2025

● Wednesday, 1-1-2025 (New Year’s Day):   I have two reasons for suspending my exercise-walking this morning: the air is very polluted, from all the firecrackers last night and early this morning; and my left thigh is injured, probably from excessive walking. I’ll see how the thigh feels tomorrow.

● Truncated Camarillo drive; refreshing. Traffic was unusually light, which always makes the drive more pleasant, for me.

● Thursday, 1-2-2025:   I had no thigh symptoms this morning, so I took my exercise-walk. Afterward, I had slight symptoms in the thigh, so I forewent my second walk.

● Friday, 1-3-2025 (10:30 p.m.):   I just awoke from another dream in which two arts were fused: music and painting. I was studying the history of American painting, and the paintings were also musical compositions. I was surveying the history of the art, including compositions of Brahms, which led to the works of Beethoven. The dream (as I remember it) was dominated by the graphic images, colorful and beautiful, mostly of landscapes. I was trying to learn to paint. In one scene I was looking at a sketch of a family having a meal, sitting at a round table, and the advice was given to always show such tables with a radial pattern for the tabletop.

● Saturday, 1-4-2025:   We may say we’re against political violence on principle. Yet, would we not favor the assassination of Hitler? Which means we’re not against political violence on principle. We’re for or against it depending on the circumstances. Strictly speaking, I’m not for or against anything on principle. All decisions are ad hoc, depending on circumstances. As to certain kinds of acts, though, exceptions may be so rare or far-fetched, that I’m for or against them virtually on principle.

Moreover, practicality constrains our making laws against certain kinds of acts, like homicide. Potential exceptions are too numerous and too subtle to fully account for in the written law. We make the law as precise as we can do practically. Further discrimination is left to the common law; to our selective enforcement of the law; and to judges’ and juries’ determination of the harshness or leniency of punishment for violations of it, to account for possible justification, or mitigating or exacerbating factors. The government is in effect saying: “Don’t do this act. We reserve the right to punish you for it. We may forbear punishment, or punish lightly—but don’t count on it.”]

● Wednesday, 1-8-2025:   I had a deposition scheduled for this morning. I had to cancel it because the fierce winds toppled a big tree near my garage, blocking my way. The city has now removed the tree. Because of the winds, there are several major, devastating fires nearby. I feel fortunate that my apartment (so far) is not in danger. I’ve been lucky over the years in this way.

● At first blush, I may seem inconsistent to say both that what is valuable (not intrinsically, but quasi-intrinsically) is just an aspect of consciousness (happiness) but that what I most value is my writing. I’m not inconsistent: the first is my judgment about an objective truth. The second is my subjective, nonrational feeling. One is my philosophy; the other is my feeling.

[Later note (1-17-2025): That’s inaccurate: both are my philosophy—my philosophy of well-being, which I’ve defined as consisting in both an objective element (happiness) and a subjective element (our desires). Our desires are nonrational and arbitrary. Sometimes, as here, philosophy and psychology coincide. . . . No, this is clearer: While philosophy aims for rationality, it also seeks to discover and to describe the truth, especially the truth of man and his life, which importantly involves his psychology. And when you describe the truth of human psychology—including your own—you’re sometimes describing the nonrational and the irrational . . . just be careful to describe it as nonrational or irrational (when it is), and not try to construe it as somehow rational simply because you’re a philosopher and it’s part of your philosophy.]

● Saturday, 1-11-2025:   I had an appointment with a physician’s assistant in the orthopedic department at Kaiser this morning, for my left upper arm, which has been painful on certain movements for the last few months. He examined me and opined that it was just a strain, which should resolve on its own. He suggested that I perhaps do light stretching exercises. Since the stretching exercises (doing them too strenuously) I think caused the injury, I’ll wait until this injury resolves before resuming those exercises.

● The horrendous fires in Los Angeles have been burning (and in fact expanding) since last Tuesday. The one in Pacific Palisades is creeping closer to my neighborhood. I’m starting to get very nervous, concerned about that. I’m by no means out of the woods in that regard. If I were religious, I’d pray. (But since I’m not, I won’t.)

● People are calling these fires “apocalyptic,” because of their huge scale: the great number of persons who’ve lost their homes. But however many—or however few—persons lose their homes, it’s catastrophic for them.

● Monday, 1-13-2025:   Today in a deposition the deponent (the person being questioned) commented that western civilization is based on Greek philosophy. He didn’t explain that, and I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it; but it occurred to me that that’s wrong: Western civilization is based on desire: people’s quest to satisfy their various desires . . . and few persons, I suspect, have a desire involving or “based on” Greek philosophy!

● Friday, 1-17-2025:   To justify his controversial political actions, Trump construes his decisively winning the presidential election as a mandate. But Trump won because his opponent (Joe Biden) was so unpopular. Probably almost any candidate who ran against Biden would have won. Dissatisfaction with your opponent does not necessarily translate to support for your crackpot ideas.

● Well, I’ve just finished the latest read-through of my Journal. This one took exactly a month. The editing was—as usual—very fruitful, and I added six pages of new Diary material, much of which I think is quite good. So I’m in a happy quandary: I’d like to submit the Journal to book publishers for publication; yet doing so seems perpetually premature when I’m continually enhancing it. If this trend continues, when will I submit it? For now, I suppose, there’s no urgent need to do so (my health and my finances are good). I can bide my time, and let the work continue to grow.

My feeling of good fortune on completing this latest read-through is augmented by my appreciation of having been spared a calamity by the still-burning Los Angeles fires. The greatest danger in that regard (for me) has passed.

● Sunday, 1-19-2025:   Truncated Camarillo drive. Enjoyable.

● Trump’s second presidential inauguration is tomorrow. Some have wondered how the American people could have elected a President who’s so great a threat to the country’s democracy. I’ve said this: “Dealing with an acute medical problem takes precedence over dealing with a chronic or long-term one.” Many working persons’ already-dire financial situations were deteriorating, and close to collapse. That danger (one that affects them personally) was acute; danger to the country’s democracy (and which might not soon affect them personally) was longer-term, or chronic. For those voters, the former took precedence over the latter.

● Monday, 1-20-2025:   When modern American politicians (at least the Republicans) laud the virtue of “sacrifice,” they don’t mean sacrifice by the rich to alleviate the suffering of the poor, or even sacrifice by everyone. They mean sacrifice by the poor, so that the rich can get richer.

● I’m going to view the mathematics lectures again, starting now.

● Tuesday, 1-21-2025:   That right wrist and forearm pain, which I thought had gone for good, has returned.

● Wednesday, 1-22-2025:   For the last hour of the bed cycle this morning, sleep was impossible, with the smell of cigarette smoke in my apartment. Miserable!

● Thursday, 1-23-2025:   This morning, Larry Mantle, a National Public Radio host, said, on air, that Donald Trump is a populist. The dictionary defines populist as “a supporter of the rights and power of the people”; and populism as “a political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.” Trump is the opposite of a populist—he’s a plutocrat. He’s a member of the wealthy elite, and his actions and policies as President (like his tax cuts for the wealthy) favor the elite at the expense of the people. Just saying you’re for the people and wanting voters to believe you’re for the people, doesn’t make you for the people. And Mantle’s statement was not just the typical namby-pamby euphemism. It was a lie . . . unless he meant merely that Trump is a populist because he seeks to be popular (his comment was dishonest or stupid—but Mantle is intelligent).

. . . On second thought, the comment could still have been merely stupid. Intelligent people sometimes say stupid things. But I think the alternative is more likely. . . . Do honest people sometimes lie? Perhaps he’s generally honest, but in this instance he gave in to fear, knowing that Trump is vindictive, and that, with Trump as President, public radio stations are vulnerable, to loss of government funding . . ..

● Sunday, 1-26-2025:   Philosophy Club. Topic: “Utilitarianism and Consequentialism.” I think that philosophers who argue for utilitarianism make at least two fundamental errors: One, they assume that morality is objective; and, two, (perhaps a consequence of the first mistake,) they assume that morality can be reduced to formulas.

In the Wikipedia article on Utilitarianism, J.S. Mill’s proof of the principle of utility is criticized as embodying several logical fallacies, including the naturalistic fallacy; the equivocation fallacy; and the fallacy of composition. A more fundamental criticism of Mill’s argument is to note that, because morality is not objective, moral precepts, like utilitarianism, cannot be proven. The best we can do regarding a moral precept is to say what our thoughts are about it, why it appeals to us (or not). Some will agree; other will disagree, and they, too, can say why. None are right or wrong. It’s like explaining why you prefer Beethoven to Bach.

Karl Popper’s suggestion that the principle “maximize pleasure” should be replaced by “minimize pain” is easily refuted: if the sole relevant principle were to minimize pain, there could be no better world than a nonexistent world, because it holds the least possible amount of pain (zero). But surely a world with no pain but considerable pleasure is better. Though we may give priority to decreasing pain over increasing pleasure, yet pleasure and pain are commensurable. I would willingly experience a certain amount of pain in order to (later) experience a great enough amount of pleasure. And the traditional utilitarian principle “maximize pleasure” already accounts for pain: it means the greatest net pleasure (pleasure over pain).

Another argument against (or criticism of) utilitarianism is that “it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable.” Well, yes and no. It’s true that our actions’ consequences are not completely knowable. But they’re not completely unknowable. Surely, we do more good by trying to do good than by trying to do harm, or even just by not trying to do good. Else, it would be just as good that I ignore the traffic rules when I drive as obey them, just as good that a rich businessman cut his workers’ pay as raise it. In a rough way, we get what we intend.

In the article section “Aggregating utility,” there’s this: “Philosopher John Taurek also argued that the idea of adding happiness or pleasures across persons is quite unintelligible and that the numbers of persons involved in a situation [is] morally irrelevant. . . . We cannot explain what it means to say that things would be five times worse if five people die than if one person dies. . . . There is not five times more loss of happiness or pleasure when five die: who would be feeling this happiness or pleasure?” Preliminarily, to ask the question about how many die, confuses the matter, because then you’re talking, not just about the difference in numbers, but also about the difference between life and death, which is a separate issue. To address just the question about numbers (of people), Taurek’s assertion is true in a certain theoretical way (perhaps what he’s getting at—though he doesn’t realize it—is the idea that there’s no intrinsic value). But, practically, taking into account numbers of persons makes sense. If there’s no difference between helping five and helping one, then there’s no difference between helping five and helping none (or, for that matter, between helping someone and hurting him). And the policy of helping as many as possible works to the advantage of any given person, because he’s more likely to belong to a larger group than to a smaller one.

About average utility, the Wikipedia article says: “On the other hand, measuring the utility of a population based on the average utility of that population avoids Parfit’s repugnant conclusion but causes other problems. For example, bringing a moderately happy person into a very happy world would be seen as an immoral act; aside from this the theory implies that it would be a moral good to eliminate all people whose happiness is below average, as this would raise the average happiness.” In response, bringing a moderately happy person into a very happy world would not be counter-utilitarian, let alone immoral, because it would reduce no one’s happiness. Likewise, average utility would not indicate eliminating people whose happiness is below average, because that would raise no one’s happiness (and would anguish the family and friends of those eliminated). Plus, if we start “eliminating” people, everyone will become anxious (unhappy). Utility does not require us to abandon common sense.

Finally, yet another criticism of utilitarianism is that it’s too demanding. Shelley Kagan says: “Given the parameters of the actual world, . . . maximally promoting the good would require a life of hardship, self-denial, and austerity . . ..” Two responses. First, if people’s maximally attempting to promote the good would make their lives austere, then such maximal effort would defeat utilitarianism’s purpose: to promote human happiness. If people generally would be happiest by making just a partial or a slight effort to promote the good, then that’s the kind of effort utilitarianism would indicate. Or perhaps this rule: work toward utility as arduously as, and in the ways in which, you feel inclined. Second, we don’t reduce a moral standard to conform to your conduct. If you’re honest half the time, and the rest of the time you lie, cheat, and steal; we don’t change the rule “One should be honest” to “One should be honest at least half the time” so that you’ll be able to say that you abide by it. Utilitarianism describes an ideal. Perhaps it will never be fully attained. But it’s useful to have in our minds as a guide for what to strive for, both in our conduct and in the state of the world.

[Later note (3-11-2025): In my foregoing comments on utilitarianism, I start out criticizing it, but I end up defending it. The resolution is this: I think utilitarianism is a good, useful guide. But it must be appropriately qualified. The criticisms of it that I argue against are not apt criticisms.]

● Monday, 1-27-2025:   I see in the news that Trump’s long-promised deportation blitz has begun. I suppose any day now, grocery prices will start to come down.

● Tuesday, 1-28-2025:   I went to Fresno again today, for a deposition. Some of the landscape between Los Angeles and Bakersfield was covered with snow. Again my car (and I) performed beautifully.

● Saturday, 2-1-2025:   I’m starting another read-through of the Journal. I took my standard two-week break from it, though, also as usual, during that break I did some new writing in my Diary.

● Tuesday, 2-4-2025:   I’m the fifofiest of them all!

● Wednesday, 2-5-2025:   This neck pain is a pain in the neck!

● Friday, 2-7-2025:   This is from my report on today’s workers’ compensation deposition:

Defense attorney asked Mr. Cruz whether he filed this workers’ compensation claim because he was fired, and he answered “Yes.” Defense attorney might argue that that means that Mr. Cruz filed the claim to retaliate against the employer for their firing him. But the counterargument would be that that’s not what it means. Rather, it means only that he would not have filed the claim if he had not been fired—if he still worked there—because he needed the job, and would be afraid that his filing a claim would cause him to lose the job. Since that condition which he felt precluded his filing the claim was removed (he no longer works there), he felt free to file it. Besides, he has genuine injuries, for which he has a right to compensation, regardless of his motive for bringing the case.

● Monday, 2-10-2025:   Donald “Wrecking-Ball” Trump.

● Tuesday, 2-11-2025:   I parked my car in the alleyway this afternoon to give plumbers access to my garage. I left this note on my car:

Tuesday 4:00 p.m.

I’ll move this car shortly.

If you need it moved sooner, please call me (Richard): (818) 343-0123.

● Donald Trump hates the United States government as we know it, and is trying to destroy it. He’s cutting everything: government agencies, public funding, the federal workforce . . .. That’s as likely to benefit the public as a surgeon (or someone masquerading as a surgeon) is likely to benefit a patient by opening him on the operating table and indiscriminately cutting the viscera. Many common people think Trump is a real surgeon, who knows medicine, that he’s wielding a scalpel, to try to help them. But he’s a butcher wielding a butcher knife. And he has no intention of helping the common people. I hope they wake up before it’s too late.

[Later note (2-14-2025): That analogy is flawed, in two ways. First, to picture the country as “a patient,” a single person, suggests that everyone’s interests are aligned, that the “surgeon’s” actions affect everyone in the same way. Rather, the country is made up of numerous people, and different persons are differently affected. Second, the Trump administration is not an incompetent butcher blindly slashing. They know well what they’re doing: their cutting hurts the vast majority (poor and working people), but it helps the wealthy, which is their aim.]

● Thursday, 2-13-2025:   When I read my Journal for editing . . . it seems strange, but I’m actually glad when I come upon an entry that I think needs correcting, either by rewriting it or by adding a Later note to it. I think that’s because I enjoy the revising; and because I know that I’m thereby making an improvement; and because—at least momentarily—it makes me feel that my obsessive, constant rereading of the work is justified.

● Friday, 2-14-2025:   Among Trump’s lies are these: He speaks of acting (specifically, cutting taxes) to help “the taxpayers.” Since even working people pay taxes, “the taxpayers” connotes “the people”; and we think he’s talking about helping the people. The way he cuts taxes is to cut government programs that taxes fund. When he does that, he describes it as cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But that’s a pretext. Even the most laudably efficient government program will contain some waste, fraud, or abuse. That doesn’t mean that the program, overall, is wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. Programs he wants to cut, like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, ones that help poor and working people, are, by and large, very efficient. Trump is not cutting a program’s waste, fraud, or abuse; he’s cutting the program. For working people, the value of the government programs they thereby lose exceeds the amount of their tax reduction; for the wealthy, their tax reduction exceeds the value, to them, of any lost government programs. Hence these tax cuts help the wealthy and hurt working people. When Trump says he’s helping “the taxpayers,” what he means (and what he’s doing) is, not helping the people, but helping the wealthy—and hurting the people. . . . And what has happened is that the American people have been had.

● If the American people ever figured out what’s happening in this country—a big if—they’d be very angry.

● Sunday, 2-16-2025:   When Trump says he’s using “common sense,” it doesn’t mean he’s seeing a problem in a fresh, clear way. Rather, it merely serves as cover for his doing what he wants to do, with no deliberation or argument, and no discussion of whom the action helps, and whom it hurts (and it usually helps [or “helps”] the privileged few and hurts the many—which means it does more harm than good).

