New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Mar 10, 2026 C. Michael Smith is a clinical psychologist and medical anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Theological Seminary, and the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He has taught and lectured internationally on Jungian psychology, shamanism, and spiritual integration. Dr. Smith is founder and director of the Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies in the USA, France, Belgium, and South Africa, and author of Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue and Psychotherapy and the Sacred. In this conversation Michael explores the multifaceted nature of awakening, emphasizing that it is not a singular event but a continuous journey involving integration, discernment, and the embodiment of compassion. He discusses the importance of the heart as a guiding force, the necessity of facing darkness, and the role of creativity in expressing our true nature. He highlights the significance of daily practices in maintaining a connection to the divine and the ongoing effort required to actualize our spiritual potential. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:05:17 Awakening and the challenge of embodied realization 00:17:33 Integrating and embodying the divine 00:25:56 The heart is the knower 00:33:00 Digestion & integration: nervous system, shadow, sangha, daily practice 00:37:07 Discernment is essential 00:42:13 The felt sense as guidance, somatic integration and creativity 00:50:34 Using the mind in service to the soul callings 00:54:46 Jung, dreams and dropping into the depths 01:01:27 Navigating collective shadows and raw evil 01:18:18 Impermanence, practicing neutrality and compassion 01:23:26 Actualizing spiritual realization in daily life 01:31:03 Final thoughts New Thinking Allowed Guest Host Leanne Whitney, PhD, is a depth psychologist and transformational coach based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the author of Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali and currently serves as Executive Director of Center for Transformation and Integration. Her website is https://leannewhitney.com To learn about Leanne Whitney’s upcoming Transformational Coaching Certification Course with an emphasis in Somatic Integration Therapy, please visit: https://transformationandintegration…. Producer: Elena McNally Editor: John Hartmann (Recorded on February 13, 2026)   To order Consciousness in Jung and Patañjali by Leanne Whitney, go to: https://amzn.to/2QY3tS2   To order Jung and Shamanism In Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul/Retrieving the Sacred by C Michael Smith, go to https://amzn.to/3CRXN5R

Published: February 21, 1996 (TheOnion.com)

The Bronx Zoo, long a trailblazer among the world’s zoological reserves, opened its exciting new Loitering Teens exhibit Saturday to the anticipation of zoogoers nationwide.

“They are fascinating,” said Ronald Fehgr, 51, a member of the Bronx Zoo Board of Directors and the man who lobbied hardest for the exhibit. “The public will enjoy watching them hang out and smoke in an attractive natural setting.”

The loitering teen is indigenous to many commercial areas throughout the U.S., but this is the first time they have been captured and put on display.

They are recognizable by their large Starter-brand jackets, baggy and ill-fitting pants, sullen attitudes, piercings on their bodies, and red speckled faces.

The zoo’s 13 specimens were found in urban areas, caught by big game hunters in a city-wide dragnet. Many were lured into traps with the promise of free cigarettes and spare change.

“The first few groups died in captivity,” Zoo spokesman Gerard Makhfuio says. “That’s to be expected, so we weren’t too disappointed.”

The exhibit will eventually consist of a half-block of city-like facade including an arcade, fast-food restaurant and concrete park. For now, though, the loitering teens have been placed in the former kodiak bear holding pen, in a comfortable setting of rocks, caves and small pools of potable water. Plans to place a video arcade game inside the pen as soon as possible have already been approved by the zoo board.

“They appear to be comfortable in the rocky setting, but for the most part they seem to mope around a lot,” senior zookeeper Bernard Gilks says. “When the custodians come in to clean their cages, and put on some rock music, they perk up a bit. They definitely respond to music.”

One lesson zoo officials quickly learned was not to introduce parents into the teens’ cages. When this happened, according to one eyewitness, the teens became enraged, ran around the cage, and screamed repeatedly, “you just don’t understand me,” at the top of their lungs.

Also of concern to zoo officials are the mating rituals of the teens, who appear to be awkward and ill at ease around members of the opposite sex.

“We’re hoping to get them to mate,” Makhfuio says. “But as of now, all they appear interested in is shaking zoo patrons down for change and hiding from someone known only as ‘Johnny Law.’”

Still, wax statuettes of the teens were a best-seller over the weekend, and there has been talk of opening up a petting area for other humans to interact with them on a limited basis.

If visitor numbers continue to run as high as last weekend’s total, the Loitering Teen exhibit could surpass “Women In Our Midst” as the largest attraction in San Diego Zoo history.

