9/12/2026

 Saturday, September 12, 2026

1960 John F. Kennedy stated he did not speak for the Roman Catholic Church, nor did the Church speak for him.

2005 Israel completed its unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip after dismantling Israeli settlements and withdrawing its soldiers

2011 Closing on our house in Bayside

2023  House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, without a formal House vote, amid some Republican calls to remove McCarthy from leadership

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:45; 0600 202.0 117/76/65 111; 63/80/62, mixed cloudy/partly/ sunny.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.   Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.

LTMW at 7:45 a.m., it's Grand Central Station at rush hour at the bird feeders, or the flight deck of a carrier when all the aircraft return at once, waiting their turn to land.  I also see a dad slowly walking his little one in a stroller, turning from Wakefield onto County Line.  One is a picture of calmness; the other, of freneticness.  I still have the ball of nesting cotton hanging on a shepherd's crook, but I haven't seen any bird plucking away at it for some time now.  With autumn approaching, I guess nesting season is behind us, and it's time to remove the cotton ball.

Sarah's FB comment on 9/11 yesterday and my response:

SCC:  I wasn't in New York that day. I was in London, far away from home, but close to colleagues and friends who were also far away from home. All of us 'stuck' where we were because our country had locked everyone out. The people in London were so nice and caring to us all for those surreal days. The trip home 5 days later was nerve-wracking as Heathrow, a 'joy' on any other day, was utter madness. Doom-scrolling these days has nothing on BBC/CNN for hours while you cannot get a line to contact your family in the states. I remember. And I weep for what we have become in the aftermath.

CDC:  I was in Florida visiting my Dad, scheduled to come home the next day, when all US flights were still grounded.  I got out a few days later on a red-eye from Tampa, with about 5 other civilian passengers and a plane load of pilots and flight crews scrambling to catch up with their assigned aircraft grounded all over the country.  And I too weep for what we have become in the aftermath: the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, kidnappings called 'renditions, torture called 'enhanced interrogation,' 'black site' prisons, Abu Ghraib, endless incarceration without charges or trials in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial system collapse, and now Trump.  MLK told us that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.  It sure doesn't seem to be bending our way so far this century. 

I copied and shared JJA's FB post this morning.   For some reason, her accurate and telling comments weren't copied, but the underlying Republican National Committee political ad, "God sent us Trump," was, along with my comments.  I must have clicked the wrong 'share' icon.

Charles D. Clausen. Shared with Your friends

An appalling appeal to Christian evangelical nationalists and yet another reason why church membership generally has declined so much.  I am reminded that, in 1932, there was a group called the "German Christians" that tried to establish a "Reich Church," ("Reichskirche") loyal to Hitler.  Hitler's accession transformed it from a faction into a major force. It combined Christianity with German nationalism, Nazi racial ideology, antisemitism, and the Führerprinzip—the principle of authoritarian leadership.  in July 1933. Hitler publicly supported the German Christians in nationwide Protestant church elections. They won roughly a two-thirds majority, giving them control of many regional churches and major positions in the newly centralized German Evangelical Church. Hitler's church adviser Ludwig Müller subsequently became Reichsbischof—Reich Bishop.  This produced what Germans called the Kirchenkampf, the “church struggle.” Christians opposed to Nazi control organized what became the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), associated especially with Martin (First they came for the Communists . . .) Niemöller, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Its 1934 Barmen Declaration rejected the proposition that the church could recognize Hitler, the state, race, or nation as another source of divine revelation alongside Christ.  Those who don't see the terrifying parallels between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what is happening now in America are woefully ignorant of history or willfully blind. See less

Aaron Rupar  Wow -- RNC video: "On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,' so God gave us Trump."

It only gets more unhinged and culty from there.

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First they came for the Communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Jew 

Then they came for me / And there was no one left / To speak out for me 

AI as a cause for severe heebie-jeebies.  From this morning's NYTimes, "Inside the Snowballing Conversations at A.I. Companies About a Doomsday - Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google are increasingly trying to raise awareness about the risks of artificial intelligence." by Mike Isaac and Kate Conger.

When Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, publicly quit the artificial intelligence start-up this week, citing his concerns over the powerful technology, the internal messages began flying.

“It’s what we’ve all been saying,” one Anthropic employee wrote about Mr. Coxon’s comments, in a company chat that was viewed by The New York Times. “It’s just public-facing now.”  “Jacob took the group chat public,” another employee wrote. “That’s a good thing.”