● For two weeks, my left lower leg (in the usual place, just below the knee) has been painful enough to prevent me from taking my exercise-walks. I could walk despite the pain, but that would make it worse, and cause it to take longer to heal.

● Sunday, 2-23-2025:   My left leg is healing. It’s finally good enough to resume the exercise-walks. But I’m doing it cautiously. Yesterday I went just a third of the way, once. Today I walked the same distance, twice.

● Philosophy Club meeting, in-person; I’m not going—I attend just the ones that meet by Zoom (computer). But I read the readings on the topic: “Bowdlerizing literary works.” And, as usual, I have an opinion about it (if not an argument): I’m against it. I wouldn’t want my work bowdlerized.

It’s useful to contrast bowdlerization with (normal) editing: Editing furthers the author’s intention in and vision of the work; bowdlerization (to make it more acceptable to some audiences) subverts it. Editing, when done well, improves the work; bowdlerization degrades it.

● Tuesday, 2-25-2025:   I overdid the walking yesterday, because today the left lower leg symptoms have returned, albeit mildly. I’ll suspend the exercise-walking again this morning. . . . In the afternoon (I had no deposition today), the leg felt OK, so I took an exercise-walk. First I went two-thirds of the usual distance of one walk. About an hour later, I went one-third of the way. The leg still feels all right.

● Thursday, 2-27-2025:   Cutting taxes is the rich robbing the poor.

● Friday, 2-28-2025:   He who cannot admit (at least to himself) that he makes mistakes, cannot learn from his mistakes. Trump seems to be an example, of someone who can’t admit that he makes mistakes . . . and of a mistake.

● The recent flare-up of the left leg injury seems for now to have completely resolved. This morning I took my full exercise-walk, though just once; no ill effect.

● Saturday, 3-8-2025:   That pain in my left leg has returned, with a vengeance! I’ll have to suspend my exercise-walking for at least a few days.

● Sunday, 3-9-2025:   I set all my clocks ahead for daylight saving time.

● Today my left leg feels better than it did yesterday. It’s not yet good enough to do my exercise-walking; but the improvement is encouraging.

● Tuesday, 3-11-2025:   I just finished another read-through of my Journal. This one took a month and a week. As usual, it was very productive. I’ll begin another one in a fortnight’s time.

● Friday, 3-14-2025:   Last week I started wearing my walking shoes instead of my regular street shoes, for most trips, in hopes that my left-leg injury would heal faster. I don’t know whether it’s made a difference. My leg still has not healed enough to do my exercise-walking.

● Saturday, 3-15-2025:   Haircut (Brenda). ($30.)

● I have a severe backache. I’m having trouble getting out of bed, and walking. I brought it on by isometrically contracting muscles in my lower back yesterday.

● Sunday, 3-16-2025:   In his book The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Robert Graves criticizes a passage by Bertrand Russell. Then Graves comments: “Professor Russell’s mind is reputedly exact and brilliant when it deals with problems of mathematics; when it deals with politics and education it tends to relax.” I would put it a bit differently: Being a great mathematician does not necessarily mean also being a great writer.

● Monday, 3-17-2025:   Here’s more “daily journal” writing. I’m in that hellish two-week period between Journal read-throughs—about halfway through. Mercifully, for the next four days I have busy-work (a deposition every day; a deposition takes up almost the entire day). Then I’ll have just four days until my next Journal read-through. And on one of those days (Sunday), I’ll take a desert ride. But today, I have no deposition; I’m at home. And, right now, I have no particularly worthwhile thought to express, or particularly strong feeling about anything—I’m making a note just as an excuse to write, for lack of anything else to do. I lack the energy to read another piece in Robert Graves’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder or to resume watching the mathematics lectures. I’m resorting to once more rereading John R. Trimble’s Writing with Style, which, for me, is easy reading. Shortly, I may do more mindless television-watching. It’s 9:00 a.m. At 10:30 a.m., if I feel more energetic after drinking my first cup of tea, I may resume reading the Graves book or tackling the mathematics lectures. The severe backache is very slowly improving. I worry that, when it finally stabilizes, it will be worse than before. It seems as though every time I have a little accident that aggravates it, it’s (permanently) a little worse. (I see by the clock that it took me about 35 minutes to write this paragraph . . . the first draft of it.)

● After drinking my first cup of tea, I felt up to tackling the mathematics lectures again, and I did so. I feel very frustrated. In one of the early lectures, I was unable to follow a proof, that, in a way, seems as if it should be very simple. It’s as if I have some sort of mental block, as if, perhaps, my exclusive concentration on verbal reasoning has caused my mathematical aptitude to atrophy. . . . Or perhaps the proof was not as simple as it seemed.

● Friday, 3-21-2025:   In the Wintertime, when I’m at the kitchen sink brushing my teeth or washing my urinary catheters, I turn on a portable heater, positioned near to where I stand. I was forgetting to turn it off when I finished. So, to remind me, I place an object (a pair of scissors with an orange handle) on the kitchen table just before I turn on the heater. When I turn it off, I put the scissors back in their original place.

● David Brooks made a perceptive observation on Trump: He’s not “transactional,” as he’s often described—he’s extortionistic. He doesn’t make a deal with you (unless making you an offer you can’t refuse is making a deal). Rather, he tells you what he wants you to do, and he bludgeons you into doing it. . . . But, I would add, in many other instances he’s corrupt: Flatter him or give him an expensive present, and he’ll do what you want him to do.

● I just solved another significant neighbor-problem. Every morning I take a nap shortly after breakfast. When I have a morning deposition, I take the nap in my car. But when I have no morning deposition, I take it in my apartment, with my head on my desk. The nap at home has been problematic because of harassment by the next-door neighbors on both sides. They make noise and listen intently for any (even very slight) responsive sounds from me. If I were asleep, it wouldn’t be a problem. But most of the time, I’m awake enough to hear their noises. It’s very stressful to try to remain perfectly silent to avoid the trap, and the stress tends to keep me awake. A few days ago, it occurred to me to use earplugs, as I do—for the same purpose—when I’m in bed at night. This morning I tried it (wearing earplugs), and it worked!

● This break between Journal read-throughs will be longer than I expected, and longer than usual. Next week, I’ll be too busy to start another Journal read-through until the weekend: I have a deposition every day next week; on three days, I have two.

● Sunday, 3-23-2025:   A work of art is necessarily finite. Aristotle’s dictum that a piece of writing has a beginning, middle, and end, also implies this: What has a beginning and an end is finite.

● John R. Trimble, in his book Writing with Style, says that the novice writer writes for himself, unconcerned about the reader. Whereas, the professional writer writes for the reader. I think the process is more complex. There’s a third stage, where the writer knows what makes a piece of writing good, and he internalizes that standard and values attaining it. His knowledge about the quality of his writing may exceed that of his readers; he strives for excellence, even if his readers are not sophisticated enough to fully appreciate it (indeed, he may now have no readers). Thus he’s again writing for himself.

● Truncated Camarillo drive. Refreshing.

● Does the Old Testament (“Thou shalt not kill”) prohibit the death penalty? No. In fact, it positively endorses it. The Old Testament also says: “If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. Whoever kills . . . a person shall be put to death.” Taken together, these pronouncements mean that, just as you should not put out another person’s eye, neither should you kill another person. But—if you do so—your proper punishment is having one of your own eyes put out, or, in the case of murder, being killed yourself.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t oppose the death penalty? No. It means just that we shouldn’t use the Bible as authority for that opposition.

● Tuesday, 3-25-2025:   In the last few days, a big story in the news has been the accidental inclusion of a journalist on an electronic group chat among high-ranking national security officials discussing plans for an immanent United States military attack. It’s a scandal. Perhaps the explanation for the accident is simple: The official responsible for preventing such mistakes had been fired. . . . You don’t wholesale cut the federal workforce without some loss of function. If those workers were useless, they wouldn’t have been hired. That effect is compounded when you hire for loyalty instead of competence. This outcome, though perhaps unintended, is inevitable—and foreseeable.

● Saturday, 3-29-2025:   I’m beginning another Journal read-through.

● Sunday, 3-30-2025:   I’ve had a serious backache for two weeks now. At the beginning, it was severe. Even worse than the physical pain was the worry that it signified a permanent worsening, which may require surgery. I thought it might be a sign of a herniated lumbar disc because the pain radiates into my buttocks and down my left let. During the last two weeks, I suspended all exercise, both the stretching and the walking; experience has taught me that it’s counterproductive to do stretching exercises when the condition is acute. But the lack of exercise probably compounded the problem. In fact, the reduced stretching regimen over the last few months, occasioned by the new injury to my left arm, probably predisposed me to a back flare-up. I resumed some stretching exercises this morning, though fewer than usual. It seems to have helped. I’ll slowly increase my exercising until I regain the original set, even at the risk of worsening the condition of my left arm (the back must now take precedence over the arm, because it’s become the more significant problem).

● Thursday, 4-3-2025:   Well, good old Trump has crashed the stock market, with his tariffs. What I said about George W. Bush is even more true of Trump: he’s a peculiar combination of evil and incompetence. Whether Trump’s incompetence is, on balance, good, making him less able to effect his evil intentions, it’s at least sometimes bad. For example, his disastrous tariffs were a matter, not of evil, but of incompetence. Trump did not intend the stock market crash that his tariffs caused. In fact, he’d rather that the market advance, because he takes it as a reflection on his presidency. Had he known that his tariffs would crash the market, he probably wouldn’t have imposed them. But now that it’s happened, he won’t change course, because that would be to admit that he made a mistake, which he can’t do. I think I’ve discovered what Donald Trump’s middle initial (J) stands for: Jackass—Donald Jackass Trump. I hesitated to say that, lest someone use my remark against me (my middle initial, too, is J). But then I thought: No, there’s a difference: Trump is a jackass. I’m not.

● Tariffs are sometimes helpful, but only if done by an expert wielding a scalpel. If done by an incompetent wielding a chainsaw, they’re inevitably destructive.

● In 2024, a gunman tried to assassinate Trump while he (Trump) was giving a campaign speech. Trump narrowly escaped calamity (the bullet grazed his outer ear). He later claimed that God saved him, so that he could become President again. Now, let me see if I understand this. The attempted assassin acted independently of God . . . God did not act until the last split-second of the event, when He intervened to push the bullet, or Trump, such that the bullet would miss Trump’s vital organs? (But, in that case, why didn’t He deflect the bullet, or Trump’s body, just half an inch farther, so that the bullet would have missed Trump entirely?) Or, God controlled the entire event: He caused the gunman to shoot Trump in the ear . . . God, for some reason, wanted that to happen? I suppose it just goes to show: God works in mysterious ways.

● Saturday, 4-5-2025:   A few weeks ago, Israel unilaterally broke the months-long cease-fire with the Palestinians in Gaza. Claiming that she’s attacking Hamas, Israel continually bombs Palestinian hospitals and schools, killing Palestinians, many, perhaps most, of them women and children. Israel continually orders Palestinians to move from certain places, saying she’s going to bomb those areas. Which bombing has already pretty much turned Gaza to rubble. It seems to me that Israel is using the existence of Hamas as an excuse to destroy Gaza, and that Israel’s real purpose is to make life for the remaining Palestinians there miserable enough that they’ll leave, so that Israel can take the land for herself. Trump has recently declared that he, too, desires that outcome, but that he wants the land for the United States (. . . or for himself).

● I’ve solved another neighbor problem. I sit at my desk, in the big room of my apartment, facing a large window, with a view to the main common area of the apartment complex. In front of the window, inside my apartment, are blinds, which I have turned so that I can see out from most places in that room, but not from where I sit at my desk. This is because, if I can see out, people outside can see me (if lighting permits), and (for my privacy) I don’t want people outside to be able to see me sitting at my desk. But I like to be able (sitting at the desk) to see outside just enough to be able to see which of the no. 3 neighbors are leaving their apartment, when they do so. For which purpose I use a mirror. Those neighbors eventually noticed the mirror, and worked out my purpose for it. To see the image in the mirror, while sitting at my desk, I must turn my head (toward the mirror). In the cold months, I wear my big down jacket and a heavy muffler. So turning my head to look toward the mirror makes a slight sound, which they can hear. They likewise eventually (just last week) figured out that I’m turning my head to see them in the mirror when they open their front door. That made them angry, and they loudly slammed their front door when they heard me thus turning my head. So I could no longer turn my head to look at the mirror when they opened their front door. I solved the problem simply by buying another mirror, which I placed almost directly in front of me and angled so that, in it, I can see the other mirror and espy who’s walking outside my apartment—without turning my head!

● This has been an unusually good day for me. Nothing extraordinary happened. But my mood and energy have been excellent.

● Sunday, 4-6-2025:   Today I did my full stretching and walking regimens, for the first time in almost two months.

● Monday, 4-7-2025:   When I’m scheduled for two depositions in a day (morning and afternoon), if one of them gets canceled, and I’ve already traveled to the first one, it’s much better if it’s the afternoon deposition that’s canceled. Then I can just return home after the morning deposition, as I’d do if I’d had just the morning deposition in the first place. Whereas, if the morning deposition is canceled, I’ll have to wait around at the first office for several hours, until it’s time to travel to the afternoon deposition. And if I have just one deposition on a certain day, I’d rather it be in the morning than in the afternoon, because with an afternoon deposition, I get home so late that I don’t get enough sleep time.

● Saturday, 4-12-2025:   In recent decades, there’s been a “fashion” trend of people wearing baseball caps backward, with the visor in the rear. Some perhaps think that’s nonsensical, because it defeats the cap’s purpose of keeping the sun out of the wearer’s eyes. But, no, it actually makes good sense: it’s very useful, in keeping the sun off the back of the wearer’s neck.

● When, because of bodily pain or discomfort, I have to skip my exercise-walking at the usual time (early in the morning), sometimes the symptom resolves within a few hours, and I can do the walking later in the day.

● Sunday, 4-13-2025:   Yesterday, for the first time ever, I wore a baseball cap on my exercise-walk. I’d had it in my car for several years. I bought it for my occasional wave-watching trips to the beach, to keep the sun out of my eyes. Why it didn’t occur to me for so long that it would be helpful in that same way when I walk, I don’t know. But it was most helpful. Often when I walk during daylight, I not only wear dark sunglasses, but also shield my eyes by putting up my hand to block the sun. The cap does that so well that I didn’t even need to wear the sunglasses. It was a revelation, a milestone (at least in my walking, if not more generally in my life).

● Tuesday, 4-15-2025:   In his first term as President, Trump was a clown; in his second term, he’s a tyrant.

● Thursday, 4-17-2025:   In bullying colleges and universities into acting as he wants them to act, Trump claims he’s fighting antisemitism. That’s another Trump lie. What he’s calling antisemitic is pro-Palestinian activism. Those demonstrators—many of whom are Jewish—are against the Israeli government’s barbaric, genocidal conduct. They’re not necessarily against Israel as a country, let alone against Jews. And Trump’s actions don’t fight antisemitism or protect Jews. Indeed, the most effective action Trump could take to fight antisemitism, would be to pressure Israel to stop its depraved attacks on the Palestinians!

● I wonder if it’s too simple to say of Trump: Bad people make bad Presidents. . . . It may be too simple, in that, one way we judge whether a person is good or bad is how he acts as President. If Trump changed course as President and acted to help the country and the world, we (I) would say, “Perhaps he’s a good person, after all.” In other words, it’s less that bad people do bad acts, than that people who do bad acts are therefore judged to be bad people.

● Saturday, 4-19-2025:   Having been prevented by injury so often during the last few months from doing my exercise-walks, being able to do them now seems almost miraculous.

● I’ve wondered about the risks of publishing this Journal. Heretofore, I thought the risk might be that someone who takes offense at it would not offer me a good job, who otherwise would do so. But lately another risk occurs to me: that Donald Trump or his henchman Elon Musk might take offense and imprison me, or otherwise punish me.

● Wednesday, 4-23-2025:   I had a very good day today. My mood and energy were unusually good. I worked energetically throughout the day; I didn’t even feel the need to take a nap (and I didn’t take one). For most of the day, I didn’t hear any next-door neighbors, on either side, or above. I’m not sure how, if at all, that’s related: I don’t know whether it helped, but it surely didn’t hurt.

