“The name ‘I’ or the thought ‘I am’ is like a lighthouse to a sailor on a stormy night. It indicates the place of peace, the place of safety. “
–Rupert Spira
Rupert Spira (born March 13, 1960) is an English spiritual teacher, philosopher and author of the Direct Path based in Oxford, UK. Wikipedia
― John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18,1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Wikipedia
Yes, the Sun – in fact, our whole solar system – orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We are moving at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. But even at that high rate, it still takes us about 230 million years to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way!
National Geographic • Mar 23, 2022: Where does evil come from? Morgan sets out to understand the root of evil and how our ideas of it have evolved over the millennia. Is the devil real? From the underworld of ancient Egypt to a modern-day maximum-security prison, Morgan discovers that evil might be more than a supernatural force. The birth of religion may be inextricably tied to the need to control evil.
Bringing transparency to how a vaccine becomes a vaccine, Dr. Jen Gunter breaks down research, development and testing that makes these life-saving therapeutics safe — long before they reach your local pharmacy. For more on how your body works, tune in weekly to her podcast Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter, from the TED Audio Collective.Read transcript
OB/GYN, pain medicine physician See speaker profile
Jen Gunter is on a mission to correct the misinformation and disinformation that infects online medical resources.
Detention of Voria Ghafouri, who is not part of World Cup squad, seen as warning to players in Qatar
Supported by
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor Thu 24 Nov 2022 (TheGuardian.com)
Iranian security forces on Thursday arrested one of the country’s most famous footballers, accusing him of spreading propaganda against the Islamic republic and seeking to undermine the national World Cup team.
Voria Ghafouri, a former member of the national football team and once a captain of the Tehran club Esteghlal, has been outspoken in his defence of Iranian Kurds, telling the government on social media to stop killing Kurdish people. He has previously been detained for criticising the former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif.
Iran are due to play Wales on Friday. The Iranian team has already been embroiled in controversy after failing to sing the national anthem before its game against England, and Ghafouri’s arrest is likely to be seen as a warning to the players not to repeat their protests.
He was detained after a training session with his club, Foolad Khuzestan, on charges of having “tarnished the reputation of the national team and spread propaganda against the state”, the Fars new agency said.
Other agencies said he was being charged with “insulting and intending to destroy the national football team and speaking against the regime”.
Ministers in recent days have accused Ghafouri of being a Kurdish separatist, but he replied that he would give his life for Iran. Earlier this year, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said: “Some people, who benefit from the country’s peace and security, enjoying their jobs and their favourite sports, bite the hand that feeds them,” a reference many thought was to Ghafouri.
The footballer, 35, was a member of Iran’s 2018 World Cup squad, but was surprisingly not named in the final lineup for this year’s World Cup in Qatar.
Originally from the Kurdish-populated city of Sanandaj in western Iran, Ghafouri had posted a photo on Instagram of himself in traditional Kurdish dress in the mountains of Kurdistan, but is a cult hero beyond Iran’s north-west. Sanandaj endured some of the most violent crackdowns in the protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, and Ghafouri had visited some of those injured in the protests in Mahabad.
In 2019, he distributed blue jerseys in honour of Sahar Khodayari, a woman who self-immolated after being sentenced to prison for attempting to watch an Esteghlal match at Azadi stadium. After another incident of violence against female football fans in 2021, Ghafouri wrote on Instagram: “As a soccer player, I’ve indeed become humiliated when I play in an era when our mothers and sisters are prohibited from entering stadiums.”
Many fans suggested his career at Esteghlal, a championship winning team, was cut short in June as punishment for speaking out. Others argued that in his mid-30s, Ghafouri was too old for the Iranian top flight.
He recently tweeted: “Stop killing Kurdish people!!! Kurds are Iran itself … Killing Kurds is equal to killing Iran. If you are indifferent to the killing of people, you are not an Iranian and you are not even a human being … All tribes are from Iran. Do not kill people!!!”
The Astrology Podcast • Dec 5, 2019: The second of our two part series on the significations of the houses, this time focusing on the meanings of houses 7 through 12, with astrologers Kelly Surtees, Austin Coppock, and Chris Brennan. In part 1 of our series on the significations of the twelve houses in astrology we spent a lot of time in the beginning talking about different conceptual structures underlying the meanings of the houses, whereas in this episode we just jump right in to talking about the 7th house. You can watch part 1 on houses 1 through 6 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bddnu… At the beginning of part 2 we talk a little bit about the more public nature of the houses in the upper hemisphere, as well as how the interrelationship between opposing houses starts becoming more clear from the 7th house forward.
The Astrology Podcast • Nov 27, 2019: Part 1 of our series on the meanings of the 12 houses in astrology, with astrologers Kelly Surtees, Austin Coppock, and Chris Brennan. At the beginning of the episode we review some basic conceptual structures that are necessary for understanding how the houses got their meanings, such as the concept of angularity, good and bad houses, and the planetary joys. After that beginning material is out of the way, we begin by talking about the first house and what it means within the context of natal astrology, followed by the rest in zodiacal order. We don’t really deal with the issue of house division much in this episode, since that was covered partially in a recent episode on the origins of the different forms of house division in astrology. This is the first of a two part series, and the rest of the houses will be dealt with in part 2, which should be released sometime next month. Patrons of the podcast will get early access. This is a followup to our previous episodes where we talked about the significations of the seven traditional planets, and the qualities and meanings of the zodiac signs, part 1 and part 2. This was the first episode that we recorded when we got together in Denver last week to record a bunch of episodes in person in our studio.
“The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.”
― Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Wikipedia
