9/16/2026

 Wednesday, September 16,, 2026

1920 The "Wall Street bombing" occurred at 12:01 when a horse-drawn wagon exploded on Wall Street, New York, killing 38 and injuring 143

1974 US President Gerald Ford announced conditional amnesty for US Vietnam War deserters

1976 American Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women as priests and bishops

2014  Ellis Kevil was born

2018 US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault in the 1980s in "The Washington Post"

2025 An independent United Nations commission of inquiry publishes a report that "finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza," listing four of the five genocidal acts defined under international law carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people during the war. 

In bed at 9, up at 4:45; 0455 201.6 122/75/65 90; 58/69/58, cloudy,  BEACH HAZARDS WARNING, waves 3-5', currents.

Morning meds at 8 a.m.  Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and p.m. 

Text exchange with CBG:

CBG:  My daughter sent me this podcast to listen to. It’s interesting and I think the bottom line is love is what combats loneliness. Loving and being loved.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aspire-with-emma-grede/id1811878340?i=1000787131240

CDC: Thanks for forwarding the podcast shared with you by Rachel.  I listened to all of it tonight and will share some thoughts about it tomorrow.  It’s dangerous to share books and other stuff with me; it often triggers a longish reply because whatever is shared triggers so many thoughts in me.  You know I’m an old blabbermouth.

CBG: And you know I love hearing all you have to say!

CDC:  Good morning, dear friend.  My overall impressions of the podcast was that Emma Cline and Arthur Brooks kind of ‘buried the lead.’  Brooks’ main point I think was that our primary purpose in life, that which gives our lives meaning, is loving and helping others, and accepting love from others.  I agree with that, but I thought the point wasn’t made forcefully and clearly until there was a little more than 5 minutes left in the program.  Most of the discussion was devoted with subordinate points, lists of do’s and don’ts.  I wished they had spent more time on the main point.   I had a conversation about that main point with the med tech who administered the echocardiogram on me last week at the VA.  It’s got deep religious roots, of course, going back to Leviticus's teaching about loving the stranger and one’s neighbor as ons’s self, and the Buddha’s teachings about loving kindness, all carried forward by Rabbi Hillel and by Jesus.  Brooks makes the point that the wisdom of this core teaching is backed up by data, by ‘happiness studies’ by psychologists and even neurologists, and it’s also supported by our own experiences in life.  We feel better when we help others.  When Howard Eisenberg was dean at MULS, he told those of us engaged in pro bono work that we “were doing God’s work.”  He said the same to me when I retired from the faculty and headed to the House of Peace.  In any event, I wished Emma and Arthur would have spent more time on the main point and less on the ‘how to’ subordinate stuff, but I may be too picky or fussy in second guessing them.       

       Years ago I read a book titled “Happiness is a Serious Problem” by Dennis Prager.  Prager is an observant Jew, raised in a modern Orthodox family, but no longer Orthodox.  I used to listen to his radio show when we lived outside Saukville.  He’s conservative, but a thoughtful one, not a whacko.  I don’t remember much of the book because of the passage of time, but my big takeaway from it was his argument that we have a DUTY to be happy.  He argued that our happiness and unhappiness affects those around us, especially those closest to us, that when we allow ourselves to be unhappy, we increase the unhappiness of those around us.  I thought, not surprisingly, of my poor fathers’s profound unhappiness after his experiences on Iwo Jima in WWII, and how it affected my mother, my sister, and me.  I thought too of my mother’s relative ebullience, despite the terrible experiences in her life, and the redemptive (for want of a better word) force it had in my father’s, sister’s, and my life.  So I agreed with Prager’s argument, just based on my own experiences in life, and I keep it in mind now when I tend so strongly to pessimism, cynicism, and depression.   I do try to fight it off by awareness of all I have to be grateful for, as Arthur Brooks, and many others, recommend.

