12/21/23

 Thursday, December 21, 2023

In bed at 10:30, up at 5:20, heart aching as I listen to Geri coughing again, fingers crossed.  Let Lilly out.  36°, high of 41°, cloudy day ahead, wind is 10 mph off the lake, 4-10/15  Sunrise at 7:20 at 122°SE, sunset at 4: 19 at 238°SW, solar noon at 11:49 a.m., altitude 24° 

Treadmill; pain.   CPP much of the day but 30:19 & 0.60 at 3 p.m., watching "The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Physicist" on YouTube.  I watched only the first hour or so and will return to the rest.  Very intresting.  The Buddhist is Alan Wallace, trained by the Dalai Llama, and Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at CalTech.  The program occurred on 2/16, 2017 at Dartmouth.  I was and am interested in what each of the interlocutors had to say because of my interest in Buddhism and Mindfulness on the one hand and cosmology and particle physics on the other.  (An interesting fact mentioned by the physicist: There are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and on average about 100 billion stars in each galaxy!) 

I'm grateful  for the many diseases I have escaped in my life.  My dear sister and I were both cigarette smokers for decades.  She suffered from COPD; why not me?  Bob Friedber and I, born 3 years apart,  shared the same birthday,  He came down with lung cancer, though not a smoker; why not me?  My beloved mother died at 51 when an aneurysm leaked into her brain; why not me.  TSJ died of a heart conditon, David Branch of amyloidosis, and Bill Guis of canceer; why not me?   

 Solstice.  The December solstice (winter solstice) in Milwaukee is at 9:27 pm today. In terms of daylight, this day is 6 hours, 22 minutes shorter than the June solstice. In most locations north of the equator, the shortest day of the year is around this date.  The earliest sunset is on December 9.  

A self-portrait I painted in oil many years ago.  One of the things I like about it is the interrupted, vertical, white line that appears on the right side of my face.  It is mouse poop that I found on the painting when I retrieved it from its storage space under the basement stairs in our house in Saukville.  I cleaned it up as well as I could but am happy I couldn't clean up that vertical white line.  It helps to keep me humble, even in a self-portrait.

Interstitial cystitis.  Cystitis refers to inflammation of the bladder, a painful condition.  The Mayo Clinic website says "In otherwise healthy men, cystitis is rare. Any symptoms should be checked by a health care provider." I'm one of the rare men to have the condition.   Or probably not-so-rare because I am not "otherwise healthy."  In any event, WebMD says "Some people have a condition called interstitial cystitis, where the bladder is constantly swollen but there’s no detectable infection. Doctors aren’t sure what causes it, and it’s much harder to treat than regular cystitis."  I can attest to that.  One of its symptoms is frequent urination.  I have thought for some time now that I am up and out of bed making 'pit stops' at least 5 and more often 6 times each night.  Last night, I used my mechanical clicker to keep track of the pit stops and the count, including the one just before going to bed and the one upon arising, was 8, i.e., 6 during sleep time and on average, once every hour and 10 minutes.  I can't know the effect of the sleep interruption on my health, but I am only too aware of its effects during the day, i.e., tiredness from insufficient sleep.  The last couple of days I've been too 'out of it' to devote much time  to journal entries, brain-fogged.  Hence my little doggeral on yesterday's journal: "Chronic pain / Saps my brain."  Pain is the more troubling symptom.  If I can't empty my bladder of its meager contents, I am in deep trouble, barely able to stand up straight or to walk and in severe pain.  Because of this, I can't enter our freeways without some anxiety.  If there is an accident (or a freeway shooting) that causes a shutdown of traffic and I am trapped in my car, I am, as I have said, in deep trouble.  I keep a portable hospital urinal in the car but it's not likely that I would be able to use it on the freeway, even standing outside the car.  Sometimes I can pee standing up, but often I have to be seated on a toilet.  When I mentioned this to Nurse Practitioner Katie in the VA Pain Clinic, she suggested using Depends Adult diapers, a daunting thought, and not a workable one because are about 100 to 1 that I wouldn't be able to pee at will while sitting in the car or even while standing outside it. Such is the nature of my antique plumbing.  It's a rare day, if any, that I don't experience a lot of discomfort from the IC and more ofter, some pain, including pelvic floor muscle spasms.  I am wondering now whether I am going through a recurrence of the Hunner's Ulcers that I had 15-20 years ago.  That grim experience was treated with 3 outpatient surgeries and a period of weekly DMSO infusions.  It had me dealing with frequent periods of suicidal ideation.

    Notes from a journal I kept back in 2009:

3-26-09.  Up at 8, @ 10 hours of sleep.  Intermittent pain during the night, moderate pain on awakening until @ 10:30 a.m.