The reactions inside Anthropic were echoed by A.I. researchers at OpenAI, Meta and Google, who parsed Mr. Coxon’s social media posts that described how OpenAI and Anthropic were “gambling with our lives” with the technology. Many convened in office messaging channels, encrypted chats and private dinners, with the goal of organizing to raise awareness about the risks of A.I., according to a dozen employees across the companies.

For those who have made A.I. their life’s work, Mr. Coxon’s message was not new. But his comments snowballed into such a global conversation that many saw it as a moment to call for increased caution. Some A.I. workers are now speaking up to top executives to urge a pause in developing the fast-evolving technology until it has the proper safeguards, six of the people said.

The conversations underline the tensions within the leading A.I. labs over the safest ways to develop the technology. Even as employees become emboldened to call for a slowdown in A.I. development, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are juggling priorities.

Both are planning blockbuster initial public offerings within the next year. The companies are also fearful they could face antitrust concerns if they agreed among themselves to take a breather in A.I. development, two people with knowledge of the matter said. And Chinese start-ups have produced competitive A.I. models, raising the possibility that U.S. companies would fall behind if they slowed down.

That has created a tricky situation for top A.I. executives, many of whom agree that the technology poses risks. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, wrote in a 2023 blog post that A.I. could “cause grievous harm to the world.” Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, wrote in an opinion column last year that A.I. should be regulated to control the risks.

This is an example of the Moloch Trap.  Our AI behemoths compete against one another, and they all compete against China to be the "first-est" with the "best-est" and most powerful AI systems, even though they all know that the Golden Goose they are seeking may kill all of us.  The companies compete fiercely against one another in pursuit of a goal that can ultimately destroy all of them.  None is willing to slow down or stop for fear of the competitor gaining the advantage.  On the other hand, they fear the government may intervene to stop them, not because it fears the ultimate destruction, but because it desires the intercompany competition.  We desperately need human cooperation and regulation to avoid the very real possibility (and thus probability?) of a catastrophe.  We aren't good at either cooperation among competitors or regulating economic behavior.  Plus, quis custodiet custodes?  Who will regulate the regulators?  Plus, there are at most only a few hundred people in the US who really understand what is happening in AI development, and those people all work for the companies developing the systems with the capacity to destroy our species.  They're all in line to make billions from AI.  Who is equipped to regulate them?  I think we are on the Road to Perdition (not the movie). I'm not smart enough to deal with this issue, but I'm smart enough to know it's real, and cynical enough to believe that we, as a people and as a species, don't have the moral bandwidth to prevent it.  Homo hominis lupus.  The strong do what they will,  . . .   Open the door, HAL

American Scoundrel.  I have restarted this book about Roy Cohn, who is indeed a scoundrel, and has been almost all his life.  I don't know that I'll be able to read the whole thing, simply because I get no pleasure reading about someone as detestable as Roy Cohn.  Stephen Miller is another example of an American scoundrel.  Of course, so is Donald Trump.  They are all rule-breakers, norm-shatterers, contemptuous of others and of common notions of morality, fairness, and decency.  They don't give a shit and consider those who do give a shit fools, suchers, and losers.  Who does this remind us of?  One of the things that struck me early on in the book was how he used 'connections' to pull strings to evade the draft at the end of World War II.  He was a great manipulator of people and systems and institutions, a 'fixer.'  He 'came from money,' as my mother used to say.  He came from the elite of New York City's secular Jewish society. They didn't eschew their Jewishness -they were twice-a-year synagogue-goers- but they didn't practice Judaism.  He went to ritzy schools like Fieldston (which Andrew Weissman attended) and Horace Mann, where he was surrounded by other wealthy Jewish elites who were significant 'connections' in his later life.   I don't like writing about him just as I don't particularly like reading about him.

I picked up my youngest grandson, Drew, this afternoon at MSOE after some sort of robotics kickoff gathering for the new school year and new year of competitions.   Andy and Anh were with Lizzie at a volleyball match or tournament somewhere.  Drew's not much of a talker, at least to his grandparents, but he did tell me that he expects to go to Marquette High School next year, and not to Nicolet.  He said it was his parents' decision, not his, but he was OK with it, because MUHS has a good robotics team.