● Sunday, 4-27-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). Topic: “Is it wrong to sexually objectify people?” Philosopher Raja Halwani, in his piece “Why Sexual Desire is Objectifying—and Hence Morally Wrong,” argues (largely following Kant) that “sexual desire and objectification are inseparable”; that it’s morally wrong to objectify others or oneself, and that therefore sexual desire is morally wrong. His conclusion is problematic (to say the least!), for two reasons: One; because sexual desire is part of human nature, we can’t get rid of it, and, two, because, even if we could get rid of our sexual desire, no one would choose to do so, merely to avoid sexual objectification. Nonetheless, what’s wrong, and what we should try to restrain, in this regard, are certain destructive manifestations of our sex drive, like men “wolf whistling” at women, which practice women find demeaning. Moreover, while I agree with the proposition that people’s well-being, or humanity, should be respected, I think that there are far more-important contexts or ways in which dehumanization should be fought against than sexually; for example: greed and poverty. The inequality of wealth does far more harm than sexual objectification. To the extent that objectification is morally wrong, a key element in its evil (which of course Kant wouldn’t take account of) is its effect.

● Within a century, Germany and the Jews have switched places. In World War Two, the Germans were the perpetrators of genocide and the Jews were their victims. Now, Germany is an enlightened nation and Jews (or Israel, “the Jewish state”) are perpetrators of genocide. . . . I suppose that by “Never again!” Jews meant only that never again would we be the victims of genocide; it’s all right if we’re the perpetrators. . . . But there’s no comparison between the Holocaust and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. On second thought, there is a comparison: the Holocaust was much bigger. And yet, for a victim, there is no difference: A Palestinian killed by Israel is just as dead as a Jew killed by Germany.

● Saturday, 5-3-2025:   What’s on the other side of a flag?

● Wednesday, 5-7-2025:   As President, in his second term, Trump has considerably increased his own wealth, and considerably decreased almost everyone else’s.

● Thursday, 5-8-2025:   I may write a book called The Boodle and the Poodle. I don’t know what it will be about, but at least I have a good title for it.

● Friday, 5-9-2025:   The aromatic bush has again bloomed into fragrance.

● The freedom of free enterprise is the freedom of the rich to get richer—and to make everyone else poorer.

● Sunday, 5-11-2025:   We’re in a several-days’ heat wave. Last night was the first night this year when I’ve had to keep my front door open, at night (with the screen door closed), to cool the apartment.

● I just finished the latest read-through of my Journal—all but the usual final step: adding to it my new Diary entries. This one took about 42 days. I’ll skip that last step this time. To begin the next two-week break from working on the Journal now is good because I have a deposition every day next week. Without that kind of busy-work to occupy my time, the breaks are painful. (A deposition every day of the week is unusual; if I delay starting the break, I may get an emptier schedule.) I’ll add the new Diary entries at the start of the next read-through.

● Tuesday, 5-13-2025:   Capitalism is the rich stealing from everyone else.

● Wednesday, 5-14-2025:   Capitalism is where a few get rich and the rest suffer.

● Thursday, 5-15-2025:   “Never say never.” . . . Didn’t we just say it?

● Saturday, 5-17-2025:   Like this first week of my two-week break from reviewing my Journal, the second week (next week), too, will be painless: again I have a deposition every day!

● Truncated Camarillo drive: refreshing. I drove a rented little Buick SUV. My car is—again—in the repair shop, for the same problem, the air conditioning, which they were supposed to have fixed two weeks ago, but didn’t.

● I’m watching a documentary film on the United States’ war in Vietnam. The U.S. government’s motivation therein was apparently somehow to fight communism. But for the North Vietnamese, the economic system was at best incidental; they fought mainly to resist foreign (U.S.) invasion of their country. . . . On the other hand, we should take with a rather large grain of salt the (U.S.) government’s declaration of its purpose.

[Later note (1-25-2026): On second thought, even if our stated reason was the real reason, does that justify our conduct? What gives us the right to bomb a country to prevent it from adopting communism?! If they want communism, they have a right to it. Would they have a right to bomb us because they disagree with our economic system (capitalism)?]

[Later note (1-26-2026): Capitalism is characterized by wealth inequality; socialism and communism, by wealth equality. Therefore, the motive to institute or maintain capitalism, typically on the part of the rich, is liable to be selfish, venal (causing some to suffer, so that they, the rich, can stay rich or get richer—causing those who have less than they need to have even less, so that those who have more than they need can have even more); whereas, the motive to institute or maintain socialism or communism (since you don’t stand to specially benefit, beyond the advantage to everyone) is likely to be beneficent: the good of the people. . . . And, to maintain or expand their wealth, capitalists will not only impoverish other people—they’ll kill them.]

● God and Satan cooperate to maintain the afterlife system: Satan maintains Hell, which God needs, as a place to send certain people for punishment . . . just as we need prison wardens, to maintain prisons, which we need as a place to send certain criminals for punishment.

● Today I saw this bumper-sticker message: “Jesus is Lord.” I’m confused. Isn’t “Lord” synonymous with “God”? If so, are there two gods: God and Jesus Christ? I thought Jesus Christ was, not God, but the son of God, a different entity?

● Monday, 5-19-2025:   I have another disabling backache. It started today. I don’t know what caused it: perhaps reclining in the uncomfortable rented car.

● Wednesday, 5-21-2025:   Happy Birthday, Richard!

● Friday, 5-23-2025:   Well, next week again, I have a deposition every day! (except Monday, which is a holiday—Memorial Day). Tomorrow I pick up my car from the repair shop; I hope this time it’s finally fixed.

● Saturday, 5-24-2025:   I recently ordered new checks for my personal checking account. When I hadn’t gotten them after a few weeks, I inquired, and was informed that they’d been delivered several weeks before. Which means they were stolen. For security, I had to close that account and open a new one to replace it. This time, I’m having the new checks delivered to the bank, where I’ll pick them up. As well, I’ll have to go to the local social security office to give them the new account information, so they can send my monthly payments to the new account. It’s inconvenient, but not as much so as I feared. And given the theft of the checks, I was lucky in having lost no money from the account.

● The severe backache that started about a week ago, has considerably subsided. But now I have a slight feeling of malaise, including a cough and a hint of a sore throat. In fact, for the first time in half a year, I just took codeine cough syrup for the cough.

● Sunday, 5-25-2025:   Well, I am sick. But it’s not COVID or the flu; it’s just a cold. I have a cough and a sore throat. About four hours ago I took codeine cough syrup for the cough. Now I’m going to take codeine (a #3 codeine tablet—30 mg of codeine) for the sore throat. This is just two days after my recent appointment in the podiatry department at Kaiser hospital. The last time I got sick, in December 2024, it likewise began just after being at Kaiser. That’s probably where I got it both times. Which vindicates my concern about being there. From now on, when I go there I’ll wear two facemasks.

● I get a manicure every other week; now it’s on Sunday, at 9:30 a.m. About 5 years ago, I switched manicurists, to The Best Nails, in Northridge. They’ve always charged me the same price: $15.00 (and I give the manicurist, Kathy, a $4.00 tip). Today I paid $20.00 (plus the $4.00 tip). They didn’t ask for a higher amount; I volunteered it. They come early every time, and I’m usually their only customer before 10:00. And Kathy (usually) gives me a very good manicure. The $15.00 was well below the going rate. I figured they probably avoided raising my price, lest they lose a regular customer (me). The $20.00 is little enough (I can easily afford it), and I wanted to be fair to them.

[Later note (7-5-2025): They used to often arrive as much as ten minutes late. Since I increased my payment, they’ve been consistently on time.]

[Later note (1-9-2026): The punctuality didn’t last long.]

● It’s now just after noon (on Sunday). I no longer feel sick at all: the cough and the sore throat (or the throat soreness) have disappeared. Perhaps, because I wore a facemask, the amount of whatever bug caused the symptoms was so small that my body fought it off quickly. . . . And yet, I also wore a facemask during my December 2024 visit to Kaiser, and that cold was severe and lengthy. Perhaps the earlier cold was not caused by the Kaiser visit.

● It’s now 9:30 p.m. I still have a slight cough and diminished appetite (for food), and now chills; earlier today I had a headache. The headache was a side-effect (a “rebound” effect) of the codeine. The other symptoms are part of the cold.

● Monday, 5-26-2025:   I suspended my stretching and walking exercises for a week, because of the backache, not because of the cold. Today I resumed them, but I did reduced regimens.

● Yesterday I started the process of adding the most recent Diary entries to my Journal, and today I finished the process. After I reread the article for this month’s Philosophy Club topic (“Terrorism”), I’ll begin once again reviewing the Journal from the beginning.

● Tuesday, 5-27-2025:   Today I did my full stretching and walking regimens.

● Thursday, 5-29-2025:   I’m still sick. I’ve been improving generally. But yesterday and today the cough has been worse. I’m reluctant to take codeine for it, because the side-effects—constipation and headache—are worse than the cough. I also wonder if perhaps the coughing is necessary: my body’s way of expelling toxins.

● Friday, 5-30-2025:   Like my depersonalization / derealization, I can pretty much pinpoint the start of my need for taking daytime naps. The napping need and habit began almost as suddenly as the depersonalization / derealization, and at about the same time, no more than a year later. The first happened when I was 18; the second, when I was 19. It was part of the immediate aftermath of the gunshot wound to my right leg, which I’ve written about in this Journal. I had two major surgical operations on my right leg, and I was in the hospital for two weeks. When I left the hospital, the surgeon gave me instructions for my followup care at home. One of them was to take a nap every day, during the day. That felt very unnatural. I didn’t feel tired or have any inclination to sleep. And I had never before taken a nap during the day (if I did so as a baby or as a young child, I don’t remember). But I was a good patient, and I dutifully followed the doctor’s instructions. I laid down, and I actually fell asleep. I continued to do it, and before long, perhaps within a week or two, I’d formed this new accursed habit, which I’ve had ever since. Looking back on it, that was the worst single effect on me of that accident (had I lost the leg—which I very nearly did—I might consider the napping habit as the second worst effect). But, as between the depersonalization / derealization and the napping habit, the former affects me far more profoundly.

● Just now, in doing some routine maintenance on my car (like checking the tire pressure and the engine oil level, which I do every other week), I accidentally put a teaspoonful or so of power steering fluid in the coolant tank. I’ll assume that it was harmless, and not worry about it. But if the car soon malfunctions, I’ll know why.

● Saturday, 5-31-2025:   Lying in bed, at 8:15 p.m., my cough (caused by the cold) was so bad that I resorted to using codeine cough syrup. I’ll just have to deal with the side-effects, the constipation and the headache.

● Sunday, 6-1-2025:   Philosophy Club, by Zoom. Topic: again, “Terrorism.”

● As to whether terrorism is ever justified, I would say this: Yes, in theory, if its effect, on balance, was good. But such an instance would be rare, and hard to show. It seems to be usually harmful. So we must outlaw it.

● It may be justifiable to kill or maim innocent civilians if that will prevent greater harm, and it’s the only way to do so.

● The question has been asked: “Must terrorist violence (to qualify as terrorism) be directed against life and limb, or does violence against (some) property also count?” My answer is: Yes, violence against property may count. It might count more. In my view, the highest value of human civilization is our artifacts: our greatest intellectual and artistic productions. For example, if a government threatened to destroy all the compositions of Mozart and Bach (suppose we had no copies), and we could prevent the destruction by, but only by, killing a hundred innocent civilians, I think that such killing would be morally justified—indeed, morally compelled.

● Wednesday, 6-4-2025:   Am I a consequentialist, a deontologist? I’m neither. When I believed in intrinsic value, I was a consequentialist. But since discovering that intrinsic value is impossible, I no longer am. In ethical decisions, I seem always to side with consequentialists. But I’m not a consequentialist on principle. I believe that ethical decisions are subjective, and made on an ad hoc basis. There might be a case in which I would disfavor the course of action with the best overall consequences, because another element of the situation strikes me as more compelling (. . . though I can’t now think of such an instance).

[Later note (9-14-2025): Now I’m not sure whether that’s true. My “disfavor[ing] the course of action with the best overall consequences,” might instead be my disagreement that the consequences in question are the best . . ..]

[Later note (9-24-2025): Whether or not I’d disagree that proposed consequences are “the best,” my disfavoring a certain course of action would involve my feeling about its consequences. To say that an action has consequences is just to say that it affects someone or some thing. And to oppose, or favor, an action that had no effect (even potentially) on anyone or any thing . . . would be irrational. So I am a consequentialist.]

● Saturday, 6-7-2025:   Last Thursday (6-5-2025), at a deposition in Long Beach, my car battery died. I learned that I could have AAA roadside assistance come and install a new battery, which I had them do. That saved me a huge amount of time and inconvenience: leaving my car at my mechanic’s shop, renting a replacement car, transferring the contents of my car to the rental car and then back again when my car is ready. The tow truck driver tested the electrical system and found that all the other components were good: the alternator, the starter, et cetera.

● Gay men and lesbians have designated June as their “Pride Month.” That suggests that gay men and lesbians are proud, or trying to become proud, of being gay or lesbian. Which seems to involve a category error. Your sexual orientation is not something to be proud of. What we take pride in is our unusual abilities. For example, I pride myself on my intelligence and my writing ability. I’m not proud of being heterosexual. Perhaps the reason for gay men’s and lesbians’ “pride” (ala “Pride Month”) is that, because they were stigmatized for so long for their sexual orientation, many of them felt ashamed of being gay or lesbian. They’re compensating for that now by trying to have the opposite feeling: pride in it. But the proper, precise healthy condition is not pride in their sexual orientation, but merely a lack of shame about it—a lack of shame that allows them to be proud of themselves, for the same kinds of reasons that anyone is proud of himself.

● Sunday, 6-15-2025:   I’m suspending my stretching and walking exercises today because of a backache.

● Whenever I go to the store to return a salad (which all too often go bad), I dress up (wearing what I wear to depositions, rather than my usual jeans and T-shirt); the store is less likely to give me a hard time about the return if I’m dressed up.

● Truncated Camarillo drive; refreshing.

● I just awoke from a dream. In it I was repeatedly savagely beating a man in the head, causing him severe brain damage. His brain was exposed, and it was made of avocado. Many other people were present and watching the spectacle. At some point I felt guilty about hurting the man so badly, and I wondered inwardly about why I felt I had a right to do it. I thought it was amazing that he was still functioning; I expected that, at any moment, he wouldn’t remember where he was. But I woke up before that happened. The interpretation? I’m perhaps feeling guilty about how effectively, in my continuing war with my next-door neighbors, I’m hurting them and/or about how effectively, in my Journal, I’m refuting other philosophers. Of course, I’m ambivalent about it. The other feeling is gratification. My ambivalence is symbolized by the avocado brain. I feel guilty for damaging a man’s brain, but gratified that I’m uncovering a portion of avocado, a delicious food.

● Monday, 6-16-2025:   Well, the hot weather has finally come. Today is the first day this year when it was hot enough in my apartment that I didn’t wear extra clothes for warmth. That is, I’m wearing the minimum: socks, long underwear bottoms, and a T-shirt. The temperate weather lasted a long time, which means the hot season will be relatively short this year: less than four months (until October).

● Television programs about crime often talk about the last person to see a murder victim alive. But isn’t the last person to see the murder victim alive, the murderer?

● Yesterday’s backache seems to have completely resolved. I probably suspended exercising at just the right time.

● Tuesday, 6-17-2025:   I was premature in declaring the end of the backache . . . and in resuming the stretching exercises yesterday morning. Now I’ll resume the suspension.

● This week I have (I had) just one deposition (yesterday). Which is all right, because I’m in the midst of another read-through of my Journal (so I have an enjoyable activity to do in the absence of paid work). This has been a pretty good year so far, creatively. Even if I did no more creative work the rest of the year, it would still have been a good year—and we’re not even halfway through it.

● As President, Donald Trump is criticized as being authoritarian. But that’s an incomplete criticism. The difficulty is that he exercises his authority in a bad way, hurting the population as a whole. If he were a benevolent dictator, there would be less (perhaps nothing) to criticize, though we might still prefer democracy.

● Thursday, 6-19-2025:   Yesterday, I took one full exercise-walk. Today I did one full stretching regimen and one full exercise-walk. Tomorrow I’ll resume the full regimen: the stretching and two walks. From now on, when I haven’t taken an exercise-walk for as long as 3 or 4 days, the first day back I’ll take just one walk instead of two.

● Monday, 6-23-2025:   I have terrible pain in my lower back and right hip.

● Thursday, 6-26-2025:   When I have a morning deposition in Glendale, I eat breakfast at Porto’s Bakery (in Glendale). I always get the same thing, a chicken sandwich, called the Chicken Milanese (pronounced Mill-a-ness-a). They have two chicken sandwiches, but only that one is available early in the morning, so you have to specify it by saying that name. The last time I was there, I couldn’t quickly remember the second word; and, instead of saying nothing, I used a substitute that I thought was similar, figuring that they’d know what I meant: “Chicken Marinella.” The clerk who took my order didn’t comment, and I got the right sandwich.

● Haircut (Brenda).

● Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America great again” is particularly ironic, in that, as President, Trump is methodically destroying America. . . . Another Trump lie.

