Calcium

If the opposite of heat was eleven and papaya was a synonym for alligator, the rest of our words might be equally carnivorous. Clocks and California could be used interchangeably. I once saw an episode of an old black & white television series in which a man was confounded when everyone around him began using gibberish words in sentences. Dinosaur was used in place of lunch; a boy asked the man where the boy could take his girlfriend for dinosaur. The man got angry at the boy. But then the man’s wife began substituting nonsense for meaningful words. And then everyone in his sphere did the same. But they all understood the language. The man did not. He lost his mind. I may have done the same. Shall we go out for gangster after today’s calcium service?

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If the reports from Statcounter are correct and reliable, someone (likely bots) based in China regularly visits this blog, usually but not exclusively during late night and early morning hours. The visits appear to be launched from China Unicom, a Chinese state-owned telecommunications operator, the third-largest wireless network operator in China. Recently, these Chinese visits—which have no referring link, suggesting to me they probably are bots—have not had, on  Statcounter, a live hyperlink to a specific post. They indicate which post was visited, but there is no live link to that post. That is a change from previous Chinese visits (of which there are many, many, many). I wish I knew why visits to this blog by Chinese bots are so common. But I do not know. So I will stop rambling on about it. For now.

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Nuclear weapons have long constituted tragic reality. To date, that tragedy has played out on relatively rare occasions. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people. A 1986 paper copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Casualties Due to the Blast, Heat, and Radioactive Fallout from Various Hypothetical Nuclear Attacks on the United States, offers estimates of the numbers of deaths and other casualties under various scenarios. One table included in the paper estimates that deaths would range between 3 million and 56 million. The authors of the paper “examined three different hypothetical ‘limited‘ nuclear attacks on the United States, each involving a 1-megaton (Mt) airburst over approximately 100 targets of three different types.” The three types of targets the authors examined were: 1) the city centers of the 100 largest U.S. urban areas; 2) 101 industries rated as the highest-priority targets for an attack on U.S. military-industrial capability; and 3) 99 key strategic nuclear targets.  The authors, in the conclusion of their paper, suggested a ‘limited’ attack on the USA (or by the USA on what was then the Soviet Union) probably would escalate considerably. Mutual (and global) assured annihilation, one might assume, would be the outcome. Tragic reality, indeed. The mere idea that nuclear weaponry, in an environment when multiple opposing superpowers possess nuclear capabilities, could ever be a deterrent is madness. Madness is not impossible, of course. We see it live, online and in on television news broadcasts, every day.

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The temperature outside, as of 6:29 a.m., is 57°F. That is dangerously close to cold! How in the hell did that happen? Just days ago the daytime high was in the 90s; even higher, I think. Suddenly, the temperature plunged into the 50s! If the meteorologists responsible for predicting the future are right, the temperature will climb by almost 30 degrees before it reaches today’s peak.  I will not complain about the cold. I will not complain about the warmth. Not today, anyway.

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Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh ~

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Calcium. It’s what’s for dinosaur.