Red Heifer

 Tanchuma (Chukas 08) A certain convert questioned Rabban Johanan ben Zakkay, “These things which you do seem like a kind of sorcery. You bring a heifer, burn it, pound it, and take its ashes. Then when one of you is defiled by a corpse, they sprinkle two or three drops on him, and you say to him, ‘You are clean.’” He said to him, “Have you ever had a bad spirit of madness enter you?” He told him, “No.” He said to him, “Perhaps you have seen someone into whom a bad spirit has entered?” He told him, “Yes.” He said to him, “So what did you do for him?” He said to him, “They bring roots and burn them beneath him. Then they sprinkle water on the spirit, and it flees.” He said to him, “Let your ears hear what you are uttering with your mouth. Similarly is this spirit an unclean spirit. Thus it is stated  ‘and I will also remove the prophets and the unclean spirit from the land.’ They sprinkle the purifying water upon him, and he flees.” After the gentile had left, R. Johanan's disciples said to him, “Our master, you repelled this one with a mere reed of an answer. What have you to say to us?” He said to them, “By your lives, a corpse does not defile, nor does a heifer purify, nor does water purify. Rather, G-d has said, ‘I have enacted a statute for you. I have issued a decree, and you are not allowed to transgress against my decree.’” Thus it is written  “This is the statute of the Torah.” And for what reason are all the sacrifices male and female, while that one is only female? R. Ayyevu said, “It is comparable to the son of a female slave who defiled a king's palace. The king said, ‘Let his mother come and clean up the excrement.’ Similarly has the Holy One, blessed be He, said, ‘Let a heifer come and atone for the incident of the golden calf.’”

Bamidbar Rabbah (19:08) A certain idolater asked Rabban Yoḥanan ben Zakai: ‘These actions that you perform seem to be a type of sorcery. You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it, and take its ashes. One of you becomes impure from a corpse, one sprinkles upon him two or three drops, and you say to him: You are purified.’ He said to him: ‘Has a spirit of insanity never entered you?’ He said to him: ‘No.’ ‘Have you seen a person into whom a spirit of insanity has entered?’ He said to him: ‘Yes.’ He said to him: ‘And what do you do to him?’ He said to him: ‘We bring roots, smoke them beneath him, and sprinkle water on it, and it flees.’ He said to him: ‘Let your ears hear what you express from your mouth. The same is true of this spirit, this spirit of impurity, as it is written: “I will remove the prophets and the spirit of impurity from the land”. We sprinkle upon it the water of sprinkling, and it flees.’After he left, his students said to him: ‘You rebuffed this one with a reed. What do you say to us?’ He said to them: ‘As you live, it is not the corpse that impurifies, and it is not the water that purifies. Rather, G-d said: I instituted a statute, issued a decree; you are not permitted to violate My decree, as it is written: “This is the statute of the Torah.”’

Milo Yiannopoulos ‘very ashamed’ of support for Trump after deportation

 https://thehill.com/media/6064328-milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump/

Yiannopoulos told British commentator Piers Morgan on his talk show “Uncensored” on YouTube that he believes the Trump administration has “devolved into the Loomer admin,” referring to far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who took credit for reporting Yiannopoulos to ICE.

“To think that the promise and hope and joy and anticipation of Trump 2016 could, over the course of 10 years, collapse into this ugly, war-mongering –– taken as a whole, mentally ill heap of crazy with some of the most unstable and lunatic people seemingly directing the president’s actions,” Yiannopoulos told Morgan.

“If,” he added, “I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have gotten involved in supporting Trump in the first place. And I’m very ashamed that I did.”

Hegseth is winning the battle over the Pentagon’s future

 https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/01/hegseth-driscoll-tech-culture-wars-01060795

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wanted to transform the service into a modern, tech-oriented force. Pete Hegseth made that almost impossible.

The Army secretary, in his final months in the job, found his efforts to champion a leaner force with a lighter footprint challenged by Hegseth and the new acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who focused on gearing the Army toward grooming and fitness standards, according to the people. And that, coupled with the resignation of well-regarded top generals, led Driscoll to head to the White House and deliver his resignation to President Donald Trump.

The White House defended Hegseth’s leadership of the Pentagon, saying he’s aligned with the president’s anti-diversity, equity and initiatives stance. “After Joe Biden’s Pentagon prioritized DEI and woke ideology, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth quickly reversed course,” said spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The President has complete trust in Secretary Hegseth.”

Hegseth is Incompetent

America Breaks its Promises

 

 Start minute 5:00

The Republican Party’s Midterm Nightmare Is Taking Shape

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/30/republican-party-midterms-trump-01055934

He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”

The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.

The culprits are obvious: the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.