Receivved call from Dr. Silbar's office to schedule "a look inside your bladder" on 4/1 at Rawson Avenue office.  Informed called of my bad experience at Froedtert w/ urodynamics test.  I don't know whether the trainee-nurse was especially ham-handed or whether the intense pain was a result of my bladder-urethra-prostate-penis anatomy, but I hope never to have a similar experience. . . 

By 2:30, pain has increased to 5 or 6, L.T. & perineal.  Walking becoming painful,  By 3:30, pain is slight. . . 

To bed at 10 with some moderate pain.

Still having a hard time keeping all the meds straight, especially the new ones: Cytotec 4 times a day w/food, amitriptyline morning and night, omeprozole 1/2 hour before morning and evening meals.

4/7/09   Tuesday   Today the catheter procedure.

The catheter procedure was painful but less painful that the one I suffered through at Froederdt 2 years ago.  I wondered if Dr. Silbar really believed I could follow his instruction to "relax" as he worked to thrust the catheter past my urethral sphincter which very decidedly did not want to open the door to my bladder.  The neck of my bladder was also inhospitable.  Ouch & ouch.

While he was surveying the terrain of my bladder wall, Silbar asked me if I had been a smoer, which should have tipped off that he was seeing something that looked like cancer.  Sure enough, when the ordeal was over, he told me there was redness in there that could by cystitis or could be cancer.  I think he took some tissue but I can't be sure since my head was still a bit stressed out from the invasion of the other end of my torso.  It would have been helpful to have someone there with me with a clear head.  Andy offered last night but I declined - a mistake.

12/20/20  Kitty hospital

1/6/21  Capitol assaulted 

Personal journals have their uses.  I wish I had been more diligent in maintaining one.  It's been a long hard slog with chronic pelvic pain and interstitial cystitis.  I'm noting that even in 2009, the CPP was on the left side of the perineum.

VA Meditation and Mindfulness chat.  I called in to the weekly conversation originating in the Green Bay VA center on mindfulness & meditation again this morning.  Lou led the discussion, joined by Bill, Mike, Chris, Jim and me.  A good discussion.  There is nothing very formal or directed about these sessions but they are interesting and helpful.  It's also a long-distance, attenuated form of socializing with a few other vets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/20/23

 Wednesday, December 20, 2023

In bed at 10 and up at 5:10.  Let Lilly out and loaded dishwasher.  29°, high of 38°, sunny day, wind SSW at 6 mph, 2-7/15.  Sunrise at 7:19, sunset at 4:18, 8+59.     

Treadmill; pain.  CPP/RP all morning.  30:00 & 0.59 while watching the last part of the Frontline program on Netanyahu.

I'm grateful to be alive, but tired.   Chronic pain / Saps my brain.😞

A favorite drawing rom a photo I took of: Nikki Onorato

Frontline last night: Netanyahu, American & the Road to War in Gaza.  The program reminded me that it was Netanyahu as the leader of Likud who roused tremendous opposition to the Oslo Peace Accord from Israel's ultrareligious and right wing security advocates.  And it was Netanyahu who rose to power after his attacks on the government led by Yitzak Rabin were followed by the assassination of Rabin by a 25 year old right wing 'patriot.'  Rabin had been pictured in a Nazi uniform and wearing a Palestinian kafiyyah and was the subject of cheers "Death to Rabin" and "In blood and fire we will expel Rabin."  It was at the conclusion of a peace rally that Rabin was gunned down by the young assassin.  Rabin's widow blamed Netanyahu for inciting the extremism of the right wing and doing nothing to stop it.  In the next election, after Hamas-directed suicide bus bombings, Netanyahu was elected and the peace process and the "two state solution" were dead.

12/19/23

 Tuesday, December 19, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:06, up at 4:16.  19° under clear skies turning cloucy this morning, high of 34°, wind is W at 8 mph, 7-14/28, wind chill is 9°.  Sunrise at 7:19, sunset at 4:18, 8+59.  Let Lilly out at 4:45.

Treadmill; pain.  CPP, RP, and TP this morning, but it cleared up enought to do 33:00 & 0.70 on the treadmill around 11 a.m. while watching The Silence of Mark Rothko documentray on OVID.  At 4 p.m., I did a session of Chair Yoga on YouTube with the VA Whole Health leader from Grand Island, NE.

A collection of drawings in the TV room

I'm grateful for my amateur paintings and drawings.  They keep me company when I'm on the treadmill, sitting at my desk downstairs, in my bedroom, in the TV room, and in my workspace when I'm working on another painting.  I like them all, the pretty good and the not so good.  They all contain mistakes and disappointments of one sort or another and none of them is worth much to anyone but me, but I remember working on each one of them, so they also represent minutes and hours of my life, personal history. 

