PUTIN WANNABE
Turkey debates law that would increase oversight of NGOs

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan answers questions during 

a joint news conference with U.S. President Donald Trump

 at the White House in Washington

Fri, December 25, 2020

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's parliament began debating a draft law on Friday that would increase oversight of non-governmental organisations and which, according to rights campaigners, risks limiting the freedoms of civil-society groups.

The bill would allow the interior minister to replace members of organisations who are being investigated for terrorism charges. The interior ministry could also apply to courts to halt the groups' activities under the draft bill.

The government says the measure, covering "foundations and associations", aims to prevent non-profit organisations from financing terrorism and to punish those who violate the law.

Civil-society groups, including Amnesty International and the Human Rights Association, said terrorism charges in Turkey were arbitrary, and that the draft law would violate the presumption of innocence and punish those whose trials were not finalised.

The bill was drafted by President Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party (AKP), which holds a majority in parliament with nationalist MHP allies, suggesting it is likely to pass.

Investigations based on terrorism charges have been launched against hundreds of thousands of people under a crackdown following a failed coup in 2016. Hundreds of foundations were also shut down with decrees following the coup attempt.

Critics say Erdogan and the AKP have used the failed coup as pretext to quash dissent. The government says the measures were necessary given the security threats facing Turkey.

Under the draft law, foundations would be inspected annually by civil servants who could request any documents from them.

Local governors or the interior minister could block online donation campaigns to prevent terrorism financing and money laundering, under the draft law.

Fines of up to 200,000 lira ($26,200) could be levied for any group found to be engaged in illegal online donation campaigns, compared with a current maximum of 700 lira.

($1 = 7.6335 liras)

(Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Pravin Char)

Children understand far more about other minds than long believed


Henrike Moll, Associate Professor of Psychology, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Fri, December 25, 2020

Don't underestimate what I get about the world around me. 

Baby image via www.shutterstock.com.

Until a few decades ago, scholars believed that young children know very little, if anything, about what others are thinking. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who is credited with founding the scientific study of children’s thinking, was convinced that preschool children cannot consider what goes on in the minds of others.

The interviews and experiments he conducted with kids in the middle of the 20th century suggested that they were trapped in their subjective viewpoints, incapable of imagining what others think, feel or believe. To him, young children seemed oblivious to the fact that different people might hold distinct viewpoints or perspectives on the world, or even that their own perspectives shift over time.

Much of the subsequent research on early childhood thinking was highly influenced by Piaget’s ideas. Scholars sought to refine his theory and empirically confirm his views. But it became increasingly clear that Piaget was missing something. He seemed to have gravely underestimated the intellectual powers of very young kids – before they can make themselves understood by speech or even intentional action. Researchers began to devise ever more ingenious ways of figuring out what goes on in the minds of babies, and the resulting picture of their abilities is becoming more and more nuanced.

Consequently, the old view of children’s egocentric nature and intellectual weaknesses has increasingly fallen out of favor and become replaced by a more generous position that sees a budding sense not only of the physical world but also of other minds, even in the “youngest young.”

Dark Ages of intellectual development?

Historically, children didn’t receive much respect for their mental powers. Piaget not only believed that children were “egocentric” in the sense that they were unable to differentiate between their own viewpoint and that of others; he was also convinced that their thinking was characterized by systematic errors and confusions.

For example, the children he interviewed seemed unable to disentangle causes from their effects (“Does the wind move the branches or do the moving branches cause the wind?”) and could not tell reality apart from superficial appearances (a stick submerged halfway into water looks, but is not, bent). They also fall prey to magical and mythical thinking: A child might believe that the sun was once a ball that someone tossed up into the sky, where it grew bigger and bigger. In fact, Piaget believed that children’s mental development progresses in the same way historians believe human thought progressed over historical time: from mythical to logical thinking.

Piaget firmly believed kids were focused entirely on their own actions and perceptions. When playing with others, they don’t cooperate because they do not realize there are different roles and perspectives. He was convinced that children literally cannot “get their act together”: instead of playing cooperatively and truly together, they play side by side, with little regard for the other. And when speaking with others, a young child supposedly cannot consider the listener’s viewpoint but “talks to himself without listening to the others.”