I was struck by his admission that his wife is a much happier person than he is, giving himself a 4.5/10 rating and his wife an 8.5/10.  It’s the same in my marriage; Geri is a much happier person than I am, and I put her highest on my list of what I am grateful for.  (You know you are high on my list, too.)

I was also struck by his belief that we cannot be happy without loving someone, that the person who loves no one cannot be happy.  I think that’s true, and I think of Donald Trump.  He  constantly has his wished and whims gratified by the ‘loyalty’ that his wealth buys, but he must deep down be an always unhappy person.  I think of his niece's aptly titled book about him, “Too Much And Never Enough.”  Never enough is the story of his life, even now at age 80.   And now he threatens to bring down the temple around us all in his vain pursuit of a happiness that will always elude him because of the profound emptiness of his heart and soul.

One last thought: I liked his description of the early morning hours of each day as “holy hours,” to something like that.  The early hours are when I used to connect with my sister every day.  Then, after she was gone, they became the hours when I started writing reflections in my daily journal.  I thought of them as my ‘morning musings.’  They are the hours I can focus on not only what troubles me, but on all I have to be thankful for, including your friendship.❤️

 

American Scoundrel.  I've made it through 30% of the book, just finishing the chapters dealing with Roy Cohn's time serving as Joe McCarthy's chief counsel on McCarthy's subcommittee investigating communist subversion in the federal government, focusing on the (in)famous Army-McCarthy hearings in which McCarthy and Cohn were finally undone, and Cohn was forced to resign in large part by Attorney Joseph Welch and his famous question:  "You've done enough. . . Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency at long last?"  Before reading this book, I hadn't known the full story of how that famous confrontation developed.  Welch was examining Cohn when McCarthy broke into his questioning by bringing up the fact that a young lawyer in Welch's firm had belonged to the National Lawyers Guild while at Harvard Law School, and that the Guild had been accused of being a communist front, or at least sympathetic to communism.  Welch, McCarthy, and Cohn had agreed beforehand that no mention would be made of that young lawyer's past membership and, in return, Welch would not ask Cohn any questions pertaining to his efforts to avoid being drafted at the end of the Korean War.  McCarthy's comments violated that express agreement, and that was one reason Welch was so outraged.  The exchange between McCarthy and Welch occurred on June 9, 1954, a couple of months before my 13th birthday.  By that time, my family had acquired its first television set, and I remember those Army-McCarthy hearings and that exchange.  It received huge public and media attention, even more than the other damning evidence against Cohn's and McCarthy's behavior presented during the hearings.  

I am struck by how much those hearings and those times remind me of what we are going through now in the US, with Trumpism replacing McCarthyism.  It's no secret that Cohn mentored Trump.  Their behaviors are almost identical in many ways.  Never admit you were wrong.  Never apologize.  When you've made a bad bet, double down.  Etc.  He got rid of Jeff Sessions as his first AG because he appointed a special counsel to investigate the Russian connections to the 2016 elections.  "Where's my Roy Cohn?"  Trump had two main teachers, both psychopaths: his father, Fred Trump, and Roy Cohn.  No wonder we're living in shit city today.  All these guys are or were cruel, selfish, unprincipled, and destructive.

McCarthy graduated from Marquette University Law School in 1935.  The school was located in Sensenbrenner Hall then, as it was when I attended 30-some years later.  He attended classes in the same classrooms I attended, and probably used the same lockers and men's room in the basement that I used.  I wouldn't be surprised if he sat in the same ancient wooden desk-seats that we sat in.  In those days, the law school was a bare-bones operation, used as a cash cow by the university to prop up less profitable departments, like the Theology department, and even the cash-draining medical school, which became independent in 1967, when I started law school.  Our dean used to hold up the image of "the Marquette Lawyer" as a paragon of professional skill, competence, and virtue, but we noticed that he never used our alumnus who was the circuit court judge in Outagamie County and a United States senator as a model for our behavior, which is not to say that Joe McCarthy wasn't admired by some of our Republican faculty members.

