Category: Writing

Bela’s Bright Ideas

Bela writes her poem on Pulse.

Bela writes frequently and publishes her poetry online.

Recently she published a poem, Do You Need Time?

I am delighted to share the poem with you all. Here is the link to Pulse.

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Do you need time?

I’m not sure I need time —
at least not as it’s commonly considered.
It’s simply what we’re given, like it or not,
for as long as we draw breath:
a new sunrise, a fading sunset,
and the spaces in between,
where we live out an unknown number of days
on this breathing planet.

Time to ponder or to provide,
to nurture, to rest,
depending on the moment
and the hands we’re dealt.

There is time for mountains to rise,
for seas to tumble rhythmically on distant shores.
Time for ground creatures to burrow in before winter,
for hawks to circle rivers and fields, searching —
always searching — for what sustains them.
Time for trees to grow or go dormant,
for planets to whirl their patient orbits —
there is time.

How we humans engage time is another matter.
We guard it, chase it, curse it,
as though it had power over us.
But time simply is.
Rushing or hoarding has never bought us
one more minute in an hour
or one more day in a year.

Perhaps all that’s left
is to flow with it — scheduled or not —
to find our own rhythm
within its turning frame.
We can wrangle with it until the end,
but still, it will roll on.

And maybe that’s mercy:
that time needs nothing from us
but our willingness to live inside it —
fully, gratefully,
while we can.

Pololu sunrise ~ 2016, bj

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May everyone find their own rhythm.

The Truth about Gods, part two

The concluding part of this essay by Patrice Ayme.

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Endowing aspects of the universe with spirituality, a mind of their own, is stupid in this day and age, only if one forgets there are natural laws underlying them. But if one wants to feel less alone and more purposeful, it is pretty smart.    

Patrice Ayme

Here is the inventor of monotheism: Nefertiti. Once a fanatic of Aten, the sun god, she turned cautious, once Pharaoh on her own, backpedalled and re-authorized Egyptian polytheism. (The sun-God, Sol Invictis, was revived by Roman emperor Dioclesian 17 centuries later, in his refounding of Romanitas and the empire. His ultra young successor and contemporary, emperor Constantine, used the revived monotheism to impose his invention of Catholicism. Funny how small the conceptual world is.)

***

The preceding part (see Part One yesterday} contains many iconoclastic statements which made the Articial Intelligence (AI) I consulted with try to correct me with what were conventional, but extremely erroneous, ill-informed data points. AI also use the deranged upside down meta-argument that it is well-known that Christianism is not like that, so I have got to be wrong. Well, no, I was raised as a Catholic child in two different Muslim countries, and also in a Pagan one; the Muslim faiths I knew as child were as different from Suny/Shiah faiths as Christianism is, overall, from Islamism. In other words, I know the music of monotheism. So here are:

***

TECHNICAL NOTES: 

[1] To speak in philosophical linguo, we capture two civilizational “ontologies” (logic of existence):

  1. Polytheistic-personal: relational, distributed, ecological.
  2. Monotheistic-fascistic: hierarchical, authoritarian, abstracted.

[2] Paganus, in a religious sense, appears first in the Christian author Tertullian, around 202 CE, to evoke paganus in Roman military jargon for ‘civilian, incompetent soldier‘ by opposition to the competent soldiers (milites) of Christ that Tertullian was calling for.

[3] ‘FAIR OF FACE, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.‘

With these felicitous epithets, inscribed in stone more than 3,300 years ago, on the monumental stelae marking the boundaries of the great new city at Tell el Amarna on the Nile in central Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten extolled his Great Royal Wife, the chief queen, the beautiful Nefertiti.

Nefertiti (‘the beautiful one has come‘) co-ruled Egypt with her older (and apparently famously ugly, deformed by disease) husband. Egypt was at its wealthiest. She was considered to be a DIVINITY. All her life is far from known, and revealed one fragment of DNA or old text at a time. She ruled as sole Pharaoh after her husband’s death, and seems to have offered to marry the Hittite Prince (as revealed by a recently found fragment: ”I do not wish to marry one of my subjects. I am afraid…” she confessed in a letter to the amazed Hittite emperor.). She apparently decided to re-allow the worship of the many Egyptian gods, and her adoptive son and successor Tutankhaten switched his name to Tutankhamen). Both her and Tutankhamen died, and they were replaced by a senior top general of Akhenatten who both relieved the dynasty from too much inbreeding (hence the deformed Akhenaten) and too much centralism focused on the sun-disk (‘Aten’)  

[4] Those who do not know history have a small and ridiculous view of FASCISM. Pathetically they refer to simpletons, such as Hitler and Mussolini, to go philosophical on the subject.. Google’s Gemini tried to pontificate that ‘labeling the structure of monotheism (especially its early forms) as ‘fascistic’ is anachronistic and highly inflammatory. Fascism is a specific 20th-century political ideology. While the author means authoritarian and hierarchical, using ‘fascistic’ distracts from the historical and philosophical points by introducing modern political baggage. It would be clearer and less polemical to stick to ‘Hierarchical’ or ‘Authoritarian-Centralized.‘

I disagree virulently with this cognitive shortsightedness of poorly programmed AI. The Romans were perfectly aware of the meaning that the faces symbolized (they got them from the Etruscans). So were the founders of the French and American republics aware of the importance of fascism and the crucial capabilities it provided, the powerful republics which, in the end, succeeded the Roman Republic (which died slowly under the emperors until it couldn’t get up); those two republics gave the basic mentality now ruling the planet.

Fascism is actually an instinct. Its malevolent and dumb confiscation by ignorant  morons such as Hitler and Mussolini ended pathetically under the blows of regimes (the democracies on one side, the fascist USSR on the other) which were capable of gathering enough, and much more, and higher quality fascism of their own to smother under a carpet of bombs the cretinism of the genocidal tyrants. It is actually comical, when reading old battles stories, to see the aghast Nazis out-Nazified by their Soviet opponents (discipline on the Soviet side was a lethal affair at all and any moment.) Or then to see SS commanders outraged by the ferocity of their US opponents. At Bir Hakeim, a tiny French army, 3,000 strong, buried in the sands, blocked the entire Afrika Korps and the Italian army, for weeks, under a deluge of bombs and shells, killing the one and only chance the Nazis had to conquer the Middle East. Hitler ordered the survivors executed, Rommel, who knew he was finished, disobeyed him.   

***

Early Christianism was highly genocidal. The Nazi obsession with the Jews was inherited from Nero (who, unsatisfied with just crucifying Christians (64 CE), launched the annihilation wars against Israel) and then the Christians themselves. There were hundreds of thousands of Samaritans, a type of Jew, with their own capital and temple (above Haifa). Warming up, after centuries of rage against civilization, the Christians under emperor Justinian, in the Sixth Century, nearly annihilated the Samaritans; a genocide by any definition.

Later, by their own count, at a time when Europe and the greater Mediterranean counted around 50 million inhabitants, the Christians, over centuries, killed no less than 5 million Cathars from Spain to Anatolia. Cathars, the pure ones in Greek (a name given to them by their genociders), were a type of Christian). In France alone, in a period of twenty years up to a million were killed, (not all Cathars, but that accentuates the homicidal character). As a commander famously said: ”Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens” (Kill them all, God will recognize his own). The anti-Cathars genocide drive in France, an aptly named ‘crusade‘,  something about the cross, lasted more than a century (and boosted the power of the Inquisition and the Dominicans). The extinction of Catharism was so great that we have only a couple of texts left. 

