God does not give you victory in battle. He lifts you above the battle.

–paraphrasing A Course in Miracles – Chapter 23 – IV. Above the Battleground

Issued on: 21/07/2021 – 03:23 (France24.com)

Text by:NEWS WIRES4 min

Wildfires raging across the western United States and Canada, including a “monster” two-week-old blaze in Oregon, on Tuesday belched smoke and soot that gusted eastward and caused harmful air pollution as far away as New York City.

In 13 western states, more than 80 large active wildfires have charred almost 1.3 million acres (526,090 hectares) of drought-parched vegetation in recent weeks, an area larger than Delaware, according to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho.

Several hundred additional fires have burned in western and central Canada. They included 86 classified as out of control on Tuesday in British Columbia alone, leading officials there to declare a state of emergency.

The jet stream and other cross-continental air currents have carried smoke and ash thousands of miles. People in distant cities were feeling the air contamination in their eyes, noses and lungs.

In New York City, where a gray haze shrouded Manhattan’s skyline, the air quality index (AQI) for fine particulate matter reached 170, a level considered harmful even for healthy individuals and nine times above exposure recommendations of the World Health Organization. Philadelphia hit 172.

Other northeastern cities, including Boston and Hartford, Connecticut, had readings in the unhealthy zone above 150. Residents were advised to wear face masks outdoors to limit exposure.

Smoke drifting in the United States from Canadian wildfires in Manitoba and Ontario, likely pushed the AQI in Detroit and Cleveland above 125, considered unhealthy for sensitive individuals, NIFC meteorologist Nick Nauslar said.

Wildfire smoke from Canada’s western provinces reached as far east as Ontario, prompting widespread government air quality warnings.

In the U.S. West, parts of Idaho and Montana suffered from unhealthy levels of air pollution from 40 large blazes nearby and smoke from southern Oregon’s Bootleg fire, currently the largest in the United States.

Heavy exposure to wildfire smoke has been linked to long-term respiratory consequences for firefighters, including a sharply elevated risk of developing asthma, according to a University of Alberta study released this week.

The general population also faces severe health effects.

“Wildfire smoke exposure … increases susceptibility to respiratory infections including COVID, increases severity of such infections and makes recovery more difficult,” federal air resource adviser Margaret Key said by email.

‘Monster’ fire enters 3rd week

The wildfires themselves posed a more direct risk to life and property.

The Bootleg blaze has blackened 388,600 acres (157,260 hectares) of desiccated brush and timber in and around the Fremont-Winema National Forest, about 250 miles south of Portland, since erupting July 6. Only three other Oregon wildfires over the past century have burned more territory.

As of Tuesday, an army of some 2,200 personnel had managed to carve containment lines around 30% of the fire’s periphery, while the blaze expanded farther to the east and north.

Incident commander Rob Allen said in his daily report that tinder-dry fuels within the fire zone would “continue to burn and produce smoke for weeks.”

“Fighting this fire is a marathon, not a sprint,” Allen wrote. “We’re in this for as long as it takes to safely contain this monster.”

At least 67 homes have been destroyed and another 3,400 were listed as threatened, with an estimated 2,100 people under orders to evacuate or be ready to flee at a moment’s notice.

Daily newsletterReceive essential international news every morningSubscribe

The western conflagrations, marking a heavier-than-normal start of the wildfire season, have coincided with record-shattering heat that has baked much of the region in recent weeks and caused hundreds of deaths.

Scientists have said the growing frequency and intensity of wildfires are largely attributable to prolonged drought and increasing bouts of excessive heat that are symptomatic of climate change.

The Bootleg fire is so large that it has at times generated its own weather – towering pyrocumulus clouds of condensed moisture sucked up through the fire’s smoke column from burned vegetation and the surrounding air.

These clouds can spawn lightning storms and high winds capable igniting new fires and spreading the flames.

(REUTERS)

Past royal efforts are tame in comparison to what Duke of Sussex could unleash on his family

Caroline Davies Tue 20 Jul 2021 09.39 EDT (theguardian.com)

Queen Victoria did it, as did a couple of her granddaughters. And her great-grandson, the Duke of Windsor, famously did so 15 years after his abdication.

