12/9/23

 December 9, 2023

In bed at 9:15 and up at 6:45, still tired.  46°, drizzle, high of 47°.  Wind is WSW at 11 mph, 3-17/29. O.25" of rain in last 24 hours, 0.1" expected in the next 24.  Sunrise at 7:11, sunset at 4:16, 9+4.

Treadmill; pain. Some RP/PP  much of the morning.  5:00 & 0.10   Netherlands unsettled.

I'm grateful for wild turkeys this morning.  

LTMW at a thrilling flock of 18 wild turkey hens crossing from Mequon onto our front yard, not running but moving right along, not stopping to check out the ground beneath our feeders.  I've read that the wild turkeys can get to be a nuisance in some places, but I still get a cheap thrill every time I see them on our property.  These hens seem particularly small to me.  Could it be that they are all relatively young?  It doesn't seem likely.  Hens are considerably smaller than males, weighing in between 5 and 12 pounds compared to the "Toms" at 11 to 24 pounds.  The hens are usually less than 37 inches whereas the Toms may reach 48 inches or more. . . Ten minutes later, the flock returns, heading north, and spread out, walking more slowly than before.  I see at least one that is noticeably larger than the others, making me wonder if perhaps this flock consists of  one or perhaps a couple of mature hens and their growing broods.  They have decided to spend some time exploring our front yard.  I'm looking at 10 of them now congregated under the bird feeders.  The larger bird appears to be less engaged in feeding than in sentry duty.  She stands still with her long neck outstretched vertically checking presumably for predators.  When they are all done, the flock heads back across the bend joining County Line and Wakefield, back where they came from.  I'm wondering where they roost at night.

America's favorite sport is professional football.  College football is its minor leagues, and high school football colleges' minor leagues.  It's a brutal sport and one that I enjoyed following for decades, even after the disease of chronic traumatic encephalopathy first started to be discussed.  I quit when the evidence of it became incontrovertible, as did the NFL's knowledge of the evidence and its efforts to debunk it.  The NFL owners and commissioners had the same set of values as the executives of the tobacco companies did when they denied under oath in a Congressional hearing that cigarettes are addictive and when they spent millions denying the undeniable nexus between cigarette smoking and cancers.  In truth, they have only one value: making money, lots and lots of money, even at the cost of football players' and cigarette smokers' health.  I didn't quit smoking until 1994, 30 years after the Surgeon General's report on the health effects of cigarette smoking and I still think every now and then how pleasant it might be to start smoking again now that I'm so old.  I didn't quit watching football until 6 or 7 years ago when I was disgusted with myself for contributing to the greed of the billlionaire NFL owners and the football establishment.  This morning's NYT has a feature piece on CTE among the winners of college football's biggest award, the Heisman Trophy.  It notes that of the 1,035 brains of football players examined at Boston University, nearly three-fourths had CTE.  That figure is probably not indicative of the incidence among all football player since the brains donated to the BU researchers are mostly from long-term players suspected of having CTE, but the incidence may well be high.l  We may not hear or read about former players with CTE whose symptoms don't manifest in ways that get public attention and whose brains are not examined post-mortem.  In any event, what I'm thinking of this morning is how appropriate it seems that this brutal sport has become the most popular sport in America, not baseball anymore, or basketball, and certainly not soccer, but NFL football, the one game in which players are expected to be physically injured, to sacrifice muscles, bones, ligaments and tendons, and as we all now know, brain tissue, in the pursuit of what? and cui bono?  There is something so capitalistic about it, so 'free market' (willing players working and incurring injuries for wealthy employers willing to pay them, so "survival of the fittest" about it, a player goes down with injuries, 'next player up.'  The players remind me of the coal miners in Appalachia, where it was easier and cheaper to replace a dead or injured miner than to replace a mule or the equipment the miners used.  Football players and coal miners of course have great differences, but they have this in common: they are expendible.  Next player up.  Next miner up.  Meanwhile, the team owners and mine owners rake in the profits and, in the case of football, we fans enjoy the spectacle.  It's not Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus, but we can count on some of the players being assisted or being carried off the field of battle.  What we can't know is how many will suffer permanent and debilitating brain injuries.  Yet I'm tempted every now and then to watch another game.

What price will Israel and the U.S. pay for the war in/on Gaza?  The U.S. predictably vetoed the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.  The UK abstained and all other members of the council voted to adopt it.  "Gaza’s humanitarian support system is at “high risk” of “total collapse,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned Friday. The situation could spark a “complete breakdown of public order” and the mass displacement of Palestinians into Egypt, he said.  The situation is a “spiraling humanitarian nightmare,” in which some 85 percent of the population is believed to be displaced and an estimated 60 percent of housing has been destroyed or damaged, he said.

Meanwhile, across the West Bank these days Israeli settlers, backed and sometimes aided by soldiers, force Arabs out of villages, farmlands and herding pastures. They also destroy Palestinian olive trees.  Human rights monitors say they are documenting an apparently coordinated campaign to bring vast swaths of land under the control of Jewish settlements (all of which are illegal under international law, and some of which are also illegal under Israeli law) while forcing Palestinians into densely populated cities and towns.

What is it that joins the United States and Israel at the hip?  We can be sure it is not the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the region.  First, it's a democracy basically for Jews.  It asserts itself to be a Jewish state for Jews and intent on remaining so.  Jewish settlers in the West Bank have citizenship rights; Arab Palestinians do not.  Secondly, the U.S. has no problem having friendly relations with the monarchies in the region, e.g., Saudi Arabia, and with military dictatorships, e.g., Egypt.  We lefties cringe at what China does to its Muslim Uyghurs and yet look aside at what Israel has been doing for years to the Palestinians in the West Bank and indeed in Gaza, i.e., the blockade.  The most we do, even under and perhaps especially under Biden's administration, is virtue-signalling, tut-tutting human rights abuses in the West Bank, referring to the long-dead "peace process" and "two state solution" while Israel, especially but not exclusively under Netanyahu, does everything it can to make a two state solution and peace impossible.  We were horrified and condemned Russia for its destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.  We condemned and went to war in the former Yugoslavia over "ethnic cleansing," but the most we can do when it comes to Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, is sanctimoniously urge respect for human rights, international law, and the law of war, all the time supplying Israel the weapons and ammunition it needs to carry out its policies regarding the Palestinians. If Israel has much innocent blood on its hands, its everready partner in its projects has long been and continues to be the United States of America.