For Israel, All the World is "Red"

A new Israeli directive paints the whole world in red, as dangerous because the corona virus. Incoming travelers are quarantined two weeks. While preparing mass vaccination, it is imposing severe isolation measures. The vaccination campaign in the USA is not proceeding smoothly, there are pockets of resistance and the nattering nabobs of negativism are spreading skepticism. Sweden's "light" quarantine has failed. Having survived a year of the epidemics, I am still confused. 

Fighting corona through Enthymemes

   Driving home, I heard on the radio that a fast way to check if on got the corona virus is to smell the coffee. One immediate and sure symptom of the disease is the loss of the sense of smell, so if you don't notice the aroma of a steaming cup of coffee, you are done for good, go and write your last will. Applying syllogism - the indisputable deductive reasoning first described by Aristotle in Prior Analytics - it becomes obvious that smelling strong coffee all day will protect you from the virus. I have always a large cup of coffee on the table, it runs away all the airborne corona. 

The stuff of which our universe is made

 UFOs appear all the time and are photographed and measured. They maneuver in the sky, they organize battles, they never contact humans nor leave any physical prove of their existence. They are here to make us nervous. 

The latest about the stuff of which the universe is made maintains that mass is positive, gravity plus dark matter is negative, and the total is approximately zero. As Diogenes y el Linyera used to say No somo' nada. We are nothing. 

Gravitational tsunamis

The fabric of the universe is an elastic membrane, but how elastic? Surprisingly, it follows well know physical laws and can be calculated. It is very resistant, you have to strike one big black hole against another one to originate perceivable waves at a large distance. In the immediacies it must feel like an earthquake. Every body deforms the spacetime - see ill. The most astonishing aspect (for this old engineer) is that it all follows easily understandable physical - mathematical laws. One asks oneself: "Is this all that there is?" and then "What for is it?" 

The White Man's Curious Beliefs

The Aztecs suffered from night panics and solved this infantile mental issue by enacting a nightly ritual of killing a man. It always worked, the sun - fortified by the fresh blood - managed to rise early morning. Unending obscurity is terrifying, specially if you have neither candles nor electricity. Lunatic, but there may be something in it. White folk, on the other hand, consider eating animals a sin. Even wearing dead animal skin is so contra-natura that in due curse it will be punished. If not by the Great Animal Spirit above, other White people will volunteer and correct the offender. The fearless Chinese will eat everything. 

Boring Space Aliens Meetings

 The revelation that the USA is maintaining regular meetings with space aliens debating the fabric of the universe, caused a very small sensation in the media. Left is WSJ's artist illustration of one of those interminable, boring meetings on Mars. People ask: "Is spacetime really a fabric?" Answer: "Today it is an elastic fabric but not long ago it was a space filled with ether. Slowly, the ether evaporated and the vacuum filled up with marmalade, like a sufganiya ". That sweet, sticky gel slowly solidified and became an elastic rubber-like fabric. That is a well known process called vulcanization. Newton studied the movements of the planets and discovered that transparent rubber bands hold the planets circling around the sun."  

Palestinian Hebraists

 Palestinians are intensely interested in the Hebrew language, some because they wish to explore their family history, others because it may provide them with some advantage. Interest in Hebrew has soared in the West Bank and Gaza in the past few years. Dozens of journalists are studying Hebrew in Ramallah while a 600-student school in al-Bireh has Hebrew classes. Even more surprisingly, Hamas began teaching Hebrew in its own schools in 2012 and thousands of Gazan children are now learning the language. “They are keen to learn. The classes are already oversubscribed.” It started in Hebron, whose inhabitants are musta'arabim - Jewish descendants (and the Whitest Palestinians).  Already in the nineteen twenties Arab families from Hebron petitioned to enroll their children in Jewish schools. Ill.: The Hebrew workbook of Ruhi al-Khalidi, who later represented the District of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament in 1908.