Sunday, October 18, 2026
1767 Boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Mason–Dixon line, was agreed upon
1867 US took possession of Alaska from Russia, after paying $7.2 million in the Alaska Purchase
1878 Edison made electricity available for household use
1900 Count Bernhard von Bülow became Chancellor of Germany, famously referring to Germany's need for a 'place in the sun' and a global empire
1952 The first issue of Mad Magazine was published
1961 Emergency crisis was declared in South Vietnam due to communist attack
1988 Israel's Supreme Court upheld ban on Kahane's Kach Party as racist
2023 At least 500 Palestinians were killed in an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, with local officials blaming an Israeli missile attack and Israelis blaming a misfired Palestinian rocket
2025 A series of No Kings protests against the Trump administration were held across the United States. Additional protests were held worldwide before several US embassies
In bed at 9, up at 2:05, sleepless; 0230 203.2 114/69/64 96; 41/29/62/40, sunny, windy day ahead. Back to bed at 6:30, but I was unable to sleep to continue reading about Nan Goldin, and to write about he below.
Morning meds at 7:15 a.m. Entresto at 5 a.m. and p.m. I missed the evening med again, yech!😖
LTMW at 7:45 a.m., first I notice the plethora 😊 of birds above, on, and below our feeders. On the ground, the doves and snowbirds are busy feedng on the abundance of seeds I spread last night. I'm surprised by how very many snowbirds there are. do they travel in flocks? At the feeders, there are mostly finches and chickadees on the tube feeder, with doves and cardinals on the tray feeder, and a sparrow going at the suet cake. Every so often, a bird of one breed or another perches of the down-dipping branches of the locust tree above the feeding station. It's cold outside and the suet cake is drawing much more traffic than usual. I'll probably put out a second cake today (if I ever get dressed!)
While watching the birds and squirrels, I saw my Lebanese neighbor Ghasson walking his bull mastiff, Athena. For some reason that I'll never understand, Athena has a habit of stopping on their walks where County Line Road bends onto Wakefield Court. She stops walking and sits down, always looking west, down County Line. What touches me when I so often see this, gazing out my window, is that Ghasson always stops too, and patiently wait while Athena looks back down County Line. When his patience wears thin, he doesn't tug on Athena's leash, pressuring her neck. He just walks up to her to pat her on the head or shoulder, reminding her that it's time to go home, whereupon Athena stands and resumes passeggiata. On other occasions, I see other neighbors with small dogs that balk at walking simply pick their dogs up and carry them. Yet other neighbors are pretty rough with their pups, yanking on their leashes and forcing them to stop resting, or sniffing whatever it is they find so worthy of sniffing on our or the neighbor's lawn. On the day of the Honor Flight to Washington, I saw a dog owner pushing his dog in a stroller. I'm reminded that when I would walk with my dear cat Blanche DuBois to Geri's house to visit her before we were married, Blanche would ride on my shoulder. When we returned from our honeymoon trip to Ireland, our friend who was tending her in our absence informed us that she had gotten out somehow and was missing. A week later, she showed up on Geri's front porch, never having walked there herself. There's no particular point to any of thes, just some memories and observations. The photo show what Blanche and I liked to do when we weren't walking. She's been gone for almost 20 years now, and I still miss her.
Nan Goldin was not my favorite photographer, by any means. She took photos of her own life and the lives of the LGBTQ+ 'tribe' with whom she lived and consorted, but she's a courageous person by anyone's reckoning, Last night and early this morning, I watched Laura Poitras's 2022 documentary about her, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. The film is mostly about Goldin's semi-successful fights to force some modicum of justice from the Sackler family for their murderous marketing of Oxycontin, but it also contains some footage about Goldin's troubled early life and the effect on her at age 11 of her 18 year old sister Barbara's suicide. Barbara died by lying down on a railroad track and being run over and torn up by the train. In her pocket, she had a quote from Joseph Conrad's Hear of Darkness:
“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”
That thought gave me pause. It still gives me pause.
