4/14/2026

 Tuesday, April 14, 2026

1536 King Henry VIII expropriated minor monasteries

1865  Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre 

1973 Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray resigned after admitting that he destroyed evidence in the Watergate scandal

1983  President Ronald Reagan signed $165 billion Social Security rescue

1986 Desmond Tutu was elected Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa

1989 In the Iran-Contra trial, Oliver North's case went to the jury

2020, Donald Trump froze funding for the World Health Organization pending a review for mistakes in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and for being "China-centric."

2021 President Biden said, "It's time to end America's longest war," confirming his decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by Sept 11

2025 Donald Trump suggested deporting United States citizens to the controversial Terrorism Confinement Center prison in El Salvador, despite the unconstitutionality of the proposal. 

In bed 9:20, awakended at 1:39 by my phone with the Tornado Warning below, back in by 3ish, up again at 8, 0300 129/68/62/112 204.2;61/5670/51 with more thunderstorms expected around 5 p.m.

Morning meds at ? a.m.  Ranolazine at 8:10 a.m. and p.m. 

Geri and I moved the bird feeders further away from the house today to keep the squirrels away from them.  One or more of them had been climbing up our screen and leaping across to the seeds, thereby avoiding the squirrel baffle on the shepherd's crooks.  I'm afraid we have driven this poor squirrel nuts with frustration.  He keeps climbing up the screen trying to see if he can leap the great distance to the seeds.  When he tries, he falls to the ground, but he keeps trying.  I'm feeling sad for him, especially since I worry so much about whether I'm creating a dependency on the birds and squirrrels with these feeders.

Critical 1:39 AM IMMINENT THREAT ALERT.  National Weather Service TORNADO WARNING in this area until 2:00 AM CDT.  Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest level of a sturdy building.  If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and lprotect yourself from flying debris.  Check media.

 Geri and I each received the THREAT ALERT on our phones and were out of bed by 1:40.  I seriously considered ignoring it, staying in bed, but thought of Geri in the next room, so I got out of bed and checked on her only to see her up and reading her phone message.  I suggested staying in the hallway, away from all windows, but she wanted to head to the basement, which we did, and where we stayed until 2:05.  It reminded me of a similar situation we experienced in our home outside Saukville, when my Dad had first lived with us.  I remember thinking how ironic (wrong word) it was that he had left Florida, the land of severe weather, to come to peaceful Wisconsin only to be gotten out of bed in the middle of the night to seek shelter from a tornado, which never occurred.  The photo is a muffed shot of Geri in the basement in her pajamas wrapped under a blanket awaiting the 'all clear.'

    Even with the very welcome second round of sleep after the interruption, I'm feeling a bit out of it and loopy/spacey, and probably wont be writing much today, because I'm not thinking very much or very clearly today.  Here is something I posted a year ago today that is worth considering again:

How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me) by Roger Rosenblatt in this morning's New York Times:

It took me 85 years to learn these things, but I believe they’re applicable at any age.

1. Nobody’s thinking about you.  It was true 25 years ago, and it’s true today. Nobody is thinking about you. Nobody ever will. Not your teacher, not your minister, not your colleagues, not your shrink, not a soul. It can be a bummer of a thought. But it’s also liberating. That time you fell on your butt in public? That dumb comment you made at dinner last week? That brilliant book you wrote? No one is thinking about it. Others are thinking about themselves. Just like you.

2. Make young friends

3. Try to see fewer than five doctors.  . . . It’s not the doctors I dislike; rather, it’s the debilitating feeling of moving from one to another to another like an automobile on an assembly line. If the end product were a Lamborghini, I’d be fine. But I’m a Studebaker.  I know all these doctor visits are prudent and inevitable. But when one’s social life consists of Marie, who takes my blood, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou, it’s hardly a good sign.

4. Get a dog. 

5. Don’t hear the cheers. 

6. Everyone’s in pain.  If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. People you meet casually, those you’ve known all your life, the ones you’ll never see — everyone’s in pain. If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that. 

