10/5/2026

 Monday, October 5, 2026

1947 Harry Truman delivered the first presidential address televised from the White House

1951 Jackie Gleason debuted the character of bus driver Ralph Kramden in 1st "The Honeymooners" skit (Cavalcade of Stars)

1988 Chile voted in a referendum 56-44 against extending Augusto Pinochet's regime by 8 years, thus ending the dictator's 16½ years in power

2015 California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill giving terminally ill patients the "right to die"

2025 At least five people were killed in Lviv, Ukraine, during an overnight Russian attack involving 53 ballistic and cruise missiles and 496 drones.

2025 Donald Trump authorized the deployment of 300 National Guard personnel to Chicago, IL.

In bed around 9, up around5; 0525 202.2 117/74/69 132; 47/39/60/47, sunny all day

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5:50 a.m. and p.m.

Holy smokes, I'm a misanthrope!  Wikipedia says of misanthropy: 

Misanthropy is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature. A misanthrope or misanthropist is someone who holds such views or feelings. 

We, misanthropes, don't think much of humankind as a species.  We're not stupidly unaware of the scientific and technological achievements that have been made by many members of our species since its creation, or its evolution from hominoidea or apehood, like the beneficial uses of fire, water, and many minerals, homo faber, but we are also never unaware of our history of using our achievements to prey on one another and on other species, homo hominis lupus, and to despoil the earth even to the point of risking its destruction or radical metamorphosis, the nuclear arms race, mutally assured destruction, climate change, and the AI race.  I am one of only 1.8% of the world population who were born before the Atomic Age, before the United States dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima.  More than 98% of my fellow humans have lived their entire lives under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction and of a Nuclear Winter, perhaps our species' most effective way to reverse global warming.  I lived almost 4 years before that bit of "progress" entered my life.  Now, as I approach the exit doors, I am in or about to enter the era where the whole species may be annihilated before the end of this decade, another 4 years of grace.

Is the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction behind us? Hardly.  There are nine nuclear-armed states today: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. SIPRI and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) both put the global total at about 12,200 nuclear warheads as of early 2026. Of those, roughly 9,700 are in military stockpiles and potentially available for use, while the remainder are retired but not yet dismantled.  The most reliable estimates tell us there are about 3,900 deployed strategic warheads worldwide. Those are the long-range weapons associated principally with ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers. Roughly 2,100–2,200 deployed warheads are kept on high operational alert.  FAS’s current estimate is about 1,794 Russian non-strategic warheads in its military stockpile. The United States has roughly 100 deployed non-strategic B61 bombs, with additional bombs in reserve.  Countries continuously work on improving their nuclear arsenal.  For the United States, deployed strategic warheads range from the 8-kiloton W76-2 to the 90-kiloton W76-1, the 300-kiloton W87, and the 455-kiloton W88. Russia likewise deploys warheads ranging from roughly the low hundreds of kilotons up to several hundred kilotons on many of its strategic missiles, with some older systems carrying still larger yields.  For perspective, the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons. A single modern 300-kiloton warhead has about 20 times Hiroshima’s explosive yield; a 455-kiloton W88 about 30 times.  Most of mankind has lived under the threat of these deployed and ever-on-operational-alert weapons for their entire lives.  

The AI scientists are even scarier than the nuclear guys, with warnings of annihilation of our entire species within the current decade, or perhaps a little later.

If I had the energy to spend the day thinking about it, I would compare my pessimistic views with Reinhold Neibuhr's in Moral Man and Immoral Society, Jonathan Swift's in Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, and with John Calvin's theology of mankind's total depravity.

And, BTW, tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of Joseph Stalin's announcement that the Soviet Union had its own atom bomb.  I suppose October 6, 1951 should be considered the birthday of Mutually Assured Destruction.

In this morning's NYTimes, an op-ed: How AIPAC Failed — and How It Can Recover, by Eric Alterman:

After the 1995 assassination of Rabin and the subsequent collapse of the peace process, AIPAC resumed its steady march rightward. The lobby also began to embrace the support of far-right Christian Zionists. At a public interview in 2021, Ron Dermer, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said “the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians” rather than American Jews, who he said were “disproportionately among [Israel’s] critics.” AIPAC followed suit.