For many younger Americans, this is the first U.S. war in the Middle East. Here’s how we got here.

by Naomi Bethune March 9, 2026 (Prospect.org)

Why did President Donald Trump launch Operation Epic Fury? He’s provided a stream of reasons: forcing regime change; destroying Iran’s missile capabilities (to eliminate what he called “imminent threats”); “annihilating” the Iranian navy; ensuring that Iran cannot further develop nuclear weapons; and blocking Iran’s support of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

More from Naomi Bethune

Regardless of the reason—if one truly exists—such military action is at odds with Trump’s stated “America First” foreign-policy strategy, ostensibly prioritizing unilateralist and noninterventionist behavior. Trump has routinely made a point of withdrawing from prominent international treaties and organizations (the Paris climate accords and North American Free Trade Agreement) in an effort to isolate American interests.

Why, then, did Trump join Israel in going to war with Iran? What can history tell us about the possible outcomes of this decision? How can people who were born after key developments in U.S.-Iran relations in the 20th century begin to understand how we got to this moment? Young people seeking to understand the context of the Iran war will glean more from recent history than Trump’s stated reasons.

The Cold War Origins of the U.S.-Iran Relationship

In the early 1900s, the U.S. was mostly indifferent to Iran. It wasn’t until after World War II, a period in which the U.S. emerged as a global superpower, that the perspective changed. Snuffing out any hint of communism was the aim of the U.S. and its allies during the Cold War (1945–1991), a goal that led to 72 attempts to enforce regime change across the world. Most of these operations failed (in the eyes of the U.S., at least), but in Iran’s case it was successful.

Western fears of Iran embracing “communism,” and adding to the Soviet Union’s communist faction, began to rise. In 1951, Iran nationalized its oil industry, taking control of the in-country operations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum, or BP), a British enterprise that controlled a significant portion of Iran’s oil reserves. Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected prime minister in the spring of that year, and began to implement progressive social reforms.

Iran’s burgeoning evolution into a more democratic society—and its attempt to wrest away oil profits from overseas interests—led the U.S and Britain to orchestrate a coup to overthrow Mosaddegh in 1953. The CIA and the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, along with Iran’s military, overthrew Mosaddegh. Iran’s attempt to nationalize its oil industry died with the coup, and the U.S. ensured that Western companies resumed control of oil exports.

When all was said and done, U.S. companies walked away with 40 percent of Iran’s oil shares; Iran was left with an authoritarian monarch after being on the precipice of becoming a democratic state. It was the first time the U.S. had employed the CIA to depose a democratically elected government, and was used as a model for future regime change operations.

A Fraying Relationship

Between 1953 and 1977, the U.S. and Iran had a mostly cordial relationship. During the 1960s, the U.S. assisted Iran in creating its nuclear program, providing a nuclear reactor and significant amounts of enriched uranium. Iran, along with over 50 other countries, signed the original Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1968.

This was especially important in the context of the Cold War. As the nuclear arms race raged on between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—and by extension, each country’s proxies—the threat of nuclear warfare rose as well. In an effort to quell this possibility, the Non-Proliferation Treaty slotted states into two classifications: nuclear weapon states (countries that had built and tested a nuclear explosive prior to 1967) and non-nuclear weapon states. Iran is a non-nuclear signatory, joining dozens of other states that promised not to acquire nuclear weapons, while still having the right to develop “peaceful” nuclear capabilities.

The Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) changed things, and set the stage for Iran’s current political and cultural landscape. Protesters ousted the U.S.-endorsed Shah and replaced him with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As the “Supreme Ruler” of Iran, Khomeini oversaw a dramatic reshaping of Iran’s governance by turning the country into an Islamic republic. The Shah fled, requesting entry to the U.S. to receive cancer treatment. President Jimmy Carter permitted this, triggering significant outcry and increased anti-American sentiment in Iran. It also led to the Iran hostage crisis (1979–1981).

After storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran, a group of Iranian students took more than 60 Americans hostage. Backed by Khomeini, the crisis lasted 444 days as the U.S. refused to extradite the Shah, and also passed a trade embargo to apply pressure on the hostage-takers. Lengthy negotiations and one failed rescue mission later (in which eight American soldiers were killed), the hostages were released on the first day of President Ronald Reagan’s first term. It also marked the end of formal diplomatic ties between the two countries.

During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the U.S. supplied Iraq with intelligence and weapons, and built a relationship with then-leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein. At the same time, however, the Reagan administration trafficked arms and other missiles to Iran in an effort to improve relations, while also using the proceeds to fund the Contras, who were an anti-communist right-wing rebel group in Nicaragua.

