This is the Spaghetti Nebula, a supernova remnant unfolding across space and time. Its faint emissions, filtered through dust, reveal not an ending, but a transformation—matter reconfigured, structure emerging from dispersal. (from New Thinking Allowed)
Photo by Shaoyu Zhang for APOTY25.
(Stars & Nebulae category.)
Sony Pictures Classics Feb 10, 2022 Jazz Tangcay, Senior Artisans Editor at Variety, moderates a conversation with The Who We Are Project founder Jeffery Robinson, and WHO WE ARE: A CHRONICLE OF RACISM IN AMERICA directors Sarah Kunstler & Emily Kunstler.
| Marianne Williamson May 2, 2026 |
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass/ Heritage Art/ artist unknown
Just as Roman society had already begun to crumble before the barbarians ever reached their gates, so America was on the path of dying empire before Donald Trump reached ours. So many sectors of American civilization – and so many of us, I’m afraid – had compromised our principles, our ethics, even our decency too often and too completely, for years. Tiny lies, tiny vulgarities on the part of individuals as well as institutions became cultural norms. Things that seemed perhaps like unimportant compromises with our own integrity, easy enough to gloss over, became features rather than glitches in how we did business, even inhabited our personal relationships. In the quantum field out of which this moment emerged, there’s no difference between a lying lover and a lying corporation.
Thus weakened morally, we became politically vulnerable. The problem wasn’t just that Trump prevailed. It’s that he found it to be so damn easy. He got to the gates and he broke them open. In ways tough to admit, it wasn’t that hard. He and his minions are raping and pillaging even as we speak, and they’ve only just gotten started. They won’t be done until every Black person, woman, immigrant and non-Christian is put back in their place – you know, that place below, acquiescent, compliant, subservient, less vocal. The worst thing is, the people behind all this actually think that will be for the best. That’s how evil this phenomenon is.
The vision of the New Barbarians is everything the founding of the United States is not. Their efforts are a direct attack upon a society in which we are true to the idea that “All men are created equal.”
That sentence is not simply that we’ve decided to create a society in which all men are treated equally. It’s a statement that we will treat all men equally because we were created that way. To our Founders that meant everything, and it should mean everything to us. The sentence is a spiritual creed, not just a political agreement. And only a devotion to that creed will empower us to prevail against the barbaric forces at work in our modern politics.
Unless We the People reclaim for ourselves the radicalism of our Founding vision – that all men are endowed by our Creator with unalienable Rights, and governments are instituted to secure those rights – then everyone from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Russell Vought to Donald Trump and the rest of them will be successful at demolishing it. To them, those principles are just meaningless nonsense; it’s up to us whether they will be meaningless to us. It was so obvious when Terry Moran asked Donald Trump what the Declaration of Independence meant to him, the President responded, “Well, it means exactly what it says… it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot.” It was glaringly obvious he had never read it.
Now that we are where we are, what matters is not who Trump is but who we are. The Declaration of Independence is America’s mission statement, and what matters is whether you and I understand it. When enough of us reclaim its vision, deeply, in our hearts, then we will have the power to push back the barbarians. But not before. Why? Because that document is not just a statement of politics, it’s a statement of moral force. It transmits more than information; it transmits power. And we need that power to nourish us now. Shouting about what the Constitution says, without claiming the emotional and spiritual power of the Declaration, ultimately gets us nowhere. Elected officials and legal experts shouting at the modern barbarians every time they trample on our Constitution, “You can’t do that here! It’s against the law!” is not enough to save us. Quite simply, the barbarians don’t care that they’re trampling on the Constitution. That’s exactly what they’re here to do.
The Founders’ task, as they saw it, was to create a government that would reflect divine universal law – not just British law. They referred to “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as having entitled us to our freedom, therefore our rights are not granted by the government. Governments are instituted to secure the rights already granted to us by Nature’s God. Government derives its just power from the consent of the governed, as expressed through representative electoral processes outlined in our Constitution. If and when government does not secure our rights, We the People have the right to alter or abolish it. The Constitution is politically brilliant; the Declaration is morally profound. The Declaration, like the Constitution written eleven years later, was radical in 1776 and it is radical today.
