10/21/2025

 Tuesday, October 21, 2025

335 Roman Emperor Constantine the Great ruled that Jews were not allowed to purchase and circumcise Christian slaves

2018 Julia Louis-Dreyfus was fittingly resented with the Mark Twain Prize, comedy's top honor, at a ceremony in New York

2020 the parents of 545 children who were separated at the US-Mexico border cannot be found, according to the American Civil Liberties Union

In bed at 9:15, awake at 5 and onto the LZB where I lay motionless but awake with a myriad of bait bucket thoughts of the Notch House gang, especially of EGFIII, until 6:33 when I got up.  Nasty hip pain during the night and leg/ankle pain when I rose for pit stops.  46°, wind chill  36°, high of 52°.  Again, the male cardinal is the first to arrive at the tray feeder, almost simultaneously with a house finch or song sparrow on the tube feeder.  It's still too dark to tell at 7:15, but today I can clearly identify the beautiful snowbirds searching in the grass below the feeders for whatever the wild turkeys have left  behind

Meds, etc.  Morning meds around 8 a.m.

   

J. D. Vance and Pete Hegeseth at Camp Pendleton.  I watched the videos of J D Vance and Pete Hegseth at Camp Pendleton for the 250th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the USMC, though the anniversary won't occur until November 10th.  Vance wasn't as bad as I thought he would be.  His was just a 'gung ho,' 'oora-heavy, aren't we great speech, with only a small part devoted to Pete Hegseth's bugaboo "diversity" efforts in the military.  Hegseth was more political, always sucking up to Trump and pushing his "Department of War" and "lethality" crap.  

After surviving boot camp at MCRD San Diego in 1944, my Dad did his infantry training, and probably his communications training, at Pendleton.  The Hoang family (less yet-to-be-born Anh) lived at Pendleton after escaping from Vietnam and putting in time at a refugee camp in Thailand.  Pendleton looms large in Marine Corps history and lore, and also in the history of my in-laws.  Yet, I've never set foot in it nor seen it.  Ditto MCAS El Toro, Cherry Point, MCB Camp Lejeune, or MCRD Parris Island.  I did spend about half a year at the historic and important MCB Quantico, 8 months at the 1st MAW headquarters at Danang, a few months at remote MCB Camp Schwab on Okinawa but no time at Camp Hansen or MCAS Futenma, and a few weeks at MCAS Iwakuni, Japan, but none at MCAS Atsugi.  My longest active duty tours were in odd spots: MCAS Yuma, AZ, and NAS Willow Grove, PA.

Text exchange with SCK:

Hi, Steve.  Back on the 9th, you and I exchanged texts sharing our despondencies about over the future.  This part of an article on crime in Chicago in The Atlantic reflects a big part of the problem.  The Democrats are so identified with minorities, especially Blacks,  in the minds of so many White Americans, they find themselves seeming to consider as acceptable status quo conditions that are nonetheless horrendous.  Violent crime rates in urban America is a Black and Brown phenomenon, not ex

Charles Clausen:::  What these politicians refuse to acknowledge is that violent crime in Chicago remains a serious problem, as I heard from residents there on a visit last month. The number of homicides has indeed dropped from a recent peak of 805 in 2021, and stands at 347 so far this year  But New York City, with a population more than three times that of Chicago’s, has recorded 255 homicides in 2025. The most recent homicide tally for Los Angeles, which has about a million more residents than Chicago, stood at 217.  Chicago, in the same year that officials celebrated its “safest summer” in six decades, could end up roughly four times deadlier than New York and twice as deadly as Los Angeles.  Chicago is deeply segregated, and homicides remain a plague for Black and Latino young men, who make up the great majority of the killed and the killers. A study of homicides in Chicago in 2020 and 2021, when the murder rate was even higher, found that young adult males who lived in the city’s most violent zip codes faced a greater risk of gun death than U.S. soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The homicide rates in the deadliest neighborhoods remain dozens of times higher than those of Chicago’s safest, mostly upper-middle-class and white neighborhoods.  In total, Chicago registered  more than 8,000 homicides from 2010 to 2024, and more than 41,000 Chicagoans were wounded by gunfire in that time.

Whoops.  I don’t seem to be able to send the complete message.  Sorry!   I emailed the whole article to you and to Nikki.  It’s depressing as hell.  If you care to read it, you’ll see why  I despise Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA back in 1995, which led so directly to what has happened to Chicago and Milwaukee and so many American cities in the years since.  Fucked by our capitalist corporate overseers.

Steven:::  It's astonishing how quickly it happened before our eyes and took forever to notice. I guess this is one of those things that started in the 70s and kept accelerating worse to what we have now.

Charles Clausen::  Karl Marx had a theory that capitalism contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.  I don’t know, of course, how true that is, but it does seem to me that that is what we are seeing right now before our eyes.  Right along with the slow but accelerating decline and fall of the American Empire.  I guess we’re not in a true nose-dive, but we sure seem to be in a “flat spin” downward.  Jets can pull out of a nose-dive; not so easy to get out of a flat spin.

I'm waiting for our Reichstag fire:  From An Original Thinker of Our Time:  Jeremy Adelman’s ‘Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman’ by Cass R. Sunstein in NYRB, May 23, 2013 issue:

After graduation, Hirschman began to study economics at the University of Berlin, which was of course in the midst of intense political conflict, and which contained a large number of Hitler supporters. In his own account, the situation did not seem truly grave until “the Reichstag fire, which really marked the beginning of the political horror.” 

. . . .  

From yesterday's journal entry:  " Democracy is not what partisans prefer; it is what they settle for." Hirschman.