10/31/23

 Tuesday, October 31, 2023

First snow of the season

In bed at 9:30, on lzb at 3:13, not much sleep, back to bed at 4:10, up at 6:30.34°, high of 38°, wind chill of 21°, wind SSW at 12, 6-20/34 w/ snow flurries, 1.05" of snow expected😱  Sunrise at 7:25, sunset at 5:45, 10+19       

An oil (I think) I did at the end of the 1st Gulf War: George H. W. Bush triumphant after securing Kuwait's oil reserves for Western capitalism's oil companies, Margaret Thatcher in front of him, having 'given him a backbone', and barely visible ghostly figures behind him, the dead soldiers and civilians who paid with their lives for Bush's banishing America's "Vietnam Syndrome."

Thoughts I have listening to Israelis lay all blame for the death of thousands of children on Hamas and listening to Palestinians lay all blame for the death of Israeli civilians on themselves.

Eighth Air Force

by Randall Jarrell

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,
A puppy laps the water from a can
Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving
Whistles O Paradiso!--shall I say that man
Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

The other murderers troop in yawning;
Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one
Lies counting missions, lies there sweating
Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.
O murderers! . . . Still, this is how it's done:

This is a war . . . But since these play, before they die,
Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man,
I did as these have done, but did not die--
I will content the people as I can
And give up these to them: Behold the man!

I have suffered, in a dream, because of him,
Many things; for this last saviour, man,
I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?
Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can:
I find no fault in this just man.

Gospel of John, Ch. 19  I find no guilt in him.  So Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe.  Pilate said to them: 'Behold the man . . .I find no guilt in him. . . .  We have no king but Caesar. . . So he delivered him to them to be crucified.

Gospel of Matthew 27:19  While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him. 'Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.'

Gospel of Matthew 27: 24-25  Pilate saw he was getting nowhere and a riot was developing.  So he sent for a bowl of water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood.  The responsibility is yours."  All the people answered: "His blood is on us and on our children."

Dulce et Decorum Est

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• 
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Wilfred Owen

1893 – 

1918

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Jarrrell died, probably a suicide, at age 54, severely depressed after the assassination of JFK.  Owen was KIA in France one week before the Armistice was signed., age 25.

As the Russians and Ukrainians exchange artillery fire and missiles, and the Israelis pound Gaza wit artillery and air attacks, and with tanks, I think of Jarrell's 

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

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From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I think of the condition of the thousands of bodies killed by missiles, rockets, bombs, artillery shells, tanks, crushed by concrete, or shot, stabbed, burned, or dismembered by God-directed murderers.

LTMW at snowbirds digging into the 2 suet cakes I put out the other day.  Snow is falling steadily. . . . I filled the short tube at 4 o'clock to avoid the guilt I feel early in the morning looking out on an empty feeder approached by hungry birds looking for some breakfast.  I also scattered some seed on the snowy ground for the snowbirds, doves, chipmunks and squirrels.   Looking through my bathroom window earlier, I saw a somewhat bedraggled looking lone wild turkey, I assume a Tom, walking across our back yard.  The snow has been pretty solid all day, though none of it so far has been accumulating on the roads, just on the grass.  I'm looking forward to lighting a log in the fireplace at sundown. . . .  At dusk, two elegant white-tail does walk past my window and stop at our easternmost berry tree along County Line Road to nibble some low-hanging still-green leaves.  So elegant, so beautiful.  Such a blessing.

Healing Hands  at the VA with Jody was a very interesting and pleasnat experience.  I wasn't feeling any pain during the session so I don't know whether it would be helpful in terms of pain reduction but I will try the "biaural beats" on YouTube and see if it's helpful in any way.  I was quite dizzy at the end of the session, unsteady on my feet all the way to the parking garage.  I think I may have dropped into a semi-conscious state during the session.  The whole experience was very pleasant and I look forward to repeating it, though I don't understand the "chakra" theory underlying it.  Twice, perhaps three times, during the session I noticed my foreheard getting noticably warm to the point where I wondered if Jody were applying some kind of heat.  I asked her at the end and she said 'no', it was just her "energy" passing onto me when she was doing whatever she does near my head.  Whatever it was, I could definitely feel it as heat without any sense of touching.

Ezra Klein podcast: "If Not This, Then What Should Israel Do? with Zack Beauchamp.  I listened to the one hour podcast but couldn't help nodding off during parts of it.  Beauchamp recommended reading "The Selected Works of Edward Said" which I just bought on Kindle and "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977" by Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg which I just ordered from the libary.

I am appalled by all the killing of civilians in Gaza, especially of course the killing and wounding and trauatizing of thousands of children.  I am appalled by the "seige" warfare Israel has waged against all of Gaza for the last three weeks, witholding food, water, medicines, and fuel necessary to power generators at hospitals and drinking water facilities.  I am appalled by the complete refusal to consider any pause in the bombardment of Gaza or to consider any humanitartian relief getting to the people of Gaza other than a trickle of trucks at the Egyptian Rafah border crossing.   I can't justify it.  Netanyahu says none of this is  prohibited and illegal "collective punishment' of all the Palestinians within Gaza, that it is just part of Israel defending itself and warring against Hamas, but who can reasonably believe this?  Nor can I justify Biden's and Blinken's defense of Israel's comments.  The United States is intimately complicit in Israel's war crimes.  The writing was on the wall when Biden flew to Israel to be seen by the whole world HUGGING the fascist Netanyahu.  Shame on both of them.  Shame on us.