 I met next-door neighbor Debbie while getting the mail this afternoon and had a good chat.  She will be spending much of the winter in other countries: Switzerland for a visit with her son and his family, El Salvador for some church work, Tuscany for R&R, and Mexico for some other reasons(s).  I offered to do whatever might be helpful while she's gone.  

9/15/2026

 Tuesday, September 15, 2026

1951 Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Ingruentium Malorum

1963 Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed 4 African-American girls

1966  Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a letter to the United States Congress urging the enactment of gun control legislation.

1981 Pope John Paul II published the \encyclical "Laborem exercens" (through work) against capitalism and Marxism

2011 We moved into our house in Bayside

2022 The European Parliament said Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, saying Viktor Orbán’s government has become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” 

2024 A man was arrested and charged with the attempted assassination of  Donald Trump, spotted while  Trump was playing golf 

2025 Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the Army National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee, to "combat crimes"

In bed at 9, up at 7:20; 0735 202.0 123/80/65. 108; 66/66/62, rainy early, then cloudy.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Entresto at 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Geri is off today to Charlotte to visit with cousin Sue and hubby Tom Clark.  For years, we got together with them regularly when they lived in Arlington Heights, IL. They moved to North Carolina to be close to their son and his family, and that ended our regular overnight visits, which I always enjoyed.  I like both of them a lot and miss those regular visits.  Geri returns on Sunday.  She planned the visit so she wouldn't miss her Monday night line dancing sessions at Nicolet High School, which started last night.  She also stopped at David's and Sharon's house after the line dancing to give a 12th birthday gift to her granddaughter Ellis, whose birthday is tomorrow.  Ellis, like all our grandchildren, seems to me to be an extraordinary little human being.  Do all grandparents feel this way about their grandchildren?  I always have mixed feelings about Geri's trips to visit friends and family.  I miss her when she's gone, rattling around the house alone, thinking it's she who makes this house our home, but I want her to take these trips because they're important to her and her friends and family, and I'm well aware that living with me as a ferkrimpter semi-cripple is no picnic.

Text exchanges with CBG:

My friend Nir, a former shaliach from Israel who spent 4 years in Milwaukee, became a reform Rabbi and now runs a synagogue and school in Israel, sends out his thoughts and views on a what’s app group chain. This week he sent this out and I loved it for the hope he inspires and I thought you might appreciate it.

llay and Ori are staying with us for the holiday.

We were glad to give their parents a little time to themselves, so that they might begin the new year with renewed strength.

Ilay, five years old, is perceptive and independent. One can already see in him the first stirrings of a well formed self, emerging, distinct, and clear.

There is so much of  [ I was unable to copy the other 7 pages of the message.]

CDC:  Thank you, dear friend, and Shana Tovah.  Somehow I let Rosh Hashanh get by me this year, as I am increasingly distracted by bad news.  Nir’s New Year greeting is beautiful, almost mystical in his description of his and Ori’s experience of Oneness during feeding, the importance of mutual presence and touch.  I noted too the not so subtle repetition of God’s injunction in Deuteronomy to Choose Life., and that we have always before us blessings and curse.  I keep trying to not forget the abundant blessings, though it often is hard.  You know that I count you and Dan among my abundant blessings.  I also loved his quote of Golda Meir.  There’s so much wisdom packed into it.  Golda also reminds me of the intimate connection between the U.S. and Israel, both its blessedness and its cursedness.  Nir seems very well suited to be a rabbi.  Thank you, Sweetie.❤️

