11/1/2026

 Sunday, November 1, 2026

1512 The public was first permitted to view Michelangelo's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

1952 "Ivy Mike", the first thermonuclear weapon to utilize the H-bomb design of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, was detonated in the Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean

   1954 The US Senate admonished Joseph McCarthy because of his slander campaigns

2012 Acid was poured over a 15-year-old girl by her parents after she was seen talking to a young man in an "honour killing" in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan

2025 Israel Defense Forces Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who served as Military Advocate General, resigned after leaking a surveillance video to the media showing the gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman detention camp in August last year. 

2025 Three people were killed in an American airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea.

In bed at 9, awake at 3, up at 3:30; 0340 203.6 115/69/64 98; 49/63/49, mostly cloudy day ahead.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5:40 a.m. and p.m.

Naza, or collateral damage.  I saw this recently released documentary by Yaval Abraham and Rachel Szor at the Oriental Theater at noon today.  Getting there and getting into my seat in the big auditorium was a bit of a challenge, but I was helped by a stranger, an Air Force veteran who spent two years at the Air Force Academy before voluntarily leaving.  He helped me navigate in the theater's darkness, got me into my seat, and helped get me out of the seat at the film's conclusion.  A good Samaritan whose kindness I was happy to rely on.

This is not a film to enjoy, but rather one to learn from.  It shows nighttime interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, conducted by Abraham over three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv.  Shown only as dark silhouettes with their voices distorted to hide their identities, the interviewees describe the AI systems and mobile phone surveillance used to identify targets in Gaza and their role in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.  I won't attempt to summarize the testimonies by the 24 IDF members.  Suffice it to say that the film gives terrifying insights into (1) government surveillance of civilians via private telephones; (2) the use of Artificial intelligence in military and governmental targeting of opponents; (3) the extent and results of hatred and dehumanization by one people for another; and (4) what modern war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide look like.  The closing image in the film shows a  Palestinian father looking for his children in the rubble that had been their home, calling into the destroyed apartment building, and children's legs protruding from beneath a concrete slab.  Devastating imagery.

Although it's not mentioned in the film, it also vividly calls into question the deep partnership between the American and Israeli governments and militaries, and America's complicity in decades of crimes against Arab Palestinians, militants. and civilians.  Democrats and Republicans are both guilty as sin.

The film also, of course, made me remember Vietnam, our years-long bombing campaigns in the North, and unceasing bombing in the South - high explosives and incendiaries, and sprayed carcinogenic herbicides.  A big difference between our relentless bombing in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972 was that we never had a policy of deliberately killing civilians.  Nonetheless, even by September 1966, bombing had caused approximately 29,000 casualties—killed and wounded combined—of whom about 18,000 were classified as civilian or logistics personnel.  By 1972, the Nixon administration had substantially loosened the geographic and operational restrictions imposed by LBJ and his administration.  LBJ was intensely concerned with the probability of losing international and domestic support for the war if there were significant civilian casualties.  Nonetheless, by the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians had been killed, although estimates vary considerably.  If we include civilians who were wounded but survived, the total rises to approximately seven million civilian casualties, according to some historical estimates.  All in a catastrophically losing effort to protect America's and capitalism's access to Asian markets and raw materials.  

I also thought of, of course, Russia's rocket, missile, and drone attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.  As I wrote above, a viewer doesn't watch this film for enjoyment, but for instruction.

I drove to the Oriental on I-43 to North Avenue.  On the way home, I took North to Humboldt Boulevard, and Humboldt to Capitol Drive, to 7th Street and back on I-43.  It was a trip down memory lane. I admired the beautiful old Milwaukee homes along Humboldt, and recalled picking up a Milwaukee Ballet Company employee at one of the elegant old apartment buildings during my years on the board of the Ballet.  On 7th Street, I passed Messmer High School, whose board I was on for a year with Don Shane, and the little house on 7th Street where I would pick up Hattie Clayton and her 6 children during my years as the church van driver for St. Francis parish, remembering Hattie's telling me of the gunshots she experienced in that neighborhood every night.

Today is All Saints Day, at least in Western Christianity.  Here are some thoughts from my journal three years ago today.