The specific challenges the organization faces today can be traced to Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to appear before Congress in March 2015 at the invitation of Representative John Boehner, then the Republican speaker of the House. In an unusual move for a foreign ally, Mr. Netanyahu publicly aligned himself with the Republican Party’s attempts to undermine President Obama, a Democrat and a leader who happened to be supported by a majority of American Jews. In his address, Mr. Netanyahu denounced the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts toward the nuclear disarmament in Iran, better known as the Iran deal. AIPAC and an affiliate spent nearly $30 million on a failed campaign to prevent the deal’s passage.

AIPAC’s increasing identification with both the methods and the goals of the Republican Party has become ever more evident over the past decade. In early 2020, it produced a Facebook ad accusing “radicals in the Democratic Party” of “pushing their antisemitic and anti-Israel policies down the throats of the American people.”

AIPAC’s annual conference was once a way station for all presidential hopefuls, but in 2019 Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, as well as former Representative Beto O’Rourke, among others, all declined to attend, a decision that would have been hard to imagine just four years earlier.

In December 2021, AIPAC created a super PAC that also swung right. The group immediately amassed an enormous war chest and announced endorsements of over a hundred Republicans, many of whom had voted against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. By 2022, its high-profile donors included conservative Republican billionaires such as the Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and the hedge fund manager Paul Singer.

Using right-wing Republican money to defeat liberal candidates in Democratic primaries exposed AIPAC to considerable anger on the part of progressives, and further alienated the lobby from the mainstream opinions of American Jews. This was especially true of young American Jews whose views of Israel had been shaped by an ever more oppressive occupation of the West Bank and Gaza well before Oct. 7, and the mass killing of Palestinians that followed in its wake. . . . 

By sticking to its long-held, inflexible, “Israel right or wrong” line and allying itself with a party whose views on race, immigration, economics — and, these days, democracy — are anathema to most American Jews, AIPAC has effectively forfeited the role it enjoyed in the days when Israel was a genuinely bipartisan cause. . . . 

While no doubt a traditional flavor of antisemitism occasionally attaches to pro-Palestinian arguments on the left, more recently it has been the right’s increasing tolerance of widespread antisemitism among its most influential voices — from Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens to Nick Fuentes — that has morphed into a particularly fervent form of anti-Zionism. MAGA anger over Iran (and Israel’s role in the war) has hardened that space.

Were AIPAC to commit itself to the battle against this fusion of old-fashioned right-wing antisemitism with its new, virulent anti-Zionism, it could serve the interests of Israel, American Jews and the United States simultaneously. It might also rescue its own reputation in the process. 

I wonder how many times I have opined that Israel and the Israeli electorate passed the tipping point in 1995 when Yigal Amir shot and killed Yitzhak Rabin because of his role in agreeing to the Oslo Accords, which ultimately contemplated the creation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza.  The Israel we thought we knew before then, at least up to 1967's occupation of those lands, was the land of hearty, brave, innocently victimized refugees from Europe's long history of antisemitism and oppression, from the Holocaust, even after the end of the war and so-called Jewish "liberation," from having no homes to return to, a people with no land.  It was a land in which the Peace Process was not a mirage, but a real hope.  After Rabin's assassination, as Israel turned hard right, and especially after Netanyahu's rise to power, the peace process became a mirage, as did any realistic hope for a "two-state solution" for the Jewish/Palestinian problem that had existed for longer than half a century.  A big part of the problem has been and remains the conflation of opposition to Israel's right-wing, expansionist, apartheid government with antisemitism, so that guys like me, who have benefitted from most of a lifetime's friendship with Jews, are smeared by being called antisemites.

Blue Velvet.  Speaking of total depravity, as I did discussing my misanthropy, I watched David's Lynch's 1986 very weird movie Blue Velvet over the last couple of days.  Holy moly, I had forgotten how strange it is, especially Dennis Hopper's character as Frank and Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy Valens.