10/10/24

 Thursday, October 10, 2024

1938 Germany completed its annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland

1954 Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi after the withdrawal of the  French troops

1961 "The Bob Newhart Show" premieresd on NBC in the US

1973 Vice President Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to allegations of tax fraud

1981 Anwar Sadat's funeral service was held in Cairo

In bed at 9:10, up at 5:00😊     

Prednisone, day 149, 7.5 mg., day 28/28.   Prednisone at 5:15,  followed by banana bread.  All Bran + berries an prunes at 10:15.  I took my 'morning meds' at 4:40 p.m. after filling my two weekly pill boxes.

"[T]he ugly trajectory that the human race has charted for itself," The phrase is from an article in this morning's NYTimes by Wyatt Mason entitled "Why France’s Most Controversial Novelist Is Also Its Most Celebrated: Reviled as much as he is lauded, Michel Houellebecq holds up a mirror to a world we would rather not see."  It caught my attention as I half-watched Morning Joe with its reporting on the devastation across western and central Florida from Hurricane Milton.  Such a wimpy name for such a powerful storm, like 'Uncle Miltie' in the early days of television, but a storm whose destructiveness was greatly increased by Climate Change, part of 'the ugly trajectory that the human race has charted for itself."  On YouTube this morning I watched an episode of the PBS series Terra on "What is the Riskiest Region in the US as the Climate Changes?".  The answer, not surprisingly, was the southwest, southcentral, and southeast regions of the country, i.e., the areas that are already the warmest.  Notwithstanding the risks of heat, floods, storms, drought, and fires, the regions with the highest climate-related risks are also the areas people are moving into for economic reasons, e.g., employment, cost of living, cost of housing, etc.  Phoenix and Houston are very high-risk cities but they are also population magnets.  Curiously, the highest-risk county in the country was said to be Beaufort County, S. C.

 Another part of that trajectory is the increased likelihood of atomic warfare, if not by the Russians in Ukraine then by the Israelis in Lebanon or elsewhere, or in the Taiwan Strait or on the Korean Peninsula.

 "With geopolitical tensions escalating the risk of nuclear warfare to its highest point in decades, reducing and abolishing nuclear weapons is the only viable path to save humanity," the UN chief told the Security Council, as delegates expressed deep concern about the continuous erosion of the international non-proliferation architecture.

“There is one path — and one path only — that will vanquish this senseless and suicidal shadow, once and for all.  We need disarmament now,” said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, urging nuclear-weapon States to re-engage to prevent any use of a nuclear weapon, re-affirm moratoria on nuclear testing and “urgently agree that none of them will be the first to use nuclear weapons.”

In March of this year, The NYTimes started a series about the increased risk of nuclear war in our unstable world.  It's called "At The Brink."  Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.  We thought of it frequently after 1957 when Joseph Stalin announced that the USSR had developed its own atom bomb.  We thought of it more frequently in 1961 when JFK advised all of us to build fallout shelters in our homes, and in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Who thinks of it now, in our era of ICBMs and nuclear weapons not only much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but others much less powerful than those, the so-called 'tactical nukes.'  

We also have the biological weapons.  Experts are still arguing over whether the COVID-19 virus which killed millions and sickened hundreds of millions was man-made and escaped from the biological weapons lab in Wuhan, China.  China has its biological weapons labs, and so do Russia and the United States, and who knows what other countries.  

And now there is unregulated, uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable Artificial Intelligence.  "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."

"What, me worry?"  Alfred E. Neuman, 1950s.  I am racing toward la porte de la mort, a fact in which Jimmy A. and I used to take some comfort.  But we knew that our immanent demises provide no comfort or protection to our children and grandchildren and all the other endangered souls in this world so yes, I worry just as even Alfred E. Neuman did after the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

And BTW,  BBC America carried a report today of a study by the World Wildlife Fund that the world's wildlife populations have fallen by nearly 75% in the past 50 years.

Memory loss/executive function/cognitive decline?  I showered and shaved this morning.  Rather, I showered and shaved my face but forgot to shave my neck.

Lilly's hind legs are becoming worse.  Her walking gait is stiff and arthritic but her running gait is graceful.  She is unable to support her hindquarters with her hind legs when she stands without moving.  Her legs just sink under her.  We know her days are numbered and our hearts ache.

Geri bought a new washing machine at Best Buy this afternoon, disappointed by all the 'add on' charges but she checked their price against ABT's and there is only a $3 difference on the bottom line.  We won't get delivery and installation until November 11th, a disappointment.

Anniversaries.  With Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, my future son-in-law's family became citizens of the Reich.

With Ho Chi Minh's and General Giap's victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the French were not only defeated but humiliated.  Their only hope of remaining a colonial power was Algeria which soon enough dashed France's vain and wicked ambition.  And of course, the United States wickedly and foolishly stepped into the French shoes in Vietnam where I became a temporary resident for 234 days in 1965-66.

I enjoyed the Bob Newhart Show starring Bob and Susanne Pleshette.  It ran in tandem with the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  I stopped watching network sitcoms years ago when they became not very enjoyable or humorous and very raunchy.  To this day, my Irish Catholic upbringing doesn't permit me to enjoy raunchy sexual humor, either in sitcoms or in standup routines.  I'm embarrassed by it, even at age 83, and even though I'm pretty sexually liberated intellectually, but only intellectually.  You can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy.    There's never been a time in my life when I have felt sexually liberated, too much fear of Hellfire drilled into me by the holy sisters, brothers, and fathers regarding purity, chastity, and our bodies being 'temples of the Holy Ghost.'  From my memoir:

In June of 1950, as I approached my 9th birthday and entering 4th grade, Pius XII canonized the Church’s youngest ‘saint and martyr,’ St. Maria Goretti.  Maria was stabbed to death in 1902 at age 11 years, 9 months, and 21 days, by Alessandro Serenelli, a 20 year old neighbor who attempted to rape her.  She resisted at the cost of her life.  This terrible crime was a cause celèbre in Italy and was picked up by some Church people as evidence of what was wrong with Modernism and Worldliness (Alessandro) and of the value and the primacy of Purity (Maria.)  Maria’s canonization was more significant than most because she was made not only an official saint, but also an official martyr.  “Martyrs” were traditionally those who were killed “for the Faith.”  They were the Christians in the Coliseum, the Vietnamese martyrs, and the like. Alessandro killed Maria not because she was a Catholic or a Christian, but because she refused to “put out.”  Designating this young victim of murder and attempted rape a martyr carried the message not that sexual assault was evil, a given, but that sex was evil.  It was better for Maria to suffer the fatal penetration of 14 stab wounds than to suffer the unwanted but nonlethal sexual penetration. Maintenance of virginity was exalted over maintenance of life.  The ‘sex is bad’  message was not lost on those of us growing up in the American, which is to say Irish, Catholic Church.  Pictures of St. Maria Goretti joined pictures of St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower who entered the convent at age 14 and died of tuberculosis, a virgin, at age 24, on the walls of St. Leo Grammar School and countless other Catholic schools around the world.

Spiro Agnew, what a crook.  Richard Nixon, what a crook.  The "law and order" boys.

Anwar Sadat led Egypt in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to regain the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967. This made him a hero in Egypt and the wider Arab World.  After the war, he engaged in negotiations with Israel and the United States that culminated in the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Popular in Egypt but unpopular in the Arab world, the treaty saw Egypt regain the Sinai Peninsula but also its suspension from the Arab League.  The peace treaty led to Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin winning the Nobel Peace Prize, making Sadat the first Muslim Nobel laureate.  It also led to his assassination in 1981.  In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin would pay the same price for agreeing to the Oslo Accords,