Want to know about Christianism? Just look at the torture and execution device they brandish, the cross. Christianism literally gave torture and execution a bad name, and it’s all the most cynical hypocrisy hard at work. 

And so on. To abstract it in an impactful way, one could say that much of Christianism instigated Nazism. That’s one of the dirty little secrets of history, and rather ironical as the dumb Hitler was anti-Christian, and still acted like one, unbeknownst to himself, his public, and his critiques; those in doubt can consult the descriptions of the Crusades by the Franks themselves, when roasting children was found to relieve hunger.

Chroniclers like Radulph of Caen (a Norman historian writing around 1118) described it vividly: “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.” Other sources, such as Joinville, Fulcher of Chartres and Albert of Aachen, corroborate the desperation and brutality, though they express varying degrees of horror or justification.   These acts were not systematic policy but extreme responses to the hunger and chaos of war, and they were preserved in Frankish narratives as part of the Crusade’s grim legacy. (There were also cases of cannibalism in WW2).

Christianism, when not actively genocidal, certainly instigated a mood, a mentality, of genocide; read Roman emperor Theodosius I about heresy. Here is the end of Theodosius’ famous quote: ‘According to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel, let us believe in the one deity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We order the followers of this law to embrace the name of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, we judge them to be demented and ever more insane (dementes vesanosque iudicantes), we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the PUNISHMENT OF OUR AUTHORITY which in accordance with the will of Heaven WE SHALL DECIDE TO INFLICT.‘

The ‘Men In Black‘ of the Fourth Century destroyed books, libraries and intellectuals, ensuring the smothering of civilization, as intended (destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, the world’s largest library) around 391 CE. Contemporary writers like Eunapius and Libanius lamented the ‘rage for destruction’ of the Men In Black. Some non-Christian texts were preserved in monasteries, true, but the point is that Christianism made possible the destruction of non-Yahweh knowledge. This is the problem king David himself already had, the fascism, the power obsessed little mind of Yahweh. Monasteries were often built with a covert anti-Christian mentality, things were complicated. When queen Bathilde outlawed slavery (657 CE), her closest allies were bishops, yet she had to execute other, slave-holding bishops. She also founded and funded four monasteries. Soon the Frankish government passed a law enforcing secular teaching by religious establishments.

The uniforms of the Men In Black were copied later by the Dominicans (‘Black Friars’) who led the genocide of the Cathars, in co-operation with the Inquisition, also dressed in black, and then the SS. Luther. Saint Louis expressed explicitly that nothing would bring them more joy than Jews suffering to death. Saint Louis was more descriptive, evoking a knife planted in the belly of the unbeliever and great pleasure. In Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis (c. 1309), Louis recounts a story of a knight who, during a debate with Jews, stabbed one in the belly with a dagger, saying it was better to “kill him like that” than argue theology.  Louis presented this approvingly as zeal for the faith, and wished he could partake. Although he warned, he wouldn’t do it, that would be illegal. With a faith like that Louis IX could only be canonized in 1297 CE. And, following Saint Louis’ hint, the Nazis removed his legal objection by changing the law in 1933, when they got to power.

Luther gave multiple and extensive ‘sincere advices‘ on how to proceed with the genocide of the Jews in his book: ”The Jews and their Lies”. Here is a sample: “If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over, with the words, ‘I baptize thee in the name of Abraham.” 

But Musk’s AI, ‘Grok’ informed me that its basic axiom was that Christianism was never genocidal, but instead ‘suppressive‘. Then it thought hard for ‘nine seconds‘ to try to prove to me, with biased context, that I had exaggerated.

I had not.  

***.  

The entire church was into assassination madness, glorifying in its own cruelty; the chief assassin of Hypatia, a sort of Charlie Manson to the power 1000, was made into a saint: Saint Cyril. Cyril’s minions grabbed Hypatia who had just finished giving a lecture, dragged her in the streets, and stripped her clothing, and then stripped her of her own skin, flaying her with oysters shells, causing her demise. She was the top intellectual of the age. Hypatia met her torturous end in 415 CE. Cyril was made into a saint 29 years later, in 444 CE! With saints like that, who needs Hitler?

Not to say Catholicism was useless; the jealous and genocidal, yet loving and all-knowing Yahweh was always a good excuse to massacre savages and extend civilization on the cheap. The Teutonic Knights, finding the Yahweh fanatics known as Muslims too hard a nut to crack, regrouped in Eastern Germany and launched a very hard fought crusade against the Prussian Natives, who were Pagans. After mass atrocities on both sides, the Teutons won.

The Franks embraced the capabilities of the cross, fully. Having converted to Catholicism, they were in a good position to subdue other Germans, who were Arians (and that they did, submitting Goths and Burgonds, Ostrogoths and Lombards). Three centuries later, Charlemagne used Christianism as an instrument to kill Saxons on an industrial scale, in the name of God, to finally subdue them, after Saxons had terminally aggravated Romanitas for 800 years, driving Augustus crazy. 

Charlemagne, in daily life, showing how relative Christianism was, and its true Jewish origins, used the nickname ‘David’ for king David, the monarch who refused to obey Yahweh, who had ordered David to genocidize a people (petty, jealous God Yahweh then tortured David’s son to death). 

Charlemagne lived the life of a hardened Pagan, with a de-facto harem, etc. More viciously, Charlemagne passed laws pushing for secular, and thus anti-Christian education. Following in these respects a well-established Frankish custom. Charlemagne knew Christianism was a weapon, and he was careful to use it only on the Saxons; internally, there was maximum tolerance: Christians could become Jews, if they so wished.

PA

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I found the full essay quite remarkable. Jean has heard me rattle on about it numerous times since I first read the essay on November 2nd. I sincerely hope you will read it soon.

Finally, let me reproduce what I wrote in a response to Patrice’s post:

Patrice, in your long and fascinating article, above, you have educated me in so many ways. My mother was an atheist and I was brought up in likewise fashion. But you have gone so much further in your teachings.

Your article needs a further reading. But I am going to share it with my readers on LfD so many more can appreciate what you have written. Plus, I am going to republish it over two days.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!


The Truth about Gods, part one.

A brilliant essay by Patrice Ayme.

Patrice writes amazing posts, some of which are beyond me. But this one, The Personification Of The World, PAGANISM, Gives Us Friends Everywhere, is incredible.

My own position is that my mother and father were atheists and I was brought up as one. Apart from a slip-up when I was married to my third wife, a Catholic, and she left me and I thought that by joining the Catholic church I might win her back. (My subconcious fear of rejection.)

My subconscious fear of rejection was not revealed to me until the 50th anniversary of my father’s death in 2006 when I saw a local psychotherapist. Then I met Jean in December, 2007 and she was the first woman I truly loved!

Back to the essay; it is a long essay and I am going to publish the first half today and the second half tomorrow. (And I have made some tiny changes.)