7. Listen for Bob Marley. 

8. Join a gang.  This advice is meant for men more than women, because women are always part of one group or another. The value of socializing comes to women naturally, which is why the world would be better if women ran it. They know how to get along in groups. Men, on the other hand, are solitary, static things. Generals without wars, astride iron horses. They don’t band together naturally, but they ought to, especially when too much solitude leads to self-conscious gloom. Join a gang — that’s what I say. I do not mean a motorcycle gang, simply a group of guys who share an interest. Joining a gang also serves society at large. It keeps us off the streets.

9. On regrets.  They’re part of life. Learn to live with them. 

10. Start and end every day by listening to Louis Armstrong.

My thoughts:  #1 is great advice.  We tend to forget that we are all self-centered.  How could it be otherwise.  We need it to survive, plus we usually can't help it.  I' m thinking of a fearsome poem by Christina Rossetti, Who Shall Deliver Me?

God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself,
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease, and rest, and joys:

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me,
Break off the yoke and set me free.

 #2 is great advice also but also, easier said than done.  Ditto # 3.  I have my primary care doc, my rheumatology doc, my infectious disease doc, my heart rhythm doc, my physical medicine doc, my mental health doc (worries about geriatric depression and suicide, big VA concerns),  my eye doc, my urologist, and various other on-call specialists.  I'm always living with the question of whether to follow Zeke Emanuel;s advice.

#4.  I'd like to, but Geri's dead against it and she does almost all the 'heavy lifting' concerning caring for a dog, as she did with Lilly.  I sorely miss our Lilly.

#5.  He's referring to Bill Russell's response to his daughter's question about how he copes with all the boos he used to receive.  He said he didn't hear them.  She asked how he could do that and he said it was because he didn't hear the cheers.  He didn't pay any attention to either, just to getting his work done well.

#6.  Terribly important.  It reminds me of the T shirt of the guy at Sendik's: Everyone you encounter is fighting a battle you know nothing about.  How easily we forget, or just don't care.  

#7, The author lived in NYC, in an apartment building with a doorman.  The author walked his dog every morning around 4 a.m.  One morning in the buildings lobby, he hearded a disembodied beautiful voice singing Bob Marley's One Love.  He asked the doorman if he had heard it and the doorman answered, "That was me."  Thereafter, he never saw the doorman without thinking of his wonderful hidden talent and encouraged his readers to wonder about all the hidden talents in all the people we meet in our lives.

#8.  I wish I could 'join a gang.'  Most of my best friends are dead or live in other states.  The author points out how bad we men are at socializing compared to women.  Geri is on the phone with family orl friends every day, enjoying and sharing their company, their advice, their support.  For me, it's only rarely.

#9.  The advice that may be the most difficult for me to follow.  I tend to wallow in my regrets, sometimes to be overpowered by them.  It's why I so often think of W. B. Yeats' Vaccillation, the fifth stanza:

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

#10.  Louie's certainly not a bad choice, or even better, the great duets  by Louie and Ella Fitzgerald.  I guess it's a signifier of my psyche I that gravitate towards the blues, soft jazz, torch songs, and requiem mass music . . . May choirs of angels lead you . . .   See #9.😞

4/13/2026

 Monday, April 13, 2026

1861 After 34 hours of bombardment, Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederates 

1954 Robert Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist

1986 Pope John Paul II met Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff at the Rome synagogue

2025 Israel destroyed part of the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City, the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which is managed by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem. No direct casualties are reported, but one child is killed due to interrupted medical care. 

2025 During Palm Sunday, two Russian ballistic missiles carrying cluster munitions struck the centre of Sumy, Ukraine, killing at least 35 people and wounding 117 others. 

In bed at 9, awake at 3:20, up at 3:50.  127/62/32 10; 60/53/71/56, partly cloudy day, more rain tonight.  