Florida, Vaccines and Religious Liberty

 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/james-uthmeier-florida-vaccines-catholic-schools-3e678e5a?mod=hp_opin_pos_4

State Attorney General James Uthmeier threatens to bar Catholic schools from voucher programs if they insist on vaccinations.

The movement against vaccines has led to a resurgence of measles and now is taking a dangerous constitutional turn in Florida. Attorney General James Uthmeier is threatening to ban Catholic schools from the state’s voucher programs over their immunization requirements. Democrats aren’t the only politicians attacking the free exercise of religion these days.

Mr. Uthmeier in July issued a peremptory letter to Catholic bishops accusing them of violating Church doctrine and state law by requiring students to be immunized and not allowing parents who object to vaccines for religious reasons to opt out. There is “no legitimate religious reason” to deny religious exemptions, he wrote.

Republicans are worried about the midterms. Trump is focused on his legacy

 https://www.wsj.com/politics/republicans-are-worried-about-the-midterms-trump-is-focused-on-his-legacy-597e5512

As his approval ratings sag ahead of US midterm elections, Donald Trump is on a mission to burnish his legacy, but Republicans worry that his focus on himself is backfiring with voters.

One senior administration official said the president has entered “legacy mode.” He is fixated on how he will be remembered by future generations, according to aides, conscious of avoiding the fate of past occupants of the White House he views as weak, such as Jimmy Carter.

Despite his low approval ratings, Trump plans to put himself at the center of the midterms, a move that will test whether his influence with voters is waning. As the president’s team debates how to spend MAGA Inc.’s enormous fundraising haul, Trump has told advisers that he wants to produce a series of television ads centered on his agenda, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Republican Party’s Midterm Nightmare Is Taking Shape

 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/08/30/republican-party-midterms-trump-01055934

As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.

Will 2026 bring a backlash against the party in power, but one largely confined to House losses because of polarization, limiting Democratic strength in Senate races? Or will there be a greater wave that grows high enough to sweep out Republicans thought to be safe, flipping both chambers of Congress in the process?

Absent a drastic shift in voter sentiment, this election is poised to mirror the last time a Republican was besieged by ornery voters upset with corruption, the price at the pump and an unpopular Middle Eastern war: complete Democratic takeover.

The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

 "Just as I can talk about space having a shape, I can also talk about space-time having a shape. My initial instinct is to think of time as a line, which makes it very difficult for me to think of anything other than a line that is finite and therefore has a beginning and an end, or a line that is infinite. But there are other possibilities. Since time and space make up four dimensions, I must consider shapes that I can’t see. I need mathematics to describe them. But I can picture shapes representing parts of space-time that enable me to understand what I mean by the question of what happened before the Big Bang. For example, imagine there was only one spatial dimension, so that space-time is two-dimensional. This creates a surface that I can see, like a rubber sheet that I can play with and wrap up in interesting ways. I think most people’s model of two-dimensional space-time would be an infinite flat sheet with time extending infinitely backward and forward and space also one-dimensional and infinite. But, as I explored in the last Edge, space could be finite. I could wrap space up to make a circle and then time would extend this circle to make space-time look like a cylinder. I could, of course, join the cylinder up to make a bagel- or torus-shaped space-time. That would make time finite too. In this model of space-time I could loop around and return to a previous moment in history. Logician Kurt Gödel proposed solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity that have this feature. Gödel, as I shall explain in my final Edge, greatly enjoyed messing with people’s logical expectations. But Gödel’s circles of space-time are generally regarded as curiosities, because going back in time causes too many problems when it comes to causality. Possible shapes for a two-dimensional space-time To get a more realistic picture of space-time, I need to create a geometry that takes into account our current model of the history of the universe, which includes a beginning: the Big Bang. To see this point in my two-dimensional space-time universe, I could wrap up the surface so that it looks like a cone. The universe, which is just a circle, shrinks as I go back in time until I hit the point at the end of the cone. This is where time begins. There is nothing before that. No space. No time. Just a point of infinite density. This is a good model for something rather like the Big Bang. Or, rather than pinching space-time at a point, perhaps it could look like a sphere—like the surface of the Earth. This has its own implications for how I answer the question of what happened before the Big Bang. If I head south along a line of longitude, then when I hit the South Pole there is a sudden flip and I find myself on another line of longitude on the other side. But these are just numbers that we give to these points on the Earth’s surface. It doesn’t actually represent a discontinuous flip in the shape, just a jump in the way that we measure it. So by changing the coordinates, what appears to be a singular point can look quite smooth. This is one of Hawking’s ideas for time. Perhaps I should try to embed space-time in a shape such that this point that seems to show time stopping is actually just the south pole of the shape. After all, how do you answer the question, what’s south of the South Pole? The question doesn’t really make sense. It is striking that often when a question arises to which it seems we cannot know the answer, it turns out you need to acknowledge that the question is not well posed. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is not really an expression of the fact that we cannot simultaneously know both the momentum and position of a particle, so much as that these two things don’t actually exist concurrently. Similarly, attempts have been made to show that the question “What happened before the Big Bang?” isn’t one whose answer cannot be known. Rather, the question does not really make sense. To talk about “before” is to suppose the existence of time, but what if time existed only after the Big Bang?"

