I have posted longer pieces on the Iran War at www.fpmalbany.org, but starting 2026/07/08, I am adding this page for shorter items, including ones posted to my LinkedIn page at James Lyons Walsh | LinkedIn.
2026/07/08, PM: Since finishing my doctorate in fundamental physics in 2020, I've been trying to address the global polycrisis, the complex of mutually reinforcing existential threats to civilization. One technique I've used has been to show familiar things in an entirely new light, to stimulate cognitive dissonance, a precursor to learning or to changing one's mind, as I learned in teacher training at The College of Saint Rose.
A fertile source of things to be re-envisioned is the Holy Bible. For example, the text clearly discusses sexual matters in ways that will fly over the heads of little pitchers with big ears, but we've been persuaded somehow that figurative language is literal and vice versa. Chapter 7 of the Gospel of Mark should make clear what I'm talking about in the former case.
The authors of the Holy Bible might also have wanted to cloak their meaning in cases where people might get into trouble talking clearly, to show folks how to communicate over the heads of their oppressors. I think the famous Number of the Beast from the Book of Revelation is such a case.
The Number of the Beast is the "human number" 666. I think that a "human number" is a numeral, since numerals are conventional, while numbers, arguably, exist independent of people. The Roman numeral for 666 is, interestingly, DCLXVI, or all the individual Roman numerals in order of decreasing size, with the largest individual Roman numeral, M, omitted.
To me, the Beast of Revelation is therefore an otherwise well-ordered society with an emptiness at the top, an amoral, thoroughly immoral, mad, or demented entity in the top job, for surely, an otherwise functioning society is a beastly danger to everyone when its head is missing in some sense, leaving it to run amok.
Let those with understanding reckon the Number of the United States right now.
Here's a relevant video Paul Krugman posted today: https://youtu.be/ZUhfOr2DiA4?si=5pSt0HQ8PVSYxiY-
2026/07/08, AM: With events moving so fast, I need to post this excerpt from an open letter in progress:
"Last Sunday at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, New York, USA, a substitute priest gave an absolutely masterful sermon about the happiness to be found in piety and, more specifically, vocation to holy orders. In happier times, this sermon would have been admirable, but in today's world, it continued the practice at the cathedral of ignoring the mass murder in which the nation in which the sermon was delivered is engaged, for the United States is gratuitously intensifying the climate crisis, launching wars of choice, continuing its long tradition of extrajudicial killing, dooming vulnerable people through the termination shock from sudden discontinuation of foreign aid, and failing to address the severe food insecurity already affecting millions in consequence of the disruption of fertilizer and fuel supplies caused by its war against Iran."
Below is my latest posted open letter, on the anomie, and consequent bloodthirstiness, in the United States, born of hereditary wealth loosed of all reasonable bounds in the neoliberal age, which has waxed uninterrupted since at least 1981. How many millions worldwide is the United States in the process of murdering? Will the term "good Usonian" soon supplant "good German"?
Open letter: Fool