National Feral Cat Day is 16 October

By Rose Lyn Jacob

WITH APOLOGIES TO DR. SEUSS on National FERAL CAT DAY 2022

There are zillions of cats who have no home.

Some just hang around, while others like to roam.

Some are just lost and others are found,

by humans who leave kibble and chow on the ground.

Some live in barns, some live under houses,

some chase through fields after fat, juicy mouses.

Some are so shy they won’t come to eat,

and need to be tempted with tidbits of meat.

These cats all make kittens – dozens or more.

And the kittens they’ve made just make more who make more!

We call these cats “feral “--cats who don’t have a home,

cats who live in the street, cats who go out to roam.

So we trap ‘em and take ‘em all to a VET –

That’s an animal doctor who takes care of your pet.

The girl cats are spayed and the boy cats are neutered,

Before they’re returned, they’ve had shots and are speutered!

We build shelters to house them or find homes in a barn

So they’re out of the weather and kept safe and warm

Your support is essential, so we just want to say,

WE THANK YOU, as we celebrate, FERAL CAT DAY!

My Wife Rabbi Rose Lyn Jacob's Column for 12 Oct in the Culpeper Star-Exponent

You’ve no doubt seen some version of that first year Sunday School art project of Noah and his wife on the bow of an ark with two giraffes sticking their necks through port holes, along with a couple of zebras, and a pair of lions. There is a multi-colored rainbow overhead; sometimes just a colorful scribble, sometimes colored meticulously within the lines; a sign, God’s promise that he will never destroy the world again. Above the ark is a white dove holding an olive branch in its mouth, a symbol of renewal.

It has probably been a few years since you read the story, but have you ever wondered just how long it took Noah to build the Ark from the time God instructed him to build it, giving him the blueprint in CUBITS; 300 cubits (138 meters) long, 50 cubits (23 meters) wide, and 30 cubits (13.8 meters) high, until completion? Oh, and by the way, how long is a meter? How much time did it take for Noah and Mrs. Noah to get the materials together, scope out a location that wasn’t exactly “dockside” and start to build?

Once the vessel started to take shape, they were, no doubt, ridiculed by their neighbors. “What the heck is going on? Noah, what are you up to? Noah’s response was pretty much the same. “Oh, just planning for the future.” I’m positive that there was a whole lot-a head shakin’ goin’ on. No lectures on how evil his neighbors were; no ticking off their iniquities. No warning of God’s plan to wipe everybody away and start again; but this time without dinosaurs.

Building an ark has been on my mind lately. In October alone, there have been devastating floods in India, California, Florida, South Carolina, New South Wales, Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and it isn’t even the ides of October yet! Landscapes, coastlines, cities, towns and fields are gone. The threat of famine is growing exponentially; and that is without the grain shortages caused by the war on Ukraine!

Catastrophic geophysical events such as rising water, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis and submerged lands become deeply rooted a culture’s psyche, its folk tales, myths and religious beliefs for the good reason that these stories send warnings to future generations that say, “Yes, this has happened, and yes, it could happen again.” Whether brought on by the gods, or rapidly melting ice sheets, they are cautionary tales that give us a glimpse into the inner lives of those who were there and who share stories based in trauma and catastrophe that live on long after the poets and storytellers are gone.

Noah had some time before the deluge started to plan for the future. We have also had time to plan, yet continue to squander that time. We hold conferences debating Global Warming, and our leaders vote “yea or nay” on climate initiatives. We assuage our conscience and compensate for our Carbon Footprint by paying a few dollars more for plane tickets; an offset, a “Mea Culpa” to the rainforests.

The warnings have been there all along, there, on the nursery wall. Perhaps we have been lulled into a false security by that rainbow above the Ark. Call it a Bible story or a geo-myth, it should be a call to action. Just like all Bible stories, this one is open to interpretation. But perhaps we should talk less, and do more. Time to gather the wood and the pitch and start building.

An Interesting Logistics Comparison

In 1944, as Germany suffered increasing losses on the ground, and experienced deeper shortaqes of critical war materiel, Hitler rained more and more bombs down on London and other British cities. It made no difference. On the battlefield he was a beaten man.

