5/23/23

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

In bed by 10, awake at 3:40 and up at 4:05 with random half-thoughts.  Let Lilly out under clear skies, 49℉, high of 71℉, S wind at 3 mph, 1 to 8 mph during the day, gusts up to 13 mph.  Sunrise at 5:20, sunset at 8:16, 14+56.

Garage Door broke yesterday, or more precisely, the steel cable that controls the rise and descent of the door snapped. There may also be some damage to the rollers on the door itself. I'm unable to open the door manually.  The Volvo is stuck in the garage; the Honda parked on the driveway.  We're in for another unexpected expense associated with owning our cherished home.  Replacements/additions over 11 and 1/2 years: well pump, roof, sump pump, water aeration, filtration, softening system, water heater, drain tiles and steel beam supports on the east foundation wall, driveway lighting, what am I forgetting?  In any event, I called Overhead Door Southeast Wisconsin and will have a technician here sometime today, probably this morning.  $70 service call fee, waived if work is ordered. , ,  work done, $1570.  Yecch.

What $1570 looks like.

Catholic East Elementary School students walked out on classes yesterday to protest the firing of the school's principal, Tim Trzcinko.  He was removed by Seton Schools, the entity/group established by the archdiocese to manage archdiocesan schools.  Seton confirmed that Trzcinko had not harmed any children.  He said he was fired for questioning hiring and compensation practices.  "We have assured our families that all decisions being made follow our values as a Catholic school and are made with the best interest of the students, staff and school community in mind," a Seton statement for the media read.  Without knowing all the facts, it's not possible to form an opinion about this firing, but knowing what I do of the authoritarian 'ways and means' of Church authorities, I'm skeptical. 

Not entirely unrelated, Roman Catholic Ron DeSantis made a pitch yesterday to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention that electing him could lead to a 7-2 right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.  “I think if you look over the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two,” DeSantis said in his address to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. He went on to say that, “if you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a Roberts or somebody like that, then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that.”

AND  Texas lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to require the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state, part of a newly energized national effort to insert religion into public life. . . Groups that watch church-state issues say efforts nationwide to fund and empower religion — and, more specifically, a particular type of Christianity — are more plentiful and aggressive than they have been in years. One group says it is watching 1,600 bills around the country in states such as Louisiana and Missouri. Earlier this year, Idaho and Kentucky signed into law measures that could allow teachers and public school employees to pray in front of and with students while on duty.

“What Mencken most strongly objected to in religion was not the expression of nonsensical views—these could easily be combated by rebuttal from the other side—but the inveterate tendency of religion to seek the enforcement of its views by the power of the government.”  H.L. Mencken, H.L. Mencken on Religion

Lord, protect me from your champions.

DeSantis to announce tomorrow.  Is this nation doomed to  terrible candidates for future presidencies?  The last go-round we had a choice between the Democrat candidate by default old Joe Biden who is now too old to be entrusted with the office or Fascist, rapist, traitorous, Russian mole Donald Trump. In 2012 we had Obama/Biden and Romney/Ryan and in 2008 Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin.  In 2004, it was Bush/Cheney and Kerry/Edwards and in 2000 Bush/Cheney vs. Gore/Lieberman vs. Nader/LaDuke.  In 1996 we Clinton/Gore vs. Dole/Kemp and in 1992 Clinton/Gore vs G.H.W. Bush/Quayle vs. Perot/Stockdale,.  Fit for service as president among those candidates were George Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton, Al Gore,  Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and probably Lieberman, Edwards, and Ryan, Unfit were Donald Trump, Mike Pence, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle, Ross Perot and Stockdale, Nader and LaDuke.

Milwaukee dystopia.  From this morning's JSOnline: "More than 60 members of a loose connection of feuding groups of people in Milwaukee, which is responsible for an outsized portion of the city’s gun violence the last several years, have been arrested and criminally charged. . . Of the 61 individuals who were identified by law enforcement Monday, about half are juveniles. Eleven of them face charges of homicide or have been convicted and sentenced already, while others have been accused of anything from illegal gun possession, to car theft and recklessly endangering safety.  Chisholm said the feud stems from the 2020 homicide of a 17-year-old. Since then, more than 100 shootings and at least 25 homicides have been attributed to the conflict."

