Friday, September 20, 2024

"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins



Our salads have never been optimized for nutrition but are also an obvious target simply because they lend themselves to high volume controlled production in both greenhouses and starter beds.

There is also a lot of potential using immature plants in starter beds for a lot of species.

all this can be seen as a broadly developing beginning which will revolutionized our dinner plate.

 
"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins

September 16, 2024

https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/golden-lettuce-genetically-engineered-30-times-vitamins/

"Golden Lettuce" is genetically engineered to have higher levels of the antioxidant beta-carotene, hence the yellow color


Most of us don’t eat as much fruit and veggies as we know we should, but that goal might now be a bit more achievable. Scientists in Spain have engineered a new “Golden Lettuce” with 30 times more nutrients than the regular green stuff.


Lettuce isn’t the most exciting vegetable, but you’ll often find it padding out sandwiches, wraps, stews and other meals as a way to cram in extra nutrients (and cut restaurant costs). But maybe there’s a way to get more health benefits out of less lettuce.


A team from the Research Institute for Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMCP) has now genetically engineered the humble lettuce to boost its nutrients. Specifically, they increased the levels of an antioxidant called beta-carotene, which your body uses to make vitamin A. This is important for healthy vision, immune function, and cell growth, and is thought to be protective against Alzheimer’s, heart disease and some kinds of cancer.

Beta-carotene is usually found in high amounts in vegetables like carrots, pumpkin, and sweet potato. As you might guess, the common theme across those veggies is an orange color, and the new lettuce is no exception. Higher amounts of beta-carotene stains the leaves a striking yellow color, hence the nickname Golden Lettuce.


The levels of beta-carotene in the Golden Lettuce leaves were up to 30 times higher than those of regular lettuce. Not only that, but these antioxidants were more bioaccessible too, meaning our digestive systems can extract them more easily from our food.

Increasing those levels wasn’t completely straightforward, however. Beta-carotene is normally produced in a plant’s chloroplasts, the cellular structures that perform photosynthesis – but if you jam too much in there, it reduces the plant’s ability to gain energy from sunlight. So, the team found a way to move the antioxidant into different parts of the plant cells.

“Our work has successfully produced and accumulated beta-carotene in cellular compartments where it is not normally found by combining biotechnological techniques and treatments with high light intensity,” said Manual Rodríguez Concepción, lead author of the study.


This Golden Lettuce could soon join a genetically enhanced salad with more nutritious radishes and peas, and antioxidant-rich purple tomatoes and potatoes.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has a $7.5-billion price tag




At least we have a convincing protocol to do it with and thus a ball park figure on how much.

Two ships along with a long net  can do it and likely load the garbage.  Can we use fishing vessels using a similar harvest model to fishing?  Can the catch be drawn into a large bulk carrier in compressed form?

In the end, we want to do this.


The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has a $7.5-billion price tag


The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) project says the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be cleaned up in 10 years



The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP for short, isn't exactly what you might have heard. It's not a floating garbage land-mass twice the size of Texas that you can settle, even though it kind of already has its own currency (called Debris), a flag, and passports made of recycled plastic ... and citizens?


In 1997, Captain Charles Moore was returning home from a sailing competition when he and his crew encountered a large area of floating plastic debris between the California coastline and Hawaii in the North Pacific Gyre, one of five major ocean gyres – and one of five offshore accumulation zones of plastic.


After two years of research, he returned to the site. He'd discovered the GPGP, a swirling vortex of floating garbage.

Several days ago, The Ocean Cleanup (TOC) project announced its ambitious timeline and cost to get the Great Pacific Garbage Patch cleaned up once and for all: 10 years and US$7.5 billion.

"The Trash Isles" flag, made by LAD Bible Group in a push to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch


To put that enormous dollar figure in a context that you and I can understand, Walmart made about $54 billion per month last year. By that same token, Monaco, a place that's seemingly only for the ultra-wealthy, has a yearly GDP of roughly $7.3 billion.

That said, TOC also stated that if its latest technological ideas were to culminate in workable solutions, it could cut the cleanup timeline and cost by roughly half, to five years and $4 billion.


It's the first time an actual dollar amount and a timeline have been made clear, as the garbage patch floats in international waters and has never "been the responsibility" of any one nation and has been largely ignored.

Contrary to how the media may have portrayed the GPGP in the past, it isn't a giant chunk of floating garbage land. It's actually just a whole lot of garbage floating about the ocean in a general area estimated to be between 230 thousand and 620 thousand square miles (600 thousand to 1.6 million sq km). It is estimated there are about 88,000 tons (80,000 tonnes) of debris floating about the ocean's surface in the area, or near to it. There's likely far more on the ocean floor.

It's mostly trillions of pieces of microplastics, but also heaps and heaps of stuff like fishing nets, single-use water bottles, packaging, toilet seats, Barbies, traffic cones, TVs, soccer balls, rubber duckies, used needles ... you know, the stuff one would expect to be floating about in the ocean.

Some of the slew of garbage fished out of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup

It's become such a permanent fixture in the waters of the Pacific, that ocean life has either adapted to it or been victim to it. Many would have seen the sad sea turtle with a straw embedded deep into its nostril, or the albatross chicks having been fed bottle caps and cigarette lighters by their unknowing parents.

Animals that have adapted to it – 46 different species on record, in fact – have been on the ride of their lives. Coastal species not normally found in deep waters like crabs, barnacles, sea anemones, mussels, oysters, and even regular ol' land-dwelling insects and spiders have been found in the open ocean, hitching a ride along on these man-made isles of garbage.


As plastic isn't exactly biodegradable, it instead breaks down into smaller pieces – microplastics – from the constant bombardment of UV rays and churning of ocean waves, this creates an even bigger problem for cleanup efforts.