So, the Duke of Sussex follows a well-trodden royal path with news that he is penning his “accurate and wholly truthful” memoirs, writing “not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”.

As shudders, no doubt, convulse Buckingham Palace, the book has a planned publication date in autumn 2022, perfectly timed for the Christmas market, but perhaps not the finale the Queen would have hoped for her platinum jubilee celebrations.

Past royal memoirs are tame in comparison to what Prince Harry could unleash on his family, if his soul-baring screen interviews with Oprah Winfrey are a yardstick.

His efforts are unlikely to compare with Queen Victoria’s published journals, which were by no means scandalous, though she was dissuaded from writing a book about John Brown, the Scottish ghillie and personal attendant to whom she became close in widowhood.

Victoria’s granddaughters, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, and Princess Marie-Louise, as well as Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, widow of the Queen’s cousin Prince Henry, all produced “terribly interesting” accounts of royal life, said the royal historian Hugo Vickers, though all non-controversial.

Harry’s musings can best be compared to those of the exiled Duke of Windsor; A King’s Story, published in 1951, and an international bestseller still available on Amazon. His wife, Wallis Simpson, also took up the pen.

“The Duke of Windsor’s was not terribly revelatory or scandalous,” said Vickers, adding that it was beautifully ghostwritten. “I don’t think his or the duchess’s caused any more ructions that you would imagine they would.”

Simpson consulted her former husband when writing her memoirs, though he never wrote his own. “He said: ‘As far as I’m concerned the truth lies at the bottom of the well and anyone who wants to go and look for it is welcome to do so.’ So he did not write anything at all, or ever tell his story,” said Vickers.

Though not especially revelatory, the Duke of Windsor’s account was frowned on given that his mother, Queen Mary, and brother, George VI, were still alive. “By today’s standards it might be regarded as pretty tame,” said Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty magazine. “But 70 years ago, it was seen as all quite shocking, disrespectful and treacherous. I think he saw it as his opportunity to settle scores and did so.”

With Harry reportedly working with the Pulitzer-winning ghostwriter JR Moehringer and the deadline for a first draft rumoured to be in October, its contents are the subject of much speculation, though experts believe that he will be under pressure to up the ante.

“The pressure must be on him to come up with something even more sensational that what we learned from the Oprah interview,” said Little. “It’s hard not to think that Harry would want to redress the balance, as far as he’s concerned, in print, though it’s been done on screen.

“You would think hearts will continue to sink at Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Kensington Palace. I suppose in an ideal world they would have liked a line to be drawn after the Oprah revelations. But clearly that isn’t Harry’s way of doing things. And so this won’t have been great news for Harry’s family.”

He could revisit the racism allegations he has levelled against the royal household. “Then there’s Meghan’s arrival into the spotlight, her becoming girlfriend, then fiancee, then bride. And, of course, he has a lot of demons still about his childhood and the treatment his mother got both at the hand of the establishment and the media. Also, having to leave the army much sooner that he would have liked might also manifest itself.”

Little added: “You would think it is going to be quite a troubled read in a way. You would hope that by the end of it there will be light at the end of the tunnel. He’s been in North America now for 15 months or so, so clearly he feels he’s turned a corner.”

Sarah, Duchess of York, was fiercely criticised when she wrote My Story, detailing her experience at the hands of the press and the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Andrew. She was accused of cashing in on her royal connections. Harry’s publisher, Penguin Random House, have said proceeds are going to charity.

For the Duke of Windsor, his memoirs brought him back into the spotlight after years of relative obscurity. And, as with any memoir, there are different versions of the story.

