11/15/24

Friday, November 15, 2024

D+10 

1969 An estimated 2 million people took part in the Vietnam War Moratorium demonstrations across the United States

1990 US President George H. W. Bush signed the Clear Air Act of 1990

2022 The world's population reached 8 billion, just 11 years after passing 7 billion, though slowing down (9 billion expected in about 2037), according to the UN [1]

In bed at 9, up at 4 to let Lilly out, with no hesitation at the doorway, on the stoop, or on the sidewalk, and her regular pacing after receiving her treat.

Prednisone, day 185, 7.5 mg., day 1.   Prednisone at 5 a.m. with banana bread.  Trulicity and morning meds at 8:20.

RFK, Jr., rounding out DJT's cabinet from Hell.   Trump will nominate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services which includes, inter alia, the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  The New Yorker cartoonist Will McPhail's cartoon of the day shows a passenger standing in the aisle of an aircraft with his hand up, addressing other passengers with their hands up and saying: "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us.  Who thinks I should fly the plane?"  RFK, Jr.'s Medical claims: (1) Vaccines are tied to autism, (20 COVID-19 targets certain races and protects others, (3) Mass shootings have increased due to heightened use of antidepressants, (4) Flouride in drinking water is linked to IQ loss, (5) Certain chemicals can cause children to be transgender, and (6) WiFi produces a radiation that causes cancer.  

What we are seeing is Steve Bannon's 'deconstruction of the administrative state.'  At the CPAC conference in 2017 he said there were 3 focuses of the Trump Administration.  First, national security and sovereignty. Second, economic nationalism ('America First') 

The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state… I think the consistent, if you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction, the way the progressive left runs, is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just gonna put in some sort of regulation in — in an agency.  That’s all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.

He has also said "I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too" and "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia." [I substitute "capitalists" for "globalists" and agree.] "Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with the 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken."  [Again, I agree.  Bad on Obama, bad on Geithner.]

My FB post on July 22, 2022:

Donald Trump is a bad man. He was a bad man on January 6, 2021. He was a bad man on January 20, 2017, when he was inaugurated and on November 8, 2016 when he was elected. He was a bad man on June 15, 2015 when he magisterially rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy and to denounce Mexicans as criminals and rapists, though "some, I assume, are good people." Trump's personal wickedness, dishonesty, and perfidy have been open and notorious throughout his adult life. I am mindful of that every time I watch the Republican witnesses called by the January 6th Committee. They are all Trump enablers. Pat Cipollone, his White House counselor, is the most flagrant, successfully fending off Trump's first impeachment in 2019-2020, enabling Trump to stay in power, to run for reelection, and to put all of us through the wringer of the 2020 election and its aftermath, especially January 6th. That said, while I acknowledge the testimonies of Cipollone, Pottinger, Matthews, Hutchinson, and the other Trump administration officials, I never lose sight of the fact that they were all voluntary Trump enablers. Ditto the 'Christian first, conservative second, republican third' Mike Pence. Each hitched his or her wagon to the evil star of a bad man, a very bad man. Forgive me if I don't applaud them.

I listened to the Bernie Sanders interview on the NYTimes this morning.  As usual I agreed with pretty much everything he said.  Some of what he said reminded me of the notion of "theory of the case," or in litigation, the theory of (1) what happened (the facts), and (2) what it means legally (the law that applies to those facts)  Sanders argued that Trump accurately saw that 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and are therefore economically insecure despite the great unemployment, GDP, and stock market statistics and he had culprits who are responsible to this insecurity: Democrats, elites, and immigrants.  Biden and Harris talked barely a whit about economic insecurity, our wretched worst health care system in the developed world,  income and wealth inequality, etc.  Trump's theory of the case was simple (and therefore misleading), easy to understand, and provided scapegoats, satisfying the all-to-human need or at least desire to blame someone for whatever goes wrong.  All Biden could come up with was 'defending democracy' ignoring the fact that it has been precisely American democracy that has led to the condition we're in.  If the truth be told, democracy is everybody's second choice in terms of governance.  Our first choice is to have our world governed the way we want it governed.  Harris's big selling point was the "opportunity economy."  Snore.   The Dems' argument was basically more of the same, despite the fact that 60% of the voters were, and are, economically insecure, afraid of the potentially devastating effects of missing a paycheck or paychecks because of illness or any other cause.    They had no theory of the case that something is very wrong in our society and there are ways to fix or address those wrongs, though not by scapegoating immigrants, gays, transexuals, and experts.

Not so random thoughts from my Covid notebook, vol. 4:

Simone Weil:  I suffer more from the humiliation inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Flannery O'Connor:  Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one.

Savannah Guthrie:  You're the president, not someone's crazy uncle.

Eugene V. Debs:  I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune or hundreds of millions of dollars while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

Michel de Montaigne: But whom shall we believe when he talks about himself, in so corrupt an age, seeing that there are few or none whom we can believe when they speak of others, where there is less incentive for lying?  The first stage in the corruption of morals is the banishment of Truth for to be truthful is . . . the first article that Plato requires in the Governor of the Republic.

H. L. Mencken:  The notion that a Radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic.  He is more likely one who likes his country more than the rest of us and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.  He is not a bad citizen turning to crime.  He is a good citizen driven to despair. . . Evangelical Christianity as everyone knows is founded on Hate as the Christianity of Christ was founded on Love. 

Orianna Fallaci:  No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruelest, the least generous who win.

Senator Mike Lee:   Democracy isn't the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.  We want the human condition to flourish.  Rank democracy can thwart that.

Anniversaries thoughts.  I was 28 years old and in my 3rd and last year as a student at MULS, thankful for our beautiful one-month-old daughter and thankful that I was no longer subject to recall to active duty in the Marines.   The Vietnam Moratorium was the largest-ever demonstration in US history at that time, with an estimated 2 million persons taking part around the country. Protests were mostly peaceful, protesters wore black armbands as a mark of both their opposition to the war and also to commemorate the 45,000 US soldiers killed in the conflict so far.  Another 13,000 plus would die over the next few years waiting for Nixon and Kissinger to get us out of Vietnam, 'peace with honor.'  Protests centered on the capital Washington D.C. where 500,000 demonstrators gathered to demand President Richard Nixon bring the war to a close. The day was significant for the participation of middle-class and middle-aged demonstrators, an indication of just how unpopular the war had become in America.  NIxon had been in office only 10 months when the Moratorium demonstration occurred and it shook him up to realize how unpopular the Vietnam War had become.  The hostility, indeed hatred, that had been aimed at LBJ the preceding few years now was focused on Nixon.  

George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act.  It's hard to imagine a current Republican approving such a piece of legislation.  Modern Republicans think of George H. W. Bush as a "RINO."

Can there be much doubt that the climate crisis that we are going through now is related to world population growth?