10/5/2025

Sunday, October 5, 2025

D+

1947 Harry Truman delivered the first presidential address televised from the White House

1951 Jackie Gleason debuted the character of bus driver Ralph Kramden in 1st "The Honeymooners" skit (Cavalcade of Stars)

1988 Chile voted in a referendum 56-44 against extending Augusto Pinochet's regime by 8 years, thus ending the dictator's 16½ years in power

2015 California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill giving terminally ill patients the "right to die"

Home and in bed at 9, up at 7:30, feeling exhausted, but the leg and foot seem better. The kidney area of the right back is painful again, but not quite as chronic as my L4-L5, L5-S1 arthritis, which also made it hard to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen, even with "Judy."   63°, high of 77, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon. 

Meds, etc.  I took the first Linezolid antibiotic at 8 a.m.  Morning meds at 10:30 a.m.  I realized that I missed my Friday Trulicity injection in the hospital, but I was receiving insulin injections every time my glucose tested at 137 or greater.  I received finger sticks before every meal, so they were keeping close watch on my glucose, as on everything else, checking my vitals regularly, giving me a belly injection of something that protected against blood clots, etc.  My Libre3 CGM ran out yesterday (or the day before), and I'll replace it today.  That I was in bed from 9 last night until 7:30 this morning, and that I got out of bed feeling so exhausted, suggests to me that the 7 out of the last 8 days in the hospital have knocked me for a loop.

Text exchange with Nikki: Charles Clausen:

Hi Chuck. I hope everything is well and you’re feeling better! Your doppelgänger and I just had a walk to the farmers market in Logan Square.  A nice moment in the midst of insanity. Also it’s 80+ degrees here! 

Hi, Sweetie.  I am doing better.  I turned the corner on Friday when I woke up and was able to wiggle my foot and toes for the first time in a week.  I still have a bit of pain leg and ankle, but nothing compared to what drove me to the ER last Saturday.  It’s a beautiful day up here, too, and I think I’ll haul my bones out onto the patio and enjoy some fresh air and sunshine.  I send a big hug to both you and Steve.  I’m very touched that you’ve stayed in touch with me during this dreadful adventure.❤️

I’m so happy to hear this! You'd better get outside and enjoy the warmth and the birds! Love you

FB exchange with JJA: 

Janice Jenkins Anderson: This week’s nighttime raid by ICE on a Chicago apartment building is sickening. It’s only taken 256 days for children to be zip tied and hauled naked out of their homes by masked jackbooted federal agents with weapons.  Citizens were detained for hours and apartments searched without warrants. Are we winning yet??? 

About the middle of the night raid, Steven Beschloss writes,

“Doors were smashed down, apartments were ransacked, women and children were taken out in zip ties by armed agents without warrants—and some of these children were naked. Some were taken away in unmarked cars. Some were held for hours and then released, after these violent goons took the time to “look them up.” When confronted about their actions toward the children, one laughing agent reportedly said, “Fuck them kids.”

 Charles Clausen: Lest we forget, I will post (if I can) the famous, or infamous 1943 photo of "The Warsaw Ghetto Boy."  Let us open our eyes to what is happening in our country by agents of our government acting in our names.   

Epitaph on a Tyrant    W. H. Auden    1907 –-1973

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

The lead headline in the Sunday New York Times: "As Grim Anniversary Nears, Israel Is at War With Itself."

The longest war of an endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not over yet and has come to challenge Israel’s image and understanding of itself. Its military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, raining down such destruction on every aspect of life in Gaza that much of the world accuses it of genocide. Antisemitism is on the rise. The attack this week on a synagogue on Yom Kippur in Manchester, England, was only the most recent example.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, "The Territories", 1968:

[W]ithout an agreement imposed from the outside, our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without the prospect of ultimate resolution.

"Security" is a reality only where there is true peace between neighbors, as in the case of Holland/Belgium, Sweden/Norway, the United States/Canada.  In the absence of peace there is no security, and no geographic-strategic settlement on the land can change this.  There is no direct link between security and the territories.

Our security has been diminished rather than enhanced as a result of the conquests in this war.

Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we will need to impose our rule.  Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab.

Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions.  After a few years, there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers.  The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police.  A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions.  The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel.  The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.  There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.

Out of concern for the Jewish people and their state, we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.

As for the "religious" arguments for the annexation of the territories—these are only an expression, subconsciously or perhaps even overtly hypocritical, of the transformation of the Jewish religion into a camouflage for Israeli nationalism.  Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with the service of God and imputes to the state—which is only an instrument serving human needs—supreme value from a religious standpoint.

Not every "return to Zion" is a religiously significant achievement: one sort of return which may be described in the words of the prophet: "When you returned you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination" (Jeremiah 2:7).

 Yeshayahu Neibowitz has been my rabbi, teaching much about Judaism and religion generally, also about the State of Israel and indeed about any state and about nationalism and paganism.

I sat on the patio and listened to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 this afternoon.  As usual, it was a heavenly experience, triggering again happiness for simply being alive and alert to bushes and trees, to colors and especially green, to birds flying solo through the air, to the air blowing gently but noticeably in the 75° temperature, to the chipmunk that scurried across the patio bricks with no apparent destination in mind as he ran under my chair oblivious of me above him, to the squirrel who leapt across the bricks with a big nut in his mouth, and buried it in the soil behind the house, and to the wind chimes hanging from the Callery pear tree, sounding deep, mellow, gentle tones when the breeze gets just brisk enough to blow the tubes together.

 

God's Grandeur

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.