Trillions of pieces of microplastics floating about the gyres of the Pacific ocean

The Ocean Cleanup

The problem is not insignificant.

The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit group founded in 2013 with the intent of cleaning the GPGP. To date, it claims to have collected around 26.4 million pounds (12 million kg) of trash from aquatic ecosystems around the world. One million pounds (454,000 kg) of that is from the GPGP alone, which the group believes to be only half of 1% of the total.

System 02 versus System 03 ... which is significantly larger

The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup developed a method of cleaning called System 03 (as it's the third iteration of its cleaning tech) to clean up the waters. It's a floating 1.4-mile-long (2.2-km) barrier strung between two vessels moving at about a walking pace that has 13-ft-deep (4-m) screens to catch all the floaty bits. The system uses ocean monitoring data and AI modeling to steer towards the areas with the highest plastic densities, to be as efficient as possible.


Perhaps not as cool as being able to remotely control an RC garbage boat from your browser at home, but certainly far more effective.


System 03 can clean an area the size of an American football field in about five seconds. Considering the "twice the size of Texas, three times the size of France" estimate of the GPGP – I did the math so you don't have to – roughly 260 million football fields would fit in two Texases.

Once a heap of plastic has been recovered, it's all funneled into a giant sack, pulled on board and dumped onto the deck to be sorted and packed for recycling.

The Ocean Cleanup's net allow marine life to swim through and about it safely while garbage collecting

The Ocean Cleanup


The Ocean Cleanup has even partnered with companies like Kia, which has already delivered its first batch of recycled plastics for electric vehicle production.

"Plastic is not inherently a bad material, but we must use it responsibly," said Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Project. "We demonstrate how we can turn pollution into a solution by launching applications that help clean the oceans."

TOC even made some pretty fly sunglasses from GPGP trash. Now that's just cool.

Sunglasses made of ocean garbage by The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup

Cleaning up the Pacific and relegating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the annals of history is indeed an admirable goal. But, as always, whether it is achieved will come down to cold, hard cash.

This Famous Van Gogh Painting Features Astonishingly Accurate Physics




turns out Van Gogh made a serious study of fluid flow, surely in rivers.  This was awfully inventive for the time and place.

Very different considering contemporary practice and just why did he even emerge after hi death?

and why is this so famous.  it stands beside the Mona Lisa and David.


This Famous Van Gogh Painting Features Astonishingly Accurate Physics

Physics18 September 2024

Atmospheric turbulence can be clearly seen in Vincent van Gogh's 1889 masterpiece. (Wikimedia 


Created by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in 1889, The Starry Night is one of the most intriguing works the art world has produced. Not only is it breathtakingly evocative, the roiling, swirling sky seems to suggest a detailed understanding of the physics of turbulence.


Now, a new, in-depth analysis confirms it. The brushstrokes in the van Gogh masterwork are consistent with the fluid dynamics of Earth's atmosphere – and, possibly, the broader Universe.


"[The painting] reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena," says physicist Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University in China.


"Van Gogh's precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky."

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

We mostly can't see it with our eyes, but Earth's atmosphere is an ever-moving, ever-changing, roiling mass of fluid. Clouds might reveal this constant activity, but an intimate understanding of atmospheric turbulence usually requires instruments that carefully map its otherwise invisible movements.


We can't, of course, measure the atmospheric turbulence that van Gogh depicts in The Starry Night. But what a team of scientists led by physicist Yinxiang Ma of Xiamen University could do was measure the brushstrokes to see if they matched with previous studies, which determined that the turbulence exhibited in the painting is consistent with the theory published by Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov in the 1940s.


"In contrast to previous studies that examined only part of this painting, all and only the whirls/eddies in the painting are taken into account in this work, following Richardson-Kolmogorov's cascade picture of turbulence," the researchers write in their paper.


"[Our] result suggests that van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of whirls/eddies in The Starry Night but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows."


The researchers used a high-resolution digital picture of the artwork to examine the brushstrokes in 14 whorls and eddies in the sky depicted in the painting as a tracer for atmospheric turbulence, similar to the movement of leaves in an autumn eddy.

Analysis of the brushstrokes in The Starry Night. (Yinxiang Ma)

For each of these brushstrokes, they carefully examined the spatial properties, as well as the luminance of the paint, comparing it to Kolmorogov's turbulence theory, which describes how energy flows constantly from larger eddies to smaller ones before dissipating.


They found that the eddies in the painting satisfied the requirements of Kolmogorov'slaw of turbulence scaling, which is what previous researchers have also found.


But analyzing the smallest scales of the brushstrokes, the team found that the painting was also consistent with the power spectrum of scalars as defined by Australian mathematician George Batchelor in 1959. He found that scalars, or scaled components in turbulence – that is, eddies of different sizes – should display a power spectrum corresponding to their size.


A previous study also found that the turbulence revealed in The Starry Night could also be seen in the molecular clouds out in space, where the very stars are born. The new study confirms that the artist's intuitive understanding of the physics of nature may have been even deeper than we realized.


"Vincent van Gogh, as one of the most notable post-impressionist painters, had a very careful observation of turbulent flows: he was able to reproduce not only the size of whirls/eddies, but also their relative distance and intensity in his painting," the researchers write.


Future experimental research in painting turbulent flows could help us understand how the artist managed to capture turbulence, not just in the depiction of the sky, but in the physical act of painting itself.

The research has been published in Physics of Fluids.

Black hole’s jets are so huge that they may shake up cosmology



This is what we think we see.  The scale proposed it on the face of it ,absurd.

I do think any such jet is photonic first before decaying back to sub light. this at least allows a jet.

