10/21/24

 Monday, October 21, 2024

335 Roman Emperor Constantine the Great ruled that Jews were not allowed to purchase and circumcise Christian slaves

2018 Julia Louis-Dreyfus was presented with the Mark Twain Prize, comedy's top honor, at a ceremony in New York

2020 Parents of 545 children that were separated at the US-Mexico border cannot be found according to the American Civil Liberties Union

In bed at 9 and up at 4:15.  I woke up with aching shoulders and back pain 'from stem to stern.'  I let Lilly out at 4:35. She shows signs of being afraid of the dark, very reluctant/hesitant to step outside the doorway before finally exiting after temporarily turning as if to go back into the house.  She finally left and presumably emptied her bladder before returning to the house.  The winter solstice is two months away.  Winter will begin, astronomically, at 3:20 a.m. on December 21, 2024, when we will have 6 hours and 23 minutes less daylight than we have on the summer solstice.  For the next 2 months, our daylight time gets shorter and shorter before getting longer each day.  Will Lilly make it? (Will I?)  How will she deal with all that darkness? . . . I let her out again at 6:55 in the crepuscular light and she was fine.

Prednisone, day160, 5 mg., day 11/28.    Prednisone at 5 a.m.  All Bran + at 11:30 and morning meds at 11:40.

Shopping trip.  I drove up to Port Washington to check out their work shirts and bought one, while really enjoying what a pretty town it is with its many Victorian houses, cream city brick buildings, and beautful harbor.  Then I drove down to Grafton and Costco to pick up two loaves of Dave's Bread, some raspberries and blueberries, and two cauliflower crust frozen pizzas.  While at Costco I enjoyed one of theri famous $1.50 frankfurters, eschewing the carbonated soda that came with it.  The trees along Grand Avenue in Port Washington are coming to peak autumn colors - beautiful.

Winding down and losing interest in writing about Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza/Lebanon/Hamas/Hebollah/Iran and the U.S.. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, . . .

10/20/24

Sunday, October 20, 2024

1998 Comedian Richard Pryor received the first-ever Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

2015 US Vice President Joe Biden confirmed he will not run for President in 2016

In bed at 9:15, awake at 4:27, and up at 4:44.  I let Lilly out at 6:30.  She has become very cautious about going out in the darkness.  She stands for minutes in the doorway staring (at what?) with her nose twitching while I hold the storm door open for her.  Eventually, she stepped outside and eventually pee'd but never moved more than a few feet on either side of the sidewalk, keeping within eyesight of me standing in the doorway.  As soon as she emptied her bladder, she came back into the house.  For the first time, she didn't go to one of her post-outing posts: the dining room/kitchen doorway or next to the kitchen island, waiting for a treat.  She moves around the house, nervously pacing.

Prednisone, day159, 5 mg., day 10/28.    Prednisone at 5ish. Three slices of toasted and buttered Dave's Bread with blueberry preserves at 8ish.  Morning meds at 8:30.

Group memory.  There is a New Yorker 'weekend essay' by Lydia Davis dated October 19, 2023, titled "Do You Remember School?"  In it Davis recounts her experience as a 'co-agent' with another alumna gathering and editing memories of her classmates at Brearley School.  According to the New York Times, "The Brearley School, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, is one of the most competitive, academically rigorous private schools in the city and also one of the most expensive; tuition runs $64,100 a year."  It is described as a college-preparatory school though it runs from kindergarten through 12th grade.  College prep kindergarten?  Grade school?  This tells us something I suppose of the ferocity of competition among parents to have their children admitted to the school, their ambitions for those children, and perhaps the effects on the children.  But in any event, Davis initially focuses her essay on what she calls 'group memory' and how inconsistent it is.  Of course, groups don't have memory, only individuals do, but I take her point.  I recall a reunion of the Notch House group at Ed Felsenthal's house on Marco Island several years ago.  At some point in our meanderings conversations, Ed and I referred to the drama in our senior year at Marquette in which Father John Holbrook, S.J., threatened to prevent our graduation because we refused to attend an annual weekend religious 'retreat' required of all Catholic students.  Ed and I had self-identified as "Catholic" when we were accepted as students and thus were subject to the retreat rule.  None of our classmates at that reunion, all of whom were Catholics, at least during our Marquette years, remembered the rule.  Indeed, they were sure there was no such rule and did not remember attending weekend retreats during our years in undergraduate school. Ed's memory, and mine, of our meetings with Father Holbrook were vivid and accurate, not fantasies.  How odd it seemed then, and it seems now, that our dear friends had no memory at all either of the rule or of the annual retreats themselves.  The retreats were conducted by members of the Jesuit Community at Marquette and were held in classrooms on weekends when there were no classes scheduled. The only one I specifically recall was conducted in a MULS classroom.  I don't recall who the "retreat master" was.  The most popular retreat master (and confessor) for male students was Father McAvoy, the chaplain and cafeteria manager in the School of Dentistry.  Three Our Fathers, Three Hail Marys, and keep your pecker in your pants.  