A favorite, in the TV room

KSchooling.  In listening to Ezra Klein's podcast this morning, I learned that (1) he hated school, and (2) he graduated from high school with a 2.2 grade point average.  Also, my recent throne room reading has been William Blake and Walt Whitman.  Blake was never sent to school but rather was apprenticed as a child to an engraver.  Whitman went to work at age 11 as a 'gopher,' an errand boy, at 12 he learned to set type, and at 14 he was working in the composing room of a local newspaper.  Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Agatha Christie and Sandra Day O'Connor were home-schooled. Richard Branson quit school at 16 to start his first business.  Steven Spielberg was rejected 3 times from USC film school and Carey Mulligan was rejected from acting school. 

12/18/23

 Monday, December 18, 2023

In bed around 9, up at 7:30 but pss every hour during the night, no REM? GALE WARNING, snow is possible @ 8:45.  28°, WC is 14°, high of 30°, wind NW at 24 mph,  20 kts-30kts, 4 to 8' waves on Lake Michigan. Sunrose at 7:19, smset at 4:17, 8+59.  

Big wind today

      

Treadmill; pain.  Considerable spasms last night & IC during the night w/pss every hour.  Chili dinner? CrystalLight lemonade? More RP this morning. 30.28 & 0.60, slo-mo watching Dana Bash's show with Jim Acosta.  Nasty pain before I got on the treadmill and nasty pain after I got off.😡

I'm grateful for being able to rant today.  Pathetic, but still . . . I'm hobbled with various CPPs and grumpy.      

Righteous ageism?  Nikki Haley's new ads expressly attack Joe Biden for his age, saying bluntly he's too old.  She also calls Congress "the most exclusive nursing home in America," and calls for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75.  I"'m sure she is striking a chord with many voters, including me.  I don't buy the notion that Joe Biden is running for re-election as a matter of public service and duty, thinking he's the only candidate who can beat Trump.  He has lusted after being the top dog in Washington for decades and started campaigning for the presidency 37 years ago.  Now that he has won once and got the nomination for another term locked up, he's not going to give it up.  I can't help thinking of him as a glorified, back-slapping, glad-handing,  Irish ward heeler who has a long, long, history of embellishing his own history and qualifications to defend against being seen as a pretty ordinary guy who likes to drive a Corvette and live in a mansion.  That he can be friendly and empathetic I don't challenge, but he's milked those qualities to let him live the life of power and prestige that he loves.  He's always been a "moderate" Democrat, not a progressive or liberal, meaning in part that he was always willing to serve the corporate interests of the financial and other businesses chartered and headquartered in Delaware, e.g., by making student loan debt and some credit card debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.  He was always too interested in maintaining his cozy friendships with Republicans, witness the way he chaired the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.  One final point: among Democrats, Biden has one of the most punitive, “tough on crime” records on criminal justice issues.  Biden was at the center of building federal policies that escalated the war on drugs and mass incarceration.  When President George H. W. Bush released his 'Tough on Crime' program, Biden criticized it for being not tough enough.  Biden wanted "to hold every drug user accountable."  I think of this now with all the attention on his son Hunter and his notorious drug abuse and other bad behavior.  I haven't been a fan of Joe Biden for many years.  If his creaky candidacy leads to another term for Donald Trump, I will move from "not a fan" to simply loathing him, but by then of course little about Joe Biden will matter except his most significant legacy to this country: having led to a second term for Trump and the failure of the American experiment.

Assisted living and memory care facilities, private equity & REITS.  If we want to see American capitalism at work, there are few better exemplars than the $34B assisted living and memory care industry.  The other great example is the hospital industry, witness the scandalous decline of health care at Columbia-St. Mary's under the Ascension Catholic Hospital conglomerate.  The WaPo has been running bone-chilling investigative pieces on the assisted living/memory care industry.  Excerpts:

Conceived about 40 years ago to give seniors more freedom in their final years of life, the assisted-living industry has been reshaped by real estate speculators looking to cash in on an aging nation. They were aided by Congress in 2008, when a new law gave certain investors the ability to hold senior-housing properties tax-free while also taking a slice of their annual income.

As a result, many facilities across the nation are now held by investors under pressure to produce profits for shareholders. In some places, a bare-bones approach to staffing and pay has produced a chaotic environment where medications are missed, falls and bed sores go unnoticed, residents are abused and confused seniors wander away undetected, according to a review of 160,000 state inspection reports and interviews with more than 50 current and former employees of assisted-living businesses and relatives of current and former residents.

Long-term investors in senior home real estate, which includes assisted living, receive returns of nearly 9 percent a year on average — more than double the yield for offices and hotels, according to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries.

