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Hi-Tech Hates Boundaries

28/6/2018

1 Comment

 
After a yet another hi-tech bug, I realized something:
Hi-tech hates boundaries.

For example, I need the newest version of Flash Player to operate a piece of software. I'm using the software for some very good reasons religiously speaking, and not to watch action films or something like that.

Yet while it does install, I can't figure out how to enable it. And just knowing that it needs to be manually enabled (which was not indicated anywhere during the installation process) took several days of back-and-forth to discover.

During this time, I've been in touch back-and-forth for over a week with some very nice service people online to figure out this problem, but nothing helps.

I have a feeling that something in my computer or browser is blocking Flash Player, but I have no idea what, and neither do they.

For some reason, I always find software issues to be the most exasperating, but I'm trying to put this in the frame of mind that this obstacle is better than a million dollars because everything Hashem does is for the best and He hasn't sent me a million dollars, but has sent me technological malfunctions instead, so this is excellent.

Also, I much prefer this to Grad missiles from Gaza.

Actually, as far as problems go, an unable-to-be-enabled Flash Player is the ideal nisayon. So many more things are worse than being blocked from my beloved item of software, I'm grateful that this is my nisayon and not a million other things that would be worse. And frankly, I feel petty for even gritting my teeth about it.

Likewise, I recently paid for and downloaded another much-lauded piece of software that doesn't work on my computer, even though it worked very well for a friend of mine living in the same area. I have a feeling that my filter is blocking it from working right, but there is nothing to do about that. And so far, the developer is ignoring my polite requests for the guaranteed 30-day refund if I'm not completely satisfied.

And with this second software, the download itself wasn't straightforward. It tried forcing me to sign up for DropBox until I contacted the developer and he (or more likely, a virtual assistant pretending to be him) immediately sent me a screenshot to show a tiny box at the bottom with fine print that would allow me to side-step DropBox (even though that wasn't clear from the fine print and I couldn't have known this for sure without the developer informing me).

Hi-tech doesn't like boundaries. It doesn't like fences.

Judaism loves fences.

Judaism insists on fences and strongly encourages fences even when it doesn't insist.

But hi-tech loathes fences of any kind.

If you turn off cookies, a whole array of options becomes closed to you.

If you're not signed into Google Apps, you're blocked access to certain applications.

If you try to use a program to hide your identity, your computer often slows down.

You get duped into clicking a box to sign up for yet another service or download another application if you want to download the service you've ordered.

And some programs "punish" you for using someone else's browser (which is a fence against their browser market) by refusing to work fully or even work at all.

If you turn off cookies to prevent spying and tracking and infiltration, if you sign out of an application, if you have a filter against pritzut, software against viruses, or a security plug-in -- or even the basic standard Windows Firewall, then at some point, Internet technology says, "Open that gate, bub, or you're going down."

I have the same love-hate relationship that many people have with computer/Internet technology. Frequent computer crashes and Windows's Blue Screen of Death aren't in the distant past. Yet I also experience the same "can't live with it/can't live without it" dynamic that many others have.

But while I've struggled for years now with this love/hate, grateful/resentful relationship with hi-tech, it's only with this latest aggravation (which is better than a million dollars!) that the light bulb went on.

Hi-tech hates fences.

Hi-tech works best when you are logged in, signed up, penetrable, trackable, visible, defenseless, and wholly unprotected.

And it punishes you when you aren't.

Food for thought.
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1 Comment

What's Happening with Video Games Today?

22/5/2018

0 Comments

 
Thank you very much to astute reader, Emunah, who requested this topic in a previous comment.
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The last time I played a real video game, it was at a pizza restaurant. My siblings and I convinced our parents to let us each have a turn playing the most advanced and most expensive game, which looked exactly like a cartoon that featured a blond prince wielding a sword. My sisters and I couldn't get past the first minute of the game, which consisted of getting the prince to jump onto a moving wooden disc. Our brother got a bit farther than that, before the bitter "GAME OVER" appeared.

Both frustrating and disappointing, it helped me lose interest in video games, which I'd never been good at anyway. Later, Tetris came along and I could get lost in that (and actually showed some skill with it), but after the initial burst of enthusiasm, it became yet another take-it-or-leave-it activity.

So when I first heard about "gaming" as a culture and video game addiction, I was still picturing Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. I imagined teenage guys addicted to video games that looked like this:
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Or maybe, at the most, something like this:
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Boy, was I wrong!

I think I first realized that video games had developed much more complexity when I was looking for story plot ideas, and a blogger recommended a book of game plots.

GAME plots?

Yes!

As I read through the plots, I marveled at the complex and intriguing storylines.

How could little pixelated characters jumping from level to level actually star in their own full-fledged plot? (Remember, I was still thinking Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.)

Little did I know that the world of gaming provides lifelike interaction on a level never experienced before.

Who Plays Video Games?

There are very real & problematic effects of video games on people. But first, let's look at who likes to play video games and why.

First of all, the numbers from Pew:
  • 49% of Americans over age 18 play video games at some point.
And the split between men and women is nearly half-half.
  • 10% identify themselves as "gamers."

But the hard-core gamers are predominantly male:
  • 15% vs the 6% of females who consider themselves "gamers."

And my assumption of gamers as teenage males also needed some correction:
  • 77% of males age 18-29 play video games, with 33% of them self-identifying as "gamers."
  • 57% of females age 18-29 play video games, with 9% of them self-identifying as "gamers."
  • 58% of all those age 30 to 49 play video games
  • 40% of all those age 50 to 64 play video games
  • 25% of all those 65 or older play video games

Interestingly, women over 50 are more likely to play video games than men over 50:
  • 38% vs 29%

Why are Games So Addictive?

Social Interaction & Collaboration
Rather than playing against a computer, the most popular and addictive games are role-playing games whose characters are played by real people around the world. During the game, you get to know other people and their personalities. Characters flirt with each other, help (or abandon) each other, and interact in myriad other ways.

In fact, gamers develop real friendships with other players, and some have even married! (Not surprisingly, there is even an app to facilitate this for those interested in finding true love with their fellow players.)

To paraphrase the attitude of this app designer: "Instead of struggling with a conversation over coffee, it's less awkward to investigate a new dungeon together."

And while the character images are often otherworldly, you might feel that your choice of green monster with machete ears expresses something about you that only your fellow gamer can understand and appreciate.

The addictive side of this is that the player resists letting his group down.

Not playing can effect the same feeling that a necessary football player might have about backing out of a key game in real life.

Compelling Storylines & Plots
Today's games resemble complex and compelling novelized movies, complete with plot twists and heart-stirring music.

This is based on a description from a popular game:
Jay and his surrogate daughter Eileen, must traverse a post-apocalyptic America to deliver a possible cure for a fungal virus that has ruined the nation. Jay is prepared to do anything to protect Eileen.

Or this:
This is a neo-noire detective action-adventure involving a US army veteran who joins the homicide department after finishing his mission in WWII. Later, he discovers that his partner is a crooked cop and he also traces drug smuggling by Marines in his former unit, most of whom are assassinated by mobsters. Finally, he chases a kidnapper through underground river tunnels while overcoming underground flooding and thugs in order to save the day.

But will he survive?

And you get to be part of this heart-stopping action and high drama.

Very Real & Compelling Graphics
You really are starring in your own story.

Today's games are lifelike movies.

Look at these screenshots of games:
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Real Emotion
The combination of compelling graphics and storylines provide the same effect that a compelling movie or novel does: emotional involvement.

In one of the most popular games, gamers around the world protested when the creators killed off a beloved character.

Gamers describe tears welling up in their eyes when two game characters express their love to each other or when another game character sacrifices her life for the other characters. Or describing "heartbreak" during a silent moment broken by the ringing of a phone which, when answered, emits the sound of your missing "daughter" crying out to you.

In other scenarios, gamers confess that they couldn't stop smiling or suppress elation during touching moments between characters.

In horror games, gamers note that they fear to be alone while playing.

Gamers emphasize the heightened pulse or strong emotions because they feel like they're actually serving on the front lines for something they believe in.

The Bowen Research study found that the most common emotions aroused in video games were:
  • competitiveness
  • violence/excitement
  • accomplishment
  • hate
  • sadness

All fake, of course.

Yet these emotions ranked above love or spirituality, which are also experienced during gaming, but not as much as those mentioned above.

When Rabbi Wallerstein advised one gaming addict to make aliyah to Israel and serve in the IDF, rather than playing war games all day, the young man demurred.

"Why not?" asked Rabbi Wallerstein.

The young man replied that he didn't want to actually risk his life or suffer hardship, he just wanted to feelings without any actual risk.

Those of us uninvolved in the gaming world can turn up our nose at the idea of emotional attachment to video game characters and scenes, but it's really no different than crying when a character dies or finds true love in a novel or movie. Likewise, people (okay, maybe just Americans?) get all pumped up with patriotism and false feelings of valor during particularly rousing scenes in patriot movies.

Rewards
Video games offer all kinds of rewards, both actual and emotional.

Players enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when working up from level to level.

Top players earn bonus points, in-game rewards, or even actual financial rewards from the game's creators via tournaments played for actual cash prizes.