Lydia Davis and her classmates are 76 or 77 years old.  The Notch House gang are 83 or 84 years old, those of us who are still alive.  Ed, who was our 'social chairman' and my near life-long friend, has died, the first of us to pass on though after his wife Helen.  I suppose our 'group memory' at our age is even more inconsistent or varied than Lydia Davis's classmates.  We communicate less frequently than she and her classmates do.  I emailed Tom, Bill, and Gerry when Ed died last June.  Tom and Ronnie flew into Chicago for the wake and funeral but they were the only ones able to do so.  Except for sporadic emails occasioned by some news story, our last shared experience was the gathering at Ed's house on Marco Island and the 2013 get-together at our house for the 50th Reunion of the MU Class of 1963.  The longest conversation I had at that meeting was on our patio with Phyllis Nugent.  Thinking of that gathering, of Lyn's wake, and of Ed's funeral reminds me that I should contact Cam Wakeman to see about sharing a breakfast or lunch.

From "How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?  Even many of the ex-President’s opponents haven’t grasped the scale of the man’s villainy" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, October 14, 2024

Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against nato and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.

What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them.  . . . Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. 

Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.

10/19/24

 Saturday, October 19, 2024

2003 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was beatified by Pope John Paul II

2016 Donald Trump refused to say he would accept the result of the election during a debate with Hillary Clinton

In bed at 8, awake at 5 and up at 5:30 with a sore lower back.    

Prednisone, day 158, 5 mg., day 9/28.   Prednisone at 5:45. 

Executive function; memory loss?  I went to bed last night leaving my rollator in the vestibule.  I don't recall being aware of this or concerned about it as I got into bed nor during 3 or 4 pit stops overnight.  I was very aware of it as I got out of bed this morning with a stiff, aching back and was thankful that I had a cane leaning on the nightstand.  I have been writing in this journal every day for about 2 and 1/4 years, except for a couple of weeks when I was laid up with polymyalgia rheumatica.  Every so often I have ruminated about why I do it and one persistent reason has been to keep tabs on my mental/cognitive condition.  I was at the tail end of my 81st year when I started 'keeping notes' and I'm now in the first quarter of my 84th, a time of debility, disability, and decline.  I don't want to ignore signals that I am "losing it."  Last night's experience with "Judy" is troubling.  For at least the last couple of months, I have taken the rollator into my bedroom each night to

 have it available during the night for 'pit stops' but mainly to have it available each morning when I get up with my assortment of morning aches and pains.  How could I have been so oblivious last night about the rollator?  It troubles me. 

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  I experienced great schadenfreude as I saw the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, and former archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan, excoriated for his acts and omissions at this year's Al Smith Dinner.  My favorite is this piece by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire magazine:

Regulars at this here shebeen know that we have little or no use for Timothy Dolan, cardinal archbishop of the Diocese of New York. Of all the American princes of the Church, outside of that ridiculous popinjay Raymond Burke, Dolan is among the most insufferable. He plays the jocular, backslapping Irishman while his rap sheet on burying the ongoing sexual-abuse scandal is one of the longest of all his fellow members of the Clan of the Red Hat.

