Weekly Invitational Translation: If I am a child of God, therefore God is my parent.

August 1, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

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.

The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, 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 sole, therefore one. Truth being true is therefore real, therefore right, therefore correct, therefore perfect, therefore ideal. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is 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, sole, one, real, right, correct, perfect, ideal. Since I am mind (self-evident) and since I (being) am Truth, therefore Truth is Mind. (Two things being equal to a third thing are equal to each other.) Since Truth is Mind, therefore Mind has all the attributes of Truth. Therefore Mind is total, whole, complete, sole, one, real, right, correct, perfect,

2) If I am a child of God, therefore God is my parent.

Word-tracking:
parent: keeps me safe, loves me, provides for me, nurtures me, to procure, to prepare, origin of something else
safe: healthy, whole
nurture: preserve
provide: attend to, care for, love
child: womb, offspring, consequence, sequence
sequence: order of things
God: supreme being, that which is invoked
invoke: to call, to name

3) Truth being total in itself does not beget something else. Therefore Truth is sufficient unto Itself. Truth being one cannot at the same time be divided into greater and lesser beings, Therefore Truth is equality. Since a parent keeps me safe, provides for me, nurtures me and loves me and since Truth is sufficient unto Itself, therefore Truth keeps Itself safe, provides for Itself, nurtures Itself and loves Itself.

4)    Truth is sufficient unto Itself.
        Truth is equality.
        Truth keeps Itself safe, provides for Itself, nurtures Itself and loves Itself.

5) The order of things is that Truth keeps Itself safe, provides for Itself, preserves Itself and loves Itself.

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.

For information about Translation or other Prosperos classes go to: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching.

Uncategorized

Prosperos News – August issue

August 1, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Uncategorized

August Astrology Forecast 2025

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

The Astrology Podcast Jul 30, 2025 Monthly Astrology Forecasts A look at the astrological forecast for August of 2025, with astrologers Chris Brennan and Austin Coppock of The Astrology Podcast! We spend the first hour of the episode talking about the astrology of news and events that have occurred since our last forecast, and then in the second hour we transition into talking about the astrology of August, starting at 1 hour and 12 minutes into the episode. The three main alignments this month are a Mars-Saturn opposition, Venus-Jupiter conjunction, and Mercury stationing direct opposite Pluto. Then in the final days of the month we begin to head into eclipse season. Since this is the episode after the 500th episode we also spend some time reflecting on that, and on 10 years of doing forecast episodes together. This is episode 501 of The Astrology Podcast! United Astrology Conference 2026 https://uacastrology.com Hellenistic Astrology Course https://theastrologyschool.com Austin’s Website https://austincoppock.com Patreon for Elections and Bonus Content / astrologypodcast Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:54 August quick overview 00:03:35 News segment 01:07:21 UAC 2026 01:12:02 August forecast 01:23:46 Election for August 01:29:29 August forecast continued 02:25:59 Wrapping up 02:33:04 Credits United Astrology Conference

Uncategorized

Study: Only 40% Of Mice Have Little Welcome Mat, Doorway Leading To Tiny Home Inside Wall

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

News, News In Brief

Published: March 21, 2018 (TheOnion.com)

CAMBRIDGE, MA—In a troubling revelation concerning the living conditions of millions nationwide, a Harvard University study confirmed Wednesday that only 40 percent of mice in the continental U.S. have a little welcome mat and doorway leading to a tiny home inside a wall. “Our research shows that, disturbingly, less than half of American mice can afford their own home, defined for this purpose as a space entered through the wainscoting where they sit at a table made from a spool of thread, eat off bottle-cap dishes, and sleep in an adorable sardine-can bed,” said lead researcher Susan Lord, adding that only the top 15 percent of rodents are able to decorate their residence with framed photos of cheese, beer-coaster area rugs, and wee “Home Sweet Home” signs hanging over their doors. “Moreover, only 25 percent of these creatures occupy a place big enough to house a hairbow-bedecked wife with large eyelashes and their children. Unfortunately, only the wealthiest 7 percent own a set of matching nightcaps for their darling family to wear while snoring in unison at night.” Lord went on to say that 90 percent of these mice have such inadequate living spaces that the rollicking chases that constitute the bulk of their workdays usually conclude with the pursuing cat having its face stuck inside their doorways.

Uncategorized

George Bernard Shaw on the unreasonable man

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

(Image from nobelprize.org)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

~ G.B.Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 – November 2, 1950), was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Wikipedia

Uncategorized

Tom Lehrer and Mort Mintz, RIP

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Tom Lehrer (via Wikipedia.org)

Kuttner on TAP July 30, 2025 (Prospect.org)

Both challenged American smugness, one with satire and the other with great journalism.

Two of the heroes of my youth died this past week, one at 97 and the other at 103. The youngster was Tom Lehrer.

A math genius who wrote and performed naughty patter songs with elegant rhyming schemes, Lehrer was a kind of Cole Porter for young subversives. For adolescents in the late 1950s, it was stunning to appreciate that there were adults who could mock everything our parents and teachers were instructing us about good behavior and do it with scathing wit.

