Saturday, December 31, 2022
In bed around 10?, awake at 3, and up at 3:15, nasty dream and waking thoughts of increasing urban death & destruction a la 60s & 70s, Weathermen, SLA, arson, and bombings, but from both Left & Right, Happy New Year. 26 cloudy degrees out, high of 34., snow all melted. Sunrise today at 7:23, another 4 hours😱, sunset at 4:26, 9 hours and 3 minutes of daylight.
'It's a good day': Majority of tents, occupied by Milwaukee's homeless population, removed from MacArthur Squ
Homeless men congregate around the encampment of tents Oct. 7 at MacArthur Square in Milwaukee. Roughly 95% of tents in MacArthur Square near Milwaukee's courthouse have been removed as of Friday, and the vast majority of people who were occupying the tents are now indoors. Street Angels is a local nonprofit that provides clothes, food, sleeping bags and tents for the homeless, as well as resources to help them find housing. As many as 41 tents were in MacArthur Square at one point, Sarasin said. That number is now down to four tents, with half known to be still be used.
Pope Benedict XVI and Ewell Dewey, the apostles. Pope Benedict has died at age 95. I think of him playing an apostle, indeed the successor of the head apostle Peter and Robert Duvall playing the apostle Euliss F. Dewey in the film I rewatched last night. Benedict was elected to apostle status by a conclave of powerful Princes of the Church, his fellow cardinals (but only those under the age of 80) voting in Conclave. Euliss F. Dewey appointed himself an apostle and formalized the appointment by dunking himself in some unnamed river in Texas or Louisiana while fleeing from the police after murdering his wife's lover with a baseball bat. Benedict was supposed to lead a religion of about 1,ooo,ooo,ooo people worldwide.. Apostle E.F. led the membership of The One Way Road to Heaven church in Bayou Boutee, Louisiana. Each was a True Believer after his own fashion. Quaere: who was more Peter-like? who was more deluded?
New Year's Resolutions. I don't know that I have ever made New Year's resolutions. Perhaps I have but, as with so many things, I have no memory of any. This year I should try. 1. Try not to be a jerk, selfish, self-centered, judgmental, supercilious, intellectually vain, pity partyer. 2. Try to be kinder, more understanding, more open, more accepting of differences (except for MAGA types and dangerous Republicans.) 3. Try to paint more, be more communicative, draw more, walk more. OTOH: Emily Dickinson "In this short life that only lasts an hour / How much - how little - is within our power?"
My rant on Trump's Taxes. As I watch a bit of the news coverage of the newly-disclosed tax returns of DJT and see that he wasn't audited by "our" government, i.e., the IRS, until Rich E. Neal sent the letter demanding copies of his returns for the House Ways & Means Committee, I see Republican lawmakers & supporters fulminating about the 'weaponization' of the IRS (like the supposed 'weaponization' of the FBI). I call to mind Sen. Scott of Florida and so many other Republicans opposing the Omnibus spending bill's increased funding of the IRS which they have starved from funding for years, telling small potatoes Americans like me that the IRS with increased funding will be 'coming after' us rather than well-heeled tax evaders like them and DJT. I'm reminded of Bob Friebert saying 'Don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining out.' When I was a little kid my mother told me the Republicans were for the rich and the Dems for the rest of us. Nothing has changed over my 81+ years; it's only gotten worse. Try as I may to understand why the Trumpeters are so angry about governments, particularly the federal government (and I do have some understanding of the sources of that anger) I can't help thinking of them as plutocratic, oligarchic, existential threats to what has erroneously passed for so long as 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people'. It hasn't been by happenstance that income and wealth inequality has increased to where it is now. We have long had government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. The Internal Revenue Code and its implementing Regulations stand witness to this. As a wealthy real estate developer and owner, Trump wouldn't have to break the law (which he almost certainly did) to reap the benefits of our tax laws which were written by well-heeled lawyers and CPSs and slipped into law by well-heeled lobbyists feeding well-heeled legislators specifically to protect and increase his wealth. Depreciation, accelerated depreciation, business expenses, tax shelters. We all know it and we all tolerate it because, as a practical matter, there is little we can do to change it. It is as it always has been the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must. Trump has always known this. Indeed it's clear he learned it at his Daddy's knee. It's how he came to divide all mankind into "winners" and "losers." The winners merited his admiration, the losers his contempt. And the overwhelming majority of what my mother and sister referred to as "our fellow man" were to Trump and his kind simply losers.
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