Humpty Dumpty is ravenous but the world is watching.
Jerusalem's hard-fought liberation, now in process, is a recapitulation of the Christian Crusades of the 11th—13th cc, this time, not by the knight on a white horse of legend, but through the long march of guerilla warfare by the much maligned Shia. This follows on the liberation of Iran from its Judeo-Christian yoke in 1979 and Iraq 25 years later, ironically by the US, forming the second Shia majority state. But it is the Shia minority of Lebanon that holds the keys to Jerusalem. Their 40% of the Lebanese population punches well above their weight in a fractious country split among Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims.
The history of our Story
Firing the first shots: Honduras and odious debt
Out of control, permanent crisis, role of government
клин клином or Make love not war
Exercise: rethink the Story, demonetize
What you can do
Cold ugly cynicism or warm beautiful passion
Jeffrey Kripal, How to think impossibly about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else, 2024.
People believe impossible things because impossible things happen to people. You don't need to believe any of the belief systems that build up around such extraordinary experiences to acknowledge that the experiences in fact happened.
If there is indeed truth to astrology, then I think it's axiomatic that we are wittingly or otherwise in touch with other 'universals', beings from the elite of all those trillions of stars around us. Impossible? Given our Cartesian thinking, yes. The unknown otherworldiness behind any such communication—and there is lots of evidence that something unknown and otherworldy is going on—requires impossible thinking.
Rumi: Come out of the circle of time into the circle of love.
I have taken up ping pong as my sole viable remaining sport in my 70s. It really was made for frustrated sedentary has-beens. I played real tennis till tennis elbow set in, but even the thought of lurching, run around asphalt (let alone falling) makes it easy to shift into a scaled-down version. The paddle weighs almost nothing, the ball nothing. You play for an hour without noticing the time. Unless you have bodily aches and pains making anything unpleasant. But even then, if they're not too serious, you don't notice the pain (e.g., sciatica) so much, you don't suffer.
From the start, I told Marty, 'let's not bother scoring. Let's just make every rally the best.'
Review: Dan Steinbock, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025.
Interview with Opperman Report July 2024 -- Ames and Cold War then and now
Review: Scott Anderson, Four CIA spies at the dawn of the Cold War -- a tragedy in three acts (2021)
Review: Diana Johnstone, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher (2020)
Review: Richard Falk, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim, Clarity Press (2021)
Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. No!
Well then, don your bicycle helmet. No! Drivers actually pay less attention to you if they see a helmet, figuring they're not likely to kill a smarty-pants, and are less careful around you (2x as likely to pass close). A toque or baseball cap in case of rain is more practical.
Walberg's bike adventures in and around Toronto (ok, walking around Gaspe and some religion too)
Peterborough-Oshawa-Toronto by bike 14 July 2024
Biking the Grand: Reinventing tourism 06 July 2023
Shakespeare by bike 25 June 2022
Humpty Dumpty is ravenous but the world is watching.
I am always leery of hubris. It may be true that all people of good now want 'the fall' of Israel, after a century of lies, deceit, killing and more killing, first by the British and European Jews, then by the US and European Jews, now by Britain-US-EU-Israel and European and Arab Jews. But compassion does not pay the bills. The stakes keep mounting, along with high tech death toys, and it's very hard to image Israel on the verge of collapse. It, and world Jewry, have never been so rich, so powerful in all history.
The major world powers – the 'collective West', China, India, Russia – provide it with most of the death toys and the fuel to run them. None of these hard-nosed political schemers want to see Israel collapse,
Do I hear Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine? Israel?
It took a genocide for Torontonians to commit themselves to the goal of defeating Israel. It turns out Iranian President Akhmedinejad was right after all. 'Israel' must be wiped off the map. It is an ugly cancer that could kill its Earthly host. But it will disappear only by the will of the people, Palestinian, Canadian, Jewish-Christian-Muslim united.
World News with Eric Walberg