Saturday, August 10, 2024
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.””― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
70 Second Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire by the Roman army under Titus during the capture of the city (approx)
1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice
In bed at 9:40 p.m., awake a little after midnight, and up and out at 12:40 a.m., insomnia thinking about the difficulty getting my car back. I tried getting back to sleep on the recliner at 3:30 but gave up by 4:30. I let Lilly out at about 1 a.m. and again at 5:50 a.m.
Prednisone, day 90, 15 mg., day 12. I took my 15 mg. at 5 a.m. followed by some Dave's Bread. I took my morning meds at 6:15 a.m.
Sage advice from Walden:
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?
How much more apt these words are today, in the era of 24/7 'news,' than it was in the 1840s when he wrote them. How often have I thought about how very little "news" there is on the "news," especially on televised news and most especially on the Big Three, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC? Never is this more true than during presidential election season, a 'season' that now stretches out for longer than a year. Indeed, Trump announced his 2024 candidacy in November 2022, two years ahead of the election. Joe Biden, predictably if foolishly, announced his candidacy in April 2023, a year and a half before the election. And so for two years, we have been relentlessly bombarded with "news" about these two guys in their long-distance quest for political power. Now that we are down to 3 months until the election, the reports of this poll and that poll, the size of the crowd at this rally or that, and the charges and countercharges of the candidates and their supporters lead off virtually every 'newscast, regardless of what else may be happening in the world. It's appalling, almost stomach-turning, numbingly unhelpful and uninformative in any mind-changing way. More than 90% of the voters have their minds made up about for whom they will vote and won't change their minds regardless of anything said or done by the candidates or reported on the "news." Nonetheless, hour after hour, day in and day out, the "news" channels with their talking heads and their ubiquitous political reporters fill the airwaves with drivel. A viewer tunes in to hear whether Iran or Hezbollah, or the Houthis have attacked Israel and started a world-impacting regional conflagration, and what he hears is the size of the crowd for Harris and Walz in Eau Claire, WI, or Glendale, AZ. Pass the basin, please! From Walden:
The local newspapers are hardly better. How many stories of children being shot on the streets or in their homes do I want? How many inner city shootings? freeway shootings? With severely depleted newsrooms and decimated reporting staffs, how much of the "news" is simply reporting sporting results - professional, college, and high school? When I came to Milwaukee there were two good newspapers, the Journal in the afternoon and the Sentinel in the morning. The Journal had better national and international coverage; the Sentinal had better local news coverage. Each paper had a reporter at the county courthouse and another at the federal building. Now there is one paper, the Journal Sentinel, and one reporter, if that, covers both the county and federal courthouses. On the other hand, local newspapers are dying. The Journal Sentinel has seen its Sunday circulation plummet in 10 years from 299,000 in 2012 to 170,791 in 2018 to 129,887 in 2020 to 75,016 in 2022. In 10 years the JS has lost 75% of its Sunday readers. Meanwhile, the paper has seen its daily print circulation drop from 175,600 in 2012 to 111,251 in 2018, 83,628 in 2020, and 48,158 in 2022. In 10 years the JS has lost 74% of its daily paper readers.
Watching local television news is an even worse experience, with the relentlessly happy and amiable anchors, weather people, and sports specialists, all wearing the personas and acting in the roles advised by their media consultants. Arrggh.
Social media news is so widespread and varied that I can't hope to grasp its significance. The little I see of it is on YouTube, owned by the monopolist Google. Some of it seems informative and useful but much of it is heavily biased and tendentious, intended to reinforce preexisting biases within targeted silos.
It's hard to blame a person for giving up on the news nowadays. Notwithstanding that, every morning I check the New York Times, the Washington Post, JSOnline, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. Is it any wonder that I find myself like Thoreau wishing to move up to the North Woods, find myself a cabin, and kiss it all off, or at least try to follow more of Thoreau's good advice, like:
“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.”