10/30/23

 Monday, October 30, 2023

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:09, tired, 6(?) ps during the night, IC.  30°, high of 36°😒, freeze warning till 10:00, sunny & windy day ahead.  AQI=24, wind NW ar 13 mph, 8-15/24. The wind chill is 20°😨  Sunrise at &:23, sunset at 5:46, 10+22.  Wintery temps week ahead.   

Really nasty CPP most of the morning.  I had to return to bed for a while.   Better in the afternoon but wiped out, but . . .

Treadmill  23:43 and 0.50

Our Dystopia.  From this morning's JSOnline, "Gun Deaths in Wis"

In fact, homicides, accidents and shootings deemed justified put together do not account for even one-third of all gunshot deaths in Wisconsin, according to state data.

Suicide is the missing piece. 

For every 100 fatal shootings in Wisconsin, on average 71 deaths are suicides, 25 are homicides, two are police shootings, one is deemed an accident and the balance are undetermined, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of state health data.

In the past 18 years, the number of gun deaths in the state has been steadily rising. 

Last year, more than 800 people died from gunshot wounds, a 95% rate increase when adjusted for population growth since 2004, the analysis found.

The increase was driven by a well-documented surge in homicides, especially in Milwaukee during the pandemic, but also by a less-publicized increase in suicides. Last year for the first time, gun suicides resulted in more than 500 deaths in Wisconsin, preliminary state data show.

 When homicides, accidents and police shootings are the measurement, Milwaukee County tops the list.

But when gun suicides are included, the ranking changes and the state’s rural counties rise to the forefront of firearms deaths.

In Milwaukee County, the homicide vs. suicide picture is the opposite of state averages.

There were nearly 3,000 gun deaths over 20 years of data provided by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office. Homicides accounted for 70% of the total, while suicides accounted for 28%. Milwaukee had a low suicide rate compared to other counties; just six counties had a lower rate, state data shows.

In Milwaukee, for every one gun homicide, there are another four or five non-fatal shootings, according to the Homicide Review Commission. 

In a well-documented phenomenon, Americans bought 60 million guns between 2020 and 2022, with an estimated 5 million of those sold to first-time buyers, research shows. Gun sales essentially doubled in those months.

Surveys indicate there are now an estimated 400 million guns in the U.S. owned by roughly one-third of the population. There is at least one gun in an estimated 45% of homes, a figure that fluctuates somewhat over time and was slightly higher in the 1980s.

I'm wondering about that statistic of roughly 1/3rd of the U.S. population owning guns owning an estimated 400,000,000 guns.  Is that 1/3rd of the adult population or of the entire population, including children?  Is it 1/3rd of households or of raw population?  How many of our neighbors have loaded lethal weapons in their homes, or on them?

Why all the suicides and why largely concentrated in rural areas?  I know each case is unique but I suspect some nasty truths are lurking in the numbers, more than just the unavailability of mental health care providers.  What social, cultural, and economic conditions contribute to these "deaths of despair" in Wisconsin and in America?

This day last year, an entry in this journal:

War 

News today that because of drone attacks on Russian warships in the Black Sea, Russia is pulling out of the UN-brokered agreement permitting Ukrainian grain to be shipped out to the world.  So Russia retaliated for a bomb blowing up a strategic bridge between Crimea and Russia by raining down cruise missiles, bombs, and rockets on civilian targets throughout Ukraine and retaliates for an attack on warships by contributing to world hunger, especially in poor nations, i.e., punishing more non-combatant civilians, always claiming that their inhumane crimes are the fault not of their own decisions, but because of the West.  Also news of Russian forces blanketing battle areas with white phosphorus, "Willie Peter" as Americans called it when they used it in Vietnam, supposedly for illumination purposes only.  It burns through everything and everyone it lands on, from the skin down to the bone.  An American soldier who had fought in Ukraine reported that soldiers who were sprayed with it committed suicide rather than live with the burns. 

 

 

10/29/23

  Sunday, October 29, 2023

In bed at 10:15, up at 5:20, stretched out on lzb for 20 minutes, let Lilly out. 39°, high of 44°, cloudy all day, AQI=19, wind N at 13, 10-14/22. w/c is 31.  Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 5:47, 10+25.  Last week of Daylight Saving Time, Geri's favorite night, and shockingly early sunsets.      

First of the season

Little Richard, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X.  In the last few days I have watched the CNN biographical documentary on Little Richard and the Netflix biographical documentary on Best Friends: Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.  I was struck by the similarities of these 3 unique giants in America's cultural, social, and political history, despite their huge dissimilarities. 

 Little Richard  (Penniman) was a flamboyantly gay, outrageously promiscuous, Black Rock & Roll superstar, one of my favorites when I was a teenager and up to the present.  His first big hit was Tutti Frutti, Italian for 'all fruits' and its original lyrics were about homosexual sex.  "Tutti Frutti, good booty, if it don't fit, don't force it, you can grease it, make it easy.  Tutti Frutti, good booty, if it's tight, it's all right, and if it's greasy, it makes it easy." The lyrics I heard on the radio were cleaned up to make them acceptable for radio broadcasts.  He was born in Jim Crow Macon, GA, the 3rd of 12 children.  His father was a deacon in an A.M.E. church and his mother was a member of a Pentecostal congregation.  He started singing and playing the piano early.  One of his legs was shorter than the other which gave him an 'effeminate' gait and he was taunted when young as a queer.