This also indicates a lack of uniformity across the observed universe,


Black hole’s jets are so huge that they may shake up cosmology

Spanning 23 million light years, or 220 Milky Way galaxies, a set of giant, newly discovered black hole jets known as Porphyrion may change our understanding of black holes and the structure of the universe



18 September 2024


Illustration of the giant black hole jets known as Porphyrion

Caltech

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2448553-black-holes-jets-are-so-huge-that-they-may-shake-up-cosmology/?

A pair of jets blasting out of a black hole spans 23 million light years, the equivalent of 220 Milky Way galaxies in length. This is so large that it may change our understanding both of black holes and the structure of the universe.

“If you think of jets as a thing, then you could say this is the largest object that we know of in the universe,” says Martin Hardcastle at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.





The jets, which Hardcastle and his colleagues have named Porphyrion, come from a black hole in a distant galaxy, some 7.5 billion light years from Earth. The light reaching us from them now started its journey when the universe was just 6.3 billion years old, only about half the age it is now.

The researchers identified the jets, as well as at least 10 other sets of jets that are also millions of light years across, using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope, which consists of thousands of radio antennas across many European countries. Follow-up observations using telescopes in India and Hawaii then helped to locate the host galaxy.

To produce such vast jets, the black hole responsible would have needed to ingest about a sun’s worth of matter each year for a billion years, says Hardcastle. As matter falls into the black hole over this time frame, some of it will be twisted and accelerated by the black hole’s magnetic field, blasting it out into space to form the jets.

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In the early universe, matter was more closely bunched together than it is in our current cosmos, which makes the persistence of the jets over such a long time period without being interrupted by another cosmological object unusual, says Hardcastle. “This is back in a period of the universe where galaxies are quite active. There’s a lot going on, and yet this black hole has managed just to keep blasting away more or less unchecked for a billion years,” he says.

“I would have thought something like this was impossible,” says Laura Olivera-Nieto at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany. “Simply because it seems too big to have maintained the [jet] for so long.”




Merging black holes may create bubbles that could swallow the universe




Even simulating how such a vast beam formed or what its effects might be is extremely difficult because of the distances involved, she says. “It’s truly a challenge to try to understand how this is physically possible. We cannot put it in a computer, it’s too big.”

Porphyrion extends so far that it could affect the formation of other galaxies, injecting energy and magnetic fields into other regions, says Hardcastle. This could also help explain the mystery of where the universe gets its magnetic fields from. “It dumps energy and magnetic fields and particles into the voids between the galaxies,” says Hardcastle. “That’s a mechanism for transporting magnetic fields from very, very small scales to very large scales.”









These jets might also shake up some cosmological theories, which assume that objects like black holes don’t have influence across so much of the universe.

“A result like this one shows that if you want to understand how the universe’s large-scale structure forms and evolves, you then also have to think about how the smaller components of it, like the systems that would make such an outflow, influence it,” says Olivera-Nieto.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

From 11 September to 7 October: The Fake ‘War on Terror’ Collapses


The one great truth is that those who pursue war, usually end up deeply disappointed.  A hammer is rarely a solution.

It is completely plausible to see the last twenty years of what is a war of convenience for the DEEP STATE as a contrived continuum.  

Engaging a faux war in the Ukraine against an almost unwilling enemy in Russia has only confirmed that the Russian military is a conscript scrap heap.  So what!.  Resolution means adding Russia to NATO and the EU and massive investment.

The DEEP STATE as much to answer for but then they always do.


From 11 September to 7 October: The Fake ‘War on Terror’ Collapses

For years, the US executed Israel’s regional destabilization program using phantom terrorists as justification for the ‘War on Terror.’ But 7 October 2023 killed Washington’s never-ending war project – with a flip of the switch, US adversaries have now turned the ‘Long War’ on Israel.


By Pepe Escobar



https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/09/no_author/from-11-september-to-7-october-the-fake-war-on-terror-collapses/

Colonization … is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage … the same rules of international morality do not apply … between civilized nations and barbarians.

– John Stuart Mill, quoted by Eileen Sullivan in “Liberalism and Imperialism: JS Mill’s Defense of the British Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, 1983.

The events of 11 September 2001 were intended to impose and enshrine a new Exceptionalist paradigm on the young 21st century. History, though, ruled otherwise.


Cast as an attack on the US Homeland, 11 September 2001, immediately generated the Global War on Terror (GWOT), launched at 11 pm on the same day. Initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, the term was later sanitized by the administration of Barack Obama as “Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).”

The US-manufactured War on Terror spent a notoriously un-trackable eight trillion dollars defeating a phantom enemy, killed over half a million people – overwhelmingly Muslims – and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim-majority states. All of this was relentlessly justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community” – before that term, too, was renamed as the “rules-based international order.”

Cui Bono? (who stands to gain) remains the paramount question related to all matters related to 11 September 2001. A tight network of fervently Israel-first neocons strategically positioned across the defense and national security establishments by Vice President Dick Cheney – who had served as secretary of defense in the administration of George W Bush’s father – sprang into action to impose the long-planned agenda of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That far-reaching agenda had waited in the wings for the right trigger – a “new Pearl Harbor” – to justify a slew of regime-change operations and wars across much of West Asia and other Muslim states, reshaping global geopolitics for the benefit of Israel.

US General Wesley Clark’s notorious revelation of a secret Cheney regime plot to destroy seven major Islamic countries over five years, from Iraq, Syria, and Libya all the way to Iran, showed us that the planning had already been done in advance. These targeted nations had one thing in common: they were resolute enemies of the occupation state and firm supporters of Palestinian rights.

The sweet deal, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, was that the War on Terror would have the US and its western allies fighting all these serial Israeli-profiting wars on behalf of “civilization” and against the “barbarians.” The Israelis couldn’t have been more happy or smug about the direction this was going.

