7/2/2026

 Thursday, July 2, 2026

1949 The State of Vietnam was internationally recognised, governing the southern half of Vietnam, with Bảo Đại as chief of state

1962 Sam Walton opened his first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas

1964  Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law

1976 Formal reunification of North and South Vietnam

2014, Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was criminally charged with corruption by French prosecutors

2025 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the indefinite suspension of air defense and weapons shipments to Ukraine, including Patriot interceptors and other missiles and ammunition

2025  Iran ordered the suspension of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency following the Iran–Israel war and the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites

In bed at 9, half-awake at 4 and up at 5; 0515 123/73/62  07. 202,6; 70/89/70, rainy morning, thunder/lightning.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.,  and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 6:45 p.m.

The president who cleaned up while in office.  There is much clutching of pearls and wringing of hands over the fact that Trump, his family, and his cronies have made fortunes during his first year in office.  Trump disclosed $2,200,000,000 in income.  There's no telling what Jerod Kuschner, Steve Witkoff, and Howard Lutnick took in.  Or how much 'inside tippees' are made in the securities markets and online prediction markets, like Kalshi.   Trump apparently believes it's not corruption so long as it's disclosed on the federally required financial disclosure reports.  Time may prove him right.

The former guy who painted.  Or the guy who used to paint for enjoyment.  That seems less pretentious than calling myself a "painter."  I mention it only because this late morning I picked up some paint brushes, mixed some paints and glazing liquid, and did some touch-up work of a large canvas I painted - when?  Over a year ago?  It's a knock-off of a full-length portrait by Klimt, and I tried it only because I liked the colors, it seemed easy enough that maybe I could approximate a copy, and because I had a hankering to work on a big canvas.  I had to get Sarah to stretch the canvas for me, having been unsuccessful in attracting my grandson Peter with offers of pay.  Shortly after I painted it, we experienced the Big Rain over August 9-10, 2025, receiving 11 inches in our backyard and an abundance in our basement.  We had to have our new basement floor ripped up and replaced, as well as the sheetrock on our walls, and I lost the drive to paint after that.  (Plus, my health and heart went downhill, and negotiating the basement stairs became an unwelcome challenge.).  In any event, I never really finished the painting and decided this morning (in the midst of a sour mood) that I would try to perk up the lady's face.  I reddened her face with a bit of Brilliant Red and a lot of glazing liquid, added some Cerulean Blue glazing to her skin, and darkened her eyes with a black Sharpie and a tad of blue glazing.  I got some pleasure from sitting at the work station again and messing around with brushes, tubes of paint, and a big jar of glazing compound that I had to open with a big wrench.  I discovered I had no rags down there anymore, a big absence.  They all got soaked in the flood and were tossed with so much else.  I also lost the big walking stick that my brother-in-law Jim Reck made for me out a saguaro cactus.  He had wrapped a rattlesnake skin around it, suggesting manly adventures, but I used it as a painter's mahl stick to stabilize my hand when working on a large canvas.  

It's a curious congruence of anniversaries.  In 1949, the State of Vietnam was recognized as governing South Vietnam, while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh governed the North.  The French served as the "patron" of the State of Vietnam, maintaining their role as colonizers.  The French fought Ho and his main general, Vo Nguyen Giap, who kicked their asses at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, despite a lot of American support.  On this date in 1976, after the ignominious fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the two Vietnams were reunited under "Uncle Ho."  It is painful to me to this day to remember those days. 

7/1/2026

 Wednesday, July 1, 2026

937 Rev Martin Niemöller was arrested in Nazi Germany for activities against the State

1968 The CIA's Phoenix Program was officially established

1971 Twenty-sixth Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, was ratified

1974 General Augusto Pinochet became the president and dictator of Chile

1987 President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court 

2002 The International Criminal Court was established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression

2019 Japan resumed commercial whaling after a break of more than 30 years

2024  Supreme Court ruled that presidents have criminal  immunity for all official acts,

In bed at 9:45, up at 5:55; 0615 128/75/69 123 202.8; 78/91/76 EXTREME HEAT WARNING.

Morning meds at 8 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and p.m.

Polymyalgia rheumatica?  My left shoulder has been bothering me for a week or more, slightly painful and with no apparent cause.  Keeping my fingers crossed that this isn't a recurrence of the PMR that had me knocked out of commission for months before it was diagnosed (by me!) and treated with daily prednisone for more than a year and the biologic injections of Kevzara for another year. (?)  