5/22/23

 Monday, May 22, 2023

In bed before 10 after watching the funeral episode of Succession, up at 6:10, 49℉, high of 67℉, cloudy morning, partly cloudy afternoon, sunny evening, wind S at 2 mph, 1 to 8 mph during the day, gusts up to 15 mph.  The sun rose at 5:20 and will set at 8:15, 14+54.

Geri will be off to an early dinner at Le Reve in Wauwatosa with an old friend.  I'll graze or go out. . . . Finished the beef vegetable soup Geri made a few days ago at my request.

CPP  Quite a bit of pain today.  I went to Grafton to get new eyeglasses at Costco intending to go to Walmart in Saukville/Port Washington for bird seed and suet but went home after Costco.  Unproductive, lost.

Self portrait in oil from when we lived in Shorewood.  It was stored under the basement stairwell in Saikville where a mourse left its opinion of my art in the vertical white dropping alongside my face.

Climate Change Optimism from Jill Lepore's What We Owe Our Trees in the May 29, 2023 issue of The New Yorker: "The Earth is about four and a half billion years old. By about two and a half billion years ago, enough oxygen had built up in the atmosphere to support multicellular life, and by about five hundred and seventy million years ago the first complex macroscopic organisms had begun to appear, as Peter Frankopan reports in “The Earth Transformed” (Knopf), an essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six o’clock yesterday. In his not-at-all-cheerful conclusion, looking to a possibly not-too-distant future in which humans fail to address climate change and become extinct, Frankopan writes, “Our loss will be the gain of other animals and plants.” An upside!

It's an interesting idea that the world would be better off with homo sapiens an extinct species.  It raises questions like 'better off for whom or for what"?  And 'how to measure or assess better off,' on a net basis (beneficial contributions (to whom or to what?) minus detrimental impacts (to whom or to what?)  Should all the issues be addressed from the point of view of us humans?  Is there any other basis?  If our species were to become extinct, would it permit the regeneration of natural processes on this planet that would lead to the generation of other species of flora and fauna, other life forms,  and ultimately a new species with humanlike intelligence?  An evolutionary start over?  From the cosmic, whole universe perspective, the disappearance of one species on one small planet destined ultimately to be swallowed by its own sun would seem to be almost a non-event.  In other words, who would care?  Who gives a shit?   Believers I suppose would answer "God" who created this species, and only this species, in His own image and likeness.  For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  John 3:16.  On the other hand, since believers hold that God has a providential plan and that nothing happens without his concurrence, one way or the other, if we disappear it would be because God wants us gone, that He would be pleased to start all over again, sort of like a new Noah-adventure.

5/21/23

 Sunday, May 21, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 5:20 from a dream in which I was conducting a physics class at UWM as a guest lecturer, not knowing what I was supposed to talk about, "winging it."  62℉, high of 71℉, sunny all day, WNW wind at 8 mph, 4 to 8 mph today with gusts up to 16 mph.  Sunrise at 5:21, sunset at 8:14, 14+52

LTMW at a chickadee working diligently to pull a twig out from the nesting materials Geri and I have packed into an empty suet cake holder.  Normally the chickadees are the quickest 'eat and run' birds at the feeders.  They zoom in at breakneck speed and then put on the brakes to land adroitly on the sunflower tube, grab a seed, and dash off as quickly as they zoomed in.  The goldfinches on the other hand are lingerers, especially on the niger tube.  We're not getting as much traffic on the niger tube as we did a couple of months ago, presumably because of the greater availability of food elsewhere as plant growth started in March and April.  It's easy to see why the niger seeds are so attractive to the goldfinches - they're about 1/3 or more edible oil and another 1/3 or more protein and soluble sugars.

The last of the flower petals on our three berry trees along County Line Road are falling in the gentle northwest wind, calling to mind Robert Frost's The Ovenbird

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

and Gerard Manley Hopkins' Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Lost Day.  Yesterday was a lost day.  I woke up with my brain in a kind of fog, muddled, numb. and it pretty much stayed that way all day.  I had an exchange of emails with an old friend who was upset at not having heard from me for 4 months.