Muhammad Ali was born as Cassius Clay in 1942, and raised in Jim  Crow Louisville, KY.  His father was a sign painter and his mother a "domestic helper."  He was 13 years old when Emmett Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered, giving rise to a national scandal that greatly affected young Cassius.  He started amateur boxing around age 12 and went on to win many Golden Gloves and AAU championships, culminating in winning the Gold Medal as a light heavyweight at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.  When he returned from the Olympics, he was refused service at a local diner, reminding him that while he was a hero and a champion in other parts of the world, in the U.S., he was still a "n-----." He turned professional that year and ultimately became heavyweight champion, beating Sonny Liston for the title in 1964.  He taunted his opponents and he taunted the world: "I am the greatest!." He became a Muslim and when drafted to serve in the Army in 1967 during the Vietnam War, he refused to serve.  He was convicted for his refusal, a conviction that was ultimately reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds.  He was stripped of his heavyweight championship title by official boxing commissions.  He made many enemies, mostly white, by saying things like "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong" and "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights."  I was fresh from service in the Marines and many months in Vietnam and I agreed with him.  To me, he was a brave man and a hero.

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little (and later known as Malik el-Shabazz) in 1925 in Omaha, NE, the 4th of 7 children of Earl Little, a Baptist lay preacher and supporter of Marcus Garvey and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), of which his mother was also an official.  The family left Omaha because of KKK threats, moved temporarily to Milwaukee, and then to Lansing, where, when Malcolm was 6 years old, his father died either in 'a streetcar accident' or by murder by a white supremacist group.  His mother later suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized in 1938 whereupon Malcolm and his siblings were separated and lived in foster homes until he moved in with his half-sister in Boston.  He ended up in Harlem and lived a life of crime, including larceny, burglary, and pimping.  In prison in 1946, he became a member of the Nation of Islam, the Black Muslims and subsequently became its No. 2 voice, under its founder, Elijah Muhammad.  He was outspoken in assailing what White People had done and were doing and attempting to do to Black People. "If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn't even begun to pull out the knife."  And: "I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression."  Malcolm created outrage among most Whites when he dismissed the assassination of JFK as "chickens coming home to roost," likening it to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the assassination of Medgar Evers in his driveway in Jackson, MS, and the bombing deaths of the 4 Black girls in a Birmingham AL church earlier that year.  Malcolm had a falling out with Elijah Muhammad and was assassinated in 1965, several months before I went to Vietnam.  I had and still have great admiration for Malcolm X.  I believed and still believe he spoke Truth to Power.

These brief biographical sketches omit a great many important facts about each of these men but include at least some important facts.

What do these three men have in common?

  (1) They all had tremendous charisma.  They moved masses.  Millions of teenagers, including me, loved Little Richard songs and were disgusted by Pat Boon's 'covers.'  Ali commanded and filled whatever space he entered.  Nobody, White or non-White, could ignore the words of Malcolm X.  Having grown up in highly racist Chicago in the 1940s and 50s, I knew he was a truth-teller about Black-White relations.  

(2)  They all had courage in the face of widespread antagonism.  Little Richard faced rejection, even in his family, because of his effeminacy.  Ali was rejected by 'the Establishment' for his adherence to Islam, and his resistance to the Vietnam war.  Malcolm incurred widespread fear and antagonism from Whites and contempt based on his criminal background. 

(3)  They each had many supporters from both the White community and the Black community.  Little Richard reached millions of White teens like me with his powerful music, though he started out being played solely on Black radio stations playing what was categorized as "Race music", i.e. music for Blacks.  It was the power of his music and his performances that forced it across the culturally enforced color line.  Millions of Whites knew the truth of Ali's famous to some, infamous to others words: “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”  And ditto for even the harsh words about "White devils" by Malcolm.  To this day, I wonder why there is not more militant resistance to the White Power Establishment by American Blacks.  I was powerfully struck by the words of one young Black woman interviewed on TV after George Floyd's murder: "You're just lucky that what we are demanding is Justice and not Revenge."  I have wondered about this many times - why isn't there more anger, more bitterness among the Black community than there is.  What would my attitude towards Whites, and towards the American culture and society, and power structure be, if I were Black?  I can never know, any more than I can know what my attitudes would be if I had been born female rather than male, a Jew rather than a gentile.  To borrow from the blog's title, these are Imponderables which ought to give me a lot of humility when thinking about women, Blacks, and Jews - indeed anyone born without White male Christian privilege.

(4) Each of them was a leader.  They were all highly visible.  The views and positions that made them unpopular to millions of other Americans also made them leaders to those whose positions they represented and defended: gay rights for Little Richard, draft resistance and war opposition for Ali, and Black empowerment and dignity for Blacks for Malcolm.

(5)  They each grew up as a member of an oppressed caste in America.  I suppose nothing more need be said of this commonality.  Little Richard had the double burden of being both Black and gay.  Ali couldn't buy a cup of coffee in a Louisville diner even after being a Gold Medalist representing the U.S. at the Olympics in Rome.  Malcolm's family fled Omaha because of racist threats, received more in Lansing, and may have had the father murdered by White supremacists. 

  (6)  For each of them, religion was an important part of life.  Little Richard led a dissolute life for many years but he never lost his belief in the God he learned about in the AME and Pentecostal churches of his youth.  He moved back and forth between his raucous R&R life and his abstemious religious life and was very religious in his last years.  Ali and Malcolm were believers in Islam, with Malcolm experiencing a profound re-understanding of the religion after his visit to Mecca.

