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Photo: “The Beginning Is Nigh”
‘Heavily intoxicated’: Woman says Senate nominee raped her in 2021
“Jake Tapper, now an anchor at CNN, wrote a 4,200-word essay in the Washington City Paper headlined I DATED MONICA LEWINSKY. (‘I’ll get with her because I figured that behind her initial aggressiveness lurked on easy, perhaps winning, bit of no-frills hookup.’)
–Brooke Nevils, “Unspeakable Things: Silence, Shame, and the Stories We Choose to Believe”
CNN Jul 6, 2026 A woman said Monday that Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, entered her home without permission and raped her while he was heavily intoxicated nearly five years ago when they were in a casual dating relationship – an allegation Platner denies. 0:00 Jenny Racicot describes meeting Platner in 2021 2:23 Does she have political motivations for making these claims? 4:35 Jenny describes what she saw in his eyes as the alleged assault occurred 7:24 Platner seemed aware that what he was doing was wrong at times 9:11 What happened after the alleged assault Watch 24/7 live news with CNN Headlines: https://bit.ly/4eIvlTr
His Holiness Has Repeatedly Stated This Is Not A Cult
Published: October 2, 2019 (TheOnion.com)
DEATH VALLEY, CA—Commanding that the heinous term shall not be uttered in the halls of their sacred temple, the cloistered enclave of truest of the true believers declared Wednesday that Father-Brother, His Holiness, Master of All The Spheres and Stars, has repeatedly stated that this is not a cult. “For the ninth and final time, this is not a cult but a programmatic intramental polysymbolic thought-system for enhancing mental paravirility and omnispiritual psychowellness as clearly stated in Protocol 117,” said Elder Healer Sister-Brother Camilla 82 Eridani, adding that this is the exact sort of transgram-sodden thought violation from which all must refrain, as that is the type of word used by those that seek to sow division amongst us. “Ask anyone in any of these tents of purest crystal-gossamer and they’ll tell you the same truths. His Holiness, Bruce Sagittarius-A—praise be to him—has repeatedly told us this, yet your ears are nailed shut to the truthings of our stellar Father-Brother. Why is this? Why?” True believers have further decreed that offending parties shall be brought before the Angular Councillors of Purest Gold, who will hear about the evil incongruence and render swift correction.
Free Will Astrology: Week of July 9, 2026
by Rob Brezsny | July 7, 2026 (newcity.com)
Photo: George Karelitsky
ARIES (March 21-April 19): There are only two types of humans, right? Some of us serve beauty, truth and goodness, while the rest pledge their allegiance to illusions, lies and shadows. Our planet is now caught in a colossal showdown between these two sides. And it’s high time for you to align yourself with one or the other. JUST KIDDING! The truth is far messier and more interesting: Every one of us is a blend of luminosity and ignorance. And now is a perfect moment to study how those two currents move within you. When you clearly see how you contribute to the murky jumble, your commitment to love, harmony and justice will soar.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You’ll move with style and purpose if you take quick jaunts, dare gentle risks and make a few nimble leaps of faith. You’ll go awry and astray if you wander too far afield, chase swaggering adventures or try vaulting across yawning chasms. Keep it light, sharp and intuitive, Taurus. Refrain from lugging heavy emotional baggage or drifting into daydream limbo. It’ll be wise to trust your sprightly impulses, but foolish to dissect them so ruthlessly that the magic leaks out. The color amber and the number three will be your allies. Somber gray and the number four will not. Align with sly visionaries and soulful realists but sidestep bitter contrarians and nostalgic clingers.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): I swear I’m smarter in some places than in others. My intelligence soars in Barcelona, Kyoto, Aix-en-Provence, France and Florence, Italy. But I seem dull-witted in Munich, Moscow and Washington, D.C. Even in Northern California, my long-time home, some areas bring out the best in me. I feel mediocre on Valencia Street in San Francisco, for instance, whereas I’m extra wise in downtown Berkeley. Why is this? The branch of astrology known as astrocartography says that my strengths are more likely to shine in certain spots than others. In the coming weeks, Gemini, I urge you to experiment with the possibility that this may be true for you, as well. Wander far and wide. Find out where you feel most aligned with your deep, bright, genuine self.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Male humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean change their songs over the years. New phrases can spread across thousands of miles as other whales take up and transform them. Researchers don’t know why, but the pattern is clear: The whales value novelty even in their ancient rituals. They create an evolving musical tradition. Consider what this practice might suggest for your own relationship with the past, Cancerian. The memories and patterns you’re carrying don’t have to remain frozen. You can honor your history while remixing it, adding new verses and changing the key. What needs to be preserved isn’t the exact form but the living spirit.