It’s no wonder that 7 October 2023 is a mirror image of 11 September 2001. The occupation state itself advertised this as Israel’s own “11 September.” Parallels abound in more ways than one, but certainly not in the way Israel-firsters and the cabal of extremists leading Tel Aviv expected.

Syria: the turning point

The western Hegemon excels in constructing narratives and is currently wallowing in the Russophobia, Iranophobia, and Sinophobia swamps of its own creation. Discrediting official, immutable narratives, such as the one about 11 September, remains the ultimate taboo.

But a false narrative construct cannot hold out forever. Three years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers collapsing and the onset of the War on Terror, we witnessed a great unraveling in the intersection of Central and South Asia: the Taliban were back in power, celebrating their victory over the Hegemon in a discombobulated Forever War.

By then, the “seven countries in five years” obsession – aiming to forge a “New Middle East” – was being derailed across the spectrum. Syria was the turning point, though some would argue that the tea leaves were already cast when the Lebanese resistance defeated Israel in 2000, then again in 2006.

But smashing independent Syria would have paved the way for the Hegemon – and Israel’s – Holy Grail: regime change in Iran.

US occupation forces entered Syria in late 2014 under the pretext of fighting “terror.” That was Obama’s OCO in action. In reality, though, Washington was using two key terror outfits – Daesh, aka ISIL, aka ISIS, and Al Qaeda, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – to try to destroy Damascus.

That was conclusively proved by a declassified 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, later confirmed by General Michael Flynn, the DIA’s chief when the assessment was written: “I think it was a willful decision [by the Obama administration]” when it comes to helping, not fighting, terror.

ISIS was conceived to fight both the Iraqi and Syrian armies. The terror group was an offspring of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then renamed Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then rebranded as ISIL, and finally ISIS, after it crossed the Syrian border in 2012.

The crucial point is that both ISIS and Nusra Front (later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) were hardcore Salafi-jihadi Al-Qaeda offshoots.

Russia entering the Syrian theater at Damascus’ invitation in September 2015 was the real game-changer. Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to actually engage in a real war on terror in Syrian territory before that terror reached the Russian Federation’s borders. This was captured by the standard formulation in Moscow at the time: the distance from Aleppo to Grozny is only 900 kilometers.

The Russians, after all, had already been subjected to the same brand and modus operandi of terror in Chechnya in the 1990s. Afterward, many Chechen jihadis escaped, only to end up joining dodgy outfits in Syria financed by the Saudis.

The late, great Lebanese analyst Anis Naqqash later confirmed that it was the legendary Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani who convinced Putin, in person, to enter the Syrian theater of war and help defeat the terrorism. This strategic masterplan, it transpires, was to fatally debilitate the US in West Asia.

The US security establishment, of course, would never forgive Putin, and especially Soleimani, for defeating their handy jihadist foot soldiers. On the orders of President Donald Trump, the anti-ISIS Iranian general was assassinated in Baghdad in January 2020, alongside Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, deputy leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), a broad spectrum of Iraqi fighters who had coalesced to defeat ISIS in Iraq.

Burying the legacy of 11 September

Soleimani’s strategic tour de force of setting up and coordinating the Axis of Resistance against Israel and the US was years in the making. In Iraq, for instance, the PMUs were propelled to the forefront of the resistance because the Iraqi military – US-trained and US-controlled – simply could not fight ISIS.

The PMUs were created after a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani in June 2014 – when ISIS began its Iraqi rampage – by imploring “all Iraqi citizens” to “defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens and its sacred sites.”

Several PMUs were backed by Soleimani’s Quds Force – who, ironically, for the rest of the decade would be invariably branded by Washington as a master “terrorist.” In parallel, crucially, the Iraqi government hosted an anti-ISIS intel center in Baghdad, led by Russia.

The credit for defeating ISIS in Iraq went mostly to the PMUs, complemented by its help to Damascus via the integration of PMU units into the Syrian Arab Army. That was what a real war on terror was all about, not that misnomered American construct called the “War on Terror.”

Best yet, the indigenously West Asian response to terror was and remains non-sectarian. Tehran supports secular, pluralist Syria and Sunni Palestine; Lebanon features a Hezbollah–Christian alliance; Iraq’s PMUs feature a Sunni–Shia–Christian alliance. Divide and Rule simply do not apply in a homegrown anti-terror strategy.

Then, what happened on 7 October 2023 propelled the regional resistance forces’ ethos to a whole new level.

In one swift move, it destroyed the myth of Israeli military invincibility and its much-lauded surveillance and intelligence primacy. Even as the horrifying genocide across Gaza proceeds unabated (with possibly as many as 200,000 civilian deaths, according to The Lancet), the Israeli economy is being eviscerated.

Yemen’s strategic blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea to any Israel-linked or destined shipping vessel is a masterstroke of efficiency and simplicity. Not only has it already bankrupted Israel’s strategic Eilat Port, but also, as a bonus, has offered a spectacular humiliation of the thalassocratic Hegemon, with the Yemenis de facto defeating the US Navy.

In less than a year, the concerted strategies of the Axis of Resistance have essentially buried six feet under the fake War on Terror and its multi-trillion-dollar gravy train.

As much as Israel profited from events after 11 September, Tel Aviv’s actions after 7 October rapidly accelerated its unraveling. Today, amidst massive Global Majority condemnation of Israel’s Gaza genocide, the occupation state stands as a pariah – tainting its allies and exposing the Hegemon’s hypocrisy with each passing day.


For the Hegemon, it gets even more alarming. Recall the 1997 warning of Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski: “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”

In the end, all the combined sound and fury of 11 September, the War on Terror, Long War, Operation This-And-That over two decades, metastasized into exactly what “Zbig” feared. Not only has a mere “challenger” emerged, but a full-fledged Russia–China strategic partnership that is setting a new tone for Eurasia.

