Beverly Akerman MSc

Artist, editor, writer. Recovering research scientist.

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@vwolford77429 @thefarmersheep 🤣

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@vwolford77429 @thefarmersheep Yeah but the trans explanation is the funniest

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@uricohenisrael @shalev3377 I’d like to see that!

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@UzmEsraGunes No faith in this doctor’s theories.

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@JewsFightBack Disgusting

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

In addition to all the other nonsense

[Chris Philp MP @CPhilpOfficial]

Smashing up property and attacking a police officer with a sledgehammer is not “protest”

It’s violence

Zack Polanski is a disgrace. Anyone voting Green is supporting this nonsense

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@Kristinartz Mostly, I write them and take a photo, and shop from that.

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@CrazyVibes_1 Thank you for this!

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@ThrillaRilla369 Three babies, individually, no anesthesia until after the births, to repair the episiotomies…

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

Acrylic, 20x20 inches

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings.

He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why?

Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself...

Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees." He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely.

This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot. Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil.

The hobbits meet Bombadil early on in their quest, before they reach Bree and the Prancing Pony Inn. He rescues Merry and Pippin from Old Man Willow, and invites the hobbits to stay at his house in the Old Forest.

There, the hobbits realize something strange about him: the Ring has no power over Bombadil whatsoever.

When he wears it, he remains visible. He treats it as a plaything, making it disappear with a magic trick. Indeed, at the Council of Elrond, Gandalf rejects the idea of giving the Ring to Tom, for he would likely misplace it or forget about it entirely.

So just who is he, exactly?

When Frodo asks this very question to Tom's wife Goldberry, she simply responds "He is." It's a cryptic answer that echoes God's famous answer to Moses in the Book of Exodus: "I am who I am."

Thus, many theorize that Bombadil is God, some kind of angelic being, or even the spirit of the Music of the Ainur (due to the fact that he is constantly singing). But Tolkien's letters reveal something considerably more interesting…

In April 1954, Tolkien wrote:

"The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship… but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control.But if you have, as it were, taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself… then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…"

So, Bombadil is a representation of what it means to take pure delight in the world around you — to experience people and things simply as they are, without any thought for what they could be or how you could use them. And this is why the Ring has no power over him.

To Bombadil, the One Ring is simply a ring, and the possibilities of what can be achieved through its power are of no importance. He is able to resist its evil precisely because he is entirely content with the world around him.

At the end of the story, having accomplished what he set out to do in Middle-earth, Gandalf pays Tom a visit before returning to the Undying Lands:

"I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time."

If Bombadil is the epitome of simply enjoying life and being, Gandalf is the epitome of doing. He guides the hobbits, fights the Balrog, and runs up and down Middle-earth to help destroy the One Ring.

But now that he's finally liberated from doing, he immediately heads to Bombadil's. He does so with a sense of relief, as if he's at last able to access a purer and higher mode of being — a sort of innocence that cannot be fully experienced by those consumed by doing.

Of course, by this Tolkien doesn't disparage the value of action. The entirety of LOTR displays the importance of rising up against evil, even in the face of all odds. But with the inclusion of Bombadil, he does remind readers that fighting isn't all there is.

Bombadil reminds us that while it's important to strive and *do*, it is just as important to occasionally step back and *be*. Indeed, your ability to do so plays a crucial role in helping you resist the allure of evil…

Read the full piece here:

https://t.co/aqK2daehIL

The unsung hero of The Lord of the Rings...

[Adam Zivo @AdamZivo]

Why is Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow so eager to support a Somali soccer referee who, in addition to having suspected terrorism ties, allegedly wrote that Jews drink the blood of Muslims and Arabs? Is this her idea of diversity and inclusion?

#topoli #onpoli #cdnpoli

[Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 @TRobinsonNewEra]

Zara Jabbi, 19, is wanted in connection with the March shooting at the U.S. Consulate and and death of Constable Marc Pinizzotto.

Find him.

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@kinsellawarren No, it’s beautiful. Because it means he had a good, worthwhile life. Some people only get one chance!

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

More Canadian money down the crapper! Congratulations, @AnitaAnandMP!

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Utter nonsense rooted in ZERO cultural theory of mind. A squandering of taxpayer money using a Unicornia vision of the world.

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@Aaron_Derfel

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

The attacks may start with the Jews, but they never end there…

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: A Toronto police officer has been murdered after executing a search warrant on an Iran-back Hezbollah Kta’ib cell in Canada.