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Leo-born oceanographer Marie Tharp created the first comprehensive maps of the ocean floor. Her work was pivotal in proving theories about plate tectonics. She did much of this work in the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed aboard research vessels. She had to rely on data collected by others, never seeing the terrain she mapped. But her limitation became her advantage; distance allowed her to perceive patterns that field researchers missed. I suspect that you, too, are working with incomplete information, Leo. Does this disqualify you from drawing conclusions? No! I believe your inability to access certain details will compel you to see larger patterns. What you’re missing might be precisely what enables you to see what others can’t.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): The “problem” confronting you right now is unusual: Your vision is too sharp, your thinking too precise, and your words too unambiguous. This would usually be good news to celebrate, but at the moment it’s blocking you from noticing the subtle openings life is presenting. Those portals may only reveal themselves if you soften your intense scrutiny and call on a creative, blurry logic. It’s like how, at night, you sometimes see more clearly when you peer from the edges of your vision rather than staring straight ahead.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): This is a perfect moment to express your own unique power more than ever before. I invite you to act with conviction, assert your influence and claim what you’ve earned. For best results, clarify your ambitions and assert your authority. Write down a formal vow or two. Don’t wait for approval from anyone higher up, and don’t waste time wondering whether destiny is on your side. The succulent opportunities aren’t somewhere else or someday later. They’re here and now.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): I’m exultant when a vigorous bike ride up the trail of my local mountain leaves me so cleansed and energized that a flash of truth strikes and instantly dissipates the illusions I’ve been clinging to. I get a delightful shock when, while wandering through a city’s maze of asphalt and litter, a sudden breeze carries the earthy aroma of a rebellious garden. I love it when the reckless choices of misguided leaders jolt my community into doubling down on our quest for audacious harmony, inventive affection and untamed wisdom. How about you, dear Scorpio? Where do you search for your awakenings and salvations? Keep your inner radar tuned; they’re circling close.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might build megastructures around stars to capture their energy. These “Dyson spheres” would be detectable from Earth as unusual infrared signatures. We haven’t found any yet, but his idea revolutionized how we think about looking for alien intelligence. Moral of the story: Valuable contributions can come from inventing the framework for how to search for unknown things. In the coming weeks, Sagittarius, you might not solve problems, but you could redesign the questions. You may not find the answers, but you could create better tools for exploration.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Do you have a muse? If not, please find one. You shouldn’t go another day without a provocative, inspiring presence to stir your imagination and drive you deliciously wild. If you already have a muse and that genius has been faithfully fueling your creative fire, bestow a reward. Give a gift or blessing that provides a muse-like boost to your muse. And if your existing muse has grown quiet lately, go off on an adventure together. Dream up plans to stimulate the bursts of kaleidoscopic energy that you two are capable of generating.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In some monastic traditions, practitioners engage in “work prayer.” They transform ordinary labor into spiritual practice not by thinking holy thoughts while working, but by bringing complete presence and fond attention to ordinary labors. Chopping vegetables becomes meditation. Sweeping floors becomes devotion. The sacredness arises from their wholehearted attitude. This would be an excellent experiment for you to try, Aquarius. Divine solace and inspiration will arrive as you perform your daily duties with verve and gratitude. Try this: For a few days or even two weeks, approach routine duties and familiar obligations with a ceremonial reverence. Be joyful for the privilege of being alive in the most ordinary ways.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): You’ve entered a phase when your magnetism and charisma will expand as you focus on ruminating deeply about what’s most meaningful to you. Seeking out new teachers and fresh lessons will bring lucky breaks and helpful influences into your sphere. Each fresh insight will polish your allure, and every surge of curiosity will add to your glow. Be extra sexy and ultra smart: Cosmic energies will work in your favor as you weave your id and intellect together.
Homework: Imagine I say to you, “Teach me the most important things you know.” tinyurl.com/s44s44s44
EXPOSING CIA SECRETS: Jeffrey Epstein, JFK, and September 9/11
InfoWars and The Onion Jul 8, 2026 Jim Haggerty returns with guest and ex-CIA analyst Neil Riker to expose the truth behind all the lies being told to you by the mainstream media, the government, and even your very own family. Join us. Become an Onion member while it’s still optional. https://membership.theonion.com/?camp…
NASA’s New Horizons probe just woke up from hibernation 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto. What’s it doing out there?