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The Personification Of The World, PAGANISM, Gives Us Friends Everywhere

Abstract: Personification of the world (polytheism/paganism) is more pragmatic, psychologically rewarding, and ecologically sound than the hierarchical, abstracted structure of monotheism, which the author labels “fascistic.” [4]

***

Switching to a single fascist God, Ex Pluribus Unum, a single moral order replacing the myriad spirits of the world, was presented as a great progress: now everybody could, should, line up below the emperor, God’s representative on Earth, and obey the monarch and his or her gang. The resulting organization was called civilization. Submitting to God was the only way Rome could survive, because it provided a shrinking army and tax base with more authority than it deserved.

However peasants had to predict the world and it was more judicious to personalize aspects of it. The resulting logico-emotional relationship had another advantage: the supportive presence of a proximal Gods… All over!.[1]

*** 

personification

/pəˌsɒnɪfɪˈkeɪʃn/ noun

1.the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something non-human, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

***

Before Christianism, Gods were everywhere. When the Christians took over, they imposed their all powerful, all knowing Jewish God. Some present the Jewish God as a great invention, symbolizing some sort of progress of rationality that nobody had imagined before. 

However, the single God concept was not that new. Even Americans had it in North America, as the chief of God, the Aztecs, had a similar concept, and even Zeus was a kind of chief God. Zoroastrianism had Ahura Mazda, who did not control Angra Manyu, but still was somewhat more powerful. The Hindus had Vishnu and his many avatars.

Eighteen centuries before those great converters to Christianism, Constantine, Constantius II, and Theodosius I, there was an attempt to forcefully convert the Egyptians to a single God. Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment (worship of Aten) caused turmoil and was erased by his immediate successors.

According to the latest research it seems likely that the famous Nefertiti became a Pharaoh on her own, after the death of her husband, and retreated from monotheism by re-establishing Egyptian polytheism [3]. In the fullness of time, the infernal couple got struck by what the Romans, 15 centuries later, would call damnatio memoriae. Their very names and faith were erased from hundreds of monuments

Shortly after the Aten episode, there was another confrontation between polytheism and monotheism. The colonizers of Gaza were apparently Greek, of Aegean origin, and, as such, over more than a millennium of conflict with the Jewish states in the hills, Greek Gods confronted Yahweh. The Greeks obviously did not see Yahweh as a major conceptual advance, as they did not adopt Him (until Constantine imposed Him, 15 centuries later).

While the area experienced enormous turmoil, including the permanent eclipse of Troy after the war with Greece (see Homer), and later its replacement by Phrygia, then followed by the Bronze Age collapse, then the rise of Tyre, and the Assyrian conquest, the Greeks survived everything, and their civilization kept sprawling (the early Christian writings were in Greek).

Ultimately, the lack of ideological bending, the obsession with pigs and other silliness, helped to bring devastating Judeo-Roman wars. By comparison, the much larger Gaul bent like a reed when confronted with the Greco-Romans, absorbing the good stuff. Mercury, the God of trade, preceded Roman merchants. Gaul didn’t take religion too seriously, and went on with civilizational progress.

The lack of elasticity of the single God religion of the Jews brought their quasi-eradication by Rome; Judaism was tolerated, but Jewish nationalism got outlawed. By comparison, the Greeks played the long game, and within a generation or so of Roman conquest, they had spiritually conquered their conqueror. Christianism was actually an adaptation of Judaism to make Yahweh conquer the heart and soul of fascist Rome.

***

To have Gods everywhere? Why not? Is not the Judeo-Christian God everywhere too? Doesn’t it speak through fountains, and the immensity of the desert, and the moon, and the stars, too?

***

Yahweh, the Jewish God Catholic Romans called “Deus” was deemed to be also the ultimate love object. Yahweh had promised land to the Jews, Deus promised eternal life of the nicest sort – To all those who bought the program. 

Christians were city dwellers and their power over the countryside and barbarians came from those who had imposed Christianism, the imperial powers that be (at the time, more than 90% of the people worked in agriculture). Already as a teenager, Constantine, a sort of superman born from imperial purple, terrified the court which was supposed to hold him hostage. Such a brute and excellent general could only get inspired by Yahweh’s dedication to power.

The country dwellers, the villagers, disagreed that they needed to submit to a God organized, celebrated and imposed by the all-powerful government (god-vernment?). In classical Latin paganus meant ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant’. In late imperial Latin it came to mean non-Judeo-Christian (and later non-Judeo-Christo-Islamist) [2].

Christianism found it very difficult to penetrate the countryside, where the food was produced. It never quite succeeded (Even in Muslim Albania, Pagan rituals survived until the 20th century; much of the cult of saints is barely disguised Paganism).

Peasants knew that power was distributed throughout nature, and they had to understand those powers, thus love them – That enabled them to predict phenomena.

Peasants could ponder the mood of a river, and even predict it; flooding was more of a possibility in some circumstances, and then it was no time to indulge in activities next to the river. Peasants had to guess the weather, and the earlier, the better. Peasants had to know which part of the astronomical cycle they were in, to be able to plant crops accordingly; that was not always clear just looking outside, but the stars would tell and could be trusted to tell the truth.

We can be friends to human beings, and sometimes it’s great, but sometimes we feel betrayed and abandoned. But a mountain or a sea? They will always be there, they are not running away, they are never deliberately indifferent, and generally exhibit predictable moods. It is more pragmatic and rewarding to love them more rather than an abstract Dog in Heavens. Call them Gods if you want.

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Part two will be published tomorrow.

I am publishing the notes, on both days, so you can look them up now rather than waiting another day.

TECHNICAL NOTES: 

[1] To speak in philosophical linguo, we capture two civilizational ‘ontologies’ (logic of existence):

  1. Polytheistic-personal: relational, distributed, ecological.
  2. Monotheistic-fascistic: hierarchical, authoritarian, abstracted.

[2] Paganus, in a religious sense, appears first in the Christian author Tertullian, around 202 CE, to evoke paganus in Roman military jargon for ‘civilian, incompetent soldier‘ by opposition to the competent soldiers (milites) of Christ that Tertullian was calling for.

[3] ‘FAIR OF FACE, Joyous with the Double Plume, Mistress of Happiness, Endowed with Favour, at hearing whose voice one rejoices, Lady of Grace, Great of Love, whose disposition cheers the Lord of the Two Lands.‘

With these felicitous epithets, inscribed in stone more than 3,300 years ago on the monumental stelae marking the boundaries of the great new city at Tell el Amarna on the Nile in central Egypt, the Pharaoh Akhenaten extolled his Great Royal Wife, the chief queen, the beautiful Nefertiti.

Nefertiti (‘the beautiful one has come‘) co-ruled with her older (and apparently famously ugly, deformed by disease) husband, Egypt. Egypt was at its wealthiest. She was considered to be a DIVINITY. All her life is far from known, and revealed one fragment of DNA or old text at a time. She ruled as sole Pharaoh after her husband’s death, and seems to have offered to marry the Hittite Prince (as revealed by a recently found fragment: ”I do not wish to marry one of my subjects. I am afraid…” she confessed in a letter to the amazed Hittite emperor). She apparently decided to re-allow the worship of the many Egyptian gods and her adoptive son and successor Tutankhaten switched his name to Tutankhamen. Both her and Tutankhamen died, and they were replaced by a senior top general of Akhenatten who both relieved the dynasty from too much inbreeding (hence the deformed Akhenaten) and too much centralism focused on the sun-disk (‘Aten’).  