Investors prefer to buy the buildings that house senior homes — instead of buying equity in the businesses — because they gain rental income and valuable property portfolios without being directly exposed to the legal risks of caring for a fragile population. Typically, a real estate owner will approve a detailed business plan that sets out budgets for labor and care, and pay a management company a fee to run the facility according to plan. 

Residents may never know the names of the investment firms that own their buildings, but these firms typically collect about 30 percent of their monthly rent checks, according to commercial real estate researcher Green Street. In a typical arrangement, about 65 percent of income goes to cover costs such as labor, marketing and supplies, while 5 percent goes to a management company, such as Balfour. 

Hundreds of properties change corporate owners every year, and staffing and pay are often the first expenses trimmed by investors focused on profits, according to interviews with industry experts and current and former employees at multiple companies.

The financiers included private-equity firms — investors who manage giant pools of money on behalf of even larger investors such as pension funds and endowments. These firms typically try to boost the value of assets and sell them after five to 10 years, providing returns to themselves and their outside investors.

Some senior homes were also bought by real estate investment trusts, or REITs, an investment class created by Congress in the 1960s to give stock market investors the ability to buy and sell shares in real estate. REITs pay no corporate income tax and distribute dividends to shareholders. Nearly half of Americans — around 45 percent of U.S. households — are invested in some type of commercial real estate REIT through retirement funds or pensions, according to industry group Nareit. 

Congress gave these businesses a boost in 2008 with a new law allowing senior-housing REITs to share in the profits from operations, rather than act as passive landlords. This corporate structure, also common in hotels, incentivizes REIT investors to replace management teams that fail to generate expected profits.

“They hold the hammer,” said David Kingsley, a researcher with the nonprofit Center for Health Information & Policy. 

Welltower, the biggest owner of senior homes in the country, distributes more than $1 billion in dividends to shareholders annually, including mutual fund giants Vanguard and BlackRock and the pension fund of Norway. Other senior-housing investors have collectively generated hundreds of millions of dollars for public pension plans in Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas and other states, investor filings show.

The business of big business managers is making money.  It's Jamie Dimond managing JPMorgan Chase Bank, the chief executives of Ascension Healthcare calling itself a Catholic health care "ministry", and the managers of a private equity firm or REIT owning senior living facilities.  The business of all for-profit corporations is to make money for its owners, the shareholders.  Making money = profits.  Profits = excess of revenue over costs.  Well-paid employees are a cost, a very big cost for most businesses and the way to increase profits is to decrease labor costs, by minimizing the number of employees and keeping their compensation as low as the managers can get away with.  The WaPo story reports that the average wage of AL/MC employees is $15/hour, less than baristas at many Starbucks outlets.  What a surprise: the AL/MC facilities complain of having a hard time finding and retaining good help to care for the approximately 1,000,000 persons living in their facilities. 

The WaPo story reports that "Hundreds of properties change corporate owners every year."  Why?  Because the tax advantages of ownership decline over time so owners dump current properties and purchase new properties, as happened at Newcastle Place, when Jimmy A. lived for 4 years, when it was sold for $49M in 2012 and then sold again in 2021.  The owners are not in the business to care for people; they're in the business to make as much money as possible.  Health and safety care are not the ends, they are just the means to make more money.

And about those "non-profit" hospitals I mentioned, consider this from an op-ed in the NYT on 11/30/23 titled "Why Are Nonprofit Hospitals Focused More on Dollars Than Patients?":

Nonprofit hospitals have been caught doing some surprising things, given how they are supposed to serve the public good in exchange for being exempt from federal, state and local taxes — exemptions that added up to $28 billion in 2020.

Detailed media reports show them hounding poor patients for money, cutting nurse staffing too aggressively and giving preferential treatment to the rich over the poor. Nurses and other workers recently resorted to strikes to improve workplace safety at Kaiser Permanente and the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J.

That’s not the end of it. Nonprofit executives have embarked on an acquisition spree, assembling huge systems of hospitals and physician practices to raise prices and increase profits. Ample evidence indicates that the growth of these giant systems makes health care less affordable for patients, families and businesses.

Calling these hospitals nonprofits can be confusing. It doesn’t mean they can’t make money. What it means is that they are considered charities by the Internal Revenue Service (as opposed to being owned by investors, like for-profit hospitals). And in return for their tax exemptions, these institutions are supposed to invest the money that would have gone to taxes into their communities by lowering health care costs, providing community health services and free care to those unable to afford it and conducting research. These hospitals proliferated after federal tax rules about 50 years ago made it easier to qualify for tax exemptions. They now make up more than half of the nation’s hospitals.

So why are nonprofit hospitals behaving in ways that seem to focus more on dollars than patients? Hospitals are undergoing a reckoning about their role in the national health system. The United States will require fewer hospital beds in the future if current trends continue. This looming likelihood — plus financial challenges from the pandemic, a severe worker shortage, rising inflation and stock market volatility — has put nonprofit hospitals in survival mode.

