Author: warrenrjohnson

Science

Modern Science: Counter-Intuition and Its Implications for Climate Change

Warren R. Johnson — A major challenge facing the survival of the planet is climate change. A recent assessment by the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, predicts that the most dire consequences of human-caused climate change will be upon us much sooner than expected. Yet, we are seemingly unable to deal with the dilemmas it presents. In my view, … Continue reading Modern Science: Counter-Intuition and Its Implications for Climate Change

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Creative Nonfiction, History

Picking Up a Prisoner at Dachau

Warren R. Johnson — Though it is not a particularly well-known fact, the “bunker” of the former concentration camp at Dachau was used after World War II as an American stockade. Until 1970, soldiers either awaiting trial or sentenced to less than a year’s confinement were imprisoned there. The “bunker,” a series of cells, is directly behind the former administration building that is now the … Continue reading Picking Up a Prisoner at Dachau

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Creative Nonfiction, Philosophy and Religion

Elegant Old Men

Warren R. Johnson — When our son Michael was very young, he had a very old friend. Everyone called his old friend Baba Levi. Not mister, not sir, but Baba. Baba is Persian for father, or even grandfather. He was so old that he remembered driving trucks from Baghdad to Tehran, before the First World War when trucks on the main roads joining the two … Continue reading Elegant Old Men

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Creative Nonfiction

The Ear is Quicker than the Eye: A Hospital Story

Warren R. Johnson — Having lived in Germany for many years, I’ve had the opportunity to get acquainted with hospitals from Landstuhl, the military’s largest hospital outside the United States, to Bad Aibling, where there never was a military hospital, only a civilian one. To outsiders, hospitals are almost always odd places. Patients themselves only get used to them because hospitals run on schedule. In the hospital … Continue reading The Ear is Quicker than the Eye: A Hospital Story

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Philosophy and Religion, Science

The Physicist and the Preacher

Warren R. Johnson — In 1949 Albert Einstein asserted, “The abstract concept ‘society’ means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations.” Reasoning likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1963 Letter From Birmingham Jail, argued that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He went on … Continue reading The Physicist and the Preacher

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