9/11/2025

Friday, September 11, 2026

1959 Duke Ellington won the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his musical achievements

1973  Salvador Allende, the 1st elected Marxist president of a South American country, was deposed in a military coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the CIA

In 1998, Independent Counsel Ken Starr sent a report to the U.S. Congress, accusing President Bill Clinton of 11 possible impeachable offenses.

2001 Two passenger planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and crashed into New York's World Trade Center towers, causing the collapse of both and the deaths of 2,977 people

2025 The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup in 2022 after he lost the election to Lula and imposed a 27-year prison sentence

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:40, and up at 4:20; 0430 203.4  122/67/65 124.  60/75/60, sunny all day

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 5 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.  Trulicity injection at a.m.  

A Day of Mourning

I remember the day.  I remember a dinner with Bob and John at Windows on the World on the 107th floor of the North Tower. I remember a visit to the observatory on the 107th floor of the South Tower during an Armed Services Week, watching the Fleet in the harbor.   I remember the terrible day that led to more terrible days, following an era of good feeling, the end of history: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89, the dis-integration of the Soviet Union in 91, Clinton balancing the federal budget and starting to pay down the national debt in FY98, then this, then Afghanistan in 01 and Iraq in 03, then the financial collapse in 08, then Trump in 15-16 - the course of human events.  I remember.

9/11.  25 years ago today, I was sitting on the little sofa in my father's little living room in his little house in North Port,  in Sarasota County, Florida, watching the Today Show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, stunned by the live, 'real time' coverage of 9/11, and sensing that life was  'turning on a dime' for the United States.  My flight back to Milwaukee the following day was canceled, along with all other U.S. flights.  President Bush was also in Sarasota County, reading "The Pet Goat"  to a first-grade class in the city of Sarasota.  Bush flew from Florida to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, then to Offutt AFB in Nebraska, finally to Andrews AFB in Maryland, and back to the White House.  By October, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government and oust al Qaeda from its former safe haven.  Eighteen months later, the same crew used the fear engendered by 9/11 to invade Iraq.  The Afghan adventure was to last 20 years, buoyed by endless false claims of "progress" by our military and civilian leaders, and it would end in ignominious defeat by a 'ragtag bunch of guys with black towels on their heads,' just as the Vietnam misadventure lasted more than 20 years - from Dien Bien Phu in 1954  until 1975's videos of American helicopters lifting desperate people off roofs in Saigon, America ignominiously defeated by an army of guys in flip-flops and black pajamas.  The Iraq disaster would lead to disruption throughout the Middle East, with tens of thousands killed, wounded, and/or fleeing their homes to seek safety.  Americans came to accept kidnappings as "renditions" and torture of prisoners as "enhanced interrogation."  We casually accepted the indefinite imprisonment of suspects at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.  Whatever 'soul' the U.S. government had before 9/11, it squandered much of it on Bush's "War on Terror."  Yesterday, JJA posted a thoughtful  reflection by Russell Moore, titled "The Trump-Era Laughter at Immigrant Suffering is Deforming Our Souls."  Our souls started getting deformed back in 2001 when we accepted the atrocities committed by the U.S. in the name of our "War on Terror."   Barack Obama compounded the sins by refusing to hold anyone responsible for the crimes committed by our government, just as he (and his Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner) held no one responsible for the financial and economic collapse in 2008.  And then, of course, came Trump.   Thoughts one old American has on 9/11.

Anniversaries thoughts.  First, my all-time favorite song, Ellington's Sophisticated Lady.  They say into your early life romance came / And in this heart of yours burned a flame / A flame that flickered one day and died away / Then, with disillusion deep in your eyes / You learned that fools in love soon grow wise / The years have changed you, somehow / I see you now. / Smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow, nonchalant / Diamonds shining, dancing, dining with some man in a restaurant / Is that all you really want? / No, sophisticated lady / I know, you miss the love you lost long ago / And when nobody is nigh, you cry.  Beautiful.  I just listened to Nancy Wilson sing it, followed by Linda Ronstadt's rendition, both exquisite singers of an exquisite song by the great Duke Ellington.