Published yesterday (Space.com)
“All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond.”
NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken up in good health nearly 6 billion miles away beyond Pluto after spending nearly a year in hibernation.
Traveling such vast distances between our solar system’s most remote objects means New Horizons often cruises for months at a time with little to do other than passively collect data. During these periods, the probe goes into a hibernation mode in which its instruments still collect data, but most other systems power down.
New Horizons entered just such a hibernation period last August, and has now woken up in “good health”, according to a NASA statement. The spacecraft is 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, so far away that it takes around 9 hours for its radio signals to reach us. Now that it’s awake, New Horizons will begin transmitting the data it has collected over the last 321 days and letting its controllers on the ground know how its systems are faring in the cold, dark reaches of deep space.
So far, the probe appears to be in perfect health. “Every status report through this hibernation period was ‘green,’ meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” said Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the NASA statement.
New Horizons is the first and only flyby spacecraft to conduct a flyby of the Pluto system, which it did in 2015. Four years later, the plucky probe studied the most distant object ever explored in our solar system, the snowman-shaped planetesimal Arrokoth, while it was one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) past Pluto.You may like
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Since then, the long-distance voyager has been probing the edge of our sun’s influence and studying objects in the Kuiper Belt, the cold, donut-shaped ring of icy objects that circles the outer solar system beyond Neptune.
New Horizons is currently speeding away from Earth at a rate of 300 million miles (483 million km) per year, according to NASA.
Three weeks from now, New Horizons will begin conducting a study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, the region of space influenced by the stream of charged particles blowing outward from the sun, known as the solar wind.
The data the probe is collecting at the farthest reaches of our solar system is the first of its kind. It could help scientists understand what happens at the boundary between the sun’s region of influence and interstellar space, known as the “termination shock.”
Only two spacecraft have crossed this boundary before, NASA’s twin Voyager probes. However, those far-flung explorers weren’t equipped with the same scientific instruments as New Horizons, which enable it to conduct more sensitive measurements of this distant region of the solar system.
“The data from the termination shock encounter will be a treasure trove for space physicists worldwide who are eager to understand how this vast boundary works,” Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at APL, previously told Space.com. “All these discoveries from pioneering missions like Voyager and New Horizons teach us how little we know about what lies beyond.”
From T. rex to Birds with Steve Brusatte
NOVA PBS Official Jul 2, 2026 Particles of Thought Steve Brusatte has the dirt on dinosaurs and joins Hakeem to trace the full 100-million-year history of the tyrannosaur dynasty, the asteroid that ended it, and the remarkable truth that dinosaurs never actually disappeared. One small lineage survived to become every bird alive today, and Steve walks through the long and contested scientific history of how we came to understand that connection. He also shares what it was like to serve as the official paleontology consultant on the Jurassic World films, and how to find the balance between science and cinema. Particles of Thought is back for Season 2! ???? Available on your favorite podcast platforms Amazon Music: https://bit.ly/4msqqby Spotify: https://bit.ly/3Hz8rkI Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4oB3Ten If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback helps new listeners find the show and allows us to continue creating great science content. Thank you for your support! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads a research group studying dinosaur evolution and the history of life on Earth. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds, and has served as a paleontology consultant on the Jurassic World film franchise. He will be featured in NOVA’s upcoming five-part documentary series Evolution, coming fall 2026. Particles of Thought is hosted by Hakeem Oluseyi, an astrophysicist, author, STEM educator, multi-patented inventor, science journalist, TV personality, science communicator, and inspirational speaker. His research is based on “hacking stars” to understand our universe better and develop innovative new technologies. Oluseyi’s work has resulted in 11 patents and more than 100 publications covering contributions to astrophysics, cosmology, and plasma physics and the development of space missions, observatories, focal plane instruments, detectors, semiconductor manufacturing, and ion propulsion. Chapters 00:00:00 T. rex Family Tree 00:30:33 How Dinosaurs Became Birds 00:59:01 Is Jurassic World Scientifically Accurate?
Victor Frankl on a sense of humor
Frankl in 1965
“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”
~ Viktor Frankl
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Wikipedia
Born March 26, 1905, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, Austria
Died September 2, 1997 (age 92 years), Vienna, Austria
Awe Isn’t a Luxury. It’s Maintenance.
Neuroscience is catching up to what the Sng’oi never forgot: wonder isn’t an indulgence, it’s how the nervous system comes home.