So, as Buckingham Palace awaits Harry’s book, it will no doubt think back to the Queen’s diplomatic words following the Oprah revelations, when she said: “Some recollections may vary.”

superALable George Carlin. Originally found this on this channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/FifthSun602 Thanks to the poster for this video.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

Throughout our lives, we come to inhabit the seven layers of identity, often interpolating between them and constantly changing within each. And yet somehow, despite this ever-shifting seedbed of personhood, we manage to think of ourselves as concrete selves — our selves. Hardly any perplexity of human existence is more fascinating than the continuity of personal identity — the question of what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person, despite a lifetime of change, from your cells to your values. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captured this paradox perfectly: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Two millennia before modern psychologists came to tussle with this puzzlement, the great Greek historian and writer Plutarch examined it more lucidly than anyone before or since. In a brilliant thought experiment known as The Ship of Theseus, or Theseus’s paradox, outlined (though not for the first or last time) in his biographical masterwork Plutarch’s Lives (free ebook | public library), Plutarch asks: If the ship on which Theseus sailed has been so heavily repaired and nearly every part replaced, is it still the same ship — and, if not, at what point did it stop being the same ship?

He writes:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

In this wonderful animation, the visual educators at TED-Ed — who have previously explored how you know you exist by way of Descartes and the nature of reality by way of Plato — examine the famous thought experiment and how it illuminates the perennial question of who we are:

Which you is “who”? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in fifty years? And when is “am”? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And which aspect of you is “I”? Are you your physical body? Your thoughts and feelings? Your actions?

Complement with Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing and where our thinking ego resides, then revisit other illuminating TED-Ed animations exploring what depression actually feels like, why some people are left-handed, how melancholy enhances creativity, and why playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity.

Taurus Barbra Streisand (pictured in New York in 2017) has a mall in her house. (Shutterstock)

Taurus, treasured possessions may be a source of inspiration for you

• ROB BREZSNY
• Jul. 22, 2021 1:30 a.m. (SFExaminer.com)
• FEATURES

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Author Valerie Andrews reminds us that as children, we all had the “magical capacity to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.” Oh, how I would love you to be able to recover even a fraction of those talents in the coming days. My reading of the current astrological potentials tells me that your chances of doing so are much better than usual. Your ability to connect with the eternal child and wise animal within you is at a peak.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus singer Barbra Streisand has a shopping mall built below her large home. Its purpose isn’t to sell consumer goods to strangers, but rather to stash her precious belongings and show them off when friends come over. Among the storefronts are an antique store, doll shop, costume shop and candy store. The coming weeks would be an excellent time for you to start building a shopping mall beneath your home, too, Taurus. If that’s too expensive or complicated, here are alternatives: 1. Revitalize your appreciation for your treasured possessions. 2. Acquire a new treasured possession or two that will inspire you to love your life even more than you already do. 3. Reacquaint yourself with the spiritual powers that your treasured possessions arouse in you.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The Dalai Lama says there are core similarities between science and Buddhism. Both keep searching for ever-more complete versions of the truth. Both employ firsthand observation and experimentation to do that noble work. If they find new information that contradicts previously held versions of the truth, both are willing to discard them. Now that you Geminis are entering the Deep Questioning Phase of your astrological cycle, I’d love you to make generous use of the Buddhist/scientific approach. More complete versions of the truth will be available in abundance in the coming weeks—if you’re alert for them.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian artist A⁠rtemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) achieved the impossible: She became a supremely skilled and renowned painter in an era when women had virtually no opportunities to become artists. Many aspects of her work distinguished her from other painters. For example, she depicted women as having strong, agile hands and arms. In Artemisia’s world, the power of women’s wrists, forearms and fingers signifies their ability to put their mark upon the world, to accomplish strenuous practical tasks with grace and flair. If I were going to paint images of you in the coming weeks, I would also portray you as having strong, agile hands and arms. I suspect you’ll have potent agency to get things done—to adeptly manipulate the material world to serve your ideals. (Thoughts about Artemisia’s hands come from art historian Mary D. Garrard.)