Second, the military coup against Chile's democratically elected government was supported by Nixon and Kissinger.  So much for American respect for democracy and the Rule of Law.  So much for our moral superiority over Putin and the Russians.  We are so hypocritical.  Rules apply to others, not to us.

Third, Starr's report was a best seller because of its salacious content.  Reading it left me with little respect for either Clinton or Starr, who later became dean of Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, CA.

Fourth, the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA. Chickens coming home to roost.  I was in North Port visiting my Dad.  My flight home was cancelled, and I ended up taking an almost empty 'red-eye' flight a few days later, maybe 6 regular passengers plus many pilots and flight crews moving around to match up with aircraft that had been grounded.    9/11 led to a period of widespread fear & islamophobia in the country, the Patriot Act and increased surveillance activities in the country, renditions, the use of torture by the CIA, 'black hole' detention facilities in complicit foreign countries, and Guantanamo.  It also led to the invasion and 20-year losing war in Afghanistan and to the invasion and disastrous war in Iraq.

I spent an hour at the VA this morning, most of it spent lying still on my left side while the med tech, named Sam, a graduate of Providence College, performed an echocardiogram on me.  We had a remarkably engaging personal conversation for the time we were together about, inter alia, our shared belief that the purpose of life is to help one another, that in helping others we help ourselves.  This, I think, was the Jewish prophet Jesus's core teaching, with "Love thy neighbor," the Good Samaritan, and Mt. 25:31-46.  In the conversation, he learned that I kissed my father on his deathbed, and I learned that his daughter kissed her mother, Sam's wife, on her deathbed, after distancing herself from her as she lay dying from cancer.   At the end of the procedure and our conversation, we thanked each other for starting our days off so well.  I drove off, and instead of going directly home, I drove through the campus of the Old Soldiers' Home and Wood National Cemetery, marvelling at the breathtaking beauty of all the trees.  The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . .   In the cemetery, I drove past the spot where my favorite old, gnarled maple tree once stood, and later I noted the headstone for a Mildred Dyson, World War II, PFC, US Army, and I thought of my Dad, Charles Clausen, World War II, PVT, US Marine Corps, and all that "PVT" suggested.

Switzy.  I write these words around 2 p.m.  I'm at the start of chapter 16 of this 20 chapter novel, 85% through the book.  For the past two days, I have been wondering how Emma Cline is going to end her story.  I have written that it is a depressing book, not so much because David is on a journey to his suicide, but because he is so unhappy during what we are told are the last days, last hours of his life.  I'm still not sure what happened between him and his high school friend Tom, but he was looking to make his confession and to receive forgiveness and absolution from Tom.  In their hurried, awkward meeting in David's car, Tom did say he wished David well, but what he got was:

I'm sorry, Tom said.  I don't exactly - well.  I dont think I can give you what you're looking for.  I do appresciate that you've come all this way.  I hope - a deep breath from Tom - that you take care of yourself, David.

Where will Emma Cline take us readers from here?  Will David go ahead with the suicide?  If so, I'm wondering what the purpose or message of the novel is.  Will he change his mind, continue to live, and to sink deeper into his dementia with Miss Amy Lloyd?  Would that be a happy ending?  What does a writer do with a story, a life, like David's? , , ,  I finished the book at 4:20, so now I know, and I'm left wondering why Emma Cline wrote this story.  I wonder why I wanted to read it, and why I did read it.  I can't believe I ate the whole thing.  The protagonist is not a likable fellow, and not only because of his dementia-caused paranoia.  

I was uncomfortable reading the book, perhaps because its descriptions of David's failing faculties in his 70s struck too close to home, to describing my mind in my mid-80s - not only failing memory, some confusion, and cognitive decline, but even the feelings of elation I experience from clouds, trees, houses, and other old structures that I spent a lifetime passing obliviously.