(7)  Each of them had tremendous belief in himself.  Despite all the challenges and adversities they faced, all three of them had great self-respect, a belief in their own worth, their own excellence, and their own calling.  They were proud men, sure of themselves.  Little Richard moved back and forth with his lifestyles, and in his religious phases he rued his R&R phases, but his belief in his tremendous talent and historical status as the 'originator' of a revolutionary new style of popular music never wavered.  Ali's self-confidence is legendary: "I am the greatest!" And Malcolm's self-respect is precisely what he preached and tried to instill in all his followers in the Nation of Islam, and not in a niggling way.  "One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you're going east, and you will be walking east when you think you're going west."

(8)  Despite my membership in the Dominant Caste, I had great respect for each of them, what they accomplished and what they endured, especially for Ali and Malcolm.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, "Privileged Class:

The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterized by universal self-deception and hypocrisy.  The unconcscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values, which we have noted in analysing national attitudes, is equally obvious in the attitude of classses.  The reason why privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole.  Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

Trick or Treat, 2023.   Only 7 visitors today, 4 in one group, 3 in another.  I bought a bag of ThreeMusketeerss bars and a bag of Peter Paul Mounds, knowing Geri wouldn't be tempted by the latter because of the coconut filling.  I'm a little disappointed that we get so few Trick or Treaters year after year on Wakefield.  On Andy and Anh's old house on Whitney in Fox Point, they annually had literally hundreds of kids out 'begging,' a neighborhood tradition attracting kids from who knows where.  Great fun.

10/28/23

 Saturday, October 28, 2023

In bed @ 10, awake at 6, and up at 6:15.  Let Lilly out. 38°, high of 46°, mostly sunny this morning, then cloudy.  AQI=14!, wind NW at 12 mph, 6-13/22.  Sunrise at 7:21, sunset at 5:49, 10+27.

Stephen King on Mass Shootings: We’re Out of Things to Say in this morning's NYT:

There is no solution to the gun problem, and little more to write, because Americans are addicted to firearms.

Representative Jared Golden, from Maine’s Second Congressional District, has reversed course and says he will now support outlawing military-style semiautomatic rifles like the one used in the killing of 18 people in Lewiston this week. But neither the House nor the Senate is likely to pass such a law, and if Congress actually did, the Supreme Court, as it now exists, would almost certainly rule it unconstitutional.

Every mass shooting is a gut-punch; with every one, unimaginative people say, “I never thought it could happen here,” but such things can and will happen anywhere and everywhere in this locked-and-loaded country. The guns are available and the targets are soft.

When rapid-fire guns are difficult to get, things improve, but I see no such improvement in the future. Americans love guns, and appear willing to pay the price in blood.

 An oil I did in the 1990s during the Balkan wars.

Death and Destruction as Popular Entertainment.   The only news I have seen on any of the big news channels the last few days has been about Israel's assault on Gaza and the mass murders in Lewiston, ME. If it bleeds, it leads. What's striking about the coverage of the Gaza disaster is the number and status of reporters on the ground in Israel reporting on activities.  I think especially of CNN's Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper, and Jake Tapper, but also of the 3 broadcast networks, each of which sent its news anchor to Israel: Lester Holt, David Muir, and Norah O'Donnell.  And most of us watch 'the show,' including me.  How good wars and mass murders are for ratings!  The greater the slaughter, the greater the ad revenues and the bottom line.  I'm reminded of the jokes about Waste Management Corp.'s company motto: Your shit is our bread and butter.  And, One man's garbage is another man's gold.  

 Last night, after weeks of aerial bombardment, Gaza came under increased and sustained attack from IDF air, artillery, tank, and machine gun fire which has continued into today.  The government described it as 'the next phase' of the war.  The nighttime coverage showed all the 'flash bang' explosions in Gaza, reminding me of our 4th of July celebrations - "the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air" - and driving home in my head the fact that each of those exciting explosions represents some human beings killed, some wounded, some dismembered, some crushed under concrete rubble, some innocent children, some enfeebled elderly, some parents desperately trying to protect their children.  Some ground troops have entered Gaza but it's not clear whether they are "special ops" troops or regular infantry.  Many of them will be killed before it's over but of course, this war will never be "over."  We're still fighting the Civil War and slowly realizing that, although the history books say the North won, the South and the 'values' it represented really won.   The North won the war and the South won the peace.  Look at the recent unanimous Republican vote for Mike Johnson of Shreveport, Louisiana for Speaker.  So it goes.

LTMW at a flock of wild turkeys, numbered in the teens, strutting across our front yard, heading south.  One makes a beeline directly to our bird feeders and looks in our window. . . .  They come back an hour or so later heading north, the actual count is 19.  

Geri returned from Arlington Heights before 3.  Lilly and I are both happy to have her back.

Remembering old book title jokes:  Race to the Outhouse by Willy Makit, Round the Mountain by Shelagh B. Comin, Taming Wild Cats by Claude Face, . . .

Let's not forget "For thousands of Palestinian families in the West Bank, though, the olive harvest is considered an important supplement to their income, if a potentially dangerous one. Israeli settlers regularly attack Palestinian farmers during the season and either steal their crops or prevent them from reaching their lands, in addition to destroying or cutting down olive trees. Since 1967, more than eight hundred thousand Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by Israeli authorities and settlers. Many were centuries old.

For the past several months, Israeli troops have been staging raids in West Bank cities, arresting suspected Islamic Jihad militants and seizing weapons. Meanwhile, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has begun arming the more than four hundred thousand settlers who live in the West Bank. As of July 2023, settlers in the West Bank hold some twenty-six hundred weapons issued by the Israeli Army.