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “Once upon a time”: That’s your phrase of power these days. What do I mean by that? I’m suggesting that you will strengthen your problem-solving abilities by engaging in playful pretending for the sheer fun of it. I’m predicting that you will boost your confidence by dreaming up amusing magical stories in which you endure heroic tests and achieve epic feats. And I’m proposing that you will fine-tune your ability to accomplish practical feats if you regard your robust imagination as crucial to your success.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Virgo singer-songwriter Fiona Apple says she’s not religious. On the other hand, she regularly kneels on the ground and announces to whatever great power might be listening, “Thank you for my problems, and I send my love everywhere.” She’s sincere. She regards her sadness and her challenges as being equally important to her happiness and success. The difficulties teach her what she didn’t even realize she needed to know, and make her appreciate the good times more intensely. I suggest you borrow from her approach right now.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus wrote, “Great feelings bring with them their own universe”—which he said may either be degraded or splendid, selfish or generous. I love that he allowed for the possibility that great feelings could be positive and noble. So many renowned thinkers focus on negative and ignoble states of mind. In accordance with current astrological potentials, Libra, your task is to cultivate feelings that are splendid and generous. These sentiments should exalt you, uplift you and empower you to spread transformative benevolence to those whose lives you touch.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “How can you hold on to something that won’t hold still?” asked Scorpio poet Benjamin Fondane. In general, you Scorpios have more talent than every other sign of the zodiac at doing just that: corralling wiggly, slippery things and making them work for you. And I expect this skill will be especially in play for you during the coming weeks. Your grasp on the elusive assets won’t ever be perfect, but it will be sufficiently effective to accomplish small wonders.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian Calvin Trillin is a witty writer with a good imagination and a flair for inventive language. But back in school, he confesses, “Math was always my bad subject. I couldn’t convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.” You Sagittarians are authorized by the cosmic powers-that-be to borrow your style and attitude from Trillin in the coming weeks. So you shouldn’t be fixated on mathematical precision and fastidious logic; your task is not to be conceptually impeccable and scrupulously sensible. Rather, you have a license to be extra lyrical and lush and rhapsodic and humorous and irrepressible.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In 2011, an eBay seller produced a 19th-century photo that he said proved Capricorn actor Nicolas Cage is a time-traveling vampire. Although the character in the image did indeed resemble the Oscar-winning star, he rejected the theory, and emphatically declared that he is not a time-traveling vampire. Maybe that all sounds absurd, but I must tell you that you may soon have to deal with people’s equally inaccurate and off-kilter theories about you. My advice: Don’t take it personally. Simply correct others’ misimpressions and rely solely on yourself for definitive ideas about who you are.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I’ve assembled excerpts of love poems for your inspiration. Why? Because you’re entering the Intensified Intimacy Phase of your astrological cycle. Consider using the following riffs as inspiration when you interact with loved ones. 1. “I profess the religion of love; it’s the belief, the faith I keep.” 2. “Holding your hand, I can hear your bones singing into mine and feel the moon as it rolls through you.” 3. “Raw light spills from your eyes, utterly naked, awakening an intoxicating shimmer of adventure.” 4. “I ask you please to speak to me forever.” (Poem fragments are from Ibn ‘Arabi, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, Herman Hesse, Sara Eliza Johnson and Alejandra Pizarnik.)

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): An Australian witch named Michelle Clinton praises the joys of a “moon garden.” It features flowers and plants that reveal their full beauty after dark. Among the flowers that bloom at night are evening primrose, angel’s trumpet and Dutchman’s pipe cactus. As for the flowers whose aromas are most potent after the sun sets: night-blooming jasmine, garden heliotrope, and honeysuckle. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you will have resemblances to a moon garden in the near future, Pisces. Be alert for opportunities to glow and grow in the dark. (More: tinyurl.com/LunarGarden)

Homework: Send me an oracle you’d like to receive for the first week of September: Newsletter@freewillastrology.com.

Including Prayer of Apology to African Americans [at about 1:16:00 in].