Unable to quit my ArmorATD external backup drive again this morning without a lot of help from ChatGPT.  It seems the Apple Books app was the problem.  I wish I could get rid of it, but ChatGPT recommends against trying it, since the Books app is part of my laptop's operating system and deleting or uninstalling it could cause other and worse problems.  Thank goodness for ChatGPT and for Sarah's advice on how to deal with problems like this.

Another victim of Netanyahu and the New Israel.  Diana DeGette, the 57-year-old, 15-term liberal congressional representative for Denver and its suburbs, was defeated in Colorado's Democratic primary yesterday by a 29-year-old Democratic Socialist, Melat Kiros, an immigrant from Ethiopia.  The biggest difference between DeGette and Kiros: DeGette is a supporter of military aid to Israel, Kiros is an opponent.  Kiros argues that criticism of Israel and Zionism is not automatically antisemitism, that Israel is a settler-colonial state, that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza has been genocidal, and that Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was an "inevitable consequence of apartheid and decades of occupation."  She has also argued for a "one-state solution" to the decades of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with all citizens in historic Palestine, Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs, treated equally.  She would cut off all military aid to Israel, unlike DeGette.  A sign of the times among younger Americans, or at least younger Democrats?

There is a guest opinion in this morning's NYTimes by the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman.  He wrote:

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people possess the right to live freely in their ancestral homeland, to shape their future, defend their dignity, preserve their civilization and contribute their values and wisdom to humanity. A Jewish homeland is understood as the primary vehicle for Jews to build a flourishing society, with all its residents, non-Jews and Jews alike, that manifests and broadcasts the core Torah values of human dignity, justice and compassion. The term predates the modern state of Israel by decades. And the origin story of Zionism began centuries before that.

In the Book of Genesis, we are told how God blessed Abraham and his descendants with a land from which they would be a blessing to “all the families of the earth.”  . . .

None of this means one cannot criticize the policies and practices of an Israeli administration. Anti-Zionism, however, goes much further and rejects the idea of Jewish self-determination entirely. Those who would deny the Jews the right to a Jewish state, in a world that comfortably accepts Muslim and Christian states, are discriminating against Jews. It is here that anti-Zionism crosses over to antisemitism.  

I don't copy and paste the whole essay here, but I have to note that, as the writing of a university president, it is mighty nearsighted and Pollyannaish.  It speaks of the Holocaust and utterly ignores the Nakba.  While extoling the desires of Jews to have a land of their own, it utterly ignores the fact that other people, non-Jewish people, had for centuries occupied the land that the Zionists wanted for themselves.  It mentions Biblical writings from almost 4,000 years ago, without acknowledging that most of the people in the world consider those writings mythical and indeed political.  While appropriately condemning the Holocaust and European savagery against Jews, he offers no reasoning that Middle Eastern Arabs should forfeit their land and their right to self-determination because of the desires of  Jews, mostly immigrants and settlers, to deprive them of it.  Rabbi Berman speaks of the "right" of "the Jewish people" to have a land of their own, but ignores the necessary corollary that others with the same and competing wish have a "duty" to recognize that "right."  It's easy enough to claim a right, but quite another thing to establish a duty on others to recognize and defer to it.  Moreover, we oughtn't to be so glib about 'the Jewish people, as if all persons with some Jewish heritage were the same or fungible.  What higher law gives the right to a Jew with long family roots in Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, New York, or Vilnius a right to self-determination in long-Arab and Muslim Palestine?  A Jew who lives in Milwaukee has a "right of return," but a Palestinian in a West Bank refugee camp doesn't?  What's up with that?   I'm not saying that a case can't be made for a Jewish state in Palestine; I'm just saying that this op-ed doesn't do it, and I haven't seen yet the argument that does. 

Running errands during the "extreme heat warning."  I drove up to the Saukville Walmart early this afternoon to pick up some Bonne Maman preserves and safflower seeds, and while there, picked up some dishwasher detergent, celery, and a red bell pepper for Geri.  My Volvo's thermometer told me the outside temperature was 95℉ heading north and 99° heading back south.  When Geri suggested I put off the trip until the heat wave broke, I reminded her I would only be out between my air-conditioned car and the air-conditioned store. Actually, the outdoor temperature and humidity seemed perfectly fine to me during that walk of a few minutes.  I thought the same when I was out filling the bird feeders and getting the mail yesterday.  I'm wondering whether I'm so comfortable in the hot weather because I'm usually so cold in what others consider to be warm weather.  I've become like my Dad when he lived in Florida and my brother-in-law Jimmy when he lived in the Newcastle retirement complex.  On ordinary summer days, I often wear a heavy hooded sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, even indoors.  I could easily be a snowbird if it weren't for my reliance on the Milwaukee VA medical center.  Maybe I should just move to St. Petersburg, FL, and transfer to the big Bay Pines VA Medical Center, where my cousin Doug has received treatment for decades.  It's a huge outfit, with close to 10,000 admissions and more than 100,000 outpatient visits each year.  Also, it's a teaching hospital, like Milwaukee's Zablocki.

