Post No. 3,454 - Some (hopefully) interesting reading / viewing / listening - Saturday 23rd May, 2026

I recently found the following interesting and/or useful, and am posting them here in case anyone else does as well. 

 

• “Messages in the Forest - YouTube”   https://youtu.be/UDovzbabr70   

• “The Narcissistic Traits CPTSD Gives You (Nobody Talks About This)”   https://youtu.be/dS3XAZ38aeI   This is about victims having narcissistic traits, but not being narcissistic - or, as written in one of the comments from an internet search they did:   “PTSD and Complex PTSD (cPTSD) stemming from narcissistic abuse often involve “narcissistic fleas”, where victims temporarily adopt toxic behaviors — such as reactive rage, hypervigilance, or manipulation — as survival mechanisms, leading to immense guilt, confusion, and internalized shame after leaving the relationship. While these behaviors mimic narcissism, they are, in fact, trauma responses, not a personality disorder, and are typically reversed through healing and secure environments”   

• “Are Quakers Just Activists Now?”   https://youtu.be/rL5CMDMMZTw   “Some believe Quakers have swapped spirituality for activism, but I think this is a misunderstanding. Quaker action has always flowed from faith, rather than replacing it, demonstrating a consistent connection between their religion and their engagement with the world. In this video, I look at ways why this is the case and how it can work.”   This was interesting, and the points are of some relevance, IMO, to other religions - including Pagans and First Peoples (remembering Yindyamarra Winhanganya - to live well in a world that is worth living well in, from the Wiradjuri language)   

• “The UFO Indonesia Gifted To The CIA”   https://uapf.substack.com/p/the-ufo-indonesia-gifted-to-the-cia   

• “The Heart Was Talking All Along – Science Finally Listened”   https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/science-of-the-heart/the-heart-was-talking-all-along-science-finally-listened/   

• “Why did you Incarnate during the Apocalypse”   https://youtu.be/NEzlyxUB7F4   “Jennifer Lisa Vest reflects on the significance of choosing to live during this era of global transformation. Drawing from recent experiences while traveling, they explore the potential to act as agents of change and contribute unique perspectives toward building a more equitable and sustainable future during these times of institutional transition”   

• “What the Citizen Science Meditation Study revealed | ConnectIONS Live”   https://youtu.be/fkibIkAyskM   “Explore how a large-scale citizen science study using MUSE EEG tests how four meditation techniques impact mental health, cognition, and brain–heart dynamics. This clip is from the ConnectIONS Live webinar, Meditation at Scale: What a Global Citizen Science Study Reveals About Mind and Brain.”   

 

 

• “Why Female Social Dynamics Genuinely Terrify Me as an Autistic Woman”   https://youtu.be/dSNC_K4NTlg    

 

 

• “When Protection is Actually Control: The Danger of Protecting Girls”   https://youtu.be/NANYahRuGJ0   “Stories about “protecting girls” are everywhere- in dystopian fiction, in politics, and in everyday culture. But protection is never neutral. The Testaments continues the world of The Handmaid’s Tale and beneath its story of “saving girls” lies a deeper question: who actually gets protected, and at what cost? Both the books and TV shows have become synonymous with political protests and movements in real life. The speculative novel has become a cautionary tale of the erosion of women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.   Let’s talk about the emotional reality of raising daughters in a world shaped by these ideas…”   

• “An unchecked bias: Fatphobia at work”   https://drvictoriaverlezza.substack.com/p/an-unchecked-bias-fatphobia-at-work   “Weight discrimination is pervasive, poorly understood, and almost entirely legal. It’s time we talked about it seriously.”   and   ““Weight comes from one thing...eating””   https://drvictoriaverlezza.substack.com/p/weight-comes-from-one-thingeating   which busts a stack of myths such as the one in the title   

• “The Science of Black Rage”   https://onemicblackhistorypodcast.substack.com/p/the-science-of-black-anger   “White America didn’t fear Malcolm's rage, they feared his mind.”   About Malcolm X   

• “How Does The Second Gilded Age End?”   https://youtu.be/TEhs3R2jH7w   This interesting - and very well done, albeit USA-focused. The comment about change being preceded by decades of writing and discussion is actually quite encouraging to me   

• Although I am a Pagan, this is the sort of reflective piece that I find interesting (and gets me thinking about to resuming the spiritual path interviews- or, rather, conversations, I think - that I originally proposed ... shall I start them now?)   “Are Quakers Just Activists Now?”   https://youtu.be/rL5CMDMMZTw   “Some believe Quakers have swapped spirituality for activism, but I think this is a misunderstanding. Quaker action has always flowed from faith, rather than replacing it, demonstrating a consistent connection between their religion and their engagement with the world. In this video, I look at ways why this is the case and how it can work.”   