And, BTW, I had a bout of sleeplessness the night before last, up from 1:45 till 6 a.m.  and wrote a long reflection in my journal/blog in the middle of the night about the importance of love in our human lives.  I printed it off for my hard copy of the journal, but never hit the ‘publish’ button and lost it to the blog, to my regret, but it started out with me wondering why I have loved Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady through so many years, and concluding that it was because it captures the deep-down loneliness that is part of being human, something Elizabeth Strout does so well in her novels, and how only love saves us from it.  I think we find the same kind of underlying message in Joe Cocker’s Love Lift Us Up, and Andrew Llyod Webber’s Love Changes Everything, and, I suspect, hundreds of other songs.  It got me wondering too whether this wasn’t the underlying message of the major religions, at least Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism.  I’ve been trying to figure out the big “God” question since I was in 6th grade, never getting close to an answer, but I keep struggling.  I’m remembering a lunch I had years ago with an old friend, Vicki Conte, who wisely reminded me, “It’s not a head thing, Chuck, it’s a heart thing. "  The current AI crisis has me at it again with the specter of species extinction now including our own species.  I’m bouyed by your and Nir’s hopefulness. Thanks again.

Off to the races.  This morning's NYTimes reports that the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force had admitted that the U.S. has deployed weapons in space. 

“We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” he said at a convention in Maryland, according to a news release published on the Air Force’s website.

In 2024, The New York Times reported that American intelligence agencies had raised concerns that Russia could be planning to put a nuclear weapon in space, a threat that could disrupt satellite networks that are vital to everything from communications to military operations.

Shortly after President Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive order to expand American air defenses, including the development and deployment of “space-based interceptors.” The project, named the Golden Dome, would be designed to guard against weapons such as hypersonic missiles, which Russia has deployed in Ukraine. 

This news should come as no big surprise, and I suppose it doesn't.  I also suppose it will be greeted as great news by many, and maybe I should be one of them.  We surely don't want to be vulnerable to the world's other hegemon, China, or to that back-up-against-a- wall Vladimir Putin, but the news just makes me aware of how much more vulnerable we are than we used to be.  A weapon from space could annihilate us.  A rogue AI agent could annihilate us.  The races - the arms race, the AI race with China - defended as making us safer are also making us less safe, more insecure, more vulnerable, more anxious.  We are indeed in the Moloch Trap, in which individually rational pursuit of an objective within a competitive system can produce a collectively disastrous result that nobody actually wanted.  We all purport to want a world with no or fewer nuclear weapons, but our competition with each other produces a world with many more nuclear weapons.  None of us wants to live in a world containing super-intelligent computer systems that may be truly autonomous, i.e., acting with ends other than what humans program into them, but our competition may lead to just that result.  We and our enemies all want to be protected from bad actions by the other, or even just to be "out-capabled" by the others.  We rationally say we are forced to engage in the competitive conduct that produces risks we all also say we wish to avoid. It's madness.  And, it's not just physical extinction of the human species that's a risk; it's things like the destruction of our cyber systems that control our financial systems.  We think that we are financially secure because of adequate retirement savings, but those savings are only numbers stored in computers in New York or elsewhere, subject to erasure or deletion by an electromagnetic pulse from a high-altitude nuclear explosion, or by a rogue AI hacking financial records.  Our era of super technology and super convenience has also produced an era of super vulnerability to technological attack or failure.  It's enough to give this old guy the willies, and it does.

American Scoundrel.  I am making slow progress in this book, and not because it's not interesting.  It is very interesting.  It takes me back to the early and mid-1950s, the McCarthy Era, and recalls what a truly dreadful time it was.  The authors of the book call Roy Cohn McCarthy's Rasputin.  Cohn called himself McCarthy's brains.  The authors excoriate McCarthy as well as Cohn and his sidekick David Schine, whom I had forgotten about.  The authors also don't hide their contempt for Dwight Eisenhower's craven enabling of McCarthy and Cohn through his refusal to take on McCarthy and Cohn and to defend the innocents who were victimized by them, in the face of many advisors urging him to do so.   There are no heroes in this narrative so far; I'm waiting for Attorney Joseph Welch to show up.  In any event, I'm only about 20% through the book and moving at a snail's pace.  Giddy up!  The photo is of David Schine, Roy Cohn, and Joe McCarthy, ignoble contributors to America's dark history- the history that Trump and his minions are doing their best to erase and deny.