6/30/2026

 Tuesday, June 30, 2026

2022 Ketanji Brown Jackson (51) was sworn in as the 104th justice of the US Supreme Court, replacing Stephen Breyer (83)

2022 Supreme Court landmark ruling limited the US Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate power plant pollution

2025  Israeli forces killed at least 74 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, including 23 who were attempting to get humanitarian aid

2025. At least 39 people were killed and dozens of others injured by an airstrike on the al-Baqa internet café in Gaza City, including multiple sportspeople and journalists

In bed at 9:10, half-wake at 4:10 til up at 5; 0520 203.0 123/73/64 110; 77/90/74, mostly cloudy day ahead, EXTREME HEAT WARNING  

Morning meds at 8 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Lonesome Dove.  I finished it at 11:30 this morning, all 862 pages of it.  I started it on the 22nd or 23rd, taking more than a week to get through it.  If the storyline and characters weren't so engaging, I doubt that I would have had the tenacity to stick with it, but both the plot and the character studies that accompany it are very engaging.  I'm glad I started it and glad I stuck with it.  I need to do some thinking and reading before I try to sort out my thoughts about it.  Before I do that, I'm going to first watch the Lonesome Dove miniseries on Amazon Prime. . . .

It's hard to know what to say about this novel, because there is so much packed into it.  Stephen King, according to many, the king of modern novelists, says Lonesome Dove is his favorite novel.  What should I pick out to mention in a list of favorite aspects of the novel without unfairly or inaccurately denigrating other notable features.  Here's a partial list:

1. The relationship between Gus and Call is a central feature of the novel, but so is the relationship between Call and his son Newt, between Call and the men he led/bossed, between Gus and Lorena, and Gus and Clara, Jake and Lorena, July and Elmira, Big Zwey and Elmira, Dish and Lorena, Clara and Bob,  Deets and everybody, Po  Campo and the crew.  

2. The character studies of many of the characters are also interesting.  No one is close to perfect.  Some are very bad characters, like Blue Duck at the top of the list, as well as the men on the 'whiskey barge,' the cavalry officer who tried to requisition the crew's horses, and others.  Some are not terribly wicked, but terribly weak, like July Johnson and Roscoe Brown, and Jake Spoon.  Maybe that's the standout feature of the men in the story, that they are all weak in one way or another.  What's with Woodrow Call's inability to deal with women and with his own drive to mate, his inability to accept his paternity of Newt, and his love for Maggie?  Why does he hold himself so aloof from the men he lives with and works with, separating himself both physically and psychologically from all others, even Gus?  Why was Gus so relieved when Clara picked Bob over him as her husband?  The characters who seem to be most comfortable in their own skins are Deets, a Black, and Po Campo, a Mexican cook.  

3.  I read somewhere that, especially after the TV miniseries based on his novel was released and became a big hit, McMurtry was disappointed that his book was thought of as a celebration of sorts of 'the Old West,' whereas he had intended it to be taken as an indictment of it -- of its lawlessness and widespread violence and injustice, of the abuse of women, of the harshness of life that led to suicides and mental and emotional breakdowns, etc.   The story is in many ways a Hellscape, an Inferno, rather than a glorification of that period of American history.