Abraham Lincoln did not expect to win a second term. With the Civil War dragging into its fourth year and almost half a million Americans already killed, he couldn’t blame Northern voters for having had enough. He expected a huge majority would agree with his opponent, General George McClellan, that it was time to make a deal with the South; why should their husbands, sons and fathers have to die just because someone else owned slaves? If they wanted to go, went the argument, let them go. Negotiate an end to the war and start again as two neighboring countries, one slave- owning and one not.
Lincoln stood his ground however, with a platform calling for the South’s unconditional surrender and the abolition of slavery. He did so not only to preserve the union, but to stand by what he saw as the moral raison d’etre of the war: the principles of the Declaration of Independence. If you’ve never read his Second Inaugural Address or haven’t read it recently, do so now and it will rip you open.
To him, whether this country would abandon the principles of the Declaration was the crux of his generation’s political struggle. It was their struggle then, and it is ours now. To Lincoln, if all men are created equal, entitled by their Creator to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then slavery must not be allowed to exist. The Confederate states had no plans to contain the institution of slavery within their own borders, by the way; their plan was for a huge slave-owning empire that would stretch not only across this continent but would include large swaths of Latin America as well. For millions who had never owned or traded slaves – who had lost their own loved ones in this most hideous war – to then vote for Lincoln on the strength of that moral argument, remains a staggering testament to their greatness as well as to his.
My mother used to tell me, “Growing old is not for sissies.” And neither is saving a country. We cannot, and must not, allow the political rupture of our own time to devolve into a second Civil War. Yet we must stand up as bravely as our ancestors did – true nonviolent struggle takes courage too – if we’re to preserve the principles on which we purport to stand. We have never fully actualized those principles, but from Abolition to Women’s Suffrage to the Civil Rights movement, at times we have made great strides. It is the job of every generation to seek to “create a more perfect union.” In our time, unfortunately, we are literally slipping backwards. There are those among us, barbarians in business suits, who have no use for our Founding principles – they find them inconvenient to their purposes, mocking what they see to be their quaintness and inefficiency. It’s up to us whether or not we will join the barbarians, or care so little to stand up to them that they’ll continue over the next three years to march like Hitler through the Rhineland.
Our Founders didn’t underestimate the dangers that King George’s authoritarianism posed to their rights as free people; we shouldn’t underestimate the dangers that the new crowd of American authoritarians poses to ours. Our biggest mistake in the years leading up to this was a toxic form of complacency; our biggest mistake today is if we choose to be naive.
Story by Joshua McElwee
• 4d • (MSN.com)
Pope Leo XIV leads a Holy Mass with priestly ordinations in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, April 26, 2026. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/File Photo© Thomson Reuters
By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY, April 27 (Reuters) – Pope Leo’s four-nation Africa tour featured firm denunciations by the pontiff of despotism and war and also unprecedented attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump that grabbed headlines.
But a smaller moment, in which the pope said the Catholic Church should prioritise questions of inequality and justice over those of sexual ethics, may prove to be of longer-lasting importance for the Church’s 1.4 billion members, said experts.
“The unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters,” Leo, the first U.S. pope, said in a press conference on his flight home on Thursday.
“I believe there are much greater and more important issues such as justice, equality… that would all take priority before that particular issue,” he said.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of Dignity USA, a group that supports LGBTQ Catholics, called the pope’s remarks “a very significant and overdue reorientation of priorities”.
Priests and bishops in the global Church have long emphasised as high priorities its teachings on sexual issues, including its bans on abortion, birth control and same-sex marriage.
On his first trip to Africa in 2009, the late Pope Benedict XVI sparked an international outcry when he said the Church could not relax its ban on Catholics using condoms, even to help fight the transmission of HIV/AIDS.
Related video: The pope who tried to change the church (Tom Nicholas)
Nos acompañan en la noticia de que, lamentablemente, el Papa
Benedict said allowing condoms would only “increase the problem” ethically.
POPE’S APPROACH SEEN AS NEW FOR GLOBAL CHURCH
Leo made his comments on Thursday in response to a question about the Church offering blessings for same-sex couples.