• “The world’s most powerful armies can't win wars now, so what happens next?”   https://youtu.be/-N3t4lMlUag   “Three of the world's most powerful militaries are simultaneously stuck in conflicts they cannot win.   Russia has not defeated Ukraine after four years. America has not forced Iran to surrender after three months. Israel has not destroyed Hamas after two and a half years.   This is not a run of bad luck. It is a pattern, and it is telling us something devastating about the assumptions that now drive UK defence policy.   The three failing wars — and what each one proves:   1(a) Russia invaded Ukraine and expected victory in days and got years of war, catastrophic casualties, massive equipment losses, and an economy permanently distorted, with Ukraine still undefeated.   1(b) The USA attacked Iran to supposedly eliminate its nuclear capability on 28 February 2026; three months later, Iran's government is intact, its military is intact, its population has not surrendered, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed.   1(c) Israel invaded Gaza in October 2023. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, genocide and ethnic cleansing have happened, and yet Hamas is not destroyed, there is no functioning administration, and there is no peace, nor any sign of when it might be achieved.   What the pattern tells us:   2(i) Military superiority no longer translates into political victory.   2(ii) The post-war military-industrial complex that was built on the assumption that overwhelming force would produce military resolutions to conflict is failing in real time.   2(iii) Every one of these conflicts has increased instability, and not reducing it.   2(iv) The UK is now committed to spending 3% of GDP on defence, with no coherent explanation of what political outcomes that spending is supposed to achieve.   What actually works and what the UK should be promoting is something quite different:   3.1 Diplomacy, international law, and multilateral institutions have delivered durable peace where military force has not.   3.2 The post-war European settlement, built on economic integration and institution building, not rearmament, is the model that worked   3.3 Patient negotiation and the politics of care are not weaknesses; they are now the only approaches to conflict resolution with an evidence base.   3.4 The UK is sleepwalking into a 3% GDP defence commitment at the precise moment three superpower militaries are demonstrating that military spending does not win wars. This video asks the question Westminster refuses to ask: what is it actually for?”   

• “America's Myths Are More Dangerous Than Our Lies”   https://youtube.com/shorts/hxvDBrsDekc   “Yale, June 1962. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen wrote the speech. The problem JFK was addressing was one Schlesinger had helped build.   During World War II, Schlesinger was part of the apparatus that assembled a coherent nationalist mythology — a usable story of the American founding, engineered to hold the country together against Nazis and fascists. It worked. Then it kept working, past its original purpose, conscripted into Cold War consensus: a bulwark against Red Scares, Lavender Scares, anyone who threatened the settled story of what America was and had always been.   By 1962, JFK understood the structural problem. The person telling a lie knows they're lying. The person repeating a myth doesn't — which is what makes it more dangerous. You can't argue someone out of a position they don't know they're holding.   American nationalist historiography isn't a collection of lies — it's a mythology so thoroughly absorbed that the people defending it experience themselves as defending history. Nobody's lying. That's the point. A resistance history doesn't just correct the record — it identifies how the myth functions, who it protects, and what it makes impossible to see.   A country that can't examine its own past without flinching will keep defending a fiction it has long since forgotten it invented.”   Applies to other nations as well   

 

 

My article(s) on SubStack:   

• “Noteworthy notes 001 (~1,670 words, ~11 minutes)”   https://musingsofgnwmythr.substack.com/p/noteworthy-notes-001-1670-words-11   “A basket of little goods rescued for posterity”    

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider: 

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”;  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

 

Gnwmythr 

teaching the "good" (balanced positive and spiritually mature) 
safe ways to counter the "bad" (out of balance, spiritually immature) 

 

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

#PsychicABetterWorld   and  

Note that I am cutting back on aspects of my posts - see here, and Gnwmythr is pronounced new-MYTH-ear  

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2026     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/