Food for Thought from Tracy Letts, playwright of August: Osage County.  "I think there comes a point in your life where you own your own damage.  You don't necessarily have it all figured out, you just say this is mine, these are things I have to be aware of, take care of, work around."  jotted down from the NYT Magazine 3/23/2014 and retrieved from basement workroom this morning.    A line from Barbara in the play/film: "Thank God we can't tell the future - we'd never get out of bed."

I watched the film August: Osage County this afternoon and added it to my long list of favorite movies.  Powerful performances, especially by Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.  I thought it must be one of Streep's finest performances ever.  The film paints a dark picture of a family's life, with the family disintegrating completely after the death of the father.  The three daughters Barbara, headstrong with a mean streak like her mother's, Ivy, delicate and vulnerable, and Karen, a bit of a flibbertigibbet, are bound by their roots and having grown up in the pathological Weston family, but whatever tenuous bond held them together comes unglued when Ivy falls in love with her cousin and discovers he is also her half-brother.  It's easy to discern Eugene O'Neill's and Tennessee Williams' influence on Tracy Letts.

My Rat's Nest.  I made substantial progress in cleaning up the rat's nest I maintain around my recliner in the television room.  I think I've been prone to clutterbugging much of my life but I've gotten worse in my old age.  I have one book of short stories on the side table now instead of four.  Also moved the red arm caddy from the recliner in my bedroom to the recliner in the tv room., hoping it doesn't interfere with the recliner mechanism.

5/20/23A

 Saturday, May 20, 2023

In bed at 10:35, up at 6:10. dull-witted.  46℉, high of 64℉, sunny day,  wind NW at 12 mph, 5 to 12  mph today with gusts up to 23 mph.  No rain expected for the next 10 days.  The sun rose at 5:23, sunset at 8:13, 14+50.

Une boule

A wasted day, except for the boule.

5/19/23

 Friday, May 19, 2023

Geri returns from Urbana

In bed at 11, awake at 5, and up at 5:10 thinking of Arethra Franklin's opening lyric in R-E-S-P-E-C-T, out of nowhere. 57℉, high of 64℉, light rain,  SW wind at 9 mph, 8 to 15 mph during the day and gusts up to 23 mph, day's total rainfall may be .15".  Sunrise at 5:24, sunset at 8:12, 14+46.  

The Homesman.  I watched this Tommy Lee Jones opus starring him and Hillary Swank last night.  I thought it was excellent, an homage to the women who settled (or didn't settle) the West in the years before the Civil War.  The story is set in central Nebraska Territory in the 1850s.  In a small agricultural community, 3 women have become deranged after a harsh year in which crops failed and the desolation of living on the treeless, flat grasslands of Nebraska coupled with other factors take a terrible toll on the minds of the women.  One of the women became near-catatonic after her 3 babies died from diphtheria.  Another was sexually and emotionally abused by her husband and became despondent and violent when her dead mother couldn't be buried because of the frozen soil so her 'stinking' corpse was discarded outdoors by her husband.  The third woman, deranged, tosses her infant child through the hole in the seat of the outhouse.  Women losing their minds in harsh, desolate, frontier rural Nebraska was apparently not unusual and a custom has developed of sending them back to 'civilization' in western Iowa, across the Missouri River.  The person who transported the women was known as a "homesman" and was normally a man, but through the luck of a draw in this narrative it turned out to be Mary Bee Cuddy, a 31 year old spinster who farmed her own land while unsucessfully trying to attract a husband to help her survive loneliness and the rigors of frontier life.  She rescuesd George Briggs, a ne'er-do-well claim jumper and Army deserter from a lynching and extracted his agreement to accompany her and the the 3 crazy ladies to Iowa.  Mary Bee is a Christian lady, a prayful believer; Briggs is out only for himself.  As they traveled eastward they became not exactly friends but effective teammates and Mary Bee proposed marriage to Briggs who flatly refused.  Nonetheless she stripped naked that night and persuaded Briggs to have sex with her.  The next morning, Briggs found her lifeless body hanging from a tree.  He tried to ditch the crazy ladies, leaving them tied up to the paddy wagon they had travelled in, but the ladies somehow freed themselves and followed him, causing him to change his mind and escort them to their goal of Hebron, IA, and the Methodist Church that cared for women mentally and emotionally broken by frontier living.  Then Briggs returned to Nebraska and his old irresponsible lifestyle before his temporary redemption by Mary Bee and the crazy ladies.  The bleakness of the film reminds me of another favorite movie, Meek's Cutoff, starring Michelle Williams.  Both movies give a much more realistic account of frontier living than the John Ford and other Westerns I grew up watching,  The White settlers and frontiersmen are not heroic in these movies.  Mary Bee on the other hand is heroic, but pathetic, not in a pejorative sense but rather as evoking sympathy or pity.  She had the courage to leave New York State to acquire and farm by herself land in Nebraska.  She had the courage to put herself in the lottery to determine who would accompany the crazy ladies to Iowa.  She had the courage to propose marriage to lowlife men who wouldn't accept her.  She is as decent and civilized as Briggs is the opposite.  But she is lonely.  She yearns for companionship and a partner in facing life's struggle on the frontier.  She misses trees and music and family and ultimately commits suicide when even stumblebum George Briggs rejects her and she has to near-force him to have sex with her.

