OUR FALLEN LEAVES Far into the undergrowth of our memories, the vegetation of our pasts, beneath the event trees of our lives, lie, like fallen leaves, residual memories of our happenings. Most are curled up and dry, husks of what they once were. Some have been blown so far and wide they may be impossible to recall. Some are of such mystery that they may not even be truly ours. Most are spasms of random imagination once infused with life. Some are residues of our current thoughts regarding the day’s happenings. We may have among them tales and commentaries, efforts of ours that imbued the floating shards in our mind with the living juice of life. Sometimes they came alive, have breath, and show the true colors they had, may have had, could have had, at the instants of their being. We cannot guarantee that these memories of our pasts will in future always have exactly the same shape and size, or even the same shade, given the vagaries
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Complaints, Complaints! I am of a generally positive frame of mind, with a cheery outlook on life. Like most of you, I like our times together with others to be happy ones, or, at least, pleasant. In spite of this, my blushing Bride of many years accuses me of being “picky”, of being a “brat”. I think it is important that we try and live in a positive environment. Psychologists advise us to avoid those who might be among us who are likely to spread drear and fear. Life’s too short, right! Laugh it up if you can! I have been giving the matter some serious thought. Do I want the prevailing image of me held by other people to be one that I am “difficult”? Do I have to change my behavior? Hey, this is important stuff! The whole of our social lives may be hanging in the balance! What’s this about me being a “brat” and “picky”? Often, this issue has revolved around food. But, sometime it has been about my choosiness in developing relationships with people. Am I
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Where Do We Go From Here? What a pickle we are in! Pax Americanus is dead.. America, the superpower victor of WWII, faced down Russian aspirations for hegemony. China’s communist power was still struggling to digest its gains. Japan was under American tutelage. The European Union was created to end all wars on that continent. The UN was still coming into being. America was the world’s peacekeeper and was ready to spend blood and treasure to work its will. Today, we have China flexing its muscles, buying stakes and influencing in dozens of countries around the world. It is aggressively seeking to advance its territorial influence. The UK is a spent force instead of an imperial power. The EU continues to fray at the edges, fearful of a resurgent, mischief-making Russia, and buying in to Chinese bribery. Iran has arisen as a world-wide trouble-maker being encouraged by the Russians and the Chinese. America is threatened by a historic disunity and dysf
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“Blessed Is The Match That Is Consumed In Kindling Flame”* All of us want to live fulfilling lives. That’s normal. And reasonable. That is reasonable when things around us are normal, when the world is normal. How about when that is not the case? How about then? When the world is consumed in war, and world-wide disruption, it is normal that life is not normal. We are coerced into doing things that we would not otherwise do. Or we choose to do things that we would not otherwise do. It becomes normal to do the abnormal. Hannah Senesch, a Hungarian immigrant to Mandate Palestine as a teenager, volunteered to be one of thirty-seven Jewish volunteers recruited by the British. Their job was to parachute into Eastern Europe in 1943, to help the partisans fighting the Nazis. Even when her companions withdrew because they considered it too dangerous, she went on. She was caught, tortured and executed just before her 23 rd birthday. In her own poetic words, “I heard the call and I w
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Stories About Our Lives Have you ever thought about writing the story of your life? Here you are, let’s say. You are about fifty or sixty, perhaps seventy or more. So much has happened in your life, but you know you have more in the past than you can expect in your future. Surely you think there is much more coming, there are some crowning glories you are hoping to pull off. But you are pleased with the things you have accomplished so far. There have been some hiccups, but you have overcome them. It may be useful to examine some of those as you face some future challenges you know about. We don’t’ necessarily want the world to know the real story. We may leave hints just for the fun of it-to see if the determined, the curious, the conspiracy theorists, can follow the tortuous trail blazed through the thickets of our minds. After all, they are mysterious, jagged zig-zags of electric-nano-energies trickling between the cellular protuberances of our brain. Random variances in
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Israel’s American Friend The U.S is facing an election which will determine the face of the most powerful country in the world. It is a very different country from the one it was when Dwight Eisenhower was president declared victory in 1945. That America dreamed that they had fought the war to end all wars. That country set out to ensure that objective was going to be realized. America and its allies built world institutions that it was hoped would help realize that objective. American leaders backed up that dream by expending billions in U.S. dollars, and the blood of thousands of its citizens, in the hope of making that dream a reality. Part of that dream was free international trade where the lowest cost solution was king and the poorest countries would get the jobs. Since that time for America we have had the Viet Nam war, the Afghanistan occupation, and 9/11. That dream has turned into a nightmare, with a resurgent of Russia and China, the North Korea aberra
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Living Longer: The State Of The Art We know we will never know all the answers, but it’s not for want of trying. We still have Ebola, we have COVID, new viruses appear all the time. We still have some resurgent measles because some people won’t vaccinate their kids. We still have Cancer, so complex with many avenues to explore. Illnesses can rebound on us because these plagues learn to develop resistances to the tools we have discovered to fight them. We may always face that. Although we don’t have all the answers, our wise and devoted researchers, examining the very nature of what makes for life within us, are learning to change our individual insides, down to the level of our DNA, to give us the answers we seek to defeat disease and even ageing. And AI is helping us speed up getting some answers. Part of the answer has been our increasing capacity to process quantities of data that we could never have handled in the past. This increased computing capacity is enabling us