Undefined Endings
Players often play according to a schedule. (The different time zones worldwide complicate this, forcing players to play when they should be sleeping or doing other things.) But while they need to meet to start the game at a certain time, the ending depends on unknowns, like how successful the group will be at meeting all the criteria (both known and unknown) in order to make it to the next level.

In other words, short spurts of playing don't reap benefits and even lead to disappointment and other negative feelings.

Are Video Games Bad for You?

The studies aren't clear whether video games are wholly bad for you, nor what the ultimate effect is on the human brain.

Some video games seem to improve certain functions IF they're specially designed to do so. For example, there are video games that seem to improve dyslexia.

But some gamers themselves admit that the games increase aggression. The initial war games were created by the military to give combat soldiers virtual training and to accustom them to killing so they'd be less traumatized in actual battle.

That's chilling, isn't it?

Obviously, role-playing realistic war or horror games are going to affect a person's psyche, whether they mean for it to or not.

When the mass shootings first popped up in American schools, restaurants, and movie theaters, a link between them and video games appeared, then disappeared.

Researching this led me to the more common and definite link between psychotropic medication and homicidal idealization.

At the same time, it's easy to understand how a young man suffering from schizophrenia or depression could become worse by role-playing these super-realistic horror or war games, or even hate-filled racist games, whether on medication or not. Many of the shooters were also gamers, which is why so many people jumped to blaming video games for the massacres.
Behavioral Changes
One study concluded that violent gaming didn't affect people negatively -- unless they were already suffering from negative behaviors like depression, rule-breaking, impulsivity, neurosis, inconsideration of others, disagreeableness, and getting upset easily.

(Again, in all or nearly all mass shootings in America, the murderer suffered from some kind of mental illness and played video games -- in addition to taking medication -- prior to the shooting.)

In another study, participants demonstrated increased apathy and decreased attention and concentration when tested.

The apathy and absorption isn't a joke. When a Taiwanese man died after playing a video game at an Internet cafe for 3 days, no one noticed for the first few hours. Because he sometimes fell asleep face down during his gaming binge, no one realized that his last face-down position was in fact death. (CCTV cameras showed that he struggled before he died, an act also unnoticed by fellow gamers and workers.) It was only when his body sprawled on the table and entered the stiffening phase that workers noticed and thought to call the paramedics. When paramedics arrived to cart the body out, the other gamers never even paused.

In another Taiwanese Internet cafe, a gamer lay dead for 10 hours before anyone noticed. Fellow gamers continued to play even as that body was carted out and the gamers didn't even realize that anything had happened until forensic police came to cordon off the area. Yet even then, many gamers refused to stop playing and stayed where they were.

Other studies indicate that it's not the violence of the video game that inspires aggressive behavior, but the feelings of frustration and failure that occur upon losing a game.

Finally, there have been a few deaths brought on by playing video games in one position for a shocking number of hours without eating or moving much.
Brain Changes
I want to start off by saying that brain studies are iffy. There's a lot that researchers still don't know or understand about the brain. Having said that, studies of the brain and gaming yield thought-provoking results...

The following studies were conducted upon people who didn't usually play video games and who, for the study, played for 1-2 hours a day.

Many studies show a link between violent video games and increased aggression, but these brain studies aimed to discover the physiological reason why violent video games increase aggression.

One study indicated negative changes in the frontal lobe in people who played a violent game for 10 hours over a week's duration. Disturbingly, this change in the brain persisted into the second week, despite the participants not playing video games at all.

Another study indicated negative changes in the parts of the brain that control attention, inhibition of impulses, and emotions.

Behaviorally, these participants demonstrated increased apathy and decreased attention and concentration when tested.

One researcher noted that the brains changed to resemble the brains of teens who suffered from destructive sociopathic disorders.

Gaming Gains?

Are there any benefits to playing video games?

As noted above, strategy games or games specifically created to improve cognitive function do seem to do just that. There are studies that show decreased dementia, improved visual attention, improved cognitive function, improved treatment of dyslexia, increase in gray matter of the brain (which allegedly improves cognitive function in specific areas of the brain), and so on.

And some studies show that gamers demonstrate improved visual attention overall, regardless of the game played.

Yet the official scientific jury is still out as to whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Video Games & Fatal Violence

While I still believe that psychotropic medications are the main culprit behind particularly violent behavior (like mass shootings), it's chilling how often video games seem to be involved.

Like with the teenager who shot to death his grandfather along with 6 other people (and wounded 7 more) on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, he committed this slaughter after having his dosage of Prozac increased. He was also on Ritalin. He spent a lot of time creating and uploading graphically violent animation on the Internet, animation based on violent video games he enjoyed, one of which enjoys global popularity.

Other shooters killed people according to the same methods used by gamers to kill characters in a video game. Since intricate role-playing violent video games came out, at least 14 mass murderers in America showed a history of addiction to the most popular role-playing violent video games prior to their rampage.  One even described a violent video game as a place where he felt "comfortable and secure."

Ugh.

It seems like people who already have a negative grasp of reality (a combination of their life circumstances, their diagnosis of mental illness, and their intake of psychotropic medication) respond badly when such realistic role-playing violent games are added to the mix.

And there's no realistic way of preventing angry, depressed, deluded, medicated people from accessing video games.

What's the Ultimate Issue with Gaming?

So what can we take away from all this?
  • Video games definitely affect the brain, though it's not certain exactly how and how much.
  • Video games, particularly violent ones, increase negative behaviors and emotional states.
  • Video games are set up to be addictive, both emotionally and cerebrally.
  • Video games reward players -- (emotionally, in the brain, and sometimes even financially)
  • Video games can easily be more compelling, interesting, comfortable, enjoyable, and feel more meaningful than real life.

The spiritual problem with any kind of video game is the same problem with any distraction (no matter how innocent):
It wastes your time and emotions indulging in meaninglessness when you could be advancing yourself in some other way.

(And I really think that any activity is a serious problem if it prevents you from noticing or caring that someone has died in your immediate vicinity, God forbid.)

May we all gain our all our pleasures from spiritually pure sources -- and really enjoy them!
___________
Related links:
Playing Video Games May Make Specific Changes to the Brain
Pew Research: Gaming & Gamers
Video Game Addiction
For the US Military, Video Games Get Serious
Standing for Nothing: USA
The Real Reason Why People Sin
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How the "News" Hurts Innocent Jews

15/4/2018

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A recent event brought home how far we need to go to give the benefit of the doubt, especially when the doubt is cast by the news media.

My husband was personally involved in this recent situation:

Years ago, a man whom we'll call "Pinny" opened a felafel restaurant with high-level kashrut certification.

The organization certifying Pinny's kashrut was surprised to learn that he'd falsely maligned the kashurt organization on a standard Israeli news channel. They checked it out and there he was, standing in his store next to their kashrut certificate with PINNY'S FELAFEL featured prominently on the certificate and reporting on their supervision as a substandard money-making racket.

Case closed, right?

Wrong.

Recently, Pinny contacted the same kashrut organization requesting certification for his new pizza restaurant.

The chutzpah of it all! How dare he turn to them for approval when he gave a false report on TV against this same organization?

They turned him down.

To make the "truth" even more evident, he demanded certification 2 days before Pesach, which is cutting things pretty close and puts a lot of pressure on the supervision. What kind of a person does that?

When his calls weren't returned, he texted mussar to the mashgichim (kashurt supervisors) like: Derech eretz kadmah l'Torah -- good manners precede Torah, etc.

At the same time, a couple of guys in the organization felt uncomfortable with the stonewalling. Sure, he'd maligned them on TV, but maybe he'd done teshuvah in the meantime? And yeah, the mussar texts and the demand for kashrut certification the day before Bedikat Chametz didn't show great derech eretz, but nonetheless...something seemed "off." Something just didn't add up.

Finally, the Pinny's rabbi called the kashrut organization. He'd known Pinny personally for years and found him to be a sincere and trustworthy individual. Why wouldn't they even speak to Pinny? Why were they limiting Pinny's only means of livelihood?

"Pinny falsely slandered us on TV," they told the rabbi.

"Impossible," said the rabbi and decided to check things out.

He called them back after Pesach. "Gentlemen," he said. "You've got the wrong man."

What had happened?

Pinny sold his restaurant to another fellow BEFORE the televised interview. THAT fellow stood next to the kashrut certificate which stated PINNY'S FELAFEL as he maligned the organization -- when it was no longer Pinny's felafel joint, but someone else's.
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It's important to air things out and get the facts before committing to a certain narrative.

Yes, it's very difficult to so when the "evidence" blares itself from a TV screen in front of your face.

But it's a major reason why you shouldn't automatically believe anything you see on the "news."
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Why This Generation is So Astounding

11/3/2018

8 Comments

 
In a lecture by Rabbi Alon Anava, he remarked on the common idea of this generation being a lowly generation, and therefore, the expectations on us are lower, spiritually speaking.

Unfortunately, many people take this to mean that we don't need to try as hard and that there are all sorts of ideas that allow us to feel like we can indulge ourselves more, that Hashem understands and so forth.

