2/7/24

 Wednesday, February 7, 2024

In bed at 9, awake and up at 6:04 but tired from hourly pit stops.  32°, high of 42°, cloudy and DENSE FOG ALERT until 10 a.m.    The wind is S at 6 mph, 4-12/20.  Sunrise at 7:00 at 110°ESE, sunset at 5:11 st 250°WSW, 10+10.  Solar noon at 12:05, altitude 32°.

Treadmill; pain.  Shoulder & wrist pain during the night and upon awakening.  CPP all day.  0.00 & 0.00, rough day.

I'm grateful that my left wrist and right shoulder are OK, along with my ankles, knees, hips, and fingers.  My back - not so much.  I never gave much thought to osteoarthritis as a seriously debilitating disease.  Is this just a backhanded way of kvetching rather than real gratitude for my unaffected joints?  Cheesy?  Dishonest?  In any case, I am very grateful that there is nothing on my schedule today or for the rest of the week that requires me to leave the house.  

I felt a bit blue yesterday from the cystoscopy experience in the morning, wondering whether I had made a mistake eschewing the fulguration with the catheter already in situ.  But also because of my continuing bad memory of my last fulguration: the pain beforehand, the pain afterward, myoclonic arm movements, the morphine drip, and no explanation from either the anesthesiologist or the urologist.  If fulguration can be accomplished with little or no pain, why was I anesthetized for my prior fulgurations?  Did it increase the profits at the surgical center where they were performed?  Did the prescribing doctor have a financial interest in that surgical center?  Also grumpy because of painful voiding and joint pains.  Geri did my kitchen chores for me, bless her.

The Clausen barometer on Biden's unpopularity and Israel's dilemma.  From this journal last year, 2/7/23 and 2/6/23:

State of the Union.  Joe Biden will deliver the speech tonight.  I suppose many will watch it; I intend to take a pass on it.  It's painful for me to watch Biden work to express himself.  It's not just his stuttering challenge, which is real enough.  It's not just his boundless capacity for uttering gaffes.  It's not just his inability to resist his predictable Bidenisms: 'my dad always told me,' 'my mom used to say,' etc.,  It's not just his tendency to just make stuff up, i.e., to lie.  It's not just the tired grudges I hold against him for Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, for the mass incarceration crime bill he authored or his protection of credit card companies chartered in his home state of Delaware in the bankruptcy reform act many years ago.  It's not just his insistence on seeking sympathy for the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter decades ago and the death of his son Beau.  It's all those things and more.  Despite his lifelong efforts to get everybody to like him, including Republicans, I'm "just not that into him" and his schtick.  And did I mention how I feel about his professed intention to run for another term at his age?   (2/7/2023)

Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho and the walls came tumblin' down. Israelis killing Palestinians in Jericho, Palestinians killing Israelis.  Political vacuum among the Palestinians, and the fascist government in place under Netanyahu.  Plus ça change, . .  Has Israel known one moment of real peace in its entire existence?  Jews will always have their psychological identity, their souls, marked by the Shoah; Palestinians have theirs marked by the Nakba, their expulsion from British Mandate Palestine.  A peaceful '2-state solution' to the situation has been effectively abandoned by the Israeli government, rendered a practical impossibility by the ever-increasing Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.  A Jewish State that is also a democratic state also seems to be a practical impossibility.  Israel can be Jewish or it can be democratic; it can't be both.  We appear to have a state of perennial warfare, perennially waiting for the next intifada, perennial anxiety, distrust, and hostility with the United States not exactly in the middle but always in a highly compromised position because of Israel's schizophrenia about its own identity, its own values beyond mere existence as a Jewish homeland.  (2/6/2023, 8 months before 10/7/23) 

The Republican effort to impeach DHSSec Mayorkas failed yesterday, but barely.  Wisconsin's Mike Gallagher voted against the resolution, as did Colorado's Ken Buck and California's Tom McClintock.  A fourth representative changed his vote to "no" only to preserve the option of a motion to reconsider the motion later.  Can Gallagher, Buck, or McClintock be persuaded/bribed to change their votes to lessen the embarrassment to Speaker Johnny Reb Johnson?  Gallagher is an Irish Catholic former Marine intelligence officer with a couple of master's degrees and a Ph.D. from Georgetown.  I doubt that either he or Ken Buck will flip.  Probably the same for McClintock, but I know little about him.  Nonetheless, Johnny Reb promises he will bring the resolution back to the floor when Steve Scalise is out of the hospital and he has the votes to pass it.

Senate Republicans shot down Border-Israel-Ukraine bill today.  The $118bn bill includes $60bn in military assistance for Ukraine, $14bn in security assistance for Israel, and $10bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians affected by war in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank.  Another $4.83bn would be used to support US allies in the Indo-Pacific and “deter China”, while $2.4bn would be directed toward assisting US military operations related to the conflict in the Red Sea.

With our enormous national debt, the servicing of which will approach $1T next year, should we be borrowing money, mostly from China, to support the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?   In terms of its stated goals, the Ukraine war is lost already with the failure of last year's counter-offensive and the Gaza war may well come to be adjudged genocidal in the years to come, and is already so adjudged by much of the world.  I think of President Eisenhower's 1953 "Cross of Iron" speech, including: 

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Why do Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, and Austin want to throw additional tens of billions of borrowed money into these efforts?  We find the answer in Eisenhower's 1961 'Farewell Address":

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Many companies and many people are making a lot of money from the death and destruction in Ukraine and Gaza.  At whose expense?

The Real State of the American Union revealed.  Tomorrow the Supreme Court hears the arguments in the Colorado ballot case.  There are 400 deputy U.S. marshalls whose duty is to protect the 9 justices who will decide the case.  Additionally, the Supreme Court has a police force of 125 officers whose job is to protect the building.  Who do the justices and the building need protection from?  Other Americans, mostly on the right wing.