Morning meds at  a.m.  Ranolazine at 6 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.

What have we come to? Where are we headed?  

Pete Hegseth’s Gospel of Carnage, by Frank Bruni in this morning's New York Times.

I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.

He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.

He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.

Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.

In a social media post on Friday, he wrote: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

That was hardly the pope’s first reprimand. During a Mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” And before that, he cautioned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Pete Hegseth and Robert Prevost, a/k/a Pope Leo XIV, are men, human beings, members of the most destructive species on earth, and each purports to speak for a transcendent Christian God.

Queen bee and worker bee.  Geri is both.  She reigns over our house, making decorating decisions, ruling the kitchen at dinner time, keeping it clean, and generally tending to it when it needs tending.  I'm not irrelevant to domestic sovereighty.  She askes my opinion when partnering input is appropriate, but I almost always defer to her.  I tell her I am uxorious, but not in the negative way the term is usually used, if it is used at all anymore by anyone but me.  Rather, I defer to her because I've come to realize that she has better taste than I do, and about most things domestic, better judgment, but mostly because she does most of the work that is required around the house.  I think it is a mark of respect to defer to her on these matters.  My old partner, Bob Freibert, used to joke had he and his wife Susan had a division of labor understanding in their marriage: he got to decide on the family position on matter of foreign policy and she decided all the other stuff.

I thought of the 'queen bee and worker bee' metaphor for Geri as I watched her this afternoon working on flower pots on our patio.  She had worked hard for three hours or more this morning in the marginal garden on our lot, the one that extends the entire west boundary of our lot.  The temperature was in the 70s and she came in exhausted and looking a bit frazzled from the high humidity.  She wasn't able to nap during the afternoon because of work going on next door, but nonethless, there she was again working outside on one of her never-ending garden chores.  I looked at her through my bedroom window and thought again, as I have so many time, what a prodigious worker she is.

    I took a very short walk this afternoon with "Rachel," my high-boy rollator, from our house to the first east-west street in Mequon and back.  By the time I reached that street, I was SOB, short of breath and tired, so I turned around.  I have no idea how much of that was due to CHF and how much was due to not enough sleep.  Probably a combination of both.  Later, Geri and I had another serious talk about whether it's a mistake not to sell the house and about the daunting issue, if not here, where?  Geri turns 82 in 5 days,  I turn 85 in 4 months.  Quo ire debemus?

4/12/2026

 Sunday, April 12, 2026

1861 Fort Sumter in South Carolina was attacked by the Confederacy beginning the American Civil War

1955 Polio vaccine tested by Jonas Salk was announced to be 'safe and effective' and was given full approval by the US Food and Drug Administration

1963 The police in Birmingham, Alabama, used dogs & cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators

1966 1st B-52 bombing on North Vietnam

2015 Hillary Clinton announced she would run for the President for the 2nd time

In bed at 9 or so, up at 5:20.  131/70/65 113 204.0;  48/40/71/45. rain and wind much of the day.

Morning meds at a.m.  Ranolazine at 6:45 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

It's been a semi-busy day (at least, for me), though by 2:30 all I had really accomplished was about 10 minutes of a VA chair yoga exercise downstairs which semi-exhausted me.  I need to at least try to do these stretches everyday.  I know they are helpful from the simple fact that it is so hard for me to do them because of my  Life as a lump.  I also did a load of laundry, read (in a manner of speaking) the Sunday papers, watched Fareed Zakaria, and made a breakfast of two scrambled eggs with mild jalapeno peppers and two pieces of sourdough toast with strawberry preserves.  I also managed to fit in that crowded schedule 😊 one short nap and one longer one.  It's like the first day of summer today, with a high in the low 70s.  We have the heat off and the doors open to let some fresh air in the house.  I almost took one of my paintings off the basement wall and started to rework it with some flesh-hued glaze, but didn't quite make it.  The painting is not very well done, and I'm afraid of making it worse by tinkering with it, but I'm resolved to try it.  Geri's been outside finishing up her Spring yard clean up, amazing me with her vim vigor, and vitality.   

