2/3/23

Friday, January 3, 2023

In bed at about 10:15, up at 5:54, and let Lilly out at 6 into 2 below zero weather, clear skies, wind NNW at 14m wind chill of 22 below zero.  She came in within 4 minutes or so.  High of 8 degrees today, with winds from 4 to 15 mph, gusts up to 26 mph, and wind chills of 3 below to 23 below zero.  Sunrise at 7:05, sunset at 5:06, 10+1.

Our Town  A 15-year-old girl was shot in Milwaukee Thursday night and suffered life-threatening injuries, police say.  The girl is currently at a hospital.  The incident occurred at roughly 9:19 p.m. on the 1700 block of West Capitol Drive on Milwaukee's north side.  The circumstances leading up to the shooting are still under investigation and police do not have anyone in custody. Police said the girl is from Milwaukee.  Anyone with any information is asked to contact Milwaukee Police at (414) 935-7360 or to remain anonymous, contact Crime Stoppers at (414) 224-Tips or P3 Tips.

but on the other hand,

Giannis scores 54 and Bucks lock down Kawhi Leonard in 106-105 win and the ship sails calmly on.

Sore jaw joint on the left side for 2 days now, unable to bite solidly, clench teeth.  It feels like a slight dislocation, 

Cannon Fodder Yesterday I referred to a news story stating that Russian casualties in Ukraine were perhaps 100,000.  This morning's NYT reports the number at closer to 200,000.  At two meetings last month between senior military and defense officials from NATO and partner countries, officials said the fighting in the Donbas had turned into, as one of them put it, a meat grinder.  On Norwegian TV on Jan. 22, Gen. Eirik Kristoffersen, Norway’s defense chief, said estimates were that Russia had suffered 180,000 dead and wounded, while Ukraine had 100,000 killed or wounded in action along with 30,000 civilian deaths. General Kristoffersen, in an email to The New York Times through his spokesman, said that there is “much uncertainty regarding these numbers, as no one at the moment is able to give a good overview. They could be both lower or even higher.”

Hard to be a Christian  I think of this with some frequency - this invitation or demand to love our neighbor, to keep forgiving the wrongs committed against us, to wash his feet, to turn the other cheek, to give away all that we have and follow, the whole megillah about Love and Forgiveness and Poverty, 'Lady Poverty' as Francis of Assisi referred to it.  It's not just hard, it's impossible.  Let the dead bury the dead" and "He who loves mother or father more than Me is not worthy of Me."  One of the chapter headings in Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics is "The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal."  I read the book years ago and underlined many passages, sometimes indicating my thought that the passage was terribly important or insightful, sometimes perhaps indicating that I didn't understand it and needed to ponder it.  Some of the underlining was done with a deep orange highlighter which stands out these many years after I made them; others, probably most, I made with yellow highlighting which has faded to near invisibility.  Some of my notating was done with ink squiggles in the margins of text.  The book was published in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, within memory of the Roaring Twenties and the War to End All Wars, a year before the start of the Spanish Civil War and two years before Japan's occupation of China that anticipated World War II and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Browsing my well-worn paperback copy again, I wonder what exactly was Niebuhr's idea of "God," what did that idea, that reality for him, mean.  He certainly didn't appear to be a closet atheist as I believe many divinity school denizens are, but how did his understanding of "God" differ from the Thomistic understanding I was taught in my Catholic schooling from 1946 to 1963? All-powerful, All-good, All-knowing, All-loving, Unchanging, Timeless, etc.  The understanding always leavened by the great escape hatch "Mystery."

Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank.  I watched this documentary of the photographer-film maker Robert Frank this afternoon on OVID.  At the end of the film, he ruminates on growing old "I'm growing old.  Swollen toes.  Nails falling out. Gum disease.  Itching.  Pain.  Irregular heartbeat.  No more pissing.  Constipation.  It's a grim picture.  It's a natural disaster, growing old.  It's an adjustment and you have to be careful.  You have to be careful not to be bitter about it, not to become a nasty old man, but sometimes it's better to be a nasty old man than to be too polite and too, you know, . . "