8/12/2026

 Wednesday, August 12, 2026

1950, Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Humani generis

1965 Race riot on the West Side of Chicago

1978 Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley suffered a spinal cord injury, leaving him with quadriplegia from a hit by Raiders Jack Tatum in a preseason game

2021, Phoenix became the US's fastest-growing city (+11.2%), overtaking Philadelphia to be the nation's fifth-largest at 1.6 million, according to the US Census

2021 US Census revealed the country grew more diverse, with growth in Hispanic (+23%) and Asian (+36%) populations, and the first-ever decline in the White population

2025 Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American man to death in the West Bank.

In bed at 10:15, up at 5:45; 0605 107/67/67 124 202.6; 68/79/57, cloudy, rainy conditions around 1 p.m.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and p.m.

In the partisan primary,  David Crowley beat Francesca Hong, but by less than half a point, so there will probably be a recount.  I fear neither can beat Tom Tiffany, the Republican Trumpie, in November.

Looking back.  Each day I try to look back to what I wrote in this journal in each of the past four years on that date.  I do it, in part, to see what I was thinking and writing about on those days, and how my mental and physical health were doing, but also to see whether I'm embarrassed by what I wrote or whether I no longer think or feel the same way as I used to.  I usually find that my thinking hasn't changed much over the last 4 years, though sometimes I'm a bit more or less exuberant about whatever I wrote.  Today I was struck by what I wrote on 8/12/2024, before Trump proposed his $1.5 trillion defense/war budget for FY2027, and before he started his on-again, off-again war against Iran, which will almost be another strategic loser to pile on top of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

WISN radio.  I listened to this right-wing station while driving home from the VA.  It was the Mark Belling show hosted by some other guy whose name I didn't catch.  He spoke of the danger of nuclear wars or other wars between the great powers in today's world and much of it made sense to me.  Ukraine has invaded Russia.  Israel has conducted an assassination in the capital of Iran and is awaiting a lethal response in Israel proper from Iran and from Hezbollah.  The US, joined at the hip to Israel and its fascist, apartheid government, has sent another aircraft carrier and a guided missile submarine to the area.  We are overstretched in terms of our military-industrial capacity to continue to arm Ukraine's fight against Russia and Israel's fight against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.  Plus, America is as deeply divided at home as it has been since the days of the Vietnam War and civil rights demonstrations and riots.  Israel is also deeply divided and distressed. It has become an international pariah, at least outside the U.S. and Western Europe.  Thus, it's a good time for China to take on Taiwan if it chooses.  Who are we hoping not to use tactical nuclear weapons now?  Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.  Why do we suppose either of these wicked men would decline to use some of their many nuclear weapons if it served their nationalistic and personal purposes?  Why would we think that Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, or Lloyd Austin can contain or control a crisis in the Ukraine War, the Middle East, or the Taiwan Straits?  I think back to the first and second Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s and the great tension over the fate of Quemoy and Matsu, tiny islands off the coast of mainland China, claimed by both China and by Taiwan and within artillery range of communist howitzers.   President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons against China over the islands which led directly to China starting a nuclear weapons program of its own.  From Wikipedia: "During the crisis, American leadership risked the alienation of the American public, relations with key allies such as France and Japan, and even nuclear war. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued that while the status quo result was a victory, the American government could not permit such a situation to arise again."  The memory of this period and those tiny islands reminds me again of my view that the greatest threat to world peace is the United States, its capitalist economy and government, and its military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about on January 17, 1961. Before and during the Second World War, American industries had successfully converted to defense production as the crisis demanded, but out of the war, what Eisenhower called a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions emerged. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry was new in the American experience.   Eisenhower warned, "[while] we recognize the imperative need for this development...We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Eisenhower cautioned that the federal government’s collaboration with an alliance of military and industrial leaders, though necessary, was vulnerable to abuse of power. Ike then counseled American citizens to be vigilant in monitoring the military-industrial complex, but of course, we never have.  About half of the world's wealth is now controlled by American transnational corporations, many of which are part of the so-called "defense," which is to say, war industry.  Their control over our government's foreign and economic policies is so patent that when Joe Biden pitches more arms for Ukraine and for Israel, he points out that the cost of the aid will almost entirely go to American war industries. Just the other day we learned that the small-diameter, 250-pound bomb that killed more than 100 displaced Palestinians sheltering in a school complex in Gaza City was manufactured by Boeing.  We paid for it with our tax dollars and escalating debt and Boeing and its shareholders profited.  They can't be counted on to make safe aircraft anymore or to be able to bring their astronauts back from space, but they can make weapons to kill Palestinians during their morning prayers.

Many years ago, while sharing lunch with the other lawyers in our firm, we were discussing national security, and I argued that the greatest threat to world peace has long been our own government and economy.  Our huge economy, especially after World War II, means we have a huge need for natural resources from abroad and a huge need for friendly foreign markets for our products.  That produces a huge need for a huge military to protect both the required access to foreign resources and the required foreign markets.  That's why our troops, and no other nation's troops, are stationed all over the world. I should have expected my colleagues' reaction, which was as if I had questioned their mothers' virtue.  No, America is the world's great peacemaker, notwithstanding Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Venezuela, Iran, and perhaps Cuba.   I don't think so, and haven't, at least since Vietnam.