Anyway, he commented that while this is true to a certain extent (for example, there really are people who fit the definition of a tinok sheh nishba), he feels that this is actually a very great generation. And he went on to explain why.

It got me thinking about how right he is.

If you think about it, it's amazing that there are any people who are looking for spiritual growth, who wrangle with how to apply ancient Torah wisdom to our lives and middot work today (WITHOUT watering it down with pop psychology), and who look to cultivate a relationship with Hashem when there is so much against us.

Even in the frummest communities, there are "experts" and media bombarding us with turning to therapists, medication, and other secular remedies as the ultimate solution. Davening and genuine deep-digging cheshbon hanefesh are often considered side dishes to the secular methods, rather than the main course.

(If utilized correctly, these secular-based resources can help temporarily, but the primary goal of any nisayon -- which is from Hashem in the first place -- is to turn to Hashem and develop a relationship with Him, and to allow your individual soul reach its full potential and illumination.)

Combined with that, there are so many band-aid distractions so readily available at our fingertips! Especially with today's technology, options, and accessibility, you could easily sink into novels, movies, drugs (both legal and illegal), alcohol, accumulating material positions, social media, filthy images, gossip and texting/email altercations, news, "ooh, shiny!" information, and so much more.

When I was in high school in the Eighties, I knew exactly who I could go to for drugs or a gun. (There were at least 2 boys I knew of who kept a handgun in their school lockers.) I didn't do so, but I easily could have. Things are much worse and even more accessible now.

And for women, the Internet is like an unending magazine. Women aren't as likely to go for the hard core filth, but the tiflut is definitely a pull. Sure, watching an unending stream of cooking or baking how-to videos seems so innocent compared to what other people are watching online, but is watching 8 different videos on making homemade marshmallows really the best use of one's time? When standing before the Heavenly Court (we should all live to 120!), is that going to be overlooked or will one be brought to account for not doing teshuvah or saying Tehillim during those 2 hours when practically speaking, only 15 minutes of 2 videos gave you enough to know about making those marshmallows?

Your Brain Under Attack

You don't even feel the time go by when you're engaged in any technological pursuit (i.e., surfing, gaming, watching, etc.). For decades, studies have shown that TV/movies/videos affect your brain and lull you into an Alpha-wave state, but recent studies have shown similar effects regarding Internet surfing and phone texting. And even more recently, reports have shed light on the hijinks of Facebook to hit your brain in the most addictive way.

Video games also affect the brain, decreasing the Beta waves (which indicate liveliness and degree of tension in the prefrontal region of the brain) and increasing aggressive behavior, among other things. (They can also be incredibly addictive.)

With modern music, producers use research to determine song arrangement so that the brain is hit in a certain way (called a "hook"). The opening chords of a song and other parts of the song are arranged so that when you peruse the radio or hear the song blasting out of a passing car, it hits your brain in a way that makes you want more of that song (and just one reason why pop music all sounds the same).

They even polish movie scripts down to a science. Especially with movies produced in the past 10 years, you can time the necessary plot points down the minute. Author Eibhlin MacIntosh described how if you split a movie into 6 parts (1st plot point, 1st pinch-point, midpoint, 2nd pinch-point, 2nd plot point, etc), you'll see that in a movie that runs, say, an hour and 43 minutes, the first plot point occurs at exactly 16 minutes, then the first pinch-point occurs at 32 minutes, and so on.

Children's movies, BTW, have become appallingly violent and foul. True, children's movies always contained garbage due to the fact that the movie industry was conceived and populated by degenerates. But my son showed me the clip of one popular movie in which a male bird kept getting whomped painfully between the legs -- and that was supposed to be comic. And there's other stuff that I really can't write about because it's so vulgar, but if you've even seen the 3-minute promo of any animated children's movie today, then you know exactly what I mean.

Yet very young children watch all this.

And this is just the media stuff, which you can enjoy privately while still looking very pious and sedate on the outside. And with all the piracy going on, you don't even need to pay for entertainment any more (unless you want to or if you have a guilty conscience).

Advertisers also whittled their methods down to a science.

And what about food? Sugar and chemicals hit the brain in specific ways to make you want more of that too.

What are we supposed to do when our very BRAINS are under assault?

Your Soul under Attack

And then there is all the propaganda against living a life of truth. Some of it seems oh-so harmless with its light wit and superficiality ("Just kidding!"), yet Judaism considers mockery one of the deadliest forms of opposition.

Yet other anti-God and anti-Torah propaganda is packaged in the veneer of scientific objectivity. And let me tell you, sifting through that to figure out what is the chaff and what is the actual science is quite a process. You also have to be able to see what's not there, like the research and studies they left out of the article, book, or paper.

(Helpful tip: Regardless of the prestige of a particular publication or scientist, anything synonymous with the word "assume" is not scientific, but taking you into the realm of the scientist's imagination. The Greeks already did mythology; we're supposed to be beyond that.)

Do you want to settle down with a good novel? Me, too. But I can't! Have you ever read a fantasy or science fiction novel featuring God? (With maybe one or two exceptions, they are always either polytheistic or atheistic.) And what about mainstream novels for any age? Do any of them ever tout appealing characters who are also moral monotheists? Or at the very least, a Republican? You know that when frum people read any novel in any genre, they need to ignore a lot of garbage, both ideologically and practically. And that becomes part of the reading experience for frum people.

Furthermore, non-fiction has also become dicey, weaving in Leftist/Liberal secular immoral values and potty language. Even books written by religious right-wing conservatives contain problematic ideas and foul language (not to mention the turn they take into Christianity or touting as "Christian" what are essentially Jewish values.)

(This does not even begin to cover the halachically problematic Far East mysticism increasingly popular within any self-help material.)

And finally: This is so bizarre to me, but religious right-wing conservative women who pound away about traditional values also have taken upon themselves the body-baring clothing, va-va-voom makeup and hairstyles, and potty-mouthing that actually demean women and go against the civilizing genteel dignifying influence women traditionally had on Western society. Do you remember how men used to have to curb their language and behavior around women? Well, no more! Now we can ALL be uninhibited cussers!

In short, everything's a big immoral mess AND this mess is constantly pounding on our heads (literally!) with increasing force and stealth.

Shining through the Muck

Yet despite all this, there are Jews who still take the time out of the busiest part of the day to rush to a minyan (if they're male) or to find a quiet spot and pick up a siddur (if female) to daven Mincha.

Needless to say, there are also non-Jews who try to make space in their lives for spiritual pursuits.

ASTOUNDING!

Here are other signs that you possess an amazing neshama (soul):
  • Do you try to dress with dignity and modesty even though the entire surrounding culture (and even parts of the frum community) disdains this?
  • Do you make time for Hashem (even though all the distractions -- including "kosher" ones -- are so sticky and alluring)?
  • Do you make some attempt to watch your mouth (both foul language & lashon hara) even though the entire surrounding culture thinks that foul language is cool and lashon hara is virtuous (or at least, funny)?
  • Do you make some attempt to guard your eyes from forbidden sights?
  • What about your thoughts?
  • Do you make some attempt to discipline yourself with regard to online activity?
  • Do you ever scrutinize yourself to see what you've done wrong and then actually try to make amends and improve that part of yourself?
  • Do you ever read mussar (when you could be reading a NYT bestseller), listen to a Torah shiur (when you could be pirating a movie), or listen to Shwekey (when you could be listening to a digitally designed secular pop song)?
  • Do you do anything else encouraged by the Torah despite the fact that there so many other things (sometimes under the guise of "kosher") grasping at you like Voldemort's underwater Inferi?

Rabbi Anava is right that we are actually an exceptional generation. The fact that the soul-light is able to glint through any of this muck is the biggest indication of how exalted our souls actually are, despite how we may otherwise behave.

And the main thing is to ask Hashem to help us continue to uncover that light until we can burn through all the muck and illuminate all the darkness.

Because we can. It's definitely there within us.
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I think this is the class by Rabbi Alon Anava mentioned above:
Can You Handle the Truth? (H/T Shirat Devorah)
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True Greatness Hides Itself before God Makes It Known

8/1/2018

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There's an interesting couple of posts over at Emunaroma (links below) that fit right into what's going in the current parshas (Shemot & Va'era).

Throughout his commentary on the Torah, the Kli Yakar emphasizes that Hashem chooses the "מעט /m'at" -- the lesser, the minor, the small one, the insignificant.

Whether it was the more diminutive Har Sinai or the younger sibling (Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe Rabbeinu, etc.), God chooses the m'at.

I'm mean, look at Yehudah, the progenitor of Mashiach: a middle child.

And Tamar? She comes out of nowhere, has been married twice without ever producing a child (not ideal shidduch material), and is pretty quiet. In fact, our Sages note that the whole reason why Yehudah didn't recognize her on the road (despite her having been his daughter-in-law twice) was because of her great modesty and refinement when at the home of her father-in-law...she even covered her face, so he really didn't know what she looked like.

(You're not obligated to cover your face when visiting your in-laws. The Sages just note that Tamar chose to of her own accord, which later proved advantageous.)