4. It's hard to read this story without wondering what makes the characters have the characteristics that they have and behave as they do.  It raises the free will vs. determinism issue again.  With Lorena Woods' history, is it surprising at all that she behaved as she did, that she had the attitude towards men and sex that she had, the aversions and fears that she had?  McMurtry provided us with her background, making her attitudes and behaviors understandable.  Is that different from predictable?  from determined?  He didn't provide us with Elmira Johnson's background, and Elmira comes across as a very unlikeable person, unlike Lorena.  What was it about Woodrow Call's background that made him so emotionally distant from everyone around him?  When I wrote "made him," is that any different from saying "determined him"?  What "made" Blue Duck into the cruel savage that he was?  I used to suggest to my dear sister, my only sibling, that we had very similar personalities, like the quote apochryphally attributed to William Butler Yeats: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy that sustained him through temporary periods of joy."  Kitty's and my personalities were formed in those years after World War II, growing up in close quarters with our damaged father and long-suffering mother.  We both ended up with a combination of his deep-seated morosity and her uplifting strengths and joy in living.  Were we not pro tanto "determined"?  Or, at least, as Emily Dickinson wrote: 

In this short life, which only lasts an hour, 

How much, how little, is within our power.

The 'lonesome dove' in the story is Newt, Call's unclaimed son.  His mother Maggie, a whore, died young, and his father refused to acknowledge him as his son.  Thus, for most of his young life, he considered himself an orphan, even though he was living with and working with his father.  

                        Gus: Ain't nothing better than riding a fine horse into a new country.  That exactly what me  and Woodrow was meant for, though don't tell your Pa I said that.  I'd like to keep him thinking he caused a peck of trouble, so he don't get too sassy.

                        Newt:  He ain't mentioned it.

                        Newt:  That he's my Pa.

                        Gus:  Well, that wouldn't be his way to mention it.  See, Woodrow, ain't much of a mentioner when he can avoid it.

                        Newt: Gus, is it that he don't like me?

                        Gus:  No, no.  He just -- he don't want to admit that he's human like the rest of us, Newt, that's all.

Newt:  Well, he ain't human like the rest of us.

                    Gus:   Well, he had a chance to be that way back with your mama. but he turned his back on it though, and he ain't about to admit he make the wrong choice. 

5.  Woodrow Call's inability to admit to himself his desire to bond with a woman, physically and emotionally, and his related inability to acknowledge his paternity to his son Newt, reminded me of Richard Dalloway's struggle, and ultimate inability, to tell Clarissa that he loved her.  More directly, it reminded me of my father's inability to show affection to his children, to say "I love you," and wholeheartedly give and accept hugs.  I've written about it extensively in earlier pages of this journal.  It makes me wonder, of course, about how he was raised, especially by his mother, Charlotte.  

6/29/2026

 Monday, June 29, 2026

1776 Patrick Henry was elected 1st governor of Virginia

1956 DDE signed the Interstate Highway Act

1964 Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed after an 83-day filibuster in the US Senate

1966 US planes bombed Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time in the Vietnam War

2002 Dick Cheney served as Acting President while "W"  underwent a colonoscopy

2023 Supreme Court outlawed 6-3 college race-based admission programs

2025. A mass shooting ambush situation occurred as at least one person opened fire on firefighters and law enforcement responding to a wildfire on Canfield Mountain, believed to have been set by the perpetrator. Three people were killed, including the shooter, and seven others were injured in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, United States. The shooter was later found dead. 

In bed at 9, up at 4:40; 0500 135/76/59  105 204.4; 68/87/65 Extreme Heat Warning.

Morning meds at 9:15 a.m., and Eliquis at 6:55 a.m. and p.m.

Taking a day off, unless I get an inspiration later on.  My day has been largely consumed getting through the closing chapters of Lonesome Dove.  McMurtry spins quite a yarn.  Over several hundred pages of living with his characters, a reader gets a bit invested in them, wondering how their stories will work out.  I'm not expecting a happy ending for everybody, no resolution of their many challenges, especially Woodrow Call's, but I'm hoping for something other than massacres by the Sioux.  

6/282026

 Sunday, June 28, 2026

1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Sophie by Bosnian-Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo

1934 Jimmy Aquavia was born

In bed at 9, up at 5:15; 0530 124/74/66 108 203.4; 60/73/60, partly sunny morning, cloudy afternoon. 

Morning meds at 6 a.m., and Eliquis at     a.m. and 7 p.m.  I skipped the morning dose because of last night's double dose.

Overdose of Eliquis.  My forgetfulness has become dangerous.  Yesterday I took a double dose of the blood thinner prescribed by Dr. Singh for one month to ward off a stroke or pulmonary embolism after the catheter ablation. 

Free will & determinism.  This issue has been on my mind for months now, since reading Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say.  I got to thinking about it again as I read this passage in chapter 67 of Lonesome Dove:

One little shot during a card game in Arkansas had started things happening -- things he couldn't see the end of.  The shot had ended up killing more than a dentist. Sean O'Brien, Bill Spettle, and the three who were traveling with July Johnson had lost their lives so far, and Montana nowhere in sight.