[4] Those who do not know history have a small and ridiculous view of FASCISM. Pathetically they refer to simpletons, such as Hitler and Mussolini, to go philosophical on the subject. Google’s Gemini tried to pontificate that ‘labeling the structure of monotheism (especially its early forms) as ‘fascistic’ is anachronistic and highly inflammatory. Fascism is a specific 20th-century political ideology. While the author means authoritarian and hierarchical, using ‘fascistic’ distracts from the historical and philosophical points by introducing modern political baggage. It would be clearer and less polemical to stick to ‘Hierarchical’ or ‘Authoritarian-Centralized’.

The beautiful moon, but …

… does it make us sleepless?

As has been mentioned previously, my dear wife and her Parkinson’s means that we go to bed early and get up early the following morning. Thus a recent item on The Conversation fascinated me and it is shared with you now.

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Does the full moon make us sleepless? A neurologist explains the science behind sleep, mood and lunar myths

How much does the moon cycle affect sleep? Probably less than your screen time at night. Muhammad Khazin Alhusni/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, University of Pittsburgh

Have you ever tossed and turned under a full moon and wondered if its glow was keeping you awake? For generations, people have believed that the Moon has the power to stir up sleepless nights and strange behavior – even madness itself. The word “lunacy” comes directly from luna, Latin for Moon.

Police officers, hospital staff and emergency workers often swear that their nights get busier under a full moon. But does science back that up?

The answer is, of course, more nuanced than folklore suggests. Research shows a full moon can modestly affect sleep, but its influence on mental health is much less certain.

I’m a neurologist specializing in sleep medicine who studies how sleep affects brain health. I find it captivating that an ancient myth about moonlight and madness might trace back to something far more ordinary: our restless, moonlit sleep.

What the full moon really does to sleep

Several studies show that people really do sleep differently in the days leading up to the full moon, when moonlight shines brightest in the evening sky. During this period, people sleep about 20 minutes less, take longer to fall asleep and spend less time in deep, restorative sleep. Large population studies confirm the pattern, finding that people across different cultures tend to go to bed later and sleep for shorter periods in the nights before a full moon.

The most likely reason is light. A bright moon in the evening can delay the body’s internal clock, reduce melatonin – the hormone that signals bedtime – and keep the brain more alert.

The changes are modest. Most people lose only 15 to 30 minutes of sleep, but the effect is measurable. It is strongest in places without artificial light, such as rural areas or while camping. Some research also suggests that men and women may be affected differently. For instance, men seem to lose more sleep during the waxing phase, while women experience slightly less deep and restful sleep around the full moon.

Young adult woman lying in bed wide awake, staring out the window toward a bright light.
Sleep loss from a bright moon is modest but measurable. Yuliia Kaveshnikova/iStock via Getty Images Plus

The link with mental health

For centuries, people have blamed the full moon for stirring up madness. Folklore suggested that its glow could spark mania in bipolar disorder, provoke seizures in people with epilepsy or trigger psychosis in those with schizophrenia. The theory was simple: lose sleep under a bright moon and vulnerable minds might unravel.

Modern science adds an important twist. Research is clear that sleep loss itself is a powerful driver of mental health problems. Even one rough night can heighten anxiety and drag down mood. Ongoing sleep disruption raises the risk of depression, suicidal thoughts and flare-ups of conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

That means even the modest sleep loss seen around a full moon could matter more for people who are already at risk. Someone with bipolar disorder, for example, may be far more sensitive to shortened or fragmented sleep than the average person.

But here’s the catch: When researchers step back and look at large groups of people, the evidence that lunar phases trigger psychiatric crises is weak. No reliable pattern has been found between the Moon and hospital admissions, discharges or lengths of stay.

But a few other studies suggest there may be small effects. In India, psychiatric hospitals recorded more use of restraints during full moons, based on data collected between 2016 and 2017. In China, researchers noted a slight rise in schizophrenia admissions around the full moon, using hospital records from 2012 to 2017. Still, these findings are not consistent worldwide and may reflect cultural factors or local hospital practices as much as biology.

In the end, the Moon may shave a little time off our sleep, and sleep loss can certainly influence mental health, especially for people who are more vulnerable. That includes those with conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or epilepsy, and teenagers who are especially sensitive to sleep disruption. But the idea that the full moon directly drives waves of psychiatric illness remains more myth than reality.

The sleep/wake cycle is synchronized with lunar phases.

Other theories fall short

Over the years, scientists have explored other explanations for supposed lunar effects, from gravitational “tidal” pulls on the body to subtle geomagnetic changes and shifts in barometric pressure. Yet, none of these mechanisms hold up under scrutiny.

The gravitational forces that move oceans are far too weak to affect human physiology, and studies of geomagnetic and atmospheric changes during lunar phases have yielded inconsistent or negligible results. This makes sleep disruption from nighttime light exposure the most plausible link between the Moon and human behavior.

Why the myth lingers

If the science is so inconclusive, why do so many people believe in the “full moon effect”? Psychologists point to a concept called illusory correlation. We notice and remember the unusual nights that coincide with a full moon but forget the many nights when nothing happened.

The Moon is also highly visible. Unlike hidden sleep disruptors such as stress, caffeine or scrolling on a phone, the Moon is right there in the sky, easy to blame.

A woman staring at her cellphone while lying in the dark.
Screen-time habits are far more likely to have detrimental effects on sleep than a full moon. FanPro/Moment via Getty Images

Lessons from the Moon for modern sleep

Even if the Moon does not drive us “mad,” its small influence on sleep highlights something important: Light at night matters.

Our bodies are designed to follow the natural cycle of light and dark. Extra light in the evening, whether from moonlight, streetlights or phone screens, can delay circadian rhythms, reduce melatonin and lead to lighter, more fragmented sleep.

This same biology helps explain the health risks of daylight saving time. When clocks “spring forward,” evenings stay artificially brighter. That shift delays sleep and disrupts circadian timing on a much larger scale than the Moon, contributing to increased accidents and cardiovascular risks, as well as reduced workplace safety.

In our modern world, artificial light has a much bigger impact on sleep than the Moon ever will. That is why many sleep experts argue for permanent standard time, which better matches our biological rhythms.

So if you find yourself restless on a full moon night, you may not be imagining things – the Moon can tug at your sleep. But if sleeplessness happens often, look closer to home. It is likely a culprit of the light in your hand rather than the one in the sky.

Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse, Associate Professor of Neurology, University of Pittsburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ever since I have been an adult I have wondered what the purpose was of daylight time and standard time. The University of Colorado have the history of the time change and, as I suspect, it was brought about by the war; World War I.

Here’s part of that article:

It was first introduced in Germany in 1916 during World War I as an energy saving measure, according to CU Boulder sleep researcher Kenneth Wright. The U.S. followed suit, adopting DST in 1918. Initially implemented as a wartime measure, it was repealed a year later. 

Daylight saving time was reinstituted in 1942 during World War II. The next couple decades were a free-for-all, when states and localities switched between DST and standard time (ST) at will. To put an end to the clock chaos, Congress finally passed the Uniform Time Act in 1966, which standardized daylight saving time and its start and end dates across the country — with the exception of Hawaii and Arizona, which opted to keep standard time year-round. 

Beautiful silence!

