9/15/2026

 Tuesday, September 15, 2026

1951 Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Ingruentium Malorum

1963 Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed 4 African-American girls

1966  Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a letter to the United States Congress urging the enactment of gun control legislation.

1981 Pope John Paul II published the \encyclical "Laborem exercens" (through work) against capitalism and Marxism

2011 We moved into our house in Bayside

2022 The European Parliament said Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, saying Viktor Orbán’s government has become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” 

2024 A man was arrested and charged with the attempted assassination of  Donald Trump, spotted while  Trump was playing golf 

2025 Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the Army National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee, to "combat crimes"

In bed at 9, up at 7:20; 0735 202.0 123/80/65. 108; 66/66/62, rainy early, then cloudy.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Entresto at 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Geri is off today to Charlotte to visit with cousin Sue and hubby Tom Clark.  For years, we got together with them regularly when they lived in Arlington Heights, IL. They moved to North Carolina to be close to their son and his family, and that ended our regular overnight visits, which I always enjoyed.  I like both of them a lot and miss those regular visits.  Geri returns on Sunday.  She planned the visit so she wouldn't miss her Monday night line dancing sessions at Nicolet High School, which started last night.  She also stopped at David's and Sharon's house after the line dancing to give a 12th birthday gift to her granddaughter Ellis, whose birthday is tomorrow.  Ellis, like all our grandchildren, seems to me to be an extraordinary little human being.  Do all grandparents feel this way about their grandchildren?  I always have mixed feelings about Geri's trips to visit friends and family.  I miss her when she's gone, rattling around the house alone, thinking it's she who makes this house our home, but I want her to take these trips because they're important to her and her friends and family, and I'm well aware that living with me as a ferkrimpter semi-cripple is no picnic.

Text exchanges with CBG:

My friend Nir, a former shaliach from Israel who spent 4 years in Milwaukee, became a reform Rabbi and now runs a synagogue and school in Israel, sends out his thoughts and views on a what’s app group chain. This week he sent this out and I loved it for the hope he inspires and I thought you might appreciate it.

llay and Ori are staying with us for the holiday.

We were glad to give their parents a little time to themselves, so that they might begin the new year with renewed strength.

Ilay, five years old, is perceptive and independent. One can already see in him the first stirrings of a well formed self, emerging, distinct, and clear.

There is so much of  [ I was unable to copy the other 7 pages of the message.]

CDC:  Thank you, dear friend, and Shana Tovah.  Somehow I let Rosh Hashanh get by me this year, as I am increasingly distracted by bad news.  Nir’s New Year greeting is beautiful, almost mystical in his description of his and Ori’s experience of Oneness during feeding, the importance of mutual presence and touch.  I noted too the not so subtle repetition of God’s injunction in Deuteronomy to Choose Life., and that we have always before us blessings and curse.  I keep trying to not forget the abundant blessings, though it often is hard.  You know that I count you and Dan among my abundant blessings.  I also loved his quote of Golda Meir.  There’s so much wisdom packed into it.  Golda also reminds me of the intimate connection between the U.S. and Israel, both its blessedness and its cursedness.  Nir seems very well suited to be a rabbi.  Thank you, Sweetie.❤️

And, BTW, I had a bout of sleeplessness the night before last, up from 1:45 till 6 a.m.  and wrote a long reflection in my journal/blog in the middle of the night about the importance of love in our human lives.  I printed it off for my hard copy of the journal, but never hit the ‘publish’ button and lost it to the blog, to my regret, but it started out with me wondering why I have loved Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady through so many years, and concluding that it was because it captures the deep-down loneliness that is part of being human, something Elizabeth Strout does so well in her novels, and how only love saves us from it.  I think we find the same kind of underlying message in Joe Cocker’s Love Lift Us Up, and Andrew Llyod Webber’s Love Changes Everything, and, I suspect, hundreds of other songs.  It got me wondering too whether this wasn’t the underlying message of the major religions, at least Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism.  I’ve been trying to figure out the big “God” question since I was in 6th grade, never getting close to an answer, but I keep struggling.  I’m remembering a lunch I had years ago with an old friend, Vicki Conte, who wisely reminded me, “It’s not a head thing, Chuck, it’s a heart thing. "  The current AI crisis has me at it again with the specter of species extinction now including our own species.  I’m bouyed by your and Nir’s hopefulness. Thanks again.

