11/2/24

 Saturday, November 2, 2024

1917 British government proclaimed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration

1963 Ngô Đình Diệm, the President of South Vietnam, was assassinated in a coup by the South Vietnamese Army

1976 Jimmy Carter was elected President defeating incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford

1993 Rudy Giuliani won the New York mayoral election, becoming 1st Republican mayor since 1965

2004 George W. Bush was re-elected as President of the United States, defeating Democrat candidate John Kerry

In bed at 9:15, and up at 5:15 to let Lilly out.  No hesitation this morning.  A year ago today there were 3 inches of fresh snow on the ground.  This morning the County Line berry trees are buzzing with robins jumping from branch to branch, berry to berry. 

Prednisone, day 172, 5 mg., day 23/28.   Prednisone at 5:30, taken with some saltiness.  I awoke with badly aching shoulders, low and mid-back.  Morning meds around 8:30 and breakfast of All Bran w/ berries and prunes at 9.

Moby Dick, Loomings     

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair  Upon the straits; on the French coast the light / Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! /Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, / Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we / Find also in the sound a thought, / Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, /Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain /  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The State of the Nation.  Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State has placed the state's National Guard on alert from Nov. 4th to Nov 7th.  The office of Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) said this week it will put 60 National Guard members on standby on Election Day.  In the District of Columbia, Police Chief Pamela A. Smith has said that the entire D.C. police department will deploy through at least the Nov. 5 election. This means all eligible 3,300 officers will work 12-hour shifts, with most leave time and vacations canceled.  

Anniversaries.  First, let us never think that Minister Balfour and Her Majesty's government gave a tinker's dam for the Jewish people or the aspirations of Zionists.  They were concerned only with the UK's interests in the Great War and thereafter.  Plus, they doubledealt the Zionists and the Arabs, who also had nationalist aspirations that directly conflicted with Zionism.

Seoond, the assassination of Diem was a beginning and an end.  It was the end of any believable pretense that South Vietnam was a democracy grounded on the will of the people.  Happy horsesht ab initiio and thoughout.  It was the beginning of a succession of military cabals leading one American ambassador to describe South Vietnam as a country with an army but no government.

Third, in the long history of American presidencts, was Jimmy Carter sui generis?

Fourth, Rudy Giuliani, altar boy, good Catholic, philanderer, rabble rouser, bum from the beginning.

Fifter, when the American electoate chose George W. Bush over John Kerry after he led the nation into a tragic unnecessary war in Iraq on falso pretenses of WMD, I learned never to trust the judgment of the American people.  "You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know—morons.” – Jim in Blazing Saddles.