Anniversaries thoughts:  First, why mention Pius XII and Humani genris?  Because he and it were the reason I had such a cramped education in philosophy and theology at Marquette University between 1959 and 1963.  I and my classmates were indoctrinated, literally, with the Scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas developed in the the 13th century.  Humani generis forbade the teaching - or thinking- of philosophical and theological positions that any way deviated from the official teaching of the Catholic Church, doctrines and dogmas.  The encyclical was written in the years following the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Holocaust, i.e., following the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century that shook to the core our understanding of human nature, human life, and history.  It was the era in which Existentialism developed and old understandings of human nature and of history and of good and evil were questioned by all serious thinkers.  It was that questioning that Pius wanted to put an end to and to a large extent he succeeded.  At Marquette, in both theology and philosophy classes, I learned Thomism and neo-Thomism, the officially sanctioned teaching of the Church issued under its Magisterium, or Teaching Authority granted by God Himself.  I believe I am recalling correctly that even non-Catholics were required to take Philosophy 50, The Philosophy of Man, a thoroughly Scholastic interpretation of human nature.  I remember Dr. Simmons, my Epistomology professor, and Dr. Connell, who taught other philosophy and theology courses, following the party line: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Summa contra Gentiles.  I still get disgusted just thinking about it.  Propaganda, indoctrination, wasted educational and growth opportunities.

The ridiculousness of Pius's edict is clear in his attack on the theory of polygenism, that the human species developed from a number of different groups of progenitors, not just from Adam and Eve.  Pius wrote:

[T]he faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Pass the basin, please. 

Second, in August of 1965, there was a Black riot in the Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago.  It lasted 3 days and occasioned 80 injuries and 169 arrests. Still, it received relatively little attention because it started the day after the much larger Black riots in Los Angeles's Watts district, where 34 died, more than 1,000 were injured, more than $40 million in property damage occurred, and 14,000 National Guard troops were deployed.  I learned of the many riots and demonstrations going on in America while I was in Vietnam with tens of thousands of other American troops doing all we could to practice our profession of killing their people and destroying their stuff while at home America was burning.  Talk about cognitive and emotional dissonance.

Third, I reflect with some shame on Darryl Stingley's paralysis caused by Jack Tatum's 'hard hit' in a preseason exhibition game on this date in 1978.  Tatum's nickname was "The Assassin," which tells us all we need to know about him and about the game of football, especially professional football.  I stopped watching football several years ago because I didn't want to support the game even as a statistic, i.e., viewership.  I stopped because of disgust with the NFL owners' denial of CTE in their players but I should have stopped back in 1978 when brain-concussing 'hard hits,' especially on quarterbacks and wide receivers, were euphemized as getting "his bell rung" by guys like Jack Tatum. 

Lastly, Phoenix is America's fastest-growing city.  Insane!  

Crime and Punishment.  I read Dostoevsky's novel many decades ago and liked it, mainly because of the relationship between Raskolnikov and his mother and sister on the one hand and the young prostitute Sonya on the other.  I think I re-read it years later, but I'm not sure of that.  Maybe I only wanted to re-read it. In any event, I've started reading it again this afternoon, but without a firm commitment to work my way through all of it.  Early on, as I read in Part I,  chapter 2, I thought how contrived it seemed, with Marmeladov drunkenly laying out his and his family's history of hardships and poverty.  "Contrived" was the criticism I leveled against the concluding chapters of East of Eden just the other day, and one that I've thought several times while reading several novels over the last several months.  I invariably have to remind myself that all novels are 'contrived,' since they are works of fiction, made up, or contrived by their authors.  I was also a bit surprised by my emotional response to Marmeladov's tale of woe, how sorry I felt for him and his family, especially his daughter Sonia, and I wondered if I had the same emotional reaction when I read it before, as a much younger guy.  I realized that Dostoevsky was using Marmeladov's family as a stand-in for millions of poor families in 19th-century Russia, especially in the cities.  I know, though, that the reason I enjoyed the novel in earlier reading(s) was my emotional involvement in Raskolnikov's relationships with Sonya and with his mother and sister.  

Dr. Neary.  I spent part of the morning getting a filling replaced by Anne Neary.  The filling is in one of my front teeth, and as I lay supine in the dentist's chair, I thought of a song from my youth:

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth

My two front teeth, my two front teeth

Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth

Then I could wish you "Merry Christmas"

And it seems so long since I could say

"Sister Susie sitting on a thistle"

Gosh, oh gee, how happy I'd be

If I could only whistle

All I want for Christmas is my

(Two front teeth, two front teeth, two front teeth)

Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth

Then I could wish you "Merry Christmas"