This came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. Although it was a highly illegal operation (Congress had prohibited funding/collaborating with the Contras—the Boland Amendments, and a trade embargo on Iran was still in place), Reagan justified his complicity by claiming that by selling arms to Iran, he was increasing the chances that several American hostages who were being held by Hezbollah, a Lebanese paramilitary group that was supported by Iran, would be released.

In the end, only a few hostages were released, but were then replaced by more.

The “Axis of Evil”

Under President George H.W. Bush, the Iran-Iraq War ended. A few years later, the Clinton administration imposed an oil and trade embargo on business with Iran by American companies. After the September 11 attacks, newly inaugurated President George W. Bush called Iran part of the “Axis of Evil,” or Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. He accused Iran of building weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the U.S., and repressing its people. From then onward, particularly in the midst of the fruitless Iraq War, the U.S. applied pressure on Iran via covert operations.

It wasn’t until the Obama administration that the U.S. began slowly reassuming careful relations with Iran, which led to the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program, and the U.S. would lift sanctions. This was short-lived and controversial, and after the agreement took effect in 2016, Trump withdrew from it during his first term in 2018.

Enter Donald Trump

Trump’s first and second terms have been marked by an aggressive approach to the United States’ geopolitical relationship with Iran. From 2017 to 2021, he implemented multiple policy changes, including the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA, the “Muslim travel ban”—which, before being blocked by the Supreme Court, impacted Iranian citizens—and the passage of over a thousand sanctions. These sanctions are called the “maximum pressure campaign,” and were reinstated during Trump’s second term.

Multiple military actions also occurred during Trump’s first term, such as a drone strike that killed an Iranian general named Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Iran responded by striking U.S. assets, and declared that it would no longer adhere to the JCPOA’s regulations. The relationship between the U.S. and Iran became increasingly volatile, and when Trump reassumed office last year, tensions only became worse. At the same time, economic sanctions contributed to Iran’s economic deterioration last year, resulting in high inflation and massive protests around the country, brutally quashed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the country’s security forces.

In April of 2025, the U.S. and Iran attempted to negotiate a nuclear peace agreement, which went awry, ending with Israel bombing suspected Iranian military and nuclear facilities in June. During what was dubbed the “Twelve-Day War,” Israel assassinated multiple nuclear scientists, military leaders, and politicians through airstrikes that also killed several hundred civilians. The U.S. joined the conflict, striking three nuclear sites. Iran retaliated by striking Israeli territory, and later targeted U.S. military bases in the region.

A cease-fire was agreed on, but the dust didn’t clear. Iran threatened to pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. A little under a year after the Twelve-Day War, the U.S. and Israel jointly attacked Iran, killing Khamenei and beginning a new war.

What’s Next?

Polls show that the majority of Americans are not in favor of the U.S. and Israel’s strikes, and war with Iran. To some, it recalls the Iraq War, a drawn-out fiasco that led to thousands of deaths and no definite political progress in the region. It also recalls the Vietnam War, another unpopular, bloody conflict that instead of quashing the spread of communism in Asia did the exact opposite. Last winter, when the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Trump indicated that the U.S. would “run” the country, regime change did not occur. Instead, the Trump administration allowed Maduro’s vice president to assume office, and now the two countries have reportedly resumed diplomatic relations.

If the history of U.S. foreign policy has taught Americans anything, it’s that forcing regime change in order to exert control over other countries’ natural resources and people is difficult. Most of the time, it isn’t successful. It often rebounds, affecting the U.S. in ways that shift public opinion on those who hold political power, sparking protest and dissent. Understanding the possible outcomes of this new attempt to exert U.S. imperialist influence should be viewed as part of a historical pattern, not a one-off action.

Naomi Bethune

nbethune@prospect.org

Naomi Bethune is the John Lewis Writing Fellow at The American Prospect. During her time studying philosophy and public policy at UMass Boston, she edited the opinions section of The Mass Media. Prior to joining the Prospect, she interned for Boston Review and Beacon Press. More by Naomi Bethune

“Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American Essayist

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

“How can we restore support for democracy in the world?” No longer the sole concern of academics and policy wonks, questions like this are now top of mind for people everywhere who believe in the power and necessity of freedom and self-rule. Journal of Democracy cofounder Larry Diamond sees three keys to reviving the drive for and commitment to democratic government: “Power, Performance, and Legitimacy.”  To learn more, read this seminal piece along with a selection of other Journal of Democracy essays exploring the causes of — and possible solutions to — the global democratic recession.

