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12
Jan
2020
It is, perhaps, the most terrifying way to die. No one likes falling, not even off a footstool. But being hundreds or thousands of feet in the sky, and falling helplessly, is everyone’s nightmare...
But it wasn’t a dream for 176 people aboard Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 earlier this week.
Fortunately, these disasters don’t happen often. If you’re going to put your life into someone else’s hands, commercial aviation offers the safest, best regulated, way of travelling. Ian Savage of Northwestern University calculated fatality rates per passenger of various forms of transportation. Airlines came in at 0.07 per billion passenger miles. Bus, subway, and train all ranked below one per billion miles.
Cars were seven times higher; motorcycles more than 200 times higher.
Setting aside a plane’s greenhouse gas emissions, you’re safer flying across a continent than walking to the corner store.
Except that if something goes wrong at 35,000 feet up, you can’t get out and walk home.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Iran, Ukrainian Airlines, missile
10
Many Protestant congregations mark the new year with John Wesley’s Covenanting Service.
Wesley is, of course, the founder of British Methodism.
A “covenant” is like a contract, but more binding. Many people make New Year’s Resolutions -- if cynically, knowing that we will soon break them. But a covenant is more than a resolution. Once you make a covenant there’s no backing out.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Wesley, Covenant, New Years
5
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales said that he is "absolutely convinced" the United States orchestrated the military coup that removed him from power last November.
I believe him.
Not because I have any inside knowledge of Bolivian politics. Nor because I have back room connections in Washington DC.
I believe Morales because I have seen too many examples of the U.S. attempting to impose what it calls “regime change” in other countries. Bolivia fits the pattern too well.
The prime example is probably Iraq.
Tags: Bolivia, Brazil, Amerika, Empire, regime change, Iraq, Chile, Iran
4
n these months, as 12 years of Joan’s chronic leukemia move towards their inevitable conclusion, I have found it – as you may imagine – difficult to write poetry of any kind. And yet I feel that it is somehow important for me to try.
Something about the sheer sparseness of the haiku formula appealed to me: three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The format leaves no room for maudlin meandering. I wrote about a dozen of them; after consulting with a pair of friends, four remain.
tides suck life away
anemones scrunch in pain
rocks rise wet with tears
Categories: Poetry
Tags:
2
The days are getting longer – had you noticed? Today will be one minute and nine seconds longer than yesterday. Sunrise hasn’t changed, but the sun now sets later. Soon the sunrise will accelerate too, and the northern hemisphere will hurtle towards summer.
Our grandson sent a photo of himself on a beach in Mexico. I must admit that my first reaction was not delight. It was envy. I looked at the sparking sand, the turquoise sea, the fluffy clouds. I could imagine warm sun on my shoulders. I wished I were there.
Why, I wondered, would anyone live anywhere but in the tropics?
But I know why, when I look out my window. Grey snow, piled along the roadsides. Brown grass. Bare tree limbs, black against a sodden sky…
I need these seasonal reminders so that I can fully appreciate summer.
Tags: summer, winter, yin/yang, contrasts