Marianne Williamson July 14, 2016 Including Prayer of Apology to African Americans. http://marianne.com/atonement/ Internationally acclaimed author, lecturer and activist Marianne Williamson gives weekly lectures based on A Course in Miracles, Live in New York City and via Livestream, on Tuesdays at 7:30pm ET. Go here to join live or via livestream: http://marianne.com/upcoming-events/

Marianne Williamson Marianne Williamson is an Internationally acclaimed author, lecturer and activist who gives weekly lectures based on A Course in Miracles, Live in New York City and via Livestream, on Tuesdays at 7:30pm ET. Go here to join live or via livestream: http://marianne.com/upcoming-events/

By Chris Vognar 

July 13, 2021 Updated: July 16, 2021 (datebook.sfchronicle.com)

In the 1954 musical “Brigadoon,” American hunters played by Gene Kelly and Van Johnson stumble into a curious Scottish village. The residents look at their unexpected guests quizzically, while the guests can’t shake the feeling they’ve entered an elaborate fantasy from another time. One thing everyone can agree on: Singing and dancing is good for the soul.

Familiarity with the Vincente Minnelli romance, based on a Broadway hit, will enhance your appreciation of the new Apple TV+ confection “Schmigadoon!” But this small-screen, postmodern musical is plenty charming on its own. It’s a witty deconstruction of the genre; while also very much in love with the classics, their infectious joy and even those movie moments that make a cynic ask, “Why is everyone singing?” (a question which, sadly, keeps many from falling under the genre’s sway).

Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong from “Saturday Night Live,” also a producer) are an unmarried couple from New York, struggling to keep their spark alive. He’s selfish; she’s controlling. They decide to take a backpacking trip, during which they get separated from their group, bear a foggy rainstorm and cross a magical bridge to a gleefully artificial land of rolling green hills, fake plants and townsfolk who just won’t stop bursting into song and dance.

These villagers seem to have emerged from a classic musical. There’s a little “Sound of Music,” a little “Music Man,” a little “Wizard of Oz,” and that’s just for starters. There’s a mayor (Alan Cumming), a schoolmarm (Ariana DeBose), a guardian of morals (Kristin Chenoweth), her pastor husband (Fred Armisen) … you get the picture. But you likely won’t be prepared for how emotionally resonant and sincere it all is, even when it sinks its teeth into all its parodic possibilities. More than once the newcomers roll their eyes at the opening notes of a song. And then “Schmigadoon!” knocks that song out of the park. The show embraces every bit of the genre’s artificiality.

The writing (Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, both veterans of “Horton Hears a Who!,” created the show) and directing (Barry Sonnenfeld) are lively and smooth. That said, the show has some terrific performers to play with. Take Cumming, who plays Mayor Aloysius Menlove. As his name suggests, he’s gay, but only the big-city newcomers have figured this out, and he remains in the closet. Cumming gives the character a deep sense of pathos, an officiousness hiding the dandy who desperately wants out. It’s a wonderful piece of acting, which should surprise no one who has followed Cumming’s career.

At one point, “Schmigadoon!” offers a perfect explanation of what makes a musical tick. If you’re talking, and emotions overwhelm you, you must sing. If you’re singing, and emotions overwhelm you, you must dance. To the extent that “Schmigadoon!” makes fun of musicals, it does so with great wisdom and affection, qualities it also applies to the give-and-take of romantic compromise.

In an era when snark and cynicism are easy and dismayingly popular, “Schmigadoon!” opts for a different path. It asks why everyone is singing, then answers by singing along.

“Schmigadoon!”: Musical comedy series. Starring Keegan-Michael Key, Cecily Strong, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Ariana DeBose, Fred Armisen, Jaime Camil and Jane Krakowski. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. (TV-14. Six episodes at approximately 30 minutes each.) First two episodes streaming Friday, July 16, on Apple TV+. Subsequent episodes released Fridays through Aug. 13.

©Copyright 2021 Hearst Communications, Inc.

I am excited to bring to you my upcoming guess: Eric Davis

Eric’s Unique Insights may be a tool to Maximize Your Life

There are opportunities everywhere for those who have the courage to seize them! You have more than you think you have. You can do more than you think you can. You alone are responsible to use your natural intelligence, talents, abilities, and what some would call your Devine given gift to create a life of your choice. Expose yourself to your possibilities. 

A Prosperos Sunday Meeting

                     Zoom Presentation

For this free, one-hour event beginning at 11: 00 a.m. Pacific time- Sunday, July 25, 2021, on Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/332275676

Interesting people + Fun Conversation + Important Insights