10/12/2025

 Sunday, October 12, 2025

D+340/265/-1206

1492 Christopher Columbus's expedition made landfall on a Caribbean island he named San Salvador (likely Watling Island, Bahamas). The explorer believed he had reached East Asia

1972 46 sailors were injured in a race riot on the American aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk

1977 US Supreme Court heard arguments in the "reverse discrimination" case of Allan Bakke, a white student denied admission to the University of California Medical School

2023 Israel said it would not stop the bombardment of Gaza until hostages were released, amid growing humanitarian crisis with 338,000 displaced and the population without electricity or water

In bed around 10 after the Cubs-brewers game, awake at 5:30, up at 5:50.  57°, high of 63°, cloudy day ahead.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at   a.m.    

A year ago today, in the closing heat of the election, I wrote: 

From the kishkes.  Maureen Dowd's weekly column includes this comment on Kamala Harris's campaigning style: "She does her homework but her delivery seems more scripted than from the kishkes. Even though it can get weird and duplicitous, Trump is better at riffing."  That's how I feel about the world's and especially the mainstream media's treatment of this entire presidential election. Despite regular statements that the election is 'existential' in terms of traditional American democracy, most of the network coverage of the Trump threat lacks what the headline to Dowd's essay calls 'the fierce urgency of beating Trump.'  MSNBC is an exception of course but outside of MSNBC, one would never guess that America stands on the edge of an abyss not simply of autocracy, but of malignant, misanthropic, misogynistic, vengeance-seeking autocracy.  Voting is already underway and with three weeks left until November 5th, with every somewhat credible poll showing that Trump is as likely to win the election as Harris is, with Republicans already 'flooding the zone' with election-related lawsuits, the world goes on as if this were the election between a Jimmy Carter and a Jerry Ford.  I'm terrified, not for myself, but for our children, grandchildren, and all the other innocents who would/will be affected by a second Trump presidency.

Homo hominis lupus. From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Freud and Religion:

Even the religious injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself, Freud argued, springs from the need to protect civilization from disintegration. Given that history demonstrates that man is “a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien” (Freud 1962, 59), the fashioning of a value system based upon the requirement to develop loving relationships with one’s fellow man is a social and cultural necessity, without which we would be reduced to living in a state of nature. For Freud, the principal task of civilization is thus to defend us against nature, for without it we would be entirely exposed to natural forces which have almost unlimited power to destroy us. 

Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and president of the LBJ Foundation: 

  “It’s indisputable that, despite his best intentions, [Joe Biden] jeopardized the Democrats’ chances of beating Donald Trump,” Updegrove said. “Unfortunately, while he was the one who staved off the reelection challenge from Trump in 2020, he’s also the one most responsible for Trump’s return to office, and I don’t think there’s any denying that.”

Barack Obama: "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."

Dying Alone.  There is a feature piece in this morning's Washington Post titled: "An age-old fear grows more common: ‘I’m going to die alone.’"  From it I learned of the increasing commonness of this eventuality or occurrence, of the term 'transitioning to end-of-life care,' and of the existence of "end-of-life doulas.'  

NOTHING TO SAY TODAY.  In a fog.  I had intended to say something about each of the above blurbs, but I'm not up to it.