7/7/23

 Friday, July 7, 2023

In bed at 10, awake at 4-something unable to sleep with bait bucket thoughts, and up at 5:20.  57℉, high of 72℉, first half of day will be sunny, the second half will be cloudy, AQI=53, Moderate.  Wind NW at 6 mph, 2 to 9 during the day and gusts up to 12.  No rain. Sunrise at 5:20, sunset at 8:33, 15+14,

More curmudgeonry.  From yesterday's WaPo, an opinion piece by Charles Lane, "U.S. institutions are polling about as well as King George III did in 1776."  We are indeed coming apart at the seams, making one wonder if there are any 'seams.'  Excerpts;

- As this country wrapped up its birthday party on July 4, polls were confirming a continued, and, in some respects, increasing, lack of public confidence in its political, economic, and social institutions.  The share of the public that expresses a “great deal,” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency (26 percent), Congress (8 percent), and the Supreme Court (27 percent) . . . registers at or near all-time lows, according to a new Gallup survey released Thursday.

-  The percentage expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the U.S. military has dropped 14 points since 2018, from 74 percent to 60 percent — the latter being a new low for the 21st century.

-  Only 43 percent express strong confidence in the police, down 21 percentage points from the all-time Gallup high of 64 percent in 2004,  and the lowest in the 30 years since Gallup began asking the question. Over the past half-century, confidence in public schools has plunged 36 points; it now stands at 26 percent, also an all-time low for Gallup.

-  The print and electronic media, once broadly trusted to hold other institutions accountable, now rank close to the bottom in Gallup’s confidence surveys. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll released in June, 73 percent of respondents agreed that “the mainstream media is more interested in making money than telling the truth.”

-  In a different survey last year, 69 percent of Americans told Gallup they do not have confidence in their national government, the worst rating of any country in the Group of Seven advanced industrial democracies.

I read the full text of the Declaration of Independence this morning.  I suspect I have read the entire text before but who knows.  We tend to focus on the most famous and revered words, starting with 'When in the course of human events' and 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" through to the concluding "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."  Thomas Jefferson's rousing rhetoric.  In between the opening and closing lines are the various grievances that prompted the pissed-off colonists to declare their independence.  As I read the Declaration, I had in mind Jill Lepore's recent essay on the practical unamendabilty of the anti-democratic provisions of our Constitution and various other writings on the paralysis of the Congress and the federal government, the power grab by the Trump/Roberts Supreme Court,  the threat of right-wing domestic terrorism, etc.  And I wondered  whether, when, and how violent resistance to the government will occur and how the 2024 elections will play out.

Bad Moon Rising, Credence Clearwater Revival, John Fogarty, 1968

I see the bad moon rising / I see trouble on the way

I see earthquakes and lightning / I see bad times today.

. . . 

Hope you got your things together / Hope you are quite prepared to die

Looks like we're in for nasty weather / One eye is taken for an eye.

LTMW at chickadees on the niger tube and the sunflower tube, a robin filling up on goodies I spilled on the ground beneath the tubes for ground feeders.  Occasionally goldfinches show up on the niger tube but more frequently on the sunflower tube.  The goldfinches like to land on the niger feeder and 'set up shop,' or stay there until they have eaten their fill.  The chickadees disturb them, chasing them away with their zoom-in, zoom-out behavior and their rapid jumping from one spot to another on the tube looking for the most accessible morsel.  I also replaced the two orange halves on the shepherd's crooks with fresh ones.  I waited too long to replace the old ones; they were pretty ratty.  Yuck.  I've left the suet basket unfilled for a few days now, discouraged by the swarms of English sparrows the suet attracts.

Cluster bombs.  Biden has approved sending these weapons to the Ukrainians, reminding us once again of American "exceptionalism."  Most civilized nations of the world have banned the manufacture and use of these weapons because of their danger to civilians.  "While all weapons are dangerous, cluster bombs pose a particular threat to civilians for two reasons: they have a wide area of effect, and they consistently leave behind a large number of unexploded bomblets. The unexploded bomblets can remain dangerous for decades after the end of a conflict. For example, while the United States cluster bombing of Laos stopped in 1973, cluster bombs and other unexploded munitions continued to cause over 100 casualties per year to Laotian civilians as of 2009."   The United States has declined to sign onto the international agreement banning cluster bombs and has also refused to join the treaty banning anti-personnel land mines.   "Since 1975, more than 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and about 60,000 others maimed by what is known as unexploded ordnance — land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and the like that failed to detonate decades ago. Quang Tri Province alone, along the border that once divided Vietnam into North and South, is said to have been more heavily bombed than all of Germany was in World War II."  And then there is Agent Orange and the other persistently lethal herbicides that we used in defense of 'freedom.'  News like this reminds me of the minuscule but culpable role I played in Vietnam, keeping track of the hundreds of thousands of missions flown by our pilots dropping bombs, cluster bombs, spraying herbicides, etc. over the land.  All in a day's work.  Better dead than Red and all that.  Semper Fidelis.  Now we'll help to do in Ukraine's Donbas what we did in Quang Tri.

Oh, how I love reading Fintan O'Toole.  In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Unrepentent Pence.  Excerpts"

- [Mike Pence]  has ended up as a gray man of no substance, who has to insist ever more emphatically on his own godliness because he has no soul left to sell. In the video with which, on June 7, he launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he managed not to say Trump’s name—an attempt at conscious uncoupling that convinced nobody.

- That a candidate with Pence’s name recognition is polling in the single digits, barely ahead of the almost unknown Vivek Ramaswamy, shows how, like so many others who offer their necks to Trump’s fangs, he has been sucked dry.

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