Off to the races.  This morning's NYTimes reports that the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force had admitted that the U.S. has deployed weapons in space. 

“We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” he said at a convention in Maryland, according to a news release published on the Air Force’s website.

In 2024, The New York Times reported that American intelligence agencies had raised concerns that Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon in space, a threat that could disrupt satellite networks that are vital to everything from communications to military operations.

Shortly after President Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive order to expand American air defenses, including the development and deployment of “space-based interceptors.” The project, named the Golden Dome, would be designed to guard against weapons such as hypersonic missiles, which Russia has deployed in Ukraine. 

This news should come as no big surprise, and I suppose it doesn't.  I also suppose it will be greeted as great news by many, and maybe I should be one of them.  We surely don't want to be vulnerable to the world's other hegemon, China, or to that back-up-against-a- wall Vladimir Putin, but the news just makes me aware of how much more vulnerable we are than we used to be.  A weapon from space could annihilate us.  A rogue AI agent could annihilate us.  The races - the arms race, the AI race with China - defended as making us safer are also making us less safe, more insecure, more vulnerable, more anxious.  We are indeed in the Moloch Trap, in which individually rational pursuit of an objective within a competitive system can produce a collectively disastrous result that nobody actually wanted.  We all purport to want a world with no or fewer nuclear weapons, but our competition with each other produces a world with many more nuclear weapons.  None of us wants to live in a world containing super-intelligent computer systems that may be truly autonomous, i.e., acting with ends other than what humans program into them, but our competition may lead to just that result.  We and our enemies all want to be protected from bad actions by the other, or even just to be "out-capabled" by the others.  We rationally say we are forced to engage in the competitive conduct that produces risks we all also say we wish to avoid. It's madness.  And, it's not just physical extinction of the human species that's a risk; it's things like the destruction of our cyber systems that control our financial systems.  We think that we are financially secure because of adequate retirement savings, but those savings are only numbers stored in computers in New York or elsewhere, subject to erasure or deletion by an electromagnetic pulse from a high-altitude nuclear explosion, or by a rogue AI hacking financial records.  Our era of super technology and super convenience has also produced an era of super vulnerability to technological attack or failure.  It's enough to give this old guy the willies, and it does.

American Scoundrel.  I am making slow progress in this book, and not because it's not interesting.  It is very interesting.  It takes me back to the early and mid-1950s, the McCarthy Era, and recalls what a truly dreadful time it was.  The authors of the book call Roy Cohn McCarthy's Rasputin.  Cohn called himself McCarthy's brains.  The authors excoriate McCarthy as well as Cohn and his sidekick David Schine, whom I had forgotten about.  The authors also don't hide their contempt for Dwight Eisenhower's craven enabling of McCarthy and Cohn through his refusal to take on McCarthy and Cohn and to defend the innocents who were victimized by them, in the face of many advisors urging him to do so.   There are no heroes in this narrative so far; I'm waiting for Attorney Joseph Welch to show up.  In any event, I'm only about 20% through the book and moving at a snail's pace.  Giddy up!  The photo is of David Schine, Roy Cohn, and Joe McCarthy, ignoble contributors to America's dark history- the history that Trump and his minions are doing their best to erase and deny.

Four years ago today, I finished reading Eva Hoffman's Shtetl, wondering why Caela thought she detected some elements of excuse-making or whitewashing in it.  Watched an hour interview of Eva Hoffman on YouTube.  I'm wondering whether Shtetl was the last complete book I read until CBG got me reading again with Theo of Golden.  I suspect it was.