of "The Tale of a Real Man".
"THE MONKEYS WILL DEFEAT THE BOLSHEVIKS"
The idea that experiments could result not in human rejuvenation, but in the complete humanization of an animal, was also not taken out of thin air.
Bulgakov knew well - from Kiev - Viktor Shklovsky, who recounted in his " Sentimental Journey " the rumors that circulated in the city during the Civil War: "They said that the English... had already landed herds of monkeys trained in all the rules of military order. They said that these monkeys could not be propagandized, that they went on the attack without fear, that they would defeat the Bolsheviks."
Rumors are rumors, but since the 1910s, Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov has been seriously trying to breed a hybrid of man and ape, which was written about not only in scientific journals, but also in the press, including the tabloid press.
And it was in 1924 that Professor Ivanov, who was then working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, received permission to work at a chimpanzee nursery in French Guinea. The project fell through, but, most surprisingly, the scientist received a grant from the Soviet government. Anatoly Lunacharsky favored the project of creating a new man, and through the manager of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, Lenin's former personal secretary Nikolai Gorbunov, Ivanov, who had left for Europe, was given 10,000 dollars at that time.
Later, the professor conducted unsuccessful experiments on "artificial insemination of female chimpanzees with human sperm" already in the USSR, in the Sukhumi monkey house. It would be surprising if Bulgakov had not heard about the strange story of Dr. Ivanov.
And in general, the spirit of the times was filled with fantasy.
Not long ago, the Bolsheviks seriously counted on turning the Civil War into a world revolution. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was no longer considered an eccentric from Kaluga, wrote articles for the interplanetary communications section of the Red Army Air Forces Academy.
And the old social democrat Alexander Bogdanov, a long-time comrade and opponent of Lenin (and, by the way, a science fiction writer, the author of the book "The Feast of Immortality") promoted his own theory of life extension and rejuvenation - through healing the body with young blood. To this end, in 1926 Bogdanov - with the support of Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova and the People's Commissar for Foreign Trade, the USSR's plenipotentiary representative in Britain and France Leonid Krasin - headed the Institute of Blood Transfusion, now the National Medical Research Center of Hematology.
"THESE THINGS ARE MUCH MORE DANGEROUS."
The early Soviet "festival of immortality" did not last long. Bogdanov, who died suddenly in 1928 during a blood exchange with a young student, was, one might say, lucky. Time was inexorably changing, and the "fantasists" of politics and science were being replaced by pragmatists of Lenin's (and in fact, Stalin's) call.
In 1930, Professor Ilya Ivanov, who had failed to breed a new man, was sent into exile to Alma-Ata, where he died. Ivanov never bred "Sharikov" from a chimpanzee. Lenin's personal secretary, Academician Nikolai Gorbunov, through whom "sponsorship funds" were sent to Ivanov, was convicted on October 7, 1938, and executed the same day.
As for Professor Voskresensky, in 1931 he simply… disappeared, as if he were a tenant of the evil apartment No. 50. Journalist Vadim Nesterov notes that the official biographies of the scientist end with the mysterious phrase: “In 1931, he left his job at the nursery and left Sukhumi,” after which the traces are lost.
In the new tragic times there was no room left for ideologically dubious fantasy. The fate of the story about the professor who “did not like the proletariat” was one of the first warning signs in this sense.
Bulgakov wrote "Heart of a Dog" quickly.
He began in January 1925, and in March he was already reading two parts of the story at a meeting of the "Nikitin Subbotniks" in Moscow. And he was immediately "on the list". In two reports, transmitted by an OGPU employee who was present at the readings, the most outrageous quotes were given: about the devastation in people's heads, about the advice not to read "Soviet newspapers, especially Pravda" before lunch, etc.
“My personal opinion: such things, read in the most brilliant Moscow literary circle, are much more dangerous than the useless and harmless speeches of 101st-class writers at meetings of the All-Russian Union of Poets,” the agent shared.
It was becoming obvious that Glavlit would not prevail over the story. The last hope was left on the editor of the cooperative almanac "Nedra", the old Bolshevik Nikolai Angarsky, who was able to "push through" Bulgakov's stories "The Devil's Play" and "The Fatal Eggs". But "artillery" heavier than Angarsky, a party member since 1903, was connected.
Lev Kamenev, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), spoke out against the publication, stating: “This is a sharp pamphlet on modern times; it should not be published under any circumstances.”
On May 7, 1926, a search was conducted in Bulgakov's apartment, the manuscript of the writer's diary and two typewritten copies of "Heart of a Dog" were confiscated. Only three years later, with the assistance of Maxim Gorky, the confiscated texts were returned to the author.