[Reuters @Reuters]

🦛 The Berlin Zoo announced the name of its newborn pygmy hippopotamus — a rare mammal native to West Africa: Broetchen, which is German for ‘bread roll’

[Beverly Akerman MSc @Beverly_Akerman]

@niyetsel Progress

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A German psychologist spent her career proving that the embarrassing habit of talking to your dog is one of the most powerful stress-regulation tools the human nervous system has, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Andrea Beetz.

She works at the University of Rostock in northern Germany, in the Department of Special Education.

In 2012 she co-authored a paper in Frontiers in Psychology with three other European researchers, and the finding inside it should have changed how every doctor on Earth thinks about loneliness, stress, and the strange habit human beings have of narrating their lives to animals who cannot speak back.

The paper was not a single experiment. It was a review of 69 separate peer-reviewed studies on what happens inside the human body during interactions with pets, all of which met strict criteria for sample size, research design, and scientific rigor.

Her co-authors were not minor names either. Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg is the Swedish physician who spent decades mapping how oxytocin works in the human bloodstream. Kurt Kotrschal runs the Wolf Science Center in Austria and is one of the most respected animal cognition researchers in Europe. Henri Julius studies attachment between humans and animals. Together they assembled the cleanest summary of what science actually knows about why being around a pet changes a person.

The results across the 69 studies were almost embarrassingly consistent. When a human being interacts with an animal they have any bond with, the same physiological cascade happens almost every time. Cortisol drops, which is the primary stress hormone in the bloodstream. Blood pressure drops, both systolic and diastolic. Heart rate slows. Self-reported anxiety decreases. Mood improves measurably on standardized scales.

And underneath all of it, the hormone called oxytocin rises in the human bloodstream.

Oxytocin is the molecule that floods a mother's body during childbirth and breastfeeding. It is the same chemical released during orgasm, during a long hug with someone you love, during the deep eye contact between a parent and a newborn.

It is the hormone the human body uses to mark another living being as safe, familiar, and worth bonding with. It widens the blood vessels, slows the heart, suppresses the production of cortisol, and quietly tells the nervous system that the threat level in the environment is low enough that the body can repair itself instead of bracing for danger.

The 69 studies the team reviewed found that the same molecule rises in the human bloodstream when you pet your dog, hold your cat, watch your fish, or talk softly to a parrot that does not understand a single word you are saying.

The strangest finding in the whole paper is that the animal does not have to understand you for the system to work. The mechanism is not based on actual comprehension.

It is based on the act of directing social attention toward a living presence and feeling, on some level, that the presence is paying attention back. The brain only requires perceived reciprocity. It does not require real reciprocity.

In 2015, a Japanese research team led by Miho Nagasawa published a study in the journal Science that pushed the finding even further. They measured oxytocin levels in 30 dog and owner pairs before and after the dogs and owners interacted for 30 minutes.

When dogs and owners exchanged long periods of eye contact, oxytocin rose in both species. Not just in the human. In the dog too. And the longer the gaze, the bigger the spike on both sides of the leash. The same study tried the experiment with hand-raised wolves and got nothing. The loop was specific to the bond that domestic dogs and humans had spent 15,000 years building together.

What Beetz and her team had identified through 69 studies, Nagasawa proved with direct hormone measurements in a controlled lab. The act of looking into your dog's eyes and talking to it is running the same neurochemical program that a mother runs with her newborn baby. The brain treats the interaction as social bonding because, biologically, it is.

The implication is the part that should change how you live. People who narrate their day to their dog are not lonely or strange. They are using one of the oldest stress-regulation systems the human nervous system has ever built. The habit looks embarrassing from the outside and feels completely natural from the inside because it is doing exactly what the body evolved to do when a safe presence is nearby.

The research was clean enough that the entire field of Animal-Assisted Therapy was built on top of it. Therapy dogs now work in hospitals, psychiatric wards, schools for children with autism, prisons, hospice care, and disaster relief sites across more than 30 countries. The protocols are formal. The interventions are measurable. The science behind why a dog in the room lowers a patient's blood pressure during chemotherapy is the same science Beetz and her team summarized in 2012.

The most haunting line in the paper is the one near the end where the authors point out that the oxytocin pathway evolved long before language did. The system was already in place when our ancestors lived in caves and the first wild dogs started circling human fires. The hormone never required words. It just required a body next to a body.

When you talk to your cat about your day, the words are doing almost nothing. The animal hearing your voice while you direct attention toward it is doing almost everything.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you feel your nervous system tightening up. Stop scrolling, put the phone down, and sit on the floor with whatever animal is in your house. Talk to it. Look at it. Pet it. Let your shoulders drop.

The hormone the rest of the world is selling in podcasts and supplements is already inside you, waiting for the signal.