Suddenly, Washington has forgotten all about terrorism. This is the real “enemy” – now considered the top two US “strategic threats.” Not Al-Qaeda and its many incarnations, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized in the previous decade as those mythical “moderate rebels” in Syria.

What’s even more eerie is that the conceptually nonsensical War on Terror forged by the neocons immediately after 11 September is now morphing into a war of terror (italics mine), embodying the desperate Hail Mary pass by the CIA and MI6 to “confront Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

And that’s bound to be metastasized into the Sinophobia swamp because those same western intelligence agencies consider the rise of China to be “the greatest geopolitical and intelligence challenge” of the 21st century.

The War on Terror has been debunked; it is now dead. But get ready for serial wars of terror by a Hegemon unaccustomed to not owning the narrative, the seas, and the ground.

Something I Can't Explain or Forget with Naomi wolf










This item describes a lucid dream state experienced by the author in which she met Jesus and received comms mind to mind.


It is important that i read this.  So much confirmed. please read this item and do not let your brain wiggle away.

Naomi is now living a life in imitation of Jesus as best she can.  Because she was really shown.



The Thing I Feared Most to Write, Part Two

Something I Can't Explain or Forget



Dr Naomi Wolf

Sep 15, 2024

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/the-thing-i-feared-most-to-write-a86
Some days it seems as if the dark forces have won.

A friend sent me a document from the Department of Defense website that reveals a full-spectrum propaganda/information management program, aimed at…us. I don’t understand how our little boats of truth can survive the resources and personnel directed against us.

A loved one has kidney damage. A loved one has heart damage. A loved one is going for surgery. An elder’s heart simply burst. An elder fell. An elder now walks with two sticks.

I pray for everyone continually and I remember the days when we rolled around in health, heedlessly, barely noticing, as if we were pressing grapes without measure into an endless vat of wine.

Now that past is past.

Loved ones who are young look pallid, with a yellowish glaze across their cheekbones. I look, hoping they will not notice, for evidence of living capillaries, for the blush of life.

They have grey-blue shadows, under their eyes, that that never go away. Their cheeks are hollow.

I pray all the time. Now that I believe a great harvesting of human life is underway, a great shaking-out of the human project, I have no more excuses. I feel that our current conditions have been brought about so that we are in an X-ray moment spiritually, in which we cannot be lukewarm or equivocal.

We must choose this day whom to serve.

Joshua 24:14: 14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I have to write what I have longed not to write; what both good Christians and good Jews have advised me never to write.

I have to write it now because what happened to me, that I do not discuss, has comforted me and instructed me and guided me in this terrible time.

Who knows; this story may comfort you as well.

Some years ago, I was writing a book about female sexual and reproductive health. I was scared to complete and publish it, since that would mean that I would have to speak publicly about female sexual biology and physical desire, which were at that time still somewhat taboo subjects. The theme of my book was that the sexuality of women, and their gift of fertility, were sacred treasures, and that these should be treated by society (and by women themselves) with great respect, and not degraded or debased.

I was afraid I would be attacked for bringing these issues into daylight and speaking about them frankly (I know that my former fears about this in today’s much more brazen time now sound quaint). But I was so very fearful that for the first time in my life, I suffered a writer’s block.

I was immobilized.

I happened to be in Portland, Oregon. I was wandering along a charming shopping area, 23rd Street, downtown. It was a cool, wet day. That vibrant Northwestern drizzle, green and misty, was a fragrant veil against my face.

Victorian houses lined both sidewalks. Stores offered handmade chocolates and tie-dyed cotton skirts. Cafes with fresh-ground coffee, gift shops with scented soaps, all beckoned.

On the basement level of one of the Victorians, a wooden sign read: “Counseling”.

Having nothing better to do, and thinking that a random chat with a stranger might ease my inability to write, or at least that it could not hurt, I walked down the steps.

I was in an unmemorable hallway: standard-issue chairs and beige carpeting. I sat in a chair and waited. The door opened; an unremarkable woman gestured me into her office. I found myself in a space as bland as the waiting area had been.

The counselor was about forty. She looked like a mom who had gone back to work. She wore an Oregon-standard suburban-lady outfit: leather clogs, khaki slacks, a bright cotton sweater. Her shoulder-length light-brown hair showed a feathering of grey at the temples. Her pleasant, open face was bare of makeup.

She gestured me to sit on a little grey couch. I glanced at the credentials framed on her wall: an MSW license. There were cozy pillows, the splash of color in a Mexican rug, and — that was it. There was nothing else suggestive or unusual there. I don’t even remember her name.

I explained to her my writer’s block, and she responded that her method used hypnotherapy. I was comfortable with this, as my mother is a sought-after past-life regression therapist. While I am agnostic (as is my mother) about whether what her clients experience are actual “past lives” or simply the immense narrative power of the subconscious mind, I knew that various people had used that methodology to get to the heart of their concerns quickly.

Certainly, as a writer, I recognize that the subconscious mind is nothing to belittle. It holds both terrors and riches. I also knew enough about phobias (writer’s block is a phobia) to know that my subconscious mind could indeed hold the key to why I was unable to face the blank page, and that it could possibly show me what I needed to do to move past that immobilization.

The counselor explained that she would put me into a light meditative state. I was comfortable with that as well.

I closed my eyes.

“Ten, nine, eight…” She counted, in a quiet, soothing voice. She had explained that I was to walk down a staircase and count with her, silently, with each step. “Seven, six, five...” I was to count with her until I reached the bottom of the staircase.

I did so.