● I heard on the news that Trump is going to open up previously federally protected wilderness areas to logging and oil drilling, because “our nation needs it.” By “our nation needs it,” he means that rich people stand to make money from it . . . and/or Trump stands to make money from it.

● Religions are as rational as dreams.

● Friday, 6-27-2025:   Here’s a follow-on to my first 5-24-2025 entry, above. Today, I finally picked up my new checks at the bank. When I got home, and walked into my apartment, my eyes were immediately drawn to an unopened box that looked identical to the box I was holding, which contained the new checks from the bank, and I immediately realized my mistake. The box that was already here came at just about the same time as the larger box containing the new computer I ordered, and I assumed that the smaller box was part of the computer order. So I set it on top of box with the new computer, awaiting a technician’s coming to install the new computer (which I’ve been too busy so far to arrange for). Of course, the other box contained, not computer parts, but my checks! All that trouble of closing the old account and opening a new one was for naught! I guess that explains why no money was stolen from the old account. Part of my motivation for composing this update is to give me some consolation, to allow me to feel better about it by thinking that it wasn’t a complete loss—I got this little funny story out of it.

● Saturday, 6-28-2025:   I just got a bit of a shock: I learned that The Teaching Company, from which I’d gotten all those educational audio courses, is defunct. That’s a great loss to me. I’d assumed they’d always be there.

● I became aware of that when I got up during the night, at about 2:00 a.m.; I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. It’s now about 3:00 a.m. Rather than lie in bed awake, I’m at my desk, doing what I do at my desk: making a note in my Diary, reading my Journal. I’m again in one of those terrible moods I used to get, and thought I’d grown out of: a combination of anxiety, desperation, despair.

● Shameless is an interesting word. I was going to look it up in the dictionary. But I thought I’d give my initial impressions before doing so. It seems to mean the opposite of what it says. Literally, it means without shame. But it seems to be used to mean shameful. And the shameless person is all the more shameful for feeling no shame about his shameful behavior.

● It’s now about 6:45 a.m. I just found those educational audio courses on the Internet. The company name is different but the products are much the same. I found it by looking at an old brochure I had from them. It’s The Great Courses, and their Web address is thegreatcourses.com. Their telephone number is 1-800-832-2412.

● Sunday, 6-29-2025:   Truncated Camarillo drive: pleasurable.

● Wednesday, 7-2-2025:   A most troublesome development: I think that my recurrent backaches may at least sometimes be caused by sleeping (lying down) in my car. That would be extremely problematic. I don’t see how I could avoid those naps. I don’t know which would be worse: the backaches, or being unable to lie down (or recline) in my car.

● Thursday, 7-3-2025:   I just awoke from a dream. I was visiting my sister at a beautiful house in a beautiful area in Chatsworth (California). I was awkward and ill-at-ease in anyone’s presence, and on one occasion I left the room in which my sister and I were sitting, to be by myself. She noticed that neurosis of mine and I felt bad that she had learned that about me. In another scene, I was looking at the landscape and appreciating its beauty. This generalization occurred to me: The longer or greater your familiarity with a certain region, the smaller or more localized the areas in which you can observe their special features. I kept thinking that that was a profound observation and I recurrently wanted to write it down. At some point I became aware that my sister was terminally ill, and that therefore I might someday inherit the house from her.

● Friday, 7-4-2025:   Having suspended my stretching and exercise-walking for eleven days because of back pain, I partly resumed today: I did the full stretching regimen but just one-third of one exercise-walk. Better too little (or less than possible) than too much.

● Well, it seems as if (after 2 years, 9 months) the neighbors in no. 3 are moving. For the last hour or two, they and other people have been steadily going in and out of the apartment. They leave carrying things; they return empty-handed. I’m sorry to see them go. Though they’ve been continually hostile to me; of the four sets of residents who’ve been there while I’ve been here, they’ve been the least hostile, which of course isn’t saying much (it says little about how good these people were; it says much about how bad the others were). And, almost from the beginning of their being here, I’ve had very effective means of counterattack. Indeed, I’m surprised they stayed as long as they did.

● It’s recently occurred to me that New Year’s Eve and July 4^th, the two times every year that I dread for the sustained loud noise and terrible air pollution caused by firecrackers, are almost exactly half a year apart.

● . . . Yep, they’re gone! . . . but someone is there. It’s probably the owner or someone cleaning the apartment to get it ready to be rented out again.

● Saturday, 7-5-2025:   I just completed the latest read-through of my Journal. This one took 42 days; I added five pages’ worth of new Diary material. Again, both in correcting my errors and in adding new Later notes (sometimes the Later notes correct my errors), the process was fruitful—fruitful enough to justify the time and effort involved.

● I couldn’t take an exercise-walk today because the air was too polluted from the firecrackers last night.

● Sunday, 7-6-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). The topic: “Anti-Natalism”:

“IS IT BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN BORN? Is most any human life too tragic or painful on balance to be worth living? If you’re persuaded this is the case, should we therefore refrain from bringing children into the world? We can evaluate the reasons “Anti-Natalist” philosophers believe that it would be better if we’d not been brought into existence.”

Here’s my answer: The great majority of people, including me, while we’re alive, would be better off not having been born (that is, would be better off not existing), because our unhappiness outweighs our happiness. That would be true for many fewer people (or at least people would be less unhappy) in an egalitarian world. Whether that would make life good, or worthwhile, for most people (or cause [human] happiness to outweigh unhappiness), I don’t know. But unhappy people, most of them, will keep living—and procreating—because they possess values in addition to happiness (perhaps this is a manifestation or sublimation of the survival instinct). The value that keeps me going is my wish to maximize my body of creative work. And I would prefer that humanity continue, so that my work will live on, which requires a continuing audience. . . . But, meanwhile, I’ll advocate for social changes like greater egalitarianism, to make human life more pleasant, or less unpleasant.

● Three thoughts on Jarlath Cox’s essay “The Goodness of Existence”:

One, Cox describes Philosopher David Benatar’s Anti-Natalist argument this way: Experience is bad because pain predominates over pleasure. Moreover, nonexistence is better than experience, not only because nonexistence is neutral or nil (and no-experience is better than bad experience), but, further, because nonexistence itself is actually good. And that’s true because the absence of pleasure is not bad, but the absence of pain . . . is good! The argument is arbitrary. Cox obviously structures the argument that way merely to fit the conclusion he wants to reach. You could just as easily reach the opposition conclusion, simply by making the reverse argument, to wit: The absence of pain is not good, but the absence of pleasure is bad. Hence, nonexistence is bad. More basically, either of those arguments is incoherent: Nonexistence means there’s nothing—including no good or bad. And if nonexistence is good, how good is it? Is twice as much nonexistence twice as good as half as much nonexistence?

Two, Cox quotes Derek Parfit: “If saving a life is a positive thing, then so is creating one.” Now, why might that be true? Well, it might be true if life, or human life, or human happiness, were intrinsically valuable, and so we wanted to bring about as much of it as we could. But intrinsic value is impossible (see my “Ethics”). Or we might think that having a greater number of people would benefit us, perhaps because there are too few people to do all the work we need to have done. But that’s not true, either: We’re overpopulated, meaning that a greater number of people would reduce the quality of life of those of us already here. In general, the reason we save lives is, not that we think life is valuable, or that we value life, but simply that we, the living, wish to continue living. We’d want to be saved if and when we’re in danger. If we thought that others would not try to save us, we’d all be a little anxious (or a little more anxious). And if our friends, relatives, or loved ones were not saved if they were in danger, we’d be anguished. Whereas, nonexistent potential humans have no interest in living; and their nonexistence causes no anxiety or anguish for us (and not for them!). To quote myself: “Life is not something we think should be created, ab initio, where it doesn’t exist; rather, it’s merely something that living things, finding themselves alive and with certain desires, wish to arrange so as to satisfy their desires.”

[Later note (10-26-2025): Here’s a simpler argument. Creating lives and saving lives could not be equivalent. For it’s always desirable to save lives. But it’s not always desirable to create new ones: If it were, the idea of overpopulation would be meaningless, and we’d increase the population until we were overrun and the world was unlivable.]

Three, Cox argues that pain may be intrinsically good because it may serve an evolutionary or survival purpose, in warning us of threats to our lives or bodies, and there are occasions where people actively seek painful experiences, like the pain endured while working out at the gym. But if pain is useful in warning us of threats, that would make it extrinsically good (because of its consequences), not intrinsically good (good in itself). And if I seek a strenuous gym workout, I’m seeking the longer term health benefit. I’m not seeking the pain. For the sake of my health, I’m putting up with the pain. If there were a pleasurable way to get the same benefit, I’d surely choose that instead. From that flawed premise, Cox reasons thus: Both pleasure and pain can be good; therefore, what’s good is “the ability to experience at all” and “existence is always a benefit rather than a harm.” But if this were true, we wouldn’t kill a badly injured animal (which we do to end its suffering); suicide or euthanasia would never be appropriate for a severely disabled, terminally ill person experiencing intractable pain; we’d have no qualms about torturing prisoners; and unhappiness would be as desirable as happiness.

● I think I would have been better off not having been born. But I’m glad I was. (The desire to live is nonrational; at times, it even seems irrational.)

● Monday, 7-7-2025:   At about 6:45 this evening, the man, my previous neighbor in no. 3, entered that apartment. Perhaps he left something there and came back for it.

● Tuesday, 7-8-2025:   I think the bastards are back! (The no. 3 neighbors, that is.) I’m glad.

● Saturday, 7-12-2025:   Well, at least the man in no. 3 is back. He may be alone here now. Perhaps the couple separated, and the wife and the kids moved out (at least temporarily). Perhaps they got fed up with his constant hostility toward me. Or perhaps that conduct caused them to dislike him . . . or they, too, felt drawn into attacking me, and they disliked that about themselves . . . and they disliked him for affecting them that way.

● Sunday, 7-13-2025:   My Roku screen-saver picture showed an image of a movie marquee with a movie title: “Not One Toe Missing.” Curious about the title’s significance, I searched for it on the Internet. One entry was about the title’s “meaning.” But it didn’t reveal the meaning. Then, just to entertain myself, I tried to imagine how I would define the title, if I were somehow called upon to do so. Here’s what I came up with: It means you have all the toes you started with, and you have at least ten. That last qualification is needed because, if you have fewer than ten toes, then, even if you had all the toes you started with, it might still be said that some were missing. And the first part of the definition is needed, because, even if you have ten or more toes, some could still be missing if you once had more of them. . . . It’s amazing that a piece of writing could be generated from that! (Whether it’s a good piece of writing is another matter.)

● Monday, 7-14-2025:   Today, for the first time since the recent backache, I resumed my full exercise regimen, both the stretching and the walking. No bad effect so far.

● Tuesday, 7-15-2025:   I use such qualifications as “In general” and “by and large” in my writing to defend against the anticipated retort “Speak for yourself.”

● Wednesday, 7-16-2025:   The life of primitive humans has been described as “short, brutish, and nasty.” . . . Would life be better if it’s long, brutish, and nasty? . . . Probably the “short” in the original description is meant, not to suggest that such a life was even worse by being short, but rather to reinforce the other two words: the more brutish and nasty a primitive life is, the shorter it’s likely to be . . ..

● Saturday, 7-19-2025:   Sadly, the man in no. 3 is leaving. A person I took to be a real estate agent was leaving that apartment, and I overheard him saying, on his cell phone, “This is the tenant’s last day.” . . . Later, the bastard (the neighbor, not the real estate agent) attacked me by the “landmining” maneuver. He seemed to be especially intent on mounting a successful attack, no doubt to be able to leave on a triumphant note, with his last attack on me for once having succeeded. But I saw it coming and was just as intent on resisting it. I’ll send him away defeated!

● Sunday, 7-20-2025:   I’m beginning another read-through of my Journal.

● I was right (probably): the man in no. 3 is gone (no one is there now). The no. 1 neighbor, too, is out(?). It’s marvelous. For a moment, I have a taste of privacy and peace. . . . No, I was wrong about the the no. 1 neighbor being away: he’s there, and attacking me.

● Well, someone is in no. 3, perhaps a person who shows the apartment to prospective renters.

● I just had occasion to reread some entries in a much older diary, covering about a year and a half, starting in mid 1993, during which time I was still using opiates and cannabis for intoxication, daily. I had only enough patience with it to read just five months’ or so worth of entries. It reminded me what a dark, troubled, painful time that was for me. My situation now is infinitely better.

● Monday, 7-21-2025:   Why do Republican (or right-wing) governments, like the Trump administration, seek to weaken or eliminate environmental regulations? As usual, it’s to make the rich richer. The (rich) owners of the regulated industries make more profit when their factories can more freely pollute. Of course, like all people, the rich dislike living in a toxic environment. But they can afford to move anywhere they please. If their town becomes polluted, they simply move to a pristine area. And their moving costs are far smaller than their increased profit. Whereas, poor and working people don’t profit from pollution, and, by and large, they don’t have the wherewithal to simply pick up and move (especially to an unspoiled place). If their town becomes polluted, they must just live with it. In other words, greater freedom to pollute benefits the rich, but hurts everyone else.

● Wednesday, 7-23-2025:   My impression is that artificial intelligence can write better than mediocre writers, but not as well as great writers.

● Thursday, 7-24-2025:   There was a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians earlier this year. In March, the Israelis unilaterally broke it. Since then, there have supposedly been negotiations to reestablish a “cease-fire.” But what sense would a cease-fire make, a cessation of hostilities, only to be resumed a few weeks or months later? What’s happening there is not so much a fight as a genocide: Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We don’t want it to pause—we want it to end!

● Sunday, 7-27-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). Topic: “What is Evil?”

At greater length, here’s the topic:

“WHAT IS EVIL? Is there such a thing as evil? Is evil a useful concept or is it an outdated moral term? Is evil just another word for very immoral, ethically wrong, or selfish? Or is there something more to it? Whichever way you define evil, what is its source? Is it due to someone being ‘sick in the head?’ Is evil due to ignorance? Or are there other roots of evil? Note that these questions do not assume that evil is a metaphysical or supernatural force. A secular notion of evil might be viable.

“Further questions: do ‘evil’ people generally think of themselves as being evil or doing evil? Or do people who do evil think of themselves similarly to how most people do, that is, as decent people who, on those occasions when they must do harmful or immoral actions, feel justified in doing so, or feel that they made an understandable mistake that nearly anyone could make?

“Could almost any of us become evil if we were put in dire situations? What circumstances do you think would cause you to do evil, however you define evil?”

● Here are my initial thoughts. By “initial,” I mean my thoughts before reading the suggested articles on the topic. As a philosopher who’s thought and written about the subject for many decades, I suppose my thoughts on it now are not truly impromptu.

Prefatorily, there can be no objective, formal, rigorous definition of evil. Definitions of it are subjective, informal, loose. To define it rigorously would be to put too fine a point on it.

What we mean by evil, in a philosophical vein, is a person’s deliberately and unjustifiably causing harm to other persons.

More specifically, we mean that the intention and the effect is the causing of great harm. For lesser degrees of intentional human harm, we use milder terms like “inconsiderate”; “thoughtless”; “selfish”; or “bad.”

As to whether people we might think evil think of themselves as evil, I believe some pride themselves on being evil. But probably most do not consider themselves evil, because we tend to rationalize our behavior. Many people probably justify their harmful actions by their hatred of their victims: They “reason” that those they hate are bad; that something bad happening to a good person is bad, but that something bad happening to a bad person is good. It’s how I used to feel about insect pests in my home dying a miserable death (at my hands). I felt they deserved it because they were pests, and so their suffering was good. Looking back on it now, I realize that such an attitude is nonsensical (because an insect has no understanding of its action’s effect on other creatures and no real choice in how it acts).

I think that evil is not done out of ignorance: ignorance perhaps of the victim’s suffering. This is so by definition (my definition): an evil act entails both a bad effect and a bad intention. I think the most common source of evil conduct is selfishness: acting to benefit oneself despite the—understood—harm to others.

As to whether I could act evilly, I would hope not. But, alas, I suppose I’m no less susceptible than the average person is to rationalizing my selfish conduct.

● Monday, 7-28-2025:   I just awoke from a bad dream. I was looking for a job. I had been doing some work at and for an insurance company and they seemed to have made a commitment to me that they would hire me the following week. But it fell through; they told me they would not hire me, after all. I thought I heard them speaking with another candidate for the job, who had done a sample advertising project for them, an announcement of a spelling bee, and they were impressed with that idea of his. At the tail end of the dream, they were walking me out of their offices. I asked the woman who was walking me out of the offices whether they’d hired someone else instead of me; she seemed to resent my question, as being too forward. I quickly changed my approach, to try to leave on a pleasant note, telling the woman, “It has been a pleasure working with you and all the other people here.” But I was profoundly disappointed. I was worried about my unemployment and my lack of money. I figured that I’d continue my job search with other insurance companies, because what little work experience I had was in that industry. I think I understood that I was living with my old father. Perhaps the dream was stimulated by my thought, within the last few days, that my work for Lance’s office might end at any time.

