Seeing With My Own Eyes It was a beautifully sunny today contradicting the promised rain. Then came the rain and then it went. The staunch container ships were arrayed across English Bay here in the city. The water was glassy calm even with a sprightly breeze off the ocean ruffling my hair, currently being worn long and loose. My Bride and I are enjoying the pleasures of this autumn day as we take our medicinal walk along the Sea Wall. I am wearing my straw hat which I have adorned with many feathers and a button preaching love. We hold hands or lock arms depending on the traffic. People smile at us or remark on my hat. We are having a good time living in the moment. We are pushing it in the age dimension. When we married at seventy, we never thought about our age, and now it’s nearly twenty years later. We know people are living longer as advances in medicine and information about desirable lifestyles are having their impact. Yet, we
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The Vanishing Breed This is not a scholarly article with annotations of sources and detailed attributions. Much too bulky! You are getting here a version of history that I have been able to drag out of Google and the Bible to make the points I want to make. It is what it is. My story of populations is a numbers game so we will have a few numbers to talk about. The story goes back to Abraham. Sarah, his wife, was barren, so she brought her handmaiden Hagar to give Abraham children. She bore Ishmael. When God intervened, and Rachel bore Isaac, she persuaded Abraham to turn Hagar and her son out. Ishmael is the supposed progenitor of the Arabs, the other element, with the Jews, of the Semitic race. The story shifts to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who took his family, numbering some seventy persons, to Egypt, where his son Joseph stood at the right hand of the Pharaoh. We know that things changed after some time, and the rulers, perhaps fearing the power and numbers of these
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Light And Color. Light and color are an important part of the joys we find in life. It is no surprise we don’t have any trouble talking about that. At the same time there is a lot of mystery about those elements in our lives that we don’t think about. Since the dawn of man they have fascinated us. Many humans have found them a source and a basis for worship. Man has studied them since they first began looking up. Over the centuries they have been the subject of human study. These days, our scientists are have offered some ideas they believe in for our consideration. They say light is an expression of energy. That seems obvious. They also think that light takes the form of waves or particles called photons. That may be new to us. They tell us light can be considered to travel in waves. In the world of quantum physics scientists have determined that light can also travel as particles. Indeed, it is claimed that light can be both at the same time. Once we are
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Choosing Your News How the world has changed! We always assumed that the news we might get about world events would be the same wherever we looked to get it. Not anymore! Your news, whether the detail reported, the spin on how it is reported, or whether events are reported at all, really depends on where you look for it. Maybe that was always true and we never realized it. Well, we realize it now. After the October 7 th attack on Israel by Hamas the world’s airways were flooded by reports about Israel’s occupation of that place when Israel had left the territory more than twenty years previously. Few in the media mentioned that. Immediately there was talk of genocide by Israel when it was Hamas that had opened hostilities and placed their civilians in harm’s way as Israel pursued those who had brutally murdered mostly civilians, even burned babies alive in front of their parents before executing them. And as Hamas promised to do it again and again, including
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Terrorism Where do I begin. Maybe I should start with a definition. So many of the groups that I would consider terrorists, these days, are being called “militants” by the media. For me terrorists are non-state actors violently attacking unarmed civilians, and even state actors, in the name of some cause they are promoting. Some groups may actually look and act like armies with territorial ambitions to control spaces where they can act out a program. At their heart , terrorists have no regard for anyone that may stand in their way. They often have loyalty only to an idea and the losses they sustain in carrying out their program seem unimportant to their leadership. State actors by contrast are usually held to a code of conduct. My particular focus is on the many Islamic groups that are motivated by messianic aims related to establishing a world-wide Caliphate of one form or another. For the uninformed , the rivalry within this movement between Sunni
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Why Hamas and Hezbollah Attacked Israel! Iran has been financing proxies on Israel’s border to eliminate the state of Israel. Israel faced continuous missile attacks from Gaza over the past few years, to which Israel responded in kind. On October 7 th /23 Israel was attacked by Hamas from Gaza, killing 1200 people, mainly civilians, even babies. Hamas captured 250 hostages on that day as well. Since then, Israel has attacked Hamas which threatened, and still threatens, to repeat that attack again. They have refused to surrender or release the hostages. They have even executed some of the hostages since that date. And they have continued to hide their efforts behind civilian infrastructure like schools, hospitals, U.N. facilities, mosques and civilian shelters. Hamas hides in tunnels they have constructed over the past decades. They force civilians, sometimes at gunpoint, to act as human shields for their military activities and weapons storages. Although Israel attempts to shie
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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