He said he supported a landmark 2023 decision by the late Pope Francis allowing pastors to give blessings to same-sex couples informally, outside of a ritual service, and on a case-by-case basis.
But Leo said he wanted to prioritise other ethical questions and did not want the blessings to be formalised further.
“To go beyond that today, I think that the topic can cause more disunity than unity,” said the 70-year-old pontiff.
Rev. James Keenan, an academic at Boston College, called Leo’s approach new for the global Church.
The pope is “stating that the Vatican has a hierarchy of concerns and the perception that matters of sexuality have singular priority of place is not the case,” said Keenan, a Jesuit priest who founded a global network of Catholic academics focused on ethical issues.
“This is clearly a prudential judgment by the pontiff… that issues of blessing gay marriage ought not eclipse more immediate challenges of dictatorships and war,” said Keenan.
The Catholic Church teaches that sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are sinful. It says people with same-sex attractions should try to be chaste.
LEO’S ‘WHO AM I TO JUDGE’ MOMENT
Francis, who led the Church for 12 years until his death last April, largely also sought to emphasise the Church’s teachings on justice issues.
Asked in 2013 about rumours surrounding a priest working at the Vatican being gay, Francis famously responded: “If a person is gay and is seeking the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge them?”
Those remarks, signalling unprecedented openness from a pope toward LGBTQ Catholics, became a seminal moment in Francis’ tenure, quoted widely and printed on merchandise and T-shirts.
“This seems like Leo’s ‘Who am I to judge?’ moment,” said David Gibson, a Vatican expert and academic at Fordham University, about Leo’s Thursday remarks.
“(Leo) is about peace and justice and sees those moral teachings as equally important as sexual ethics,” said Gibson.
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, another group that supports LGBTQ Catholics, praised Leo’s response.
“He listed other matters, more social matters — justice, equality, freedom — as being of greater moral concern,” said DeBernardo. “For years, Catholic advocates for LGBTQ+ people have been saying the same thing.”
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee Editing by Gareth Jones)
The star-studded event celebrated achievements by the world’s top scientists in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics.
By Ashley Lan
April 30, 2026 (hollywoodreporter.com)
On Saturday, April 18, the world’s leading scientists and mathematicians joined Hollywood’s top stars in Los Angeles for the 12th annual Breakthrough Prize awards—often referred to as the “Oscars of Science”—to celebrate landmark scientific advancements and the people who make them possible.
Founded in 2012 by tech giants Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Julia & Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, the Breakthrough Prize was created to honor the achievements of the world’s top scientists, awarding approximately $15 million annually in prizes. In 2026, six Breakthrough Prizes of $3 million each were presented in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics—bringing the cumulative amount awarded over its 15-year history to $345 million.
The annual ceremony was a star-studded affair that put science in the spotlight. Actor and Emmy Award winner James Corden returned for the fifth time to host the evening, with legends like Gigi Hadid, Lily Collins, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Hanks (who shared a video tribute to the late astronaut Jim Lovell, whom he portrayed in Apollo 13) presenting awards and offering remarks throughout. Other newer names that have been generating buzz all year were also in attendance, like Olympic freestyle skier and model Eileen Gu, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, and Waymo CEO Tekedra Mawakana.
Academy Award-winning actors Octavia Spencer and Sean Penn kicked things off by awarding the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences to Stuart H. Orkin and Swee Lay Thein for research that transformed sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable conditions to treatable ones through gene editing therapy. As she accepted the award, Thein poignantly shared, “As a kid playing on old railway tracks in Malaysia, I never dreamed that I would be here today.”
In Life Sciences, Katherine A. High and husband-and-wife team Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire were recognized for developing the first FDA-approved gene replacement therapy that has restored sight to patients born with Leber congenital amaurosis—a rare inherited retinal disease that typically leads to total blindness in early adulthood. And further prizes were presented to Rosa Rademakers and Bryan Traynor for independently discovering the most common genetic cause of both ALS and frontotemporal dementia—a repeat expansion mutation in the C9orf72 gene.
