6/23/2026

 Tuesday, June 23, 2026

1960, the first contraceptive pill was made available for purchase in the United States

1996. Archbishop Tutu retired as head of the Anglican Church in South Africa

2025 Russian forces launched a large-scale drone and missile strike on Kyiv, damaging residential areas, hospitals, and sports infrastructure, killing nine people and injuring at least 33 others.

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:40; 0600 150/76/54 xxx 204.0, 0610 148/76/53; 55/70/52, sunny/

Morning meds at 8:35 a.m., and Eliquis at6:48 a.m. and p.m.

Lonesome Dove.  I'm 80 pages into the 862 pages of this novel and enjoying it very much.  It's the first book of Larry McMurtry's that I've read and it's easy going.  I love his description of the characters: Gus, Call, Lorena, Pea Eye, Newt, Jake Spoon et al.  All the women who have appeared or been referred to are whores, or "sporting women."  Lorena is the town whore of Lonesome Dove, and a strong character who has been hardened by early life of sexual abuse both by her family and by the men who 'rescured' her from her family.  She is an easy character to like and admire.

I've always enjoyed Western movies, not only in my youth but throughout my life.  I know that most of them, especially those made when I was a child, were Christian nationalist fantasies in which there were easily identifiable good guys and bad guys, in which the cowboys and settlers were always the good guys as against any Indian, (or Mexican or bandit).  Ditto the pioneers and settlers.  I also enjoy reading and learning the history of the Europeans's Westward expansion, the real history, not the fantasy stuff.  It's exciting and depressing, a history of great ambition, accomplishment, and endurance, and of great exploitation and injustice.  I think the only Western novel I've read, before Lonesome Dove, was another great story, True Grit, Charles Portis.  It also was a great movie, with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn and Kim Darby as Mattie Ross, seeking the killers of her father.  The film was remade in 2010 with Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld.  The original is better.

AI and the potential for chaos.  The Five Eyes intelligence network (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, & New Zealand) has issued a report that warns our government and business computer systems and records are all vulnerable to breaches by AI in the hands of bad actors, or others, within months, not years.  The report warns that government and businesses must act now to protect against this threat.  Will they?  Can they, even if they wanted to?  I doubt it.  Is there any reason to believe that our government under Donald Trump has either the will or the capacity to take on the regulation of industrial, technological behemoths who are developing AI platforms?  I often get the heeby-jeebies thinking that the retirement savings we have accumulated over our lifetimes is not real money, but rather 1s and 0s in a computer bank somewhere.  Same for our banking and mortgage records, social security records, VA records, etc.  It's foolish to fail to recognize the threat of the AI programs that are becoming more powerful - and unregulable - every day.  I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.  I've lived almost 85 years, and I've never felt more vulnerable.

 Anniversaries.  I list Desmond Tutu because I had a cheap thrill many years ago when Tutu visited Marquette University to receive some award and I found myself standing next to him in a small elevator at the Student Union.   More thrilling than once riding in the same elevator with Lou Rawls in the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver or often dealing blackjack to Martha Raye at the Officers Club in Danang when she visited with a USO show.

And the Pill!!!  The beginning of the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and of Women's Liberation.  Somehow as a traditional Catholic lad I missed all that.  I reached adulthood in the 60s (August 1962), but I was irretrievably a child of the 50s.  Alas!  You better not sleep with a girl unless you intend to marry her!  And once married, forever married.  Many of those born just a few years later lived in a world of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll.  I lived in the world of Patti Page, Doris Day, and June Allyson.   Some grew up on Playboy and Penthouse, I grew up on National Geographic and 8 pagers..  In Catholic schools, sex education consisted of Father Burke  coming into talk to the boys in the 7th and 8th grade about not spending too much time in the the bathtub or shower, and to remember that our bodies were 'the temple of the Holy Ghost,: and that girls were "an occasion of sin", or ever a "proximate occasion of sin"  and that "impure thoughts" and even worse, "impure deeds" were mortal sins that could result in spending eternity in everlasting Hellfire, deprived of the Beatific Vision.  Could one grow up with a healthy attitude toward sex and sexuality with that kind of conditioning? images  lyrics Mom