Jul 08, 2026 (wisdomschool.com)
There’s a grove of old growth a couple of hours from where I live, Douglas firs so old and so tall that walking into it feels like walking into a cathedral somebody forgot to put a roof on.
The light comes down green and slow. The traffic noise in your head, the one that never quite stops, goes quiet. The first time I stood in there I caught myself doing the thing we all do when something is too big for us: I stopped narrating.
For a few minutes there was no running commentary, no to-do list, no me in the usual sense at all, just the trees and the smell of duff and a silence with actual weight to it. I came out feeling scrubbed clean, and I couldn’t have told you why.
Now I can, because the scientists have started measuring it.
This past winter a team at McGill, working with colleagues in Chile, examined more than a hundred brain-imaging studies of what actually happens inside our heads when we spend time in the natural world. What they found is a kind of cascade.
The brain processes the fractal patterns of nature, the branching of a fern or a river delta, far more easily than the hard edges and blinking screens of a city, so the sensory load drops almost the moment we walk outside.
As it drops, the body slips out of fight-or-flight; the heart rate slows, the breath deepens, and the amygdala, our little threat alarm, settles down.
Then attention, which we normally have to force, begins to restore itself on its own.
And finally the brain networks tied to anxious, repetitive, self-focused thinking grow quiet.
The researchers found that as little as three minutes can start the whole thing rolling. Three minutes.
That last part, the quieting of the self-focused machinery, is where this gets interesting, because it’s the same thing researchers keep finding when they study awe in particular.
A growing body of work shows that “positive awe,” the feeling we get from vastness, from a night sky or a mountain or a piece of music that lifts the top of your head off, nudges the nervous system out of fight-or-flight and into the rest-and-digest state, while quieting the very parts of the brain that keep us trapped in our own small story.
The psychologist Dacher Keltner, who’s spent decades on this, sends people out on what he calls “awe walks”, and finds they come back with lower stress, less inflammation, and a stronger pull toward generosity and connection. Awe doesn’t just feel good. It measurably moves us out of ourselves and toward each other.
Awe works by making you feel small, and it turns out that feeling small, for a few minutes, is exactly what an overloaded nervous system has been starving for.
Here’s what gets me, though. We treat all of this as a luxury. Wonder is the thing we’ll get to once the inbox is clear, something you schedule a vacation around once a year if you’re lucky.
But the science is saying nearly the opposite: that awe is maintenance, as basic to a human animal as sleep or clean water, and that we’ve built a civilization almost perfectly designed to keep us from it.
We’ve paved the groves, lit up the night so thoroughly that most of us can’t see the Milky Way from our own backyards anymore, and filled every spare second with a screen engineered to hold our attention precisely by keeping us agitated and self-focused, which is to say in the exact brain state that nature dissolves.
The people who never lost this knew it in their bodies.
Years ago, Louise and I had the honor of spending time with the psychologist Robert Wolff, who spent years deep in the Malaysian jungle with an aboriginal people called the Sng’oi. He wrote a book about it, and I wrote the foreword to it: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing.
What struck Wolff, what changed him, was that the Sng’oi had an uncanny, intuitive sense of the living world around them, a way of knowing that came not from analyzing the forest but from being so woven into it that the line between self and place wore thin.
They weren’t taking awe walks. They were simply at home, in the way our whole species was at home for three hundred thousand years before we built walls and started calling the outside “scenery.” Wolff came back convinced that we haven’t evolved past that way of being. We’ve just forgotten it.
I’m not romanticizing here. I like antibiotics and hot showers and the laptop I’m typing this on as much as the next person. But I think we’ve made a quiet, costly trade, swapping a baseline of belonging for a baseline of low-grade alarm, and then wondering why so many of us feel frayed all the time.
The good news, and it really is good news, is that the door back is almost absurdly easy to open. You don’t need the cathedral grove (though I’d recommend it) or the forest where Louise and I climb a mountain every weekend. You just need three minutes and a little attention.
So here’s what I’d suggest, and it won’t cost you a dime. Once a day, find something bigger than you and give it your full, undivided attention for a few minutes.
The sky doing its slow evening thing. A tree you’ve walked past a thousand times, looked at as though you’d never seen it before. The ocean if you’re near it, a thunderstorm if one rolls through, the frankly unreasonable fact of a single leaf.
Don’t photograph it. Don’t narrate it. Just let it be too big for you, and notice what happens to the noise in your head. Your nervous system already knows exactly what to do. It’s been waiting for you to stop and look.