Goldin, already famous for documenting marginal lives and later for her campaign against the Sackler family and opioid philanthropy, becomes for Moser a model of Jewish dissent expressed through moral witness. In the chapter, her anti-Zionism is presented less as an abstract theory than as a response to what she sees happening in Gaza in real time. The title comes from her formulation that Gaza is, in effect, “the Holocaust on our phones”—an intentionally shocking comparison rooted in the fact that images of destruction and suffering are now visible continuously and immediately.
Moser follows Goldin through public protests and art-world confrontations, especially in Germany, where memory of the Holocaust has produced an unusually strong identification of support for Israel with postwar moral responsibility. Goldin attacks that equation. She argues that criticism of Israel, and even anti-Zionism, is not antisemitism, and that Holocaust memory should lead Jews and Germans toward solidarity with victims of state violence rather than toward automatic defense of Israel. The chapter shifts from the historical figures in the earlier parts of the book to a very current conflict over memory, Jewish identity, censorship, art, and political speech. Moser portrays Goldin as someone refusing what he sees as a central Zionist claim: that Jewish historical suffering necessarily validates or morally privileges a Jewish nation-state. Instead, her argument is that Jewish history imposes an obligation to recognize Palestinian suffering, even when doing so places her in conflict with Jewish institutions and with Germany’s official culture of Holocaust remembrance. Like the other Jewish anti-Zionists discussed throughout the book, Goldin pain a price from Zionist Jews for her courage.
It was a very good ending to a very good book. I'm glad I read it.
AI's effect on legal education. The lead op-ed in the NYTimes today is titled " I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down." I read a portion about it and saw it was a polemic about how business students quickly lose whatever altruistic goals they that may have led to business school in the socialization processes that occur with the school. The same thing happens in law schools for sure and perhaps, I don't know, in medical and dental schools. I've written about that elsewhere, though I don't know whether I could find it. What the article and its headline made me think about is what radical effects AI will have on highter education and professional education generally. A million years ago, make that maybe 30 years ago, when I was still on the faculty of MU's law school, I recall sitting on a sofa in front of the fireplace in our home on Newton Avenue grading final exams in a Civil Procedure class I taught. As I did so, I recall thinking how incredibly inefficient and unnecessarily expensive legal education is, and how I and others in the professoriate and in law school administration profited from the inefficiency, and law student bore the cost. That was 30 or more years ago, before most of us had an inkling of what was coming down the pike in the form of Artificial Intelligence. Now anyone with an interest and access to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini should be able to get a professional legal education cheaply and at his or her own pace, at home. Correction: I don't know whether any of the 'systems' or 'models' have been trained to replicate a typical law school curriculum, but I have no doubt whatsoever that could be. Which will be the first law school, or first university, to experiment with AI-taught courses? When it happens, which seems inevitable, how will the ABA, still the dominating accrediting authority, react? Could legal education be radically restructured in ways that would make it both more effective in training new lawyers and less expensive and time-consuming? That also seems inevitable. The ABA (and most professional accrediting agencies) has long seen its role as protecting protecting the profession by establishing entry barriers, i.e. by making very hard to get into. Ditto state bar associations who control bar examinations. Abe Lincoln got admitted to the Illinois Bar by clerking for an already-admitted lawyer for a period of time, 'reading law,' and passing the bar exam. Now most jurisdications require a 4 year undergraduate degree and 3 years of law school before a candidate is even eligible to 'sit for the bar exam.' Legal education and the entities that govern eligibility to practice law have long needn't a swift, hard kick in the ass. Let's see whether AI may deliver the boot.
As a relevant aside, I note that when I applied to law school in my last year in the Marines, 1967, the tuition was $500 a semester, $1,000 a year. When I arrived, I discovered the tuition had risen to $575, or $1,150 a year. Today tuition is $53,000, total estimated costs for a year at the law school, more than $76,000. If the school's tuition had merely kept pace with inflation since 1967, it would be around $11,500 today, not $53,000. In other words, the cost to obtain a Marquette law degree today, in inflation-adjusted terms, is 4.6 times as expensive as it was when I scraped together the money needed to attend from 1967 to 1970. Are today's students 4.6 times better prepared to practice law today than Tom St. John, Tom Brown, Larry Anderson, and I were when we graduated in 1970? I wouldn't bet on it.