As a parish priest at the Church of the Immaculata outside St, Louis, he shared a pulpit with Fr. LeRoy Valentine, who is alleged to have abused boys for years before the Church took any action at all, shining on survivors who came to it. According to survivors who came forward, Dolan claimed to know nothing about the man with whom he served at Immaculata. He climbed the greasy chain of command until he was archbishop of Milwaukee. When the scandal hit there, Dolan transferred $57 million worth of assets off the archdiocese’s books and into a cemetery trust fund where it would be sheltered from the lawsuits coming down the tracks. From The New York Times:

Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.” However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

So it couldn’t have been a surprise when Dolan sat next to El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, yucking it up as the adjudicated criminal dropped a multi-megaton bomb at the Al Smith Dinner in New York. He whined. He took cheap shots at the other guests. He even swore. Speaking about former mayor Bill de Blasio, he said:

“We have another former New York City mayor with us. Frankly, easily the worst in our history. And it’s not Michael [Bloomberg]. That, I can tell you. I’m surprised that Bill de Blasio was actually able to make it tonight, to be honest. He was a terrible mayor. I don’t give a shit if this is comedy or not. He was a terrible mayor. He did a horrible–he did a horrible job. That’s not comedy, by the way. That’s fact. But unlike the rest of New York, at least Bill doesn’t have to worry about the criminals. They owe him big. He let them get away with a lot of stuff.”

No worries, sir. Nobody in the rapidly petrifying audience thought this was comedy. You should’ve delivered this speech at Los Alamos.

And this on the same day that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agrees to pay $880 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse. As in all things, the most important element in all comedy is timing.

The National Catholic Reporter is to be commended for hitting Dolan upside his zucchetto for criticizing the vice president for not attending—a mistake, I think—while ignoring the felon in the woodpile.

Perhaps it would be best to stop here to collect our breath and spend a moment or two reflecting on just who should be placed on the spot for engaging in less-than-civil behavior, as well as contributing to the diminishment of Catholic identity and credibility in the public square. Even in this era of the endless gush of stuff coming at us on every manner of device, it is possible to cull reality from it all. In the case of Trump, the material almost outruns social media's ability to keep up.

But first, a quick look back at the cardinal’s role in all of this, which extends to a well-reported recording of a phone call he made to Trump with other Catholic leaders in 2020. The two exhibited a kind of unctuous, ecclesial-political bromance, the former president declaring the cardinal a “great gentleman” and a “great friend of mine.” He also gave a nod to an implicit quid pro quo to paying attention to what his eminence “asks for.”

The sin here is not that Kamala Harris had the good sense to reply, “No thank you, I’m previously engaged.” The real scandal is that the good Catholic cardinal of the great city of New York would not have the courage to say, this year, that the current Republican candidate is a walking example of so much the Catholic Church finds repugnant in today’s politics that he would suspend the normal invitations.

In this morning's NYTimes, the Irish-Catholic Maureen Brigid Dowd, an alumna of Immaculata High School and the Catholic University of America, took her turn lambasting New York's  Irish-Catholic archbishop:

The cardinal should go to confession.

Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.

At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.

. . . . .

Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.

Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God. The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of the great Democratic patriot Al Smith. 

Trump is proudly amoral. He disdains the Christian values I was taught by nuns and priests. His only values are self-interest and self-gratification. He has replaced a code of ethics with the Narcissus pool.

Certainly, Dolan is happy with Trump’s abortion crackdown. But can’t he see that Trump is corroding our country’s moral core? . . . 

The pols on the dais looked like a Last Supper for this unnerving election. Hopefully, it’s not a Last Supper for the Republic. 

I love the not-so-subtle way Dowd includes Dolan himself as one of "the pols on the dais."  Timothy Dolan has given me the creeps ever since he was appointed archbishop of Milwaukee, succeeding Rembert Weakland.  His phoney-baloney effusive ebulllience led me to nickname him 'Mr. Joyboy' after the Rod Steiger character in the 1965 movie version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.  Mr. Joyboy was the chief embalmer at Whispering Glades Cemetery, modeled after Los Angeles's Forest Lawn Cemetery.  He was and is an ambitious ecclesiastical climber and was rumored to have a shot at becoming the first American pope, an appointment that would no doubt please him.  That he enjoyed sitting next to and schmoozing with Donald J. Trump at the Al Smith Dinner tells us a lot about the man and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  So, forgive me, Father, I'm glad that many people saw fit to dump on him for it.  Oh, and I resolve not to sin again (but with these two, I know I will.

