Saturday, December 16, 2023
In bed at 9, awake at 3, unable to sleep, moved to lzb at 3:20, unable to sleep, up at 4:10. Let Lilly out. 42°, high of 44°, 0.15" of rain this afternoon. Wind SSE at 7 mph, 5-14/25. Sunrise at 7:17, sunset at 4:17, 9+0.
Treadmill; pain. I felt OK this morning (except for the lousy night's sleep) but the spasms returned before Caela's visit. PITA😡
I'm grateful that I can still drive and have a good car to get me around. Driving at night is challenging, especially (1) in this area with few or no street lights, (2) especially in constricted construction areas, (3) especially in rain, and (4) especially wherever lane markers are hard to discern. Each of those circumstances requires my focused attention. I realized it driving home from Lyn Felsenthal's wake in the dark, in the rain, with lane markings invisible, through restricted construction areas. Yikes!😰
Micaela's visit this afternoon. She intended to stay only 5 minutes but stayed a half hour or so. Good conversation, glad she came, glad to hear how she is doing approaching January 18th, Yahrzeit, and glad to hear how Saul is doing.
VATICAN CITY — Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope.
Then his career collided with church prosecutors, who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption, setting up the Vatican’s trial of the century.
On Saturday, Becciu — the first cardinal tried by the Vatican’s little-known criminal court — was found guilty of several counts of embezzlement after a trial marred by allegations of witness tampering and papal interference. Becciu was sentenced to five years and six months in a verdict read out in a converted quarter of the museum that houses the Sistine Chapel.
LTMW. Very busy morning with all our usual visitors plus a solitary starling. Lots of goldfinches perched on the niger feeder and, as usual, when a sound or movement outside spooks all the other birds that fly away, the goldfinches hold their ground. They're either very hungry or very brave or perhaps a bit deaf or nearsighted.
Klamath River dam removal. There is a feature story in this morning's WaPo about the removal of 4 dams on the Klamath River in northern California and southern Oregon. Environmentalists and indigenous tribes who have historically relied on salmon fishing in the river are very happy; agricultural and other economic interests relying on river water are very unhappy. My leftist tendency is always to side with the environmentalists and tribal members who want to return the river to its natural flow and to return the wetlands that were drained to permit large-scale agricultural enterprises. Then I think of the need for the food products produced by farms, especially big industrial farms and I'm reminded of how much reliance there has been on those farms - reliance by the farmers, by those who work those fields, by those who buy the food products coming from those farms, and all the ancillary businesses supporting and supplying those farms. I was reminded of one of my motor trips from Phoenix back to Milwaukee after taking my Dad to his winter home with Kitty. As I drove through Denver, I was struck by the enormous number of trucks and cars moving everywhere and by how utterly dependent we in the U.S. are on gas and oil. Our whole economy and way of life are dependent on the ability to move about, to move ourselves and to move products, both necessities and fripperies. That reliance on gas and oil explains much about our country, our politics, our government, our foreign policy, our militarism, everything. Another great necessity is food to feed ourselves and the world, much of it coming from huge, powerful agricultural industries. It's easy to have leftist, knee-jerk reactions to many issues without adequate consideration of all the interests involved in many contentious environmental and political battlegrounds. Life is complicated. I used to tell the law students clerking at our law firm that "Nothing's simple, nothing's cheap." That's an overstatement of course but I was advising them to be or become aware of the inherent complexities of legal disputes. Beware of believing in 'sure winners' and 'sure losers.' Your adversary will leave no stone unturned creating complexities, especially when he is paid by the stone. Never forget the built-in fortuities inherent in the decision-makers, i.e., judges juries, and bureaucrats. I learned all this myself only through experience and from the teachings of those more experienced than I was. I should have added "Nothing's sure" to "Nothing's simple, nothing's cheap."
Israel's IDF has killed 3 hostages waving a white flag. This is a very sad report in this morning's papers. Two hostages were killed when a soldier opened fire, feeling his life was threatened, while the third was killed in renewed fire despite a cry for help heard in Hebrew and a commander’s order to cease fire, the Israeli military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with the rules of the briefing. He added that the hostages were possibly “abandoned or escaped” before they emerged “tens of meters” from an Israeli military position. Three are dead and the soldier's life is probably ruined, as are the lives of his family. Many thoughts come to mind. One wonders how old the soldier was, what were his combat experiences, why he felt threatened, etc. One thinks also of the fact that generally Israelis and Palestinians look alike; they are fellow "Semites," mythological descendants of Noah's son Shem. In a sense, this is a war between cousins, not unlike the Russians and the Ukrainians. I think also of the impossibility of distinguishing "good guys" and "bad guys" among young male persons in Gaza who are not wearing IDF uniforms. I think back to my time in Vietnam, wondering whether the Vietnamese barber cutting my hair was secretly VC. I suspect this tragic incident will cause further unraveling within Israeli society and further divisions for Netanyahu to try to exploit in his quest to stay in power and avoid imprisonment.
David Ignatius on the West Bank:
Settler violence has surged since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist assault, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis. Since then, there have been 343 settler attacks against Palestinians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At least 143 Palestinian households, with 1,026 people (including 396 children), have been displaced by violence. Settlers have killed eight Palestinians and injured 85, the U.N. organization says.
The violent settlers almost always go unpunished. From 2005 to 2022, 93 percent of the 1,597 investigations opened by the Israeli police into cases where Israelis were said to have harmed Palestinians were closed without indictment, according to Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din; only about 3 percent led to convictions.
If we want to know how the Israeli government and the Israeli military feel about the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, all we need to look at is how the Israeli government and the Israeli military treat the Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. Even more telling, is how the Israeli government and military treat the Jewish settlers knowing how the settlers treat the Palestinians. A very recent UN report says 477 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year, more than half of them since October 7 and mostly by the IDF.
Master Gardener. I watched the first half of this Paul Schrader film last night, and the second half this afternoon. My second Schrader film, the other being First Reformed. There is nothing light or cheerful in his films. He also wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver. I'm guessing this comes from his upbringing in a strict Dutch Reformed Calvinistic family in Michigan and his attendance at Calvin College. It's a grim, bleak, (pick your adjective) view of human life. I c (can see the influence of Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthasar, Diary of a Country Priest), Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), and Carl Theodore Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc). I've watched all those cited films and I can't say that I enjoyed them because they are not meant to be enjoyed. The same is true for Schrader's films.
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