For the mind, body and soul!

Four days ago I sent in a comment to Magic and Beauty. This is what I wrote:

My darling wife has Parkinson’s (PD). She has had it for many years. As a consequence we are awake early, usually between 4am and 5am. As soon as it is sufficiently light to see the trees I go and feed the wild deer, usually three or four of them but some mornings ten, twelve or a few more.

Then I return to our deck that faces East and just pause for five minutes just looking at Mount Sexton and the tree line nearby. It is a very beautiful sight and is my way of doing nothing! 
Im (that should be I’m) 81 in November and want to stat (that should be stay) as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

and this was replied by ‘Age45’.

Dear Paul, Many thanks for your comment and sharing with us the way of your life which is helpful (since all life experience is meaningful and significant). Wish your darling wife and yourself all the best.

Now to today’s post which is a republication of her article.

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Silence hides a space where thoughts can calm down. Silence helps a person reset and prepare for the challenges that a new day brings

  1. Silence therapy is always useful because nothing happens in silence and it is then that a person hears their own fears and repressed emotions, i.e. in silence. Silence is a rarity today in a world where various sounds are a constant part of everyday life. Silence can be unpleasant and sometimes frightening because it confronts a person with their own being.
  2. Silence is not an empty space but a space for breathing, connecting and regeneration, psychotherapists and psychologists explain. Silence is healing in partner relationships only if it is conscious and shared. If a person needs a little time to calm down and calm down their emotions and then return to the conversation, then silence is just a space for processing and not an obstacle to contacts.
  3. Silence therapy can be practiced in everyday life by taking micro-breaks, i.e. just 5 minutes a day without a phone, without music and sounds, i.e. just breathing. Or a conscientious walk without headphones with light steps and listening to sounds from the environment but deep breathing.
  4. Morning silence is part of silence therapy, ie take 10 minutes without speaking without a screen, because this kind of morning silence can positively change the entire course of the day.
  5. Silence during the conversation is also advised, i.e. you should not rush to answer because a pause between sentences can open up space for deeper contact. Healthy relationships do not run away from silence, but wisely use the silences to take a breath and not be silent about a painful topic. Research shows that just 2 minutes of silence can have a powerful relaxing effect from your favorite music.
  6. Medicinal silence lowers blood pressure, slows breathing and calms the mind. Regularly practicing silence is a gentle and powerful treatment and form of self-regulation. Silence is often understood as a loss or something that needs to be filled in today’s modern culture of hyperproduction and constant stimulation. But silence shows its function precisely in that discomfort. Silence exposes what we normally cover with noise. In silence, fears, unspoken thoughts, repressed emotions are heard. That is why people run away from silence and that is why people need silence.
  7. In silence, we listen to our own being and others because presence is born. Many therapeutic processes rely on the power of sharing silence, i.e. moments in which words are neither necessary nor sufficient. Silence becomes a bridge that connects in therapy and in interpersonal relationships, not an obstacle.
  8. Silence can also become a form of distancing, punishment, and control in interpersonal relationships (although it is a powerful tool for connection and presence).
  9. There is a difference between healing silence and silence that hurts. Passive aggression, withdrawal without explanation, silence that hangs in space after a conflict – these are situations in which silence becomes a wall and ceases to be space. The treatment of silence is a term used in psychology to explain this form of silence. Silence does not strengthen contact, but sabotages contact. Silent treatment is a form of emotional manipulation in which other people are punished by denying communication. Then silence is used like a weapon in communication.
  10. Silence is unhealthy in a relationship if silence is used as a means of punishment or manipulation. If a person feels discomfort, confusion and tension and does not know the reason. If there is no open communication after the conflict or the silence lasts too long and does not lead to clarification, it deepens the distance.

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Powerful words from her!

And a photograph from me that spells out peace and silence.

More about Jane Goodall

An article published by The Conversation is offered today.

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Jane Goodall, the gentle disrupter whose research on chimpanzees redefined what it meant to be human

Jane Goodall appears on stage at 92NY in New York on Oct. 1, 2023.
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

Mireya Mayor, Florida International University

Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.

Goodall’s life journey stretches from marveling at the somewhat unremarkable creatures – though she would never call them that – in her English backyard as a wide-eyed little girl in the 1930s to challenging the very definition of what it means to be human through her research on chimpanzees in Tanzania. From there, she went on to become a global icon and a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Until her death on Oct. 1, 2025 at age 91, Goodall retained a charm, open-mindedness, optimism and wide-eyed wonder that are more typical of children. I know this because I have been fortunate to spend time with her and to share insights from my own scientific career. To the public, she was a world-renowned scientist and icon. To me, she was Jane – my inspiring mentor and friend.

Despite the massive changes Goodall wrought in the world of science, upending the study of animal behavior, she was always cheerful, encouraging and inspiring. I think of her as a gentle disrupter. One of her greatest gifts was her ability to make everyone, at any age, feel that they have the power to change the world. https://www.youtube.com/embed/rcL4jnGTL1U?wmode=transparent&start=0 Jane Goodall documented that chimpanzees not only used tools but make them – an insight that altered thinking about animals and humans.

Discovering tool use in animals

In her pioneering studies in the lush rainforest of Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Game Reserve, now a national park, Goodall noted that the most successful chimp leaders were gentle, caring and familial. Males that tried to rule by asserting their dominance through violence, tyranny and threat did not last.

I also am a primatologist, and Goodall’s groundbreaking observations of chimpanzees at Gombe were part of my preliminary studies. She famously recorded chimps taking long pieces of grass and inserting them into termite nests to “fish” for the insects to eat, something no one else had previously observed.

It was the first time an animal had been seen using a tool, a discovery that altered how scientists differentiated between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey chose Goodall to do this work precisely because she was not formally trained. When she turned up in Leakey’s office in Tanzania in 1957, at age 23, Leakey initially hired her as his secretary, but he soon spotted her potential and encouraged her to study chimpanzees. Leakey wanted someone with a completely open mind, something he believed most scientists lost over the course of their formal training.

Because chimps are humans’ closest living relatives, Leakey hoped that understanding the animals would provide insights into early humans. In a predominantly male field, he also thought a woman would be more patient and insightful than a male observer. He wasn’t wrong.

Six months in, when Goodall wrote up her observations of chimps using tools, Leakey wrote, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Goodall spoke of animals as having emotions and cultures, and in the case of chimps, communities that were almost tribal. She also named the chimps she observed, an unheard-of practice at the time, garnering ridicule from scientists who had traditionally numbered their research subjects.

One of her most remarkable observations became known as the Gombe Chimp War. It was a four-year-long conflict in which eight adult males from one community killed all six males of another community, taking over their territory, only to lose it to another, bigger community with even more males.

Confidence in her path

Goodall was persuasive, powerful and determined, and she often advised me not to succumb to people’s criticisms. Her path to groundbreaking discoveries did not involve stepping on people or elbowing competitors aside.

Rather, her journey to Africa was motivated by her wonder, her love of animals and a powerful imagination. As a little girl, she was entranced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 story “Tarzan of the Apes,” and she loved to joke that Tarzan married the wrong Jane.