Today's outing took me to the Shell station to fill my gas tank, to the Target store in Grafton for dishwasher detergent and black HP inkjet cartridge for our printer, and to the MetroMarket for Mrs Rhode's Artisan French dinner rolls and a pint of Talenti vanilla bean gelato.

Ramona.  I moved her from the big easel to a work table to get easier access to her robe and flowers.  I also moved some paints, acrylic medium, and brushes into the workroom but didn't have the energy to start painting.

It's almost been Indian summer here today except we haven't had a hard freeze yet.  The temperature has been in the low to mid-70s with sunny skies.  Beautiful. 

At 4:33 on this Saturday afternoon, I sit on my recliner in the TV room that I hate calling 'the TV room', that I used to call 'the library' and even 'the White House library' back before the house was painted a light gray-blue, and I wonder whether I should turn on the TV and 'catch some news,' see if the Israelis have launched their get-even-and-then-some violence against Iran or Hezbollah or Hamas and I wonder what is wrong with me that I should think of seeking news of more death and destruction when I have had an entire, long lifetime of watching and listening and reading news of death and destruction.  What is wrong with me indeed?  There is a chickadee on the tube feeder outside my recliner window and a mourning dove on the ground beneath. Now a sparrow takes his place on the tube feeder and a newly-arrived snowbird arrives to see what is left for her on the ground.  Time to fill the feeder and my soul.  Fuck the news. . . . As I stood motionless near the tube feeder a red-breasted nuthatch flew near my head and alighted on the empty suet holder ignoring the full one on another limb of the shepherd's crook.  It moved me to get another suet cake out of the freezer and to fill the empty holder.  By 5:45, as the daylight grows dimmer, a female hairy woodpecker flies in and works on one of the suet cakes.

Leisure by W. H. Davies

WHAT is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,

And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

10/18/24

 Friday, October 18, 2024

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I was in bed at 9, awake at 4:15 with a very painful back, listening to Lilly pacing, and up at 4:20 with Lilly waiting for me in the vestibule. I let her out, but she did her normal look around for a couple of minutes, turned around, and came back into the house and disappeared into Geri's bedroom? sun room? living room?  I had the kitchen cleaned up, the dishwasher loaded and working, and Geri's morning coffee station set up by 7 a.m.

Prednisone, day 157, 5 mg., day 8/28.  Prednisone at 5:15.   

Losing it?  I started my morning reading with the NYTimes and realized that there was hardly anything in this morning's paper that I cared to read.  No interest in reading more about Yahya Sinwar or the Mideast bloodbath  No interest in reading about Trump's and Harris's campaign stops.  No interest in reading about Volodimar Zelensky's plan for Ukraine's victory over Russia within the next year.  I ended up reading (and listening to) an article about James Carville, about to turn 80.  I haven't even read the last two op-ed pieces by Tom Friedman, whose columns I normally read, at least for the last year.  Just as I am losing interest in reading and watching "the news," I'm also losing interst and motivation to write about it so this journal, like me and Lilly, may be on ints last legs.  Speaking of which, the pain and stiffness in my back and hips (my "pelvic girdle") are making walking an ever more hazardous undettaiking.  I used to think that it was my difficulty with balance that made me a high risk for falling.  I still have the balance problem, and perhaps it is worse than in years past, but it's the stiffness and pain problems that are increasingly challenging.  I thought of my propensity to fall down yeterday as I walked into Sendik's to get a few bratwurst buns.  I always try to park next to a grocery cart stall so I can grab a cart and use it as a walker getting to and from my car.  Should I be joinging the YMCA or JCC, retaining a personal trainer, or at least going out for walks with Judy or Rachel, or am I just fooling myself that I'm capable of any of that?  I see Dr. Chatt at the VA on the 29th and maybe she'll have some recommendation(s), but probably just more physical therapy, at which  I am not a good patient.   In any event,  . . .

