Ask a supporter of the U.S. empire:
"How many countries has your government bombed in your lifetime?"
Watch the blank stare.
Then ask:
"How many times have you been told your country is a force for good?"
Watch the smile.
They are not stupid.
They are saturated.
We Are All Sacrifices
We are the sacrifices of your social media pages, the heavy substance for your articles, research, and newspapers. We are the embroidery on your clothes and bags, the map wrapped around your necks.
We are the perfect script for your directors, the never-ending content for all journalists. We are the photo gallery you scroll through, passing by our agony, only to applaud before returning to your normal lives. We are the opening act of your galas, and we are the closing ceremony.
We are the myth of writers, analysts, and reporters. We are the blood that fills your inkwells, the numbers that decorate your annual reports.
We are your cafe debates, the raw material for your consciences—which only awaken in front of the cameras.
We are the free spectacle for a world sitting in the front rows. We are the medal you hang on your bags, the cover of your books, the watermelon that adorns your names. We are the first and final step on your ladder to fame.
We are the very last tear you would ever think to shed.
"I've just gutted a Paki."
— Paul Mullery, 17, after stabbing Akhtar Ali Baig in the heart on East Ham High Street.
It was a £5 bet.
Who could kill one of us first.
That was 1980.
These are the names of those who came after.
Muslims killed, beaten, acid-attacked, firebombed, abused — on British streets.
For being Muslim.
Most are never named.
Most are never reported.
Remember them.
Report: https://t.co/NTLpXVTNS2
Keep us alive: https://t.co/Z8H0Flg44Y
Substack: https://t.co/52Z6Nx1LTm
IG: @islamophobiauk
This is not a detainment camp in World War II, nor a prison in the Holocaust, this is Gaza. A chilling reminder that history repeats.
A holocaust is happening right before our eyes and the world is silent
People (inc. sometimes me) talk about overthinking as something that blocks contact with the body.
But there is a secret technique in which overthinking can be a portal to body sensitivity (a portal that actually cures the overthinking itself).
To understand this technique, you have to understand that what you are doing when you are thinking is listening intently to a part of your nervous system.
You just happen to be putting all your attention on a specific part of your nervous system - the largest part, namely your brain.
By focusing on the brain at the expense of the rest of your nervous system, you end up short-circuiting your thinking into loops.
But if you can tune into the felt-sense of thinking rather than the content of your thoughts, you will start to unlock the secret technique I'm discussing.
Thoughts do have a felt sense.
If you really tune in deeply to the space within your head when you are thinking you may experience a kind of tingling sense that some experience like a sort of magnetic field or barely perceptible electric current.
This is the flow of subtle energy that forms into verbal concepts when you think.
This energy actually flows all throughout our body, but is particularly easy to sense in the head - especially for overthinkers - because so much of the nervous system is concentrated in the head.
The more you gain sensitivity to the pre-verbal sensory-energetic field in your brain, the easier it is to start sensing it elsewhere.
You will hopefully start to see that this same energy that feels so compelling inside your head - that energy that leads you to compulsively think and think - flows through every part of your nervous system.
And it is just as fascinating to tune into as any thought.
Indeed tuning into the unique manifestation of this energy in different parts of your nervous system will give you access to all manner of new sensations, skills, intuitions, and ways of knowing and feeling.
Entire new rooms to explore in the mansion of your being.
Not only will learning this technique help you break out of compulsive thinking loops, but it can help you see how your overthinking is secretly training a certain type of sensitivity in you.
A sensitivity that can be used to unlock deep wisdom, hidden loci of awareness, and mysterious expansions of your consciousness that go far beyond the confines of words.
University of Waterloo psychologists tested this exact practice in 2009. They had people with low self-esteem repeat “I am a lovable person” each day. Those participants felt measurably worse afterward than a control group who said nothing. The affirmation revealed the gap between the statement and their actual self-image, making that distance feel larger rather than smaller.
The explanation comes from what psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas called self-verification theory. Your brain checks every self-statement against your stored self-image. If that image says “I am not particularly likable,” and you tell it “I have a great personality,” the brain treats the new statement as a threat and pushes back. The gap triggers rejection, pushing the stored image deeper rather than lifting it.
