1/2/24

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

In bed at 9 and up at 5:30.  26°, high of 34°, clear skies all morning and windy, cloudy afternoon, wind SW at 13 mph, 8-16/30, wind chills  14 ° to 24°.  Sunrise at 7:23 at 121°SE, sunset at 4:27 at 239°SW, 9+4. Lilly got Geri up at 6 to let her out - a change of routine.

Treadmill;pain. Woke with the usual PFM tightness, and high back pain.   Mild spasms during the morning & early afternoon, but by 2:30, on the treadmill and 30:38 & 0.65 while watching Robert Sapolsky again discussing biological determinants of human and primate behavior with Nate Hagens on YouTube.

I'm grateful for Lilly, especially after my two big scares with her scary behavior yesterday, suggesting a stroke or something terrible going on inside her brain or other part of her body.  I'm grateful for all the pets I have had over a long lifetime, from Blanche, through Ralph, Bear, Ruby, Moose, Barkis and Pegotty, back to Freckles, Cookie, Fuzzy the hamster and Petey the parakeet  They have all given me companionship and comfort in one way or another, even when I was sleeping and, in Blanche's case, especially when I was sleeping 

Homo hominis lupus.  The Soviet Union designed the S-300, a mobile, surface-to-air defense weapons system, during the Cold War to hit incoming U.S. bombers or ballistic missiles. An S-300 can fire a projectile with a 293-pound high-explosive warhead, capable of stopping targets moving at more than 2,600 miles per hour. On Friday,  12/30, Russia unleashed 14 of these deadly devices, not defensively against airplanes or missiles, but offensively at cities in Ukraine. They were part of a wave of missiles and drones that marked the largest one-day aerial attack on Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion 22 months ago.

The barrage ripped into 45 multistory buildings, including schools, churches, hospitals, maternity wards, shopping centers, and warehouses, as well as Ukrainian military installations and a defense factory. It killed 40 people in all: 17 in Kyiv, nine in Zaporizhzhia, six in Dnipro, four in Odessa, three in Kharkiv, and one in Lviv. The onslaught wounded 160.

Today,  Russia bombarded Ukrainian cities with an overnight assault of drones and missiles, extending a vicious wave of holiday-season strikes on population centers by Moscow and Kyiv that has left dozens of civilians dead and suggests a brutal new stage of the war that is being felt well beyond the stagnating front lines.

Proving yet again that the best place to look for savages, barbarians, and cruel, heartless beasts is not in Africa or Asia, but in 'civilized' Europe, the home of White Supremacy and world wars.

Israel: Judicial Supremacy?  With an 8 to 7 vote, Israel's Supreme Court has rejected the Netanyahu government's judicial reform that precludes the court from invalidating laws deemed "unreasonable."  The question becomes whether the far-right government will accept the court's split decision.  Which will be 'supreme' in Israel - the Court or the Legislature and Executive?  Once again, Israel seems to be America's doppelganger, our canary in the coal mine.  We assume that the U.S. Supreme Court has the last word on the constitutional validity of laws passed by Congress and approved by the president, and on actions taken by the other branches of government or by state government, but says who?  The Constitution doesn't say so.  So-called 'constitutional issues' arereally rareely 'legal.'  They are political. public policy questions.  In what sense was the Warren Court deciding a legal question rather than a public policy issue when it ordered the desegregation of public schools in 1954?  Ditto Harry Blackmun's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1974 and Samuel Alioto's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2023?  In Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."  But why?  On these huge public policy issues, why are the few unelected members of a court, any court, better able to decide the issues than elected representatives?  The issue has been with us since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 and the Judiciary Act of 1789 and its still with us.  This tension between the political branches of government and the judicial branch is even deeper in the case of Israel, which has no constitution.  

Susan Glasser's piece on Trumpschmerz in The New Yorker:

Four years ago, on the threshold of a critical election year that would decide whether Donald Trump won another term in the White House, I asked a German friend, Constanze Stelzenmüller, of the Brookings Institution, to come up with one of those long Teutonic words for the state of constant, gnawing anxiety that Trump’s disruptive tenure inspired. She came back with a true mouthful, a thirty-three-letter concoction that pretty much summed it up: Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz. Helpfully, she suggested that it would be fine to shorten this to Trumpschmerz. It means something like “Trump-worry,” but on steroids. At the time, I defined it as “the continuous pain or ache of the soul” that comes from the excessive contemplation of the slow-motion Trump car crash. Well, here we go again. Headed into 2024, America is stuck with another bad case of Trumpschmerz.

Biden’s miscalculation was not about Trump—the President has always been dead serious about the threat posed by his predecessor and by the party that embraces him—but about himself. Having aspired, for the better part of four decades, to the office he improbably won on his third try, Biden has been reluctant to relinquish it in favor of a younger Democrat. His theory of the case seems to be rooted in his belief that he, and he alone, can insure Trump’s defeat. But that rationale has become harder to sustain as his polling has grown worse and worse. As of the end of the year, Biden is, at best, tied with Trump; the Real Clear Politics average has him down 2.3 points.

Trump’s victory is by no means assured. It may well be that predictions of him winning in 2024 will turn out to be just as wrong as the forecasts of a recession were at the start of 2023. But the past few years of Trump, Trump, Trump have taught me, if nothing else, that hoping for the best is not necessarily a winning strategy. With American democracy on the line, I’m taking the only defensible position toward the New Year: full-scale dread. I plan to pull up the covers and hide under my pillow as long as possible come January. It’s going to be a long 12 months.

Hear, hear!  Me, too. 

Robert Sapolsky's arguments on free will and determinism has me thinking about a lot of stuff, and of course, mostly solipsistically.  Ordinarily I would be writing here about some of those thoughts but I'm driven - deterministically? - to try to get some organization in my iPhotos library.