Piaget and his followers maintained that children go through something like a dark ages of intellectual development before slowly and gradually becoming enlightened by reason and rationality as they reach school age. Alongside this enlightenment develops an ever-growing understanding of other persons, including their attitudes and views of the world.

Changing mindset about minds

Today, a very different picture of children’s mental development emerges. Psychologists continually reveal new insights into the depth of young children’s knowledge of the world, including their understanding of other minds. Recent studies suggest that even infants are sensitive to others’ perspectives and beliefs.

Part of the motivation to revise some of Piaget’s conclusions stemmed from an ideological shift about the origin of human knowledge that occurred in the second half of the 20th century. It became increasingly unpopular to assume that a basic understanding of the world can be built entirely from experience.

This was in part instigated by theorist Noam Chomsky, who argued that something as complex as the rules of grammar cannot be picked up from exposure to speech, but is supplied by an innate “language faculty.” Others followed suit and defined further “core areas” in which knowledge allegedly cannot be pieced together from experience but must be innate. One such area is our knowledge of others’ minds. Some even argue that a basic knowledge of others’ minds is not only possessed by human infants, but must be evolutionarily old and hence shared by our nearest living relatives, the great apes.

Ingenious new investigation tools

To prove that infants know more in this realm than had been acknowledged, researchers needed to come up with innovative ways of showing it. A big part of why we now recognize so much more of kids’ intellectual capacities is the development of much more sensitive research tools than Piaget had at his disposal.

Instead of engaging toddlers in dialog or having them execute complex motor tasks, the newer methods capitalize on behaviors that have a firm place in infants’ natural behavior repertoire: looking, listening, sucking, making facial expressions, gestures and simple manual actions. The idea of focusing on these “small behaviors” is that they give kids the chance to demonstrate their knowledge implicitly and spontaneously – without having to respond to questions or instructions. For example, children might look longer at an event that they did not expect to happen, or they might show facial expressions indicating that they have empathy with another.

When researchers measure these less demanding, and often involuntary, behaviors, they can detect a sensitivity to others’ mental states at a much younger age than with the more taxing methods that Piaget and his disciples deployed.

What modern studies reveal

In the 1980s, these kinds of implicit measures became customary in developmental psychology. But it took a while longer before these tools were employed to measure children’s grasp of the mental lives of others. Recent studies have revealed that even infants and toddlers are sensitive to what goes in others’ minds.

In one series of experiments, a group of Hungarian scientists had six-month-old babies watch an animation of the following sequence of events: A Smurf observed how a ball rolled behind a screen. The Smurf then left. In its absence, the infants witnessed how the ball emerged from behind the screen and rolled away. The Smurf returned and the screen was lowered, showing that the ball was no longer there. The authors of the study recorded the infants’ looks and found that they fixated longer than usual on the final scene in which the Smurf gazed at the empty space behind the barrier – as if they understood that the Smurf’s expectation was violated.

In another set of experiments, my colleagues at the University of Southern California and I found evidence that toddlers can even anticipate how others will feel when their expectations are disappointed. We acted out several puppet shows in front of two-year-old children. In these puppet shows, a protagonist (Cookie Monster) left his precious belongings (cookies) on stage and later returned to fetch them. What the protagonist did not know was that an antagonist had come and messed with his possessions. The children had witnessed these acts and attentively watch the protagonist return.

We recorded children’s facial and bodily expressions. Children bit their lips, wrinkled their nose or wiggled in their chair when the protagonist came back, as if they anticipated the bewilderment and disappointment he was about to experience. Importantly, children showed no such reactions and remained calm when the protagonist had seen the events himself and thus knew what to expect. Our study reveals that by the tender age of two, kids not only track what others believe or expect; they can even foresee how others will feel when they discover reality.

Studies like these reveal that there is much more going on in toddlers’ and even infants’ minds than was previously believed. With the explicit measures used by Piaget and successors, these deeper layers of kids’ understanding cannot be accessed. The new investigative tools demonstrate that kids know more than they can say: when we scratch beneath the surface, we find a fledgling understanding of relations and perspectives that Piaget probably did not dream of.