The violence permeating Gaza has begun to erupt in the West Bank. Since October 7th, the Health Ministry has counted at least ninety Palestinians killed by Israeli troops or settlers. And, as in Gaza, Palestinians have been leaving their homes in the West Bank, out of fear of settler violence. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, eight communities—home to four hundred and seventy-two people, including a hundred and thirty-six children—have been vacated. In six more communities, at least eighty people have left their homes."

10/27/13

Friday, October 27, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 7:20, one hour on lzb.  [All the other info was deleted in an editing mishap.]

Geri off to help Sue's garage sale. [deleted also]

LTMW [deleted]

 "We put our faith in God."  From this morning's NYT:  "Najib al Amil, a 72-year-old priest in the Lebanese town of Rmeish, on the border with Israel, raced to harvest his olive trees as the sound of shelling rumbled in the distance. Soon, his olive groves could be a battlefield, he worried, and there would be no trees left to harvest.  “We put our faith in God,” he said."

When will they ever learn?  When will they ever learn?

Empty day.

10/26/23

 Thursday, October 26, 2023

In bed @10:30, after watching a bit of Sherlock Holmes in The Lady in Green, following continuing news coverage of mass murder in Lewiston, ME, with 22 dead, 50-60 wounded,[exaggerated numbers] awake at 4:05 with CPP, up at 4:15, wondering what's happening in Lewiston, in Gaza and Israel, in Ukraine, 61°, high of 64°, ⟩0.50 and ⟪1.00" of rain expected in next 24 hours, AQI=61 (PM2.5), wind SSE at 7 mph, 3-14/27.  Sunrise at 7:18, at 106E, sunset at 5:52 at 253W, meridian el.= 34°.

VA Day.  I got a pedicure at the VA podiatry clinic and an RSV vaccination at the ZIPH Clinic, then home  by 12:40 to wait for my next appointment with the health coach at 4:00.  I'll try to nap.

. . . . . 

Back to the VA at 4 through wretched rush hour & construction bumper to bumper traffic.  Met with Melina for @ 45 minutes.  Said I would try 'chair yoga' in Building 43 and Meditatio/Mindfulness gatherngs.

Treadmill Nothing today; to tired after not enough sleep last night + some pelvic pain.

US aircraft attack Iranina assets in Syria.  Last night's lullaby was the mass shooting in Lewiston.  Tonight it's Navy/Marine pilots bombing Islamic Revolutionary Guard targets in Syria.  The plot thickens, simmer turns to boil.  Here we go.

      

10/25/23

 Wednesday, October 25, 2023

In bed by 9:30, awake at 2:30, onto lzb till 3 and then up with earworm "You've Got to be Taught" from South Pacific, and thoughts of Caste, llistening to sump pump.  63°, high of 70°, light rain, AQI=51, win SW at 15 mph, 5-15/30.  Sunrise at 7:17, sunset at 5:53, 10+35.

I spoke with Ed today.   Mary Fran texted me this photo from Lyn's wake, with me smiling like the village idiot.  Ed & I remind me of Statler and Waldorf, the two old coots on The Muppet Show.

From Fintan O'Toole's Defying Tribalism in NYRB, 11/2/23 issue.

For almost all of its thirty-year duration, it seemed quite natural to think of the conflict in Northern Ireland, unfolding just a few dozen miles away from my hometown of Dublin, as an anachronism. The local joke was that when planes landed at Belfast airport, the pilot announced, “Welcome to Belfast. Put your watches back one hour and three hundred years.” This was part of the fascination for outsiders of what was otherwise a rather intimate catastrophe. The Troubles seemed a strange temporal regression, a rip in the fabric of European history through which the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had entered into the enlightened, secular present. White Christians who spoke the same language, lived cheek by jowl, and mostly watched the same movies and TV shows were not supposed to be willing to kill each other because their ancestors had taken different sides in the Reformation.

It was not so much the violence itself that seemed archaic—there was plenty of that around elsewhere in different forms. It was, rather, the way violence appeared as merely the starkest manifestation of a tribalized society. Tribalism in this sense (the term being otherwise rather insulting to most tribal peoples) is not at all the same thing as political partisanship. There are three important differences. Tribalism spills beyond the strictly political arena into parallel assumptions about history, geography, economics, and, of course, religion. Unlike partisanship, it makes the ethnic or social group, rather than the nation or the state, the primary locus of belonging. And neither side in this (typically binary) contest truly accepts the legitimacy of an electoral defeat. Being outvoted is understood not as a disappointment but as an existential threat.

These differences were—and to an extent still are—apparent in Northern Ireland, but they no longer look like distinguishing features that mark it as a unique kind of political space in the democratic world. Its holdovers have turned into harbingers. The throwback now feels more like a foretelling. What seemed in the 1970s and 1980s like a very niche retro political fashion is now all the rage.

Max Weber defined a nation as “a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own.” But in Northern Ireland it became all too obvious that “a community of sentiment” can be formed and sustained by distrust and dislike of another community’s sentiments. Where this feeling becomes definitive, the idea of the state becomes profoundly uncertain. Thus the Troubles are now—and not in a good way—everybody’s trouble: there are, in the United States and Europe, powerful forms of mass political identity that do not “adequately manifest” themselves in loyalty to the institutions, laws, and values that make a democratic state possible.

        . . .

