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I’m so glad that Zion is becoming a favorite boy’s name. I could like a Zionist who roots for the New Orleans Penguins Zion Williamson. Have you heard the hew and cry about Zionism? Many throw it out as an insult and heresy.  Others embrace it as a way to show solidarity to Jews and the modern state of Israel. Though Zionism;s push to reconnect with the land is on the right track, today’s…

World peace?

Often when a waitress asks, “What else can I get you?”, I answer. “I would like a serving of world peace.” Then they laugh and say “I wish we served that here” or “sorry fresh out” or just look puzzled. One recently had an even better comeback. She said, I’ll get to work on that. Later that week when i asked her how the pursuit of world peace was going. She said, “You’re the one who brought it…

“Light some elephant dung on fire and sniff it,” said my Zimbabwean boss Sibo Ndlovu as she waved her hands with sparkling red nails beneath her nose as if kneeling above a pile of burning elephant dung.  We spoke by the pool of a luxurious hotel far from her native Shona village.  Sibo had many bouts of nosebleed in the childhood, but one sniff of elephant dung smoke and she was cured for life,…

We’re finally getting some sunny days here in swamp-east Arkansas. It’s so flat here, water doesn’t run off.  Luckily, we get lots of sun to dry up the pools from the latest rains. The sun brightens spirits just as it evaporates excess water.  But this sun cannot brighten the souls of the miseducated. Before the sun came up this morning, I put on the hat of a peer-reviewer.  I opened the food…

Down here in rural southeast (or swamp-east) Arkansas, we don’t see many Jews. Jews were among the early settlers of the Delta, but have been declining in numbers for 150 years. You can find synagogues in towns like Helena, but most no longer hold services since it a minimum of 10 Jews is needed for components of the Shabbat service. The average resident has so little knowledge of Jewish…

It’s cold in the house.  I let the fire die down too far and need to build it up. But before I do that I must address the fire which has almost died out in America. Led many to give up on America.  To do so, I am going to go Old Testament on you.  “Do no harm to my prophets.” Predictions try to hide their admonitions. Prophecies’ admonitions stare you in the face. When I  predicted last year…

The New Testament of our Bible tells us of Jesus’ life, his teachings and the activities of his apostles in the early church. My favorite books are attributed to the only apostle to have a peaceful death: John, a former fisherman. John was called a son of Thunder by Jesus and cared for Mary, mother of Jesus, after the crucifixion. You can visit the graves of Mary and John at Ephesus. Five books…

The law of gravity is universally accepted because it cannot be denied.  My grandson in his highchair loves to test the law of gravity by throwing his food, spoons and bowls on the floor.  Gravity is consistent whether it is the toddler and his food, the Earth and the Sun, or all the galaxies in the Milky Way. Objects are attracted to each other according to their mass, as Sir Isaac Newton put…

Many systems, including all living systems are unpredictable but their chaos is not random. They are deterministic but highly responsive to the conditions which create them. This is called path dependency or the “butterfly effect.” Children, created and nurtured by loving parents, are inherently unpredictable yet almost always turn out to be good kids. In chaos theory, an attractor is a set of…

Most people like flowers and trees. Very few like the Latin names for flowers. But I may be able to get you interested.  Stick with me. If you wanted to name a tree, you would probably go with some interesting character of the tree, right?  So a tree which smelled a bit after you cut it and which had reddish bark might be called red stinkwood. Or, if the fruit looked a bit like a plum and was…

Around here (the deciduous forests of the temperate latitudes), wildflowers are the first to announce Spring. Harbinger of Spring (Ereginia bulbosum) is the first. It’s a barebones flower. Hardly any petals at all, just dots of the reproductive parts: stamen and pistil. Hence the common name “salt and pepper.” But since it is already April, you won’t see salt and pepper at the Wildflower Day…

Click on the arrows in the slide below to see all the slides in this seminar.

To the young, a small cut is nothing. It heals up in no time. Older organisms get cuts which don’t heal. Cells within the wound work against healing. The whole area must be cut out so that the organism can heal. We are at that stage as a nation. The nation has a deep wound which is festering. Two vociferous camps each are convinced they have the truth and their opponents are evil and must be…

Twenty years ago, I realized all Northern European peoples are Ukrainian. When the ice age descended and glaciers covered most of Europe, a small section of Ukraine, now the disputed Crimea, was a place of refuge for Europeans. As the glaciers retreated, this remnant spread out over the whole continent. Later waves of migration brought genetics from other regions, but Scandinavia, the Netherlands…