Power, Performance, and Legitimacy Around the world, democracy has lost steam. If we are to regain the momentum, we must harness these essential elements and wage the struggle with the conviction that the times demand. Larry Diamond   Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all. Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett   Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability. Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni   Can Capitalism Save Democracy? Capitalism is often blamed for democracy’s ills. But much of the blame is misplaced. It is not business capture of the state but rather state capture of business that poses the greatest danger to democracy. Semuhi Sinanoglu, Lucan A. Way, and Steven Levitsky   How Financial Secrecy Undermines Democracy An expansive underworld of hidden wealth lies beneath the everyday economy. This stealth network of tax havens, secret trusts, and offshore accounts is weakening democratic institutions and fueling our worst enemies. Charles G. Davidson and Ben Judah   America’s Crisis of Civic Virtue The problem for democracy today is not capitalism; it is a decline in public honesty and civility. But there is an opportunity to revive our sense of national community, if we seize it. Arthur C. Brooks   In Europe, Democracy Erodes from the Right When ordinary voters are given a choice between democracy and partisan loyalty, who will put democracy first? Frighteningly, Europe harbors a deep reservoir of authoritarian potential. Milan W. Svolik, Elena Avramovska, Johanna Lutz, and Filip Milačić   When Democracy Is on the Ballot Democracy is on dangerous ground when its fundamental rules become the main point of political contention. This is where we are today. The truth is that the institutions, not just the players, need to change. Michael Ignatieff

The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Members of the press and members of Congress who wish to receive electronic access should email our managing editor. For more information, please visit our website or send us an email. Subscribe now for full access to the Journal of Democracy archives.

Image credit: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

(Image from Facebook.com)

“I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.” 

~ Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah  

Rābiʼa al-ʼAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya or Rabia Basri was a poet, one of the earliest Sufi mystics and an influential religious figure from Iraq. Wikipedia

Born713 AD, Basrah, Iraq

Died801 AD (age 88 years), Basrah, Iraq

on Mar 09, 2026 03:30 am

Andy Corbley ,  Staff Writer  –  Good News Network

Stephan: The conversion to non-carbon energy-powered vehicles is an essential step to prepare for the future, and here is a good news next step — a new kind of battery for EVs.

Samsung SDI’s solid-state battery – credit, Samsung, released

In late October, Samsung announced that it was preparing to take its long-anticipated solid-state batteries to market with a trilateral agreement between itself, BMW, and American battery expert Solid Power.

It was January of last year that industry outlets began to get some of the promises that all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) developed by Samsung SDI would bring. With an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, they’re twice as dense as conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Samsung claimed they were smaller, lighter, and safer, capable of driving 600 miles, and charging within 9 minutes. Typically, a lithium-ion battery pack in a modern EV charges from 10% to 80% in around 45 minutes, and has a limit of around 300 miles of range.

“Samsung SDI’s preparations for mass-producing next-generation products of various form factors such as an all-solid-state battery are well underway as we are set to lead the global battery market with our unrivaled ‘super-gap’ technology,” said Samsung SDI CEO Yoon-ho Choi.

ASSB cells […]

Read the Full Article »

on Mar 09, 2026 03:35 am

Michelle Z. Donahue,  Staff Writer  –  National Geographic

Stephan: I was doing some research for a paper I am writing, and came across this study, and then found a general audience article that reported it. If you have been reading SR regularly, or going to Academia.edu to read my papers, you know that for decades I have been telling you that all living beings have some measure of consciousness, that consciousness is causal and fundamental and that spacetime arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. Materialism is not so much wrong as inadequate, because it does not recognize that consciousness is fundamental. The founders of modern physics all told us that, but only a few people listened. The reason that wellbeing must become our first priority as a society, is because all consciousness is interconnected and interdependent, as this study demonstrates. The failure of American society to recognize this is why we are in the mess we are in.

A brown and yellow hoverfly rests on a dewdrop-covered evening primrose in the U.K.
Credit: MichaelGrant / Wildlife/ Alamy

Even on the quietest days, the world is full of sounds: birds chirping, wind rustling through trees, and insects humming about their business. The ears of both predator and prey are attuned to one another’s presence.

Sound is so elemental to life and survival that it prompted Tel Aviv University researcher Lilach Hadany to ask: What if it wasn’t just animals that could sense sound—what if plants could, too? The first experiments to test this hypothesis, published recently on the pre-print server bioRxiv, suggest that in at least one case, plants can hear, and it confers a real evolutionary advantage.

Hadany’s team looked at evening primroses (Oenothera drummondii) and found that within minutes of sensing vibrations from pollinators’ wings, the plants temporarily increased the concentration of sugar in their flowers’ nectar. In effect, the flowers themselves served as ears, picking up the specific frequencies of bees’ wings while tuning out irrelevant sounds like wind.