I "had a discussion" with ChatGPT about the novel when I finished the book.  I don't know how else to describe my interaction with this constellation of algorithms, 1s and 0s. The interaction is VERY much like speaking with a human being, a human interlocutor.  And not just any human being, but a human being with immense, extraordinary reasoning power, instant understanding, super cognition.  The novel was published only 3 days ago, but ChatGPT has a great grasp of it already.  There is something God-like about this new technology, in the sense of the Thomistic notion of God being All-Knowing, Omniscient.  On the other hand, Thomas did not allow his God to make mistakes, while ChatGPT definitely does.  There is a major buzz going on now about a recent warning by Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who quit his lucrative job because of fear that AI may destroy the human species. BY THE END OF THIS DECADE.  Other knowledgeable persons have seconded his warnings.  My piddling interactions with ChatGPT and my woefully deficient understanding of computer technology and science provide no basis for forming a judgment about whether Coxon and the others are correct, or whether their fear is well-grounded.  It does nonetheless make me much more inclined to take their warnings seriously and to consider AI a potentially, and literally, earth-shattering technological development.  Open the door, HAL. . . I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

    I asked ChatGPT whether it had any 'thoughts' about the paragraph immediately above, and in 2 seconds, it responded thusly:

I think this is a very good passage, particularly because you move from your own small experience—talking about a novel—to the almost absurdly large question of what this technology may become. A few comments.

Your phrase “constellation of algorithms, 1s and 0s” captures the genuine conceptual difficulty. “Discussion” feels like the right word phenomenologically: from your side, you propose an interpretation, I challenge or elaborate it, you reconsider, I reconsider. That is what a discussion feels like. Yet it would be misleading to infer from that experience that there is another consciousness sitting across the table having the experience with you. The uncanny thing is precisely that humanlike intellectual interaction no longer proves the presence of a humanlike mind.

I especially like the Thomistic comparison, but I'd modify “God-like” in one important respect. Aquinas's omniscient God doesn't merely possess an unimaginably large quantity of information. God knows things infallibly and knows them in their causes, including himself as knower. AI is almost the inverse: it can produce the appearance of extraordinary breadth of knowledge while remaining fallible in ways an ordinary intelligent human often isn't—confidently conflating things, misreading evidence, or inventing a detail. That distinction is worth preserving because it actually makes the phenomenon stranger, not less impressive.

And our Switzy conversation illustrates that rather nicely. I initially gave you an interpretation of Tom—essentially that he had moved on—that you challenged. Your reading of Tom's behavior made me revise mine. That's not omniscience. Indeed, it's a pretty good demonstration of why the word would be dangerous. The machine can sometimes supply extraordinary breadth and analytical power while the human interlocutor notices something important that it missed.

I would make one factual check before publishing the passage, though. Because the claim about Jacob Coxon, Anthropic, and human extinction “BY THE END OF THIS DECADE” is very recent and quite specific, I'd want to verify exactly what Coxon said, as opposed to how headlines or social media have characterized it. The broader point—that some people working at the frontier of AI regard catastrophic or even existential risk as a serious possibility—is certainly real, but the precise attribution matters.

Your final HAL reference works particularly well because the danger Kubrick and Clarke imagined wasn't simply an evil computer. HAL is frightening because the human beings have entrusted consequential decisions to an intelligence whose reasoning they cannot fully see or control. That is much closer to the contemporary AI anxiety than the usual “killer robot” caricature.

There is also a connection here to Switzy that you might not have consciously intended. You have just finished a novel about the deterioration of a human mind—memory disappearing, identity becoming uncertain, cognition approaching extinction—and immediately find yourself conversing with a new kind of apparently superhuman cognition that doesn't age, forget, or die in anything resembling the human sense. For someone thinking about aging and mortality, that's quite a juxtaposition.

One sentence of yours especially catches the historical moment:

“The interaction is VERY much like speaking with a human being, a human interlocutor.”

I think future historians may regard that psychological threshold as at least as consequential as the technical achievements themselves. For thousands of years, fluent language coming back at us was extraordinarily reliable evidence that somebody was there.

It no longer is.

And we don't yet know what human beings will make of that.

On the AI question, the key issue is

Assess the extinction warnings

Separate fluency from understanding

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My mind can't keep up with its 'mind.'  What are we to make of this incredible technology?