Viktor Orban was defeated in Hungary.  It's not often that I feel real excitement over the results of a foreign election, but this one thrilled me.  I am reminded, however, of Thomas Merton's warning:

A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything around.  But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. . . power will pass from one party to another but when the smoke clears . . . the situation will still be the same as it was before.  There will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the other for their own ends.  There will be the same greed and cruelty and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before.  For the revolutions of men change nothing.

Merton overstated his case but he was making a case denigrating revolution ground in human ideology to an imaged revolution grounded in the Sermon on the Mount.

4/11/2026

 Saturday, April 11, 2026

1925 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Quas Primas

1961 President John F. Kennedy provided US helicopters and crews to South Vietnam

1983 1st visit to a Lutheran church by a pope (John Paul II in Rome

2025 The U.S. terminated the temporary protected status of Afghan and Cameroonian nationals. 

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:45 and again at 8, from falling back to sleep at weigh-in and BP.  0600129/60/33  110  202.8. 40/49/32 and sunny.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Ranolazine at 8:25 a.m and 8:05 p.m.    

Jim Reck's birthday.  He would have been 85 today, a simple, happy and good man.  He loved his wife and children and brother-in-law, me, deeply.  We were near -contemporaries, only 4 months apart.  He died on March 8, 2024.  His son, Michael, wrote of him on Facebook, an eloquent and accurate obituary:

Dad, you are the man I hope to make the most proud. 

You taught me how to be a gentleman. You taught me how to love fully, with my whole heart. You taught me everything I know about being a man. I know I mastered some of your lessons, and some I have tried and failed to get right yet. But I promise I will keep trying toget them right.

Just know I have finally found a woman that I love the way you love and loved Mom. There was never a time where you could question how much he loved His Kitty. And now he is up in Heaven with her. Truly in his Heaven, taking care of her again. 

If you knew him, you know he was the king of inappropriate humor, you knew he was willing to always do anything and everything for those he loved, he would be there for you at a moments notice. He was never afraid to say I love you. 

His life wasn't always easy. As a child he grew up in a broken home, that wasn't as loving or supportive as it should have been. He spent his teens in a Chicago street gang called the Shy City Scribes. He was a trouble maker, a law breaker and pretty much a runaway, and then he met my Mom. He always said if it wasn't for her he would have died young and stupid.

He went in to the army, did his service to our country, came out and went to technical school, got a job with Xerox, where he stayed for his entire career and he married his love, my Mom.

They started their life together, wanting a family but, they were told they wouldn't be able to have children. They sought to adopt a child and that is were I came in. They were in the process of finalizing the adoption when my Mom found out she was pregnant with the miracle child, my sister, Chrissi. And their dream of having family came true. 

Dad, you were the best Dad ever. Maybe I prejudice here, but that's how I feel. Growing up you sacrificed, you did all you could for us and then some. You were a roadie for me many times, you watched my metal bands play shows, even though you loved country music. You were always there when I needed you. 

I love you Dad. I hope I will make you proud when we met again. Rest in Peace and be with your Angel. Give Mon a hug for us.

Michael understated the awfulness of Jim's childhood.  He was in and out of foster homes throughout his childhood, attending more elementary schools than there are grades in them.  His mother was cruel and abusive.  He turned his life around when he met, loved, and ultimately married my sister Kitty.  He acknowledged throughout his life that she saved his life and he owed everything to her.  It wasn't hyperbole.  I commented on Michael's post:

Mikey, as I've often said, you are a gifted writer but I am so sad to read these words. You are sure right about your Dad's childhood as an abused and neglected child. He often told me of how he was on a bad path until he met your wonderful Mom. I remember talking with her about how he had broken the cycle of abuse and neglect that he endured as a child with his life as a steady, loving, reliable provider for his family and a good citizen. His life was an acheivement to be proud of. He loved your Mom with his entire heart and soul, just as she loved him. My heart's aching as I think of both of them. For some reason, what I am remembering most vividly of your Dad now is the day I was visiting them in Glendale when your Dad found a baby sparrow that had fallen out of its nest. He picked it up and protected that bird and then he drove that little bird (and me) for miles out into the desert in the middle of nowhere where there was a wildlife rehab facility where he entrusted that little bird. And you know the story of his keeping watch over an endangered baby burro all night. Your Dad used to go on elk hunting trips with his beloved Bucky, up into the mountains but he couldn't get himself to shoot an elk. Several years ago, your cousin Sarah and I did a driving tour of national parks and one day as we were driving we spotted on a ridge a magnificent bull elk that took our breath away and Sarah said to me "Yep, that's why Jim can't shoot them." There is a very warm place in my heart for your Dad, and of course for your Mom. All our lives were enriched by both of them and are diminished by their passing. I'm feeling sad today but glad that my life has been enriched by your Mom and your Dad, and by you and Chrissie.

The photo I chose to use at the top of this remembrance of Jim is of him and his beloved horse, Bucky, with Jim checking out the condition of his hoof, pertern, or fetlock. He loved Bucky as he loved his family and as he loved life.  My head is crowded now with so many thoughts about Jim and his horse, and what they reveal about Jim's character and wisdom.  As I said at the beginning of this reflection, Jim was a simple, happy, and good man.  He was largely uneducated and unsophisticated, not as 'smart' as I am, but much, much wiser.

My iPhone speaking to me: Your walking steadiness continues to be very low and you may be at high risk of falling in the next 12 months. It's been giving me this message for a few years now.  I want to answer by saying I may be at high risk of falling in the next 12 minutes. 

Feeling like a fool.  I went to bed at 9:15 last night, woke up around midnight, and again around 3 and tried to empty my bladder, each time producing only a very small amount of urine.  It happened again when I got up around 6, and then throughout the morning.  I felt no pain or discomfort, but described the situation to Chatgpt which advised me to get to an ER promtly.  I didn't want to rely on an EI so I called the VA Triage Nurse, who also advised going to the ER.  I did it and they of course first did an ultrasound of my bladder which, surprise, was empty.  I of course felt foolish.  As one with congestive heart failure, I've been advised not to consume more than 64 ounces of water and other fluids each day.  Also, to consume less than 2000 mgs. of sodium/salt each day.  I guess I'm erring with underconsumption of both liquids and sodium.  In any case, I'm feeling pretty foolish, wondering about my marbles and my judgment.

4/10/2026

 Friday, April 10, 2026

1963 USS Thresher, a nuclear powered submarine, sank  220 miles east of Boston, killing 129 men, including 17 civilians

2006 Hundreds of thousands protested against US immigration reforms contained in H.R. 4437, also known as the "Sensenbrenner Bill"

2019 First-ever photo of a black hole was announced, taken by The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration in 2017 in galaxy M87, 6.5 billion times the mass of earth, 55 million light-years away

2019 New York declared a public health emergency and compulsory vaccinations after a measles outbreak in Brooklyn with 285 cases

2023 The Dalai Lama apologized for a video showing him asking a boy to suck his tongue, after widespread criticism

In bed at 10:10, awake at 2:10, and up and onto the LZB at 3. Fell back to sleep on the LZB around 5 till 7:30.  0325 151/74/62, 033 130/68/32, 0340 134/72/32, 204.4, 0745 150/69/62 203.0.  41/49/ 37. 

Morning meds at 10:15 a.m.  Ranolazine at 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.  Trulicity injection at 10:20 a.m.

