Bernard Zaleha, PhD, JD

  The ticket stub above is from a John Denver concert on September 22, 1973, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. It was my first concert that wasn't some Christian traveling group. Not quite a year earlier, sometime in October 1972, a nature documentary aired about bighorn sheep. There were various promos leading up to the air date featuring this guy I'd never heard of with longish blonde hair and granny glasses named John Denver. He meant nothing to me at that time, but I was already keenly interested in all things wild nature. Rich Hogg and I had become backpacking enthusiasts a year and a half earlier, and I had painstakingly worked my way through Thoreau's 'Walden' the preceding school year. In the TV special, Day of the Bighorn, John sang 'Rocky Mountain High', 'How Do You Say Hello to a Grizzly Bear', and other songs that would become dear to me, including 'Rocky Mountain Suite (Cold Nights in Canada)', which he had w...

In the last few weeks, a Facebook post has been circulating that answers the question, Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid. I append below the January 24, 2025 post from a Facebook user named Sue Bird as a recent example among many. The post is correctly attributed Adam-Troy Castro and it originated on his Facebook site on October 2, 2018. It is worth noting, therefore, that all his examples of Trumpian evil are more than six years old. Mango Mussolini has engaged my many more acts of evil since then, including January 6, 2021, and all his current coup efforts along with his chief co-conspirator, Mars Boy Musk. Castro’s original post did not contain any links. At some point, some subsequent poster or posters supplied links to backup each of Castro’s examples. As of today, February 23, 2025, each of the links below are still active. I actually enjoy Castro’s full post as he wrote it (instead of the slightly abridged version in wide circulation) and have reproduced the his ...

My Saturday, October 7, 2023, post to Facebook, plus updates through December 4, 2024: ------------------------------- It was a year ago today, October 7, 2022, that I was told by phone by a physician in my main PCP’s office to go immediately to the Emergency Room to get a blood transfusion because my hemoglobin levels were dangerously low (6.5). I ended up being admitted for what would be a 3-day hospital stay while they tried to find me an acceptable unit of blood. They never did find an acceptable unit of blood. Turns out that when your blood already has weird antibodies in it, finding an acceptable unit is no small chore. The main product of that hospitalization was connecting me with Michael Yen, who is now my hematologist/oncologist. Lacking available blood, he got my hemoglobin levels back up with a treatment regime of high doses of Prednisone. In the short term, that worked. Alas, it cannot be a permanent solution. He was also able to determine that I have autoimmune hemolytic ...

I was "educated"/indoctrinated in Seventh-day Adventist parochial schools all the way through my first quarter in college (at Pacific Union College) in the Fall 1975. Don Vollmer (famous within Adventism as a member of the Wedgewood Trio, a fundamentalist folk group) was my 8th-grade bible teacher for the 1970-71 school year at Redlands Junior Academy, and he had us reading a book by Adventist author Fernando Chaij titled Preparation for the Final Crisis . The book is basically an exegesis of Ellen G. White's quotes (EGW was the founding prophetess of the SDA church) from all her writings about "The End Times" and "The Time of Trouble." In his chapter titled, appropriately enough, "The Time of Trouble," he quotes this from a chapter in "The Great Controversy" (also titled by EGW, "The Time of Trouble"): "The assaults of Satan are fierce and determined, his delusions are terrible; but the Lord’s eye is upon His people,...

Redeeming & Re-imagining Easter Resurrection for the Modern World: Finding a Jesus worthy of an Atheistic Age First published, 4/4/2021; Undated 9/18/2024 Happy Easter everyone.  Today we reach the most problematic moment in the annual cycle of Christian holidays.  On Christmas, we celebrate "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all Humanity," as metaphorically imagined in the incarnation of the sacred in the birth of a poor Jewish peasant child, resting in a feed trough for domestic animals, accompanied by poor herdsmen from the hills, the utter antithesis of the prosperity gospel spouted in some evangelical megachurches today.  This is, of course, still an anthropocentric creed which had not arrived at the needed expansion of the moral circle to embrace non-human life, as taught to us by St. Henry (Thoreau), St. John (Muir) of the Mountains, and St. Aldo (Leopold), and that most mischievous eco-saint of them all, Cactus Ed (Abbey), but still a step in the right direction. In...