During the presentation, scientist-physician Yentli Soto Albrecht—who carries the very gene mutation Rademakers and Traynor identified—took the stage in a moving speech and spoke of her father who passed away from ALS: “My dad and I share a genetic fate, but I’m changing my future,” she said. “The scientists honored here tonight discovered our genetic mutation. They mapped the battlefield; now we can wage the war.”
Notably, Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu and five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen also honored Anthony Hyman and Clifford Brangwynne with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for their groundbreaking discovery of a new fundamental mechanism of cellular organization. The prize was actually awarded in 2023, but the duo was unable to appear at the ceremony due to the COVID-19 pandemic and accepted it this year.
Prizes in Fundamental Physics were awarded to the Muon g–2 Collaborations at CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab, recognizing decades of work by scientists around the world who pushed experimental precision to extraordinary levels in measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon—a key test for undiscovered particles and forces. During the presentation, a ballerina suddenly appeared on stage, spinning and circling, offering a creative manifestation of muon’s spinning magnetic moment.
Breakthrough Prize co-founder Yuri Milner and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize, a brand-new physics prize that recognizes women physicists who have recently completed their doctorates and are already making important scientific contributions. Named after astronomer Vera Rubin, who discovered core evidence for dark matter, this year’s inaugural prize was awarded to Carolina Figuerido, who has already revealed hidden relations among quantum field theories.
As the final award in Fundamental Physics, award-winning actresses Michelle Williams and Lily Collins shared the story of Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics winner David J. Gross, underscoring his intellectual family life, discovery of Einstein’s book on physics, and subsequent six decades of significant contributions. While receiving his prize, Gross spoke about how, through the journey of theoretical physics, “Scientific discovery, once revealed, belongs to humanity forever—and challenges us to use it wisely.”
The sole Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics went to Frank Merle for his transformative work on nonlinear evolution equations—the mathematical descriptions of how waves, fluids, and other dynamic systems change over time. Merle’s insights overturned fundamental assumptions in the field, including the surprising discovery that equations long thought to be stable can, in fact, blow up in finite time.
Throughout the night, the ceremony also featured impressive music performances by Grammy winner Lionel Richie, who performed his global hit “We Are the World” alongside a choir of children in attendance, and soprano Renée Fleming, who sang “Hallelujah” accompanied by composer and pianist Billy Childs as a tribute to the great scientists who passed over the last year. Pop icons David Guetta and Ava Max then closed the show with a rendition of “Forever Young” as all the Breakthrough Prize laureates took the stage for one final standing ovation, drawing the scintillating evening to an exuberant close.
(Contributed by Calvin Harris, H.W., M.)
Rilke in 1900
“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. Wikipedia
Born December 4, 1875, Prague, Czechia
Died December 29, 1926 (age 51 years), Montreux, Switzerland
Published: April 30, 2026 (TheOnion.com)
HONOLULU—Cackling wildly as He willed the barnyard fowl into existence, a drunk God Almighty, Supreme Leader of the Universe, reportedly made a few dozen roosters materialize Thursday over a random point in the Pacific Ocean. “Yo, Gabriel, check this shit out!” the wasted Creator of All Things said while jostling the archangel on the shoulder and pointing at the birds struggling in the waves below. “Look at all these fucking birds I got. Can’t fly to shore, so what you gonna do? Come on, look at this shit. Look, they’re all splashing and squawking like motherfuckers. Should I put ’em in a volcano or something? Maybe I’ll materialize a couple orcas for good measure. Or wait—what about a whirlpool? Damn, I don’t think I’ve had this much fun since the flood!” At press time, reports confirmed God was throwing down an extra large rooster to make as big of a splash as possible.
Campus student groups organized a candlelight vigil with more than 100 attendees on Sproul Plaza on Tuesday evening to honor those killed during the Feb. 28 missile strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran.
U.S. military investigators found the United States were likely responsible for the attack that killed about 168 people, including 110 students.
“The difficulty in having a candlelight vigil is that you hope that it will stop,” said ethnic studies lecturer Hatem Bazian. “But unfortunately, as we’re seeing the development around the world, it doesn’t look like there is any stopping anytime soon.”