"He ought to have taken his hanging," Augustus said out loud.

Actually, Jake couldn't be blamed for any of the deaths, but he could be blamed for Lorena's troubles, . . . "Who ought?", Lorena saked.  "Jake," he said.  "Look at all the bad that's happened since he showed up." 

Some quotes from Robert Sapolsky's tome Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will:

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

 “Depression is often framed as a sufferer having a cognitively distorted sense of “learned helplessness,” where the reality of some loss in the past becomes mistakenly perceived as an inevitable future. In this study, though, it was not that depressed individuals were cognitively distorted, underestimating their actual control. Instead they were accurate compared with everyone else’s overestimates. Findings like these support the view that in some circumstances, depressed individuals are not distortive but are “sadder but wiser.” As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality. And thus, perhaps, “we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Truth doesn’t always set you free; truth, mental health, and well-being have a complex relationship, something explored in an extensive literature on the psychology of stress.”

“In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.  It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:

Where I Rest 

Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. 

Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear.

Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. 

For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. 

Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. 

But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. 

But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. 

Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here. 

It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.”

The great poet William Blake put it more simply, more directly, more clearly in his Auguries of Innocence:

Every night and every morn, some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.

How much did "free will" play a role in the character formation of any of the characters in Lonesome Dove?  Consider especially the women, especially the whores,  and most especially Lorena Wood.  She was orphaned around age 12, and then sexually abused and trafficked by a succession of older men, before ending up in Lonesome Dove as the only prostitute in town.  She fell for the weak gambler Jake Spoon, who left her on their trek north, where she was captured by the evil Blue Duck, who sold her to a group of Indians who subjected her to terrible sexual abuse before she was finally rescued by Gus McCrae.  By how much were Lorena's choices in life after her parent died the result of her "free will"?  

I'm impressed by the character studies in the novel, especially those of the women characters, including Lorena, Elmira Johnson, and Clara Allen.   I'm also struck by the deep wickedness of the "bad men," Blue Duck and the Suggs brothers; and the weakness of characters like Jake Spoon, July Johnson, and Roscoe Brown; and the description of the lovesickness of Dish Boggett, Gus McCrae, Newt Dobbs, Elmira Johnson, and Big Zwey; and the resourcefulness of the minority characters, Joshua Deets and Po Campo. 

I ended my day's reading at page 610 of 862.

6/27/2026

 Saturday, June 27, 2026

 1905 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was established at "The Continental Congress of the Working Class" in Chicago, Illinois;

1950 The US sent 35 military advisers to South Vietnam

1977 A 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowed lawyers to advertise

2018 Joseph Crowley was defeated in New York by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

2019 US Supreme Court ruled the Constitution doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering, allowing a ruling party to redraw electoral boundaries

2025  Donald Trump announced the suspension of the trade talks with Canada, also announcing new tariffs on goods crossing the Canada–United States border.

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:15; 0439 140/73/57 102 204.4, 0445 140/70/55; 58/70/55, sunny day ahead 

Morning meds at 6 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 6:15 p.m.

That strange man J. D. Vance made the news again by not only praising Richard Nixon for his "political genius," but also for pooh-poohing Watergate as only worthy of a 12 hour news cycle, and for this:

"It's not only that he got out of Vietnam, but he got out from a position of strength.   It's one thing to tuck tail and run; it's another thing to clearly define an objective, to accomplish that objective, and then to ensure that you don't allow "mission creep" to transform a victory into a defeat."

Vance must not have studied Vietnam War history at Ohio State or at Yale.  Is there anyone else anywhere who believes that the US pulled out of Vietnam "from a position of strength"?  Plus, Nixon had "a clearly defined objective" of winning the 1968 election when he used his partner-in-crime Henry Kissinger to get the South Vietnamese to withdraw from the Paris Peace Conference, thereby subotaging LBJ's efforts to end the war.  Then, Nixon kept the war going  from 1969 until 1973 when we withdrew, tucking tail and running, setting the stage for the inevitable fall of Saigon in 1975.   By the time we withdrew from Vietnam, America was at war internally, with riots in most of our cities, massive political protests and demonstrations on college campuses and in our cities, and bombings, including the Sterling Hall bombing on the UW-Madison campus.  On top of all that turmoil, between 1972 and 1974, the Watergate scandal, that J. D. Vance now dismisses as insignificant,  developed and also tore the country apart, with the pro-Nixon and anti-Nixon contingents despising each other.  Other than the Civil War, it was the worst period of polarization in the country's history up to the Trump Era, of which Mr. Vance is now a chief apologist.