I was surprised to find myself descending rough golden-white stone steps, hewn as if by coarse chipping. The flat risers of the stairs blended in curves, not in squared edges, into the stone walls that flanked them, as do the Herodian and other ancient steps unearthed by archaeologists. The steps were exactly like the ones I had walked down in the Old City in Jerusalem, where I had lived for a couple of years as a child, and then as a teenager.

“…Four, three, two, one.”

I was at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice, now distant, explained that I would see a door in front of me.

I faced a rough-hewn wooden door, held together not with nails but with leather cords.

“Now open the door and tell me what you see.”

I opened the door.

#####

Before me a man in his early thirties, sitting on a rough wooden bench.

I was now in the room with him.

The two of us were in a crude, stone-walled workshop, like the simple, ancient workshops in the Old City that are still in use, half hewn out of the hillsides’ golden rock. Deep shadows pooled in the corners.

The man was seated at a worktable. I saw that it was held together by wooden dowels, not by metal nails. The man wore a simple robe, made of light brown fabric closer in texture to hemp cloth or to burlap than to modern woven cloth. The edges were uneven, unhemmed. He was barefoot; the floor was made of packed dirt — the golden sandstone dirt of Jerusalem; and I saw that his feet were dusty. The soles of his feet rested on the golden dirt of the floor. The frayed edging of his robe, his feet, the table’s surface, were all dusty. It was the dust of premodern poverty. He was obviously poor.

I understood glancingly that I now was in a meditative, or hypnotically relaxed, state. It was as if I had left my conscious awareness far above, and had dropped to a much deeper level, below normal cognition; it was as if I had reached a deep well of awareness inside my being, full of still water.

I gazed at this being in astonishment. I knew exactly who this being was.

I knew that he was Jesus.

What I saw was incredible.

But it was also terrifying and upsetting.

My reactions were completely split. My awareness was torn in two.

My subliminal mind, where I was mostly present, was overjoyed. I had never been happier in my life. I was in the presence of my best friend, whom I did not consciously know, but whom, subconsciously, I thought I had lost forever.

Hot tears welled from under my closed lids, and spilled down my cheeks. I was crying as if I had waited my whole life to cry like this; as if these tears had been in me, dormant, forever.

But even as my subconscious mind was rejoicing, I could far above me feel my conscious mind — my personality, my biographical self, my ego — freaking out; appalled; twisting about like a hooked fish, in a desperate effort to escape.

My conscious mind was horrified.

I am a Jewish lady.

This was the wrong person.

This was not whom I had wanted to see.

####

I recognized that this was Jesus they way you recognize your own child across a crowded playground. My mother has bright red hair and on hot weather, carries a Japanese parasol. When she lived in the West Village, she was the only person who looked like this. I recognized this being in front of me the way I would recognize my red-haired mother, carrying her parasol, from across the traffic on Sixth Avenue.

I felt that I was in the presence of my lost love; my home; my soul’s best friend.

I became aware that this being was emanating light. But it was not like any emanation of light I had seen in the world of my waking life, or even in art-historical depictions of haloes or of saints — or of Jesus himself, for that matter.

The room in which we were present, was dark; there was no modern illumination in it. But millions of rays of light came out of this person, multi-directionally. These rays of light were brightest where they emerged from around his body, and faded a bit into the surrounding air, at a distance of a few feet away from him.

These rays of light were unspeakably captivating to observe. They shifted and moved, in a multi-directional way, whenever this being shifted or moved. They were alive.

At one point his right arm moved closer to me on the workshop table, and the light rays flowed toward me from his arm, as well as flowing vertically and horizontally and in all simultaneous directions. When I watched these light rays shift and move around this man, I understood that this light energy was also a form of love, and that it was also a form of music.

I understood, in other words, that light — all light, but also especially this unearthly light - was on the same spectrum as love; and that all light, material and divine, was also on the same spectrum as sound. I also understood that this light was the primordial energy of earth, and that it healed.

This being was crafting a beautiful spherical glass or crystal object. It resembled the blue-glass eye symbols worn to ward off evil, that are still produced by craftsmen in Jerusalem’s Old City. But this object, I understood, represented the “third eye” of higher awareness. Its purpose was to be placed eventually — with work and struggle — in the foreheads of human beings. This was our job; to evolve so as to attain this integration of the lovely spherical crystal object, this divine object, into ourselves, our human awareness.

(No one actually spoke in this experience that I had; it was all fully silent. I experienced the transmission of meaning as if this was how communication really is in some other dimension - that is, it was immediate, effortless and mind-to-mind, without the need for physical words or the struggle of cognition. Time was meaningless too; my thoughts or observations and the insights that accompanied them, unfolded all at once; the insights appeared in my mind as if they were placed inside my consciousness with no effort from me.)

I understood that in the process of crafting this symbol of higher consciousness, human beings were supposed to co-create the object alongside this divine craftsman. He could not do it alone without humans’ help, and humans could not do it alone without his. This co-creation was a human project, or the project for humans.

In this state, I realized that any of us could have these rays of light/love emanating from us always, similarly - that that was our human birthright. I understood that we could all radiate this way, with this light/love that healed and that was magical. The only thing that kept us from doing so was our ignorance of our own divine condition or our stubborn rejection of it.

“Sin” or rather “error”, I saw, also dimmed our capabilities, and our innate light. Ignorance of our true nature, and “sin” — meaning bad decisions, weak decisions, self-serving choices, unkind choices, and finally, choices to align with dark forces — were, I understood, a kind of grime or unpleasant opacity that dimmed these rays of ours, day by day, if we decided to choose harmful acts and thoughts.

The way our bad choices over time dimmed these rays functioned like the willful damaging of a beautiful technology. It was as if bad, selfish, or ignorant decisions gummed up the light/love transmitter’s effectiveness, a functionality that is the basis of how we are created and of how we are supposed to work as humans in the world, while using the medium of our lives.