How often I have loitered in winter while it was already spring. Yeats, Vacillation -
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
And more good advice in Walden: "The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.” How much time have I devoted to journaling? How much time to watching television, both "news" and entertainment. What has been the real cost of each activity in terms of time spent (how accurate the word 'spent'!) Journaling has been very costly, but it has allowed, indeed forced, thought and reflection, and even the act of striking the right keys on the keyboard, rough formatting, word choices, composition, recognition of confusion and ignorance. And it has resulted in a record of sorts of what I was thinking about and perhaps doing during the days of my late life. Some of it has been drivel, and some of it has been serious thoughts, worth thinking, worth writing down, and worth saving. What do I have to show for the time spent watching television? Almost nothing.
Is the United States Israel's bitch? From this morning's WaPo:
U.S. will fund Israeli unit accused of gross human rights abuses. An Israeli security unit found by the United States to have committed gross violations of human rights will continue to receive U.S. funding because its actions have been “effectively remediated,” the Biden administration said Friday. The announcement concludes a months-long investigation that coincided with an intense lobbying campaign by the Israeli government to oppose funding restrictions for the Netzah Yehuda battalion, an ultra-Orthodox unit accused of wrongdoing in the death in 2022 of an elderly Palestinian American man. “This unit can continue receiving security assistance from the United States of America,” said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. The finding amounts to a victory for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a stinging defeat for human rights experts inside the State Department and Pentagon who built a case over years that certain Israeli units should be barred from U.S. assistance under legislation known as the Leahy Laws.
Is there any atrocity that an Israeli or Israeli group can commit that is too grievous for the U. S. government to stomach? The American decision-maker was Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. What is the significance of that?
Current and former officials said the decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to approve continued funding for the unit defied past practices of withholding assistance until serious accountability measures are taken such as criminal penalties for individuals accused of gross human rights violations.“I have never seen a case where administrative measures such as the ones employed here were sufficient for remediation,” said Charles Blaha, a former State Department official in charge of the office that implements the Leahy Laws.
“This is especially troubling when one of the allegations against this unit is that the unit is responsible for the death of an American citizen, which really calls into question the value that the State Department places on Palestinian American lives,” he said.
The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not provide comment.
In 2022, a commander of the battalion was reprimanded and the platoon commander and company commander removed from their positions following the death of Omar Assad, a 78-year-old former grocery store owner from Milwaukee who had been detained at a West Bank checkpoint.Assad was reported to have suffered a stress-induced heart attack that was probably brought on by being bound, gagged and held by Israeli forces, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement at the time. The IDF added that his death was the result of “moral failure and poor decision-making” by the soldiers who had detained him.
Blaha, who retired last year from the department and worked extensively on the case, said the consequences didn’t match what amounts to a “criminal homicide.”
“Just think about what they did: This was a 78-year-old man. They arrested him for no legitimate reason — he was never charged with anything, they gagged him, they bound him, they left him on the floor of a construction site in the middle of January. The man died of a stress-induced heart attack, according to the Israeli autopsy,” said Blaha. . . .
Long before the State Department had announced its decision, Netanyahu vowed to resist the action.
“If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit of the IDF — I will fight it with all my strength,” Netanyahu said in a statement earlier this year.
Republicans in Congress vehemently opposed any efforts to punish the Israeli unit or any members of it, with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) saying the action would “stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.”
Just think of what Rubio has said, withholding American military assistance to any single unit of the IDF that engages in gross human rights violations stigmatizes the entire IDF and gives support to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Ergo, no matter what atrocity may be committed by an Israeli unit, we must continue to funnel American financial and military resources to it. Words fail me. I find myself thinking of my former student (MULS 1994) and friend Othman Atta, a Palestinian American citizen. What if it had been Othman, arrested without charge, bound, gagged, left on the floor of a construction site in January, and 78 years old?
J. D. Vance, hillbilly enemy of elites, hillbilly champion of the working man. 3 homes. Five bedroom house in Alexandria, VA, bought for $1,600,000. Assets listed on congressional disclosure filing of $4.4 million to $11.5 million, PLUS the value of the 3 homes (townhouse in D.C,=. bought for $590,000 in 2014 and 6,400 sq. ft. home in Cincinnati bought for $1.4 million.)
Adaptation and resilience. Yesterday I moved around the house quite a bit, leaning on my rollator Judy. I've managed to unload and load the dishwasher using the rollator seat as a handy shelf to move dishes, etc., back and forth. I'm very pleasantly surprised that Judy provides as much help as she does but note that I still have hip pain, even worse knee pain, and pain in the thigh in between.
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