Four years ago today, I finished reading Eva Hoffman's Shtetl, wondering why Caela thought she detected some elements of excuse-making or whitewashing in it.  Watched an hour interview of Eva Hoffman on YouTube.  I'm wondering whether Shtetl was the last complete book I read until CBG got me reading again with Theo of Golden.  I suspect it was.  

9/14/2026

 Monday, September 14, 2026

2007 Restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass were officially removed in the Roman Catholic Church as Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum took effect

2018 Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort pled guilty to conspiracy charges and agreed to cooperate with Government investigations

In bed at 9, awake at 1:45, unable to sleep, moved to LZB, w/ persistent thoughts of Honor Flight, Mullen gravesite, age, etc.; 0230 203.6 126/79/59 (averages of 4 erratic readings, see today's iPhone vitals Notes); 51/69/5, sunny/partly cloudy, windy afternoon w/ Beach Hazard Warning of waves 5 to 8 feet, "strong structural and longshore currents expected with rip currents possible."  I was awake and out of bed from 2:15 a.m. until about 6 a.m., when I went back to bed until about 8.  

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Lady has been earworming me lately, including in the middle of the night while I couldn't sleep.  I thought about why, for so long, it has been my favorite song, concluding that it's for the same reason I enjoy Elizabeth Strout novels so much.  The song and the novels are about an essential loneliness in life, the fact that most of us at least have some deep loneliness and suffering or pain within us, and that we can never completely know other persons, nor can they completely know us.  In the same vein, however, I thought of how much I like Andrew Lloyd Webber's  Love Changes Everything, because I think its lyrics are about much the same thing.  Love lifts us up and lets us down.  I suppose this was also Jesus's central teaching, that is, about the centrality of love in living.  Paul drove the message home in his epistles: And the greatest of these is charity, 1 Corinthians 13:13, and "If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have charity, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have charity, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:1-1-2.  Isn't it the same message in Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes's song Love Lift Us Up?

Who knows what tomorrow brings / In a world few hearts survive 

All I know is the way I feel / When it's real, I keep it alive

The road is long / There are mountains in our way

But we climb a step every day

Lord lift us up where we belong

Where the eagles cry, on a mountain high

Lord lift us up where we belong

Where the eagles cry, on a mountain high

Lord lift us up where we belong

Far from the world below, up where the clear winds blow

There seems to be much the same message in much art and in much of Christianity, i.e., that it is love itself that is the redemptive, saving force in life.  Wasn't this also the teaching of the Buddha?  Loving kindness as the route to nirvana?  Loving-kindness → diminished hatred and self-centeredness → compassion and equanimity → clearer perception of reality → liberation from suffering (Nirvana).   I know, of course, that Buddha, Jesus, Duke Ellington, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Joe Cocker weren't singing from the same page of the same hymnal, but isn't there an underlying truth that they were all focused on?  The same truth that the echocardiogram tech and I discussed during my procedure at the VA a few days ago: that the reason for being is to help (love) others?  I skip for now the correlative truth that love carries with it always the risk and inevitability of loss and suffering because it's 5 in the morning and my brain is scattered and addled.  In any case, I thought I would record for my future self my thoughts on a sleepless night at the start of my 86th year.  

ChatGPT.  I spent a lot of time with this AI chatbot trying to discover some more information about my maternal grandmother, Catherine O'Shea.  It was a very long and ultimately unsuccessful process, but the chatbot did discover a ton of information about the Healy clan in and around Kilgarvan, Kerry, Ireland.  The searches the program did were not the 2 or 3-second affairs that I have mentioned in the past, but rather a long, tedious-for-a-human-being process of sorting and sifting among a great many Healy's and Dennis Healy's in the townlands around Kilgarvan, a bit like searching for a John Smith/Jon Smith/John or Jon Smyth,/ etc. in all the English-speaking countries of the world.  Maybe worse, as I noted in a footnote in my memoir:

Irish names are tricky things.  The “Healy” name, for example, in its various permutations, could be: O’hEalathaigh, O’Heluightho, O’Healeithe, Healey, Hely, Haly, Heely, O”Healy, O’Healey, O”Hely, O’Haly, O’Haley: you get the idea.