When I was a 23-year-old former NFL cheerleader, with no scientific background at that time, and looked at Goodall’s work, I imagined that I, too, could be like her. In large part because of her, I became a primatologist, co-discovered a new species of lemur in Madagascar and have had an amazing life and career, in science and on TV, as a National Geographic explorer.
When it came time to write my own story, I asked Goodall to contribute the introduction. She wrote:

“Mireya Mayor reminds me a little of myself. Like me she loved being with animals when she was a child. And like me she followed her dream until it became a reality.”

In a 2023 interview, Jane Goodall answers TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s questions about chimpanzee behavior.

Storyteller and teacher

Goodall was an incredible storyteller and saw it as the most successful way to help people understand the true nature of animals. With compelling imagery, she shared extraordinary stories about the intelligence of animals, from apes and dolphins to rats and birds, and, of course, the octopus. She inspired me to become a wildlife correspondent for National Geographic so that I could share the stories and plights of endangered animals around the world.

Goodall inspired and advised world leaders, celebrities, scientists and conservationists. She also touched the lives of millions of children.

Two women face each other, smiling and holding a book
Jane Goodall and primatologist Mireya Mayor with Mayor’s book ‘Just Wild Enough,’ a memoir aimed at young readers. Mireya Mayor, CC BY-ND

Through the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to engage people around the world in conservation, she launched Roots & Shoots, a global youth program that operates in more than 60 countries. The program teaches children about connections between people, animals and the environment, and ways to engage locally to help all three.

Along with Goodall’s warmth, friendship and wonderful stories, I treasure this comment from her: “The greatest danger to our future is our apathy. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.”

It’s a radical notion from a one-of-a-kind scientist.

This article has been updated to add the date of Goodall’s death.

Mireya Mayor, Director of Exploration and Science Communication, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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That comment by Jane that was treasured by Mireya is so important. “The greatest danger to our future is our apathy. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other.”

Yet more about Mindfulness

I am returning to this subject.

Simply because it is so important to us humans. For the world we live in has changed, and changed drastically. Now we are ‘wired up’ and that means less time to do nothing.

In 2010 I presented a book review Mindfulness by Ellen Janger.

Now I want to share an article presented by The Conversation.

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Mindfulness won’t burn calories, but it might help you stick with your health goals

Meditation exists on a spectrum, from mindful moments and bursts of mindfulness to building up to a formal meditative practice. d3sign/Moment via Getty Images

Masha Remskar, Arizona State University

Most people know roughly what kind of lifestyle they should be living to stay healthy.

Think regular exercise, a balanced diet and sufficient sleep. Yet, despite all the hacks, trackers and motivational quotes, many of us still struggle to stick with our health goals.

Meanwhile, people worldwide are experiencing more lifestyle-associated chronic disease than ever before.

But what if the missing piece in your health journey wasn’t more discipline – but more stillness?

Research shows that mindfulness meditation can help facilitate this pursuit of health goals through stillness, and that getting started is easier than you might think – no Buddhist monk robes or silent retreats required.

Given how ubiquitous and accessible mindfulness resources are these days, I have been surprised to see mindfulness discussed and studied only as a mental health tool, stopping short of exploring its usefulness for a whole range of lifestyle choices.

I am a psychologist and behavioral scientist researching ways to help people live healthier lives, especially by moving more and regulating stress more efficiently.

My team’s work and that of other researchers suggests that mindfulness could play a pivotal role in paving the way for a healthier society, one mindful breath at a time.

Mindfulness unpacked

Mindfulness has become a buzzword of late, with initiatives now present in schools, boardrooms and even among first responders. But what is it, really?

Mindfulness refers to the practice or instance of paying careful attention to one’s present-moment experience – such as their thoughts, breath, bodily sensations and the environment – and doing so nonjudgmentally. Its origins are in Buddhist traditions, where it plays a crucial role in connecting communities and promoting selflessness.

Over the past 50 years, however, mindfulness-based practice has been Westernized into structured therapeutic programs and stress-management tools, which have been widely studied for their benefits to mental and physical health.

Research has shown that mindfulness offers wide-ranging benefits to the mind, the body and productivity.

Mindfulness-based programs, both in person and digitally delivered, can effectively treat depression and anxiety, protect from burnout, improve sleep and reduce pain.

The impacts extend beyond subjective experience too. Studies find that experienced meditators – that is, people who have been meditating for at least one year – have lower markers of inflammation, which means that their bodies are better able to fight off infections and regulate stress. They also showed improved cognitive abilities and even altered brain structure.

But I find the potential for mindfulness to support a healthy lifestyle most exciting of all.

A senior couple sitting on the beach, pressing their feet together as the woman pulls the man's arms forward in a stretch.
Mindfulness meditation may enhance the psychological skills needed to follow through on exercise and other health habits. Maria Korneeva/Moment via Getty Images

How can mindfulness help you build healthy habits?

My team’s research suggests that mindfulness equips people with the psychological skills required to successfully change behavior. Knowing what to do to achieve healthy habits is rarely what stands in people’s way. But knowing how to stay motivated and keep showing up in the face of everyday obstacles such as lack of time, illness or competing priorities is the most common reason people fall off the wagon – and therefore need the most support. This is where mindfulness comes in.

Multiple studies have found that people who meditate regularly for at least two months become more inherently motivated to look after their health, which is a hallmark of those who adhere to a balanced diet and exercise regularly.

A 2024 study with over 1,200 participants that I led found more positive attitudes toward healthy habits and stronger intentions to put them into practice in meditators who practiced mindfulness for 10 minutes daily alongside a mobile app, compared with nonmeditators. This may happen because mindfulness encourages self-reflection and helps people feel more in tune with their bodies, making it easier to remember why being healthier is important to us.

Another key way mindfulness helps keep momentum with healthy habits is by restructuring one’s response to pain, discomfort and failure. This is not to say that meditators feel no pain, nor that pain during exercise is encouraged – it is not!

Mild discomfort, however, is a very common experience of novice exercisers. For example, you may feel out of breath or muscle fatigue when initially taking up a new activity, which is when people are most likely to give up. Mindfulness teaches you to notice these sensations but see them as transient and with minimal judgment, making them less disruptive to habit-building.

Putting mindfulness into practice

A classic mindfulness exercise includes observing the breath and counting inhales up to 10 at a time. This is surprisingly difficult to do without getting distracted, and a core part of the exercise is noticing the distraction and returning to the counting. In other words, mindfulness involves the practice of failure in small, inconsequential ways, making real-world perceived failure – such as a missed exercise session or a one-off indulgent meal – feel more manageable. This strengthens your ability to stay consistent in pursuit of health goals.

Finally, paying mindful attention to our bodies and the environment makes us more observant, resulting in a more varied and enjoyable exercising or eating experience. Participants in another study we conducted reported noticing the seasons changing, a greater connection to their surroundings and being better able to detect their own progress when exercising mindfully. This made them more likely to keep going in their habits.

Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to get started with mindfulness practice these days, many of them free. Mobile applications, such as Headspace or Calm, are popular and effective starting points, providing audio-guided sessions to follow along. Some are as short as five minutes. Research suggests that doing a mindfulness session first thing in the morning is the easiest to maintain, and after a month or so you may start to see the skills from your meditative practice reverberating beyond the sessions themselves.