Before switching from the NYTimes to the WaPo, I read Jamelle Bouie's column titled "When the Top General in the U.S. Says You’re ‘Fascist to the Core’.  He warns that

 Presidential rhetoric corresponds to presidential action; it precedes and defines it. What a candidate says on the campaign trail connects to what he (or she) will do in office. And if Trump has had a single, consistent message, it is that he’ll use the violent arm of the state to cleanse the nation of “scum” and “vermin,” whether immigrants and refugees or dissenters anhd political opponents like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.

It's easy to see why Trump is out to get Adam Schiff. Schiff was the lead impeachment manager in the first impeachment trial of Trump and has inveighed against Trump for years.  He is a Harvard Law graduate and worked as a research assistant for Professor Fawrence Tribe, another persistent critic of Trump.  It's a little harder to come up with a specific reason for Trump's animus against Pelosi although she certainly has also been a most effective critic of much of what Trump has done both in office and as a candidate.  My theory is that he's out to get her because of the famous meeting at the White House when Pelosi stood up, in a room full of powerful men, pointed her finger at Trump, and uttered the insult "With you, all roads lead to Putin!"

10/17/24

 Thursday, October 17, 2024

1933 Albert Einstein arrived in the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany

1973 OPEC oil ministers used oil as an economic weapon in the Arab-Israeli War, mandating a cut in exports and recommending an embargo against unfriendly states

1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1979 US President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the Department of Education

Lilly was in bed at 9, awake at 3:30, and up at 4:00. She was sleeping next to her mattress on the floor in the TV room, and I woke her up by sneezing at 4:15, after which she moved to the living room without asking me to let her out.  

Prednisone, day 156, 5 mg., day 7.   Prednisone at 5 a.m.  My shoulders seem to be OK this morning.

This morning's headlines on Israel and the U.S. in the WaPo are "American B-2 bombers target Houthi sites in Yemen; U.S. sees aid enter northern Gaza," "Israeli attacks on aid convoys in Gaza persist, U.N. says." and "Israel complicates election’s final stretch, an issue Democrats hoped would fade."   I wonder again, as I have so long, what are the real reasons the United States is so tied to the state of Israel.  Only a fool would buy the propaganda that it is because Israel is a fellow democracy.  First, America favors other democracies only when it is in America's own economic interests to do so.  America is very comfortable supporting autocracies and even military dictatorships when doing so favors America's corporate, capitalist, and economic interests, witness our history with, e.g., Egypt, Chile, and all the countries in the Caribbean, Central, and South America.  It is a question of whether Vietnam fit this pattern or whether that set of policies was simply the stupid and tragic results of LBJ's Texas machismo and Robert McNamara's MBA hubris.  Second, Israel is a democracy only for Israeli Jews, not for the Arab Palestinians living in the occupied territories.

B-2 bombers cost approximately $1,000,000,000 each and can carry 20 tons of bombs including 'bunker-busting' bombs such as were used in the attack on the Houthis.  I do not argue that the Houthis do not deserve the bombing because they attack commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden but note that it is what has been happening in Gaza for the past year that occasioned the attacks on the commercial and naval shipping.   

The warning letter from DOD Secretary Austin and Secretary of State Blinken comes about a year too late.  Does Joe Biden think this letter gets him and the U.S. off the hook for complicity in the starvation and other group punishments the Israeli government has inflicted on the Gazans?  From the WaPo article:

This account of the Biden administration’s handling of ballooning violence in the Middle East during the election’s final weeks is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the United States, Europe and the Middle East as well as Harris’s campaign. The dynamic they conveyed is of an improvisational White House that has followed Israel’s lead into a widening regional war while only marginally influencing Netanyahu’s actions. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their observations.

The war’s spread has alarmed the Harris campaign, which sees the images of dead civilians as complicating her path to victory in key swing states with sizable Arab American and Muslim populations. ' ' '  Look at our track record of intervening to get humanitarian assistance in,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday. “When we have seen the results not measure up to the standards that we expect, we have intervened with them.”

But according to the administration’s own assessment, the amount of aid delivered to Gaza has dropped by more than 50 percent since the spring. 