Further down the line, you have Ruth. Again, her refined modesty and reluctance to stand out are what actually make her stand out. Her refinement and concern for modesty is even more startling considering that she comes from a particularly brazen nation. Furthermore, she's a convert from a nation despised (with good reason) by the Jews. To make things even more complicated, she looked different. Apparently, the Moavites had a distinctive look, making Ruth identifiable at first glance.

In other words, she was an ethnic minority of one from a most unpopular ethnic group.

(Note: I looked up Moavite archeology to get an idea of what the Moavites might have looked like, but found very little. Almost nothing remains of that once-powerful nation.)

Yet very quietly and unassumingly, Ruth swept up all the Moavite sparks of vitality with her when she left and elevated them with her conversion to Judaism.

And that was the beginning of the end for Moav.

Later, she married the great Boaz and their great-grandson ended up being King David...again, the direct line of Mashiach. Ruth also merited to have her story written out and an entire megillah named after her.

The Reluctant Leaders of Israel

In Shemot and Va'era, we have Moshe Rabbeinu, the baby of the family and a stutterer. He actually spends significant parts of his life undercover:
  • He's born in secrecy within a closed home to hide his light.
  • He's hidden in a floating box in the Nile (while his sister hides herself to watch over him).
  • He's locked up in an underground prison for several years.

Moshe Rabbeinu actually tries to get out of the leadership position Hashem has chosen for him. After his first official meeting with Pharoah leads to increased suffering for his beloved people, Moshe Rabbeinu tells Hashem: "Perhaps I was the cause, since You sent a stutterer like me to him?"

Moshe Rabbeinu is definitely not engaging in any self-promotion here. In fact, he thinks he's the wrong man for the job and is not afraid to tell this to God Himself.

Also, it's worth noting that Aharon Hacohen shows absolutely no jealousy over the fact that his younger and less silver-tongued brother is chosen as the great redeemer. Due to Aharon's profound humility and willingness to play second fiddle his entire life, his descendents are rewarded with the eternal priesthood.

Devorah Haneviah led the nation to military victory, but first she tried to avoid doing so.

There are many, many examples throughout Tanach of the lesser person, the one trodden upon or ignored, being chosen by Hashem for an exalted role.

Here's one of my favorites: Gidon.

The Small-Tribe Boy Achieves Greatness

The story of Gidon in Judges has always been one of my favorites. When I finally studied it with the commentaries, I found even more to love.

We come across Gidon during a downturn in Jewish history. Gidon is born to the Jewish nation as it's oppressed by the camel-riding crescent-bearing Midyanites (the precursors of today's Arabs).

Initially, Gidon is a member of the smallest tribe, Menashe. Furthermore, his family is one of the smallest and least significant of the Menashi families. And within his immediate family, Gidon is one of the younger brothers.

In other words, in terms of external status, Gidon is about as unimportant as you could be within the trodden-upon Jewish people at that time.

Gidon is working away in the threshing house.

Unbeknownst to Gidon and his father, an angel is invisibly waiting outside in the courtyard under a tree.

Knowing that discovery means death, Gidon tells his father, "Abba, you are old. And if the the Midyanim will come, you will not be able to flee. You go, and I will thresh."

That's according to Rashi. According to Radak, Gidon tells his father, "My father, you are old. Enter into your home and I will thresh because if the Midyanim will come, you don't have within you the strength to flee."

That's when the angel said in the name of God, "You have upheld the mitzvah of honor [honoring your father] and you are suited to that all of my children shall immediately be redeemed by your hand."

The angel became visible and declared, "God is with you, mighty one of valor."

(Please note that Gidon did not tweet, "Dude! Angel just appeared to me and declared me 'mighty one of valor'! Please follow me!" Nor did he upload a selfie of himself and the angel to Instagram. Nor did he update his Facebook page with the new twist of events along with a request to "like" the "angel 'n' me" post. In fact, he was rather hesitant about his newfound status. Okay, I'm kidding about the social media. I know there was no such technology back then.)

Both Radak and Malbim state that Gidon's mesirut nefesh for kivud av (putting his father's safety and well-being above his own) ignited the merit which caused the angel to make itself known and everything else that followed.

But there was one other reason why Gidon was chosen.

Radak explains that the night before was Leil Haseder of Pesach. Gidon said (in addition to the text of the book of Shoftim), "Last night, we read the Hallel and my father read me, 'When Yisrael went out of Egypt' -- If our forefathers were tzaddikim, then perform a miracle for us in their merit. And if they were reshaim, then just as you performed for them, perform a miracle for us too."

(Again, Gidon said this privately to God and the angel. He spoke quietly from the heart; he did not pass it on to the town crier.)

And Hashem said, "By your life! Because you acted as a defender [sanigor] for my children, you are worth Me speaking with you immediately."

VERY powerful stuff, as you can see.

Just the quiet self-sacrifice for his father and then arguing with God to perform a miracle not just for himself, but for the ENTIRE Jewish people...Gidon was suddenly catapulted from oppressed insignificant little Jew to prophet and national redeemer.

Not bad for a boy from a small tribe, eh?

There was no audience for Gidon initial actions. Just his father and an angel.

But Gidon's vocalized care and concern for everyone else apparently went viral in Shamayim.
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To sum up:
  • Traditionally, our greatest Jews (regardless of gender) tried to avoid the spotlight.
  • No need to go looking for attention; Hashem knows exactly who and where you are.
  • The absolutely most powerful act you can ever commit is to care about others and to vocalize that care and concern to Hashem.
  • Plead for redemption on behalf of others, whether they're good or bad!

Finally, I just want to say that as always, this is a process. Obviously, I have a public blog. So I am not exactly hiding myself under a bushel, am I? And sometimes, I feel more like gnashing my teeth than finding merits in my badly behaving fellows.

But the main thing is to try.

Knowing the goal and at least turning your face in that direction is a big part of achieving that goal.

Who knows if there's an angel waiting outside for you?
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Emunaroma posts:
Does God Really Want My Face More "Out There"?
Two Sides of the "Images of Frum Women in Media" Debate
(Please see Miriam's comment in particular.)

The sparks Ruth's conversion swept out of Moav:
The Powerful Secret of Sincere Conversion
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Standing for Nothing: USA

3/10/2017

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One of the most significant changes in society today is the phenomenon of people standing for nothing.

Where Have All the Partyers Gone?

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On the other side of the Atlantic, you have a new book out called iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us. 

I haven’t read it, but there are some intriguing articles about it.

There is a lot of food for thought in this meticulous research, but one thing that stood out was the lament of both the researchers and readers:
  • Teens are becoming intimate later; they’re waiting all the way until 11th grade!
  • They don’t hang out at malls so much anymore!
  • They party less and drink less!
  • Teen homicide is down! (Okay, that wasn't said lamentingly, but it is true, baruch Hashem.)

And then there are the inevitable comparisons to teens of previous generations who hung out smoking and drinking at skating rinks in the Seventies and got their drivers license in the Eighties as soon as possible to go cruising and escape parental supervision in order to indulge their taavos.

(Interestingly, they don't yearn for the days when young adults married earlier and with better results, started families earlier, volunteered for military service in greater numbers, or went to work earlier, and so on.)

To be fair, the point of the research is to show that kids aren’t avoiding these indulgences out of rising morals but because of their attachment to their phones and social media.

And yes, I get the disturbing point that smartphones are so compelling, they even override the most compelling millennia-old taavos.

That’s pretty disturbing. So I definitely understand this point made by the researchers.

Furthermore, because teens are socializing less face-to-face, plus suffering from social media-induced depression and loneliness, author Jean Twenge observes:
"As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves."
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That's downright chilling.

Jean Twenge and her assistants are doing society a big service by getting this information out to everyone.

But you should see the people lamenting how “kids don’t hang out at the malls anymore,” and so on.

Again, this lamenting about the good ol’ days when teens immediately got a drivers license for the freedom it offered (mostly to engage in unsavory or meaningless behavior), when teens hung out at skating rinks, and engaged in meaningless physical relationships earlier, and so on…

What are they saying?

Put down your smartphones, kids, and then...do what, exactly?

May the Farce be with You!

You can’t revolutionize society based on these values.

Like I said, it’s not just the superficial stuff. I know that all these well-meaning people and groups are not that superficial.

But my point is that they’re proclaiming these meaningless things alongside the more serious and meaningful issues.

Why should someone get off her suicide-inducing social media in order to go to a party where she can drink until she vomits and get exploited by equally drunk boys?

Or to wander the mall in search of the latest meaningless trendy trinket or outfit?

American youth with Western values have nothing to stand for and nothing to live for.
(Actually, they DO, but many just don't realize it within their cultural value system.)

So what's going to happen?
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The really eye-opening article mentioned above:
Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?

Another post on this subject:
How Would You like to Take Your Poison: Scrambled or Sunnyside Up?
Standing for Nothing: UK
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The Real Reason Why People Sin

11/9/2017

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Something that gets lost in the discussion of middot or fixing deep-seated issues in society is the reason why people do the wrong thing.

People sin because something about that particular sin makes them feel good.

When that sin becomes a primary goal and something they engage in frequently (and when not actively engaging in it, they think about it or plan with anticipation how to engage in it), we call it "addiction."