Based on our research on mindfulness and exercise, I collaborated with the nonprofit Medito Foundation to create the first mindfulness program dedicated to moving more. When we tested the program in a research study, participants who meditated alongside these sessions for one month reported doing much more exercise than before the study and having stronger intentions to keep moving compared with participants who did not meditate. Increasingly, the mobile applications mentioned above are offering mindful movement meditations too.

If the idea of a seated practice does not sound appealing, you can instead choose an activity to dedicate your full attention to. This can be your next walk outdoors, where you notice as much about your experience and surroundings as possible. Feeling your feet on the ground and the sensations on your skin are a great place to start.

For people with even less time available, short bursts of mindfulness can be incorporated into even the busiest of routines. Try taking a few mindful, nondistracted breaths while your coffee is brewing, during a restroom break or while riding the elevator. It may just be the grounding moment you need to feel and perform better for the rest of the day.

Masha Remskar, Psychologist and Postdoctoral Researcher in Behavioral Science, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Moments of rest are essential, grounding moments as written in the article. The article is great and has great motivation to abide by the recommendations.

Please read carefully the article and change your ways.

Technology, and Scamming

The title says it all!

We live in a world that is rapidly becoming more and more digital. But we also live in a world where the criminals are becoming better at carrying out their crimes. So a recent article in The Conversation seemed appropriate to republish.

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Scams and frauds: Here are the tactics criminals use on you in the age of AI and cryptocurrencies

Scammers often direct victims to convert cash to untraceable cryptocurrency and send it to them. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University

Scams are nothing new – fraud has existed as long as human greed. What changes are the tools.

Scammers thrive on exploiting vulnerable, uninformed users, and they adapt to whatever technologies or trends dominate the moment. In 2025, that means AI, cryptocurrencies and stolen personal data are their weapons of choice.

And, as always, the duty, fear and hope of their targets provide openings. Today, duty often means following instructions from bosses or co-workers, who scammers can impersonate. Fear is that a loved one, who scammers also can impersonate, is in danger. And hope is often for an investment scheme or job opportunity to pay off.

AI-powered scams and deepfakes

Artificial intelligence is no longer niche – it’s cheap, accessible and effective. While businesses use AI for advertising and customer support, scammers exploit the same tools to mimic reality, with disturbing precision.

Deepfake scams use high-tech tools and old-fashioned emotional manipulation.

Criminals are using AI-generated audio or video to impersonate CEOs, managers or even family members in distress. Employees have been tricked into transferring money or leaking sensitive data. Over 105,000 such deepfake attacks were recorded in the U.S. in 2024, costing more than US$200 million in the first quarter of 2025 alone. Victims often cannot distinguish synthetic voices or faces from real ones.

Fraudsters are also using emotional manipulation. The scammers make phone calls or send convincing AI-written texts posing as relatives or friends in distress. Elderly victims in particular fall prey when they believe a grandchild or other family member is in urgent trouble. The Federal Trade Commission has outlined how scammers use fake emergencies to pose as relatives.

Cryptocurrency scams

Crypto remains the Wild West of finance — fast, unregulated and ripe for exploitation.

Pump-and-dump scammers artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency through hype on social media to lure investors with promises of huge returns – the pump – and then sell off their holdings – the dump – leaving victims with worthless tokens.

Pig butchering is a hybrid of romance scams and crypto fraud. Scammers build trust over weeks or months before persuading victims to invest in fake crypto platforms. Once the scammers have extracted enough money from the victim, they vanish.

Pig-butchering scams lure people into fake online relationships, often with devastating consequences.

Scammers also use cryptocurrencies as a means of extracting money from people in impersonation scams and other forms of fraud. For example, scammers direct victims to bitcoin ATMs to deposit large sums of cash and convert it to the untraceable cryptocurrency as payment for fictitious fines.

Phishing, smishing, tech support and jobs

Old scams don’t die; they evolve.

Phishing and smishing have been around for years. Victims are tricked into clicking links in emails or text messages, leading to malware downloads, credential theft or ransomware attacks. AI has made these lures eerily realistic, mimicking corporate tone, grammar and even video content.

Tech support scams often start with pop-ups on computer screens that warn of viruses or identity theft, urging users to call a number. Sometimes they begin with a direct cold call to the victim. Once the victim is on a call with the fake tech support, the scammers convince victims to grant remote access to their supposedly compromised computers. Once inside, scammers install malware, steal data, demand payment or all three.

Fake websites and listings are another current type of scam. Fraudulent sites impersonating universities or ticket sellers trick victims into paying for fake admissions, concerts or goods.

One example is when a website for “Southeastern Michigan University” came online and started offering details about admission. There is no such university. Eastern Michigan University filed a complaint that Southeastern Michigan University was copying its website and defrauding unsuspecting victims.

The rise of remote and gig work has opened new fraud avenues.

Victims are offered fake jobs with promises of high pay and flexible hours. In reality, scammers extract “placement fees” or harvest sensitive personal data such as Social Security numbers and bank details, which are later used for identity theft.

How you can protect yourself

Technology has changed, but the basic principles remain the same: Never click on suspicious links or download attachments from unknown senders, and enter personal information only if you are sure that the website is legitimate. Avoid using third-party apps or links. Legitimate businesses have apps or real websites of their own.

Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible. It provides security against stolen passwords. Keep software updated to patch security holes. Most software allows for automatic update or warns about applying a patch.

Remember that a legitimate business will never ask for personal information or a money transfer. Such requests are a red flag.

Relationships are a trickier matter. The state of California provides details on how people can avoid being victims of pig butchering.

Technology has supercharged age-old fraud. AI makes deception virtually indistinguishable from reality, crypto enables anonymous theft, and the remote-work era expands opportunities to trick people. The constant: Scammers prey on trust, urgency and ignorance. Awareness and skepticism remain your best defense.

Rahul Telang, Professor of Information Systems, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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That last paragraph really spells out how it is in the modern world. I repeat that last sentence: “Awareness and skepticism remain your best defense.“

What a beautiful account!

From the find of the six puppies to the fantastic conclusion.

I subscribe to The Dodo. On September 5th Maeve Dunigan wrote an article that is so beautiful. I have permission to republish the story.

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Rescuers Hear Cries In Open Field — Then See Faces Peeking Out Of A Drain.

“[They] were friendly and very social.”

By Maeve Dunigan

Published on Sep 5, 2025

In a field near the Kansas Humane Society’s Murfin Animal Care Campus, a concrete storm drain peeks out of the green grass, its circular opening extending into a black tunnel below. One morning this past July, humane society team members arrived at work and heard a heartbreaking sound echoing from within this drain — the sound of animals crying for help.

Kansas Humane Society

The rescuers hurried over and found the source of the noise. There, cowering inside, were six little puppies left to fend for themselves.

puppy in drain
KANSAS HUMANE SOCIETY 

Using treats as a tasty incentive, the team coaxed each puppy out from the hole. The pups served a mandatory stray hold at the Wichita Animal Shelter next door. Then they returned to the Kansas Humane Society for further care.

woman helping dog
KANSAS HUMANE SOCIETY 

Staff members gave the pups a comfortable place to recover. They named the dogs Abby, Ellie, Greg, Lev, Mike and Tommy, and made sure each of them received the necessary vaccines and medical attention needed to grow up healthy and strong.

puppies in backseat
KANSAS HUMANE SOCIETY

“The puppies were very wiggly, especially Ellie,” a representative from Kansas Humane Society told The Dodo. “All were friendly and very social.”