I liked the film very much.  It brought back memories of several driving trips alone or with my Dad across Nebraska on I-80 and of reading Willa Cather novels years ago.  .  The Homesman is distinctive much as Godless is by focusing on resourceful women in the Westward expansion of the U.S., fulfilling the nation's 'Manifest Destiny.'

Biden, G7 in Hiroshima.  Memories of Hiroshima from my memoir:

     One day, the woman who owned or at least managed the bar we frequented took us on a commuter train to Hiroshima to see the Peace Memorial Museum at the original Ground Zero.  The twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the city was only several weeks away.  I was – stupidly – struck by how new and modern the city was as I emerged from the train station.  Walking to and through the Peace Memorial Museum was a searing experience.  The “Atomic Bomb Dome” building was still standing.  The bomb had detonated almost directly above that building and a few others that were still standing.  The force of the blast was downward, blowing away roofs and floors and everything in between but leaving the steel-reinforced exterior walls standing.

I was solemn the whole time I was in Hiroshima, but the atmosphere in the city’s downtown area and even around the Peace Memorial was busy, bustling, like New York or Chicago.  There were a great many people, including families with children, at the Peace Memorial and their demeanors seemed not all that different from people going into the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, kind of semi-festive.  The Japanese adults ignored my friend Ron Kendall and me but little children stared at us.  For many of them, I suspect we were the first Americans or Europeans that they had seen in person and up close, or perhaps they stared because of the Marine Corps ‘whitewall’ haircuts that we had.  I was a freak in the eyes of the children.

    It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt.  I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was.  I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American.  By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers.  By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for.  By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field.  By shared humanity.   The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling.  There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.  Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be.  But was it necessary to bomb the city?  Two cities?  Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka?  The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa.  The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties.  The firebombing raids proved otherwise.  The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.” 

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam.  The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.

The day I left Cleveland for Japan and Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson spoke with Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam:

“. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the [political] divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions.  And it’s really had me concerned for a month and I’m very depressed about it because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything except just praying and grasping to hold on during [the] monsoon [season] and hope they’ll quit.  And I don’t believe they’re ever goin’ to quit.  And I don’t see that we have any plan for victory militarily or diplomatically.”

How prescient."

Throne Room Reading.  I moved a Franklin Library collection of short stories from the tv room bookshelves to the bathroom for some private reading.  I just finished Anatole France's The Procurator of Judea, a bit of fiction about Pontius Pilate which ends with him unable to remember some provincial guy from Galilee he had executed, one of multitudes of troublesome Jews he had condemned.  I didn't particularly enjoy the story, which was a bit dense, but read it because of its author, who also wrote one of my favorite quotes: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."  Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894), ch. 7.  Also: "You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists."  L'Humanité (18 July 1922)  To like effect, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, after whom the BOQ at MCS Quantico Basic School is named: "I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.  And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . . War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. . .  . . . I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." Smedley Butler, War is a Racket, 1935.

