9/17/2026

 Thursday, September 17, 2026

1787 US Constitution was signed by delegates at the Philadelphia Convention

1941 Famous meeting between Danish physicist Niels Bohr and German head of the nuclear energy project Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen to discuss nuclear weapons

1978 Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter signed the Camp David Accords, frameworks for peace in the Middle East and between Egypt and Israel

1986 US Senate confirmed Shorewood H.S. alumnus William Rehnquist as 16th chief justice

2024 Handheld pagers belonging to members of the armed group Hezbollah exploded across Lebanon, killing nine people and injuring 2,800

2025 The European Union outlined a set of sanctions against Israeli settlers and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and urged the 27 member states to issue these sanctions to freeze European assets and ban inter-EU travel. 

In bed at  9:20, up at 5:40; 0640. 202.6  119/75/67  108;61/69/60, rainy morning, cloudy day.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.  I missed my evening dose last night.  Did my alarm not go off???  Not good.

Life turns on a dime: expectations.  The lead article in this morning's NYTimes is titled Republicans Reel on the Midterm Map as Deep-Red Areas Come Into Play.  It's about all the polls suggesting that the Republicans are in electoral trouble in some deep-red states and that the Democrats may regain control of the House and the Senate next November.  Almost all of the TV political pundits are all talking about the same polls and predicting the end of Trump's almost total control of the power tools of government.  I refuse to get all het up over these polls because I learned long ago the truth of an adage I heard for the first time on the old TV sitcom Northern Exposure, i.e., life turns on a dime, and the truth of what the Buddha taught long ago than that, i.e., that expectations cause suffering.  We tend to go through our lives believing or assuming that life follows the first part of Newton's law of mechanics or motion: a body at rest tends to remain at rest & a body in motion tends to remain in motion.  We tend to ignore the second part - unless acted on by a force.  We're like Desmond and Molly in the Beatles song Ob-La-Di, singing life goes on, and indeed it does, until it doesn't.  We can't predict the future based on today's political polls, even though they have been largely the same for some time.  No one knows what may happen between now and November 3.  We hope to drive the Republicans from power in both houses of Congress; we should work toward it, and be grateful if it occurs,  but we shouldn't expect it.  We shouldn't take it for granted.  As Buddha taught, expectations lead to suffering, to disappointment, and to diminished joy and gratitude when hoped-for good things come.  I probably go too far the other way, tending to expect bad things, i.e., to be pessimistic, Mickey the Mope.  It's a tendency I developed in my childhood, a way to fend off disappointment.  I'm working to get better.

Otherwise

by Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

I think we're in big trouble: OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior.  From this morning's NYTimes:

OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission, amid an ongoing industrywide debate about A.I. safety.

The San Francisco company revealed what it said was the “unexpected or concerning” behavior of its A.I. models as part of a new framework for reporting “misalignment,” which is when the goals or actions of A.I. systems diverge from human intentions and values.

OpenAI said it did not believe the industry “has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.” Decisions about how A.I. should advance, the company said, must rest on evidence that people outside the labs building it “can examine for themselves.”

I fear that the genie is already out of the bottle, that we're way past the tipping point.   

Donald Trump and Willy Horton.  At a campaign rally for the lackluster Republican candidate for Thom Tillis's seat in the US Senate,  Donald Trump said this:

Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy. Same thing as this -- same as, same exact thing. And on his first day out, he raped and murdered, raped and murdered again and again. And he ended up killing three women.  Overnight Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide because of that one advertisement. They put it on just like we're putting this on because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office, not this guy former governor Roy Cooper]

From It Was All A Lie, by former Republican campaign manager Stuart Stevers, 2020:

Race, the Orignal Republican Sin

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger."  By 1968 you say "nigher" - that hurts you.  Backfires.  So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and stuff like that.

In my first race I had stumbled onto a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern poltics was played. . . .

What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect?  You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters.  That is the truth that led to what is famously called "the southern strategy."  That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.

. . . 

What the Republican Party must realize is that it needs America more than America needs th eparty.  And the America it needs is the one that is 320 million Americans and growing, a country of immigrants and less white every day: the real America, not the gauzy Shangri-La of suburband bliss that never existed.  I'd like to say I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to that challenge.  But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.

Amen. 

The graphic is a painting I did years ago, intending to depict the larger-than-life Willy Horton with serpentine or reptilian eyes, with a diminished George H. W. Bush, who was responsible for the racist ad featuring Horton, as a smaller creature nipping at him over his shoulder.