Thursday, June 20, 2024
Summer solstice, 3:50 p.m., CDT
1919, The Treaty of Versailles was signed.
1967, Mohammed Ali was sentenced to 5 years for refusing to be inducted into the armed forces during the Vietnam War
1977, Menachem Begin formed the Israeli government
In bed around 9:20 and up at 2:20 with a painful lower back on the left side. Let Lilly out at 3:15. I nodded off between 6:12 and 7:24. I woke up thinking I should sit on the patio, watch the wildlife, and listen to the birds with Merlin as I did last summer, but that became more difficult with my canes and walker.
Prednisone, day 39, 15 mg., day 3. Pills at 5:05, and had breakfast of Grape Nuts & berries at 5:15. At 7:39, my reading was 317 and by 8:00, I had a high glucose alarm ringing at 351. BP 1 hr. test: 137/77.
Our Town is a dystopia. This morning's headline on JSOnline: "One teen killed, one injured in shooting at Washington Park after Juneteenth Peace Day event" From the story:
"The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office said the shooting took place at about 8:53 p.m. in the northeast corner of the park, at 1859 N. 40th St., on the city's west side. The shooting followed a report of 50 young people about to fight near the playground.
MCSO chief deputy Daniel Hughes provided a briefing at the scene late Wednesday night. He said a MCSO detective encountered a suspect indiscriminately firing a fully automatic, or fully automatic converted, weapon from the intersection of North 42nd and West Lloyd streets, toward the playground of the park.
The suspected shooter is a 17-year-old Milwaukee boy.
"Coincidentally, on May 20th, our sheriff's office previously arrested this suspect for a charge of felon in possession of a firearm," Hughes said. The suspected shooter was out on $750 cash bail, he added.
The Juneteenth Peace Day event took place at the Washington Park bandshell from 5 to 8:30 p.m. after organizers decided to end the event early. The event was organized by a group, This 4 the City, and was billed as "a day of peace and unity" and a chance "to give Milwaukee youths a safe outlet after this year’s Juneteenth festivities."
"At approximately 8:25 p.m., the T4TC, or This is 4 the City event, hosted by MK Music Agency in celebration of the Juneteenth holiday, was ended early by event organizers," Hughes said. "This was due to unruly attendees and multiple fights involving large groups of unsupervised youth. Attendees started to leave. However, fights continued throughout the exit."
Hughes said the MCSO recovered five firearms during the event and another three during the homicide investigation.
It's the third year in a row that there was gun violence on the Juneteenth holiday. Last year, six teenagers were injured in a mass shooting near the conclusion of the Juneteenth festival on King Drive.
Summer solstice in Milwaukee. It's a day early this year because of imprecisions in our calendar system, the fact that it takes, on average, about 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes — or 365.24219 days, for the Earth to orbit the sun. Sunrise is at 5:12 a.m. and sunset at 8:34 p.m. giving us 15 hours, 21 minutes, and 58 seconds of daylight. At solar noon at 12:53, the sun's altitude will be 70°. It's a cloudy morning with a good chance of rain so we won't see the solstice sunrise. Or is the solstice sunrise tomorrow morning, with the solstice sunset this evening? Did druids gather at Stonehenge this morning or will they do so tomorrow morning? I think of the old joke: 'Ask me 2 questions: what do you do for a living and what's the hardest part of your job? Q: What do you do for a living? A: I'm a standup comic. Q: What's the . . . A: Timing." Thinking of Stonehenge at summer solstice reminds me of Newgrange at winter solstice and of my trip there with Sarah years ago.
A year ago I wrote "Untethered Thoughts about Hunter and Joe Biden. News stories are reporting that Hunter Biden and his attorneys have struck a plea bargain with the Trump-appointed US Attorney in Delaware under which Hunter will plead guilty to 2 tax misdemeanors and participate in a 'diversion program' for his gun-purchase-related falsehood. I know little of Hunter Biden other than the bits I have heard in the media but here are some impressions. First, he seems like a very unadmirable guy who has traded on his father's position as a US senator and then as US vice president to make a lot of money for doing nothing other than being Joe Biden's son. Second, his problems with drugs and women also make him pretty unadmirable, at best. Third, I don't think I would like this guy or want him as a friend. Fourth, I can't help feeling sorry for him precisely because he is Joe Biden's son and not the favorite son. Fifth, I have mixed feelings about Joe Biden's decision to keep the Senate seat he had recently won when Hunter's and brother Beau's mother and sister were killed in a vehicular collision. If small children ever needed a loving parent's presence after such a tragedy, it was Beau and Hunter. How much time could Joe make available to his children, even as a commuting US senator? Sixth, can there be much doubt that Hunter, compared to Beau, was the 'spare', much like Prince Harry was to Prince William? Beau was so favored and so accomplished compared to Hunter, who seems like a psychological train wreck. I always cringe at least a little when Father Joe speaks of Son Beau almost as his heir apparent with Hunter the misfit ne'er-do-well child in the background. When an adult child ends up as thoroughly screwed up as Hunter did, mustn't we at least wonder about the job his one natural parent did during the child's early and later life?"