Accordingly, they have prioritized protecting their finances, focusing on scale and market power. Unfortunately, these actions too often come at the expense of their mission to serve their communities. This has meant less charity care for patients who cannot afford expensive surgeries or emergency room visits and higher prices for those who can.

'nuf said. 

LTMW at a young tom wild turkey eating his fill under the sunflower & safflower feeder.  Magnificent cerise-colored wattle,  He is followed by a gray squirrel munching on his leavings.  I filled the feeder last night so I could avoid going out this morning and I am glad I did, now that the wind chill is almost in the single digits.   

Throne room reading.  I've been reading some Whitman, including his Song of Myself, and #32.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

 

 

12/16/23

 Saturday, December 16, 2023

In bed at 9, awake at 3, unable to sleep, moved to lzb at 3:20, unable to sleep, up at 4:10.  Let Lilly out.  42°, high of 44°, 0.15" of rain this afternoon.  Wind SSE at 7 mph, 5-14/25.  Sunrise at 7:17, sunset at 4:17, 9+0.   

Treadmill; pain.  I felt OK this morning (except for the lousy night's sleep) but the spasms returned before Caela's visit.  PITA😡  

I'm grateful that I can still drive and have a good car to get me around.   Driving at night is challenging, especially (1) in this area with few or no street lights, (2) especially in constricted construction areas, (3) especially in rain, and (4) especially wherever lane markers are hard to discern.  Each of those circumstances requires my focused attention.  I realized it driving home from Lyn Felsenthal's wake in the dark, in the rain, with lane markings invisible, through restricted construction areas.  Yikes!😰

Micaela's visit this afternoon.  She intended to stay only 5 minutes but stayed a half hour or so.  Good conversation, glad she came, glad to hear how she is doing approaching January 18th, Yahrzeit, and glad to hear how Saul is doing.

Schadenfreude, I can't help it: Cardinal found guilty of embezzlement.  From this morning's WaPo:

VATICAN CITY — Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope.

Then his career collided with church prosecutors, who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption, setting up the Vatican’s trial of the century.

On Saturday, Becciu — the first cardinal tried by the Vatican’s little-known criminal court — was found guilty of several counts of embezzlement after a trial marred by allegations of witness tampering and papal interference. Becciu was sentenced to five years and six months in a verdict read out in a converted quarter of the museum that houses the Sistine Chapel.

LTMW.  Very busy morning with all our usual visitors plus a solitary starling.  Lots of goldfinches perched on the niger feeder and, as usual, when a sound or movement outside spooks all the other birds that fly away, the goldfinches hold their ground.  They're either very hungry or very brave or perhaps a bit deaf or nearsighted.

Klamath River dam removal.  There is a feature story in this morning's WaPo about the removal of 4 dams on the Klamath River in northern California and southern Oregon.  Environmentalists and indigenous tribes who have historically relied on salmon fishing in the river are very happy; agricultural and other economic interests relying on river water are very unhappy.  My leftist tendency is always to side with the environmentalists and tribal members who want to return the river to its natural flow and to return the wetlands that were drained to permit large-scale agricultural enterprises.  Then I think of the need for the food products produced by farms, especially big industrial farms and I'm reminded of how much reliance there has been on those farms - reliance by the farmers, by those who work those fields, by those who buy the food products coming from those farms, and all the ancillary businesses supporting and supplying those farms.   I was reminded of one of my motor trips from Phoenix back to Milwaukee after taking my Dad to his winter home with Kitty.  As I drove through Denver, I was struck by the enormous number of trucks and cars moving everywhere and by how utterly dependent we in the U.S. are on gas and oil.  Our whole economy and way of life are dependent on the ability to move about, to move ourselves and to move products, both necessities and fripperies.  That reliance on gas and oil explains much about our country, our politics, our government, our foreign policy, our militarism, everything.  Another great necessity is food to feed ourselves and the world, much of it coming from huge, powerful agricultural industries.  It's easy to have leftist, knee-jerk reactions to many issues without adequate consideration of all the interests involved in many contentious environmental and political battlegrounds.  Life is complicated.  I used to tell the law students clerking at our law firm that "Nothing's simple, nothing's cheap."  That's an overstatement of course but I was advising them to be or become aware of the inherent complexities of legal disputes.  Beware of believing in 'sure winners' and 'sure losers.'  Your adversary will leave no stone unturned creating complexities, especially when he is paid by the stone.  Never forget the built-in fortuities inherent in the decision-makers, i.e., judges juries, and bureaucrats.  I learned all this myself only through experience and from the teachings of those more experienced than I was.  I should have added "Nothing's sure" to "Nothing's simple, nothing's cheap."