Old ways have value, too

Despite these obvious advances in the study of young children’s thinking, it would be a grave mistake to dismiss the careful and systematic analyses compiled by Piaget and others before the new tests dominated the scene. Doing so would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, because the original methods revealed essential facts about how children think – facts that the new, “minimalist” methods cannot uncover.

There’s no consensus in today’s community about how much we can infer from a look, a grimace or a hand gesture. These behaviors clearly indicate a curiosity about what goes on in the mind of others, and probably a set of early intuitions coupled with a willingness to learn more. They pave the way to richer and more explicit forms of understanding of the minds of other. But they can in no way replace the child’s growing ability to articulate and refine her understanding of how people behave and why.

Piaget may have underestimated infants’ cognitive powers, perhaps for lack of modern tools. But his insights into how a child gradually comes to grasp the world around her and understand that she is a person among a community of other persons remain as inspiring as they were 50 years ago. Today’s challenge for us developmental scholars is to integrate the new with the old, and understand how infants’ sensitivity to other minds gradually develops into a full-blown understanding of other persons as distinct from, and yet similar to, oneself.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

Can great apes read your mind?

Young children are terrible at hiding – psychologists have a new theory why

Why are so many of our pets overweight?

Henrike Moll receives funding from the Office of Naval Research.

We Spoke With an Eco-Activist About Why Environmentalism Matters for Everyone



Lola Mendez
Fri, December 25, 2020, 

Petrice Jones isn’t just the ultra-talented star of Netflix’s new hit show Locke & Key—he’s also an eco-warrior. The British actor is the brains behind The One Movement, a social enterprise aiming to educate, empower, and support people fighting to protect our planet. He joined forces with Lonely Whale, an organization dedicated to caring for our oceans, to host the 52 Hertz podcast series about climate optimism.

On 52 Hertz and his social media platforms, the self-declared climate optimist raises awareness about global environmental issues like plastic pollution. We spoke with Jones about the need to elevate BIPOC voices in the environmental movement, how the climate impacts BIPOC communities, and what keeps him hopeful amongst the chaos.

AD: What inspired you to host the Lonely Whale podcast series, 52 Hertz, about climate optimism?

Jones: Collaborating with Lonely Whale was a no-brainer for me. Our mission is the same: We want to mobilize an audience that creates daily habits that are better for the planet, and to help others understand that their voice and their actions, no matter how small, can make a difference.

The first season of 52 Hertz elevates the voices of those who are finding truly innovative approaches to the problem. By highlighting unique efforts within the ocean conservation space, we uncover the many ways that others—no matter their age, background, or industry—can challenge the status quo and create genuine impact.

Hearing people’s stories made me want to take things further, I started asking myself what else I could do. Understanding that we’re not separate from our environment but rather part of it is fundamental to calculate the “true cost” of any endeavor. If you think of yourself as separate from the environment, you may think that the true cost is one that’s personal or financial. The true cost is one that considers both the financial and environmental factors.

What is the intersection of the environmental movement and the BIPOC community?

Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru of Black Girl Environmentalist, a supportive community for Black girls, womxn, and nonbinary environmentalists, is definitely an inspiration to me. Her focus on the need to disrupt the status quo within the environmental movement, and calling for the movement to center the experience and expertise of frontline people of color, especially Black and brown people who have been historically left out, is truly admirable work.

You can’t have an environmental movement without the BIPOC community. Wawa talks about this in 52 Hertz, episode 3, but the environmental movement itself is historically racist. It’s well past time for the environmental movement to reckon with that history.

So, the environment is a civil justice issue?

Intersectional environmentalism is a movement that advocates for justice for both the Earth and communities of color. It’s about protecting people and the planet, recognizing that by harming the planet, we’re harming our most vulnerable communities.

Intersectional environmentalism isn’t just an idea or something we can talk about or debate as a concept. Studies have shown that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to poor water and air quality. Zanagee Artis, the cofounder of Zero Hour, and I talk a lot about the importance of prioritizing the environment when we vote in episode 11 of 52 Hertz. Because climate change is an intersectional issue, everything from health care and foreign policy to war relates back to the environment and impacts climate change in the future.