For people whose self-image is already neutral or positive, though, the same words behave completely differently. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon used fMRI brain scans in 2020 to map the exact pathway. Affirming a personal value lit up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a reward region just behind your forehead), and that activation then dampened the brain area that registers threat.
UCLA researchers measured cortisol separately in 2005. People who spent two minutes affirming their values before a stressful task came out with significantly lower cortisol than the control group. Cortisol is your primary stress hormone, so the body’s stress response had measurably changed.
Your inner monologue is also running this loop constantly. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan points to research showing inner self-talk runs at roughly 4,000 words per minute, about 30 times faster than spoken speech. Most of that stream is about who you are, and for most people, those statements run without any conscious selection.
Two modifications improve the success rate of the monk’s method. Saying “You can do this” in the second person outperforms “I can do this” across multiple Kross studies, because the slight distance sidesteps the brain’s consistency check. And replacing trait statements like “I am a hard worker” with values statements like “I care about hard work” bypasses the brain’s fact-checker entirely, because a value is harder to dispute than a claimed trait. The science says the words matter less than the gap between what you’re saying and what you already believe about yourself.
Cortisol drops 31% on average after a massage. Serotonin rises 28%. Dopamine, 31%. Cortisol is the body’s stress alarm, raising heart rate, driving inflammation, and weakening immunity. Serotonin and dopamine are the chemicals that stabilize mood, motivation, and mental calm. All three numbers come from a University of Miami review of 30-plus studies, measuring hormone levels in saliva and urine before and after massage.
The body painting in this video shows exactly what trained hands are targeting. Those deep red fibers are the trapezius and erector spinae, the wide upper-back muscle and the long columns running beside the spine, which take most of the load from hours of sitting or standing. Beneath them is fascia, a continuous web of collagen wrapping every muscle and organ in the body. When it stiffens from injury or bad posture, the tension spreads, which is why lower back pain often first appears as hip or shoulder discomfort.
A 2012 McMaster University study in Science Translational Medicine looked at the actual biology. Researchers took tissue samples from thigh muscles after participants cycled to exhaustion, massaged one leg for 10 minutes, and left the other alone. The massaged leg had less inflammation and started building more mitochondria, the tiny energy factories inside every cell. The effect works the way ibuprofen does, minus the stomach damage. The same study found massage has no effect on muscle lactate, the waste compound that builds up during hard exercise, knocking out one of fitness’s most repeated claims.
Immune cells respond too. Research on breast cancer patients found regular massage increased natural killer cell counts, the white blood cells that detect and destroy viruses and abnormal cells. Sleep improves alongside this, partly because serotonin converts directly to melatonin, the hormone that controls sleep cycles.
About 619 million people lived with chronic back pain in 2020, roughly 1 in 12 adults worldwide, per the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. By 2050, the projection hits 843 million. Back pain is already the leading cause of disability globally. The anatomy in this painting is a map of where most of that suffering lives. Pressure on those muscle layers shifts cortisol, inflammation, immune cells, mitochondria, and sleep hormones all at once, with no side effects that need a second prescription.
In a frightening hate incident, a man wearing a balaclava attempts to burn down a local Imam's home in Bolton, with his young family inside.
The perpetrator is still at large.
🇨🇳China has cracked down on influencers who flaunt extreme wealth online. The country has been targeting accounts that show off luxury cars, mansions, designer clothes, expensive jewellery, private jets, and lifestyles built around “money worship.”
One of the most famous influencers affected was Wang Hongquanxing, known online as “China’s Kim Kardashian.” He had millions of followers and became known for showing luxury outfits, jewellery, first-class travel, and an ultra-rich lifestyle.
Then his accounts became inaccessible.
The government says the crackdown is about creating a healthier online culture and stopping people from glorifying materialism.
The social networks policing of show-off wealth will:
A) Have a positive effect on the people’s more balanced lifestyles;
B) Change nothing, or even encourage more materialistic thirst for the “forbidden fruit”;
C) Other?