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Jester on Muni, San Francisco, February 2026 (ZontaPhotos.com)
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Michael Moore Apr 7, 2026 A scene from Michael Moore’s 2018 film, “Fahrenheit 11/9.” This sequence maps the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany onto the rise of fascism in the United States.
The Independent Apr 7, 2026 Pope Leo has said threats against the population of Iran are “unacceptable”, in an unusual appeal hours after President Trump’s latest threat shocked world leaders. Leo, an outspoken critic of the war, called on citizens across the world to contact their political representatives and ask them to bring the expanding regional conflict to an end. Watch more on Independent TV: https://tinyurl.com/yc7ukx9n
5 hours ago (BBC.com)
Greg Brosnan, BBC Climate and Science team
‘Earthset’
Nasa has released the first photographs taken by the Artemis II astronauts during their fly-by of the Moon.
The first image, above, shows an ‘Earthset’ as the astronauts glimpsed our home planet peeking out beyond a cratered lunar landscape.
The second photograph, below, shows the spectacular solar eclipse to which the astronauts were treated as the Moon blocked out the Sun.
Nasa did not say which of the astronauts, who are on their return journey to Earth after the fly-by, took the photographs.
The Earthset photo carried echoes of the famous Earthrise photograph taken by Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8 in 1968 in the moon fly-by that preceded the historic first human landing the following year.
The view of a vulnerable blue planet against the background of the depths of space is still seen as one of the most iconic environmental photographs ever taken.
The astronauts took the photos during a six-hour flyby, including a period of radio silence when their capsule was behind the Moon.
Nasa said in its description that the Earthrise photograph was captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 18:41Eastern Daylight Time (2341BST) on Monday.
“The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region,” Nasa said.
“In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation.’
For the astronauts, seeing a lunar eclipse as the Moon blocked out the Sun was a highlight, even on this extraordinary trip.
In the photo above, the Sun’s corona can be seen around the Moon’s edge. Solar eclipses are fleetingly brief when seen from Earth, but because of Orion’s proximity to the Moon, the astronauts enjoyed nearly 54 minutes of totality, Nasa said.
The bright spot to the left of the frame is Venus.
Victor Glover described the eclipse as “sci-fi” and “unreal”, also describing the view of the corona of the Sun.
“This continues to be unreal,” he said. “The Sun has gone behind the Moon and the corona is still visible, and it’s bright and creates a halo almost around the entire moon.
“The Earth is so bright out there and the Moon is just hanging in front of us.”
While satellite photographs have been taken of the Moon’s far side in the nearly five decades since the last human landing in 1972, Nasa said that the astronauts seeing it with their own eyes during the flyby was invaluable.
The crew recorded audio descriptions of what they were seeing, and Nasa’s scientists will be poring over these notes for new information.
The following photograph shows Earthrise as our planet came back into the astronauts’ view after their time behind the Moon.
(Image from X.com)
By Mahmoud Shabestari
The Universe: His wine cellar;
the atom’s heart: His measuring cup.
Intellect is drunk, earth drunk, sky drunk
heaven perplexed with Him, restlessly seeking,
Love in its heart, hoping at least
for a single whiff of the fragrance
of that wine, that clear wine the angels drank
from that immaterial pot, a sip of the dregs-
the rest poured out upon the dust:
one sip, and the Elements whirl in drunken dance
falling now into water, now in blazing fire.
And from the smell of that spilled cup
man rises from the dust and soars to heaven.
Mahmoud Shabestari or Mahmūd Shabestarī is one of the most celebrated Persian Sufi poets of the 14th century.