[Martin Luthr] King, in that speech, called his people “the veterans of creative suffering,” a remarkable phrase in which “veteran” replaces “victim” and pain is reimagined as a stimulus for transformation. It ought to be a touchstone for the left.

Perhaps one of the reasons why it ceased to be is the difficulty of finding a language that acknowledges, on the one hand, the specificity of the suffering of particular social groups and, on the other, the universal travails of most people under feral capitalism. Adrienne Rich, writing in 1996, noted:

In the America where I’m writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be “shared” with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of “recovery.” We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public.

Class politics, underwritten by Marxist theory, provided at least one way of doing exactly that: thinking about pain not only as a personal or group experience but as a public condition produced by the ways economies and societies work. It was possible to recognize, for example, that a straight white male coal miner enjoyed the privileges of whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality but also suffered oppression and exploitation as a worker. It was possible fiercely to oppose systemic injustices without suggesting that those who escaped their very worst effects were just as guilty as those who created them.

. . . .

in the binary imagination of tribalism, there are only two possible states: to be dominant or to be dominated. Even a genuine revolt against repression and injustice can be understood only as a strategic move by those in the second category to move themselves into the first.  

Hpppy horseshit.  I wonder whether any Vietnam veteran or anyone who simply lived through the "Vietnam Era" can be blamed for cynicism from leaders of hegemons waging war on occupied peoples.  I and many of my fellow Marine officers stationed at the air wing headquarters at Danang had our fill of "happy horseshit" a few months into the war, or wouldn't it be more accurate to write 'into our invasion" 

Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting, Mr Guterrres said that “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” However, he added that the grievances of the Palestinian people could not justify “the horrifying and unprecedented October 7 acts of terror”  Mr Guterres also condemned "clear violations of international humanitarian law," calling Israel's constant bombardment of Hamas-controlled Gaza in response to the attack, and the level of destruction and civilian casualties, "alarming." He said the Hamas attacks “cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”.

Escalating the row on Wednesday, Israel's ambassador to the UN told Israeli Army Radio: “Due to his remarks we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives. We have already refused a visa for under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths. The time has come to teach them a lesson.”

Good grief!  What lesson is it that Israel's leaders teach the rest of the world?  How to become a pariah?

Things that go bump in the night.  At 4:15 this morning, as I sat in my recliner reading Fintan O'Toole's book review in the NYrB, something that sounded like it was hard plastic fell over or toppled on the bookshelves behind me.  Something moved, seemingly by itself, in such a way as to make a noise of some amplitude, not all that loud, but distinctly loud at 4:15 in the dark morning when and where nothing else was moving so as to cause something else to fall over or topple.  "From Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, and Things that go Bump in the Night, Good Lord, deliver us!"

Mike Johnson, second in line of succession to the Presidency.

1. Evangelical Chirsitan

2. Election denier

3. Anti-democracy

4. Anti-states-right

5. Voted against

    Establishment of independent January 6th commission

    Bi-partisan infrastructure bill

    Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act

    CHIPS and Science Act

    Bill to avoid government shutdown on October 1st

    All abortion rights bills, favors national ban on abortion

    Bill to codify Same-Sex marriage recognized by SCOTUS

 Very pleasant, God-fearing, Trump-loving, Southern Baptist gentleman from Shreveport, LA, and a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary.   "Jim Jordan with a suit coat and a smile."

Treadmill.  20.28,  0.50  I could have lasted longer, but thought perhaps it would be better after the last few days off, to take it slow.  Plus, it was a lot easier.😎😉

Geri had the pest control fellow here today.  He found holes and absence of screening on 2 gable vents plus chew-through damage to a connection between the central air conditioner and the house.

Prep for meeting with Melinda tomorrow.  I looked through the long list of programs in the Whole Health program and made a list of questions on a 3X5 card to bring to our appointment.

 

10/24/23

  NTuesday, October 24, 2023

In bed by 9:30, up at 4:30.  57°, high of 73°, partly cloudy morning & sunny afternoon ahead, another windy day. Wind SSW at 12 mph, 4-16/29, DPs 46-60°. Sunrise at 7:16 at 105°, sunset at 5:55, 254°, 10+39, solar noon at 12:35, elevation 35°.  Summery days ahead.    

Call the VA rehab doc, Dr. Chang late yesterday.  He said the x-rays confirmed that I have pretty severe arthritis in two sectors of my back and degenerative disc disease.  No surprise.  He recommended frequently stretching by back by bending way forward while seated.  I'm also supposed to do frequent 'opening umbrella' stretching for the CPP but I can't do it when I'm experiencing the pain and forget to do it and/or am undisciplined when I"m not in pain.  Not good.

Lilly came out to be let out at about 4:45.  I'm always a bit anxious about letting her out in the dark because of neighborhood coyotes.  I don't think a single coyote would attack her, but I worry about a pair or a larger group.  Our neighbors in the Blustien house told Geri that their doorbell camera picked up a single coyote on their front lawn at 10:30 two nights ago.  I appreciate the elegant white-tailed deer and the hardy wild turkeys as neighbors but can't say the same for the coyotes.

    I caught the mouse in a trap I set two days ago.  He probably got into the house through the garage door.  I hate to kill them but they drive Geri nuts and I guess I don't want to have a bunch of them scurrying around the house but just the same . . . 

'm truly sorry Man's dominion 
Has broken Nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion, 
Which makes thee startle, 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, 
An' fellow-mortal!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast, 
An' weary Winter comin fast, 
An' cozie here, beneath the blast, 
Thou thought to dwell, 
Till crash! the cruel coulter past 
Out thro' thy cell.