I must stress that when I say “sin”, I did not understand this notion in the classical sense of shame in front of the Divine, or of the Divine’s disgust with us. There is almost no word for what I mean here instead of “sin” in the presence of this being. Imagine a word that encapsulates a horrible, self-sabotaging, regrettable mess. There was great love and compassion and understanding surrounding the human-ness of this dark gunk, these bad choices. But I did see that the complicating, deadening, darkening consequences of bad choices were inevitable; the grime or residue that resulted from our bad choices was part of the natural law governing how we were made and governing the moral universe into which we humans were born.

I also saw that the golden rays that emanated from this being, were coextensive with the raw material of our entire human lives as well - just as our human lives were coextensive with this being’s golden rays - and that they also constituted our human dimension, as well as being the stuff of the love between humans, human love of animals and theirs of us, and our collective love of God’s creation.

I saw that every human being is born to align with these harmonious rays, that undergird a person’s life almost like grooves on an old record. The moral choices of that person become like the needle.

The golden grooves, in effect, are God’s will, which always harmonize us with the greater universe and with our lives’ missions, and with love.

I saw that if people choose to contradict God’s will and the natural moral order of the universe, or if they defy it, or if they scramble and defile the paths that God’s sense of harmony has set out for them, all they are doing is creating their own environment, their own conditions, now and in the future. I saw that all they are doing is scratching their own otherwise beautiful “records”, and making their own lives’ music inharmonious, ugly, or worse.

I saw that they then bring difficulty, disharmony and eventually catastrophe upon their own lives’ conditions; and that all of this is not God’s “punishment,” but is generated entirely by their own doing.

By seeing this (and “seeing” is the wrong word; I was just receiving this somehow), I had the following insights.

One is that there is really no such thing as stealing; there is no such thing as lying; there is no such thing as cheating; there is no such thing as secret adultery; there is no such thing as fraud. There is no such thing as “getting away with” anything through deception or concealment.

People who believe that there is, are simply unaware of the workings of the universe.

There is no such thing as lying, or theft, or fraud, and so on, because everything, everything is seen and accounted for and known. Everything one does is inscribed in this record of one’s life, a record that then affects oneself, one’s conditions, the music one makes for oneself, one’s family, the world.

You don’t hurt anyone else, in other words, ultimately, I saw, in the deepest reality, by bad actions; you first and most without exception, hurt yourself.

The corollary to this insight was a beautiful and comforting one. What I described in the paragraph above is true because no one’s life record is unimportant to God. No one’s life is unimportant to God.

No one’s. Indeed, everyone’s life is a central concern, to God. How is that possible? Humans can’t do it themselves, or imagine it, but that was what I understood: that God’s awareness is so vast that somehow everyone can be at the exact center of His love, even as everyone else is also always at the exact center of His love.

He sees us all; not searching us out punitively, but because he loves us all in ways beyond human capacities to understand.

There is no concealment possible, because God’s love is so capacious and immense and intimate and detailed, that every one of us counts immeasurably to him. He made us transparent to him, and he made the moral conditions of the world as I described a few beats above, because he so loves us and attends to us so minutely.

I understood that “sin,” or horrible choices, could only happen because people did not understand how important they were to God. They made awful decisions when they thought that they did not matter to God, and when they were persuaded that God was not encompassing them.

If they knew how loved they were, I understood, they would never make such choices.

In Matthew 10:29 Jesus says:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

I felt that this was what I was experiencing, or being shown. If God can be mindful of every sparrow’s fall — and indeed the fall takes place inside of God’s care; even in death the sparrow is not abandoned — how can we doubt our own centrality to our Creator?

I gathered that when you align with God’s will in your life, which is pretty simple, and live as if you know you are creating your own moral reality minutely, then blessings from the universe are drawn to you. There may still be tragedies or obstacles or difficult times that are inevitable (I was not given to understand why); but by remaining aligned with God’s will nonetheless, the challenges turn ultimately into blessings, even though all of this takes place in a pattern too big and complex for us at that given moment, to see.

There was another insight I received into the well of my awareness.

This person gestured toward an area above his right shoulder. It showed a manmade wood-and-metal image of a Crucifixion.

Then he gestured to an area above his left shoulder. It revealed not the visual Stations of the Cross as they exist now, and have for the last five hundred years or so, in religious iconography — the painful moments on the way to Jesus’ own execution. Rather, he showed me a replacement series of visual “Stations of the Cross,” but drawn from his life.

In one scene, he was feeding the hungry. In the next, he was speaking lovingly to a woman with an issue of blood. Next, he was healing a paralytic. Then he was protecting a woman about at risk of being stoned due to conventional hostilities. He was eating with prostitutes and tax collectors, the most hated, marginalized people in society.

He conveyed — indicating these two images to his left and to his right — something like: how sad it is. Everyone looks at my death, but they ignore my life.

I understood from this, as Matthew 3:9-10 explained, that “I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up Children for Abraham.”

Jesus’ having been raised from the dead was not the most important of God’s miracles revealed by his life on earth. (This is a paragraph that I dread and am in terror of writing, as I fear offending people or sounding disrespectful to religions. Please know that I am not proselytizing or advocating, merely describing a very subjective personal experience). The love he showed was the greater miracle.

I gathered that when we emulate that life, we too release light, and are capable of healing and of bringing about wonders; not at the scale he did, of course, because we are human, but echoing these abilities in our own more humble ways.

The message I took away was that those people erred who turned toward his resurrection as if believing that his death and resurrection was all it took for them to be “saved”. The real miracles, the real lessons of his journey with us on earth, were embedded in his life.

His life was supposed to be like a primer lesson for us.

We were supposed to emulate his life. That was what God actually wanted, not ritualistic observances of any one or other kind.

