Time to Think

What I Missed in Just One Week    #219 By Hank Silverberg You may have noticed I did not post a blog this past week. My wife and I took a trip of a thousand miles to see family for the first time since the start of the pandemic for Passover. It was good to see them all.  We had a celebration of my mother's life, since the pandemic prevented a funeral a year ago, and then we had a huge family Seder that included all of her nine great-grandchildren for the first time. I love this type of event.  (Take the bridge and avoid NYC) But I confess the crowds at the service areas on our trip (where we stopped in Maryland and Connecticut) made me a bit nervous. I was wearing a mask, but that darn Omicron variant is still a worry, even though I am fully vaccinated. (If you are not, you are making a mistake.)   What surprised me most were all the things that happened in the 72 hours where I was not paying much attention to the news. (I had one or two hours of list...

  Lessons From the Civil War      #218 By Hank Silverberg  April 9,1865 was the day Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulyssis S. Grant at Appomattox. The defeated Confederate States of America,  (Surrender at Appomattox, Courtesy of battlefields.org) a country which never legally existed, still had armies in the field, but Lee's surrender pretty much ended a long and bloody Civil War which killed almost 700,000 Americans, both in uniform and civilian. And almost immediately after Appomattox the myths began about the causes of that war and who was to blame for starting it.  I write about this today because the myths persist all these years later and still seem to find their way into contemporary politics. That war was the biggest failure in American political history. And the wounds, despite Mr. Lincoln's plea, have never really healed.   School children across the south were taught for decades that the war w...

How Can Anyone Believe Putin?                                #217 By Hank Silverberg The news from Ukraine has gotten worse this week. The Russians continued their murderous missile and air strikes on Ukrainian cities even as their army was pushed back out of several Ukrainian towns. Military casualties are mounting on both sides.  (A street in Bucha, Ukraine Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images)   But it was the bodies of dead civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha which showed us the worst of this war. Civilians had been executed and left lying in the streets, some of them with their hands tied behind their back. And the city's Mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, says there's also a mass grave holding 230 bodies just from that one small town (pre-war population of 36,971).  Several other towns were liberated from Russian control, but Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky warned citizens not to g...

  Reading Between The Lines                        #216 By Hank Silverberg Sometimes you just have to read between the lines. President Biden's speech in Warsaw this past week was a masterful piece of leadership. It made clear that the United States and NATO are not going to let Vladimir   Putin echo Peter the Great and restore the Russian empire at the expense of Poland or any other NATO country. And Biden sent a clear message that the west will do everything short of committing troops in defense of non-NATO member Ukraine.  Its impact could be as great as President Kenndy's anti-communist, Cold War, West Berlin speech in June of 1963, ("Ich bin ein Berliner.") which firmed up our opposition to Soviet threats and expansionism and sent a clear message to Nikita Khrushchev.    It can also be compared to Ronald Reagan's Berlin Wall speech in 1987 which re-affirmed America's leadership in the Col...

A Hot Topic                                                #215    By Hank Silverberg War is raging in Europe,  the pandemic is still hanging over our heads as more variants  show up, and hostile confrontational politics continue to dominate the headlines. But the biggest threat to mankind may once again have provided strong evidence of impending  worldwide disaster, and it is pretty much being ignored.  The coldest place on Earth, Vostok on the ice shelf in eastern Antarctica, is 50 to 90 degrees above normal right now, warmer than it's ever been before. The sudden rise has scientists who study such things a bit flabbergasted.  It's not exactly balmy, but a heat wave has raised temperatures in Vostok sheet UP to zero. This time of year, it usually averages about -63 degrees Fahrenheit.  Zero is the warmest it's ever b...