Excerpts from Why Old People Cry, by Roger Rosenbalatt in this morning's NYTimes:

Old people cry a lot. I will see a sweet child in the street, watch a news story about a heroic rescue or catch sight of a peony or of a full moon, and my eyes will be awash with tears. Whatever it is that I am feeling seems expressible only this way. People weep for joy or sorrow. I do neither, consciously.   Something comes over me . . . .

Why do I tear up so often? I think it has to do with the past, how much past has built up inside me all these years. . . . And how suddenly the present becomes the past. Lifelong friends, here yesterday, gone today. . . So many things lost in a life, my life, yours. So much left to articulate yearning.  . .  Is that why I tear up? Because I’m so overwhelmed with life as I approach the end of it that I’m at a loss for words and all I can do is cry?

Whatever happened to your life long ago, whatever carousel you were on, reminds you of yourself, who also happened long ago. So you’re tearing up for all that is gone, all that monumental past, vast and variegated. These days, I have so much past behind and within me, it’s as if it bubbles over.

Whew!  I'm glad to learn I'm not the only one.  I can get overwhelmed with emotion and even sense my tear glands activated watching and listening to a concert or other performance, or seeing children pouring out of elementary school at the end of a school day, or seeing a dad or mom walking their children down the street, holding their hands.  With the small children, is it joy I'm experiencing, or fear for their futures?  All of that.

America and Israel.  One of the lead stories in the online edition of this morning's NYTimes is headlined "Israelis See Their Friendship With the U.S. Slipping Away."  The story related, in large part, to the victory of three patently anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian candidates in recent elections in New York City, "in the most Jewish city in the world, after Jerusalem.”  More broadly, 

"Americans’ sympathy for the Palestinians exceeded their sympathy for Israel for the first time in a New York Times/Siena poll in September. And 60 percent of Americans said that they held unfavorable opinions of Israel in a Pew survey in April, up from 42 percent in 2022."

I tried to sort out my own views on Israel a year ago today.  It wasn't easy: 

My journal entry on June 27, 2024 headed "Wikipedia, the ADL, and Israeli-Palestinian Relations:  My beliefs then, my beliefs still.

Wikipedia's editors have classified the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”  Wikipedia's volunteer editors wrote that the ADL is unreliable when it comes to the conflict “due to significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, unretracted, regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The general unreliability of the ADL extends to the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.  The ADL expressed “concern and dismay by Wikipedia’s attack on ADL’s reliability on the topic of antisemitism and other issues of central concern to the Jewish community.”  The letter also accused Wikipedia of “stripping the Jewish community of the right to defend itself from the hatred that targets our community.”

According to another story in this morning's WaPo, the Israeli government blames the UN for the food shortages, increasing starvation, approaching famine, and difficulty in distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza.  

The worldviews of Israel and strong Israel supporters are radically different from that of the rest of the world.  The former accurately see Israel as a small democratic nation surrounded by enemies, the most powerful of which - Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and multiple militias -  seek to destroy it as a nation-state entity.  The feeling of constant existential vulnerability has predictably grown since October 7th.  Much of the rest of the world sees Israel as a strong, thriving, nuclear power, with one of the world's strongest militaries, engaged for decades in military occupation, racist and fascistic oppression, and ethnic cleansing if not apartheid, and now war crimes if not genocide against indigenous Arab Palestinians.  Because Israel is a self-created and self-defined Jewish state, populated mostly by Jews, and supported by most diaspora Jews, the relationship between the Jewish state and the Jewish nation, tribe, family, or people, i.e., Jews generally, is a subject always open to debate, often fierce debate.  I've been reading two books recently (and currently) about the issue.  The first is a collection of essays by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992).  The second is What Shall I Do With This People: Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism (2002) by Milton Viorst.