Israel's IDF has killed 3 hostages waving a white flag.  This is a very sad report in this morning's papers.  Two hostages were killed when a soldier opened fire, feeling his life was threatened, while the third was killed in renewed fire despite a cry for help heard in Hebrew and a commander’s order to cease fire, the Israeli military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with the rules of the briefing. He added that the hostages were possibly “abandoned or escaped” before they emerged “tens of meters” from an Israeli military position.  Three are dead and the soldier's life is probably ruined, as are the lives of his family.  Many thoughts come to mind.  One wonders how old the soldier was, what were his combat experiences, why he felt threatened, etc.  One thinks also of the fact that generally Israelis and Palestinians look alike; they are fellow "Semites," mythological descendants of Noah's son Shem.  In a sense, this is a war between cousins, not unlike the Russians and the Ukrainians.  I think also of the impossibility of distinguishing "good guys" and "bad guys" among young male persons in Gaza who are not wearing IDF uniforms.  I think back to my time in Vietnam, wondering whether the Vietnamese barber cutting my hair was secretly VC.  I suspect this tragic incident will cause further unraveling within Israeli society and further divisions for Netanyahu to try to exploit in his quest to stay in power and avoid imprisonment.

David Ignatius on the West Bank:

Settler violence has surged since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist assault, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis. Since then, there have been 343 settler attacks against Palestinians, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At least 143 Palestinian households, with 1,026 people (including 396 children), have been displaced by violence. Settlers have killed eight Palestinians and injured 85, the U.N. organization says.

The violent settlers almost always go unpunished. From 2005 to 2022, 93 percent of the 1,597 investigations opened by the Israeli police into cases where Israelis were said to have harmed Palestinians were closed without indictment, according to Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din; only about 3 percent led to convictions.

If we want to know how the Israeli government and the Israeli military feel about the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, all we need to look at is how the Israeli government and the Israeli military treat the Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.  Even more telling, is how the Israeli government and military treat the Jewish settlers knowing how the settlers treat the Palestinians.  A very recent UN report says 477 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year, more than half of them since October 7 and mostly by the IDF.

Master Gardener.  I watched the first half of this Paul Schrader film last night, and the second half this afternoon.  My second Schrader film, the other being First Reformed.  There is nothing light or cheerful in his films.  He also wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver.   I'm guessing this comes from his upbringing in a strict Dutch Reformed Calvinistic family in Michigan and his attendance at Calvin College.  It's a grim, bleak, (pick your adjective) view of human life.  I c (can see the influence of Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthasar, Diary of a Country Priest), Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story), and Carl Theodore Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc).  I've watched all those cited films and I can't say that I enjoyed them because they are not meant to be enjoyed.  The same is true for Schrader's films.

12/14/233

 Thursday, December 14, 2023

 In bed by 9:30, awake @ 4:55 and up at 5:15 to let Lilly out and load the dishwasher.  33°, Venue visible high in clear SE sky, high of 48°, wind WSW at 11, 7-12/23, WC is 24°.  Sunrise at 7:15, sunset at 4:16, 9+1.   

Treadmill; pain.    30:17 & 0.65 while watching PBS NOVA "Your Brain: Who's in Control?" on YouTube which interested me because of my interest in meditation.

I'm grateful that I am not in Gaza now, or Israel, or Ukraine, or Russia for that matter.  Grateful that I am not in any war zone, combat area, or any area targeted by computers and algorithms for Death and Destruction (except insofar as Milwaukee may be pre-targeted by one or more of Russia's and China's nuclear-armed ICBMs.)  On the other hand, I live in a country where, as of November 30, 2023, a total of 660 people have been killed this year and another 2,320 other people have been injured in 557 mass shootings.  In Milwaukee alone, in 2022, there were more than 1,000 non-fatal shootings and more than 200 homicides.  Grateful, yes, but chastened by America's reality.

One too often ignored reality of warfare.  Years ago, while sitting at his kitchen table in his little cinderblock house in Florida, my father and I had what was really the only talk we ever had about his time on Iwo Jima, even though we were both former Marines, both veterans of a foreign war.  Our conversation wasn't long, quite the contrary, and it was not very descriptive.  He was 24 years old during the battle, considered an 'old man' by his mostly younger Marines.  He lived for another 62 years after the battle and in those 62 years, I believe he never spoke of the battle, except the little bit he shared with me at his kitchen table that morning in Florida.  He said that he and the other Marines weren't worried about dying or being wounded by a gunshot, i.e., from a rifle.  What haunted them was the fear of being dismembered,  that is, blown apart by heavy weapons: mortars, rockets, artillery, and even land mines.  I thought of that discussion while reading a story in this morning's WaPo on the war in Gaza, including this paragraph: "Depictions of the horrors wrought by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza have streamed out for weeks, showing the killing of thousands of people, many blown apart by airstrikes. Some show young people, smiling in happier times before they were dismembered and buried in rubble. Some show child survivors trembling, the shock on tiny faces grimed with blood and ash."  These are the images that we never see: body parts, arms, legs, heads, and headless torsos.  My father saw them, and so have thousands of Gazans.  He never forgot; neither will they.  And as Auden wrote 'those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.'  Hamas did evil to Israelis, Israelis do evil to Hamas, who do evil to Israelis, who do evil to Hamas, and the beat goes on, the beat goes on.  How, if at all, will this circle ever be broken?