● Tuesday, 7-29-2025:   The paradigmatic example of an evil person cited by philosophers of evil is the serial killer. That strikes me as a significant limitation of their conception of evil. It omits those whose actions have a more widespread (and so greater), though less obvious and dramatic, bad effect. Examples are politicians who start wars; captains of industry who overwork and underpay their employees, and devastate the environment; and the wealthy, whose amassment of wealth impoverishes everyone else.

● Sunday, 8-3-2025:   New tenants may have moved in next-door, in no. 3. They’re already hostile. I await their fatal mistakes.

● . . . I didn’t have to wait long!

● Monday, 8-4-2025:   Last week, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report on employment in the United States. The report was “disappointing.” Trump’s response was to fire the chief statistician, claiming that she’d falsified the report to make him look bad. Sometimes there’s just nothing more to say. . . .

[Later note (8-24-2025): . . . until now. What Trump is upset about is, not that the statistics were cooked, but that they’re unfavorable to him. He knows they weren’t cooked. That’s just his pretext for firing the statistician, so that he can replace her with someone who will cook the statistics—in his favor.]

● Trump de-funded public radio and television stations, on the grounds, according to him, that they have a liberal bias. Trump is so far-right, that, by comparison, even those more or less at the political center look like Marxists.

● Wednesday, 8-6-2025:   I’m disappointed that many institutions in this country, like big law firms, media networks, and universities, are giving in to Trump’s demands rather than fighting for their rights. But I think I understand why they do it (give in, that is): they’d rather bend than risk breaking. The expense of fighting Trump could virtually destroy an institution, even if it wins the fight. And there’s no guarantee that it would win if it fought. It perhaps reasons that, as long as it continues to exist, odious changes can be undone. But its destruction would be irreversible. And long-term harm to the country would be greater with a permanent loss of these institutions than with a temporary impairment of their integrity. But that’s probably just an exercise in rationalization, a desperate attempt to view the situation positively.

● Friday, 8-8-2025:   Defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic, as the Trump administration has done, makes no more sense than defining criticism of Trump as anti-American. No: Trump is harming America—he’s anti-American. American opposition to him is patriotic. Likewise, Israel’s current government, committing genocide in the name of the Jewish people (“the Jewish state”), creates antisemitism, and is itself antisemitic. It will stain Israel’s reputation as the Nazis did Germany’s. Those who oppose Israel’s government are, in effect, fighting antisemitism. Trump’s defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic is a transparently fallacious bit of reasoning designed to prevent just criticism of an evildoing American client state.

● Sunday, 8-10-2025:   The (Republican) governor of Texas is trying to (further) gerrymander Texas to favor Republicans, and ensure a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2026 mid-term elections. This is obviously unfair. It’s unprecedented because rearranging the voting districts is supposed to be done only once every ten years, in response to updated census information. And yet, it’s apparently not illegal. Trump argues in favor of the Texas gerrymandering plan on the grounds that he won a decisive victory in Texas in the 2024 presidential election, and so he’s “entitled” to some additional Republican seats in Congress. His argument amounts to the claim that the winner of an election is entitled to manipulate the voting apparatus to make the election’s results permanent. Perhaps he also reasons that the Democrats are bad, and so anything the opposing party, the Republicans, can do to gain an advantage against them is good. That’s Trump’s common sense.

● Monday, 8-11-2025:   There’s an irony in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”: Many Americans more keenly appreciate features of this country that made it special (dare I say “great”?!) now that Donald Trump, as President, is destroying them. Many such people now indeed wish to make America great again—to restore it to its condition before Trump did so much damage to it.

● They say you don’t appreciate what you have till it’s gone. Well, there’s at least one exception to that: I appreciate what I have in my writings, and in my ability to produce them.

● Over the weekend, Israel targeted and killed a famous Palestinian journalist, together with six of his (presumably less famous) journalist companions, in Gaza. The rest of the world is increasingly turning against Israel for its destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people, rejecting Israel’s denial that it’s starving the Palestinians, a rejection based on news reports and photographs. Israel’s response: kill the journalists.

● Whether Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians is, technically, genocide . . . is a quibble.

● Sometimes I wonder how Trump can take pride in his performance as President when he’s hurting the country, and the world. He may reason (to himself) that he’s making things better—for the good people (the wealthy, and certainly for the good people who count the most: himself and his family). The rest (the non-wealthy, many of whom are Democrats, his enemies) don’t count; if things are worse for them, it doesn’t matter . . . or it’s good. And yet, Trump wants everyone to love him and to think he’s doing a wonderful job. But most of those people whose opinions he values are the non-wealthy, for whom he’s making things worse. Sooner or later they’ll discover what’s happening, and turn against him. He tries to stave off that eventuality simply by lying, to the public (he probably lies to himself as well). One might pity him . . . if he weren’t so evil.

● Friday, 8-15-2025:   Donald Trump is facing a crisis, in the form of his involvement with notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who abused hundreds, if not thousands, of teenaged girls: Trump and Epstein were close friends for a decade or more (and many people have long suspected Trump of involvement in those crimes). The trouble for Trump came because during his last presidential campaign he promised his supporters that, if reelected President, he would release “the Epstein files,” and expose all the people who participated with Epstein in the sex crimes—but then, a few months ago, Trump refused to release them (no doubt because they’d incriminate him), which created a furor on the part of many of his (at least erstwhile) most dedicated supporters, who felt betrayed.

Though Epstein died in prison (by suicide or murder) while awaiting trial for his crimes, his long-time companion and coconspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was tried and convicted (in 2021) on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. For which she was serving a 20-year prison sentence in a maximum security federal prison. But a few weeks ago, officials in Trump’s Justice Department met with Maxwell, and she was immediately transferred to a minimum security facility, where the conditions of confinement are infinitely better. To boot, she’s been given “work release,” meaning that she can leave the facility during the day. Legal experts have said that the transfer was unprecedented—and inappropriate—for someone convicted of such heinous crimes. Many have wondered why she was transferred. Well, I know why: It’s hush money, like Trump’s payment, in his first term, to the porn actress. Maxwell gets much more pleasant living conditions as long as she keeps quiet about Trump. The moment she implicates him, she’ll go right back into the maximum security prison (they’d claim that it was because she violated her conditions of release by lying). Which of course confirms what was suspected about Trump in this regard. If Maxwell had no information incriminating him, there would have been no reason to transfer her. Or perhaps Trump did it just out of the goodness of his heart.

● It may be that what I thought was a new resident in no. 3 is actually just a new leasing agent.

● Saturday, 8-16-2025:   I’ve wondered whether the cigarette smoke that sometimes disturbs my sleep at night, especially in the hot weather, is getting into my apartment through my front door (which I keep open at night in the hot weather, and which communicates with the common area of the condominium complex), or from the opposite direction, through gaps in the wall-mounted air conditioner in my bedroom (from people smoking on the street or sidewalk). A recent event has, I think, answered the question. The old Filipino woman cigarette smoker in no. 7, who’s been here for perhaps two years (I thought it was a group of them, but it’s just her), goes outside the complex to smoke, but she lights her cigarette while still inside the complex, and fairly close to my front door. Well, about a week ago she finally moved—no more smoke smell in my bedroom . . . until a new smoker moves in.

● Wednesday, 8-20-2025:   Well, I was wrong about the old woman in no. 7 having left. Nonetheless, I think my conclusion about the cigarette smoke in my apartment coming from the common area of the complex rather than from the street or sidewalk, is valid: these days, that old woman is the sole source of smoke in the common area here, but many people smoke on the sidewalk near my bedroom. And a noticeable smoke-smell fluctuation is more likely to result from a variation in one person’s smoking activity than from a variation in the aggregate of many people’s smoking activity.

● Sunday, 8-24-2025:   I’ve noticed that, when I’ve gone for a long time without a significant headache (one bad enough to require medication), and I then look at my headache-medication record to see exactly how long it’s been, I invariably get a significant headache within a few days. For a long time, I was at least vaguely aware of that pattern, but I nonetheless checked my medication record, to satisfy my curiosity. I believe I continued to do it because the connection didn’t seem to make sense: I couldn’t think of why that should happen (and the observation smacked of superstition). So I figured I was just imagining it, and ignored it. But this time (and it’s been a long time since my last significant headache), I’m wise to it: I can’t explain it, yet it seems true. For several weeks now, I’ve resisted the temptation to check the record, and I still haven’t gotten another headache.

● I just read an article discussing recent photographs of President Trump’s right hand, which photographs showed some badly applied makeup, apparently to cover up a skin discoloration or defect. Many are asking whether it signifies a serious health problem. But I wonder: Do those questions express worry, or wishful thinking?

● Wednesday, 8-27-2025:   Politicians, like Donald Trump, who use the political slogan “Make America great again” never say what previous time or circumstances in America they’re referring to as having been great. And no one asks them.

● Saturday, 8-30-2025:   If I were free to do so, I might move to another state. But I’m not free to do so: I must stay in California because I’m licensed to practice law just in California (to practice law in a state, an attorney must be licensed in that state, which in turn involves the ordeal of passing that state’s bar exam). Other factors keeping me here are these: I know a certain area of California law (workers’ compensation) well enough to be able to earn a living at it; I have an advantageous business relationship here; I have affordable rent; and generally I’m familiar enough with my immediate area to be able to find my way around, in various ways.

● A month or two ago, the Trump administration took away all federal funding from public radio and television stations. Before that, he was threatening it. In a way, I’m glad he finally did it. That will make the stations more honest. They won’t pull their punches out of fear of Trump’s retaliating against them. They’ll speak their minds, knowing there’s nothing more he can do to them.

● Monday, 9-1-2025 (Labor Day Holiday):   Whence the apparent affinity between the right wing and bigotry? It comes from an attitude common to both: a lack of compassion, even a disdain, for other people, and a consequent disinclination to help them, or even a desire to hurt them, economically and otherwise. Conversely, Leftists tend to favor social justice, as well as economic justice, because they have compassion, which makes them want, economically and otherwise, to help the less fortunate.

● In this read-through of the Journal, I’ve been reading the online version. I just now found a “Later note” that was in the online version but not in the word processing version (and I added it there). I noticed the omission only because I happened to make a slight edit to that Later note, and when I went to make the edit to the note in the word processing document, I saw that it wasn’t there. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed that it was missing. So I’ll (again) have to go through the Journal specifically to check for possible omissions in either version.

● Tuesday, 9-2-2025:   Hello, reader! I’m sitting at my desk. I’m still alive.

● Saturday, 9-6-2025:   This is Kant’s famous categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim on which you act were to become, through your will, a universal law.” It could be paraphrased thus: “Act as you would have everyone act.” I’ve criticized it. Two further problems with it occur to me: One, it’s unworkable, because, even assuming that everyone wished to do good, no one can prescribe action for everyone, because people vary considerably. The kinds of good acts they do will vary according to their differing talents, interests, inclinations, and conceptions of the good. Two, a clearly wrong act could conform to the categorical imperative. For example, a Nazi could think: “I would like everyone to kill as many Jews as possible, until no Jews remain.”

● Monday, 9-8-2025:   I did something weird just now. I got up for the day an hour earlier than usual, an hour earlier than I intended to. I somehow misread the clock as 4:30 a.m., when it was only 3:30 a.m. I noticed the mistake only about half an hour later. But I won’t go back to bed. This morning it’s actually useful to have an extra hour.

● Tuesday, 9-9-2025:   What’s a toopperdoodle? It’s a doodle at least one of whose parents is a tooper.

● Wednesday, 9-10-2025:   In the last few days, the weather has begun to get cooler. And my lower back has begun to hurt.

● Thursday, 9-11-2025:   Donald Trump is using yesterday’s assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk as an excuse to rail against the Left, claiming that they caused the assassination by using extreme language against the Right, like calling them “Nazis” and “fascists.” Well, the Right—many of them—are Nazis and fascists. It’s a testament to our decency and self-restraint that more of them are not killed. The great majority of political violence is committed by the Right against the Left.

● Sunday, 9-14-2025:   I just finished the latest read-through of my Journal. This one took 6 days short of two months. I did it leisurely and I had an unusually full deposition schedule. Again, the editing was fruitful. And I added 9 pages’ worth of new Diary material, much of which I think is excellent. The work extends to page 769. Now I’ll go through it to check for missing entries. I won’t count that as part of a read-through, so I can use the task as busy-work to help fill the two-week break time.

● In the aftermath of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, there’s much criticism of “hate” in this country. That must be inaccurate, because, is it not appropriate to hate evil, or what we think is evil? For example, should we not hate Nazism, or fascism (or Nazis or fascists)? When we criticize “hate,” exactly what are we criticizing? Perhaps we mean inappropriate hatred—hatred of that which it’s wrong to hate; hatred, say, of democracy, or egalitarianism, or black people, or gay people, or poor people . . . or the people.

● Monday, 9-15-2025:   I think I overdid the exercise-walking this morning. The left knee felt slightly sore, but I did the second walk, anyway. I figured that, with a deposition each of the next four days (precluding taking my exercise-walks for four days), that would be long enough for the knee to heal. But skipping the second walk would have been the prudent course. Nonetheless, it’s hard to tell. My judgment is imperfect. Sometimes I won’t walk when I could have walked; other times I’ll overdo it.

● Tuesday, 9-16-2025:   At my dental appointment yesterday, my dentist confided a problem he had with an insurance company. He said he took a dental x-ray of a patient, which study was negative for dental problems, but his in-person visual examination of the same tooth revealed a need for work. The insurance company refused to cover the recommended procedure, explaining that their decision was based on the x-ray, and disregarding the dentist’s conclusion. I suggested this response to the insurance company: “If the x-ray suggested a need for dental work, but, with further examination, I concluded that no work was needed, would you still go with the x-ray and disregard my conclusion?”

● Wednesday, 9-17-2025:   Never interrupt a man when he’s going to nine. What does that mean? Well, I was thinking it. Then I thought, Why shouldn’t I write it down? (I had no answer to that . . . so now you’re stuck with it.)

● Thursday, 9-18-2025:   Last night I dreamed that I was about to go surfing with four friends (. . . no, it was three—there were four of us, including me). We were going to use motorcycles for the event (in the ocean!), and were getting our motorcycles ready. I had a conflict with my friends: they were not planning to use life vests, but I insisted that we (or at least I) use them.

● I got my flu and COVID-19 vaccinations just a few hours ago, at Kaiser. I’m bracing myself for the unpleasant side effects, which include a headache and body aches. I haven’t had a headache in many, many months. But I was overdue for the vaccine, and not ruining my headache-free record was not a good enough reason to postpone it. Best to get it over with. Well, at least I’ll finally see how long it’s been since my last headache (I’ll no doubt have to take medication for the headache).

I asked them when my next vaccination should be; they said Kaiser would call me when next year’s vaccine is ready. I put it on my calendar for a year from today, just in case they don’t call me, or I miss the call.

● I’m feeling the side effects of the vaccine, but, at least so far, they’re not as bad as usual, and not bad enough to require medication. Perhaps because my body has lately been so efficient in suppressing headaches, that suppressant is continuing to work now.

● A lawyer asked fellow lawyers on the trial lawyers’ Listserv for advice on whether he could wire money from his client trust account. But in the title of his email he mistyped money as “Monet.” Many lawyers responded sharing their advice. I momentarily considered sending this reply: “Yes, but only a copy; not the original.”

I got another little jolt about an hour later when I saw a response by a lawyer named Pablo Pinasco. At first glace, I read the name as Pablo Picasso. I thought it was a joke, like: Oh, Pablo Picasso thinks you can wire Monet . . ..

● Saturday, 9-20-2025:   I no sooner recovered from the side-effects of the vaccinations than I have another uncomfortable bodily problem: my hands and fingers are covered in itchy mosquito bites. It’s all I can do to keep from scratching. Last Thursday, I rolled down the windows in my car to get cooler air while I slept before a deposition in Burbank, and a mosquito got in. I heard it in my ear, and then I saw it in the car when I drove away after the deposition. Yesterday, Friday, in the morning, it was still in the car. On Thursday, I tried to get the mosquito out of the car by lowering windows as I drove, but that didn’t work. Today I’ll buy a little spray bottle, that I can put alcohol in, and keep it in the car, to kill flying insects if that happens again. (. . . The vaccine side effects are much more unpleasant than the mosquito bites.)

● Saving Private Ryan . . . ? What about all the other soldiers? Don’t we want to save them, too?

