Good morning! In a difficult week for us we experienced one of our favorite blessings — spring migration, including seeing a bundle of Hooded Mergansers (not my picture):
Ukrainians in Wisconsin. No better people than the cheeseheads:
STOUGHTON, Wis. (NewsNation) — A year ago, the Poroshkovs braced for the worst, and they got it.
They were in their 14th floor apartment when they saw a missile fly, impacting a nearby building. As Russian bombs continued to hit Kyiv, the Poroshkovs spent most of their time in a bomb shelter, watching as food supplies dwindled.
Today, however, this family of four is navigating life in small-town Wisconsin.
The Poroshkovs — father Illia, mother Natalia, and daughters Melaniia, 13, and Stefaniia, 4 — are among 110,000 Ukrainian refugees living in the United States as the war in their homeland drags on. They’re working hard to rebuild a life while supporting their countrymen.
Natalia works at a flower shop. Melaniia is in seventh grade, where she’s enjoying art classes and improving her English by reading fantasy novels. Illia and Stephaniia spend the days at home. Illia is waiting for a work permit, and volunteers his time working to funnel humanitarian aid back to Ukraine. They’re waiting to find an opening in day care for Stephaniia.
“It was difficult to believe that (a stranger) cares about you,” said Natalia, through a translator, while reflecting on how her family got to the United States.
Still, as American support for the war may be waning, these survivors who have come to our country say: Don’t forget us, because the war’s not over yet.
Aimee’s practicing gratitude for grief and lament:
Sometimes Christians have a hard time talking about our grief. We think we need to be happy all the time. Like our witness to Christ depends on it. Seeing the news from the Southern Baptist Convention yesterday, even though it’s no surprise, still made me sad. And mad. It’s just one snap shot of the condition of the church. And I think we need to grieve that. Maybe right now that is what we need to do as a church. Lament to God. I have been journaling to God some since the new year and this is a short meditation on the personal grief I’ve been carrying in my experiences with church the last few years. And practicing gratitude for it. Grief does something for us and we can embrace that.
I am going to try and practice gratefulness for grief. It’s been over three years of carrying a grief. Much joy and newness has been given in it. Because there was much death. Today, I am grateful for that agony that refused to let me stay numb. The agony that woke me up to then die to faux blessings in my life. To false belonging. To success. And to even being the one to give my kids the “right” path to the faith.
No more NDAs, rah rah rah!
Companies can no longer offer severance agreements that prevent employees from making disparaging remarks about their former employer, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday.
The big picture: The federal agency said these agreements require employees to waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act, and that such policies are a violation of the act.
According to the NLRB, "the employer’s offer is itself an attempt to deter employees from exercising their statutory rights, at a time when employees may feel they must give up their rights in order to get the benefits provided in the agreement."
Employees also cannot be prevented from disclosing the terms of their severance packages as outlined in any exit agreement, the NLRB said.
It is assumed even today that public sentiment is the primary driver of social change. It ought to be sobering, then, that we saw mass mobilizations in the aftermath of the state-sponsored lynching of George Floyd in numbers not seen since the Vietnam war and Civil Rights movement, and have not yet seen widespread legislative change. To the contrary, we are, in some states, witnessing retrenchment and new modes of racialized intimidation. This suggests to me that public opinion is not the answer to these issues because if those opinions are not mobilized, they cannot save lives.
Here, the language of racial capitalism helps us (and get used to hearing about it in my pieces!) If it is the case that the “culture” which produces racial violence is not merely a matter of race but inextricably a matter of money and class, everyone thinking that violence is bad or that it was terrible for Tyre Nichols to be murdered will not save the life of a single person. That outrage must be mobilized into particular political action, particular acts of economic and political solidarity, and the building of new systems that tend toward the support of life rather than the commodification of it. Lynching did not fade because people stopped being racist; it faded because it became bad for American business. Perhaps the only way that racial violence of any kind will fade is if it becomes profitable for no one.
Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky — or “direct air capture,” as it is known by experts and scientists — is a bit like a time machine for climate change. It removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground, almost exactly the reverse of what humanity has been doing for centuries by burning fossil fuels. Its promise? That it can help run back the clock, undoing some of what we have done to the atmosphere and helping to return the planet to a cooler state.
The problem with direct air capture, however, has been that it takes energy — a lot of energy. Carbon dioxide only makes up 0.04 percent of ambient air, making the process of its extraction chemically and energy intensive. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by 2100 the world needs to remove between 100 and 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air to meet its most ambitious climate goals — or between 10 and 100 times China’s annual emissions. But if the energy powering that comes from fossil fuels, direct air capture starts to look less like a time machine than an accelerator: a way to emit even more CO2.
Now, however, a company is working to combine direct air capture with a relatively untapped source of energy: Heat from Earth’s crust. Fervo Energy, a geothermal company headquartered in Houston, announced on Thursday that it will design and engineer the first purpose-built geothermal and direct air capture plant. With the help of a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the company hopes to have a pilot facility online in 3 to 5 years.
If it works, it will be a way to produce carbon-free electricity, while reducing CO2 in the atmosphere at the same time. In short, a win-win for the climate.
You walk into your local bar and order a beer. Your server brings your order, along with a few snacks to nibble on while sipping your brew: dates and some dried fish.
This was likely the experience for patrons at what might be the world’s oldest-known bar.
Archaeologists recently excavated a site in Iraq dating to around 2700 B.C. in the ancient Sumerian city-state of Lagash that they think could contain the oldest tavern ever discovered.
“We found the remains of a public eatery, the earliest that we are aware of in one of the first cities of southern Mesopotamia,” said Holly Pittman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and project director of the excavation.
An international team of researchers from Penn and the University of Pisa announced the discovery this month. The site was uncovered in the fall at Tell al Hiba, located in southeastern Iraq, about 150 miles from the modern port city of Basra.
Archaeologists found a seven-room structure featuring an open courtyard with benches and a large open cooking area with a 10-foot-wide mud-brick oven. They also discovered a primitive refrigerator. Known as a “zeer” in Arabic, the device consisted of two bottomless clay jars that used evaporation to help cool perishable items.
In another room, the team discovered a large quantity of conical bowls that held ready-to-eat food and jars that the archaeologists think contained beer.
“We’re trying to find out now through lipid analysis what was in the bowls or the jars,” said Pittman, who is also Near East curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “But it looks like this was kind of a McDonald’s with prepared food for fast service.”
Brother I appreciate your meanderings .
I grieve for the American church as well
I appreciate the good reminder to stay involved in expressions of care for Ukranians in the US and abroad. And kudos to the National Labor Relatoins Board for their decision on National Labor Relations Act. Our migratory birds looked a bit cold this week, but what a joy to see them (even if a Sharp Shinned Hawk was on the prowl). Re: "Today, I am grateful for that agony that refused to let me stay numb. The agony that woke me up to then die to faux blessings in my life. To false belonging. To success. And to even being the one to give my kids the “right” path to the faith." I sense sorrow accompanied by freedom. Birthed out of that has been a great number of stirrings... as you share with us. I had a long conversation with a woman in ministry this week, which included how I'd been encouraged from your blog and book reviews. I won't go into the difficulties she's come up against, but your willingness to influence and be a voice has been a help to me and others.