1/16/25

 Thursday, January 16, 2025

D+72

1919 The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, authorizing the prohibition of alcohol, was ratified by a majority of US stat

1945 Adolf Hitler moved into the Fuhrerbunker, his underground bunker in Berlin, where he lived until his suicide on April 30

In bed at 8:50, awake and up at 3 a.m.     

Prednisone, day 247, 5 + 2.5 mg., day 9.  5 mg. Prednisone at 5 a.m  Other meds at 12:30 p.m.     

Geri's surgery is today and of course I worry.  I went to bed last night thinking about it and woke up this morning thinking about it.  She has spent the last several days getting ready for the surgery and mostly getting ready for the disruption in our normal lives that will come immediately after the surgery.  She has cooked soups and her semi-homemade marinara sauce, buying food, buying her knee-cooling equipment, scheduling physical therapy sessions, and cleaning the house.  Busy, busy, busy.  Though I kvetch a lot about the pains and indignities of old age, one thing about my senectitude that is good is my appreciation of her, not just how central she is to my life (what is a more encompassing term than 'central?), but how alive and living in the moment she is, how admirable in how many ways.  How do I love thee, let me count the ways.

    Voice mail from Dr. Graf at 1:06:  "Everything went great with Geri's surgery.  She's got a new knee in there. . .  Hopefully, we'll have her up and walking later today. . ."  

Joe Biden's Farewell Address.  I didn't watch it, though I felt a bit guilty about skipping it since I know he's done some terrific things during his incumbency.  It's not just that I don't like the guy and don't buy i his schtick, but for me it's painful to listen to his oratory.  I appreciate however his warnings about American oligarchy (as if we haven't had one for some time now) and the tech-industrial complex.   

The Headlines say it all.

In His Farewell, Biden Warns of ‘Oligarchy’ Taking Shape in America.  Joe Biden Warns Of “Tech Industrial Complex” In Farewell Speech

A Euphoric Tech Industry Is Ready to Celebrate Trump and Itself

 Big Tech funds Trump’s inaugural

 Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to attend Trump's inauguration

 TikTok C.E.O. Plans to Attend Trump Inauguration

Apple CEO to Attend Trump’s 2025 Inauguration as Donations Expected to Reach a Record $200M 

Also, Sam Altman  OpenAI and Sundar Pichai Alphabet = Google, YouTube, 

Tromp nominees with net worths of at least $1 billion to important federal offices:

Tom Barrack, ambassador to Turkey

Scott Bessent, Treasury secretary

Frank Bisignano, Social Security Commissioner

Doug Burgum, Interior Secretary

Steve Feinberg, Deputy Defense Secretary

Tilman Fertitta, Ambassador to Italy

Jaren Isaacman, NASA Admiistator

Charles Kushner, ambassador to France

Kelly Loeffler

 Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary

Linda McMahon, Education Secretary

Mehmet Oz, Medicare & Medicaid Adminstrator

John Phelan, Secretary of the Navy

Leandro Rizzuto, Jr., ambassador to OAS

Warren Stephens, ambassador to the UK

Chris Wright, Energy Secretary

Among the reasons for my despair.  David Brooks' 1/15/25 column in the NYTimes, "We Deserve Pete Hegseth."  Excerpts:

 First let me hit you with some realities:

The secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, has said that the West is not prepared for the challenges that will come over the next five years and that it’s time to “shift to a wartime mind-set.” Kori Schake, who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that while World War III has not begun, “a world war is approaching.”

Recent American defense strategy has been based on the optimistic assumption that we will have to fight only one war at a time. But the closer cooperation between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea make a coordinated attack more likely, meaning we may have to fight three or four regional wars simultaneously.

The weak U.S. industrial base has hollowed out American resilience. China’s shipbuilding industry has a capacity more than 230 times greater than that of the United States. When experts recently conducted war games with China, the United States ran out of long-range anti-ship missiles within three to seven days.

The Chinese are building gigantic amphibious landing craft of the sort they would use for an invasion of Taiwan. They have developed a powerful microwave weapon that has the intensity of a nuclear explosion and can disrupt or destroy electronic components of our weapons systems. H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, recently said, “I think China is laying the groundwork for a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States.”

In 2023, the RAND Corporation issued a report on U.S. military “power and influence.” Here’s how it opened: “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.”

Now, if you are holding hearings for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues. Or you might come up with other serious questions: How do drones change war-fighting? How will artificial intelligence alter the nature of combat? How do we shift from a defense policy built around counterterrorism to a policy built around nation-state warfare? If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.

But did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearings in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearings, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.

We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing — by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.

Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft. During the hearings Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he contemplated making his horse a consul.

His lament -- None of the senators at Hegseth's confirmation hearings asked about these matters or any similarly significant war-related matters.  Rather they concentrated on his views on women in the military, his willingness to obey illegal orders from Trump, etc.   Brooks is right.  The hearing was disgraceful and disheartening.         

The Substance.  Speaking of disgraceful and disheartening, I watched this movie on MUBI last night, all 2 hours and 20 minutes of it.  Well, I sort of watched it while defrosting the freezer in the garage and texting with my cousin-once-removed Colleen Nitchoff, and with Caren Goldberg.  The movie is apparently currently in theaters if that's believable.  I suppose there are some (male) moviegoers who would enjoy the flick just for the copious footage of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in the buff.  The movie is at bottom about body image and the psychological and other burdens body image places on women, especially in the entertainment worlds of movies and television.  It's equally about the 'male gaze' and the objectification of women.  The Demi Moore character, a Jane Fonda-like health and fitness celebrity,  in effect sells her soul, in fhe form of her body, to the Devil, in the form of  some eponymous "Substance" that takes years, weight, flab, and wrinkles of her body.  But this is a true horror film, and a gory, grizzl, and gruesome one, and there is a terrible price to be paid for the temporary, every-other-week good looks.  The movie is a real horror show in more ways than one and I can't imagine recommending that anyone see it, but the acting by Dennis Quaid and especially by Demi Moore is excellent.