● Sunday, 9-21-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting. Topic: “Economic Inequality.” In full, here’s the topic:

“IS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY BAD IN ITSELF, OR IS IT SIMPLY THE LACK OF RESOURCES THAT’S BAD? Is the sole problem with economic inequality the fact that those at the lower (and perhaps middle) end of the spectrum suffer material deprivations and hardships? If those deprivations and hardships were remedied, what reasons, if any, would we have to reduce inequality?

“Most agree that economic inequality is objectionable if it comes about through unjust means. But, if inequality comes about fairly and morally, are there principled reasons to oppose it?”

Here are my thoughts. If those with less money do not thereby suffer severe deprivation or hardship, economic inequality is less unjust, but it’s still unjust. You can talk about the less wealthy not lacking resources; but the point is that they have fewer resources than the rich do. They lack resources relatively. And having more money must confer some significant benefit, else people wouldn’t desire it. By the law of diminishing returns, the commonweal is greatest with rough equality of wealth. An additional dollar would help a poorer person more than it would help a richer person. And human psychology is such that poorer persons resent the very existence of inequality (it’s a righteous resentment of an injustice), which resentment, too, makes them less happy. A more particular advantage of wealth is political power. The wealthier have greater influence in public elections. Hence wealth inequality also subverts democracy: the ideal of one man, one vote.

As to whether economic inequality is objectionable if it comes about “fairly,” the idea is nonsensical. There is no “fair way” to achieve an unfair situation. And if another situation is more desirable than this one, should we not try to achieve it, however the present situation came about?

● Some oppose egalitarianism on the grounds that the motivation for it is merely “envy” on the part of the less wealthy of the more wealthy. They use “envy” because envy is universally acknowledged to be bad. But it’s not envy—it’s resentment: righteous resentment of an injustice.

● My objection to economic inequality is based on its consequences. If I somehow knew of another planet of humans many light years away, all of whose inhabitants were very prosperous, and with a high degree of well-being, I would not choose to reduce them to the far lower economic level of Earthlings, if their loss of wealth would not make us on Earth (or anyone) better off, just for the sake of equality.

● We don’t need huge wealth disparity to motivate people to do fine work. The people who’ve made the greatest contributions to the world were not wealthy. For example, Einstein and Mozart were not millionaires, let alone billionaires. Those who need great wealth disparity to motivate them—we don’t need their contributions.

● Monday, 9-22-2025:   I suppose that what most religious people mean by the soul is a person’s consciousness together with his basic (human) personality or character traits. They probably don’t mean merely consciousness, because your consciousness could be reincarnated in a lower organism, like a mouse, or even an insect. But those people would probably deny that such creatures have souls. . . . And, come to think of it, they would probably deny the existence of reincarnation, too, which seems to conflict with the idea of Heaven and Hell. That is, how could you be in Heaven or Hell, and yet also be living on Earth as another creature, perhaps another person?

● Wednesday, 9-24-2025:   Well, I finally got a headache . . . bad enough to require medication. So I was able to look at my records, and found that my last significant headache was on 1 June 2025. That’s a long time without a headache!

● Friday, 9-26-2025:   It seems as though the cool season has finally come! Hallelujah! This is the first night in many months that it’s been cool enough to keep my front door closed at night.

● Sunday, 9-28-2025:   I just awoke from a dream in which I was a newly, or recently, recovered crack-cocaine addict at an inpatient treatment center for those addicts. Perhaps it reflects my appreciation of my advancement in life.

● Monday, 9-29-2025:   This morning, for the first time in many months, it was cold enough that I wore my jacket on my walk.

● Tuesday, 9-30-2025:   Trump rails against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in hiring. He claims that it causes black persons and women, among others, to be hired because of their race and gender, rather than their competence. On that rationale, he’s fired huge numbers of black women from their government jobs. Which is ironic. Trump hires people to fill the highest government positions on the basis of their loyalty to him, rather than their competence. Many of those he’s hired are spectacularly incompetent and unqualified, like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Robert Kennedy, Jr., as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In no other presidential administration since the country’s founding would these incompetents have been hired for such positions.

● Trump has recently caused the military to sink twenty-two Venezuelan boats, at sea, most of them off the Venezuelan coast, killing all on board, claiming that they were “narco-terrorists,” on the way to smuggle illegal drugs into the United States. I think this is the equivalent of his sending military troops, over local leaders’ objections, to various United States cities, claiming that it’s to “fight crime.” In both cases, the stated rationales are pretexts; the actions merely express his anger and aggression toward those he dislikes: all the cities to which he sends troops are led by Democrats; and Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro, is a leftist (and Venezuela is a small country that can’t stand up to the United States’ military). Of course, Trump’s attacking the boats is even worse than his sending troops into cities, because in that first case he’s killing people. He’s acting as judge, jury, and—literally—executioner. Even if all those people he’s killed were attempting to smuggle drugs into the United States, death is not a just penalty for that crime. And presumably some of them were innocent. Justice demands that, before you’re punished for a crime, you be found guilty of it in court. That’s especially true where the punishment is the final and irrevocable one of death. There’s a word for what Trump is doing: murder. I understand one reason why the religious like to believe in an afterlife: For perpetrators of egregious crimes, who are unlikely to face earthly justice, one wishes there were a Hell.

● A significant lower-backache, the first one I’ve had for some time. It’s perhaps a byproduct of the cooler weather.

● Thursday, 10-2-2025:   I just awoke from a dream in which my one great drive in life was to find a romantic mate, a woman, but I was making no progress toward that goal. I was pursuing other interests, and friends were scolding me (and I felt guilty) for not being more deliberate and aggressive in meeting and dating eligible young women. I could feel my time fast evaporating and despaired of finding a mate while I was still young enough to enjoy it. That’s autobiographical. There was a time, long ago, though it feels like not long ago at all, when finding a mate was my primary wish. Several decades hence, but still several decades ago, finding a mate was one of my three primary ambitions, the other two being financial well-being and a great oeuvre. Well, I did indeed miss my chance at finding a mate. I now see my creation of an oeuvre as by far the most important goal; or perhaps, more accurately, as the only important one. Probably because of age, I no longer crave, or even desire, a romantic relationship. And I don’t feel a need or desire to have a great amount of money; I simply want enough to be able to survive, to cover my basic needs, to be financially secure, to live reasonably comfortably, and to have enough leisure to write. My income and savings (at least given my continuing good health) are enough to meet those criteria. And I feel good about my progress in building my oeuvre.

● The backache of a few days ago has largely resolved.

● Saturday, 10-4-2025, 1:15 a.m.:   After about midnight, I couldn’t sleep. Typically, my sleep may be shallow; but at least I’m sleeping intermittently, drifting in and out. Being unable to sleep at all is unusual for me. So, instead of lying in bed awake, I got out of bed . . . and here I am, sitting at my desk, writing. For the last few days, at home all day (having no depositions to handle), I’ve forgone my accustomed morning nap, because the neighbor in no. 1 has been home then (he’s usually gone by about 9:00). I press on with my activities, and eventually the tiredness passes; I don’t take a nap, even though I could (because the neighbor has gone). My living situation leaves much to be desired! But I’m well aware that it could be far worse—all in all, I feel fortunate. I’ll go back to bed now (2:15 a.m.). (It didn’t take me a whole hour just to write this paragraph; I worked on another paragraph as well. . . . Not that I wouldn’t take an hour, or longer, to write a paragraph—just not this paragraph. . . . though the more words I add, the more time it’s taking.)

● Yesterday, for the first time in perhaps a year, I did some Thera-Band exercises for my left shoulder. I did them very gently (with very slight resistance and very few repetitions), to avoid injuring that upper extremity by straining it, which has happened before.

● I think I know what caused last night’s sleeplessness: I neglected to take my sleep medication (Remeron, 15 mg). I thought I missed it, but I wasn’t sure. I then decided not to take a tablet, figuring that it would be better to take none than to take a double dose.

● Monday, 10-6-2025:   Just at the beginning of the cold season, the weather is cool, but not cold. In the house, I’m not warm enough, so I put my jacket on. An hour later, I’m too warm, and I take the jacket off, and so on and off, on and off. In a month’s time, I’ll have to wear the jacket continuously and run the space heater . . . and I’ll still feel cold.

● Tuesday, 10-7-2025:   The present feels like a permanent state, or at least a plateau, we’ve reached. But much later, in retrospect, it seems like just a temporary phase we passed through. It (the present) now seems like the awake state; in memory, like part of a long dream.

● Wednesday, 10-8-2025:   Apparently, a new (the fifth) set of residents has moved into apartment no. 3. They’re not the usual group: two parents and their young children. Rather, it’s a number of young men in their twenties. As usual, they’re quite hostile, to me. I think I’ve established a sub silentio angry-sound, against at least one of them, though I don’t know which one. . . . They may be two brothers.

● Thursday, 10-9-2025:   I call Donald Trump and his followers the rabid right.

● I just finished going through my Journal to check for missing material. I found one missing entry and missing material in another entry (and I added what was missing). I found an entry that was supposed to have been deleted (and deleted it), and two typographical errors (and I fixed them). The task took longer than I expected (well over a week, it seemed). I think it was worth the time and effort (both for the repairs and for the peace of mind in knowing it’s been done). Doing it has made this break between Journal read-throughs unusually long—almost four weeks.

● I just saw this news headline: “Trump draws praise from world leaders for brokering Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal.” My response: It’s disingenuous to characterize the United States’ role in the ceasefire as “brokering a deal” when the United States is responsible for the war, by arming the aggressor (Israel). The honest characterization is that the United States finally pressured its client, Israel to stop her perpetrating genocide, as the United States always had the power to do, and should have done long ago.

As for Trump, he doesn’t deserve praise for ending a war that he enabled (by arming the aggressor, Israel). If you start, or prolong, a fire that almost completely destroys a house and kills half the occupants, you don’t deserve praise for extinguishing it. No—you should be punished for committing arson and murder. But, alas, the world leaders don’t have that option. Their choice is either to praise Trump, which hopefully will encourage him to stop the destruction, or to criticize him, which may discourage him stopping it.

● Saturday, 10-11-2025:   I’ve begun another Journal read-through.

● Concerning Trump’s catchphrase “Make America great again,” broadly speaking, we make America greater, not by going backward, but by continuing to progress. More specifically, Trump ironically is doing just the reverse: he’s destroying America. Even this country’s harshest critics have always recognized America as having one fine value to a greater extent than any other country, and which has made her the greatest country on Earth, if anything has. And that value is freedom—not freedom to make money, but freedom of speech. It used to be that, as long as you weren’t calling for imminent violence, you could speak your mind, including (and especially significantly) to criticize the government. But Trump is destroying freedom of speech. If you speak against Trump, or against what Trump is for, you’ll be called a terrorist, and lose your job, or be deported or bankrupted. The real terrorist is Trump. Trump rails against “wokeness.” But we’re going to lose America, or at least what makes America great, unless more people wake up—and soon!

● Sunday, 10-12-2025:   In recreational drug use, we sacrifice accomplishment for experience . . . and long-term well-being for immediate pleasure.

● Tuesday, 10-14-2025:   Every creature feels natural and comfortable in its body (when it’s healthy). . . . If it feels more natural and comfortable in an altered body, the altered body is healthier for the creature.

● I’ve discovered the cure for the Summertime blues: Fall.

● Wednesday, 10-15-2025:   In my 9-15-1999 entry, above, I write about nostalgia. On rereading it just now, it occurred to me that I no longer feel nostalgia. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I’m fairly content and satisfied with my life now: I work just part time (and the work is easy); I have all the money I need (if not all the money I want); I’m healthy; I spend my leisure time writing; and I feel good about my oeuvre. Whereas, until the last few years, I was discontented, and my life was uncomfortable, at times downright painful. So now I wouldn’t be inclined to fantasize about living more pleasantly in an idyllic previous time in my life. In other words, perhaps I’ve finally achieved the ideal state I wrote about there: appreciating the present. . . . My first impulse was to append this comment as a Later note under the original 1999 entry. I decided not to, because it would be anticlimactic, disclosing so early in the Journal this major—and changed—information about my current life, 26 years on (rather than simply disclosing developments as they occur). That’s a disadvantage of some of the Later notes.

[Later note (2-6-2026): To clarify, working part-time gives me all the money I otherwise need—I don’t have enough money not to have to work.]

● Thursday, 10-16-2025:   Yesterday was the first day since last Winter that I turned on heaters in my apartment.

● There’s a special state-wide election in California on November 4, about redistricting. I voted today, by mail. This is the first time I’ve voted by mail, though I’ve had many opportunities to do so before. I was always afraid that I wouldn’t be able to follow the instructions, and I’d make a mistake, causing my vote not to be counted. But I read the instructions on the ballot and they seemed clear and simple.

● Friday, 10-17-2025:   Haircut (Brenda).

● Saturday, 10-18-2025:   I was going to take a desert ride tomorrow, but I can’t because my car (the engine) overheated; I had to have it towed home. I’ll bring it to my mechanic on Monday, and rent a car while mine is being repaired.

● Sunday, 10-19-2025:   Prudence dictates that I suspend my exercise-walks today: left leg discomfort. . . . It resolved a few hours later, and I took one walk in the early afternoon, with no adverse effect.

● Monday, 10-20-2025:   Here’s an email message I sent to my financial advisor last week:

Hi Ron,

I just got an email from EdwardJones saying, “We’re confirming the recent change you made.” It goes on to say . . . “Recently, you asked us to change a Portfolio Objective as it relates to a specific goal . . .” Well, I didn’t make, or authorize, a change. If you made a change, that’s fine. I trust your judgment about that. But I didn’t make a change. I would never (on my own, without first talking to you) make a change to my account, because I lack the expertise to do so intelligently. I rely on you for that. . . . Of course, if it was something obvious, I might do so. I mean, if they said, “If you make such and such change to your account, we’ll send you a check today for two million dollars,” I suppose I’d make the change! I assume that what’s involved here is nothing like that (though I don’t know what it is).

Richard (Eisner)

[Later note (11-21-2025): It turns out that Ron or his assistant made the change.]

● Friday, 10-24-2025:   Here’s a letter I sent to my car mechanic:

Miguel,

Today you asked me what legal specialty is the most lucrative, so that you could advise your son, a law student. I floundered for an answer. But thinking about it further, here’s what I’d say. Lawyers in every legal specialty vary considerably in their wealth: some are rich; many others are struggling. A new lawyer should pick a specialty, based, not on its lucrativeness, but on what kind of law he enjoys. You spend so much of your time working, that if you don’t enjoy your work, you won’t enjoy your life; but if you enjoy your work, you’ll enjoy your life. Also, if you don’t enjoy it, you probably won’t stick with it for long—you’ll change specialties, or even careers. Whereas, the more you enjoy it, the more likely you are to spend the time and effort needed to get really good at it. And the better you are at it, the more likely it is that you’ll be financially successful at it.

I hope that’s helpful.

Sincerely,

Richard

● Saturday, 10-25-2025:   I owe my life to the law—the law against murder.

● I’m worried about my hearing. Last Monday, 10-20-2025, I was exposed to loud noise for five to ten minutes while I was at my car mechanic’s shop transferring some of the contents of my car to the rental car. Tree trimmers across the street were using a wood-chipper. I wore my headset hearing protector, but the noise was so loud that the protector seemed to make hardly any difference. I didn’t notice an effect on my hearing until this morning, when I suddenly had severe tinnitus accompanied by what seems to be a (further) hearing loss, in the high frequency range. For example, a switch that, before, sounded like “click,” now sounds like a “cluck.” I hope it’s just temporary.

● Sunday, 10-26-2025:   I just awoke from a dream in which I had worked for a workers’ compensation law firm for perhaps a few months, but they fired me. I half expected it because I knew I wasn’t a productive employee. A female lawyer, a coworker, was giving me the bad news. She let go another employee at the same time, just before me; and after the other one left the room, she asked me if I knew why I was there; I said “Yes.” She told me she was writing my good traits at the top of the page, and the bad ones at the bottom, and she showed it to me. It seemed to me there was more at the top of the page than at the bottom. I responded by first telling her that I appreciated her doing it that way, and that I thought it was an unusual approach, to list the employee’s good qualities, as well as his bad ones. I commented on some of the good indications. One was something like “Detail Days.” I told her I didn’t remember the details of it, but that I remembered that I enjoyed the process. Also at the top of her page were many pictures of animals, and I jokingly said that it’s good that I get along well with animals. I thought she was grasping at straws to find something good to say about me. There was also a picture of a young female coworker; I asked her what the woman’s picture symbolized. She said something like: “She spent too much time working with you on [something-or-other].” Which seemed more a criticism than a compliment, of me. After that meeting, I was driving, and I was thinking about what I’d do for employment. I remembered that I was also a new employee of a bank, and that I thought I should try to learn well the bank job so that I wouldn’t meet the same fate there, but I was worried about it. Perhaps the dream reflects my worry about the possible ending of my work for Susan Garrett’s office (that it will end before I’m ready to stop working). Perhaps it also reflects my worry about my hearing, which still—almost 24 hours later—hasn’t gone back to normal (normal for me). If it doesn’t go back to normal, it will mark the start of a new (worse) phase of my life.