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Psychedelic Therapy: A Revolutionary Approach to Restoring Your Mental Health and Reclaiming Your Life

 "As the pioneering psychologist Peter Levine writes, “Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, and misunderstood cause of human suffering.”[1] He explains that trauma is not simply what happens to us; it is our inability or lack of opportunity to move through the emotions evoked by traumatic events, causing us to get stuck in them. When we are young, to move past a painful experience we need the presence of a supportive adult. We become traumatized not primarily because painful things happen to us, but because we must endure that suffering alone, without support. In fact, we might suppress even the conscious awareness of what happened to us simply to survive. Suppressed, deeply imprinted, sublimated, diverted, and compensated for in many ways, the trauma itself and our defenses against the suffering it imposed become ingrained—mostly unconsciously—into our brain, nervous system, body, and mind. This response, which is unique to each individual, becomes a potent source of addictive patterns and of coping mechanisms that lead to many illnesses of body and mind. The healing capacity of psychedelic experiences stems, in part, from their ability to evoke the painful imprints of your childhood self while those experiences are witnessed by the empathic curiosity of your adult self—crucially, as our authors repeatedly stress, in a safe environment. I can’t overemphasize the provision of safety, especially the relational space between therapist and patient. As the authors rightly point out, “Decades of psychotherapy research have shown that the quality of the relationship between a client and therapist is the strongest predictor of successful outcomes—often more important than the therapist’s specific methods or qualifications.” In a safe setting, the capacity of psychedelic medicines to help people transcend the limitations of what the authors call our “personal ego and narrative” can reframe how we view ourselves, our lives, and even our world. As they insist, both the set and the setting must be right. The set is the client’s mindset and intentions, while the setting is composed of the context: physical comfort, emotional safety,and the expertise, self-awareness, patience, and compassion of the therapeutic guide. There is no mystery about the potential gifts of psychedelic therapy. Understanding trauma is the key—an understanding that is sadly missing from much of mainstream medicine and psychiatry. As the authors point out, trauma imposes deleterious core narratives “about who we are, how the world works, and what is possible in our lives,” narratives that “tend to sharply limit the possibilities of our lives.” Psychedelics can, as it were, dissolve such narratives and loosen their power over our sense of self, allowing us to cultivate self-love, forgiveness, and compassion. They may, according to some promising research, help rewire certain brain circuits in a positive way.""

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Beracha

 Rambam (Prayer 15:06) A priest who does not have any of the factors which hinder the recitation of the priestly blessings mentioned above should recite the priestly blessing, even though he is not a wise man or careful in his observance of the mitzvot. This applies even though the people spread unwholesome gossip about him, or his business dealings are not ethical.He should not be prevented from reciting the priestly blessings because reciting these blessings is a positive mitzvah incumbent on each priest who is fit to recite them. We do not tell a wicked person: Increase your wickedness by failing to perform mitzvos.

Rambam (Prayer 15:07) Do not wonder: "What good will come from the blessing of this simple person?" for the reception of the blessings is not dependent on the priests, but on G-d, as the Torah states: "And they shall set My name upon the children of Israel, and I shall bless them." The priests perform the mitzvah with which they were commanded, and God, in His mercies, will bless Israel as He desires.

The Trouble With Trump’s Attempt to Rename Lake Ontario

 https://time.com/article/2026/08/28/the-trouble-with-trump-s-attempt-to-rename-lake-ontario/

As two geographers who have spent decades studying political toponymy, or the politics of place naming, in both the United States and Canada, we are dismayed by the careless nature of Trump’s impulsive use of place renaming as a form of political rage baiting. 

Renaming Lake Ontario is part of a larger pattern of using place naming to promote the Trump brand and his “America First” ideology. From the very outset of his second presidential term, Trump launched the so-called “Golden Age of America” by announcing that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America.” This has now been followed with “Lake America,” and Trump even mused about possibly renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, we presume to something along the lines of “American Ocean” or “Ocean of America.”

Over the past year, Trump’s obsession with naming places has given rise to a new term—toponymic narcissism—which refers to the condition of being obsessed with naming places after oneself.  

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?

 https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/are-therapists-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-adults-cutting-off-their-parents-d08f6d69

Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree. ‘Everything becomes trauma.’

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials, so she did as she was told. 

She cut off all ties with her mother.