Am I too harsh in my judgment of Joe? I suppose so, but I can't get over my thinking of him as an extremely ordinary guy who has aspired for most of his life to extremely extraordinary power, a guy who is a habitual bullshitter, a glad-hander and a back-slapper, and the guy who after thankfully preventing a second Trump term in 2020 is doing his best to give the Oval Office back to him 4 years later. He's too old to be running again. The polls have told him that for years. His own Democrat and independent voters have told him that for years. The mirror, the films and videos, and his body have told him that. But having lusted after the office for years, he can't give it up voluntarily and the rest of the world will pay the price for his lust, one way or the other.
Anniversaries. First, the Treaty of Versailles, by which the Allies, their own nationalisms having contributed to causing World War I, contributed to the arguably inexorability of World War II.
Second, three weeks after my discharge from the Marines, a federal jury in Houston convicted Muhammed Ali of refusing to the drafted. Having served in Vietnam two years earlier and having seen the devastating costs the war was imposing on the Vietnamese and the American people, I supported Ali who argues: ""Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong. Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?" The federal judge gave Ali the maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. By this time, public opinion in America was already turning against the war and Ali was accurately seen as a national security threat for encouraging draft resistance. At the time of Ali’s conviction, media reports suggested that 1,000 Vietnamese noncombatants were being killed each week by U.S. forces, one hundred U.S. soldiers were dying every day, and the war was costing $2 billion a month. The Supreme Court later overturned Ali's conviction on technical grounds and Ali eventually came to be regarded as a hero by many Americans, including me.
Third, on this date in 1977, Menachem Begin became the first Likud prime minister of Israel, initiating a line of such PMs including Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and culminating in Benjamin Netanyahu. Begin was a murderer and a terrorist in the Irgun, as related in Wikipedia:
Two of the operations for which the Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin massacre that killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with Lehi on 9 April 1948.
The organization committed acts of terrorism against Palestinian Arabs, as well as against the British authorities, who were regarded as illegal occupiers. In particular the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments; in media such as The New York Times newspaper; as well as by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the 1946 Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency. Albert Einstein, in a letter to The New York Times in 1948, compared Irgun and its successor Herut party to "Nazi and Fascist parties" and described it as a "terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization".
Yitzhak Shamir waa the leader of anoher terrorist group, Lehi, orr "The Stern Gang." Again, Wikipedia:
The group referred to its members as terrorists and admitted to having carried out acts of terrorism.
Lehi split from the Irgun militant group in 1940 in order to continue fighting the British during World War II. It initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis, proposing a Jewish state based on "nationalist and totalitarian principles, and linked to the German Reich by an alliance". After Stern's death in 1942, the new leadership of Lehi began to move towards support for Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and the ideology of National Bolshevism, which was considered an amalgam of both right and left. Regarding themselves as "revolutionary Socialists", the new Lehi developed a highly original ideology combining an "almost mystical" belief in Greater Israel with support for the Arab liberation struggle. This sophisticated ideology failed to gain public support and Lehi fared poorly in the first Israeli elections.[25]
In April of 1948, Lehi and the Irgun were jointly responsible for the massacre in Deir Yassin of at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children.
Ariel Sharon was the 11th prime minister of Israel. Again, Wikipedia:
As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. An official enquiry found that he bore "personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees, for which he became known as the "Butcher of Beirut" among Arabs. He was subsequently removed as defense minister. From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon championed construction of Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He became the leader of the Likud in 1999, and in 2000, amid campaigning for the 2001 prime ministerial election, made a controversial visit to the Al-Aqsa complex on the Temple Mount, triggering the Second Intifada. Sharon remains a highly polarizing figure in Middle Eastern history. Israelis almost universally revere Sharon as a war hero and statesman, whereas Palestinians and Human Rights Watch have criticized him as a war criminal,
This is the political provenance of Benjamin Netanyahu whose racist, right-wing, genocidal government is even worse than those of his Likud predecessors.Nonetheless, the United States Congress, including the Democrat-led Senate aitst's majority leader Chuck Schumer, have given Netanyahu the high privilege of addressing it in a joint session.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz in a YouTube interview:
Interviewer: To wonder if Israel is a democracy is sterile?
Leibowitz: It is a sterile question. It is willfully that the state deprives these two million people of civil and political rights. South Africa was not a democracy either. But the people are governed by a very great statesman whose name should go down in history, de Klerk, who in stages but quite rapidly is indeed giving the population including the blacks, all the civil and, it would seem, political rights. This is happening today through the world in practically all countries that are considered enlightened. But the State of Israel is the only dictatorship that exists today in the enlightened world. So it is not a coincidence that Israel is the only state in the world, in the enlightened world, in which the president of the Supreme Court was capable of saying that torture could be used in order to make Arab prisoners talk. Everyone knows full well that everywhere in the world those in the power use torture, but it is illegal. All the states in the Western world abolished it in the 18th century, even before the French revolution. 200 years ago. they abolished the use of torture during police interrogations, all the western countries, even Tsarist Russia. But the State of Israel represents the backwardness of a state body. in which there is a monster who exercises the functions of president of a Supreme Court only to say that the use of torture is permitted when it is necessary in the interests of the state. That shows that a Nazi-like mentality, because it is a Nazi mentality, also exists in our country. That is a fact. Admittedly you can find it anywhere. No human group is safe from such a character But the fact is that in the Israeli legal system neither the judges nor the lawyers challenged this man. That says a great deal about the Nazi mentality that is dominant here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM2fXTkjU2E
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