● My hearing seems for the most part to have returned to normal.

● Wednesday, 10-29-2025:   I say I’m semi-retired; but it’s more by description than by design. In other words, I don’t think, “I want to be semi-retired” and therefore choose to work just so many hours a week. Rather, I work for one lawyer; I take all the work she gives me. If she gave me much more work, I’d take it. If I wanted to work more, it would entail working for other lawyers as well, which would be complicated and awkward—I’d have to turn down considerable work offered by the other lawyers in order to continue to take all the current lawyer’s work and to maintain that relationship (if I started to turn down some of her work, she might hire someone else to do the additional work, which would end my advantageous position as her exclusive independent-contractor lawyer). The amount of work (the pay) she gives me is enough to cover my (modest) needs, and I highly value my leisure time. So I don’t go to the trouble of trying to get more work. I work perhaps 10 – 25 hours a week, on average, which could be described as semi-retirement.

● Friday, 10-31-2025:   In a certain American city, a main road had a large pothole. Motorists were complaining about it, and clamoring for the city to repair it. But the wealthy owner of a tire shop in town opposed it because it would lower his profits and raise his taxes. Eventually, it became a political issue. The wealthy tire shop owner also owned a local radio station, and he ran political ads that characterized people in favor of fixing the pothole as tax-and-spend liberals, radical leftists, and those against it as proponents of freedom and prosperity.

● I went to the bank today to cash/deposit some paychecks. A teller there whom I deal with frequently was retiring (there were banners announcing it); this was her last day at the bank. I wished her a good retirement. I was glad I got chance to wish her well. . . . And then the neighbor, or one of them, just closed his front door, no doubt to see if he can get me to change my pattern of typing in response, to be able to think he affected me, to get a little victory over me. As usual, I succeeded in frustrating his attempt.

● I just got a survey from the Vipre anti-virus company, whose product I subscribe to for my computers. When I rated as “very bad” their response to my recent help request, they asked me for a more detailed explanation. I replied with this (only slightly revised):

I lack the technical skill to get the help the way you offer it. I need to talk to someone on the telephone in real time. I had to call my IT person, who helped me while I was on the phone with him. But I’ll give you this more specific feedback. Recently, I got a message from you on my computer (I don’t recall whether it was an email or some sort of pop-up message) that said my Vipre subscription had expired, and it forced me to make an immediate choice of paying for a renewal, or uninstalling the program. I pay for a yearly subscription, and I remembered paying recently. Out of exasperation and anger, I clicked on “Uninstall.” Stop sending such messages when customers are up-to-date on their payments. And restructure those messages to include an option giving the customer time to consider the situation and a chance to respond after he’s done some investigation. The messages you send now in that regard are coercive and unfair—it’s no way to treat loyal customers.

● Sunday, 11-2-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom); topic: “Free speech.” In a nutshell, here are my thoughts. In his article “What John Stuart Mill Got Wrong about Freedom of Speech,” philosopher Jason Stanley argues that Mill supposed a marketplace of ideas, where the best-reasoned conclusions would win out. Stanley says that, especially in fascistic or authoritarian societies (as ours has now become), this condition no longer obtains. Right-wing politicians flood the media, not with reasoned debate, but with propaganda, paid for by wealthy donors. That’s probably true. But what should the remedy be? The temptation may be to further restrict speech. I both agree and disagree with that expedient. I agree in that the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 Citizens United case abolished campaign spending limits for corporations, thus giving the wealthy considerably greater (and even more disproportionate) political power. That decision should be reversed. But I disagree in that, aside from the Citizens United case, the law in this country—at least until now—has struck a good balance between free speech and restricted speech. I wouldn’t want greater restrictions on speech because I fear that that would do more harm than good. It wouldn’t limit what the right-wing propagandists do, but they’d use it to further suppress the voices of the Left.

● Wednesday, 11-5-2025:   The United States Supreme Court has become an organ of the Republican party.

● Friday, 11-7-2025:   I just awoke from an interesting dream. I was a thief. I had stolen a computer system and computer program from northern California, perhaps from San Francisco or Berkeley. In fact, I had stolen several of them. The program had something to do with controlling and protecting the environment. In one scene, I was parked at a restaurant at night. I had the stolen equipment in the trunk of my car. When I came back to my car, someone had broken into my trunk and was rifling through it. It seemed to be someone who was or was connected with the rightful owner of the equipment I’d stolen. He told me something to the effect of, “People in San Francisco are not going to take this lying down.” I thought it would be better (the adverse consequences for me would be less harsh) if I simply let him repossess the equipment. So I went back into the restaurant to wait for him to remove those goods from my car. But it turned out that everyone believed that I was the rightful owner. (The import of the man’s comment, it turned out, was, not that the owners would be upset about the theft, but that northern California potential users of the system would be upset that it was owned by someone so far away, in southern California.) They wanted to work with me to create or develop the program, and we were in a meeting with many sophisticated people, who were offering me advice. I thought that I would not be capable of working on it, but I figured I could hire someone for that. One person suggested that the website should include a price comparison of common goods, to help website users make wiser purchases. I said I thought that was an excellent idea, since it would be useful information and would also draw more viewers to the website. I suggested that, if practical, some additional information about potential products should be included as well. I was mentally trying to think of examples of products that could be thus reviewed, perhaps cars, when I woke up. The interpretation? I have no idea.

● Here’s another way in which my neighbor in no. 1 attacks me: When I’m eating (especially, dinner), he waits by our common wall (my kitchen table, at which I eat, is close to that wall), and, as soon as he detects a change in the speed, the pace, of my chewing, he slams the door. All I can do to respond is to make sure I don’t overtly react, to deprive him of the satisfaction of knowing that it affected me, and to avoid establishing it as a weapon against me (he perennially tries to establish the door-slamming as his angry-sound against me). That’s part of my defense; my offense consists in various sub silentio angry-sounds of my own. I’ve also noticed a pattern to his attacks: After a while when his attacks on me are ineffectual (which is always), he goes for a few weeks in which he doesn’t attack me. But inevitably, he tries again. His renewed attacks last for several days to perhaps a week. Whereas, my sub silentio angry-sound attacks on him are continual. It’s a war: I win, he loses.

● Sunday, 11-9-2025:   Another fact of life in relation to the neighbor in no. 1 is my constant effort to keep track of his two motor vehicles, a little Toyota Corolla car and an old Ford F-150 pickup truck—to know whether he’s home. On days when I’m here at least in the morning, I take my first exercise-walk at about 5:00 a.m. As soon as I get to the street, I look around to try to spot his vehicles. (He uses his garage for storage, so he parks both vehicles on the street.) That way, if, on my second walk, between 7:00 and 8:00, (Monday – Saturday,) I see that his truck is no longer there, I’ll know he’s gone. Sundays are a little trickier. In any event, if both of his vehicles are present, it means he’s home. (Sometimes I know he’s there because I hear him in his apartment; but not hearing him is inconclusive.) I can do certain activities, like taking a nap, only if he’s away. Conversely, when I do the activity that involves making my primary sub silentio angry-sound, I like to know he’s there.

● Today I lost about $45.00. First, I put a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket to pay for my manicure. When I went to take it out to pay, it was gone; it had probably fallen out of my pocket (I looked for it on the ground between my car and the manicure shop, but couldn’t find it). Then, when I got home, I took out trash and recyclables. Later, I realized that I’d accidentally discarded the new (full) bottle of calcium pills (worth about $25.00) instead of the old (empty) one. I went to the recycle bin to retrieve it, but the bottle was gone and the contents, the pills, were strewn around in the bin—I didn’t try to retrieve them. Probably someone had taken the glass bottle to sell to a recycler and had emptied it first. I wasn’t very upset at the losses. For me, it’s a trivial amount of money. Plus, it wasn’t a total loss. No doubt someone found the money—probably someone who needs it more than I do. It’s also good to know that someone’s recycling by looking in the bin (who, again, needs the money more than I do—though, for that bottle, he’ll get far less than $25). To boot, the experience will teach me to be more careful in those ways. (. . . And it gave me another Journal entry.)

● Monday, 11-10-2025:   At the grocery store today, signature gatherers just outside the store’s entrance were soliciting people’s signatures for a proposed ballot measure. Overhanging their little portable table was a banner with bullet points giving some highlights of the proposed bill. One point was “Lower taxes.” On my way out of the store, one of the gatherers asked me to sign his petition. I declined, saying: “Your advertisement says the proposal would lower taxes; lower taxes usually means good for the rich and bad for the poor.” He seemed slightly stunned by my ready response.

● If you make a comment and someone replies: “You don’t warrant an intelligent response”; a good retort is: “So, that wasn’t an intelligent response?”

● Wednesday, 11-12-2025:   In late 2013, I wrote about Bryan Garner’s recommendation to keep a “daily journal,” a record of each day’s events and thoughts. I tried doing it, but soon reverted to my usual practice of making Diary entries just when I felt the urge to do so, which for the most part is not every day. My procedure works better for me, because it makes this Journal better, thus: I thought that, for at least several years, the Journal was too diluted, filled with too much unimportant and uninteresting material. And, as I’ve said, I lack sufficient discipline to omit Diary entries from the Journal. Thus, to try to make the Journal more concentrated, I must be more, not less, restrained in writing in my Diary.

● Backache . . . perhaps because it’s about to rain.

● Thursday, 11-13-2025:   I suspended walking and stretching exercises because of the backache.

● The backache resolved soon after I got up for the day, and I did my walking and stretching.

● On 3-14-2025 I said I was starting to wear my walking shoes instead of my regular street shoes for most trips, to hopefully help heal my left-leg injury. I think lately my backaches have been less frequent, less severe, and less prolonged. Perhaps the shoes have helped. And perhaps, too, I’m recovering from some of the back injuries I sustained in the few years.

● Sunday, 11-16-2025:   In comparing democracy to autocracy, the question arises: Isn’t benevolent dictatorship better than democracy? It may be. But there’s no guarantee that a dictator will be benevolent. In fact, benevolent dictators are the exception. By and large, democracy is better for a state than autocracy, because, in general, we tend to act selfishly. An autocrat will seek to benefit himself, to the detriment of the commonweal. But when the people rule (in a democracy), the people, likewise, will seek to benefit themselves . . . which will benefit the people, the commonweal. The people are the only ruling party without a conflict of interest: they’re the only ones whose self-interest aligns with the public’s interest.

● Monday, 11-17-2025:   I’m near the end of the latest read-through of my Journal. After the section I’ve called the wasteland, roughly 2014 – 2020, the material’s allure or importance rebounds: there’s a greater proportion of better entries. Saturday night, when I went to bed, I had just gone through most of that better section. And I felt wonderful about it. But the quality of material falls off again. The next day, Sunday, and today, I’ve been reading that subsequent weaker section. And I felt disappointed. Which has taught me this: Part of the good effect of the Journal comes from its concentration of good material. That effect can be destroyed by the inclusion of lesser material. As hard as it is for me to cut entries, I suppose I’ll just have to do it—and before I submit the Journal to publishers. I think I’ve confused a work with an oeuvre (the set of all of an artist’s works). That is, an artist (his oeuvre) should be judged by his best works. His poor or mediocre works should be disregarded. If we suddenly unearthed 500 badly written compositions by Mozart, we’d still consider him the greatest composer (based on his magnificent other compositions). Whereas, the greatness of a particular work may be diminished by its inclusion of bad material, which can damage its aesthetic effect. I should bear in mind that this is a luxury problem: It’s much better to have many fine elements, and merely have to eliminate some poor ones . . . than to have no fine elements and have to create them.

Here are some considerations in deciding whether to keep or to delete material:

1. The longer an item, the more good content it must have to justify keeping it—to justify readers’ greater time to read it.

2. An item that has no important or interesting content; no particularly clever mode of expression; and no humor . . . should probably go.

3. Material that’s important or interesting only to me . . . is not important or interesting.

4. General ideas and observations are more important and interesting than mere biographical facts. This is not a memoir or an autobiography; it’s a journal. Some biographical facts may be all right, for variety, to inform readers about my basic life situations (to give context to other personal facts, experiences, and feelings that are more interesting). But a mere biographical fact should be given higher scrutiny.

[Later note (11-21-2025): On second thought, my Journal is a hybrid: It’s not strictly a single work: it’s a collection of works. And it’s essentially a diary, which records the ebb and flow of the author’s life, whose flame does not always burn brilliantly, but flickers.]

● Friday, 11-21-2025:   I just finished the latest read-through of the Journal. This one took 40 days. As usual, it was fruitful. And I added about twelve pages’ worth of new Diary entries. The Journal is now 783 pages long, including the blank space (sometimes taking up almost a whole page) at the end of each year’s material. I’m now in that hellish two-week break between Journal read-throughs. This one will be particularly uncomfortable, since the depositions (which would normally keep me occupied) have lately dwindled to one or two per week. . . . . I just watched the first lecture (of 24) of the mathematics course. I had intended to view the course earlier this year, but I didn’t get far. I stopped at an early lecture when I felt frustrated at being unable to understand a certain seemingly easy proof. I’ll go through the whole set and learn what I can from them, even if that’s very little.

● Saturday, 11-22-2025:   For about an hour and a half this morning, my electricity was off. For much of that time, I felt despair.

● Sunday, 11-23-2025:   Are you wasting your time if you’re experiencing pleasure? First, whether you’re using your time well is subjective. You may feel you wasted your time if you failed to accomplish what you intended to accomplish, and you consider the missed accomplishment more important than the pleasure you ended up with, or if you intended merely to feel pleasure but the pleasure you ended up with was less than what you expected. Yet your time is less wasted if you at least have pleasure than if you have no pleasure or (even worse) if you have pain. You might consider the pleasure you got more important than the accomplishment you missed (perhaps the pleasure will enable you to work more effectively toward the accomplishment). And, of course, if you accomplish something even better than what you intended to accomplish—or if you had even more pleasure than you expected to have—you’ll probably think you had a time-use windfall.

● Monday, 11-24-2025:   I just awoke from a dream in which I was an advisor to the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency. That election had just occurred; it was too close to call, and it remained so. Both sides were seeking some way to decide it. The Democratic candidate proposed that a large open container of confetti be thrown in the air directly over the line in the assembly room dividing the two camps, and declaring the winner as whichever side more confetti fell on. The Republicans agreed, and the can was thrown up. It turned out that more of the confetti fell on the Republican side. I announced the result: we had a Republican President, Jeannie Schwab, a lawyer I once knew. She did some legal research and writing for me when I had my own law office in Los Angeles in the 1990s. I later realized that the result was caused by the ventilation in the room blowing toward the Republican side. I momentarily considered contesting the result on that basis: that it was not fair due to the ventilation bias. But then I thought better of it, because making the argument would cause us to be seen as bad losers. I then found myself walking in the city, and most people had not yet heard the news. And I thought, this is an interesting situation wherein I knew a piece of major national new before most others did. I woke up soon thereafter.

● I’m suspending my exercise-walks today, as a precaution, because of slight discomfort in my left leg, about the knee.

● I’ve just had a marvelous idea. It’s very problematic to take my daily nap (which I do within a few hours’ time of getting up for the day, sitting at my desk with my head on the desk), because the no. 1 neighbor knows I’m napping and he attacks me during it, which plays havoc with sleep. It’s painful to try to wait until he’s left for the day, and he doesn’t always leave. My new idea is this: why don’t I just take a nap in my car, in the garage? I used to think that, to nap in my car, I’d have to drive away and park somewhere, which I’ve done several times. But why must I leave the garage? Perhaps it wouldn’t work in hot weather, because it would be too hot inside the car in the garage. But that shouldn’t be a problem when (as now) the weather is cool. And if the neighbors know that I’m napping in my car, so what?—when I do it in the apartment, they know it. Inside the car, with the windows rolled up, I’m insulated from their noise: I can’t hear them, and they can’t hear me. I’ll try it tomorrow. A coup!

● Tuesday, 11-25-2025:   Today the left leg discomfort has resolved; I did my two exercise-walks.

● I just came back into the apartment from my first ever nap in my car—in my garage. It worked beautifully.

● I’ve always thought “take a decision” was incorrect, that “make a decision” was the proper expression. Well, yesterday I read an article about it, and apparently I was wrong. This example capsules the difference: Taking a decision: “While hiking in the woods yesterday, a huge grizzly bear charged me. I took the decision to shoot it.” Making a decision: “Before I left home for my hike, I had to choose which of my two rifles to bring with me for protection against bears. My Sako .243 is the more accurate. But my Winchester .270 is the more powerful, though a bit heavier. I figured that, if I needed to shoot a bear in defense, the bear would be relatively close to me, and bears are large, so I wouldn’t need an especially accurate rifle. Rather, the premium would be on stopping power. So I made the decision to carry the Winchester.”