Lehrer was one such young adult. The other was the gang at Mad
magazine. Long before the protests of the 1960s, my generation was primed to be subversive.

Lehrer performed his ditties for his Harvard classmates while in his teens, cut a record at home in 1953, and was surprised when it found a national audience and ultimately sold half a million copies.

I must know most of Tom Lehrer’s songs by heart. An emblematic one is “Be Prepared,” supposedly the Boy Scout Marching Song.

Be prepared, to hide that pack of cigarettes
Don’t make book, if you cannot cover bets. …
Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price.

Lehrer, who once spent a summer working at Los Alamos, had this to say about Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who went to work for the Americans after the war:

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.

“Lobachevsky,” about an actual Russian mathematician, contained advice for the young researcher, sung in a Russian accent:

Plagiarize, plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please research.

He also wrote wicked songs aimed at more sophisticated adults, of which the most luscious is “Alma,” an anthem to Alma Mahler, who managed to bed the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the author Franz Werfel. She had many other lovers, including the heartbroken painter Oskar Kokoschka, whom she jilted. Oskar didn’t even make the song. (Rhyming with “Kokoschka” must have been a challenge even for Lehrer.)
Set to a Viennese waltz of course:

Alma, tell us
All modern women are jealous
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

Lehrer spent the last 30 years of his career teaching math at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with stints at Harvard and MIT as well. Writing and performing naughty patter songs was a sideline.
I once met Lehrer. I asked him why he stopped performing while still in his forties. He explained that one of his last concerts was a benefit to help pay off George McGovern’s 1972 campaign debt, and added, “I figured that any country that can elect Richard Nixon twice is beyond parody.” One can only imagine Lehrer on Donald Trump.

His obituary in The New York Times carries the byline of Richard Severo, who died in 2023. Lehrer outlived his obituary writer. He would have enjoyed that.

Morton Mintz in the 1970s, when he was a reporter for The Washington Post covering consumer fraud and corporate corruption.Credit…Gerald Martineau/The Washington Post

MORTON MINTZ, WHO DIED ON MONDAY at 103, is a name that may not be familiar to many younger readers. He was the great investigative journalist of his era. He was not a Woodward/Bernstein-style investigator. Mort went after the evils of capitalism, when that brand of muckraking was out of fashion.

One of his most important contributions was helping to spare Americans the mutilations of the drug thalidomide. In July 1962, he wrote an extensive profile of Frances Kelsey, the FDA pharmacologist who had withstood industry pressures to allow thalidomide in the United States, despite evidence from Europe that the drug, marketed as a morning sickness medication for pregnant women, had caused thousands of birth defects. His piece catalyzed a movement for stronger drug regulation, culminating in new FDA legislation signed by President Kennedy that October.

When I reported for work at The Washington Post in 1974, as the youngest writer on the national staff, I was put into a four-desk carrel with three great journalists a decade or two my senior. They were Bill Greider, later the Post’s national editor, Jack MacKenzie, who covered the Supreme Court, and Mort Mintz.

On my first day on the job, Mort asked if I could do him a favor. Mort was covering the effort to keep alive a government entity called the Renegotiation Board. During World War II, when there was crash production of supplies for the military, defense contractors profited handsomely from cost-plus contracts. The Renegotiation Board was created to conduct audits after the fact.

If profits turned out to be excessive, the contractor had to repay the government. The Board saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Miraculously, it had survived from the early 1940s into the 1970s.
But now Nixon appointees at the Board and their defense contractor allies were on the verge of shutting it down. Mort had developed some sources on the Board, who kept him apprised of the infighting, and he had a major piece about to run in the next day’s Post. He had gotten hold of a staff list of the Board with phone numbers, and he had devised a plan to protect his sources.

Bob, he said, you and I are going to divide up this list. You call each number, and you say, “Hello, this is Bob Kuttner from The Washington Post. I’m doing a story on the Renegotiation Board. Can I talk with you?” They will of course say no. Try to keep them on the phone for a little while, then call the next one. That way, Mort continued, when my story runs tomorrow and they interrogate the staff to find the treacherous leaker who talked to the Post, there is a record that they all did.

I don’t recall if my jaw literally dropped, but I was gobsmacked by Mort’s ingenuity. I must have made 60 phone calls. I still smile when I imagine the meeting where the whole staff is asked, “Who’s the SOB who talked to the Post?” Working with Mort was like having a world-class personal journalism coach. To this day, one of the things I teach young reporters is the importance of protecting sources.

Mort remained the scourge of some of the most evil industries, including pharmaceuticals, tobacco, and the auto companies. One of his notable scoops, in 1966, was on GM’s campaign to intimidate Ralph Nader. The result was congressional hearings and an apology and financial settlement of $425,000 from GM that funded the first “Nader’s Raiders.” He also helped expose and drive out an early IUD, the Dalkon Shield, which caused infertility.