The theme of "Heart of a Dog" came up later as well.
In November 1933, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova wrote in her diary: “The writer (Sergey) Budantsev called and said that the physiologist (Sergey) Bryukhonenko, who is working on the issue of reviving a dead organism and is conducting experiments with a severed dog’s head, would very much like to meet Mikhail Afanasyevich.” But it was obvious that there could be no talk of taking the story out of the drawer.
Meanwhile, the flywheel of repression was grinding down Bulgakov’s close friends and acquaintances, literary officials and party functionaries, supporters and opponents of the publication.
One day in 1931, the theater critic and literary "card sharper" Moritz heard footsteps on the stairs - they had come to arrest him. The NKVD was investigating the idealistic circle of the philosopher and poet Georgy Shpet, and the theater critic, along with other "fellow travelers of the Soviet power", was sent into exile in the Arkhangelsk region.
In 1936, the hospitable owner of a literary salon, Nikolai Lyamin, was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. This was before the Great Terror began, and he was also “lucky.” After three years in one of the Ukhtpechlag camps, he was released. In February 1940, Lyamin managed to visit his dying friend Maku, Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1941, he was arrested again, under the same article. Nikolai Nikolaevich Lyamin died of exhaustion in the Saratov NKVD prison in October 1942.
Politburo member Kamenev, who blocked the publication of the story about Sharikov, was convicted in the case of the "Trotskyist-Zinoviev Center" and shot. In 1940, Nikolai Angarsky, who promoted the story, was arrested as an "English and German spy" and a year later shot at the Kommunarka firing range.
CITIZEN SHARIKOV AND MR. BOBIKOv
The manuscript did not burn - until the writer's death in 1940 and for more than a quarter of a century after it, the story lay in the archive. And, apparently, it continued to be perceived "toxically", as a pamphlet on communism and its project of the "new man". Even though this project was taken seriously only in the early Soviet years and, perhaps, during the Khrushchev thaw.
If "The Master and Margarita" was officially published in 1967 (albeit in a truncated form) in the Soviet magazine "Moscow", then "Heart of a Dog" went into "tamizdat"
…Soviet literature clandestinely published abroad…
a year later. As Elena Sergeevna explained, the text of the manuscript was copied without her knowledge and against her will - and copied with errors. An additional "minus to karma" was that the story was published by the West German magazine "Grani", associated with NTS.
The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, a Russian anticommunist organization founded by Russian emigrés in 1930 in Yugoslavia on the principles of individuality and Christian tolerance.
In 1976, the first screen adaptation was filmed in the West - a film co-produced by Italy and the FRG with Max von Sydow as Preobrazhensky. In German distribution, the film was called "Why Mr. Bobikov Barks" - for some reason, that's how Sharikov was renamed. It was possible to avoid "cranberries": director Alberto Lattauda had already filmed "The Captain's Daughter" and Chekhov's "The Steppe". But he exaggerated the colors. For example, when Bobikov comes to get a job at the "cleaning" and says that he wants to "work with cats", he is told: "There are no more of them here, they've all been eaten."
Another curious detail: Lattauda (given the leftist sentiments in Europe in the 1960s and 70s) said that his target was European fascism, not Russian Bolshevism. The "fascist" turned out to be the vivisectionist Preobrazhensky, and the good-natured scoundrel Sharikov-Bobikov was the victim.
Vladimir Bortko gave assessments closer to the author's in the film adaptation, shown at the height of perestroika, in November 1988. Just a year after the first publication of the story in its homeland, in the magazine "Znamya".
The director's discoveries and the skill of the actors - the master Yevgeny Yevstigneyev and the then unknown Vladimir Tolokonnikov - made the story even more ingrained in the public consciousness than Bulgakov's other works.
As befits a masterpiece, it had both admirers and haters.
In an interview with the newspaper Sobesednik, Bortko recalled a quarter of a century after the premiere: "I opened the newspapers and was stunned. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the quotes, but you can look up the archive and you'll see that I'm close to the text... It said something like this: 'Nobody has ever filmed such crap as "Heart of a Dog". For this, the director should have not only his hands cut off, but his legs as well, and be thrown off a bridge.'
THE POLYGRAPH-DEVIL AND VLADIMIR ILYICH PREOBRAZHENSKY
The article “Secret Writing in the Heart of a Dog,” published in 1987 in New York by a certain S. Ioffe, went viral in late Soviet society.
