12/12/23

 Tuesday, December 12, 2023

In bed at 8:45, up at 5:30 but not much rest after 2:30 or so, BP and unwelcome thoughts.  31°, high of 34°, wind WNW at 14, 10-15/27. Wind chills today between 15° and 25°.  Let Lilly out at 5;40.  Venus is very bright and high in the SE sky.  Sunrise at 7:14, sunset at 4:16, 9+2.  

Treadmill; pain.   30:16 & 0.65 watching the second half of the lecture on 'the biological underpinnings of religiosity.   Little pain today as of 5 p.m.   Breakfast: GrapeNuts w/ lots of fruit; Lunch, gum drops; Dinner: CBH & eggs

I'm grateful for Catherine Rampell.  I became a big fan of hers back when she frequently appeared on news shows with Stephen Moore, a diehard Republican and Trumpeter whom she regularly eviscerated on his misrepresentation of economic and other facts.  I read almost all of her columns in the Washington Post and wish I saw more of her on television.  She is brilliant and knowledgeable and everything she writes and says makes sense to me.  She's a Princeton alum and daughter of two other Princeton alums.  Her major at Princeton was anthropology, not economics, so she is one of the many public persons who regularly remind me that I am nowhere near as smart and otherwise talented as they are.  I recall hearing that one of Winston Churchill's famous putdowns was to describe someone as "a humble person, who has much to be humble about."  The older I get, the humbler I become as I regularly read and watch people like Catherine Rampell.

    In today's column, she writes about what I consider to be perhaps the greatest problem facing the U.S., the inability to fund its operations which has led to an unsustainable growth in the national debt.  Republicans always blame our deficits and debts on too much spending, especially on safety-net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  Democrats place the blame on Republican tax cuts, especially GWB's and DJT's, that Republicans always claim will increase revenues and that invariably have the opposite effect.  "Starve the beast" is the Republican theory that they can cut federal government spending, and the size and reach of the federal government, by reducing federal revenues.  This rarely happens and what we are left with is huge and growing annual deficits and aggregate federal debt.  I have to agree with the conservatives that the debt and its growth are unsustainable.  We will crash at some point.  The answer is to raise taxes and specifically the marginal tax rates on the very wealthy.  The refusal of the Republicans to exact reasonable taxes from the super-wealthy will ultimately lead to a crash of the economy that will hurt everybody except the super-wealthy.  I think these thoughts along with the thought that it was the transferring of American jobs to China to reduce labor costs and increase profits that has led in large measure to the strengthening of China and the weakening of America, economically, militarily, and in terms of 'soft power' around the world, even in what is thought to be our "sphere of influence," Central and South America.  It's the Republicans, the capitalists, and corporate decision-makers who are leading the U.S. down as a 'superpower.'

Larry Anderson, my old law school buddy and good friend called this morning to chat.  We were on the phone for 32 minutes.

MBSR, or Mindfulness-based stress reduction.  Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindfulness is the awareness that arise from paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to whatever arises in the field of experience.

'Non-judgmental' means that you will actually see how judgmental the mind can be in certain moments, and not judge the judging.

(1) 'As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than is wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.

(2) The power of mindfulness is in the present moment.

(3) Inhabit the present moment.

(4)  When faced with situations we don't like, we usually default to two options.  We can turn away from them and do our best to either ignore them or escape from them.  Alternatively, we can get  caught up in endlessly obsessing about our troubles.  Either we, we feel victimized by our experience.

(5) There is a whole other way to approach painful experience.       

(6 ) Opening to experience moment by moment.   It means we can create the intention to suspend our tendency to be perpetually triggered and to instantly judge everything depending on whether, often in a fraction of a second, we like it or we don't like it  

(7) It's not about making anything disappear.  

Reading, re-reading, and slow reading.  I sometimes and often have trouble understanding what I am reading.  I think it happens much more now that I am old.  I may be wrong about this, though, since it may be that it occurred as often when I was younger and I just passed over it, and moved on to the next sentence or paragraph or whatever.  I never was a 'speed reader' and always thought the whole idea of 'speed reading' was ridiculous.  Now I tend to stop and read again what I just read, considering what it meant and all that it meant.  I don't do much cursory reading unless I'm not very interested in what I am reading, just reading to get to the next interesting or important stuff.

Library run: an Anthony de Mello book, The Interstitial Cystitis Solution, Honest Aging, & 100 Poems to Break Your Heart

The Sapolsky Religiosity Lecture:  Do I have a "temporal lobe personality"?