Leibowitz was an Israeli polymath, a deeply observant Jew, and a Zionist who was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1903 and moved to Mandate Israel in 1935 where he lived till his death in 1994.  Isaiah Berlin said of him:  "It is not so much his intellectual attainments and achievements as a thinker and teacher that have made so profound an impression on me . . . as the unshakeable moral and political stand which he took up for so many years in the face of so much pressure to be sensible, to be realistic, not to let down the side, not to give comfort to the enemy,  not to fight against current conventional wisdom . . . Of him I believe it can be said more truly than of anyone else that he was the conscience of Israel . . .  "  Milton Viorst was a journalist and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs widely published in national and international journals.   Both writers address issues concerning the relationship between Jews and the Jewish state of Israel and, more basically, the issue of who is a Jew.  To Leibowitz, a Jew is one who practices halakhah, who observes the commandments found in the Torah and in the Oral Law.  "Apart from [the institutions of halakhic practices], Judaism does not exist."  He makes the point that other than halakhah, there is nothing, no commonality, that makes worldwide Jewry a definable, unique "nation." Viorst starts his book relating one of my favorite jokes about the inherent fractiousness of religions, about the Jew stranded on an island who builds his own town, but with two synagogues, one to pray in and one "I wouldn't set foot in!"  The title of his book comes from Moses's exasperated rhetorical question to God [Exodus 17: 4-6] when the Jews he led over Sinai were ready to stone him because of the hardships they were suffering.  Mostly it is a polemic against Jewish religious fundamentalism and religious nationalism and messianism.

It is in large measure this question of Jewish identity and the relationship between Jews, however self-defined and others-defined, and the State of Israel, that makes it difficult to assess the State of Israel, its governments, and its history, especially concerning the treatment of Arab Palestinians.  To many in our world, Israel, after 1967 and more especially after October 7th,  has become a pariah state, a state like South Africa under apartheid.  The response of many Israelis and their supporters is to call their critics antisemitic, biased, or simply bigoted against Jews.  Israel = Jews collectively and Jews collectively = Israel and therefore, opposition to Israel's policies and practices = hostility to Jews.

The situation is complicated by the remembrance of the Holocaust, the Shoah, the attempted annihilation of Europe's Jews not only by the Nazis but also by so many non-German, willing accomplices.  To be a Jew in this dangerous world is, I suspect, to be naturally and predictably at least somewhat wary, self-protective, watchful, and on the lookout with a tendency to "circle the wagons" when outside threats appear.  How these characteristics must be magnified in the case of Israeli Jews surrounded by enemies with both the will and the means to kill them and their children.  I, not a Jew,  not an Israeli, can never fully appreciate this.   Nonetheless, the tendency to circle the wagons when criticized too often leads to blame-deflecting, blame-shifting, and scapegoating, to a refusal to admit that Israel, like every other country, and Jews, like other people, can be guilty of very bad conduct.  How often have I thought, when hearing one excuse or denial or another from the Israeli government or IDF, 'I can't believe my own government, why should I believe Israel's?'  If Israeli Jews believe that every criticism of their actions springs only from the bigotry of antisemitism, they are relieved from the challenge of trying to assess the criticism honestly, to examine their consciences.  It also fosters a deep "us and them" culture, Jews and Gentiles, friends and foes.  Once we are relieved of the burden of self-assessment, of examining our consciences, our behaviors are prone to become only more offensive.  I think it was particularly perverse that Israel is blaming the United Nations humanitarian agencies for the inability to get humanitarian aid to the increasingly starving, increasingly diseased people of Gaza when all the evidence from journalistic and human rights agencies attest that the main causes of the problem are Israeli.

Like the Wikipedia editors, I do not believe the ADL is a reliable reporter on Israeli-Palestinian relations.  Nor do I believe AIPAC or the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Christians United for Israel, Hadassah, the Jewish Agency, or similar groups deeply devoted to supporting and defending Israel.  I do not believe Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing, racist coalition government and I do not believe the IDF.  Knowing what I know of my own government's duplicity (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the Afghan Report, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, spinmeisters, , . . .), how can I believe Israel's?

Furthermore, I can't believe that conflating opposition to Israeli policies and practices concerning Palestinians with antisemitism is: "good for the Jews."  How does tarring me and others opposed politically and morally to the oppression of marginal minorities with the slur of 'antisemite' or bigot help Jews generally?  How does it help the many Jews, in Israel and in the diaspora, who support the Jewish State's legitimacy and right to exist but are also opposed to major Israeli government policies and practices?  Although the numbers are dwindling, there is still a Left and a peace movement in Israel and a larger one in the diaspora, and they, like their opponents in and out of Israel, rely on or at least aspire to the support and goodwill of non-Jews like me.