There, the "veils were already torn off": Preobrazhensky is Lenin, Sharikov, for whom Klim Chugunkin served as the material, is, of course, Stalin. Bormental is Trotsky, Shvonder is Kamenev. And Dzerzhinsky and Zinoviev were even "travestied" into the servant Darya Petrovna and the maid Zina. With the advent of the Internet, this conspiracy theory migrated there. It can easily be found on social networks.
There are also quotes from the fantasy-prone publicist Boris Sokolov, author of the 1996 Bulgakov Encyclopedia:
"The process of a dog's transformation into a human covers the period from December 24 to January 6, from Catholic to Orthodox Christmas Eve... The new man Sharikov is born on the night of January 6-7 - on Orthodox Christmas. But Polygraph Polygraphovich is not the incarnation of Christ, but of the devil."
But beyond the mystical and conspiracy theories, Bortko's film itself, and along with it the original source, became not just one of the many "revelations" of the perestroika era, but also remained in memory for decades, now becoming a source of memes and videos on social networks.
Sharikov and Shvonder are mentioned in everyday conversations in Russia much more often than Pechorin and Chatsky. It is impossible to imagine Russians without “Heart of a Dog” in a hundred years. Even those who have not read it. After all, they also know what “Abyrvalg” is and that the word “suffocated” is pronounced eight times. The question of whether it is possible to change and improve human nature by “humanizing the beast” remains open in the 21st century.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
See a graphic of the referential document at the link:
[ColonelCassad] Among the recently declassified documents published on the CIA website, a document appeared that describes an alleged clash between Soviet Army soldiers and some aliens. The aliens lost a flying saucer and an unknown number of personnel. The Soviet troops lost 21 people.
Soviet soldiers died after encountering an alien UFO, according to a declassified document published on the CIA website, Fox News reports.
The document says that Soviet soldiers allegedly shot down a UFO flying over a military base. The humanoid aliens reportedly emerged from the wreckage, merged into one object and burst into a bright light, turning all but two of the 23 Soviet soldiers into stone. I seen dis movie!
"If the KGB dossier is true, this is an extremely threatening case. The aliens have weapons and technology that exceed all our assumptions. They can defend themselves if attacked," an unnamed CIA official is quoted in the report.
According to Canadian Weekly World News, the alleged incident occurred between 1989 and 1990 and was first published in 1993.
According to the document, U.S. intelligence received reports of a "low-flying saucer-shaped spacecraft" over a Soviet unit participating in the exercise.
Officials wrote that "for unknown reasons" the soldiers fired a surface-to-air missile at the unknown aircraft, causing it to crash near a military base.
The report describes how "five short humanoids with 'large heads and large black eyes' emerged from the crashed spacecraft and merged to form one 'single object' while making a loud buzzing sound. The spherical object then reportedly flashed with a blindingly bright light. The two men reportedly survived the encounter because they were standing in the shadows and were not fully exposed to the flash of light. Perhaps a Spinal Tap drummer? Of course, no photographs, videos, footage of the area, etc. are provided.
Otherwise, it would have made for good content for Russian science fiction writerPetukhova's creativity.
[Regnum] The US CIA published a report on its website, according to which more than 20 Soviet soldiers allegedly died in Siberia after a clash with aliens. Experts were skeptical about the document, Fox News reported.
The report states that Soviet soldiers shot down an unknown saucer-shaped craft flying at low altitude over a military base. Five large-headed humanoids emerged from the wreckage, then merged into one object, making a loud buzzing noise. A bright flash followed, turning 23 servicemen into limestone-like stone. Two survived, partially hidden in the shadows.
It is also stated that the remains of the soldiers and the fragments of the saucer were delivered to a secret scientific research base near Moscow. Scientists concluded that some energy source, not yet known to mankind, was activated near the soldiers.
An unnamed CIA official quoted in the report called the incident extremely alarming, assuming it was real. In that case, he explained, aliens possess technology beyond anything anyone could have imagined.
Former CIA agent Mike Baker told the TV channel that he has doubts about the details presented.
"If there was an incident, whatever its nature, I suspect the actual report doesn't look much like what emerged from five, six, seven iterations of what was originally [written]," Baker said.
The Fox News article states that the CIA document summarizes information published in 2000 by the Canadian weekly World News and the Ukrainian newspaper Golos Ukrainy. These details allegedly came into the hands of American intelligence agencies after the collapse of the USSR along with other KGB materials. The document itself cites a publication in a Ukrainian newspaper from 1993 as its source.