In Torah terms, it’s called a “baal [fill-in-the-blank]”—meaning, the person has become an owner of this negative act: baal lashon hara, baal taava, etc.

(This term can also be used positively, such as a “baal chessed” or a “baal tzedakah.”)

For example, every female I’ve ever met who doesn’t dress in a refined and self-respecting manner does so because the “hot” styles make them feel good.

I once saw a young Yerushalmi Yiddish-speaking woman who was slowly deteriorating in her mitzvah observance. I was stunned to see her show up to a Simcha Beit Hashoeva (Sukkot celebration) in a shocking outfit which included fishnet stockings (!!!). But she obviously had no idea what she represented. She just felt good.

This can be very innocent.

As another example, a woman may genuinely love the color fuchsia and love how she feels when she’s wearing it as a dress, a sequined hair-covering and as nail polish. She’s not thinking, “Ooh, now everyone will gawk at me; I just love attracting stares!”

No, she’s just thinking that wearing her favorite color boosts her mood.

Same thing with long, swoopy eye-catching looks-EXACTLY-like-real-hair shaitels. The wearer simply like how she looks in it. She feels GOOD in that shaitel! Or maybe she also likes the idea of being what her society considers stylish.
A lot of times, just by virtue of being the latest fashion somehow makes something attractive.
I feel it and I can’t help noticing that a lot of people seem to feel it too.

And yes, sometimes it's out of rebellion...which also feels good to some people!

The same mechanism is operating with addictions everyone realizes are bad, like with alcohol or drugs.

But this is also true with behavior.

Why "Scaring" People Doesn't Usually Work

For example, it took me a long time to realize that people who frequently put others down actually enjoy it. Sure, they might feel a twinge of shame, especially if they get called on their hurtful behavior. But a part of them feels good.

Ditto for people who lose their tempers easily. Again, I was shocked to see that they actually feel good and don't even feel so guilty about their loss of control. The fury is a release of tension and they feel powerful, especially when they see how people cater to them because of their temper.

With bulimics, the physiological result of vomiting is similar to having a really good yell at someone. So if a bulimic feels bad or angry, vomiting gets the physiological effect of screaming at someone without hurting anybody or risking confrontation.

This is why scaring people into being good often doesn’t work, especially for the long term. Even if it does work (or the sinner hits bottom), they often just go on to another negative habit.

Why? Because deep down, people can't stand the thought of living what feels like an empty, boring, or miserable life for the rest of their life.

For example, AA meetings are often filled with people who took up smoking when they quit drinking. And a lot of smokers gain weight when they stop smoking.

Another example: I know parents who stopped hitting their kids and started ignoring them instead.

When Nothing Else Feels as Good

When someone I know calmly told a long-time friend that her frequent put-downs were unacceptable, she seemed to stop, but in reality, she just went underground and turned passive-aggressive.

Later, when she went on Prozac and the insulting behavior returned (although now with Prozac-induced exuberance), the other person tried to respond by gently confronting her on the spot each time she did it. Then she gradually cut off contact with her "friend." Later, she decided to speak to her and explain why she couldn’t maintain any further relationship with her (and yes, she did tell her that the Prozac had something to do with her behavior, as a way to give her the benefit of the doubt).

But the errant friend had no idea what the other was talking about and could not think of anything she’d ever done that was wrong. Even as she said this, she still delivered mild put-downs of which she genuinely seemed unaware. (This is called “emotional blunting,” by the way, when you cannot feel how your behavior is impacting another person. It’s another Prozac side effect.)

And the offended party couldn’t push her on the issue because Prozac isn’t foolproof and who wants to be the catalyst if a Prozac-user would end up harming herself in any way?

The truth is, that person can’t get off Prozac. It makes her feel too good. And the friend she kept hurting has nothing better to offer her as far as “feel good” goes. No one does! For her, it’s worth it for her to engage in hurtful behavior of which she claims to be completely unaware and it’s worth it for her to lose a friend. Without the Prozac, she just feels too bad and unhappy and there is NOTHING that makes her feel as good as Prozac.

And I do understand that.

And this is why people can spend too much time on blogs, videos, Facebook, Twitter, the news, or literally anything else. It feels good!

So when you’re trying to influence someone (including yourself!) to change a behavior, it’s important to keep this "feel-good factor" in mind.

And maybe there isn’t anything else in their life that makes them feel as good as…
  • pizza and ice cream
  • vomiting
  • drinking
  • opium
  • meds
  • getting angry
  • criticizing and nitpicking
  • sniping
  • lashon hara
  • tight skirts and sparkly deeply orange lipstick
  • secular novels
  • secular music
  • shopping
  • tweeting
  • podcasts
  • facebooking
  • commenting
  • staring at women
  • dressing immodestly
  • watching cat videos
  • reading the news
  • talking
  • workaholism
  • sleeping
  • jeering
  • anything else you can think of

Caught in a Conflict

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Then people have a hard time because they sense or may even actively realize what they’re doing is wrong, but they can’t stop themselves because they have nothing else that feels as good.

For example, fat people suffer health problems and shame about their appearance, but find it hard to diet. Angry or snipey people destroy their relationships and they know that halacha exhorts against such behavior, but they don't stop. And the same goes for all the above behaviors.

You can feel bad about your addiction or sin, but stopping it feels even worse.

And even though people like to wax lyrical about:
  • the beauty of sunsets
  • spending time with the people you love most in your life
  • doing what you love (as a hobby or a career) and so on...
...the fact of the matter is that many people DON’T find beautiful sunsets or walks in the woods or their hobby/career or the people they love most as compelling as the above.

Some people even find these things boring. What’s harder is when the people you love most (like your parents, spouse, children, or “friends”) even make you feel bad about yourself or when your career or hobby proves unfulfilling. It depends.

This is why forming a relationship with Hashem is so important. Talking to Him as if He’s your Good True Friend is vital in conquering your inclination for the lesser things in life.
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But having said that, connecting to Hashem can still be a moment-by-moment challenge, especially when the talks feel “dry” or when you’re having a hard time settling your mind and not daydreaming or feeling pressed to do something else.

But I just don’t see another way.
All the lesser stuff has become too compelling and too accessible.

Some of it is even lauded in secular society as a good thing to do.

So it’s really good to just try bonding with God despite all the compelling stuff.

The effort alone is very precious in Shamayim.
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What I Learned about Taming My Email Habits

20/8/2017

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At first, email seemed like one of the most innocent aspects of the new Internet technology. In fact, you could even get email without Internet pretty early on (at least in Eretz Yisrael).

Yet problems appeared as fast as you could press “Send.”

Spam - Traif in a Whole New Way
Spam arose as email’s shadow. Now, spam filters come with your email. But back then, spam could be anything from innocent but annoying ads to filthy forbidden images.

A Whole New Area of Forbidden "Speech"
Then email’s deceptive appearance as regular mail (only in digital form!) plus its immediate response time led to people using it for intimate exchanges or lashon hara that quickly found its way across the Internet. Or if not made completely public, at least forwarded on to the one or two people where it could do the most damage.

The concept of “flame wars” also developed, with the lightning back-and-forth of hot ‘n’ heavy disagreement that was unlikely to develop in a face-to-face exchange and NEVER would have developed through a hand-written exchange of letters or even memos or faxes.

New Hacker Outlet
Hackers continue to hack email even with improved security and strong passwords. Inconvenience, identity theft, and worse continue to plague users.

But I thought I could handle it.

The Sweet Siren Song of Email

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I express myself best through writing, so it seemed like the ideal communication tool for me. No more searching out the right-sized envelope or figuring out what kind of stamp and how many, no more dragging myself to inconveniently located post offices to stand in line.

Furthermore, it’s an easier and seemingly gentler way of communicating with people, especially if you want to say something they don’t necessarily want to hear, whether for your own good or for theirs.

And finally, it has proved such a boon to employers and employees everywhere.

As just one of a million examples: If you’re a writer, no more waiting months to receive a reply to your submission. Your submission is received immediately and rejected immediately. No more waiting and wondering for an eternity! (Or accepted without the need for phone calls and stuff.) You can even interact with a colleague for months without ever hearing their voice.

Progress, O blessed progress!

Oops! Delete! Delete!

The thing is, you can find yourself emailing things to people that you wouldn’t say or write to them.

It’s not always conventionally "bad" stuff either. You can get intimate too fast over email, you can give forth too much of yourself via a mechanism that not only cannot be erased (unless the receiver is willing to press “Delete Forever” and even then, only Google knows whether it’s really gone), but can be forwarded infinitely for eternity.

And that’s the well-intentioned use of email.

Despite my best intentions, I’ve found myself guilty of sending emails (for better or for worse) full of content that I wouldn’t have said or written in snail-mail.

In fact, I think I even lost a job due to email, via the actions of a particularly disturbed and devious individual, though I’ll probably never know exactly why or how -- nor even if that individual was actually involved.
But if it did happen in the way I suspect it did, then I deserved it and kaparat ha’avonot.
Better to suffer consequences for negative actions in This World than in the World to Come.

Anyway, there are also altercations you undergo via email that you likely wouldn’t have  otherwise.