My thoughts are not very coherent or logical; my thoughts about Israel, at least since its rightward turn with the election Menachem Begin and a Likud government in 1977 often are not.  But I hope it helps to try to write them down and see the non sequiturs in black and white so I can be like Flannery O'Connor who wrote to her friend: "I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."

I've written elsewhere in these journal pages of Yeshayahu Leibowitz's arguments about Jewish "nationhood" being grounded only in halakah, or the observance of Jewish law found in the Torah.  He makes a pretty good case and I wish I had an index or could do a word search of four years' worth of journal pages, but I don't and I can't.  I need to pick up my collection of his writings again to see again how he justifies the right of Jews, mainly European Jews, to a nation-state of their own in land occupied by Arab Palestinians for centuries.

Surprise, surprise - the fruits of entrusting negotiating with the Iranians to those crack international negotators J. D. Vance, Jerod Kushner, and Steve Witkof.  More from the Times, Vague Language of U.S.-Iran Deal Comes Back to Haunt Peace Efforts:

The memorandum that the two sides agreed to calls for Iran to “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days. Crucially, it leaves “arrangements” and “best efforts” undefined.

Iran appears to have interpreted that language to mean that it can determine which route ships must take. Hours before its attack on the container ship, Iran had warned ships that the only route through the strait was through its waters, trying to stop vessels from using an alternate, U.S.-backed route on the southern side of the strait that hugs the coastline of Oman.

The interim deal “leaned on deliberately flexible language because that was probably the only way to get it over the line,” said Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris. “But flexibility only holds while both sides attach similar meanings to the same vague provisions.”

The vagueness of the interim agreement has led both sides to try to define facts on the ground to their advantage, before any uncertainties are resolved in a final deal, she added.

6/26/2026

 Friday, June 26, 2026

1968 Iwo Jima was returned to Japan by the US

2003 The Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

2015 The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 same-sex marriage is a legal right across all US stat

2015 US President Barack Obama sang "Amazing Grace" as part of his eulogy for the 9 victims at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston

2025 Three Palestinians were killed and many others were injured by Israeli settlers in the village of Kafr Malik near Ramallah in the West Bank.

In bed at 9, up at 5:20; 0540 144/77/56 117 204.2, 0555 135/72/55; 56/67/53, partly sunny day ahead.   

Morning meds at 9:35 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and p.m. Trulicity injection at 12:30 p.m.

Lonesome Dove.  I had not expected this novel to contain as much humor as it does, but I am really enjoying it.  Early this morning, I read chapter 37, which relates the story of Fort Smith's Deputy Sheriff Roscoe Brown's encounter with Farmer Louisa Brooks and her transactional attitude towards the institution of marriage on the frontier.  I can't help smiling and chuckling while reading it.  I picture Marjorie Main as Ma Kettle as Louisa, and Percy Kilbride as Pa Kettle as Roscoe. . . I'm learning why this saga is 862 pages long: it has many stories going on at the same time, Call & Gus heading to Montana, Jake Spoon & Lorena Wood heading to San Francisco, July Johnson searching for the fugitive Jake Spoon and then his runaway wife Elmira, Roscoe Brown searching for July Johnson, Elmira Boot Johnson searching for Dee Boot, and I'm only 1/3rd into the story.  And then there are the stories of the minor characters!

I couldn't help wondering whether, when Larry McMurtry came up with the name "Louisa Brooks" for Roscoe Brown''s lusty farm lady, he had in mind the beautiful, erotic, and notorious  Hollywood actress, flapper girl, and later call girl Louise Brooks, star of G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box.

Another reason I'm enjoying this novel is the light it sheds on the harshness of life in the Old West, especially for cowboys and doubly especially for cowboys on a cattle drive.  I've made several drives out West, first in moving from Brunswick, GA to Yuma, AZ, to report to my first PCS, later to drive my Dad twice from Milwaukee to Phoenix, and twice with my daughter on camping vacations to American and Canadian national parks.  I've always been struck by the great distances to be covered, the great breadth of the continent and the nation.  And, as I cruised along in comfort at 70 or 80 miles per hour, I always contemplated what life must have been like for explorers, pioneers, settlers, early trappers and hunters, and soldiers.  I had some sense of it from my readings, but Lonesome Dove makes the hardships, discomforts, and dangers almost tangible, and also the widespread early lawlessness.  I enjoyed ch. 46 today, about the relationship between Call and Maggie.  Quite a character analysis.  The novel is very much plot-driven, but it's also loaded with character studies.