Savage mouse bite!  Good grief, yesterday afternoon I was filling my seed scoop from my seed bucket in the garage when I saw something that didn't look like it belonged  among the seeds.  I tried to pick it out of the seeds and it bit me!  A live mouse!  Egad!  I instinctively and inadvertently dropped it and then tried to capture it as it lay on its back on the garage floor, worrying that it might have rabies, but it scooted under the freezer we keep in the garage.  I sucked on my finger tip where the bite occurred and saw the the little guy hadn't broken the skin - no blood.  I was thankful for that and went about my birdfeeding business, wondering how the little fella managed to climb up the vertical side of the seed bucket to get inside it.  Birds and squirrels aren't the only amazingly resourceful critters when it comes to seeking foods.

Discombobulation is defined most usually as a state of confusion or diorientation caused by some event or condition.  I intend it more as my state of unsettlement or being out of sync with my normal life cyle, which I think of as getting up sometime between 4 a.m and 5 a.m, or even 6 a.m., and having cleaned up the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, read and browsed the morning papers, checked out Morning Joe on MS-NOW, and started my first nap by the time Geri gets up.  Today, I didn't emerge from my bedroom until nearly 8 a.m. and found Geri up and about, way ahead of me, the kitchen needing attention, late for my heart med and other meds, Morning Joe and the papers unlooked at - way off schedule.  I was as well rested as I ever am, but still needing to shower, shave, etc., at 11 a.m., and thinking about getting up to Saukville or Grafton for some bird supplies.  

. . . . . . . 

The morning was shot, but in the afternoon I went to the central post office downtown, mailed in our tax returns and bought some stamps, then up to Walmart in Saukville to buy seed cakes and some more safflower seeds and black printer ink cartridge, and to Costco in Grafton for fill up the gas tank, with gas at $3.88/gallon.  Before those errands, I went up to Sendik's to pick up some baby bella mushrooms and garlic for the manicotta she'll be making for dinner tonight.

In today's Wall Street Journal, In Gut We Trust?, by Peggy Noonan.  Excerpts:

We’re in a fluid, dangerous story that isn’t going away any time soon. But I want to speak of something that made it worse, those social-media posts in the middle of the night.

The first story here is the U.S. joining the war, the second is the ultimate outcome, but third in importance is those posts, because they seemed so desperate, so cruel, and so Suez-like in their historical size and import.

You know them well. On Tuesday, Donald Trump on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen but it probably will.” On Good Friday, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” On Easter Sunday, “Open the f— Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH.” He ended that post “Praise be to Allah.”

The posts left his friends and foes slackjawed. I want to talk about why they were so horrifying.

They constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.

It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.

It’s even ineffective as a threat. The reason the “madman theory” worked for Richard Nixon, if it did, was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but might be tripped into extreme behavior by an adversary’s intransigence. Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.

Previous presidents haven’t always been lit by inner dignity, but all at least attempted to fake it in public, as a bow to the people and their presumably moral ways. They didn’t feel free to get revved up in the middle of the night and take their rage out for a walk to relieve itself on the sidewalk.

Here I ask you to google “U.S. presidents at war, how they spoke and wrote.” Lincoln and FDR of course, but also Eisenhower and Korea, Reagan in the Cold War, both Bushes in their wars. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. If we don’t actively remember and summon past standards, we have no chance of getting them back, because we’ll have forgotten what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue.

You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.

Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him.

As for threats, when you resort to them, you’re revealing you are uncertain of the sufficiency of your power. Real menace shuts its mouth. Napoleon acted as if a threat was information given to the enemy. He didn’t want to signal intent or commit to an action, he wanted the foe wondering what he’d do next.

In the past, Trump supporters often received criticism of his language as if it were criticism of them. That didn’t happen this time. They know he was doing something they themselves wouldn’t do and don’t want. Tucker Carlson caught this when he challenged Mr. Trump the day after Easter: “Who do you think you are?”

I think Mr. Trump shocked his followers. What he used this week was not the diction of the common man but the language of sociopathy. That isn’t how his supporters want the world to see him. It’s not what they want him to be.

Beyond that, we haven’t learned much new about Mr. Trump during his Iran endeavor, it’s more a matter of “more so.”