In the fall of 2024, Donald Trump, as a candidate for US President, promised to declassify materials about UFOs and the assassination of John Kennedy. Shortly after his inauguration in January 2025, it became known that FBI agents investigating UFO incidents were afraid of dismissals. As reported by the Regnum news agency, the agents were worried about possible personnel purges.
#1
The concern I have about current China-US relations is that most of the high military and Party officials are making a bundle off the West and US in particular. Doing something stupid would kill the golden goose. If, OTOH, the goose is gonna be cooked anyway, by tariffs, trade war, or an outbreak of common sense, then all bets are off.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] China has already announced that the current tariffs on American goods are quite sufficient and it is not going to bend under American pressure.
The US has already begun to back down a little, canceling tariffs on consumer electronics. Behind-the-scenes negotiations between the US and China on reducing tariffs are already underway.
The more intense this trade war is, the better. It is destroying the current economic global trading system, which was created in the interests of the West.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Penguin Republic celebrates the day of victory over American imperialism, which, under the threat of total war, was forced to reduce tariffs.
"The world's two largest powers are closer than ever to total economic collapse as President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping refuse to back down in a trade war that has turned into a game of chicken, " the article says.
Experts interviewed by the publication noted that the breakdown in economic ties between Washington and Beijing against the backdrop of escalating diplomatic conflicts increases the likelihood of fundamental changes in the global economy, as well as a real war between the US and China.
According to WP, Chinese officials are primarily concerned about the lack of communication channels between the countries, which complicates the normalization of relations.
"I was really shocked. I didn't expect the situation to deteriorate to this extent in just a few days," said Xin Qiang, deputy head of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.
The stakes in the standoff are high and it has become a winner-take-all game, the authors added.
Even more from regnum.ru White House says it is negotiating tariffs with 130 countries
The United States of America is negotiating with 130 countries on trade relations and tariffs. This was announced on April 13 by the Director of the National Economic Council of the administration Kevin Hassett.
"Right now, 130 countries have reached out and we're talking to them," Hassett said on CNN.
The council director added that these countries are subject to a 10% tariff on imports to the United States. In addition, a process to resolve trade disputes with China is underway, but it is “in its infancy,” Hassett added.
Tariffs? Trade deficits? T-bills? If you’re like me, an English major wordcel who never paid attention to the world of international finance and isn’t about to start now, you have no idea what to make of the Trump tariffs, our trade imbalance, futures, the markets, and whether this will be, in the long run, bad or good for the country
...Luckily, there’s now hope for people like me. A way to know what to think with a simple-to-use tool. An X poster named “Schizo Freq” posted this month: “My stance with tariffs is basically Everyone I know who’s been wrong about literally everything for the last 10 years is SUPER pissed about them. So the ‘inverse retard’ indicator says it’s probably fine.”
Greens UK. Recognize the inevitable. Old steel is dead. It must be put on a Green path so we can cleanly build windmills, electric train rails, etchttps://t.co/QD7PHOIMgo
#4
I assume he'll have a mistress or three on the side. You wouldn't want to actually consummate a marriage with that woman...would you?
But all this time we've been wondering why? Why let all these people into our countries? And I'm wondering if it's anything to do with Arab leaders bribing Western leaders with all that oil money. I mean, there must be a reason and that's what I'm beginning to think. People like Macron, Starmer, Merz and Obama are so greedy and so soft in the head that they are willing to kill Western Civilization for a fat bank account. But what will they do when their banks are compelled to become Sharia compliant?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/14/2025 13:01 Comments ||
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#5
^ and consider... Carlos Danger was there first...
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/14/2025 18:53 Comments ||
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#7
Or and. Since dear Huma is here in her capacity as spy and seductress for at least the Muslim Brotherhood — and quite possibly Al Qaeda as well or instead. Since everything about her life must offend her inner sensibility, what difference is one more layer of offense for the cause?
[DNYUZ] In the early 1990s, James Swanson was working as a research psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, where he specialized in the study of attention disorders. It was a touchy time for the field. The Church of Scientology had organized a nationwide protest campaign against the psychiatric profession, and Ritalin, then the leading medication prescribed to children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was one of its main targets. Whenever Swanson and his colleagues gathered for a scientific conference, they were met by chanting protesters waving signs and airplanes overhead pulling banners that read, “Psychs, Stop Drugging Our Kids.”
It was true that prescription rates for Ritalin were on the rise. The number of American children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. more than doubled in the early 1990s, from fewer than a million patients in 1990 to more than two million in 1993, almost two-thirds of whom were prescribed Ritalin. To Swanson, at the time, that increase seemed entirely appropriate. Those two million children represented about 3 percent of the nation’s child population, and 3 percent was the rate that he and many other scientists believed was an accurate measure of A.D.H.D. among children.
