1/23/24

 Tuesday, January 23, 2024

In bed at 8:35, awake at 3:25, and up at 3:55 to do a load of laundry and to clean up the dishes, etc., from last night's lamb dinner.  Sat down at 4:30.  31°, high of 34°. WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY: slushy snow up to 2 inches and ice accumulations under 1/10 inch, or less along Lake Michigan.  Little wind.  Sunrise at 7:15, sunset at 4:51, 9+35.  Solar noon at 12:03, altitude 28°.  Lilly got up to go out at 5:40.

Treadmill; pain.  Normal wakening pain in back and shoulder, pain in right wrist appears to be getting worse.  It's hard to hold onto anything with my right hand.  At 5 p.m. 30:01 & 0.64 watching a one-hour interview on John Mearsheimer on Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine..

I'm grateful that Sarah will be in town this weekend.

Modern life; Western civilization.  I took a look at yesterday's journal entries before printing a copy and noticed the similarity between Chris Hedges and Alan Jacobs, i.e., each is appalled to some degree with modern life and Western civilization.  Jacobs claims to be confused and frightened by modern life, unlike Hedges who seems thoroughly convinced of its rottenness.   It's interesting that each of them is a professed Christian, Jacobs an Episcopalian and Hedges a Presbyterian.  Reading and listening to writers like them comforts me into thinking that I am not mentally ill in my pessimism and cynicism about our times and our species.  O tempera, o mores.  Or is it just that we live in the same silo?

I haven't read Hedges' book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, but it's interesting that it was published in 200, during the George W. Bush administration, and it recognized the growing political strength of the Evangelical Christians who would bring us Donald J. Trump in 2016 and perhaps (probably?) again this year.

The clearest difference between (some) Republicans and (some) Democrats.  In a recent Gallup poll, 81% of Republicans favored the death penalty for those convicted of murder, while 32% of Democrats did.  So much for the "pro-life" MAGA crowd.  The Trump administration put to death 13 people by lethal injection, the first executions by the federal government since George W. Bush was president.  OTOH, last week, the Justice Department under President Joe Biden, who campaigned on ending the federal death penalty, said it would seek the death penalty against a white gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo.  Make another one of your shabby Catholic signs of the cross, Joe.   "In Catholic teaching, the state has the recourse to impose the death penalty upon criminals convicted of heinous crimes if this ultimate sanction is the only available means to protect society from a grave threat to human life. However, this right should not be exercised when other ways are available to punish criminals and to protect society that are more respectful of human life.—USCCB, A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death.

On Thursday evening, Alabama is going to take another stab (Forgive me, Father,  . . .) at executing Kenneth Smith for the 1988 murder-for-hire of Elizabeth Sennett.  Mrs. Sennett's husband, a Christian pastor, had hired Smith and two other men to kill his wife.  The jurors who convicted Mr. Smith voted 11 to 1 to spare his life and instead to sentence him to life in prison, but a judge overruled them and condemned him to death. In 2017, Alabama stopped allowing judges to overrule death penalty juries in such a way, and such rulings are no longer allowed anywhere in the United States.  Alabama will kill Smith by nitrogen hypoxia, a novel method of killing.  The crime was committed more than 35 years ago.  What a country we live in.  

AI at work, predictably.   The New Hampshire primary is revealing the future in at least one way: today, New Hampshire voters are reporting that they have received robocalls with a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote.   The worst is yet to come.

The weather is terrible today.  I went to the library and to Sendik's and experienced slush and ice everywhere.  The weather should be dipping below freezing on Wednesday and Thursday nights creating a lot of ice.  Dreadful.