10/20/2025

 Monday, October 20, 2025

1998 Comedian Richard Pryor received the first-ever Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

2015 Vice President Joe Biden confirmed he will not run for President in 2016

2025 I have an appointment with Dr. Ryzka in the VA Rheumatology Clinic

In bed around 9, up around 6.  41°, wind chill 34°, high of 61°, windy.  Almost cold enough to light a log in the fireplace.   Sunrise is not until 7:11 at 104°ESE, with sunset at 6 p.m., daylight shortening each day by almost 3 minutes, and solar noon at 12:36 p.m.  I wait to see the first bird to arrive at the feeders. . . a male cardinal on the tray feeder at 7:12, then quickly a rarely-to-be-outhustled chickadee on the tube feeder, and a downy woodpecker on a suet cake, early birds getting the seeds.  By 7:21, the finches show up in numbers, and I spot in the as yet crepuscular light what may be the first snowbird of the season. a slate-colored junco feeding on the grass under the feeders.  At 9:15, the posse of Tom turkeys showed up, one of them fanning his tail feathers, strutting, and looking dominant, with a particularly long snood draping down over his beak.  Quite a sight.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at sometime this morning, or was it when I returned from my VA rheumatology clinic appointment.😟   

Trump, the alleged drug smugglers, and death on the high seas.  President Trump has ordered 6 or 7 armed attacks on boats in the Southern Caribbean, sinking the boats and killing their occupants, between 27 and 32 persons.  News and official reports vary on the exact numbers, but there is no doubt about the fact that several vessels have been sunk and their occupants killed by American military weapons.  We don't know the names of the dead or where they were from.  We don't know why they were at sea nor what their cargo, if any, was, other than the government's claim that they were transporting illegal drugs to the United States, more than 1,000 miles away, 600 if we include Puerto Rico.  The government releases videos of the attacks, the news media broadcast them, and we watch them, witnessing state-sanctioned murders on the high seas.  

There are well-established legal protocols for intercepting vessels at sea carrying contraband,  The Coast Guard enforces U.S. and international law on the high seas and in U.S. waters under:

14 U.S.C. § 522 – authorizes Coast Guard officers to board, search, seize, and arrest on the high seas or U.S. waters when enforcing federal law.

Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act (DTVIA, 2008) – criminalizes operating stateless semi-submersibles for illicit trafficking.

Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA, 1986) – allows U.S. jurisdiction over drug smuggling vessels on the high seas, even if the vessel isn’t U.S.-flagged, provided the flag state consents or the vessel is stateless.

Nowhere in American law do we find authorization to blow vessels out of the water and kill all aboard the vessels following no legal protocol, and based only on a suspicion that the vessel is carrying illegal drugs to the U.S.  If the U.S. Coast Guard were legally to intercept a vessel carrying contraband, and to arrest those transporting the contraband, the legal penalties for those arrested do not include the death penalty.  As far as I can see, there is no legal authority for these killings authorized by President Trump.  The killings are lawless homicides.  The military personnel who carry out the killings are parties to lawless homicides.  And we get to watch the homicides in cold blood, i.e., both the killers and  we the watchers.

Today, Columbia's president Gustoavo Petro has explicitly accused the U.S. of murder.  From the NYT:

“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Mr. Petro wrote on social media. He said the man killed in the mid-September attack, Alejandro Carranza, was a “lifelong fisherman” whose boat had experienced damage and was adrift, probably in Colombian waters, at the time of the attack. 

The United Stateas refuses to reveal the evidence it relies on in claiming that the boats and humans it destroys are transporting illegal drugs being transported to the US.  How are American citizens to know whether Trump , a paragon of truthfulness, is lying, or Petro is lying?  The bottom line is that Americans ought to be entitled to know with some degree of certainty the identity of those whom its government is targetting for killing and the legal justification for the killing.

My journal entry 3 years ago re: Carlos Lozada's NYT essay "A Good Faith Examination of Bad Faith. 

 "Lozada writes of "The Rhetoric of Reaction" by Albert O. Hirschman, a book I should try to read.  Lozada: 

" . . . Hirschman was not merely wishing for a more civil public square. He viewed democratic pluralism as a shaky bargain, based not on a consensus over shared values but on a recognition by competing sides that none could achieve political dominance. “Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups,” Hirschman wrote. Democracy is not what partisans prefer; it is what they settle for." (The empasis is mine, not the author's.)

 As I have long believed, at bottom, none of us is all that committed to democracy, majority rule, or the so-called rule of law.  As Woody Allen infamously said "the heart wants what it wants.  There's no logic to these things."  Re "bitterly hostile opposing groups":  "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes could have added "and other irrational beliefs" after "superstitious fears", irrational beliefs like in the superiority of our group over all others, à la Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.  I suspect Niebhuhr's book and Hirschman's go a long way toward explaining both MAGAism and liberalism, and 'wokeism.'  Even Woody Allen has some understanding of the irrationality of our desires, our preferences, our political positions, etc.