If Harris loses Michigan, and perhaps other states, because of the U.S. complicity in tens of thousands of dead Palestinians and almost 2 million displaced and starving Palestinians, the blame will lie primarily at the feet of Joe Biden.  Joe Biden's legacy of saving the nation and the world from a second Trump term will be permanently overshadowed by his legacy of delivering a second Trump term.  "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up." B. Obama.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880 million to settle more than 1,300 claims of childhood sexual abuse.  The settlement resolves 1353 claims against the archdiocese over many years.  The settlement demonstrates that the archdiocese itself enabled the abusers and perpetuated the harm to the victims.  [Archbishop José H.] Gomez said that funding for the settlement will come from “reserves, investments, and loans, along with other Archdiocesan assets,” and not from donations."  Los Angeles is the largest archdiocese in the U.S. and this settlement reveals, yet again, the sinfulness and corruption of the Church and its immense wealth.  I'm reminded that in dioceses across the entire nation, including Milwaukee and Chicago, bishops and archbishops, and cardinals "circled the wagons" by protecting the Church and its wealth when cases of sexual and other abuse of children and adults by diocesan priests and members of religious orders came to their attention.  In 2016, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee agreed to pay $21 million to hundreds of claimants.  Just this month, a federal judge denied a motion by Wisconsin Attorney General Kaul for access to the bankruptcy court's sealed file containing information about the victims.  As I've written before in this journal and in my memoir, the "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church" is a transnational feudal organization, a superstate, with the Pope as its divine right king and bishops his vassals. It is just as subject to sinfulness, crime, and corruption as any other human power structure. 

In 2007, the same archdiocese in Los Angeles settled sexual abuse lawsuits involving more than 500 alleged victims for $660 million — the largest sexual abuse settlement by a diocese until this week. The new settlement brings the cumulative payout from the archdiocese to more than $1.5 billion.  The situation in California received renewed attention after the state passed a 2019 law that opened a three-year window in which cases were exempted from age limits and allowed alleged victims of sexual abuse to sue up to the age of 40. That window closed at the end of 2022. More than 3,000 lawsuits were filed against the Catholic Church in the state during the window. Facing an influx of suits, the dioceses of Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Santa Rosa, and San Diego filed for bankruptcy.  I think of the trip that Geri and I took to Santa Rosa in 2003 to interview for a job as communications director for that diocese where the bishop himself had been involved in a sex scandal with one of his deacons.  How fortunate that I withdrew my application.

10/16/24

 Wednesday, October 16, 2024

1946 10 Nazi leaders were hanged as war criminals after the Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Alfred Jodl

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis began as US President John F. Kennedy was shown photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba

1968 Americans Tommie Smith  and John Carlos famously gave the Black Power salute on the 200m medal podium during the Mexico City Olympics to protest racism and injustice against African Americans

1973 US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho controversially were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed

1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II

1982 Secretary of State George P. Shultz warned that the US would withdraw from the UN if they voted to exclude Israel

1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, won the Nobel Peace Prize

Autumn leavesI was in bed by 9 after fighting to stay awake, up at 5:3,7 and let Lilly out in the cold 36°in the morning.  Andy picked me up at 7:45 to drive to Ogui's Garage to pick up his Honda.   

Prednisone, day 155, 6 mg., day 6/28.  Prednisone at 6:09.  Both shoulders are stiff and achy, and my lower back is very arthritic.   Morning meds at 9:30.

"A new blood libel," media coverage of Gazan children killed by the IDF.  There is an Isaac Chotiner interview of the British novelist Howard Johnson in this morning's The New Yorker online.  It's titled "Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza" and subtitled "The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of “blood libel” against Jews."  I read it because it seemed that perhaps it was another variation on the theme that any criticism of the acts of the State of Israel is a form of antisemitism.  

Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new “blood libel” against the Jewish people. “Such bias as I have described—conscious or not—has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,” Jacobson wrote. “The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”

I read the interview this same morning as I read an essay by Aryah Neier titled "Torture in Israel's Prisons" in the October 17, 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books.

In early August the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report called “Welcome to Hell.” It presents the testimonies of fifty-five Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself who were held by Israeli authorities after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in what the report calls “a network of torture camps.” Some of these detainees were already in prison when the attack took place; others were arrested thereafter. All were subsequently released, mostly without charges.

