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
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The Happy Accident of Our Universe I am going to try and tell you a story. I say try, because I don’t fully understand what I’m writing to you about. I label it as happy because the reality we face may be a rarity, maybe the only one, which may have permitted our evolution, that is, human evolution, to come into being. I will not touch on the question of why. I have been reading about the theorizing of Albert Einstein and his ilk, cosmologists and astrophysicists, telling me so many things, a great deal of which I find very difficult to understand. They tell us that about 14 billion years ago our universe came into being when a hot, fiery, point of matter exploded and began to expand with intense and increasing speed into the space around it. For some reason, the rate of expansion slowed enough, to allow some of the energy being released to coalesce into the billions of galaxies we are aware of, made up of billions and billions of stars. Ours was among them, created some t
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Hit The “Back Space” Button! Have you ever thought about time? Did you ever watch the movie “Back To The Future!”*. I did, watched more than once, at the movies, and on television. Did you ever wish time was malleable? I bet you did without even thinking it through. Didn’t you wish you could go back and change the way things happened so you could live out a happier result than the one fate had left you with. I did, many times. There were a lot of things I would have changed, many of them that had nothing to do with me personally. We are able to do that with lots of things in our lives, and we do it without thinking. If I make a mistake in something I have written on my computer, I just hit the back space button, make the correction and go on with what I have been doing. Many times in our lives when we have made a mistake in something important in our lives, we sometimes do our best to correct it, either physically, or by speaking to the person involved. We often pay attentio