There are also things you reveal (whether private for you or hurtful for the other) that you might not have revealed otherwise.

(You can also think you’re anonymous with email—and you can be anonymous to a certain extent if you want—which is part of email’s lure and part of its pitfall.)

Via email, I’ve maintained more contact with certain people than I would have otherwise.

But ironically, it took me years to realize that mostly wasn’t a good thing.

After all, if you can’t be bothered to address and stamp a letter or make a long-distance phone call (or they can’t be bothered to do that for you), then what kind of relationship do you really have?

People grow in different directions and compatibilities change (or were never really there in the first place).

What is Email Really Good For?

Yes, email is the ideal option for many business situations and also for some personal interactions.

I have it and will continue to enjoy its convenience.

But what I’m realizing more and more is that a lot of this fast and easy technology is best used for faster and easier business and short tasks, but not more.
___________
Scrolling and scrolling down a screen to read long, complex messages also ensures that the message isn’t absorbed as well as a printed-on-paper message. Regardless of how habituated you are to reading on a screen, your eyes skip a lot. Even with the specially designed anti-reflection e-ink e-readers, studies have shown that people reading a book on an e-reader understand and retain less than they retain from reading the exact same book in print.

But so far, I can't avoid sometimes producing really long blog posts... ;-)
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So basically, email is good for:
  • Business back-and-forth
  • Sending invitations
  • Thank-you notes (okay, not everyone agrees with me here, but I definitely prefer thank-you emails to handwritten thank-you notes)
  • Dropping a quick message
  • Reminders
  • Unavoidable long-distance communications (i.e., can you imagine blogs if you had to mail your comments?)
  • Sending someone pleasant thoughts, praise, encouragement, or genuinely helpful and light advice
  • Certain kinds of photos
  • Quick and helpful information (telephone numbers, names, addresses, etc)
  • Many of the heart-warming or funny viral forwards are pretty nice too!

Like I said, I’m not giving up email. I honestly feel its benefits outweigh its disadvantages. And like I said, I feel like now I know how to deal with it in a healthier manner.
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And believe me, I’ve been building up to this healthier manner for MONTHS. Some things are a process and even when you realize the truth of things, it still takes you a while to get there. This is also good because it gives me more compassion and understanding for others who may also struggle with actualizing their realizations. Sometimes, it takes a while for what’s in your brain to travel to your heart and all the other parts of your body.
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And it would be hypocritical to look down on anyone for using it like I used to use it until very recently. I’m really not in any position to judge, trust me.

Furthermore, I still intend to respond in kind to anyone who sends me an email. There are wonderful people out there, and you sometimes end up finding them online.

But for me personally, I’m using email with greatly heightened awareness and newfound self-discipline. That’s all.
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For the differences of absorption and retention on e-readers vs print:
http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2014/02/the-physical-effects-of-e-reading/
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The Venus Effect: Lots of Fun Insanity

12/5/2017

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PictureInfrared map of what Venus possibly looks like under its massive cloud cover
Hi, we’re going to discuss Venus again today.

Why?

Well, a friend lent me a copy of The Velikovsky Heresies: Worlds in Collision and Ancient Catastrophes Revisited, which among other things provides a shocking amount of evidence to support Velikovsky’s theory that Venus is actually a comet caught in orbit between Mercury and Earth.


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Disclaimer: I am not a chasid of Immanuel Velikovsky, and it's fine with me if his stuff is proven dead wrong. I've no vested interest in whether Venus is a planet or a comet, nor whether Venus is old or young.
God's Narrative is more than good enough for me.
But Velikovsky's theories are pretty interesting, more in line with Torah (though not in line enough), and some have compelling evidence, as you'll soon see.
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Because I like to check things out myself, I happened upon pseudo-science regarding an anomaly discovered in Venus’s hemisphere, which led me to write my first Venus post,  Yet Another Stunning Discovery: Heck, We Haven’t Got a Clue!  

But then I started coming across more weird stuff.

For example, there are mounds of entire articles dedicated to Venus’s surface.

But the thing is...we can’t see Venus’s surface—not with telescopes, nor with specially designed spacecraft put in orbit around Venus, nothing.

The only concrete picture we have of the Venusian surface are a couple of photos photographed by specially designed spacecraft just before they were cooked and pressurized to death by Venus’s hellish environment.
(If you want to see all the photos from all the missions to Venus, including the actual surface in both color and black and white, please go HERE.)

Yet any article on Venus will go on and on about:
  • Venus’s large and populous volcanoes
  • its massive lava flows
  • its total absence of tectonic plates and therefore subduction zones
  • its surface that keeps “refreshing” itself to look “young”
  • how its surface is soooo hot and pressurized (around 450 C/850 F and 90 times the pressure of Earth, so it's like standing at the bottom of an Earth ocean)
  • how Venus has soooo many craters—none of which are smaller than 2 km, oddly enough
  • and how its ongoing “greenhouse gas” effect is a warning to Earthlings.
(And some of this stuff is contradictory, as you'll soon see.)

And gosh...how do scientists know all this stuff—especially since they can’t see past Venus’s clouds nor can they land a spacecraft easily on Venus’s surface (and when they have done it, it didn’t work as well as it should have and the spacecraft died pretty quickly after landing)?

First of all, the spacecraft that actually landed on Venus measured its pressure and temperature.

Second of all, scientists mapped out Venus’s surface by pinging radar waves all over it from special spacecraft. While they couldn’t ping all of Venus’s surface, they managed to ping the vast majority of it.

Here an oversimplified explanation of how that worked:
  • A wave that took a long time to bounce back evidently must have hit a low point on the surface (like the bottom of a crater).
  • A wave that took a much shorter time to bounce back must have hit something tall, like the peak of a mountain.

And while there’s a margin of error in this kind of mapping, it seems to be considered accurate enough.

Very nice, you might be saying. But do pings also tell us whether there is lava? Or erupting volcanoes? Or tectonic plates and subduction zones?
And what are those anyway?

Okay, so first of all…

Tectonic plates
On Earth, the land we stand on is said to be gigantic plates—tectonic plates, to be exact—that are floating on a sea of mantle.

This is called: The Theory of Plate Tectonics.

Tectonic: building, constructing (i.e. moving around to form stuff)

(On Venus, scientists think there are tectonics—they think the ground moves around a bit, which is what formed those rifts and mountains indicated by their radar pings, but their information indicates that Venus’s surface is all one big thing, and not split into different “plates.”)
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Divergent plates (they split apart, making small volcanos or shallow earthquakes possible) @Domdomegg
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Plates rubbing back and forth against each other (and one way earthquakes occur) @Domdomegg
The above are diagrams of plates on Earth. Venus is said NOT to have these.

Subduction Zones
According to plate tectonics, these gigantic plates of land sometimes start moving around. When that happens, one plate might slip under the other. (This is one of several ways earthquakes occurs.)

Volcanoes and mountain ranges are thought to usually form this way, through this act of subduction. Subduction zones are large areas in which the plates meet and interact this way, by shoving one plate edge under another plate edge.
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Subduction in action: One plate getting shoved under another. (Image by Domdomegg)
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Super-detailed image of tectonic plates in subduction. (Author: KDS4444 Photo Credit: Subduction-en.svg from Wikimedia Commons - License: CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Scientists state that Venus does NOT have either of these.

Except how do they know?

They don’t!

Why are scientists so sure that Venus has volcanoes?
(I mean, there were no volcanoes nor lava in the Venera photos, right?)
There are 6 reasons:
1) Sometimes, a part of Venus’s clouds really heats up in the way that Earth’s atmosphere does above a volcanic eruption. They don’t know exactly how hot those clouds heat up, so they guess it’s as hot as a volcanic eruption. The area that heats up is also similar to the amount of area that heats up above an Earth volcano.

2) In a place where the radar pinged a map of rifts rising from the ground, scientists detected places where the surface got much hotter, then cooled down again. 

3) At one point, they spotted a sharp rise of sulfuric oxide in Venus’s atmosphere, followed by a gradual drop.

4) They spotted lightning in Venusian clouds that reminded them of the kind of lightning produced by volcanoes here on Earth.

5) Venus’s surface doesn’t show much erosion or as many craters as an old planet should.
In fact, Venus’s surface looks downright “fresh” or “young,” which is extremely irritating to scientists because a young Venus is exactly what Velikovsky described and they hate Velikovsky like how ISIS hates infidels.
Also, scientists cling to their faith in an old Universe that takes millions of years to form, and a young Venus shakes this faith.

6) You will constantly read about “mantle plumes” on Venus, which many scientists believe to be the source of Venus’s volcanoes. On Earth, volcanoes are generally (but not always) considered to be caused by tectonic plates shoving one under the other (subduction).  Very simplistically speaking, plumes consist of hot stuff that simply rise from the hot inner core to the surface forming a mushroom-shaped “plume” along the way.
_________________
Now, before you say, “Well, that all sounds pretty convincing to me!”, I’d just like to remind you that Venus’s atmosphere is very different than Earth’s. It’s made up of mostly carbon dioxide with some nitrogen and other stuff, moves around Venus faster than Venus can rotate, and its noxious and volatile cloud cover is dozens of kilometers thick.