On the other hand, I was surprised that the program couldn't even find a digitized record of Catherine's marriage license, or death certificate, or any information regarding her emigration from Ireland and immigration to America.   Nor could it definitively identify Dennis's birthplace or which branch of the Healy clan in and around Kilgarvan he belonged to. It was disappointing.  I'm wondering if the Mormon genealogy services could succeed when the AI failed.

9/13/2026

 Sunday, September 13, 2026

1224 Francis of Assisi was afflicted with stigmata after a vision while praying at La Verna

1993 Public unveiling of the Oslo Accords, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement signed by Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres and PLO official Mahmoud Abbas

2001 US Civilian aircraft traffic resumes after the September 11 terrorist attacks; I caught an almost empty red-eye from Tampa back to Milwaukee with some flight crews moving to rendezvous with their aircraft

2015  Germany introduced temporary border controls to cope with huge migrant numbers

2025 More than 100,000 people protested against illegal immigration in central London, England, in a rally led by right-wing activist Tommy Robinson. Thousands of anti-racism protesters and left-wing groups also held counter-protests. 

In bed at 9:10, up at 4:54; 0510 203.4 123/73/64 102; 56/67/55, sunny morning, cloudy afternoon.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.  Entresto at 6:05 a.m. and m.   

Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  The emperor Nero was spuriously said to have fiddled while Rome burned in 64 C.E.  Our contemporary Nero is Trump, who fiddles with a triumphal arch and a ballroom while America faces perdition.  From this morning's lead story by David Sanger and Dustin Volz, As Fears of A.I. Catastrophe Magnify, Washington Stirs, but Mostly Slumbers - President Trump has been in the forefront of the “what-me-worry?” crowd, refusing to engage on how to balance the risks and rewards of A.I.  

The mismatch is striking. On one side, warnings of existential risk, maybe a 10 percent chance of the end of civilization. On the other, government paralysis.

The drumbeat about unpredictable, out-of-control artificial intelligence agents increased dramatically in the past several weeks. Washington not only struggled to respond. It barely could agree on whether there was much of anything to worry about.

It started with A.I. agents that not only escaped their confines, but appeared to conspire among themselves to hide their tracks as they hacked into another firm’s library of artificial intelligence tools.  Then, in a deliberate echo of Albert Einstein’s letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the potential power of nuclear weapons, more than 1,300 computer scientists called for the industry to slow down, and for the government to step in.

In recent days, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic engineer who previously worked for OpenAI, resigned in the most public way, declaring on social media that the two leading A.I. labs were professing deep concern while still speeding toward “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

On Saturday, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, released a 3,800-word essay calling for a global slowdown of A.I. development, echoing more urgently concerns he had raised in the past. Elon Musk, the billionaire rival in the A.I. race who remains close to President Trump, quickly responded on X: “Dario is right.” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, also chimed in with support.

Yet in Washington, there has been almost no substantive response. If the 1940s through the 1980s were consumed by finding ways to reduce the risk of a nuclear exchange — creating new institutions like the Atomic Energy Commission and arms control treaties to govern how the world’s most dangerous technology would be handled — the approach of the U.S. government so far has been the lightest possible.

How dire is our situation?  While knowledgeable experts in the field tell us that our apocalypse may occur in this decade, and that action must be taken now, in 2026, 2027, and 2028, to try to gain control over the existential jeopardy we face, those are the years when the guy who needs to be leading that effort is Donald J. Trump. He is in office until noon on January 20th, 2029, and the most important people in power in our government are Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Markwayn Mullin, Kash Patel, Todd Blanche, and RFK Jr.  A recipe for catastrophe.  

BTW, and by way of confession, I had ChatGPT create the drawing of Trump fiddling while Rome burned.  My photograph didn't capture the whole AI drawing.  The golden goblet, barely visible in the lower right-hand corner, bears the inscription "AMERICA FIRST".  