Hadany’s […]

Read the Full Article »

Ishmael

Daniel Quinn

Ishmael is such a novel, it is filled with ideals and discussion that truly leaves you feeling enlightened about the true state of our apparently advanced civilization. Once the silliness of the psychic gorilla has been disregarded, you are left with a truly astounding book that takes you on a mental journey, challenging your pre-conceived ideas and comforts that society is the great savoir of mankind when really it is a slowly acting poison, ultimately leading to oblivion. The one overriding idea in the book is that “Why should mankind claim the right to separate itself from nature?” You may find yourself with a different opinion after reading these reasoned arguments.

About the author

Daniel Quinn

I had and did the usual things — childhood, schools, universities (St. Louis, Vienna, Loyola of Chicago), then embarked on a career in publishing in Chicago. Within a few years I was the head of the Biography & Fine Arts Department of the American Peoples Encyclopedia; when that was subsumed by a larger outfit and moved to New York, I stayed behind and moved into educational publishing, beginning at Science Research Associates (a division of IBM) and ending as Editorial Director of The Society for Vision Education (a division of the Singer Corporation).

In 1977 I walked away from SVE and this very successful career when it became clear that I was not going to able to do there what I really wanted to do…which was not entirely clear. A few months later I set my feet on a path that would change my life completely. It was a path made up of books — or rather versions of a book that, after twelve years, would turn out to be ISHMAEL.

The first version, written in 1977-78, called MAN AND ALIEN, didn’t turn out to be quite what I wanted, so wrote a second, called THE GENESIS TRANSCRIPT. Like the first version, this didn’t satisfy me, so I wrote a third with the same title. THE BOOK OF NAHASH, abandoned unfinished, was the fourth version.

When I started writing version five, THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED in 1981, I was sure I’d found the book I was born to write. The versions that came before had been like rainy days with moments of sunshine. THIS was a thunderstorm, and the lines crossed my pages like flashes of lightning. When, after a few thousand words I came to a clear climax, I said, “This MUST be seen,” so I put Part One into print. Parts Two and Three followed, and I began searching for the switch that would turn on Part Four… but it just wasn’t there. What I’d done was terrific — and complete in its own way — but at last I faced the fact that the whole thing just couldn’t be done in lightning strikes.

And so, on to versions six and seven (both called ANOTHER STORY TO BE IN). I knew I was close, and version eight was it — the first and only version to be a novel and the first and only version inhabited by a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael.

ISHMAEL was a life-changing book. It began by winning the Turner Tomorrow Award, the largest prize ever given to a single literary work. It would come to be read in some 25 languages and used in classrooms from mid-school to graduate school in courses as varied as history philosophy, geography, archaeology, religion, biology, zoology, ecology, anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology.

But in 1992, when ISHMAEL was published, I had no idea what I might do next. My readers decided this for me. In letters that arrived by the bushel they demanded to know where this strange book came from, what “made” me write it. To answer these questions I wrote PROVIDENCE: THE STORY OF A FIFTY-YEAR VISION QUEST (1995).

But there were even more urgently important questions to be answered, particularly this one: “With ISHMAEL you’ve undermined the religious beliefs of a lifetime. What am I supposed to replace them with?” I replied to this with THE STORY OF B (1996).

The questions (and books) kept coming: Why did Ishmael have to die? This gave rise to MY ISHMAEL: A SEQUEL (1997), in which it’s revealed that Ishmael was not only far from being dead but far from being finished with his work as a teacher. The question “Where do we go from here?” was the inspiration for BEYOND CIVILIZATION: HUMANITY’S NEXT GREAT ADVENTURE (1999), a very different kind of book.

With these questions answered (and 500 more on my website), I felt I was fundamentally finished with what might be called my teachings and ready to move on.

I had always taken as my guiding principle these words from André Gide: “What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it.

(Goodreads.com)

(Image from AbeBooks.com)

22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals

Douglas M. Kelley

“Your Children will grow up under communism”-A prediction we scorn.

But here, in 22 cells in Nuremberg, were the men who almost made a reality of your children growing up under the Nazis.

Who were these swaggering overlord? How were they able to gather such power? Why did the German people allow the torture and the murder- Why did they condone the greatest blood-Letting in modern times?

Doctor Kelley studied and tested them all- Hess and Rosenberg and Goering-Jodl, Streicher and Ley- Hans Frank – Speer, even Hitler, Himself, through the words and beliefs of the men in the 22 cells and here, at last , we learn what caused these men to become the greatest collection of murderers in modern History.

About the author

Douglas M. Kelley

(Goodreads.com)