 "All Saints Day, the day as children at St. Leo's Grammar School we attended mass, a holy day of obligation, which we could never quite get into as a real 'holy day,' like Christmas and Easter  Ditto All Souls Day tomorrow.  All Souls Day made sense within the cosmology of Holy Mother Church because we prayed for 'the poor souls,' the souls suffering and languishing in Purgatory, waiting to be burned pure, punished for their sins, and eligible for entry through the Pearly Gates.  Of course, we wanted our loved ones, our ancestors, to be freed from the fires of Purgatory and prayers were presumably a ticket out, along with temporal and plenary indulgences.  So attending mass and praying for them, something pleasing to God, made a lot of sense.  But on All Saints Day, we just celebrated those who had already made it into the Celestial Kingdom, all the saints, known and unknown.  It seemed almost cruel that All Saints Day was and is a Holy Day of Obligation and All Souls Day was not.  But there you have it.  Thoughts on awakening on November 1st.  You can take the boy out of the Church, but you never take the Church out of the boy." 

Last year on this date, I wrote about a New York Times feature piece on the Pope's decision that 2025 would be a "Jubilee Year."

A Jubilee Year is a "Holy Year" signified by the ceremonial opening of the "Holy Doors" in the four Roman major basilicas: St. Peter's, St. John Lateran, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls.  The Vatican issued a decree on May 13th outlining ways that Catholics can obtain a "plenary indulgence" during the 2025 Jubilee Year, including by making pilgrimages, prayerful visits to specific churches.  A plenary indulgence is a grace granted by the Catholic Church through the merits of Jesus Christ to remove the temporal punishment due to sin, i.e., time burning in Purgatory for "venial sins."  We recall that one of the complaints of Martin Luther against the Church was the selling of indulgences to raise money, but first, I note that I have visited a number of the churches in Rome whose pious visits may trigger an indulgence.  St. Peter's, Sta. Maria Maggiore, St. John in Laterano, Sta. Maria Sopra Minerva, Sta. Maria della Vittoria, and Sta. Cecilia in Trastevere.  I've also visited the catacombs beneath St. Peter's, where Peter's final resting place is reputed to be and which is also a spot that can trigger a plenary indulgence.  I've also been privileged to visit two venues outside of Rome, which may occasion an indulgence: the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels in Assisi.  I have good memories of all my visits to all these places, but I know I didn't receive any indulgence, plenary or temporal, because I know I didn't satisfy the conditions, the most basic of which is believing in indulgences and in the Church's divine prerogative to award them.  I remember standing next to Geri's beloved Uncle Hardy at her mother's wake as a priest arrived to lead prayers.  Uncle Hardy nodded toward the priest, said to me, "What do you think, Chuck?" and I responded, "I don't know, Uncle Hardy, what do you think?"   He waved his hand and said, "It's all a business, just a business."   

I loved Uncle Hardy and I know he liked me.  I loved schmoozing with him, listening to stories of the Oliverio family and to stories of his own adventurous life, including his running away from home and 'riding the rails,' getting arrested by 'railroad dicks', and being sentenced to hard labor building the airport in Casper, WY (?).  Geri's brother Robert brought Uncle Hardy and Auntie Annette up to Shorewood for an afternoon's visit once when we lived in Shorewood, and we visited them in their home in Edison Park in Chicago.  It was there that Uncle Hardy cried as he told us the story of the Catholic priest refusing to let his mother, Geri's grandmother, be buried in a Catholic cemetery for some reason I can't recall now.  I think it may have been because she hadn't been a Mass-goer and hadn't had Extreme Unction before she died.  I believe it was during the Spanish Flu pandemic.  In any event, Uncle Hardy, who was in his 90s when we visited and he told us the story, never forgave that priest nor the Church, and that piece of personal history lay behind his statement to me decades later, "It's all a business, just a business."  And now, on All Saints Day, more than a century after the Spanish Flu pandemic, I remember Uncle Hardy crying about his mother.  I remember the Catholic chaplain who visited me during my hospitalization at the VA and haplessly argued with me about God.  I remember the Marine reservist Protestant minister at Willow Grove who told me most seminarians don't believe in a transcendent, personal God who answers prayers.  I think back to Monsignor Malloy ("Fill in those pews!  Don't sell to undesirables!), Father Schmidt ("Mumbo jumbo rooba dooba, chickadeeboodba, cha cha cha:", Father Devereaux, Brother Irwin, Father McEvoy at MU, the old priest in "The Sisters" in Joyce's Dubliners, found alone in the confessional, "wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. . . . ”  I remember my mother, my father, and my sister and their relationships with Holy Mother Church.  I carry all these memories, and so many more, and, though you truly can't take the Church out of the boy, or at least out of this boy, I won't attend Mass on this Holy Day of Obligation, q.v., even in this Jubilee Year.

Perfectly ordinary, perfectly breathtaking!