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain: 
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, 
Gang aft agley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But Och! I backward cast my e'e, 
On prospects drear! 
An' forward, tho' I canna see, 
I guess an' fear!

Such a great poem. (And a reminder that the Scots are not English, just as the Irish and Welsh are not English.  Of the Unionists in Ulster I speak not.)

Again I wonder: why keep a journal/chronicle?  I have thought at different times that I do it just to leave some tangible evidence that on certain dates I was alive; that I filled some space on this earth and had some thoughts, and did some activities.  "Kilroy was here."  It's only the printed copy of the journal/chronicle that is tangible, not the Blogspot blog, and maybe that's why I print off each day's musings.

I read an interview of Joyce Carol Oates by David Marchese in the 7/16/2023 online edition of the NYT Magazine in which Oates seemed to hit on a similar point:

Thinking of my early married life, my husband was a professor, and we talked about books all the time. Though we talked and talked for years, I don’t really remember that dialogue. I don’t remember the students I was teaching, whom I loved. It’s 2023, and I have to concede that I don’t remember those students. All I have left of all that happiness is my writing of that time. A book or two, some stories. I think that’s a profound fact. It’s a kind of devastating fact. Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life. If you set your hand on fire right now, it’s ephemeral. It would hurt, but Plato would say it’s not as real as something that transcends time. I am a person who was married, and was very happily married. Yet, that’s all gone now. Where is it? 

People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: “I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.” If you did that every day, you’d have a novel. Many people say, “I’m going to pet my cat” or “I’m with my children.” There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets:You’re reading this, so I’m still alive. In fact, they’re not alive, they’re gone, but while they were alive, they did have that extra dimension of their lives. That is not nothing. 

I know I'm not immortal.  I know that it is unlikely that anyone will read a single word I write.  Neither of my children nor my wife read the memoir I wrote and I suspect my sister only read a part of it because it brought back some awful memories.  I suppose most personal writing is a vain, futile, empty exercise for the writer, thousands of diarists but rarely a Pepys, Boswell, or Anne Frank.  Why write anything that no one will read?  But still, writers write perhaps simply because, as Oates notes, it's "not nothing" whereas the rest of our life, once it passes, is gone and lost, perhaps a memory, perhaps not.  It is MacBeth's 'tale told by an idiot, .  . signifying nothing," Ecclesiastes' Vanitas, vanitatem, et omnia vanitas.  Quid habet amplius homo de universo labore suo quo laborat sub sole?  On the other hand, like Flannery O'Connor "I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.” 

America dystopia:  Active shooter shot and killed at Kennedy Middle School in Germantown yesterday.  Near the same time that Geri was picking up Lizzie at Bayside Middle School, police were shooting to death a man, armed and acting erraticallly, at Kennedy Middle School in Germantown where Steve and Lan White, our mischpuche, live.

LTMW at 9 a.m. at a young mother with a white wearing a T-shirt and a white basketball cap pushing a stroller with her toddler in it.  What especially caught my eye was the child's leg happily bouncing up and down in the stroller.  I wondered whether he or she might be singing on this warm late October morning.  The safflower seeds are almost entirely gone from the short tube feeder, which I will fill soon, but I won't replace the suet cake with such warm days ahead.

Children at the Middle School and Elementary School.  I picked up Lizzie at the Middle School and drove her home to get her violin, the same one her Mom used to play, and then drove her to Stormonth Elementary School where she and some others were to play music at Stormonth's Fall Festival.  I have such mixed feelings when I see all those children leaving the middle school to go home and enjoying the festivities at Stormonth, so bright looking, so beautiful, so full of energy, promise, and potential.  I delight in watching them and have such fear of the world they are moving into.  While waiting for Lizzie at the Middle School and then again at Stormonth, I listeded to my Audible edition of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste in which she describes so many individual acts and social and governmental policies of barbarism, cruelty, sadism and I have fresh in my mind what is happening in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, the madness in the House of Representatives, the daily drama of the Trump trials played against the very real possibilty that he will regain the control of the government next year, and I think of those children.  What a world we will leave them.  What will they think of us that we weren't able or willing to make a better world for them?  Was there a time when we really naively believed that we were making progress in the world?  That the world was getting better?

Treadmill.  Nor today, disappointed in myself.

10/23/23

 Monday, October 23, 2023

In bed by 10, asleep by 12?, bed, lzb, bed, up at 6:15, 44°, high of 58°, cloudy, windy afternoon ahead, AQI=43, wind SSW at 7 mph, 2-18,/27. Sunrise at 7:14, sunset at 5:56, 10+41.

Woke up with bait bucket thoughts: dream of being with a happy Pope Francis, me glugging wine staight from a bottle, earworm drinking song 'glorious, glorious, one keg of beer for the four of us, singing glory be to god that there are no more of us, for the four of us can drink it all alone,' wondering if life is like painting where we need to know when to stop - easier said than done with life.

Hypocrisy  From Ishaan Tharoor's column in this morning's WaPo.

There was universal revulsion and outrage in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 strike on southern Israel, which saw the brutal slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis and marked the bloodiest single day in the Jewish state’s history. But sixteen days of Israel’s campaign of reprisal in Gaza has already killed 4,651 Palestinians, according to local authorities, including close to 2,000 children. Whole neighborhoods in the crowded territory have been flattened, more than a million people are homeless and a humanitarian crisis veers from bad to worse with fuel stores close to running out. Israeli demands for the mass evacuation of parts of Gaza have raised the specter of ethnic cleansing.