In fact, all of Venus is vastly different than Earth - except its size and distance from the Sun.

Using Earth as the model for what's going on with Venus isn't very reasonable.

So to answer each belief from above:
 
1) Venus’s atmosphere is so different and so much more volatile than Earth’s.
If a part of a cloud heated up, even if the area it covered resembles that of an Earthly volcano, that doesn’t prove—and hardly indicates—that a volcano caused that hotspot.
With all those volatile chemicals around, you can assume that hotspots could be caused by the weather.
Really, if you can't know, then the weather is a logical assumption.
What’s more, scientists don’t know exactly how hot that hotspot really was.

2) Jumping to conclusions based on very little evidence
Infrared imaging of one area: “It is the most tantalizing evidence yet for active volcanism,” says Eugene Shalygin from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. (See HERE.)
First of all, they’ve been talking about Venusian volcanoes for decades and this very recent 2008 observation is the best evidence they have?
Then what have they been so sure of all this time?
And remember, they can’t see anything or measure anything.
(Also very important: They don’t know the chemical composition of Venus’s lower layer of clouds...just the upper layer. So maybe there are explosive things in there? See HERE.)
Also, the heat was discovered in only one small area of the entire planet (or comet!).

This is a far cry from assuming that Venus is dotted with active or even once-active volcanoes.

Furthermore, MUST heat mean lava? Does it really have to?
  • Could it also mean steam?
  • Or gases?
  • Plasma?
  • Or maybe a weather anomaly threw something hot from Venus’s sky (like from that unknown lower layer)?
  • Or perhaps a not-yet-discovered Venusian dragon belched?
If you read the whole article on hot lava flows on Venus (which was published by the European Space Agency in 2015), I’d like to direct you to the many speculative unscientific statements:
"hot regions on the surface below are probably much smaller"
_________________________
"the team calculate that the feature may only be around 1 square kilometre in size, with a temperature of 830°C"
_________________________
"Rift zones are results of fracturing of the surface, which is often associated with upwelling of magma below the crust. This process can bring hot material to the surface, where it may be released through fractures as a lava flow."
_________________________
"Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago."
_________________________
"Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity..."
__________________________
"This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions."
_________________________
"is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating." [Emphases mine - MR]
(But to my mind, the most intriguing possibility is the belching-dragon possibility.)

Anyway, this is incredibly pathetic.

3) Using Fiction Plot Techniques as Science
Most unscientifically, they state the following regarding the rise and drop of sulfuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere:
“Although changes in wind patterns could have caused this, the more intriguing possibility is that episodes of volcanic activity were injecting vast amounts of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.”
[Emphases mine - MR]

Okay, so based on everything they know, there are two possibilities for a rise and drop of sulfuric acid:
  • Changes in wind patterns
  • Volcanic activity
So rather than researching which possibility is more realistic—or even provable (remember, they can detect wind patterns to a certain extent)—they go for the possibility which is more intriguing. Basically, they say, “Volcanoes are more fun than wind, so let’s go with volcanoes.”

How rational! How objective! How scientific!

4) They didn’t actually spot lightning.
Instead, they detected “visible flashes in the atmosphere” and “localised emissions of radio waves”…which could just as easily result from sulfuric acid droplets because they are extremely and electrically charged. (See HERE.)

5) Making Stuff Up
Rather than taking whatever handful of actual facts they possess about Venus and running with that, we see that scientists start inventing “facts” out of thin air.
Many articles about Venus blather about how Venus’s surface “refreshes” itself via lava flow even though there is no hard evidence for lava or even volcanoes—except for some interesting spots of extreme heat in certain areas of Venus, which lie about rifts in ways that sometimes Earthly lava does.
Rather than considering the idea of a young Venus (which is what the evidence they DO have actually points to), scientists turn themselves inside out to make up stuff with absolutely NO evidence.

For example, even if there is volcanic activity on Venus, it doesn’t mean there is so much that it “refreshes” the entire surface of this Earth-size object.

6) Scientists aren’t even sure whether “mantle plumes” even exist.
No, really!
It’s just a theory.
Isn’t that shocking?
You read about mantle plumes all over the place, but there is no proof. In fact, The Geological Society of London organized The Great Plumes Debate in 2003.
Gosh, how did we miss that one?
Anyway, the prestigious Nature magazine published a whole paper dedicated to the possibility of mantle plumes on Venus. See a detailed summary of that HERE.
Yet we don’t even know if mantle plumes are real.
Seriously. Do a search on "mantle plumes" and see what comes up.
Notice that the entire experiment took place in a laboratory using nano-sand, water, and a heating plate. (Just like Venus!—sarc) The little they know about Venus was too much to put through their computer.

Please also note the following quote from the article:
“The team believes that a phenomenon underlying plate tectonics on Earth also creates Venus’ coronae: mantle plumes.”
See what they did? They declared mantle plumes an Earthly phenomenon when it is only an unproven theory, then they based their belief on that.

More on Tectonic Plates
It took me a lot of searching to figure out why scientists are so bothered by Venus’s lack of tectonic plates.

In fact, Venus’s lack of plates seems to be one thing that all scientists agree on as fact, but I couldn’t find out how they got that information. However, I did discover why they are so bothered by it:

Lack of tectonic plates indicate a young Venus.

According to science, tectonic plates take 1 billion years to form. And after those 1 billion years, it takes even more time for the plates to form subduction zones (which would then lead to volcanic activity).

So the fact that Venus lacks tectonic plates hints at Venus being VERY young and new, relatively speaking—which is exactly what Velikovsky said it was.

Okay, I’m going to quote now from one of the most recent reports on Venus, a Nature abstract, published in April 2017:
“Why Venus lacks plate tectonics remains an unanswered question in terrestrial planet evolution.”
Maybe because Venus is young!
“There is observational evidence for subduction—a requirement for plate tectonics—on Venus, but it is unclear why the features have characteristics of both mantle plumes and subduction zones.”
Okay, but I thought you needed actual PLATES in order for, well, plates to be shoved one under the other—AKA "subduction"? And what is the deal with mantle plumes?
We don’t even know if they really exist!

Anyway, the abstract goes on to described some fun laboratory experiments they conducted to see if what they propose could even be possible.

Then it says something very cool at the end:
“Scaling analysis suggests that this regime with limited, plume-induced subduction is favoured by a hot lithosphere, such as that found on early Earth or present-day Venus.”
“…early Earth” eh? (In other words, Venus seems young.)

Oh, and this one is funny. Also published in Nature in April 2017:
Planetary Tectonics: Sinking Plates on Venus
“Unlike Earth, Venus lacks discrete, moving plates. Analogue model experiments suggest that observed hints at plate recycling do indeed indicate current, localized destruction of the Venusian surface.”
The abstract contradicts the title.

Actually, the abstract kind of contradicts itself from one sentence to another.

I thought that Venus had NO plates.

You can read thousands of articles online stating that Venus has NO TECTONIC PLATES.

Notice also that this isn’t a real discovery. It is just a bunch of model experiments that merely indicate destruction/recycling of Venus’s surface (which remember, scientists MUST believe in...or else! Or else they must admit that Venus’s surface is pretty new).
__________

Electric Venus

There is at least one really cool and fairly new fact (an actual fact!) about Venus:
Venus is electric.

When the European Space Agency is not pretending that wind currents are volcanoes, they are able to actually detect real stuff—like the fact that Venus is the only planet with a strong electric field. (Maybe because Venus is actually a comet?) They estimate it at 10 volts.

In contrast, Mars and Earth’s electric field is estimated at less than 2 volts.

(Actually, they don’t even know this! They can’t detect the electric field of Earth or Mars, so they ASSUME it is less than 2 volts. All they seem to know is that Venus’s field is 5 times that of Earth’s.)

Scientists are very happy about this 2016 discovery because now they can go back to their beloved Old Ancient Venus belief, postulating that Venus indeed had oceans and all that fully-developed-planet stuff, but then its electric winds stripped that all away.

Note: It could be that the original researchers writing up the papers would like to be completely forthright about everything, but their papers won’t get published unless they invent suggestions and turn things away from anything Velikovsky proposed. After all, science is and has always been highly politicized. Furthermore, there is a lot of nasty cutthroat competition for prestige and funding going on within the Ivory Towers.
________________

OTHER COOL STUFF ABOUT VENUS

  • It looks like the atmosphere (all its clouds and stuff) rotating around Venus has sped up. (In 2006, everything in Venus’s “sky” moved at 300 kph, but later the atmosphere whizzed around at 400 kph. Sometimes it takes 3.9 days to complete one journey around the planet, other times it takes 5.3 days.)

  • It looks like the rotation of the planet itself has slowed down by 6.5 minutes.
 
  • There are massive wildly spinning vortices at the poles of Venus.
 
  • Despite its nearness to the Sun, Venus’s poles are even colder than Earth’s poles: -157 C/-251F
 
  • In fact, the entire “line”  around Venus dividing it between the day section and the night section (officially known as a "terminator") is extremely cold: -175 degrees C. (Could it be global warming? sarc!)
At least, I think that’s the temperatures of the poles and the terminator. It could be that the articles got the order of the “7” and the “5” confused.
Maybe the poles and the terminator are actually the same temperature.