Gershwind Syndrome.   In listening to Stanford Professor Sapolsky's lecture on biological underpinnings of religiosity, he discussed how behaviors that are bizarre, maladaptive, and peripheralizing in the wrong context can be accepted and valorized in another context, offering shamans in primitive religions as an example: speaking in tongues, hearing things that no one else hears, etc.  Wrong context, he's a crazy man; right context, he's a holy man.  Sapolsky also discussed behavioral characteristics among some sufferers of temporal lobe epilepsy, now called Gerschwind Syndrome or Temporal Lobe Personality.  The characteristics that caught my attention were hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, and a tendency toward solitary pursuits.  Egad! I thought! Do I have a Temporal Lobe Personality?!? 😱 I spend much more time than "normal" people writing in my journal/blog and my old-age hobbies are indeed solitary: reading, writing, drawing, and painting!  I recognized the thought as "Medical Student Syndrome", in which some students may experience hypochondria-related disorders relating to the medical conditions they are studying at the time.  I probably had some of this disorder back in my undergraduate days when I took a course on Abnormal Psychology to fulfill the requirements of my Psych major. OMG, am I OCD?!?  Sometimes I do this or that.  Am I schizoid?!? (And now I know about 'schizotypal' disorders from watching Dr. Sapolsky on YouTube; maybe I'm schizotypal!😨).  My beloved told me years ago that I am "eccentric" and I recall her being displeased during one of our European vacations that I spent so much time writing journal entries in my travel notebook.  Hypergraphia!😳 and my wanting to check out so many ancient churches.  Hyperreligiosity!😩  Egad!  Maybe I am a Temporal Lobe Personality!😱

Drove Geri to Tom Alpren's for an eye exam.  AOK, next visit in 2 years.

Mindfulness Meditation call-in.  I participated by telephone while Geri was with TA.  Good conversation.  Lou, Mary, Bill, Eric.  Left at the 45-minute mark for a pit stop in TA's building.  During the conversation, Bill, who is the most active contriutor, referred to mindfulness helping him to dea with feelings of anger or gult or shame over matters in his history and of course I thought of the remorse I often feel over neglecting my mother once I left home and got married, over my emotional distance from my father despite his perhaps awkward but genuine manifestations of love, even over our first dog Freckles.  I can still get almost overwhelmed with remorse with my mistakes and failures, self-centeredness.  And Yeats, of course: things said or done, or things not done or said, not a day but someting is recalled, my conscience or my vanity appalled.  I'm writing this at night having just read Natasha Trethewey's Graveyard Blues, her poem about her mother's funeral and burial.  "It rained the whole time we were laying her down; /  Rained from church to grave when we put her down. / The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound. ' When the preacher called out I held up my hand; / When he called for a witness I raised my hand - / Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman. / The sun came out when I turned to walk away, / Glared down on me as I turned and walked away - / My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay. / The road going home was pocked with holes, / That home-going road's always full of holes; / Though we slow down, time's wheel still rolls. ' I wander now among name of the dead: / My mother's name, stone pillow for my head."

LTMW at a small herd of 5 young deer munching on berries that have fallen or been dropped by birds from our trees along County Line Road.

12/13/23

 Wednesday, December 13, 2023

In bed at 9:45, up at 5.  Let Lilly out.   22°, high of 37°, wind W at 8 mph, 7-10/20.  W/C is 13°.  Sunrise is 7:15, sunset at 4:16, 9+1.

