12/27/23

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:25, Lilly waking up but not asking to go out.  31°, high of 39° mostly cloudy day ahead,   The wind is NNW at 4 mph, 2-13/20.  High, bright, waning gibbous moon in the west, illumination 100%, shining through our west windows, perversely calling to mind the 1957 sang Dark Moon by Gale Storm and later by Jim Reeves and others   Venus small but bright in the southeast sky. Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:23, 9+0.  Lilly finally went out at about 5:15.

Treadmill; pain. IC during the night was relieved by voiding.  Some tightness in PFM.  I regret missing time on the TM yesterday.  I can only do it when I am pretty free of pelvic pain or discomfort and when I've had enough sleep that I'm not overly concerned about falling on or off it.  I must have had a time yesterday when I could have gotten on it but missed it.   Pain-free this morning at about 10;25 so I got in 20:01 & 0.41 before discomfort caused me to get off.  I watched a documentary on OVID, From Swastika to Jim Crow, about intellectual Jewish refugees from Germany finding teaching jobs at HBCUs in the South and a combination of anti-semitism and xenophobia/white nationalism anti-German sentiment elsewhere.  In the afternoon, I did another 30:32 & 0.65, relieving some of my guilt and disappointment over missing any treadmill time yesterday.😊  I watched Jamie Bernstein deliver a talk at a synagogue in Ridgefield, Conn., where Geri's friend Chris Nolan lives, talking about her book Famous Father Girl

 I'm grateful for the consciousness of gratitude, the awareness of it, even if forced by the adopted habit of writing about it in this journal.  I have such a tendency toward pessimism and cynicism, Mickey-the-Mopeism, such a dark assessment of human history and the human species, it's good to call to mind at least once each day someone or something for whom or for which I am grateful,   My Mickey-the-Mopeism isn't helped by chronic pain and discomfort but, notwithstanding all that botheration, I need to stay aware that I am surrounded by heroes, saints, and miracles.  This was true when I was younger, vigorous, and healthy; it is just as true today.  My life has been richly blessed with good, nurturing people. I have long been aware of the magical, mystical, marvelous, wondrous quality of all that is, from this exquisite, perfect, little mushroom I spotted one day next to our front driveway to the human brain and the never-understood reality of consciousness -  so much for which to be grateful.

1957, Dark Moon, Gale Storm.  1957 was the year I turned 16, 66 or 67 years ago.  Dwight Eisenhower began his second term as President. Ngo Dinh Diem made a state visit to the U.S., which later was complicit in his assassination.  I never suspected that several years later I would spend 234 days in Diem's country, playing a minor role in killing its people and destroying its stuff.  The Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik-1.  Elvis Pressley was already an established star before the year's release of Too Much, All Shook Up, Teddy Bear, and Loving You.  Gale Storm was a big star with her own TV series, My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show, and a recording star with hit records including I Hear You Knocking and the song that popped into my mind this morning, Dark Moon, with its simple, catchy if lugubrious lyrics.  As was common in the 50s, Storm did a couple White 'covers' of songs initially made popular by Black artists, I Hear You Knocking and Why Do Fools Fall in Love.  Probably the most notorious of these White cover artists was Lily White Christian Evangelical Pat Boone, who made ridiculous White covers of Little Richard songs.  As far as I was concerned, then as well as now, he never could pull it off.  Pat belting out "Whop bop b'luma b'lop bam boom"?  Fuhgedaboudit.

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky . . .

Am I paranoid or just realistic?  I have long realized that though I think of Geri and me as reasonably secure financially with our retirement savings and social security, I am always aware that our nest egg (other than our home) is all on paper reflecting 1s and 0s nestled into programs on computers and thus vulnerable both to hacking, errors, mischief, and even air bursts of weapons that destroy electrical circuits in computers that operate our power grids as well as the compnters that have all our financial records, including retirement accounts, bank accounts, social security and medicare accounts, everything that has to do with us.  The December 19, 2023 issue of The New Yorker contains an article that gives me the shivers: "The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library."  A ransomware attack, most probably from Russia, has crippled the British Library from October 28th to the present.

The public Wi-Fi wasn’t working, and neither was the online catalogue: it was impossible to use a computer to request a book, access a journal, or listen to any of the library’s millions of audio recordings.  The Web site, phone lines, and all online services—exhibition-ticket sales, reader registrations, card transactions in the gift shop, the electronic nervous system that unified the library’s collections and shared them with the world—were down.

The effect of this attack has been disastrous but it is not catastrophic because, after all, it could all be undone simply by paying the Russian criminals the $850,000 ransom they demand.  Pay the money, buttons are pushed, and the problem is resolved.  What if instead of ransomware, the cause of the system failures was an electromagnetic pulse weapon launched from North Korea, China, or Russia that disabled or destroyed the power grid?  Real catastrophe.  Goodbye financial security, goodbye civilization hello chaos.

Ezra Klein interview of Nimrod Novik.  I listened to this one-hour interview on Klein's podcast.  Novik excoriated Netanyahu and took the position that there must be eventually a 2 state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem.  His statements and arguments are all realistic except it is hard to see how his ultimate solution is possible, at least not without a civil war in Israel.  The settlers and their supporters have practically destroyed any possibility of a Palestinian state.  Nimrob himself pointed out that the West Bank now consists of 189 Palestinian islands each surrounded by settler and IDF-controlled territory.  What kind of state is possible with no contiguity.  Could there be a Palestinian state like a Melanesia or the Maldives?  Hard to conceive of any solution.