Protecting marine wildlife and natural habitats is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but it’s time to recognize that protecting our own neighbors is equally, if not more, important. Environmental racism can look like building hazardous waste facilities or ignoring contaminated groundwater in nonwhite neighborhoods. Intersectional environmentalism comes into play when we talk about environmental racism because it includes fighting for the policies and regulations that protect the planet and its people.

Why do we need to diversify the environmental movement?

When people think of an environmentalist or those involved in the environmental movement, there’s a very specific kind of person that comes to mind. But the fact is, anyone and everyone can get involved, regardless of age, experience, or background. Being an environmentalist is about so much more than just caring about conservation and our physical planet. It’s also about our love for humanity. We’re all being impacted by environmental crises and climate change. It’s all of our responsibility to step up as environmental leaders and take action. Diversifying the movement breaks down these barriers and allows us to join together through our efforts to save the future of our shared planet.

What keeps you optimistic about the future of our planet?

Despite everything going on right now, I’m hopeful for our environment because 2020 has been a year of action—for taking to the streets, for signing petitions, for demanding accountability, for voting in elections at every level, for educating those around you, for fighting for what’s right and never stopping because it’s what’s right. Public demand for the health of our planet is rising, and with this momentum growing, decision-makers can’t continue to ignore our voices. It’s also incredibly inspiring to see more and more young people get involved in the movement and become leaders themselves. It keeps me motivated in my fight for the next generation.

As a young Black man, I’ve spent much of my career searching for my face amid the environmental movement, and sometimes I couldn’t help but feel alone or frustrated. I’m thankful to the people who are mobilizing and putting in work to make this a space for everyone, whether it be through protesting, the decisions they make as consumers, or the pursuit of education.

Your power is with your vote, your wallet, and your voice. Support Black businesses and environmental-focused businesses. We have to keep pushing, and we have to go further because the environment deserves it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

Judge delays execution of only woman on US death row

FILE - This Aug. 28, 2020, file photo shows the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)A federal judge said the Justice Department unlawfully rescheduled the execution of the only woman on federal death row, potentially setting up the Trump administration to schedule the execution after president-elect Joe Biden

MICHAEL BALSAMO
Fri, December 25, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge said the Justice Department unlawfully rescheduled the execution of the only woman on federal death row, potentially setting up the Trump administration to schedule the execution after president-elect Joe Biden takes office.

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss also vacated an order from the director of the Bureau of Prisons that had set Lisa Montgomery’s execution date for Jan. 12. Montgomery had previously been scheduled to be put to death at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, this month, but Moss delayed the execution after her attorneys contracted coronavirus visiting their client and asked him to extend the amount of time to file a clemency petition.

Moss prohibited the Bureau of Prisons from carrying out Lisa Montgomery’s execution before the end of the year and officials rescheduled her execution date for Jan. 12. But Moss ruled on Wednesday that the agency was also prohibited from rescheduling the date while a stay was in place.


“The Court, accordingly, concludes that the Director’s order setting a new execution date while the Court’s stay was in effect was ‘not in accordance with law,’” Moss wrote.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Under the order, the Bureau of Prisons cannot reschedule Montgomery’s execution until at least Jan. 1. Generally, under Justice Department guidelines, a death-row inmate must be notified at least 20 days before the execution. Because of the judge’s order, if the Justice Department chooses to reschedule the date in January, it could mean that the execution would be scheduled after Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

A spokesperson for Biden has told The Associated Press the president-elect “opposes the death penalty now and in the future” and would work as president to end its use in office. But Biden’s representatives have not said whether executions would be paused immediately once Biden takes office.

Montgomery was convicted of killing 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore in December 2004. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Montgomery removed the baby from Stinnett’s body, took the child with her, and attempted to pass the girl off as her own. Montgomery’s legal team has argued that their client suffers from serious mental illnesses.

“Given the severity of Mrs. Montgomery’s mental illness, the sexual and physical torture she endured throughout her life, and the connection between her trauma and the facts of her crime, we appeal to President Trump to grant her mercy, and commute her sentence to life imprisonment,” one of Montgomery’s lawyers, Sandra Babcock, said in a statement.

Two other federal inmates are scheduled to be executed in January but have tested positive for coronavirus and their attorneys are also seeking delays to their executions.