 . . . .

5/18/23

 Thursday, May 18, 2023

In bed at 10:20, up at 6:30, beautiful orange-yellow-gold early morning sun in the clear sky.  Let Lilly out (twice), and gave her the Proin pill in liver sausage. 46℉, high of 64℉, wind  S at 8 mph, 3 to 15 mph during the day, with gusts up to 23 mph. The sun rose at 5:25, sunset at 8:11, 14+46.

Lilly is drinking quite a lot of water this morning.  She did yesterday too.  At her advanced age and with her recent incontinence while sleeping, we're keeping a close and anxious watch on her.

LTMW this morning the first thing I see is good neighbor John McGregor out for his early walk up into Mequon, the first of his several daily walks.  He has turned around much sooner than normal, perhaps needing a pit stop.  The sunflower seed tube is 3/4 empty.  I'm busy emptying my Kleenex box and dealing with my daily early morning rhinitis, almost certainly due to some allergic reaction to something in my bed, bedding, or pillows.  I didn't tether myself to the CPAP last night so the runny nose doesn't appear to be linked to that device.  The first squirrel of the morning has appeared on the feeding ground under the tubes, along with a couple of chipmunks and a white-crowned sparrow.  A young oriole landed on one of the oranges at 8:15 and ate his or her fill.  On Wakefield, a neighbor couple with their young golden doodle is walking their baby or toddler in a stroller with their older child keeping pace on his tricycle.  They stop to chat with another neighbor driving by on the way home and then turn around and follow the neighbor in the car, led by the youngster on the tricycle.

Godless.  I finished watching this 7-hour series on Netflix last night.  It was well done and I enjoyed it.  Jeff Daniels played Frank Griffin, an evil preacher leading a gang of 30 desperadoes.  Michelle Dockery, of Downton Abbey, played Alice Fletcher, a tough-as-nails widow who has a 'half-breed' Paiute son.  Thll works; they are all terrific in their roles.  There are many conflicts in the complex plot, the principal one being between Frank Griffin and his 'son,' Roy Goode.  Others include the chase by the sheriff and the marshall looking for Griffin, the relationship betweey live on a ranch outside the silver mining town of LaBelle in the middle of wide-open New Mexico Territory with Alice's Paiute mother-in-law and eventually Roy Goode, played by Jack O'Connell.  The town is populated almost entirely by women after a mining disaster killed almost all of the men.  The dominant leader of the town is Mary Agnes McNue a gun-packing, cross-dressing lesbian or bisexual widow played by Merritt Wever, sister of the half-blind Sheriff Bill McNue and widow of the former mayor.  Sam Waterston plays the federal marshall from Santa Fe, John Cook.  The star casting seems counter-intuitive, especially with Michelle Dockery, but also with Jeff Daniels and Sam Waterston, but it aen the people of LaBelle and Alice Fletcher, between the women of the town and Mary Agnes McNue, between Mary Agnes and her lesbian lover, the whore and school marm Callie Frazer, between the aptly named Whitey Winn, the White deputy sheriff in love with Black Louise Hobbes and the Blacks in Blackdom, a segregated settlement outside of LaBelle, the conflict between the newspaper editor A. T. Grigg and truthful reporting, etc. 

The series is grisly, with a lot of shooting and killing, cold-blooded murders, and Frank Griffin carrying around his amputated left arm until it becomes too "ripe" and is tossed into a campfire.  The series deals forthrightly with lesbianism in a female community, with racism and segregation ("Blackdom"), 'miscegenation' (Alice & Paiute, Whitey and Louise), with corporate greed and opportunism (Quicksilver Mining Company), with the tenuousness of 'law and order' in the face of determined law-breakers, etc.  The series invites comparison with today's America with mass shootings, gang violence, racism, corporate greed and opportunism, 'fake news' and making as opposed to reporting news, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.

Police shooting death in Mequon.  Resident in his 80s in a home in the3100 block of Bonniwell was shooting a firearm at another neighbor mowing his lawn.  Good grief.