  • Venus spins in the opposite direction of the other planets in our Solar System.
 
  • A year on Venus is shorter than a day on Venus: 225 Earth days and 243 Earth days respectively
 
  • In contrast to the rest of the atmosphere, the winds closest to the surface are slow and gentle.

There is more cool stuff about Venus, but I'm going cross-eyed from needing to read between the lines of every single article in order to ferret out the actual facts.

So that's it for now!
_________

SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONS

Here’s a fun quote from Astronomy Magazine:
“While Venus lies in the habitable zone of our solar system, something happened in its past to take it from a more lush, verdant world into a dry planet with a runaway greenhouse effect from the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
Gosh, how does he know that Venus was once a lush, verdant world?
He says is as a statement of fact.
And then something happened—for SURE!
There is no evidence, not even the remotest indication, that Venus was ever a “lush, verdant world.”

Yet he states it has if it actually happened.
_______________________
This has been such a shocking and disappointing journey for me.

Even stuff I learned as fact as a little girl aren’t really true. Or haven't been proven.
 
Basically, what scientists have done in the Venus field is to believe with their faith in an Extremely Old Universe - and with no hard evidence - that Venus is millions upon millions of years old.

Then every time they run up against indications that Venus is actually a lot younger (and maybe not even a true planet), they twist around and actually MAKE THINGS UP OUT OF THIN AIR to match their Ancient Venus Theory.

And they say things as FACT. They don’t even tell you all the time “we assume.”

They tell you as FACT:
  • Venus WAS as Earth is now—“lush” and “verdant”—but then self-destructed in a “runaway greenhouse effect.”
  • Venus has volcanoes.
  • Venus has erupting volcanoes.
  • Venus recycles/refreshes/destroys its own surface.
  • Venus has mantle plumes.
  • Venus is millions upon millions of years old
 
There. Is. NO. Actual. Proof.

In fact, there's even very little evidence - or no evidence at all. And the evidence they do have indicates the opposite conclusions than those which the faithful scientists reached.
 
Apparently, scientists will do anything to twist science away from the theories of the infidel, Immanuel Velikovsky.

And why are Velikovsky’s theories so threatening?

Because they lead down the road to a Torah narrative.
(They don't actually make it to the Torah narrative, but they do support it much more than other scientific theories.)

Science is No Longer Just For Left-Brains! Creative Right-Brains Finally Have an Equal Shot!

So I think I’ll also become a scientist of Venus. I'm certainly creative enough to become one! I look forward to publishing my research paper in the top science journals.

My abstract will read like this:
"Unusually thick-skinned dragons (whose skin we assume may operate similarly to the  same anti-pressure suits found on Earth) may populate the surface of Venus, possibly living in the rifts detected by radar pings.

We suggest that these dragons exhale - and sometimes even belch - electrically charged plumes, which account for hotspots and flashes of light observed by the Venus Express orbiter.

In addition, very tiny yet powerful ice fairies seem to have vastly lowered the temperature in the terminator layer around Venus.

Experiments conducted with detailed SIMS simulations indicate that there could be dragons and fairies of this nature. Also, we’ve been inhaling a lot of laboratory chemicals and spending entire weeks playing extremely sophisticated video games. So that helps too."
__________________
P.S. Just for knowing, recent research into Mercury is also showing evidence a being fairly “young” for a planet. For some reason, Mercury scientists are much more open about saying the Mercury seems young.
Perhaps it’s because they don’t have a Velikovsky controversy to quash regarding Mercury.
Or perhaps it’s because people who study Mercury are actually less mercurial (ha!) than those who study Venus.
_____________________

Well, if you've stuck around till the end of this way-too-long post, then you deserve a prize!

Here's a funny comic strip:
Picture
0 Comments

Yet Another Stunning Scientific Discovery: Heck, We Haven’t Got a Clue!

10/5/2017

0 Comments

 
PictureVenus
One of the greatest difficulties for the layperson in finding accurate information is the chest-puffing inherent in reporting.

Headlines blare some version of: READ THIS AMAZING ARTICLE—NOW!!!!!

And then the article itself must satisfy the reader’s emotional needs.

After all, no one wants to read an article that basically says, “Here’s something out of the ordinary, but we have no clue what it is nor do we understand a darn thing about it!”

Combine this with the human (this includes scientists) need for certainty, plus the human (this includes scientists) need for honor and acclaim, plus the tremendous competition for grant money to fund projects, and you can get a very skewed view of the Universe.

Let’s take Venus, for example.

It's a Very Large and Prominent...Something!

In January 2017, various news sources picked up on a December 2015 discovery:
For more than 5 days, Venus had a 10,000 km/6214 mile-long swath running through its atmosphere.

Bizarrely, the swath remained stationary amid a riotous, fast-moving atmosphere. (Venus’s atmosphere rotates around the planet much faster than the planet itself rotates.)

If you look up articles on this swath, you’ll see declarations of it as “a gravity wave,” accompanied by copious explanations and images describing gravity waves and how grav-i-ty waves differ from grav-i-ta-tion-al waves.

You’ll also see a lot of quotes by scientists saying, “We think it might be this, we think it might be that,” along with statements declaring that the gravity wave must somehow be linked through the crazy atmosphere to Venusian mountains.

Even the original article in the highly regarded Nature magazine features the headline:
Large Stationary Gravity Wave in the Atmosphere of Venus

But then you read the actual abstract:
“Here we report the detection of an interhemispheric bow-shaped structure…”
Structure.

Why call it a “structure”? I thought it was a gravity wave!
“We suggest that the bow-shaped structure is the result of an atmospheric gravity wave generated in the lower atmosphere by mountain topography that then propagated upwards.”
Suggest? Ah, so the “gravity wave” is just a suggestion. That’s pretty subjective and non-scientific. But don’t we want facts and proofs?

(Also, notice that within the actual abstract, they correctly continue to call it a “structure,” and nothing else. Why? Because they have no clue what it actually was.)

Then the article states that “numerical simulations” lend credence to their proposed suggestion.

However, simulations are not proofs. Or even indications, necessarily.

Furthermore, despite hoopla to the contrary, much of Venus remains a mystery. So what are these simulations based on? After all, there is nothing to stop scientists from just feeding a computer the “right” numbers to make things add up. After all, it’s a simulation.

Then the abstract admits:
“…but the formation and propagation of a mountain gravity wave remain difficult to reconcile with assumed near-surface conditions on Venus.”
Assumed? You mean you guys don’t know the near-surface conditions?

(BTW, I’m starting to gag on the number of times I hear or read the word “assume” within scientific discussions, especially regarding complex theories built on the phrase, “Well, we assume [fill-in-the-blank], so it stands to reason that…”)

Anyway, if you’re dealing with assumed conditions, then really, how are you calculating "numerical simulations"?
 
Within the body of the article, they state that the knowledge available regarding Venus's atmosphere don't really allow mountain-caused gravity waves.
This means that even their best guess isn’t possible under all the data currently known about Venus.

The article’s abstract concludes with:
“We suggest that winds in the deep atmosphere may be spatially or temporally more variable than previously thought.”
[Emphasis mine - MR]
Suggest.

Assumed.

May be.
 
In other words, they don’t know. They don't really even have a clue.
 
All anyone knows is that a very big “something” hung around against all odds in one place within Venus’s atmosphere.
 
That’s it!
 
Now, the scientists behind the article deserve credit for their honesty and precise language. They’re not presenting anything but the facts of their research and they even rightly refuse to slap any kind of definitive label to the “structure.” (Likely, the headline was picked by editors and not the authors.) They’re also very clear that they are offering suggestions and assumptions. They don’t pretend to know.
 
And yes, many reports quote this abstract correctly, state that these were suggestions, and so on.

However, because of the massive filler in all the reports, you the reader will come away from any of these reports certain that a gravity wave anchored to Venusian mountains was hovering in Venus’s atmosphere.

And you’ll also feel smart now that you know the difference between "gravity" waves and "gravitational" waves.
 
But it's all just not true.
  • There was no mountain-propagation of anything.
  • There was no gravity wave.
  • There is no further knowledge or information about this "structure."

And by the authors own admission, all suggestions appearing in the article are impossible.
They outright state that a gravity wave in Venus's atmosphere is impossible.
(Well, impossible based on what is currently known—or assumed!—of Venus.)
 
And gravitational waves have nothing to do with anything on this subject! In fact, it’s doubtful whether gravity waves could have anything to do with this!

So why does every single report on this Venus anomaly dedicate most of the report to gravity waves and gravitational waves when there was
  • no gravity wave 
  • no evidence of any gravity wave
  • and there was no possibility of this "structure" to have been a gravity wave!
 
So reading these reports just gives you a whole brainful of—well—fake news.
 
And this kind of thing happens all the time.
 
(For a fun summary of the Nature article, please see Scientific Anomalies Continue to be Discovered on Venus.)
Picture
I'm ASSUMING this is an artist's impression of what it MAY BE like to stand on the SUGGESTED surface of Venus. Pretty cool image, eh?
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