Iranian hackers target Israeli defence firm in bid for ransom


David Rose
Fri, December 25, 2020

Israeli cyber-security firm Checkpoint system said it had traced the hacks back to a Bitcoin exchanged based in Tehran - PA

A new Iranian computer-hacking group has been targeting defence companies in Israel in an attempt to expose weaknesses and obtain ransoms, it has emerged.

The group, known as "Pay2Key", boasted of carrying out dozens of cyber-attacks on high-profile targets since last month, including two in the last week.

The latest attack on Thursday targeted Portnox, an Israeli cyber-security firm, whose clients include electronics company Elbit Systems, which produces defence systems for military aircraft, vehicles and drones.

On Sunday, the same hackers said that they successfully compromised a range of Israeli defense industry companies, including Israel Aerospace Industries.

Analysts say that Pay2Key operates by using “ransomware” attacks to steal data, and threatening to leak it if the targets do not cooperate or pay up to £100,000 in Bitcoin, the electronic currency.

Checkpoint Systems, an Israeli cyber-security firm, said it had traced some of the transactions back to a Bitcoin exchange based in Iran, but it was not clear if the Iranian government was behind the attacks.

Iranian hackers have previously been blamed for "state-level" cyber-attacks against Israel, American banks and in 2017, on British Parliamentary email accounts, including those of cabinet ministers.

Among 3 Gigabytes of data released after the latest hack was a 15-page report that highlights security weaknesses in Elbit Systems. However, the report only goes as far as the year 2018, which may mean that most of the exposed weaknesses are no longer relevant.

"Over a terabyte of documents, projects, coding files and others were extracted from the company's servers," the group wrote on their website on the “dark web”, an unregulated part of the internet.

Portnox said that they were investigating after "reports indicated a hack into the company's internal servers by a hacking group that identifies itself as Pay2Key.

"The company has launched a comprehensive investigation in order to gain a full picture of the incident," it said in a statement.

Russian cat rescued from rubbish plant receives honorary ministerial role

Campbell MacDiarmid

Sat, December 26, 2020,


Russian waste plant worker Mikhail Tukash rescues a cat from a rubbish separator - GORKOMHOZ/ GORKOMHOZ

A Russian cat rescued from a rubbish separator at a waste processing plant has been adopted by the Ulyanovsk region’s environment ministry and given an honorary title.

The black and white cat has achieved local celebrity status in Ulyanovsk, a city 435 miles east of Moscow, after surveillance camera footage showed a worker at the sorting facility grabbing a bag from a conveyor belt and opening it to discover the feline inside.

“I felt something soft inside the bag,” plant worker Mikhail Tukash told the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, Reuters reported. “I cut the bag open slightly and I saw eyes looking back at me.”

The footage shows the conveyor belt come to a stop as Mr Tukash shows his colleagues the cat, which remains calm as he strokes it with gloved hands.

“I needed to cut the bag to screen it for metals. I was just doing my job,” Mr Tukash told local television in the city, which is known as the birthplace of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

The local channel reported that workers at the plant had previously rescued an African hedgehog nicknamed Vezunka, which means lucky in Russian, and two red-eared slider turtles.

The region’s environment ministry lauded Mr Tukash for the rescue, writing that the male cat was “on the brink of death” and would have “ended up in the trash separator” had Mr Tukash not grabbed him.

The well-fed and friendly cat was likely an abandoned household pet, the ministry said.

“If you can’t keep an animal at home, you can always give it away to a shelter,” minister Gulnara Rakhmatulina said in a statement.

After adopting the cat and bestowing upon him the honorary title of honorary deputy in charge of wildlife protection, the ministry released photos of him catnapping in the minister’s chair.

The ministry has announced a contest to name the rescued cat.

Breakingviews - Data centres will become green activists’ target



By Robyn Mak



RJ45 cables are pictured inside the data centre operated by French telecoms operator Iliad in Paris, France, March 4, 2019.

HONG KONG (Reuters Breakingviews) - Technology firms are due a green shake-up. Data centres and networks each use around 1% of the world’s electricity, according to the International Energy Agency – more, for now, than electric vehicles. That could hit double-digits by 2030, making related emissions a problem.