He has enormous personal tolerance for dramatic, high-stakes situations in which outcomes are unknown and won’t immediately be known. The waiting doesn’t wear him down.

He operates as if he honestly believes we don’t need allies, as if the concept is antique. He’s threatening again to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But having and holding allies is simple prudence. They steady your position in moments of danger—they help you make the case, and share the intelligence burden—and broaden your influence in peace. More than that, allies add legitimacy and moral authority. You’re acting with others, not only for yourself, and you’re going forward with shared values that imply historical meaning, which has its own force. Having allies means that when something bad happens you don’t stand alone.

It is not sentimental to care about this, it is babyish to think it means nothing.

Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut. George W. Bush was famously a gut player too, and having a good gut, a good brain and good judgment are a great boost in life and leadership. But it can’t be all gut. A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience. It can have limited utility in wholly new territory. Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning. You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.

Also gut never does a full audit—you need your brain for that, for reflection and self-examination on how or where you went wrong, to help you next time.

And gut doesn’t necessarily travel. A good gut in one domain can be a bad one in another. You can confuse domains.

Next week, my grandson Peter Charles Clausen, age 19, will be registered automatically for the American draft.  I shudder.  I tremble.  

My granddaughter, Lizzie, got her driver's license a couple weeks ago.  Huzzah! I'm so proud of her for so many reasons.  My girl💓

Artemis II splashdown at 6:07 p.m.  Astounding accomplishment for the astronauts and the whole team who worked together for years to make the flight and splashdown happen.

4/9/2026

 Thursday, April 9, 2026

1948 Massacre at Deir Yassin

1981 US nuclear submarine USS George Washington rammed the Japanese freighter Nisso Maru, sinking the civilian ship in the South China Sea

1984  Linda Hunt won an Oscar for portraying Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously

2003  Baghdad fell to invading American forces

2025  The second of two tariff rounds went into effect in the United States containing country-specific tariffs on goods into the country, including a 104% tariff on Chinese imports. The first round of 10% blanket tariffs previously came into effect on April 5.  China's finance ministry announced an increase from the previous 34% tariff to an 84% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S.   Donald Trump announced he would be raising tariffs on Chinese goods entering the U.S. to 125% up from 104%, while other countries will have only 10% for 90 days.   Amazon began suspending orders on various products manufactured in China and other Asian economies amid trade war fears.   Canada announced a 25% tariff on certain vehicle imports from the U.S. as retaliation against a previous similar measure from the U.S.  and European Union officials announced a set of retaliatory duties on U.S. imports from 10% to 25% on some U.S. goods. 

In bed at 9:20, up at 4:40.  128/78/62 204.8  48/42/59/42  

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Ranolazine at 5:20 a.m. and  6:20 p.m.

New scenic ride.  On a relaatively warm, sunny afternoon, I drove up to Jay Road in northern Ozaukee County and found a new scenic wonderland.  I went west on Jay Road to County E, then north on "E" to Hilltop Road in northern Town of Fredonnia, up to the Sheboygan County Line road.  Gorgeous rolling hills.  On the way back, I drove back on Jay Road, past the horse farm where I used to work with the occupaational therapist and seriously handicapped kids on horseback to the hamlet of Dacada and St. Nicholas of Luxembourg Chatholic Church.

The tail wags the dog?  Who is calling the shots in the Iran war, Donald Trump or Bibi Netanyahu, the American president or the Israeli prime minister?

