12/13/24

 Friday, December 13, 2024

D+38

1545 The Council of Trent was opened by Pope Paul III

In bed at 8:45, awake at 12:50, and up at 1:25.  5° outside, -5° wind chill.  The lows were 4° and -6° at 2 a.m.  I think of the birds, the whitetails, and the other critters outside and marvel at their hardiness.  I refilled the sunflower tube late yesterday afternoon so more birds could feed at the same time on it this morning.  I also spread more seeds underneath ath for the ground feeders, which include the cardinals.

Prednisone, day 213, 7.5 mg., day 28.  Prednisone at 12:30 p.m.  The first time I have missed taking the med early in the morning.  Too much 'unsettledness' from getting up in the middle of the night.  I took my regular meds right after the prednisone.     

My talk with Jill Hansen yesterday was touching. She received her copy of my Thanksgiving letter to the leaders of the Zablocki VA Medical Center and had to wipe tears away as she talked about it.  She told a personal story similar to that of the speech therapist Nicole who did the swallow study on me, i.e., that she had started out at Aurora Hospital (Nicole at Columbia St. Mary's), didn't like working there, came to the VA years ago, and found it much more rewarding working with and for the vets.  She is 'holding onto' me as long as she can as her patient even though she has been transferred to the new VA clinic in Oconomowoc.  When her permanent replacement is assigned to the Zablocki Gold Clinic, I will work with him or her after my 3 years with Jill.  It took more than a week for the letter to reach Jill.

Food for thought.  "Israel's Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi" by Mark O'Connell in the December 19, 2024 NYRB.

[Khadidi] Everyone who’s young enough and independent enough from mainstream media sees [the carnage] you just described and is horrified. They know that the mainstream media is lying through its teeth and that every politician is lying. That’s true of many older people as well. But again: the older, the richer, the whiter you get—in the United States, at least—the less likely people are to see or believe those images.   

You have to understand a couple of things. One, there is an almost unquenchable desire for revenge for what happened on October 7 of last year: the destruction not just of the Gaza division of the Israeli army but of a large number of settlements along the Gaza border; the killing of the largest number of Israeli civilians since 1948; the abduction of over a hundred civilians and perhaps a hundred soldiers; the destruction of a sense of security, which is the cornerstone of how Israelis see themselves. So the thirst for revenge for what happened seems to be unquenchable. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the Israeli security establishment has a plan. Every time Israel is at war, it attacks civilian populations on the pretext that there’s a military target there. It has always done this. There was always an ostensible military target somewhere, but the point was never only that military target. The point was also to punish civilians and force them to turn on insurgents. This is their practice and has always been. It’s taken directly from British military doctrine. Go to British wars in Kenya, go to Malaya, and you’ll see that the British military did the same thing. My point is, therefore, they are purposely killing civilians. They are purposely making life impossible. They are purposely making Gaza uninhabitable, as a means—in the twisted, war-criminal minds of the General Staff—of forcing the population to turn against the insurgents.

And the third thing is that there is a settler-colonial project in northern Gaza: take back a piece of Gaza, empty it of its population, and plant settlers. Now that may or may not happen, but multiple senior ministers have called for new settlements there. All three of those elements, I would say, explain the atrocities that we’re seeing. If that doesn’t fit the description of genocide, just throw out the Genocide Convention. It’s absolutely worthless.

[T]here seems to have been a thirst for revenge on the part of many of the people who carried out this [October 7th] assault. And this led to atrocities, brutalities, attacks on civilians. You cannot say that they didn’t intend to do that. If you go back and listen to the statement by Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing, on the morning of the attack, he’s talking about attacks on civilians. There seems to have been a desire for revenge, though obviously with means more limited than those Israel possesses. And I’m not comparing it to this unceasing, seemingly unquenchable desire for revenge on the part of the Israeli military that we see daily, but I do think it’s also an element with Hamas.

[O'Connell] . . . It makes sense that we Irish would, on the basis of that history, instinctively sympathize with the Palestinian struggle. But what I find strange is the idea that you would need that cultural memory of colonization—to be Irish, or Algerian, or Kenyan, or whatever it might be—to understand that what the Palestinians have been made to suffer is wrong.

[Khalidi]  I think Ireland is really a special case, because it’s the first overseas European colony, and no country has had a colonial experience as long as Ireland’s.

. . . The mask has dropped from American universities. They are clearly not institutions where the ideas and views of the faculty, or the welfare of the students, are the first concern. It is very clear that big private universities are primarily financial institutions, huge hedge funds with large real estate portfolios, which have as a secondary purpose making money from students. There is a rhetoric of student welfare, which is used to advance the interest of a minority of students at the expense of a majority of students. But that rhetoric is completely false. As institutions, they have absolutely no respect for, and pay no attention to, the voices of faculty.  

 Progress in Urban America:  Milwaukee has had the 125th reported homicide so far this year,  a 15-year-old boy, according to Milwaukee Police Department data. That's 22% less than last year at this time and 40% less than in 2022.  USA, USA, USA!!!!

 St. Vinnie's & Costco this afternoon.  Costco was packed with elderly Christmas shoppers.

 Anniversary thought.  Trent was the Church's answer to Luther and the Protestants.