Gerontocracy.  The NYT reports that 89 year old Diane Weinstein had more than a nasty case of shingles that kept her away from the Capitol for the few months.  The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles.  Characterized by swelling of the brain, post-shingles encephalitis can leave patients with lasting memory or language problems, sleep disorders, bouts of confusion, mood disorders, headaches and difficulties walking. Older patients tend to have the most trouble recovering. And even before this latest illness, Ms. Feinstein had already suffered substantial memory issues that had raised questions about her mental capacity.  The senator still sees the job as her calling and is no more receptive to a conversation about stepping aside than she was in 2018, when she decided to seek another term despite questions about her mental acuity.  She is clearly non compos mentis.  The almost 40,000,000 people of California have one lucid U.S. senator representing them.  The @ 580,000 people of Wyoming and @650,000 people of Vermont have 2 apiece.  It has become increeasingly clear that Republicans rely on older voters to retain power.  If the last midterm  elections had been decided by voters 45 and older, Republicans would have won the House by an even greater margin and likely taken the Senate. But thanks to young voters (especially the 18-to-29 age group, which had the second-highest turnout in midterm elections in almost 30 years, according to early estimates from Tufts University), Democrats retained the Senate, showing that an alliance of Gen Z and millennial voters answered history’s call to defend democracy.  The age/generational differences betwen Democratic voters and Republican voters is exacerbated by the anti-democaratic (small 'd' and large 'D') effects of gerrymandering and by the anti-democratic effects built into our government by the Constituion via the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College and the role of the Supreme Court.  Bottom line: we fool ourselves in thinking that the United States is a democratic, representative democracy.  We are a nation ruled by an entrenhed minority, i.e., older Republicans and increasingly by the MAGA Republican because of their disproportinate power in the House and their power in the fedeeral judiciary gained during the one-term Trump presidency.  Quaere: why should anyone not represented by this minoritarian government pledge allegiance to it?

A drawing I did during the Trump presidency of the flag upside down.  Under the  U.S. Flag Code, the flag should never be displayed with the Union down "except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."  Are we there?

 

5/17/23

 Wednesday, May 17, 2023

In bed around 9:30, awake at 3:45, and up at 4. let Lilly out for a long pee. 42℉ under a clear sky, high 53℉, the wind is still NNE at 14 mph (yesterday's 'pneumonia front' blowing down and in from Lake Michigan), 4 to 14 mph today, gusts up to 24 mph, sunrise at 5:26, sunset at 8:10, 14+44.

An old man in his nightshirt with his old dog looking through a window at birds and squirrels feeding in the early morning sunlight

How Biden Blew It on the Debt Ceiling  Paul Krugman in this morning's NYT:  "after months of asserting that it would never engage in negotiations over the debt ceiling, that it would accept nothing less than a clean increase, the administration is now … negotiating over the debt ceiling.  Many people have pointed out that this sets a terrible precedent, that having seen that extortion works, Republicans will engage in it again and again. Even these concerns, however, seem to me to be taking too long a view. Now that Republicans see what seems to be an administration on the run, there’s every reason to expect them to keep escalating their immediate demands — quite possibly to the point where no deal is possible.

I have no idea what happens next. I think there’s a real possibility that Biden officials will in the end be forced by sheer Republican intransigence to adopt unconventional methods after all — a task that will be made much harder by the fact that those same officials have spent months trash-talking the approaches they may need to follow.

But I don’t see any way to regard this whole episode as anything but a disastrous failure to face up to the reality of an opposition party controlled by extremists."

Lazy day for both Lilly and me.  We go into some form of suspended or suppressed animation when Geri leaves town.  Our brains and our bodies slow down, as does our interest in doing things.  I did manage to remember to give Lilly her bladder medicine this morning, though I forgot to give her the Cosequin last night.  I also watered Geri's outdoor potted plants.  I started to mix a batch of dough for no-knead bread but discovered my King Arthur Bread Flour is 2 weeks shy of 2 years past its "best by" date which suggests to me I haven't baked a loaf of bread in two years or more.  Not good.  I put the flour on the shopping list on my phone.  Ditto yeast.  I did watch an episode or two of Godless on Netflix and I'm enjoying it.  Working hard at avoiding MSNBC and CNN.  

How we occupy ourselves with Geri out of town