1026

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

In bed at 10:30, up at 5:30, ?? pss, 2 glasses of red.  Woke up with a dream of Geri telling me the basement was on fire.  😱  42 degrees outside, high of 52 expected, partly cloudy day, autumn-like.  The left hand seems to be 95% healed.  Wazupwiddat?  Hoping for a much better day than yesterday.

Paradise Drive

The heading is a pun on my favorite Rustic Road over in Washington County and the drive I took to get to it this morning.  I took our two Advisory Account signed authorizations to Jake Bain at Stifel's West Bend office.  The sun was shining this morning with temperatures in the 40s.  A favorite drive in the country from our days as Saukville residents: Pleasant Valley Road to CTH Z and Little Cedar Lake, Hy. 45 to 33 and Stifel, River Road to Paradise Road to Wausaukee Road to Gravel Road to CTY Y to St. Finbar's Road to Shady Lane Road to CTH I to Hy. 33 to I 43 and home.  'Colorama' coming to an end, with thousands of trees in beautiful reds and oranges and greens and ochres and yellows. big apple orchard with trees loaded with ripe apples, Riveredge and Little Cedar Lake (Ackerman County Park) more built up than in the days when I frequented these places, St. Finbar's Cemetery, the Opitz Dairy Farm whose manure we could smell on manuring days on Deerfield Road, cows peacefully lying on the ground in pasture land,  hundreds of acres of matte ochre field corn, still green alfalfa,  brown dry soybeans, widely spread out houses and picturesque farmhouses, barns, sheds, silos, outbuildings.  Many homes shielded from the road, at the end of long driveways, 'social distancing' from neighbors, Republican yard signs outnumbering Democratic 30 or 40 to 1.

THE MORNING NEWS

As Climate Pledges Fall Short, a Chaotic Future Looks More Like Reality: Without drastic action, a United Nations report said, temperatures are set to rise far more than the goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Texas Goes Permitless on Guns, and Police Face an Armed Public: A new law allowing people to carry handguns without a license has led to more spontaneous shootings, many in law enforcement say.

Pro-Trump Republicans court election volunteers to ‘challenge any vote’: Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt.

A ‘Tripledemic’? Flu and Other Infections Return as Covid Cases Rise: Flu cases are higher than usual for this time of year and are expected to soar in the coming weeks. A third virus, R.S.V., is straining pediatric hospitals in some states.

Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935)

"In modern society the basic mechanisms of justice are becoming more and more economic rather than political, in the sense that economic power is the most basic power.   Political power is derived from it to such a degree that a just political order is not possible without the reconstruction of the economic order.  Specifically, this means the reconstruction of the property system.  Property has always been power, and inequality in possession has always made for an unjust distribution of the common social fund.  But a technical civilization has transmuted the essentially static disproportions of power and privilege of an agrarian economy into dynamic forces.  Centralization of power and privilege and the impoverishment of the multitudes develop at such a pace, in spite of slight efforts at equalization through the pressure of political power upon the economic forces, that the whole system of distribution is imperiled.  Markets for the ever-increasing flood of goods are not adequate because the buying power of the multitudes is too restricted.  Consequently a periodic glut of goods leads to unemployment crises and general depressions.  Efforts to solve this problem, short of the socialization of productive property, lead to a dangerous increase in the power of the state without giving the state final authority over the dormant economic power.  Whatever the defects of Marxism as a philosophy and as a religion, and even as a political strategy, its analyses of the technical aspects of the problem of justice have not been successfully challenged, and every event in contemporary history seems to multiply the proofs of its validity. . ."

I can't remember what caused me to pull out my dog-eared, widely underlined, and highlighted copy of Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics.  I don't remember when I bought and read it but it's clear I read all of it and thoroughly marked it up notwithstanding the fact that, at least now, I need to read it very slowly and think about the meaning of just about every sentence and to try to gain some understanding of Niebuhr's understanding of "God."  He wrestles quite directly with the competing 'religions' of communism and capitalism and the inadequacies of each and so it appears I should try to reread the entire work again in old age, along with Moral Man and Immoral Society.  Presbyopia and always flagging energy and focus will make that kind of undertaking difficult, maybe practically impossible.  Let's see.