Source: Wikipedia
(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 5, 2026 Arthur Versluis is Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. Among his many books are Platonic Mysticism, American Gurus, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism, The New Inquisitions: Heretic-hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition; and American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. He is the editor of JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism. He is the founding president of Hieros, a nonprofit focused on spirituality and cultural renewal. His newest book, the topic of our interview, is Alchemical Lightwork: A Guide to Creating Cultures of Light and Spiritual Awakening. Arthur explores how alchemical traditions—understood as processes of inner, relational, and cultural transformation—can guide the regeneration of society during times of instability. Drawing from Christian theosophy, Hermeticism, and Tibetan Buddhism, he reframes “light work” as a grounded, symbolic practice rooted in natural stages of consciousness and spiritual development. Versluis points toward decentralized, spiritually attuned communities as the foundation for future cultures of renewal and balance. 00:00:00 Introduction: Arthur Versluis and alchemical lightwork 00:05:02 Cultural collapse and regeneration through alchemy 00:07:30 Mysticism beyond institutional religion 00:10:18 Three forms of alchemy explained 00:14:20 Symbolism and the emerald tablet 00:17:46 Lightwork redefined through tradition 00:23:23 Stages of transformation and the spiral path 00:30:29 Decentralized communities and cultural renewal 00:49:03 Conclusion (Recorded on March 13, 2026)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 6, 2026 Philosophy Michael Grosso, PhD, is author of The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation. He also edited and wrote commentary for Wings of Ecstasy: Dominico Bernini’s Vita of St. Joseph of Copertino (1722). His other books include The Millennium Myth: Love and Death at the End of Time, Final Choice: Death or Transcendence?, Soulmaking: Uncommon Paths to Self Understanding and Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. In this rebooted video, he acknowledges that the term “Mind At Large” originated with Aldous Huxley, who employed it to explain the many phenomena experienced under the influence of the psychedelic drug, mescaline. Grosso points out that it also offers a working explanation for the empirical data of parapsychology, as well as the many documented reports concerning religious miracles. He points out that Mind At Large differs from the concept of a deity. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on September 18, 2020)
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los Cachuchas for the pointed cloth caps they wore in defiance of the era’s restrictive dress code, both became each other’s first love. Alejandro was on the bus with Frida that fateful late-summer day shortly after her eighteenth birthday when a tram collision killed several other passengers and left her so severely injured — her pelvis fractured, her stomach and uterus punctured by a rail, her spine broken in three places and her leg in eleven — that the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital did not think she could be saved. It was Alejandro’s unrelenting insistence that made them try. Against all odds, Frida lived — but her life was irrevocably changed. How she coped with what she had to live through in turn changed the history of art.
Her letters to Alejandro, collected in the altogether stirring volume Frida Kahlo: Love Letters (public library) edited by Suzanne Barbezat, offer a rare glimpse of her becoming — as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.
From the outset, her letters command and caress at the same time. “Write to me often and long, the longer the better,” she urges him in one. “On Saturday I’ll bring your sweater, your books and a lot of violets,” she tells him in another. She takes love as seriously as it ought to be taken but also knows it dies without play: “Sorry about constantly repeating the word ‘love’ five times in a row, but it’s just that I’m very silly.” She signs herself “your pretty girl (monkey face),” “your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like,” “your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife).” (It starts so early, that trembling gamble of the heart by which a person tries to discern what they mean to another.) Over and over, she offers glimpses into her uncommon inner world. In a letter penned the summer she turned seventeen, after some arrangements for how they can see each other — Frida’s parents disapproved of the relationship — she writes:
Now I’m going to read Salambo until half past 10, it’s 8 o’clock now, and then the Bible in three volumes and, finally, think for a while about huge scientific problems and then go to bed, and sleep until half past 7 in the morning, eh? Until tomorrow, may we have a good night and may we both think that great friends must love each other very, very much, much, much, much, much, mucho . . . with “m” for music or for “mundo.”
A month later, she offers that lovely unasked assurance that makes a fragile young love feel safe and solid:
And then, beneath a drawing, she adds:
I love you very much.
Your pretty girl (monkey face)
On Christmas Day, she tells him:
[…]
You must like easy things… I would like to be even easier, a tiny little thing that you could just carry in your pocket always, always… Alex, write to me often and even if it’s not true, tell me that you care for me a lot and that you can’t live without me…
Your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like
Frieda
Punctuating the teenage ardor is the stuff of life — she tells him about taking classes in shorthand and typing so as not to waste money on paying the telegraph operator, tells him about applying for a job at the Education Library for four pesos an hour, tells him about her material and domestic struggles, but always places him above all else. When he gets sick, she writes to him:
She couldn’t have known, in comforting him through his minor ailment, that only a few months later her own embodiment would be pushed to the brink of mortality. Twenty-five days after the accident, bedridden at the hospital where her mother had only visited her twice and her father once, she writes in a letter adorned with a drawing of skull and bones:
On the eve of her discharge, she writes:
But rather than revival, she entered a long convalescence, confined to bed and savaged by pain in every region of her body as both of her parents fell seriously ill. Six weeks into her confinement, just after her mother had a seizure, she writes to Alejandro:
Alejandro remained by her side for more than a year into her convalescence, then left for Europe in the early spring of 1927. In her passionate dispatches, she never minimized her pain, but she never let it dominate her stubborn will for life.
Self Portrait with Velvet Dress, 1926.
Four months into their separation, having just completed one of her tenderest self-portraits, she writes:
Two weeks later, amidst worries about having enough money for another X-ray, she writes:
[…]
Your Frieda
(I adore you)
Seven months into Alejandro’s absence, she names the terror of abandonment trembling in every lover’s heart even in the closest proximity, for between two people there is always an ocean in which to meet or drown:
You haven’t forgotten me?
It would almost be unfair, don’t you think?
She had first voiced this fear a season earlier, writing to him at the peak of summer:
But he did. Alejandro broke off the relationship shortly after returning to Mexico that autumn. Frida may have intuited it, but she was not prepared, the way we never really are even for the blows we feel coming. Barely twenty, her body shattered and her heart broken, she found herself reeling with that most difficult, most eternal question: Where does love go when it goes?