● Wednesday, 11-26-2025:   The physical material of our bodies is recycled. Bur our consciousness is not. A creature is born with a brand new consciousness—one that’s never existed before.

● I just got back from a desert drive (193 miles; 5:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.). I hadn’t taken a desert drive in over a year (the last one was on 11-3-2024). I ate my patty melt at Tom’s Restaurant #25, in West Palmdale. It’s well known that Antelope Valley has a big problem of illegal dumping. There was considerable trash at my accustomed half-way stopping place, what I call the “Four Oaks.” There was even trash in the little stream bed. It was disgusting and depressing. The drive was worth doing just for variety in my activities; it wasn’t particularly enjoyable. The pleasure drives have gotten old—I’ve worn them out by doing them too often. Whereas, rereading and editing my Journal continues to be enjoyable; I’m therein exploring my mind, which is exciting because I’m—still—constantly making new and valuable discoveries.

● Thursday, 11-27-2025 (Thanksgiving Day):   Gun control, redux: When legislators discuss the issue of gun control, the discussion is usually restricted to ways to better screen those who wish to buy guns, as with the use of questionnaires.

I’d like to ask those legislators this question: Could a questionnaire identify, not only those who, at the time they complete the questionnaire, intend to use the gun to violently harm other people, but also those who would form such an intention later?

My answer to my rhetorical question is: Of course not! To think that there’s a way to identify everyone who would use a gun to commit violence . . . is to believe in magic. We simply cannot predict who will use a gun violently. Practically, to limit gun violence, we must keep at least the most dangerous guns (like assault rifles) away from every civilian.

● I ate a special Thanksgiving dinner: in addition to my usual salad and nuts and dates—I ate a can of sardines.

● I’ve said that editors could have a field day with my Journal. But I haven’t well articulated the reason. I think this is why: The Journal contains a lot of excellent material, but also a lot of mediocre material. The collection could be significantly (and easily) improved by deleting much of the mediocre material, which, just because I’m the author, I can’t bring myself to do, but which an editor who’s not the author, and who therefore lacks that psychological block, could do.

● Friday, 11-28-2025:   A merchant sent me an email, proclaiming: “Black Friday Deal. You’re about to save big!” I deleted the email without reading the details. And I thought, “They were right . . .”

● Napping in my car in my garage worked so well that I decided that I’d do it routinely: whenever I’m at home in the morning. But today it occurred to me that that’s risky: apartment no. 3 is adjacent to my garage, as is their garage. They might soon detect what I’m doing, and take measures to try to disturb me during my naps, like opening their garage door and starting their car (they did that today, though it may have been a mere coincidence). I fear that I may have caused them to discover what I’m doing by repeatedly coughing while I was in the car. The more often I nap in the garage, the more opportunity I give the no. 3 neighbors to find a successful attack on me for it. So far, it’s just the neighbor in no. 1 who attacks me when I nap in my apartment. So when (I know that) he’s gone, I’ll take my nap in the apartment, and use the garage for that purpose only as a last resort (when the no. 1 neighbor is home—when I don’t know that he’s gone). On second thought, I probably shouldn’t do it again.

● Saturday, 11-29-2025:   Here’s a letter I’ll soon send to the Home Owners Association in charge of the complex where I live:

Sanaz, I’m having a problem with a resident here, at Royal Tampa; I’m hoping you can help me with it. The current occupant in no. 7 has been here for perhaps two years now. She’s a smoker. She goes outside the complex to smoke, but sometimes she lights her cigarette before she gets outside. More specifically, she lights it in the vestibule by the front entrance. That structure has two sets of doors. The outer one consists of two glass doors. When closed, they provide some (if minimal) protection against air pollution outside coming into the complex. The inner door is just a grated metal gate set in a larger grated metal wall. To open that door, you have to enter a code on a keypad. It prevents people coming in, but it’s completely porous and offers no barrier to air pollution, like cigarette smoke. Smoke in that vestibule does not remain where it is: it tends to move, or expand. The glass doors block it from going out, so it goes the other way: through the grated metal wall and into the complex. And it affects me. My unit (no. 2) is close to that grated metal wall, and, especially at night in the warm and hot months, when I leave my front solid door open to cool my apartment, the smoke drifts into my unit, and into my bedroom. I’m very sensitive to the smoke, and it badly interferes with my sleep. (I bought an air filter for my bedroom, but it doesn’t help.) If the resident in no. 7 must smoke here, she should at least wait until she’s outside to light her cigarette. I don’t want to approach her directly, which would risk making the situation even worse (for one thing, she’d know that I’m the one who’s complaining). I’d much appreciate your speaking to her about it.

Richard Eisner
6520 Shirley Avenue, No. 2
Reseda, California 91335
(818) 343-0123

P.S. Please let me know when you’ve spoken to her about this. That way, if the problem persists, I’ll know whether it’s because you haven’t spoken to her, or because she’s ignoring your admonition.

● Sunday, 11-30-2025:   Philosophy Club meeting (by Zoom). Topic: “WHO OWNS THE BONES? What do you do when you find ancient buried bones that are claimed as sacred by some people and as objects of scientific interest by others? Are the bones rightly owned by their descendants? Should the bones remain buried, to show respect for the ancestors and descendants? Or, should the bones be studied for their scientific value?”

Here are my first impressions (before perusing the assigned readings): Perhaps the question should be considered on a sliding scale, like this. The older the bones, the more important they are to science, and the more tenuous their connection to living people, and so the stronger the case for giving them to science. And perhaps in some instances we should make a compromise: Let scientists do tests on the bones; when the scientific tests have been completed, give the bones to the descendants.

. . . Having read the (two) articles, I have nothing to add. . . . But having also attended the meeting, I have this to add (no one else mentioned it; it occurred to me during the discussion): The interests of science to have access to archeological material represents the interests of science and scientists in every generation (they’ll always have those interests). Whereas, the contrary interests of descendants represents just a small portion of descendants’ interests: the interests of descendants alive now. Later descendants might have a different opinion. Therefore, scientific interests always outweigh descendants’ interests.

● Unlike a literary or musical work, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end, (your) life begins, proceeds, and then just ends.

● People in every generation think they’re modern and advanced . . . because they’re the latest generation. They compare themselves with the past. They can’t compare themselves with the future, because the future doesn’t yet exist, and they can’t clearly envision it.

● Wednesday, 12-3-2025:   For the record, there’s no thought without content.

● Thursday, 12-4-2025:   I like to write . . . so I’m doing that now.

● Two possibly significant events happened today. First, I perhaps established another angry-sound against the no. 1 neighbor (the plastic-glove sound). He was attacking me especially strenuously, loudly clattering about, as though thoroughly cleaning, the portion of his apartment immediately adjacent to my kitchen where I eat—and while I was eating. He overplayed his hand and started attacking me for the plastic-glove sound, which I was quick to capitalize on (he put his head in the noose and, before he could withdraw it, I quickly pulled the rope tight and kicked the chair out from under him!). Since then (and it’s now about twelve hours hence), he’s been completely silent.

Second, on my way back home from a deposition in Glendale, my car engine overheated again. I managed to drive on the freeway as far as Encino, but then had to pull to the side of the freeway. I waited five minutes, then restarted the car. The heat was still elevated, but low enough to drive. I was just past the Balboa Boulevard exit. I backed up far enough to be able to drive off the freeway at that exit. I drove for a few more blocks but had to pull over again on Burbank Boulevard, just before (east of) Reseda Boulevard, in Tarzana. The tow truck driver who towed my car home (three or four miles away) said he had a car just like mine (a 1999 Toyota Camry) but lower mileage (165,000), and he’s selling it, for $2,000.00. He said it’s in good condition. I may buy it from him. (The possibility of replacing my car is the significant news in this event.)

[Later note (1-10-2026): I won’t get the car: he doesn’t pick up when I call and doesn’t return my calls.]

● Saturday, 12-6-2025:   I’m beginning another read-through of my Journal.

● Sunday, 12-7-2025:   Well, for the third time, I shat myself returning from my exercise-walk. I actually made it back to the apartment, and even into the bathroom, but not quite to the toilet. I had to take a shower and wash my clothes. There was just enough time to do all that before leaving for my manicure appointment. It was caused by my hasty negligence. My practice is to sit on the toilet and try to defecate before going on my walk, which procedure I forewent. That’ll teach me!

● Today is my second day of this read-through of the Journal. This one so far is unusually productive: I’m making a great many small—salutary—edits. . . . and some not-so-small (but still salutary) ones. Message to myself Sunday evening: Good work this weekend! . . . And then the freaking neighbor attacks me by opening and closing his front door just after I sit down at my desk. But, as usual, I don’t let him see an effect on me; I go on typing, as if completely oblivious of his attack.

● Wednesday, 12-17-2025:   Brian Gould sent Philosophy Club members a list of discussion topics to be voted on. Among them was this one:

“Why is lying wrong? (or is it wrong?) First, what makes lying wrong? Most agree that lying is wrong on the face of it (even if it’s justified in certain situations), but it’s tougher to say exactly what the reasons are that lying is wrong.

“Second, if lying is wrong, is it inherently wrong, or is it wrong only because of the effects it has on people?

“Third, imagine that you lie for what most would regard as lying for the greater good. For example, telling a white lie to avoid seriously hurting someone’s feelings. Or protecting the person hiding in your attic by lying to the murderer at your front door who asks you if his intended victim is in your house. In cases like these, would you say the lie is completely justified and that you’ve done nothing wrong, or have you done a small wrong to prevent a larger wrong?”

I found the question intriguing enough to try to answer it, even if it isn’t chosen as the discussion topic, thus:

One; when lying is wrong, it’s wrong generally for this reason. We’re social creatures. We live in society, and we depend on one another. Concomitantly, we interact with one another, we navigate the social landscape, via communication, by the exchange of information—true information. For example, we put up road signs to enable us to drive safely, like a sign that warns of a tight curve ahead, which will alert us to slow down. Lying gives us false information, which defeats that social purpose of communication, and almost inevitably hurts us. It would be like putting up a sign before a sharp curve that says instead that the road ahead is straight. If we think the road immediately ahead is straight, but it’s actually sharply curved, we may run our car off the road and be injured. Even telling a white lie to spare hurting someone’s feelings is risky. For example, if your wife asks you how you like her new hairstyle, and you lie and tell her you like it, that may cause her to continue the new style, when her old style was more becoming. She thus acts to her detriment, and, if she discovers your lie, she may resent it.

Two; when lying is wrong, it’s wrong, not inherently, but because it hurts people. Were it wrong inherently, lying would never be appropriate; whereas, we can imagine situations in which lying is appropriate. Yet it may feel as if it’s inherently wrong: We expect people to tell the truth, and we resent being lied to. We may say that lying is generally bad, and prima facie bad. We presume it’s bad; the liar has the burden of proof to justify his lie. Thus, “lair” has a negative connotation.

Three; describing a lie as a small wrong done to avoid a large wrong, suggests you feel some guilt for lying. But whenever you do what you think is right, you should feel no guilt about it—you’re simply doing what’s right (assuming that you had to lie to avoid the harm—assuming, that is, that you lacked a third option of avoiding the harm without lying). In the case of preventing the murder, the intended murderer has no right to the truth, and so your depriving him of it is not wrong. By analogy, you don’t describe a war hero as having done small wrongs (killing enemy soldiers) to achieve a larger good (helping to win the war)—you say simply that he fought bravely for a good cause. And yet, this is an intellectual conclusion. Our feelings don’t always coincide with our intellectual judgment. Even when we’re convinced that we took the right action, especially in less clear-cut situations, we may still have mixed feelings about it.

● Thursday, 12-18-2025:   I just got back from my annual hearing test. The audiologist said the hearing in my right ear (my “bad” ear) had worsened slightly since my last test, a year ago. The doctor (Dr. Vorasubin) said there was no change. The audiologist recommended that I use hearing aids, to prevent cognitive decline. Dr. Vorasubin said I could forgo hearing aids as long as my hearing without them is good enough to enable me to function adequately. So I’ll skip them for now. That’s basically good news. Two days ago, I had my annual physical exam with Dr. Bhat. I’m still very healthy. He said I need to drink more water. I explained to him that that’s difficult, given my need to catheterize to urinate. He said my potassium level is high. I told him I thought it was probably caused by my consumption of nuts and dates. He said it’s probably not the nuts. So I’ll (further) reduce my consumption of dates. At the exam, my weight was 125 pounds.

● Last Tuesday, my car horn was not working, and I brought it to the mechanic’s shop. He worked on it while I waited. He fixed the horn, but then the car wouldn’t start. In fixing the horn, they had somehow disabled the car’s electronics. He tried to fix that, and I was waiting. After a while, I said, “Hey—at least the horn works.” I don’t think he got the joke, because he started to explain to me that this problem was even worse than the horn not working . . ..

● Saturday, 12-20-2025:   I just got an email from Brian Gould, announcing the topic for tomorrow’s Philosophy Club meeting: “Lying”! I’ll be interested to see whether the readings or tomorrow’s discussion causes me to revise my above remarks.

● Some argue that we should never lie, since, even when we lie to prevent harm or to do good, our calculation of the benefits and harms is so unreliable that the inherent harm of lying will on balance outweigh any good. In response, let’s first make a distinction: between selfish lies, ones intended to advance the speaker’s own interests, and altruistic lies, ones intended to advance the greater good. I would speculate that selfish lies cause harm. As to altruistic lies, it’s true that our calculation of good and bad consequences is imperfect. But it’s not useless. We accomplish more good by trying to do good than by trying to do harm, or even by simply not trying to do good. I would speculate that our calculation of consequences is reliable enough that we at least do some good by altruistic lying . . . as long as we tell the truth generally, and lie only occasionally. That our judgment is sometimes wrong, does not relieve us of the responsibility of exercising it. In every situation, we must just use our best judgment. It’s the best we can do.

● In her lecture on (and titled) Lying, Philosophy Professor Sarah Stroud says that philosophers are typically “better on questions than on answers.” I think that’s true; and I like to think that I’m an unusual philosopher in that way: In addition to asking questions, I provide many (satisfying) answers.

● Professor Stroud argues that lying is generally wrong by analogizing it with breaking promises. Does she not then have to show that breaking promises is wrong? On the other hand, she makes other analogies, to other practices that are obviously bad, and need no further demonstration of their badness. Similarly, while the utilitarian take on lying—that lying is bad because it makes us unhappy—is true, it’s inadequate, because we still want to know why lying makes us unhappy.

● Thursday, 12-25-2025:   2025 has been a pretty good year. My health is still excellent, as is my financial situation. And it was a better-than-average year creatively. I wrote several excellent new Journal entries, and the editing of existing Journal material was, I think, especially productive.

● Friday, 12-26-2025:   I may write a movie, a sequel to My Name is Dolemite, to be called My Name is Linoleum.

● Sunday, 12-28-2025:   My nose, the left nostril, has been, on and off, bleeding all day.

● I have a slight sore throat. It’s probably the start of a cold, which I caught at Kaiser during my optometry appointment there yesterday morning. Goddamn it! Again! I wore two facemasks. I’ll take ten vitamin C tablets.

● Monday, 12-29-2025:   It’s 4:30 a.m.; I’ve just gotten up for the day. I feel all right—no symptoms. We’ll see what develops. . . . But, whatever develops, it’s better to have no symptoms now than to have symptoms . . ..

● It’s 2:00 p.m., and I still feel no symptoms. I guess I dodged a bullet . . . or it was a false alarm. If I’m sick at all, it’s extremely mild.

● Tuesday, 12-30-2025 (2:00 a.m.):   No, I have a very slight sore throat. I can feel it at night. It hasn’t gotten any worse, and I’ve noticed no other symptoms. That’s still dodging a bullet, because usually my cold symptoms are miserable, and last for several weeks.

● I just got a pedicure, at Creative Touch LA 1 in Sherman Oaks (4419 Van Nuys Boulevard, in Sherman Oaks) (818) 995-1867. The pedicurist was Helen. I paid $33.00 and gave Helen a $10.00 tip. I usually get a pedicure where I get my manicures, but the last few times I got ingrown toenails because of the pedicure there. We’ll see what the aftermath of this one is. . . . I had to clip one nail on one side, where I had pain even before I got the manicure. I can’t fault Helen for that. . . . and my little surgery resolved the pain.

● Wednesday, 12-31-2025:   It’s 11:48 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. It’s cold and rainy out. Good! I hope that will discourage people from being outside (and shooting firecrackers).

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