In a similar manner it may be that, with his armies in the field beaten and exhausted, Vladimir Putin is raining missiles down on Ukrainian cities. But this Russian tantrum cannot have any great effect.

Where are We Going with This?

The discussion of a potential Russian first use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine should be setting off alarm bells in rational people’s heads

There’s a concept in relations between nuclear armed belligerents (or potential belligerents) called the firebreak. It goes like this: Threats are one thing; saber rattling happens, and in the absence of other stimuli, it doesn’t necessarily create a desperate situation. An example of this is North Korea. Little Kim pretends to lose his mind and threatens terrible things on a regular basis, but nobody takes him seriously. He wants attention, not war. He has neither a casus belli nor an ongoing kinetic relationship with South Korea or the United States.

But when two nuclear powers already have a conventional kinetic relationship, the danger increases exponentially. It is generally believed that rational leaders are constrained from employing nuclear weapons by common sense and the survival instinct in all but the most extreme circumstances. The problem arises when one belligerent employs a single nuclear weapon, perhaps out of desperation, or as a demonstration to increase leverage. That single employment brings the conflict through the firebreak to the point where both powers are unconstrained in nuclear employment. The probability of nuclear employment stopping at one is low.

There is no such thing as a singular, precipitate use of a nuke that holds belligerents within some imaginary firebreak. That firebreak will evaporate.

How might we restore he firebreak in the face of Russian employment of a battlefield nuclear weapon? The solution would rest with a large, costly operation that employs conventional forces to destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and a joint NATO operation to rid the skies over and adjacent to Ukraine of Russian aircraft. Such an operation would be logistically intensive, and fraught with hazards, as are all war making operations. For those who haven’t noticed, war isn’t clean.

Russia is already back on its heels. Its missile attacks on Ukraine are mostly being carried out by converted surface to air weapons. The Russian military logistics system in general is strained near the breaking point.

Sadly, there are no guarantees in warfare. Those of us not in control must wait it out while mediocrities named Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan try to save the free world — not a comforting thought.

Danger Close

If history teaches us anything, it's that unintended consequences are the most likely outcome of any historical event. The unanswered question is always: "Who will learn the lesson?"

Vladimir Putin clearly learnt one when he invaded Ukraine, but the forces he set in motion have not come to a halt. Rulers such as Putin don't know how to stop until they get what they want, so we can only guess where the correlation of forces is leading.

The danger rests in the fact that Putin has no exit strategy. The only hope for the West, and Ukraine, is in the Kremlin leadership deposing him. Otherwise, the minimum danger is of a nuclear 'demonstration'. Such a demonstration would involve a nuclear attack on an uninhabited area. Such a demonstration was proposed as an option against the Japanese as an alternative to the attack on Hiroshima, but abandoned. It was decided that the Japanese would perceive such a n on-attack as a sign of weakness.

I hold the Biden Asministration foreign policy team in the lowest possible regard. If Tony Blinken is a fool, Jake Sullivan is an idiot. I hope they are making plans. They need to be at their very best.

One September Day

On this September day,

One last time,

That small island

Might just seem,

The center of the world,

As so many wept

God save the Queen.

Labor Day in Deep Space

Today is Labor Day, a lesser holiday to all except those devoted to the backyard barbecue. A real landmark today is the 45th anniversary of Voyager I’s launch. That aged satellite is now over 14.6 billion miles from earth, having completed its primary mission of touring the gas giants of our solar system. It, and its sister, Voyager II, have now exited our solar system and will continue on forever (unless one of them collides with some cosmic object) in hopes that they will eventually encounter another civilization. Both Voyagers carry messages of earth on gold records. Why gold? For its durability? Yes. Why a record? Forty-five years ago, that’s how we transferred data. The fact is, when the Voyagers were born, the phonograph record was our standard. They’ve been gone that long, and NASA has been monitoring them that long. The Voyagers weren’t meant to function into the twenty-first century, but their engineers built them well. Still, their plutonium reactors are gradually running down, producing less and less electricity, and their feeble radio signals will soon go silent. At that point they will continue sailing through deep space at 35,000 miles per hour, carrying our hope that they might someday encounter another civilization, giving them the first hint of a distant civilization.