That had been the point of his life.

He was warning — not in a punitive way, but in a sad, regretful and also sombrely cautionary way - that many people preferred to engage in religious dogmatism and ritualistic performance at the expense of caring for the outcast, visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, as so on; at the expense of doing justice and mercy every single day.

They did this because the former was less work.

People who harm widows and orphans and the poor, but who proclaim their piety aloud, and make a point to showcase every gesture of their dogmatic worship, really are like “whited sepulcres.” [Matthew 23]

People engage in empty religious performance and call that “salvation,” because that is easier than actually trying, day by day, to emulate the examples of his life, and be a good person.

I also got the sense of something like: “We really meant what we said.”

Like, “It’s really serious.”

Meaning: It really “were better for [someone] that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” [KJV Luke 17:2]. Meaning: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyrself. On these two commandments hang [depend] all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22, KJV]. That really is the heart of all devotional practice that God desires.

The impression I had was that much of religion was a human effort to evade the responsibility of actually walking with God.

People will do almost anything, I took away from this experience, to avoid simply visiting the sick, caring for the orphan, helping the widow; being kind; making peace.

When I gazed at that man, in his rough robe, with his bare feet; wiry, thin, clothed in his poverty; seated at his rough bench; a dark man with dusty hair and a beard, and with extraordinarily gentle, calm, accepting eyes — in all his poverty and humanness yet emitting somehow light rays in every direction that were also rays of love, and also elements of sound or vibration, shining and multiple like the strings of a living golden zither— I understood that religion was often an evasion.

All religions were beside the point that this Being was making, except to the extent that they help and support people, like guardrails or like walking sticks, in being kind to one another and in acting justly.

Being kind to one another really was the only point.

The only point really was love.

He had certainly said that, over and over.

He hadn’t been kidding, and neither had YHWH. They had meant it. It was true.

We just kept willfully misunderstanding them.

####

This is the last part of this experience, that I have feared for 14 years to write.

I fear that the minute I describe this event in my life, I (and the experience) will be thrust into some theological box or other, which would be really a prison.

Though this experience crystallized my inner life — meaning, my choices in almost every situation thereafter were far more clear to me; I had a great sense of peace and direction — I knew that if I acknowledged or mentioned this experience in any way, my material and social life would be thrown into disarray, if not into complete chaos. It would mean disruption and distress and confusion, to offer up in any public or even closed-circle way, an account of what I’d encountered.

I did not want to become anyone else’s poster child for their faith system, which I still did not share. I did not feel I had “become a Christian.” I did not want to become a coda to someone else’s label or ideology.

I also wanted to dismiss this experience as a phantom, an hallucination. But that was not possible.

I knew this experience had been more real than was my waking life. It was the most real thing I had ever experienced

The whole thing was a confrontation with a dimension more authentic than the one in which I moved from day to day.

I am not leaving my faith.

I am not Christian.

I am Jewish. I remain Jewish.

More than ever.

My experience transcended anything theological.

My experience was anti-dogmatic.

By this experience having been “non-theological,” I simply mean that my experience was of a being — a reality — a blessed dimension available to all of us; not available to us only if we are Christian, and not withheld from us if we are Jewish or Muslim or atheist, or anything else.

My experience was that this is a blessed dimension available to us all by virtue of our being human.

At the risk of offense, I did not feel that I was in the literal presence of God.

I felt that — and here is where language fails — I was in the presence of God’s communication with humans; or in the presence of his expression of his love to his humans.

I felt that this being was “of God” the way your mother’s hug is “of” your mother; or her perfume, or her voice, is “of” her; not separate from her, but also not the totality of her.

####

After I emerged from this state, I processed, haltingly, a bit, with the counselor, what had happened. She was not surprised. Strangely, similar sessions had taken place in her office before. I looked carefully around her office and did not see anything suggestive of what I had just undergone. I listened to the tape recording she had made of the session, and there was no suggestion from her at all.

I left, and I struggled.

Yes, my writer’s block dissolved. Yes I finished my book.

For years, I would wonder why this experience took place when I had been unable to complete a book about how precious is female sexual and reproductive health. Why would Jesus possibly care about that? It seemed — well, random.

Then in 2021-2024, I would find myself faced with the task of explaining to anyone who would listen, that the human race was in peril because a group of demons had decided that female sexual and reproductive health was theirs to subject to a damaging new medical technology, in order to mock, destroy and manipulate it.

If I hadn’t written that book in 2012, I do not think I would have recognized early, how serious were the dangers that faced us via this technology; and I would not have been inured to speaking in public in 2021-2024 about uncomfortable details related to female sexual and reproductive health.

I now know, from that long-ago experience, that time, and maybe even fate itself, are like a skein of yarn in a knitted afghan. Imagine an afghan made of yarn, bunched into multiple folds. A single skein can be pulled right through these multiple folds. If you are traversing the “unfolded afghan” (time unfolding in a linear fashion in your life), you have no idea that a thread has been drawn right through multiple time periods in your life and that it is pulling you mostly invisibly in a single direction.

I don’t know why I had this experience. I don’t think it is because I deserved it in any special way. I literally have no idea.

But I do know, looking back at my life, that without having been privileged to have had that experience, I could never have done the work I did in the last couple of years, trying to warn humanity of an existential evil.

Indeed, I could not have survived the last couple of years, emotionally.

###

Mostly what I felt when faced with this person, this being, was: what good news. What good news.

Humans; we are not alone, we are not bereft; we have a friend. We have a champion.

We are not alone here on this spinning planet.

It is all okay.

#####

I then went on a journey of many years, reading and praying and searching.

I sought out and talked to many religious leaders of many faiths and denominations, to try to understand what had happened to me.

In that, I was almost always disappointed.

I will tell you that story,

Next.