The infrastructure behind video conferencing and binge-watching “The Crown” on Netflix comprises mainly two parts: buildings that house tens of thousands of servers and the networks that connect servers to smartphones, PCs and other devices. Both require huge amounts of electricity. Data centres use roughly 200 terawatt-hours a year, according to a 2018 study led by Eric Masanet, an engineer at Northwestern University in the United States. That’s in the same ballpark as Australia’s annual consumption.

The good news is that figure has barely increased over the past decade. Even as data volumes have multiplied, networks and server farms, particularly so-called hyperscale centres operated by Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Alphabet-owned Google, have become extremely energy efficient.

But that trajectory looks unsustainable. Even without the isolation of the pandemic, widespread adoption of next-generation 5G wireless technology, autonomous driving and the internet of things will dramatically boost internet traffic. Moreover, chips that power servers are reaching technological limits, making efficiency gains harder to come by.

Estimates for how much energy consumption will rise vary. But for some countries, data may suck up a double-digit percentage. Ireland’s power operator, for instance, in 2018 estimated the country’s data centres may account for nearly 30% of electricity demand by 2028. The Irish Academy of Engineering reckons that will add at least 1.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions, 13% of the electricity sector’s current total.

Giant technology companies are among the world’s largest buyers of renewable energy. But that won’t be enough to spare them the attention of environmental, social and governance-oriented investors. At the top of the agenda will be pushing for better disclosure about energy use and emissions, perhaps even attributing them to specific bulk customers like Netflix and Zoom Video Communications

In January 2020, Microsoft unveiled a tool to help enterprise clients analyse their cloud service-related emissions. That’s a step in the right direction, but ESG investors may demand much more in 2021.

This is a Breakingviews prediction for 2021. To see more of our predictions, click here.

Beaver found in Plymouth among first to be reintroduced to wild in Britain for 400 years


Max Stephens Fri, December 25, 2020,

Police officers shared a photo of the runaway beaver in Plymouth on Twitter - SWNS

A beaver rescued by police this week was among the first of its kind to be reintroduced to the wild in Britain for nearly 400 years

The 20kg creature had escaped from a specially designed re-wilding enclosure near Poole Farm in Plymouth.

Local officers say they were confronted with the “unusual sight” of the beaver at large on Monday and posted a photograph on social media of the runaway creature in the city.


They tweeted yesterday: “An unusual sight for one of our crews on Monday night shift: Plymouth's resident beaver spotted out and about!

“He has apparently been caught since and is back home for Christmas.”

The male had been released into the wild at Forder Valley in November – the first in the city for 400 years.

The Eurasian Beaver was originally caught in late September in the wild from the Tay Catchment in Scotland and was released as part of a nationwide trend to reintroduce beavers in the wild.

The beaver’s behaviour and actions will now be monitored in the hope that its actions will reduce flooding further downstream and create habitats for wildlife in the Bircham Valley.

This comes after a 25kg young male beaver was spotted in Italy for the first time in nearly 500 years, after it walked over the border from Austria or Slovenia into the Dolomites.

The first clues that the rodent might be back on Italian soil were noticed by a hunting guide who spends his days roaming the mountains and forests.

Forester Reinhard Pipperger had noticed at the time young trees had been felled along a stretch of the Sesto river in Northern Italy.

The beaver was later photographed by a camera set up along the river by wildlife rangers.

Two faces of George Blake: infamous spy and affable party host

By Mark Trevelyan

(Reuters) - When I met George Blake in Moscow in September 1991, two weeks after an abortive coup against Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was in the process of falling apart and the Communist party had been banned for its role in the putsch.

It must have been a worrying time for the man whose Communist convictions had led him decades earlier to betray his country - Britain - and abandon his family.

Yet Blake, who died in Russia on Saturday aged 98, was in genial mood over supper in his apartment as he reflected on his career as a double agent, his life in exile, and the uncertain future of his adopted country.

“The coup d’etat has brought about a shock that may make it possible to make changes that should have been carried out a long time ago,” said Blake.

“Now, the tooth has been pulled out,” he said, imagining a future when the 15 Soviet republics might evolve along the lines of the European Community, forerunner of the European Union, under a form of “caring capitalism”.

It was not to be: Blake and his dinner guests had no inkling that night that the Soviet Union would cease to exist within months and Gorbachev, fatally undermined by the coup, would find himself out of a job.