After spending most of his adult life as a Marine, Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler wrote a book called War is a Racket. After 25 years on a law school faculty, I would say the same thing about American legal education.
More memories
My only journal entry a year ago: Email to James Causey at JSOnline:
Thanks for another great article about a great problem and one effective way of addressing it. It made me think back to the early 2000s when I mangaged the House of Peace at 17th and Walnut. There was one food store in the neighborhood, a Sentry store a few blocks west of us. It eventually shut down because of thefts. We knew that Sentry didn’t want to close the store, but the problem of thefts and unprofitability eventually forced the closure. The ‘business” at our free food bank, then supplied by the wonderful Sherrie Tussler at the Hunger Task Force, picked up considerably, but all we could supply was non-perishable food in cans and boxes, i.e., no fresh fruits, vegetables, or dairy. We became part of a food desert. I appreciate your pointing out the perfect storm that is developing under the current administration: rising food prices, fewer food sources, and reductions in the food stamp program. Tariffs will only make the problem worse. The nation’s needy, both rural and urban, have targets on their backs under this administration. Those professing to be “Christian Nationalists” forget Mt. 25:31-46, especially the part about “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.” Thanks for another great and needed article.
Three years ago today, in the second week of Israel's war on Gaza, prescience?
How much is too much? Most of the world was horrified by the news of Hamas' depradations, desacrations, and depravities in southern Israel on October 7th. Throughout the world, but especially in the Western world, there were expressions of sympathy and support for Israelis and Israel and recognition of Israel's right to defend itself. Knowing the history of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, I wonder whether the statements of American officials been so supportive as to give a green light, and more, to Netanyahu's government to engage in mass murders of civilians in Gaza? Defense Secretary Austin has said that America's support of Israel is "ironclad" and ""So, make no mistake: The United States will make sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself," essentially making the U.S. the partner not only the Israeli people, but of Israel's government, i.e., Natanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, et al. "In terms of conditions that we would place on the security assistance that we're providing to Israel, we have not placed any conditions on the provision of this equipment," Austin said at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "This is a professional military, led by professional leadership, and we would hope and expect that they would do the right things in the prosecution of their campaign," he said. As he traveled around the region over the past week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, making a point to Israelis and the world that he is a Jew, signaled that the Biden administration would have a high tolerance for whatever resulted from Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks. And now President Biden has flown into Tel Aviv to appear with Netanyahu and publicly side with Netanyahu's version of who attacked the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. I'm wondering if this is an example of the idea that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I believe there is much mutual hatred on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian abyss, that much blood has been shed and lives ruined by hostility and violence. We know there are radical elements in Netanyahu's government and perhaps (I don't know) in the IDF. Am I just a faint-hearted friend of Israel and the Jewish people? Can we be permitted to wonder about religious and nationalistic extremists in Israel as freely as we wonder about such people in the U.S.?
Paradise Drive, rustic road. I drove the balance due on our gutter and downspout replacement to C&K Services in Newburgh this afternoon and drove down to Paradise Drive on my very roundabout way home. It's still beautiful, as is so much of the land in northern Ozaukee and Washington counties. There are hardly any unharvested corn fields left; all the remains is stubble. Some alfalfa or other crop is still in some fields but mostly the fields are brown and the surrounding trees yellow, gold, cerise, deep red, and green. I drove through the Sugar Bush at Riveredge and down County O past Deerfield Drive. So many beautiful farms and beautiful homes, so close to Milwaukee and never seen by most city dwellers.
More sad news. Bill H. responded to my email about Lyn Felsenthal and told me Paula just got a positive report on a lung biopsy.
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