Still, you didn’t have to be a Scientologist to acknowledge that there were some legitimate questions about A.D.H.D. Despite Ritalin’s rapid growth, no one knew exactly how the medication worked or whether it really was the best way to treat children’s attention issues. Anecdotally, doctors and parents would observe that when many children began taking stimulant medications like Ritalin, their behavior would improve almost overnight, but no one had measured in a careful, large-scale scientific study how common that positive response was or, for that matter, what the effects were on a child of taking Ritalin over the long term. And so Swanson and a team of researchers, with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, began a vast, multisite randomized controlled trial comparing stimulant treatment for A.D.H.D. with nonpharmaceutical approaches like parent training and behavioral coaching.
Swanson was in charge of the site in Orange County, Calif. He recruited and selected about 100 children with A.D.H.D. symptoms, all from 7 to 9 years old. They were divided into treatment groups — some were given regular doses of Ritalin, some were given high-quality behavioral training, some were given a combination and the remainder, a comparison group, were left alone to figure out their own treatment. The same thing happened at five other sites across the continent. Known as the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or M.T.A., it was one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.
The initial results of the M.T.A. study, published in 1999, underscored the case for stimulant medication. After 14 months of treatment, the children who took Ritalin every day had significantly fewer symptoms than the ones who received only behavioral training. Word went out to clinics and pediatricians’ offices around the country: Ritalin worked. This was good news not only for families with children who struggled with attention issues but also for the corporations that offered them pharmaceutical solutions. In the years after the study’s initial publication, Swanson began consulting for drug companies. He advised Shire, which manufactured Adderall, a similar stimulant medication, on how to formulate an extended-release version of its product, so that children could take just one pill each morning instead of needing to visit the school nurse’s office in the middle of the day.
Though Swanson had welcomed that initial increase in the diagnosis rate, he expected it to plateau at 3 percent. Instead, it kept rising, hitting 5.5 percent of American children in 1997, then 6.6 percent in 2000. As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the M.T.A. study, and by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different — and less hopeful — story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. “There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, “that just are definitely wrong.”
I’ve spent the last year speaking with some of the leading A.D.H.D. researchers in the United States and abroad, and many of them, like Swanson, express concern over what they see as a disconnect between the emerging scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. and the way the condition is being treated in clinics and doctors’ offices. Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, described the situation in personal terms. “I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started,” he told me. “We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.”
Despite the questions these scientists have begun to raise, the growth of the diagnosis shows no signs of stopping or even slowing down. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 11.4 percent of American children had been diagnosed with A.D.H.D., a record high. That figure includes 15.5 percent of American adolescents, 21 percent of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys. Seven million American children have received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis, up from six million in 2016 and two million in the mid-1990s.
Now, however, some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”
A.D.H.D. is defined in the D.S.M. as a neurodevelopmental disorder, but the symptoms of A.D.H.D. can be produced by a variety of environmental causes as well. Difficulty sitting still and sustaining attention can also be symptoms of a serious head injury, fetal alcohol syndrome, childhood lead exposure, early trauma and more. There is also a high rate of overlap between the symptoms of A.D.H.D. and those of other psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety, dyslexia and autism. Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.
This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?
Sonuga-Barke goes further, arguing that the entire decades-long quest for a biomarker has been “a red herring” for the field. He understands his colleagues’ desire to find airtight evidence for the biological nature of A.D.H.D. that could help them defend the diagnosis against those who would dismiss it altogether. “In the field, we’re so frightened that people will say it doesn’t exist,” he says. “That this is just bad parenting, from the right, or this is just a product of our postindustrial society, from the left. We have to double down because we’re terrified of what will happen to the kids who can’t get the meds. We’ve seen the impact they can have on people’s lives.”
But the reality, he says, is that “there literally is no natural cutting point where you could say, ‘This person has got A.D.H.D., and this person hasn’t got it.’ Those decisions are to some extent arbitrary. That doesn’t mean that the suffering associated with A.D.H.D. is imaginary, it just means it’s on a continuum. And that is the conundrum — the empirical crisis — for A.D.H.D.”
#3
some were given high-quality behavioral training
You mean a spanking?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/14/2025 13:05 Comments ||
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#4
I remember when I got caught goofing off in junior high school how the prescription would be a meeting with the board of education. It sure smartened me up.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/14/2025 13:15 Comments ||
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#5
I’m glad there was no Ritalin back in my day- after one birthday party an exasperated parent told my mother “ he did everything but swing from the chandelier.”
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