FILE PHOTO: Soviet secret agent George Blake gestures as he speaks at a presentation of a book of letters written by other spies from a British prison, in Moscow June 28, 2001. Blake -- a notorious traitor in Britain and legendary hero in Russia -- escaped from a British jail in 1966 while serving a 42 year sentence for passing secrets to Moscow./File Photo



THE OUTSIDER

Blake was the last in a notorious line of British spies who were secretly working for the Soviet Union, and whose betrayals rocked and humiliated the intelligence establishment at the height of the Cold War.

Unmasked in 1961, he was sentenced to 42 years in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison. But he escaped in 1966 with the help of two British peace activists, was smuggled across the Iron Curtain and began a new life in Moscow, leaving behind his wife and children.

What struck me most about him was a kind of rootlessness. Born in the Netherlands, he was totally fluent in English and Russian, but spoke both languages with a marked accent.

Sporting a tweed jacket and bow tie, he resembled an affable professor with balding head and peppery beard, shuffling around an apartment where Dutch paintings and Russian icons adorned the walls and volumes of Balzac and Lenin lined the bookshelves.

In Moscow he had made himself a new life, marrying a Soviet wife, Ida, and raising their son Misha together while working at a foreign affairs institute.

At first, he recalled, he was a true believer in the promise of Communism: it made a deep impression on him that anyone could just walk into an ordinary ‘Gastronom’, or grocery store, and buy a glass of champagne at the counter.

“I thought: we are on the eve of Communism,” he said. “That’s how naive I was. Gradually I realised that wasn’t so... I thought Soviet man was a new man - and he wasn’t.”

INTO THE UNKNOWN

Despite his disenchantment with the system, Blake retained his respect for the KGB security service to which he had switched his allegiance.

“The KGB was an instrument of the party which was there to enforce and punish if people didn’t toe the party line... The KGB was there to see that if policies were not carried out, people were pulled up short,” he said.

“It was one of the few Soviet institutions which was not corrupt. The KGB was to the Communist Party what the Jesuit order was to the Catholic church.”

Far from disbanding and opening up its archives, as some were urging at that time, the organisation would survive under a new name, he predicted.

How Crisco toppled lard – and made Americans believers in industrial food


Helen Zoe Veit, Associate Professor of History, Michigan State University
Fri, December 25, 2020

It's all about having faith in the purity of the process.

melissamn/Shutterstock.com

Perhaps you’ll unearth a can of Crisco for the holiday baking season. If so, you’ll be one of millions of Americans who have, for generations, used it to make cookies, cakes, pie crusts and more.

But for all Crisco’s popularity, what exactly is that thick, white substance in the can?

If you’re not sure, you’re not alone.

For decades, Crisco had only one ingredient, cottonseed oil. But most consumers never knew that. That ignorance was no accident.

A century ago, Crisco’s marketers pioneered revolutionary advertising techniques that encouraged consumers not to worry about ingredients and instead to put their trust in reliable brands. It was a successful strategy that other companies would eventually copy.
Lard gets some competition

For most of the 19th century, cotton seeds were a nuisance. When cotton gins combed the South’s ballooning cotton harvests to produce clean fiber, they left mountains of seeds behind. Early attempts to mill those seeds resulted in oil that was unappealingly dark and smelly. Many farmers just let their piles of cottonseed rot.

It was only after a chemist named David Wesson pioneered industrial bleaching and deodorizing techniques in the late 19th century that cottonseed oil became clear, tasteless and neutral-smelling enough to appeal to consumers. Soon, companies were selling cottonseed oil by itself as a liquid or mixing it with animal fats to make cheap, solid shortenings, sold in pails to resemble lard.

Shortening’s main rival was lard. Earlier generations of Americans had produced lard at home after autumn pig slaughters, but by the late 19th century meat processing companies were making lard on an industrial scale. Lard had a noticeable pork taste, but there’s not much evidence that 19th-century Americans objected to it, even in cakes and pies. Instead, its issue was cost. While lard prices stayed relatively high through the early 20th century, cottonseed oil was abundant and cheap.

Americans, at the time, overwhelmingly associated cotton with dresses, shirts and napkins, not food.