Yet on Wednesday, a day before Biden’s speech, the United States deployed its veto at the United Nations Security Council to shoot down a mildly worded draft resolution put forward by Brazil calling for a humanitarian pause. It was the sole “no” vote on the table, with even allies including France voting in favor. The United States has long shielded Israel from censure at the United Nations, but the recent precedent of its scolding of Russia in the same forum makes the current moment more conspicuous.

U.S. and Western officials have decried the Russian invasion as a breach of international law, a shattering 0f the principles of the U.N. charter and a challenge to the global rules-based order writ large. Many governments in the Middle East and elsewhere in the so-called “Global South” have also condemned Russia’s aggression, but been more cautious to see Ukraine’s plight in the same moral frame as their Western counterparts. They point to the legacy of the United States’ 2003 “preemptive” invasion of Iraq, the West’s comparative indifference to hideous conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere and the hypocrisy of abetting the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories while cheering for the freedom of peoples elsewhere. 

 On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.  . . . . 

[A]n editorial in French daily Le Monde: “In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security is at stake in Ukraine.”

The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” 

Solomon and David's map of the Promised Land.  A posting on my FB Yiddish Word of the Day group:

1)Before the modern state of Israel there was the British mandate, Not a Palestinian state .

2) Before the British mandate there was the ottoman empire, Not a Palestinian state .

3) Before the ottoman empire there was the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt, Not a Palestinian state .

4)Before the Islamic mamluk sultanate of Egypt there was the ayyubid dynasty, Not a Palestinian state .Godfrey of bouillon conquered it in 1099.

5) Before the ayyubid dynasty there was the christian kingdom of Jerusalem, Not a Palestinian state .

6) Before the christian kingdom of Jerusalem there was the Fatimid caliphate, Not a Palestinian state .

7) Before the Fatimid caliphate there was the byzantine empire, Not a Palestinian state .

😎 Before the byzantine empire there was the Roman empire, Not a Palestinian state .

9) Before the Roman empire there was the hasmonean dynasty, Not a Palestinian state .

10)Before the hasmonean dynasty there was the Seleucid empire,Not a Palestinian state .

11) Before the Seleucid empire there was the empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon, Not a Palestinian state .

12) Before the empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon there was the Persian empire, Not a Palestinian state .

13) Before the Persian empire there was the Babylonian empire, Not a Palestinian state .

14) Before the Babylonian empire there was the kingdoms of Israel and Judea, Not a Palestinian state.

15) Before the kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the kingdom of Israel, Not a Palestinian state .

16) Before the kingdom of Israel there was the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel, Not a Palestinian state .

17) Before the theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel there was the individual state of Canaan, Not a Palestinian state . 

The posting includes the map of The Empire of David and Solomon, showing Israel to the north and Juday to the south, surrounded by the Philistines and Amelikites in what is now Gaza, the Phoenicians in what is now Lebanon, the Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites in what is now Jordan and Syria.  The West Bank was part of the kingdom of Judah.

The poster's point, I suppose, was not simply that there never was a time when Palestinians ruled, as a natin-state, over the land we know as Palestine/Israel, but also that for a period, Jews did so rule there, back when David and Solomon had an empire, i.e., were imperialists. 3,000 years ago.  I'm not sure what this is intended to prove unless it's perhaps the religious argument for greater Israel, the theme song from Exodus: 'This land is mine.  God gave this land to me.'

LTMW at 2 big Tom turkeys pecking away under our bird feeders when a (red-tailed?) hawk swooped down and scared them away, causing one to fan out his tail feathers.  A little later a group of 8-10 turkey hens spread across the front yard.  

CPP has returned today.  Rats.

Treadmill  Only 10 minutes and 0,23 mile.  Not feeling very well.  Watching more or The Final Days.

The Final Days is a documentary film on Netflix that I watched over the last 2 days, depicting the Nazis continued war on Europes' Jews even even in the final days of WWII.  It is the most disturbing documentary of the Holocaust that I have seen.  Watching this film at the same time that Russians are waging war on Ukrainian civilians and Israel is killing thousands of civilians in Gaza and is prepared to kill many thousands more makes me more persuaded than ever of that "inhumanity" is oxymoronic.  Our species is violent, predatory, capable of vast wickedness, evil.  It makes me more persuaded than ever that the idea of a loving, all powerful, God is a daydream, a fantasy created to ease our pain.  In the Eden myth in Genesis, Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and I'm thinking they came to know of the terrible Evil that inhered in themselves, that  evil that Solzhenitzhen said lies in every human heart.   I'm thinking again of that vision of The Last Judgment not being God sitting on his celestial throne passing judgment on each of us, but rather the all-revealing mirror that lets us see all of our own lives, the good and the bad.  It seems that once Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and knew they had a choice between good and evil, they opted for the evil.  It seems to fit the history of our species.  "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them . . . God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day."  And if Man is made in the image of God, what does that say about God?   He should have stopped on the fifth day.

Emergency pickup of Lizzie.  Andy called at 5:17 and asked me to pick up Lizzie at the Middle School at 5:30.  He was waiting to pick up Peter at Nicolet and Peter was late.  Geri went to get Lizzie.  God bless her.

City of Milwaukee dystopia.   Every day on average there are 2 and 1/2 people shot and injured  by gunfire.  2022 total non-fatal shootings  = 876, 2023 to date: 729  non-fatal shootings.