Mort embodied the spirit of the great muckraking journalists of nearly a century earlier. It is to the disgrace of modern American journalism that most of what passes for investigation today is taking leaks and counter-leaks about political maneuvering rather than probing the deeper politics of capitalism. If journalism were doing its job, Mort Mintz would be remembered as one of many, not as a special hero.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Uncategorized

The Edge: Change is Coming

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

In This Issue

VIDEOS & PODCASTS

ARTICLES

“Our Moment of Choice”
We Answered THE CALL
Visit the Evolutionary Leaders YouTube Channel
Invest in Synergy to Power a Transformed World

Uncategorized

Trump Examined By Doctor After Acknowledging Existence Of Suffering

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Published: July 30, 2025 (TheOnion.com)

WASHINGTON—Following reports that the president was “troubled” and “disturbed” by images coming out of Gaza, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Donald Trump was examined by a doctor after he acknowledged the existence of suffering earlier this week. “It’s possible that his statement recognizing starving children in Gaza was just a case of the jet-lagged president mixing up his words,” said Leavitt, adding that Trump was rushed from his meeting in Scotland with U.K. Prime Minster Keir Starmer to a nearby medical facility where a doctor confirmed the president still possessed the cruelty of a 27-year-old Manhattan real estate developer. “Despite what the fake New York Times may say, our president remains as callous as ever. He is currently in excellent condition, denying any compassion for other living beings, and his vitals show he’ll be back to his old rage-filled self in no time at all.” At press time, Leavitt released a contradictory statement dismissing the brief show of empathy as a typical symptom of the president’s dementia.

Uncategorized

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his beautiful letter to a bereaved father.

We dream of immortality because we are creatures made of loss — the death of the individual is what ensured the survival of the species along the evolutionary vector of adaptation — and made for loss: All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.

And yet the measure of life, the meaning of it, may be precisely what we make of our losses — how we turn the dust of disappointment and dissolution into clay for creation and self-creation, how we make of loss a reason to love more fully and live more deeply.

“Broken/hearted” by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

That is what Judith Viorst explores in her 1987 consolation of a book Necessary Losses (public library) — an inquiry into the profound and far-reaching relationship between our losses and our gains, revealing renunciation as a fulcrum of growth. She paints the vast landscape of loss upon which life plays out:

When we think of loss we think of the loss, through death, of people we love. But loss is a far more encompassing theme in our life. For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety — and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.

[…]

These necessary losses… we confront when we are confronted by the inescapable fact… that we are essentially out here on our own; that we will have to accept — in other people and ourselves — the mingling of love with hate, of the good with the bad;… that there are flaws in every human connection; that our status on this planet is implacably impermanent; and that we are utterly powerless to offer ourselves or those we love protection — protection from danger and pain, from the in-roads of time, from the coming of age, from the coming of death; protection from our necessary losses.

These losses are a part of life — universal, unavoidable, inexorable. And these losses are necessary because we grow by losing and leaving and letting go.

As a sculpture is shaped by what is chiseled off from the block of stone, so too are we shaped by what we lose — by choice, with all the complexities and difficulties of letting go, or by the scythe of chance, which takes away as impartially as it gives. Viorst writes:

The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be. Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose… It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a soulful illustrated elegy for loss and our search for light

We enter the realm of loss the moment the umbilical cord is cut to sever what Viorst calls the “blurred-boundary bliss of mother-child oneness” — the primal loss that sets off the ongoing task of becoming ourselves. From this origin point, she traces the lifelong vector of losses and gains:

Exchanging the illusion of absolute shelter and absolute safety for the triumphant anxieties of standing alone… we become a moral, responsible, adult self, discovering — within the limitations imposed by necessity — our freedoms and choices. And in giving up our impossible expectations, we become a lovingly connected self, renouncing ideal visions of perfect friendship, marriage, children, family life for the sweet imperfections of all-too-human relationships. And in confronting the many losses that are brought by time and death, we become a mourning and adapting self, finding at every stage — until we draw our final breath — opportunities for creative transformations.

In a sentiment the poet Mark Doty would echo — “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” he wrote in his beautiful reckoning with love and loss — she adds:

We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.

Complement Necessary Losses, which goes on to explore the many regions of loss in human life and how they can become frontiers of growth, with Hannah Arendt on learning how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, Thoreau on living through a loss, and Alan Watts on learning not to think of gain and loss, then explore two uncommon lenses on loss: fractals and chlorophyll.

Uncategorized

Understanding Money with Darryl R. Schoon

July 31, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

New Thinking Jul 29, 2025 Darryl Robert Schoon is a financial analyst famous for having predicted the 2008 market crash. He is author of Light in a Dark Place: The Prison Years. He has also written a novel titled You Can’t Always Get What You Want. He is a minister with the Temple of Universality in Tucson, Arizona. Here he explains the origin of paper money in China in the year 1024, and how it impacted Chinese politics. In the seventeenth century, paper money spread to England. Its use was instrumental in the expansion of the British empire. The discussion includes interest rates, business cycles, central banking, and warfare. Schoon emphasizes his belief that the economic downturns of 1990, 2000, and 2008 have been building up to an economic crisis of much larger proportions. 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 October 31, 2019)

In This Issue

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more