Local news stations soon began covering the amazing rescue, urging community members to adopt or foster the pups. Within two days, every puppy was either adopted or put on hold for adoption.

puppies
KANSAS HUMANE SOCIETY 

Today, Abby, Ellie, Greg, Lev, Mike and Tommy are all safe in their forever homes, and rescuers couldn’t be happier.

“We hope their futures are full of love, cuddles and treats,” the representative said.

To help other animals like these puppies, you can make a donation to the Kansas Humane Society.

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It is stories like this one that provide the incentive for not engaging in politics. Period!

Life on other planets

A fascinating article from The Conversation.

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Earth-size stars and alien oceans – an astronomer explains the case for life around white dwarfs

White dwarf stars, like this one shown shrouded by a planetary nebula, are much smaller than stars like our Sun. NASA/R. Ciardullo (PSU)/H. Bond (STScI)

Juliette Becker, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Sun will someday die. This will happen when it runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core and can no longer produce energy through nuclear fusion as it does now. The death of the Sun is often thought of as the end of the solar system. But in reality, it may be the beginning of a new phase of life for all the objects living in the solar system.

When stars like the Sun die, they go through a phase of rapid expansion called the Red Giant phase: The radius of the star gets bigger, and its color gets redder. Once the gravity on the star’s surface is no longer strong enough for it to hold on to its outer layers, a large fraction – up to about half – of its mass escapes into space, leaving behind a remnant called a white dwarf.

I am a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2020, my colleagues and I discovered the first intact planet orbiting around a white dwarf. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by the prospect of life on planets around these, tiny, dense white dwarfs.

Researchers search for signs of life in the universe by waiting until a planet passes between a star and their telescope’s line of sight. With light from the star illuminating the planet from behind, they can use some simple physics principles to determine the types of molecules present in the planet’s atmosphere.

In 2020, researchers realized they could use this technique for planets orbiting white dwarfs. If such a planet had molecules created by living organisms in its atmosphere, the James Webb Space Telescope would probably be able to spot them when the planet passed in front of its star.

In June 2025, I published a paper answering a question that first started bothering me in 2021: Could an ocean – likely needed to sustain life – even survive on a planet orbiting close to a dead star?

An illustration showing a large bright circle, with a very small white dot nearby.
Despite its relatively small size, a white dwarf – shown here as a bright dot to the right of our Sun – is quite dense. Kevin Gill/Flickr, CC BY

A universe full of white dwarfs

A white dwarf has about half the mass of the Sun, but that mass is compressed into a volume roughly the size of Earth, with its electrons pressed as close together as the laws of physics will allow. The Sun has a radius 109 times the size of Earth’s – this size difference means that an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf could be about the same size as the star itself.

White dwarfs are extremely common: An estimated 10 billion of them exist in our galaxy. And since every low-mass star is destined to eventually become a white dwarf, countless more have yet to form. If it turns out that life can exist on planets orbiting white dwarfs, these stellar remnants could become promising and plentiful targets in the search for life beyond Earth.

But can life even exist on a planet orbiting a white dwarf? Astronomers have known since 2011 that the habitable zone is extremely close to the white dwarf. This zone is the location in a planetary system where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. It can’t be too close to the star that the water would boil, nor so far away that it would freeze.

A diagram showing a sun, with three planets at varying distances away. The closest one is labeled 'too hot' the next 'just right' and the farthest 'too cold'
Planets in the habitable zone aren’t so close that their surface water would boil, but also not so far that it would freeze. NASA

The habitable zone around a white dwarf would be 10 to 100 times closer to the white dwarf than our own habitable zone is to our Sun, since white dwarfs are so much fainter.

The challenge of tidal heating

Being so close to the surface of the white dwarf would bring new challenges to emerging life that more distant planets, like Earth, do not face. One of these is tidal heating.

Tidal forces – the differences in gravitational forces that objects in space exert on different parts of a nearby second object – deform a planet, and the friction causes the material being deformed to heat up. An example of this can be seen on Jupiter’s moon Io.

The forces of gravity exerted by Jupiter’s other moons tug on Io’s orbit, deforming its interior and heating it up, resulting in hundreds of volcanoes erupting constantly across its surface. As a result, no surface water can exist on Io because its surface is too hot.

A diagram showing Jupiter, with four Moons orbiting around it. Io is the Moon closest to Jupiter, and it has four arrows pointing to the planet and other moons, representing the forces exerted on it.
Of the four major moons of Jupiter, Io is the innermost one. Gravity from Jupiter and the other three moons pulls Io in varying directions, which heats it up. Lsuanli/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

In contrast, the adjacent moon Europa is also subject to tidal heating, but to a lesser degree, since it’s farther from Jupiter. The heat generated from tidal forces has caused Europa’s ice shell to partially melt, resulting in a subsurface ocean.

Planets in the habitable zone of a white dwarf would have orbits close enough to the star to experience tidal heating, similar to how Io and Europa are heated from their proximity to Jupiter.

This proximity itself can pose a challenge to habitability. If a system has more than one planet, tidal forces from nearby planets could cause the planet’s atmosphere to trap heat until it becomes hotter and hotter, making the planet too hot to have liquid water.

Enduring the red giant phase

Even if there is only one planet in the system, it may not retain its water.

In the process of becoming a white dwarf, a star will expand to 10 to 100 times its original radius during the red giant phase. During that time, anything within that expanded radius will be engulfed and destroyed. In our own solar system, Mercury, Venus and Earth will be destroyed when the Sun eventually becomes a red giant before transitioning into a white dwarf.

For a planet to survive this process, it would have to start out much farther from the star — perhaps at the distance of Jupiter or even beyond.

If a planet starts out that far away, it would need to migrate inward after the white dwarf has formed in order to become habitable. Computer simulations show that this kind of migration is possible, but the process could cause extreme tidal heating that may boil off surface water – similar to how tidal heating causes Io’s volcanism. If the migration generates enough heat, then the planet could lose all its surface water by the time it finally reaches a habitable orbit.

However, if the migration occurs late enough in the white dwarf’s lifetime – after it has cooled and is no longer a hot, bright, newly formed white dwarf – then surface water may not evaporate away.

Under the right conditions, planets orbiting white dwarfs could sustain liquid water and potentially support life.

Search for life on planets orbiting white dwarfs

Astronomers haven’t yet found any Earth-like, habitable exoplanets around white dwarfs. But these planets are difficult to detect.

Traditional detection methods like the transit technique are less effective because white dwarfs are much smaller than typical planet-hosting stars. In the transit technique, astronomers watch for the dips in light that occur when a planet passes in front of its host star from our line of sight. Because white dwarfs are so small, you would have to be very lucky to see a planet passing in front of one.

The transit technique for detecting exoplanets requires watching for the dip in brightness when a planet passes in front of its host star.

Nevertheless, researchers are exploring new strategies to detect and characterize these elusive worlds using advanced telescopes such as the Webb telescope.

If habitable planets are found to exist around white dwarfs, it would significantly broaden the range of environments where life might persist, demonstrating that planetary systems may remain viable hosts for life even long after the death of their host star.

Juliette Becker, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ooOOoo

I take my hats off to the researchers that are looking for life elsewhere.