7/29/2026

 Wednesday, July 29, 2026

The completion of 4 years of journaling

1921 Adolf Hitler became leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party

1993 Israeli Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk 5-0, stating there was insufficient evidence he was Concentration Camp guard Ivan the Terrible

2016 Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for President

2025 The Netherlands banned Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from the country and called on the European Union to support a ceasefire in Gaza. 

In bed at 8:40, up at 5:15; 0540 116/70/62 116 203.6; 61/76/60, sunny.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.

Further to my notes yesterday on Netanyahu and two days ago on Israel and Zionism.  Bret Stephens' column in this morning's NYTimes, titled "A Blunt Warning for Israel":

[I]t’s tempting for the Jewish state’s stalwart defenders, including me, to downplay its failings. . . But anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being shouldn’t be silent about anti-Palestinian settler terrorism in the West Bank and the nothing-much-to-see-here policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things. It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.

That’s the point of a public letter to President Trump, issued Sunday by Matan Vilnai, a retired deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, on behalf of an organization that includes hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.

“Whereas our security agencies excel in dealing with Hamas and other West Bank Palestinian terror groups, they are severely constrained when it comes to Jewish terrorists,” the letter notes. “It is no secret that certain members of our current government orchestrate much of this chaos, including by shielding their followers — who are armed and driven by messianic impulses — from the law and its enforcement.”

That reality was again brought home last week, when extremist settlers went on a rampage in several Palestinian villages, reportedly setting fire to a home and two mosques, attacking a stonecutting factory and committing other acts of outright terrorism. That followed an incident in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after a confrontation involving a group of Israelis who, without prior coordination, had trespassed into an area under Palestinian civil control.

This sort of episode has become routine. As The Times of Israel reports, “the I.D.F. recorded 867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025.” That’s up from 682 the previous year.

Netanyahu’s answer to all this, as he told CNN’s Dana Bash, is that the violence is the work of about 150 “juvenile delinquents” and that he doesn’t accept “vigilantism.” But it’s preposterous to think that a government that can assassinate a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse finds itself unable to contain a wave of Jewish thuggery. If the prime minister wanted to end the problem, he could. Like Bartleby, he would prefer not to.

And we, the United States, Democratic and Republican administrations alike, have supported this Israeli terrorism for decades, all the time wringing our hands and clutching our pearls while bemoaning it.

Four years of journaling.  I started keeping this daily journal 4 years ago, thinking at the time that I would see if I could keep it up for a week, and then a month, but here I am 4 years later.  I started this effort as a sorry substitute for the long, daily, early morning chats by text messages that I had with my sister Kitty.  I had become so accustomed to venting, ranting, ruminating, and otherwise schmoozing with her every day that, for several days after she died on March 3, 2022,  I continued sending her texts sharing what was on my mind about what was going on in the world, and in my world.  Force of habit, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers gotta write.  By the end of July, I thought  I would give journaling a try.  I despaired of keeping a handwritten journal in a notebook because my handwriting is not good, and the more I write, the worse it gets, so I opted instead to use Blogger or Blogspot, because I had used it to save rants I had posted years early, during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in the 'comments' sections of Washington Post articles.  I ranted mostly about Alberto Gonzales, "W"'s attorney general and Tim Geitner, Obama's secretary of the Treasury.  I also did some sharing of serious thoughts about legal education after more than two decades on the faculty of MULS. The posts started in 2007 and I used the moniker P[ercy] Boswoth Slogthrop because I wanted to avoid getting crank mail, i.e., counterrants, like ones I received years earlier when one of my letters to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal about the handslapping of Army Lt. William Calley was published.  I started with the pseudonym "Percy Bysshe" but changed the middle name to "Bosworth" after the father figure, Howard Cunningham,  in Happy Days played by Tom Bosley. "Slogthrop" was just a corruption of the name of the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Army Lt. Tyrone Slothrop.  I corrupted the "Sloth . . . ' to "Slog . . ." thinking of Donald Rumsfeld, W's secretary of defense, description of our stupid invasion of Iraq in 2003 as "a long, hard slog."  Rumsfeld said the U.S.-led coalitions would win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not without "a long, hard slog."  He was right about the long, hard slog, but wrong about our winning th war.  I suspect the P. Bosley Slogthrop, like Rumsfeld, is right about some things, and wrong about others.  So it goes.  

Using Blogger permitted me to do some things I couldn't do in a handwritten journal.  First was typing rather than scribbling.  This let me write more than I otherwise would have.  Secondly, incorporating photos and other images into the texts. And, lastly, copying and pasting, which has been, I suppose, a good thing and a bad thing.  It lets me save texts from newspapers and elsewhere that I want to save and refer to later, whether I'm mentally prepared to comment on them at the time or not.  On the negative side, copying texts written by others lets me avoid writing my own thoughts.  It's an easy out from writing any original thought.  The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have to even try to express, with sometimes days going by in at least a semi-brain fog.  So it goes.    

 I've given up on To the Lighthouse and started Man in the Holocene,  a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.  Woolf's book, I am told, is "a classic", and "one of the greatest novels of the 20th century," but I could only get up to page 51 or so, struggling with her difficult syntax (sentence structure, ugh), before admitting that I no interest whatsoeveer in any of her characters, so why should I care about what they were thinking, how they were thinking, the things that Virginia Woolf was interested in.

There's a story in today's Washington Post, "As the cost of aging soars, families’ wealth is evaporating."  It addresses, or at least adverts to, all the factors that make growing old in the United States so daunting.  It calls to mind two films that deal with the problem of us old people: The Ballad of Narayama (1958), and Plan 75 (1922).  Each is a Japanese movie about old people being a drag on society and a drain of vital resources from younger people.  In Narayama, a village had a custom whereby when villagers reached age 70, they would climb a nearby mountain to a spot where they would die from starvation, exposure, or neglect.  In Plan 75, told in a modern setting, the Japanese government adopts a policy of providing large cash payments to its citizens who choose to be euthanized.  I think too of Peter Freuchen's book Eskimo that relates the Eskimo custom of enclosing old family members who can't keep up with the family's never-ending search for food into igloos to await their inevitable death.  The story in the Post brings home to me my rather long-held realization that I have outlived my usefulness to the world and to myself.  I wonder seriously, "Why go on?"  To what end?  For what purpose?  With what meaning?  Hardly idle questions, but what are the answers?  Are the practices in Narayama, Plan 75, and Eskimo so unthinkable?

"Jack & Diane"

Little ditty about Jack and Diane

Two American kids growin' up in the heartland

Jackie gonna be a football star

Diane's debutante backseat of Jackie's car

Oh yeah, life goes on

Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

Oh yeah, life goes on

Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

Gonna let it rock

Let it roll

Let the Bible Belt come

And save my soul

Holdin' on to sixteen as long as you can

Changes come around real soon

Make us women and men