Dramatic predawn sky, 12/13/23

Treadmill; pain      30:02 & 0.76

I'm grateful for Lawrence Orrie Anderson, Larry Anderson, LOA who calls me CDC.  He sat in front of me in our alphabetically arranged classrooms at the Marquette Law School and we became friends early on in our freshman year, now called 1L.  He initiated the friendship.  He's more outgoing than I tend to be and in that year I was still somewhat in recovery mode after my year overseas and in Bucks County.  I was 3 or 4 years older than most of my classmates, including Larry.   His dad was Orrie Anderson who operated a car repair garage; his mom was Mrs. Anderson, a proper Wisconsin Synod Lutheran.  Larry was single, had just graduated from UWM as an English major, rode a motorcycle, and enjoyed listening to The Shags play loud R&R music at O'Brad's on the East Side.  I was married, a Marine Corps veteran and a veteran of Vietnam, which was even then not a popular war, especially among those of draft age, like almost all of my classmates.  I think he was impressed that I was a Marine and had served in a war zone although he was at times disparaging of military service,  a very common attitude among young Americans 2 and 3 years after our invasion of South Vietnam and relentless bombing of North Vietnam.  In any event, we remained friends throughout law school and, unlike many of our classmates, Larry managed not to get drafted (because of lucky draft lottery numbers) but ended up, mirabile dictu, joining the Marines as a JAG officer.  After his discharge from the Philadelphia Navy Yard, his last duty station, he came back to Milwaukee and worked first as an assistant city attorney for Milwaukee, and then as an assistant U.S. attorney, becoming an expert in prosecuting complex drug cases.  He and his wife Gaye, whom he met when he was stationed at Quantico and she was a student at Mary Washington College in Fredricksburg,   They had a lovely bungalow on Story Parkway above the old County Stadium.  When Sarah developed an allergy to our Lhasa Apso "Moose," Larry and Gaye adopted and cared for him.   Lrrry eventually transferred to the US Attorney's office in Atlanta, GA because Gaye couldn't deal with Wisconsin winters.  They later divorced and Larry remarried his wife Jan, who had been another AUSA in Atlanta.  He stayed in the Marine Corps active reserves until he retired as a 'bird colonel' some years ago, having switched his primary MOS from JAG to Infantry, 0302.  We have been friends for more than 56 years and I was happy to be on the telephone with him for half an hour yesterday, just schmoozing.

A thought about Trump's standing in USSC on the immunity issue.   January 6, 2021, was a Wednesday, the middle of the first work week of that year.  While Congress was kept busy certifying the results of the 2020 election and fleeing from the angry mob that invaded the Capitol, the Supreme Court was literally across the street engaged in its business.  Unlike the Congress, the Supreme Court was not stormed that day, but the justices were certainly aware of what was happening across the street from their workplace.  Will this have any impact on their attitudes about Trump's moral and criminal culpability for having, as Liz Cheney put it: "summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack"?

Comparing Al Gore and Donald Trump.  From the op-ed  "Let us praise Al Gore for saving the country" by Stuart Stevens in this morning's WaPo:

We don’t talk enough about Al Gore and his greatest moment: The night of Dec. 12, 2000, when he saved the country by accepting the bitter results of a partisan Supreme Court ruling on a tied election.  The 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore gave George W. Bush 271 electoral college votes — one more than required for victory. After the excruciating spectacle of the Florida recount, there was more reason to challenge the legitimacy of the presidential election than any time since 1860.

Gore could have shattered our electoral system’s stability by raising legitimate questions about a deeply flawed process. There was clear reason to feel he had been cheated in a state governed by his opponent’s brother and by a Supreme Court influenced by his opponent’s father. It was the first time in more than a century that the winner of the popular vote was not elected president. 

But as we increasingly realize the inherent fragility of our democracy with its dependency on good will, Gore’s greatest moment may well be when he accepted defeat. This year, let us pause to honor the actions of a quiet American hero who simply did the right thing. As the Republican Party has forgotten, there can be no democracy unless someone is willing to lose. [My bolding.]

That night in December 2000, Gore told his staff not to trash the Supreme Court because he believed there was something more important at stake than the results of one election. He was right. We owe Gore the respect of a grateful nation.

Three thoughts came to mind as I read this:  First, Stuart Stevens wrote the most candid political book I have read: It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, in which he admitted that the basic appeal (in both senses of the word) of the modern Republican Party is RACE, White superiority and White supremacy.   Second, while running for president in 1988, Al Gore sat for a televised interview at my desk in my law office.  I joked that, if he won, I could boast that the 'presidential ass' had sat in my chair and I would sell the privilege of sitting in my chair for $1 a minute.  Third, there was another significant difference between Gore and Trump.  Gore served in the Army during the Vietnam War.  Trump  avoided service (something for 'losers') by getting a medical draft deferment for spurious 'bone spurs.'  Someone those 'bone spurs' never bothered him once he had the deferment.

Biden admits Israeli bombing in Gaza is "indiscriminate" and says it is costing Israel support around the world.  Tony Blinken has admitted there is "a gap" between the respect for international law and the law of war that he has called for in Israel and what is happening on the ground in Gaza.  Secretary Austin has spoken of the danger of Israel gaining tactical victories at the cost of a strategic loss.  What does all this mean for the U.S. that has just vetoed the humanitarian ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council?