Friday, November 24, 2023
In bed at 8:15, and up at 5:30 Let Lilly out (twice). 24° under clear skies, high of 32°, clouding up in late afternoon. Wind NNW at 13, 5-13/21, w/c=12℉! Sunrise at 6:55, sunset at 4:21, 9+25.
Treadmill; pain. Woke up w/o back or CPP but with IB. Geri is coughing and more coughing; it looks like a trip to MadMed or the urgent care today. I'm thinking I may have a UTI. 25:01 & 0.50 at 2:45 watching one hour lecture by Rashid Khalidi, author of "The One Hundred Year War on Palestine." Very interesting; I should get a copy from the library to read the historical documents he refers to.
COVID! Geri's home COVID test came up positive. The nurse at Madison Medical says at 5 days she is 'outside the window' for getting Paxlovid and should take cough medicine, which I went up to CVS and bought. Something told me that what she was suffering from was more than bronchitis.
LTMW at a female yellow-bellied sapsucker with the distinctive long white wing stripe feeding at the safflower/sunflower tube and a suet cake. There is lots of action on both feeder tubes and the suet cakes suggesting that the predator I think was hanging around is gone, if it was even there in the first place. In any case, this is the first time I've spotted a sapsucker in many years.
What a surprise! WaPo morning headlines: (1) Many in Middle East blame United States for devastation in Gaza and (2) Biden’s resistance to a cease-fire could alienate youth voters in 2024. Biden's literal embrace of Netanyahu and Israel's Armageddon tactics in Gaza with stupendous death tolls focusing on children do not come without costs. We can only hope that Gaza and Afghanistan don't put Trump back in the White House. What a country and world we live in.
On this date in 2020, I had a TIA. No repeats but I've been taking a full-strength aspirin each day for more than 2 years.
Called Ed Felsenthal and chatted for 20-30 minutes today. I meant to call him yesterday but never got around to it. It was his first holiday since Lyn died and I was a little surprised that none of his 5 daughters and 12 grandkids were done on Marco for the holiday, but Ed shared Thanksgiving dinner with his good next-door neighbors and had a good day. Cam Wakeman is down there visiting her daughter in Naples and will be spending a few days staying at Ed's house visiting him. I suspect I may get a call from the two of them in the next few days. We have all been friends for almost 65 years now. What a blessing.
Which is greater? Thankfulness for saying goodbye to 2023 or dread of 2024? For me, it's dread of 2024. Presidential election😱, climate change😱, Ukraine😱, Gaza and the Middle East😱, decrepitude, debility, dysfunction, decline😱, . . .
Just wondering how all the virtue-signalling defenders of "democracy" feel about democracy yielding the return of Trump. American democracy is about as fucked up as democracy can get, thanks to our 'sacred', 'God-inspired,' minority-rule-favoring Constitution, and practices like gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc., but nonetheless it is praised by Democrats and Republicans alike. The Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade is justified by Republicans as removing the control of abortion policy from the undemocratic Supreme Court and returning control to the democratically-elected representatives of the people. Steve Bannon's "deconstruction of the administrative state" is justified as returning control over important societal decisions to our democratically-elected Congress from the many undemocratic administrative agencies controlled by 'elites' and experts. Even Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election being "stolen" and the January 6th attack on the Capitol is defended as a righteous attempt to defend democracy on the ground that Trump actually won the election "by a lot." And of course, we Lefties are appropriately shaking in our boots over the prospect of Trump and his myrmidons gaining control of the federal government, abandoning "the rule of [democratically-enacted] law", and installing fascism and authoritarianism as our modes of governance. Everyone waves the banner of Democracy in pursuing their own private goals. But how many of us are really devoted to democracy? Our revered Founding Fathers, dominated by wealthy, oligarchic slaveowners, feared too much democracy, hence the Senate and the Electoral College and the appointed federal judiciary. How many of us, if given a choice between democracy and a 'benevolent dictator' whose benevolence is measured by the degree to which s/he shared our values and pursued only policies that we approved of, would choose democracy? If I had a choice between my benevolent dictator and a democratically-elected Trump (or Hitler or Mussolini or Orban or Erdoĝan or whoever), why would I not choose my dictator? I've been looking for a quotation I read some months ago by a political scientist/philosopher about our reluctantly accepting democracy only as a way of sometimes keeping our adversaries from getting their way. I can't find it but found other food for thought:
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Winston Churchill
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority. Edmund Burke
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Isaac Asimov
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. John Adams
Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid. Bob Dylan
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. George Orwell
We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life. Jimmy Carter
In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy. Fran Lebowitz
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. Aristotle
If the people of Utah shall peacefully form a State Constitution tolerating polygamy, will the Democracy admit them into the Union? Abraham Lincoln
Capitalism is against the things that we say we believe in - democracy, freedom of choice, fairness. It's not about any of those things now. It's about protecting the wealthy and legalizing greed. Michael Moore
Where liberals see as an ever-more-splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel. Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile. Pat Buchanan
Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States. Karen Armstrong
America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up. Bill Moyers.
An oil I did of Geri, miffed at me, many, many years ago. She doesn't like it at all.
My sweetie, fully vaccinated, didn't deserve this very nasty case of Covid.
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