It went where it always goes — into the totality of her person. We make everything we make with everything we are, everything we have touched that has touched us back in that tender and terrifying contact with life we call experience.
Portrait of Alejandro Gómez Arias, 1928.
Several months later, Frida completed a portrait of Alejandro looking plaintive, almost fragile, and inscribed it at the top:
Frida did not live another thirty years. But this young love that had shaped her life, possibly saved it, pulsates beneath every painting she ever painted to tell the centuries what it is like to be alive, with all the pain and passion of it — an inextinguishable reminder that every love we have ever loved, every loss we have ever suffered, becomes part of us, part of what we have to give; for, in the end, how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are.
Against the morphological backdrop of the rest of nature, a giant pink bird on stilts sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll’s imagination. And yet flamingos came out of evolution’s laboratory, surprising and inevitable as the neocortex, so extravagant in their improbability that a group of them is called a flamboyance.
But the flamboyance of flamingos does not come from within — it is acquired the way experience and life-history color a person. The story of how pink traveled from volcanos to wings is the story of life on Earth, the beauty of it and the bewilderment of it, forever defying and dismantling the categories in which we try to contain it.
Art by Marije Tolman from The Treehouse
When Carl Linnaeus laid the foundation of biological nomenclature in 1735, he divided the living world into two categories: Regnum Animale (the “animal kingdom”) and Regnum Vegetabile (the “vegetable kingdom”). Although microscopes had existed for more than a century, he excluded single-celled organisms, unsure where to place them. (It is the nature of the human animal to dismiss and negate what it cannot classify.) More than a century later, the year he coined the word ecology, the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a third category for microscopic organisms, which he called Protista — “the kingdom of primitive forms.” (Haeckel was so bewildered by the multifariousness and complexity of fungi, which defy our basic intuitions about life, that he kept moving them between Plantae and Protista, finally settling them in the latter; it would be another century until they were given their very own kingdom or, in the more representative term of mycologist Giuliana Furci, “kindom.”)
Ernst Haeckel’s kingdoms of life, 1866.
Pulsating beneath all these distinctions was the fundamental assumption that all organisms are either eukaryotes, ranging from the unicellular paramecium to the immense blue whale, or prokaryotes — bacteria and all remaining microscopic life-forms.
But then, in 1977, as the Voyager sailed into space carrying the Golden Record meant to represent life on our Pale Blue Dot, the microbiologist and biophysicist Carl Woese made a startling discovery — the tiny organisms found in volcanic hot springs, whose ribosomal DNA sequences he was investigating, turned out to be a wholly different microbial life-form sharing as little with bacteria as it did with eukaryotes. He called it Archaea. Suddenly, the tree of life had a third branch.
Aerial image of Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring.
Born with grey plumage, flamingos spend the first years of their life feasting almost exclusively on brine shrimp — aquatic crustaceans that in turn feast almost exclusively on organisms containing the same carotenoid pigments that remain in autumn leaves when chlorophyll falls away. Haloarchaea — extremophile Archaea that thrive in hypersaline environments — are a chief source of these carotenoids in shrimp. (They are also why Himalayan salt is pink.) Unperturbed by the unremitting sun exposure of open water, these tiny titans of survival protect their DNA from UV radiation by synthesizing a red carotenoid that makes its way across the metabolic Rube Goldberg machine into the feathers of flamingos.
It is not simply that flamingos metabolize archaea, digesting them to turn their pigments into plumage coloration — modern molecular analysis reveals that archaea still live intact in the feathers of flamingos, perhaps the way our own past moves through us, lives in us, colors our present with the hue of something deeper than memory, something shimmering with the mystery of what makes life alive.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
We spend our lives searching for portals to the possible. They are rarely gates swung open for us by some great hand. Often, they are where we least expect them — in the chance encounter, in the small unconscious choice, at an inconvenient moment, in a quiet corner of the quotidian. Oftener still, they are the cracks where we have broken — broken the story, broken the ego, broken the pattern. If we are attentive enough and present enough, the shy light of curiosity is enough to begin widening these openings enough to glimpse the other side, to believe there is an other side. Courage is a species of curiosity, bravery a species of belief. The hand through the crevice. The foot across the threshold. And suddenly, where there was nothing, there is something — that first opening into the possibility of everything.
That, at least, is what I think of as I read this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:
by Hannah FriesIn the hollowed-out heartwood of an old tree.
In a jagged eggshell’s translucent blue.
Between bars,
between bombs,
between blows.In the blossom’s chamber where the squash bee sleeps.
In the spiral cupped by the calcium shell.
Between sirens,
between slaughters,
between famine’s last grains.In the great choral breath before Händel’s amen.
In the time-machine swirl of stone.
Beyond our blindness, the fabric
that holds sun and
sun and sun.The pupil’s black hole.
Garden scent of the fresh-dug grave.
The hand’s open palm.Not in the flesh, but the wound.