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Is This the Rights' Fight? Wrong Turn on Right 4: Charlie Kirk Case, Fuentes, and the Far-Right’s Legacy Struggle
Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security attorney based in New York and Connecticut. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in National and Intercultural Studies and Middle East Studies from Fordham University in 2006, followed by a Juris Doctor from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She operates a boutique national security law practice. She serves as President of Scarab Rising, Inc., a media and security strategic advisory firm. Additionally, she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider, which focuses on foreign policy, geopolitics, security, and human rights. She is actively involved in several professional organizations, including the American Bar Association’s Energy, Environment, and Science and Technology Sections, where she serves as Program Vice Chair in the Oil and Gas Committee. She is also a member of the New York City Bar Association. She serves on the Middle East and North Africa Affairs Committee and affiliates with the Foreign and Comparative Law Committee.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen10 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 31: Life-Permitting Universes
Scott Douglas Jacobsen contends that subjectivity emerges only in life-permitting universes and is inherently limited: finite minds cannot fully model the larger systems that birth them. Mental maps can improve but need not, as delusion, injury, disease, and aging illustrate. Rick Rosner pushes back on multiverse looseness, arguing that in sufficiently large, natural-order universes, life is likely; only tiny universes preclude it. He asks how knowable any universe is, echoing Feynman on science’s limits. Rosner expects near-term unifying principles but enduring ignorance of particulars given cosmic scale, distances, and timescales. Both land on rigorous curiosity coupled with epistemic humility, ultimately.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 30: Particles as Baked Bread
Scott Douglas Jacobsen likens particles to baked bread, emergent from interacting fields. Rick Rosner stresses Heisenberg uncertainty. Context, decoherence, and speculative topological knots frame a 13.8-billion-year interaction braid.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 29: How the Human Mind Measures Time, Space, and Thought
In this dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the perceptual boundaries of human experience—the limits of what we can truly sense in time and space. Rosner explains that our temporal resolution hovers around a tenth of a second, the scale of reflexes and thought formation, while spatial awareness reaches down to roughly 50 microns, the threshold of the naked eye. They discuss how linguistic processing, births, and deaths occur within similar temporal slices, linking consciousness to the continuous flow of global life. The conversation ultimately frames thought as holographic—relational, dynamic, and resistant to discrete measurement.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
ORIGINS — “Where It All Began”. AI-Generated.
At just 30 years old, Cullen Spencer has already carved out a name for himself as a storyteller — one who writes not just to be heard, but to be felt. His songs pulse with emotion, honesty, and a touch of grit, echoing through the same walls where he first learned what music really meant.
By Jane Carty 11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 28: Why Pi and Fibonacci Appear in Nature
Pi recurs because circular and spherical geometry minimize surface area and energy: surface tension rounds droplets; for fixed area a circle has the shortest boundary; in 3D a sphere resists stress and encloses volume efficiently. Fibonacci patterns arise from local growth rules near the golden angle (~137.5°), packing leaves and seeds without overlap. Those rules produce spiral counts that match consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Iterative branching and logarithmic spirals extend the effect across pinecones, sunflowers, shells, and more. Beneath both patterns is information shaped by constraints: simple optimization rules yield stable forms nature reuses, from eyeballs to orbits to seed heads.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 27: Intuition & the Universe
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner probe whether math is built-in or invented, and how intuition can automate physics. Rosner casts math as conceptual shorthand that scaffolds understanding—like words such as “schadenfreude”—with estimation and repetition training intuition. They argue the universe does not “calculate”; laws emerge from interacting fields, while math mirrors structure within finite information, not Platonic perfection. Subjectivity arises as a “statistically disambiguated” layer—distinct yet embedded—analogous to centrifuged strata. Skills span a continuum from embodied physics (a basketball arc) to formal tensors, converging as fluency. Information demands context; existence is a web of relations, and models refine correspondence.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 26: Can We Understand the Universe Without Math?
Rick Rosner riffs on whether a civilization could grasp physics without mathematics, imagining whale societies that count heads but lack equations. He argues math is essential for precise theories, yet many core ideas—projectiles, orbits, relativity—begin as pictures and principles before formalization. Examples include Einstein’s thought experiments refined with tensor calculus, Big Bang nucleosynthesis by Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow, and Newton’s insight that orbits are continuous free-fall obeying an inverse-square law. Scott Douglas Jacobsen notes everyday intuition—throwing a ball, braking for a light—mirrors calculus. Rosner concludes: you can teach physics conceptually without equations, but doing physics ultimately requires mathematics. Precision demands symbolic tools.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 25: Quantum Limits, Black Holes
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore informational cosmology at black-hole boundaries and beyond. Rosner notes supermassive black holes are densest from the outside, yet interior density is tempered by curved spacetime and quantum “fuzziness.” Quantum gravity candidates, exclusion principles, and phase transitions may halt true singularities, yielding ultra-dense, evolving quantum states. Stars act as leaky correlational engines; galaxies emit immense photon webs, but the most durable records likely reside in gravitational filaments. Rosner sketches “hedgehog” collapse vectors around t0, speculates galaxies can dim and relight via cosmic-web inflow, and doubts nucleation around neutron stars. Dark-matter halos endure. Conclusions remain provisional—and productively skeptical.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Fumfer Physics 24: Neutron Stars and the Non–Black-Hole Universe
Rick Rosner explains compact objects without hype: compressing matter triggers quantum degeneracy pressure (electrons in white dwarfs, neutrons in neutron stars). When gravity exceeds these pressures—around the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit (~2–3 solar masses)—collapse forms a black hole. Dimming is due to gravitational redshift, not ‘acceleration.’ Exterior fields encode only mass, spin, and charge (“no-hair”). The information paradox’s modern view favors unitarity; black holes preserve information, though mechanisms remain debated. Crucially, the universe is not a black hole: large-scale expansion fits FLRW cosmology, with horizons from cosmic expansion, not an event horizon. Scale matters—bigger systems have gentler curvature and tidal gravity overall.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
Rabbi Debra Bennet on Jewish Life, Learning, and Building Inclusive Community at the Mid Island Y JCC
Rabbi Debra Bennet is the Director of Jewish Life & Learning at the Mid Island Y JCC in Plainview, NY. She received her rabbinic ordination in May 2007 and has previously served as the Rabbi Educator at Temple Beth Torah in Melville and as the Associate Rabbi of Temple Chaverim in Plainview, where she developed teen programming and worked to strengthen connections to Judaism and the Jewish Community. In her current role, she continues to educate and inspire her community while addressing pressing social issues, fostering dialogue and collaboration across faith traditions, and cultivating an inclusive, connected community throughout the JCC.
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen11 months ago in Interview
