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 Tuesday, October 18, 2022

In bed at 9, awake at 4, out of bed at 4:25. 5? pss, no nightcap.  Woke up thinking of Britain's Caribbean colonies, enslaved labor, Middle Passage, sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton, remembering Jamaica but unable to remember the first major one.  Will look up now - - Barbados.  With the French it was Saint Dominque (Haiti), the Portuguese had Brazil, and the Spaniards were all over the place.  Brutal European nations, economies grounded on slave labor of one sort or another.  What a thing to be thinking of when trying to get back to sleep.  Meanwhile, back in the jungle, it's 34 degrees here and I started the first fire in the fireplace.  Remembering the big hit novelty song "Stranded in the Jungle" by the Cadets in the mid 1950s. a bit racist, misogynistic.

Notes to Sarah this a.m.

Slogthrop <slogthrop@gmail.com>  6:04 AM (1 hour ago)

I am all too familiar with problems of sleeplessness.  I'm encouraged that you were well enough to do garden work yesterday and to get a head start on the cold weather.  It's 34 degrees here as I type this and I put the first log of the season in the fireplace.  I also just typed a depressing comment to your FB post about the Dems shouting bullshit to the Republicans.  For the last several years I cried the blues to Kitty in our morning conversations about the country's inexorable drift towards fascism or what is being more benignly called 'authoritarianism'.  I don't think I'm overreacting or overthinking (Kitty's theory and hope) but hopefully I am.  The Dems are simply unable to get their shit together and to come up with strong candidates who can be perceived as anything other than panderers to minority groups and elites.  I hope I'm dead wrong but I pretty much expect Michels and Johnson to beat Evers and Barnes here in Wisconsin, Kari Lake to win in Arizona, Brian Kemp to beat Stacy Abrams in Georgia.  OMG, it's very conceivable that that lout of a hypocritical misogynistic football player will beat Sen. Warnock in Georgia.  I'm afraid America is 'not safe for children and other living things' in our times.  When I see little kids going to and coming from school, I always feel guilty and very, very sad.  Of course I hope I'm wrong about all of this.

Money Makes the World Go Around, the World Go Around, . . 

This morning's WaPo: FOREIGN SERVANTS: RETIRED U.S. BRASS CASH IN WITH SAUDIS, OTHER REPRESSIVE GOVERNMENTS.  More than 500 retired U.S. military personnel — including scores of generals and admirals — have taken lucrative jobs since 2015 working for foreign governments, mostly in countries known for human rights abuses and political repression, according to a Washington Post investigation.  In Saudi Arabia, for example, 15 retired U.S. generals and admirals have worked as paid consultants for the Defense Ministry since 2016. The ministry is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, who U.S. intelligence agencies say approved the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist, as part of a brutal crackdown on dissent.

This morning's WaPo: Saudi Arabia Sentences U.S. Citizen to 16 Years in Prison for Tweets.  The Saudi government has sentenced a 72-year-old U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets he posted while inside the United States, some of which were critical of the Saudi regime. His son, speaking publicly for the first time, alleges that the Saudi government has tortured his father in prison and says that the State Department mishandled the case.

Is this supposed to be bad news or good news?

This morning's WaPo:   Soda pop, chips, hot dogs, etc. – they can take years off your life.

Make that 2 hot dogs, please, and another Dr. Pepper.  Old age, a mixed blessing at best.😣

War is Hell

The Russians have destroyed 1/3 of Ukraine's power plants putting Ukraine's civilian populace, including a lot of vulnerable people - old men and women, little boys and girls, mommies and babies, hospitals, medical service providers, sick people, et al. - in danger of losing electrical power, water, and vital services as the weather grows dangerous.  Cruise missiles and Iranian kamikaze drones have become the weapons du jour now that the Ukrainians have driven Russian artillery back to the East and South of the nation, the lands contiguous to Russia proper and Crimea.  President Zelensky accuses the Russians of waging "a war of terror."  It's a reminder, if we needed any, that at least since the end of trench warfare in World War I, all wars have been in large part wars of terror directed against civilians, noncombatants.  This was seen in the Spanish Civil War, when the German and Italian fascist air forces bombed Guernica at the request of Spanish fascist Francisco Franco.  In WWII the Germans in their Blitzkrieg  bombed English and Scottish cities and the Americans and English bombed German and Japanese cities.  The Germans engaged in schrecklichkeit throughout most of Europe and the Soviet Union.  The bombing raids were terror attacks at least as much as strategic targeting of military targets.  I came across a March, 1945 memo from Winston Churchill while researching a memoir years ago.  Churchill baldly acknowledged that a prime purpose of strategic bombing of German cities was "increasing the terror, though under other pretexts" and only reluctantly abjured "mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."  American bombers fire bombed Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945.  The Wikipedia entry on General Curtis LeMay and the bombing of Tokyo (and the other cities) reports: "In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings, and incinerating 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target.  Precise figures are not available, but the strategic bombing campaign against Japan, directed by LeMay between March 1945 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945, may have killed more than 500,000 Japanese civilians and left five million homeless.  Official estimates from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey put the figures at 220,000 people killed."

    

    There is no legitimate comparison between Russia's wholly unjustified war against Ukraine and America's war against Japan, but what the two wars have in common with all wars is the necessity of indifference and schadenfreude on the part of those waging the war.  We cannot wage war if we care about the suffering of those whom we seek to hurt and kill; they are after all not just our adversaries, our opponents, but rather our enemies, those who, in their turn, are out to hurt and kill us.  We can't lose sleep over disposing of those who would dispose of us.  And mere indifference readily turns to schadenfreude, taking delight in the hurting and killing.  It happened to virtually everyone in WWII, in Korea, and in Vietnam.  I found out in Vietnam that it's like the old Tommy Edwards song: "It's All In The Game."  For many, it is now happening in Russia and Ukraine, understandably enough for the Ukrainians, perversely for the Russians. I fear it can only get worse.

Next Audible Book

I Always Knew, by Barbara Chase-Riboud.  How is it I have never heard of this remarkable woman?  I watched her interviewed by Christiane Amanpour today (yesterday's broadcast), saw some of her beautiful sculptures, and learned she is a respected poet and novelist.  Egad!  Most of the books I have obtained from Audible are too hard to follow - loaded with important historical and economic and financial data about capitalism, slavery, etc.  The books are important, the data is important, but it needs to be read in print to be digested and not listened to like a novel or memoir.  The last book I listened to, Happening by Annie Ernaux, was more than interesting and informative, so much so I listened to it twice.  Barbara Chase-Riboud's book is a collection of letters from Barbara to her mother and should be relatively easy for me to follow without the print in front of me.

Geri's Margin Garden;Tree Removal

Took a walk along and through Geri's garden on the west margin of our lot.  It has a character all its own, developed by Geri's hundreds of hours of work over the last 11 years.  Also walked on her garden pathway to which she has devoted countless hours of labor over the last several years.  Remarkable garden, remarkable gardener.

    A good many trees have been felled over the last 2 days by Hoppe Tree Service in the vernal/ephemeral pond beneath the margin garden and shared with our new neighbor to the west.  Hired by the new neighbor (who we believe is Andy's managing partner), they took down the remaining trunk of a tree we had shortened by WEnergies last year.