Nonetheless, early cottonseed oil and shortening companies went out of their way to highlight their connection to cotton. They touted the transformation of cottonseed from pesky leftover to useful consumer product as a mark of ingenuity and progress. Brands like Cottolene and Cotosuet drew attention to cotton with their names and by incorporating images of cotton in their advertising.

King Crisco

When Crisco launched in 1911, it did things differently.

Like other brands, it was made from cottonseed. But it was also a new kind of fat – the world’s first solid shortening made entirely from a once-liquid plant oil. Instead of solidifying cottonseed oil by mixing it with animal fat like the other brands, Crisco used a brand-new process called hydrogenation, which Procter & Gamble, the creator of Crisco, had perfected after years of research and development.

From the beginning, the company’s marketers talked a lot about the marvels of hydrogenation – what they called “the Crisco process” – but avoided any mention of cottonseed. There was no law at the time mandating that food companies list ingredients, although virtually all food packages provided at least enough information to answer that most fundamental of all questions: What is it?

In contrast, Crisco marketers offered only evasion and euphemism. Crisco was made from “100% shortening,” its marketing materials asserted, and “Crisco is Crisco, and nothing else.” Sometimes they gestured towards the plant kingdom: Crisco was “strictly vegetable,” “purely vegetable” or “absolutely all vegetable.” At their most specific, advertisements said it was made from “vegetable oil,” a relatively new phrase that Crisco helped to popularize.

But why go to all this trouble to avoid mentioning cottonseed oil if consumers were already knowingly buying it from other companies?

The truth was that cottonseed had a mixed reputation, and it was only getting worse by the time Crisco launched. A handful of unscrupulous companies were secretly using cheap cottonseed oil to cut costly olive oil, so some consumers thought of it as an adulterant. Others associated cottonseed oil with soap or with its emerging industrial uses in dyes, roofing tar and explosives. Still others read alarming headlines about how cottonseed meal contained a toxic compound, even though cottonseed oil itself contained none of it.

Instead of dwelling on its problematic sole ingredient, then, Crisco’s marketers kept consumer focus trained on brand reliability and the purity of modern factory food processing.

Crisco flew off the shelves. Unlike lard, Crisco had a neutral taste. Unlike butter, Crisco could last for years on the shelf. Unlike olive oil, it had a high smoking temperature for frying. At the same time, since Crisco was the only solid shortening made entirely from plants, it was prized by Jewish consumers who followed dietary restrictions forbidding the mixing of meat and dairy in a single meal.

In just five years, Americans were annually buying more than 60 million cans of Crisco, the equivalent of three cans for every family in the country. Within a generation, lard went from being a major part of American diets to an old-fashioned ingredient.

Trust the brand, not the ingredients

Today, Crisco has replaced cottonseed oil with palm, soy and canola oils. But cottonseed oil is still one of the most widely consumed edible oils in the country. It’s a routine ingredient in processed foods, and it’s commonplace in restaurant fryers.

Crisco would have never become a juggernaut without its aggressive advertising campaigns that stressed the purity and modernity of factory production and the reliability of the Crisco name. In the wake of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act – which made it illegal to adulterate or mislabel food products and boosted consumer confidence – Crisco helped convince Americans that they didn’t need to understand the ingredients in processed foods, as long as those foods came from a trusted brand.

In the decades that followed Crisco’s launch, other companies followed its lead, introducing products like Spam, Cheetos and Froot Loops with little or no reference to their ingredients.

Early packaging for Cheetos simply advertised the snack as ‘cheese flavored puffs.’ 

Wikimedia Commons

Once ingredient labeling was mandated in the U.S. in the late 1960s, the multisyllabic ingredients in many highly processed foods may have mystified consumers. But for the most part, they kept on eating.

So if you don’t find it strange to eat foods whose ingredients you don’t know or understand, you have Crisco partly to thank.

[ You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter. ]

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

A backlash against ‘mixed’ foods led to the demise of a classic American dish

How Spam became one of the most iconic American brands of all time

The Prohibition-era origins of the modern craft cocktail movement

Helen Zoe Veit does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

CRISCO HAS ANOTHER USE IN THE KINK COMMUNITY ; PUGNUS FUTUO