This morning's headlines from the Wall Street Journal:

Trump Allies, U.S. Officials Fear Iran Victory Lap Is Premature

Trump Declares Premature Victory in Iran

Iran Tightens Its Grip on Hormuz Despite Cease-Fire

Trump Team Explores Punishment for NATO Countries That Didn’t Support Iran War

And from the New York Times:

Lebanon Mourns After Israeli Barrage Kills at Least 203 People

A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility

Trump Again Hits Out at NATO Over Iran War

Trump Is Tearing at the Soul of the Military

4/8/2026

 Wednesday, March 8, 2026

1956 6 Marine recruits drowned during a night "marsh march" in Ribbon Creek at Parris Island, South Carolina; the drill instructor was court-martialed

1970 Senate rejected Nixon's choice of Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court

2000 Nineteen Marines were killed when a V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft crashed

2019 600 million birds die each year in the US after striking tall buildings, with Chicago being the worst city, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

2020 Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic race for US president

2024 New Vatican document rejected the concept of changing a person's biological sex despite Pope Francis's overtures to the Trans community

2025 U.S. district judge ordered the White House to restore the AP's full access to cover presidential events on First Amendment grounds, overruling the Trump administration's previous order to ban the news agency after it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".

In bed at 8:40, awake and up at 4:40.  124/66/63 127 204.4  36/24/58/30  Rain early, then more wind all day.

Morning meds at 9:45a.m.  Ranolazine at 5:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.

O frabjous day, callou callay!  We had a bluebird at our feeders today.

Trump's and his Tar Baby.  I suggested some time ago that I thought Donald Trump would find his "excursion" against Iran to be a tar baby, referring to the Uncle Remus fable of B'rer Rabbit and B'rer Fox.  In the fable, when B'rer Rabbit found himself hopelessly stuck to the tar baby and about to be eaten by B'rer Fox, he outwitted B'rer Fox by getting the fox to throw him in a briar patch, where the fox couldn't get him.  Donald Trump has been desperately, almost frantically, trying to free himself from his war against Iran which is eating him alive economically, logistically, diplomatically, strategically, and in domestic and world opinion polls.  After stupidly and disastrously threatening yesterday morning that ""A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again," Trump gave Americans and the world his briar patch, a two-week ceasefire agreement that leaves stronger economically and strategically than it was before the war began.

I agreed to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.  This will be a double-sided CEASEFIRE!  The reason for doing so is we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.  We received a 10 point proposal from Iran and believe it to be a workable basis on which to negotiate.  The United States will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz.  There will be lots of positive action!  Big money will be made. We'll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just "hangin' around" in order to make sure the everything goes well.

Here are Iran's 10 points that Trump said provide "a workable basis on which to negotiate:

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.

2. Continuation of Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Accept that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program.

4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.

5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions.

6. End of all UN Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.

7. End of all international atomic energy agency resolutions on Iran's nuclear program.

8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.

9. Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region.

10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel's conflic with Hazbollah in Lebanon.

Quaere: how would any rational person characterize these 10 points "a workable basis on which to negotiate" when the US fundamentally rejects all of them?

Last night, Netanyahu issued a statement that the cease=fire does NOT include his war in Lebanon.

This morning, Trump posted the following:

The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change!  There will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear "Dust."  It is now, and has been, under very exacting Satellite Surveillance (Space Force!).  Nothing has been touched from the date of attack.  We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctins relief with Iran.  Many of the [I.S.] 15 points have already been been (sic) agreed to.  Thank you for your attention to this matter.  President DONALD J. TRUMP

What is most stunning about this cease-fire is the disagreement among the parties to it about the fundamental terms of it.  First, the US and Israel claim that it doesn't apply to Israel's war in Lebanon, while Iran and Pakistan, the mediator that forged it, say that it does.  Second, the US says it guarantees free and open passage through the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran claims that ships transiting it must "coordinate with Iran's military,' and that the agreement confirms Iran's control of the Strait.  Third, the US says that the Iranians have agreed to give up their highly-enriched uranium; the Iranians have not confirmed that in any public way.  Fourth, all three parries to the war are claimly a huge victory.  I'm reminded of the rabbi mediating a dispute between two parties.  He tells the first party, "You're right."  Then he tells the second party, "You're right."  The parties remonstrate, "We can't both be right," to which the rabbi says, "You're right." 

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  It's Trump desperately trying to let go of his tar baby.