Vigil organizers displayed poster boards featuring poetry and photos of the school and those killed in the strike. A projector played a video of Josephine Guilbeau, a former U.S. Army counterterrorism officer, in which she alleged the U.S. strike constituted a war crime. Following Guilbeau’s speech, the projector also played home videos of the children who were killed.
A member of UC Berkeley’s Ahlul Bayt Student Association, who requested anonymity because of fear of retribution, said it took about two weeks to organize the event.
“I’m a graduating senior right now, and seeing these backpacks with red blood on them or these innocent faces, I can’t help but think that I’m so privileged to be able to experience my education at a university,” the member said.
Maryam Farahmand-Asil, UC Berkeley alumna and assistant professor at Northeastern University, first approached Ahlul Bayt Student Association and other student groups to organize the event.
Farahmand-Asil had been planning the event for more than a month with the intention to raise campus awareness of the missile strike.
“About 168 students were killed on a strike in just one day, during school time — they didn’t know that the war happened,” Farahand-Asil said. “We want to raise awareness to all the students … So when they see what’s happened, they just search and they see how they can help.”
Another student group that helped organize the event was the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
A member of SJP, who requested anonymity because of fear of retribution, highlighted Sproul as a “great and accessible space” to hold the vigil.
Fateme D. Montazeri, a scholar at campus’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, said she connected with the event on a personal level.
“I have long followed violence in the Middle East, but this one reached me differently,” Montazeri said. “Was it because the children of Minab spoke my mother tongue? … For the first time, I could not maintain the distance between what I knew and what I felt.”
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what seems to be truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth. It is not an effort to change, alter or heal anything other than our consciousness.
The claims in a Translation should be outrageous and mind-blowing, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore perfect. I think, therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, I cannot be outside of all that is, therefore I, being, am Truth. Since I being am Truth therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore I, being, am total, whole, complete, perfect. Since I am Truth and since I am mind (self-evident), therefore truth is Mind. (Two things being equal to a third thing are equal to each other.)
2) Inflammation is programmed to detect foreigners or dangers or injuries to the body, sometimes foreigners or dangers or injuries long past.
Word-tracking:
inflammation: white blood cells sort of like policemen or guards
foreign: strange, outside, outsider
danger: power, jurisdiction, master or a lord (etymology)
jurisdiction: “I say what’s right.”
lord: person with power
injury: wrong, injustice, insult (to jump on)
past: already occurred, beyond in time, space, or range
body: the totality of something as in the body of work
3) Truth being all has no limit, therefore there is nothing beyond Truth in time, space, or range. Therefore Truth has no past tense OR Truth is the limitless present. Truth being all that is, there can be no power other than all that is, therefore Truth is the only Lord. Truth being the only Lord is therefore the only power, jurisdiction, or master. Truth being all that is, there is nothing foreign in Truth, therefore Truth is all domestic OR Truth is at home everywhere. Since Truth is the only power, therefore Truth is the only jurisdiction. Therefore Truth is the only authority to say what’s right. Since Truth is true, therefore right, therefore there is no injustice, injury or wrong in Truth. Therefore Truth is justice and that which is not justice is not so. Therefore Justice is all that is. Since justice is all that is, there is no need to guard against injustice or injury, therefore there is no inflammation in truth. Truth being all that is and therefore one, therefore the only body is the infinite body of Truth.
4) Truth has no past tense OR Truth is the limitless present.
Truth is the only Lord.
Truth is the only power, jurisdiction, or master.
Truth is all domestic OR Truth is at home everywhere.
Truth is the only jurisdiction.
Truth is the only authority to say what’s right.
Truth is justice.
Justice is all that is.
There is no inflammation in truth.
The only body is the infinite body of Truth.
5) The infinite body of Truth is Lord, the only power, jurisdiction or master, at home everywhere.
For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.
Weekly Invitational Translation Group invites your participation. If you would like to submit a Translation on any subject, feel free to send your weekly Translation to zonta1111@aol.com and we will anonymously post it on the Bathtub Bulletin on Friday.
Or, if you have taken Translation class, join us each Saturday for Translation Saturday Meeting at 11 a.m. Pacific time for current, up-to-the-minute Translations on the issues of the day. Email zonta1111@aol.com for the Zoom link.