Summarizing the testimonies, B’Tselem says they indicate “a systemic institutional policy” of

frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation; prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment.

“So systemic” are the abuses, B’Tselem concludes, “that there is no room to doubt” that they belong to “an organized, declared policy.” The report quotes the commander of Ketziot: “As far as we are concerned, they [the detainees] are all terrorists. We’ve reduced the conditions to a minimum.” This seems to reflect the widespread view among Israeli officials and much of the Israeli public that Palestinians in Gaza are collectively guilty of the crimes that Hamas committed on October 7. While it does not directly address the question of collective guilt, a Pew Research Center survey released on May 30 found that Israel’s Jews broadly approve of the country’s punitive military campaign in Gaza. The survey was conducted in March and early April, when the toll of those killed and wounded in Gaza was already very high and reports had made it clear that there was a humanitarian crisis resulting from the obstruction of deliveries of food, water, and other necessities. The Pew survey found that 39 percent of Israelis thought the military response to Hamas was about right, 34 percent said it had not gone far enough, and only 19 percent thought it had gone too far. Most of those who thought it had gone too far were Palestinian Israelis. Only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis thought it had gone too far. 

Aryeh Neier is a Jew.  I suspect, though only from his given name of Isaac, that Chotiner is also a Jew, and of course Howard Jacobson is a Jew.  After reading the Jacobson interview twice, I'm not entirely sure what his point is other than that he doesn't know who to believe or trust in 'the fog of war.  He doesn't equate any and all attacks on the actions of the Israeli government the IDF or the Israeli Jewish people as antisemitism. Still, he comes kind of close, seeming to accuse Western media of antisemitism.

You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.

I wonder what Jacobson would say of Neirer's article about Israeli abuse and torture of Palestinian prisoners.  Would he call him a "self-hating Jew"?  That seems to be the reaction of many diaspora Jews to Jewish critics of the Israeli government or of the Israeli system of apartheid.

Watching a news clip of a J. D. Vance rally in Williamsport, Pa., and terrified that all the people on risers behind him, cheering him, looked so 'normal,' so much like my neighbors and the people I see at Costco and Target and Sendik's.  If the polls are to be credited, approximately half of the American electorate are Donald Trump and J. D. Vance supporters.  How can this not terrify those of us who are not?

Emily Dickenson

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides -

You may have met him? Did you not

His notice instant is -

The Grass divides as with a Comb,

A spotted Shaft is seen,

And then it closes at your Feet

And opens further on -

He likes a Boggy Acre -  

A Floor too cool for Corn -

But when a Boy and Barefoot

I more than once at Noon

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash

Unbraiding in the Sun

When stooping to secure it

It wrinkled And was gone -

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me

I feel for them a transport

Of Cordiality

But never met this Fellow

Attended or alone

Without a tighter Breathing

And Zero at the Bone.

10/15/24

 Tuesday, October 15, 2024

1966 Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California

1991 Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a US Supreme Court Justice (52-48)

2000 Larry David's comedy show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" debuts on HBO

In bed at 9, awake and unable to sleep at 3 with unwanted memories of Steve Barkan, MKM, and PKR, more than 4 hours until sunrise, up and out at 3:40.  Temperature near 40°.  I let Lilly out at 5:50 into a cold, wet morning.  Rain is forecasted for the next hour.    

Prednisone, day 154, 5 mg., day 5/28.    Prednisone at 5:58.  My left shoulder is achy again reminding me that my hips have also been achy for a few days.  Is this a recurrence of PMR?  Should I be contacting Dr. Ryzka? . . . 'Morning' meds at 4:00

Drove Andy to work at 7:15 and from work at 3:30.  He'll keep the Volvo overnight and pick me up around 7:30 tomorrow morning.

The U.S. warns Israel it will withhold arms unless Gaza aid starts flowing.  Many days late, many dollars short.  Another failure for Joe Biden.  Like issuing the executive order on border control in the last few months of his administration, during the presidential campaign.k  No credibility.

My prediction for November 5:  Trump in an electoral college landslide.  I hope I'm wrong.

Out of it today.  No interest in writing.  Sleepy all day.