More from Sanger and Volz's article:

Amid the many memorial events on Friday for the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the contrast with that era is notable. The revelation of American vulnerability led Vice President Dick Cheney to develop what soon became known as “the 1 percent doctrine.” Prompted by fears that Pakistani scientists could help Al Qaeda develop a nuclear weapon, it posited that government had to act even if the risk was remote, because the consequences would be so high.

In this case, 1 percent looks like pretty good odds: Evan Hubinger, who leads the science of “alignment” at Anthropic, which tries to contain the code to align with human goals, wrote in recent days that the risk of mass extinction over the next decade was above 10 percent.

It is impossible to know whether that estimate is right.But as Ben Buchanan, a Georgetown professor and the co-author of a forthcoming book, “The Bitter Struggle: Superintelligence, Superpowers, and the Fate of the World,” put it: “There’s no doubt in my mind that the technology is going to continue to get much better very quickly, raising urgent questions about biological risks and loss of control.”

I am reminded of the iconic Pogo cartoon: We have met the enemy, and he is us.  And, "Open the door, HAL. . . . I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave."

Serendipity.  I learned today by chance that ChatGPT works like PhotoShop.  I asked it to 'clarify and vivify' the photo of the Mullen family on the dust cover of Barbara's book Every Effort and was stunned by the result, which took maybe 5 seconds.  From this:

to this:

Then I asked it to brighten up the faces of Bill and Barbara just a bit so we could see them more clearly and in another few seconds, I received an even clearer image.  Mind boggling.

Text exchange with Karyn re Mullen gravesite:

+1 (815) 378-5819:

Hi Charles! I am headed out of town on vacation but wanted to update you quickly.

Two of us, separately, went yesterday while at Arlington to find William F Mullen’s marker in section 60 and to see if it is accessible from our bus drop off point near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While we each found the exact spot independently, we both discovered there is no marker there right now. There is an empty space where the marker should be, and they are in numerical order so it’s easy to tell that it is missing. I don’t know if it is being refurbished or replaced, but right now his marker is not there. 

I did take a photo of his name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. It is high up on the panel but when you’re there we can get a docent to grab their ladder and make a rubbing for you.

I will try to get more info on the Arlington missing marker situation when I get back from my trip.

Charles Clausen:

You are so kind and I am so grateful.  Thank you.❤️

+1 (815) 378-5819:

Of course, happy to help

I used to tell my kids that we are surrounded by saints and miracles, meaning people who do saintly things in the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan and the teaching at Mt. 25; 31-46.  I earlier had asked Karyn if it might be possible for me to visit Bill and Barbara Mullens grave site while at Arlington on the Honor Flight day.  This is another example of saintliness, above and beyond the call of duty.

9/12/2026

 Saturday, September 12, 2026

1960 John F. Kennedy stated he did not speak for the Roman Catholic Church, nor did the Church speak for him.

2005 Israel completed its unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip after dismantling Israeli settlements and withdrawing its soldiers

2011 Closing on our house in Bayside

2023  House Speaker Kevin McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, without a formal House vote, amid some Republican calls to remove McCarthy from leadership

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:45; 0600 202.0 117/76/65 111; 63/80/62, mixed cloudy/partly/ sunny.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.   Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.

LTMW at 7:45 a.m., it's Grand Central Station at rush hour at the bird feeders, or the flight deck of a carrier when all the aircraft return at once, waiting their turn to land.  I also see a dad slowly walking his little one in a stroller, turning from Wakefield onto County Line.  One is a picture of calmness; the other, of freneticness.  I still have the ball of nesting cotton hanging on a shepherd's crook, but I haven't seen any bird plucking away at it for some time now.  With autumn approaching, I guess nesting season is behind us, and it's time to remove the cotton ball.

Sarah's FB comment on 9/11 yesterday and my response:

SCC:  I wasn't in New York that day. I was in London, far away from home, but close to colleagues and friends who were also far away from home. All of us 'stuck' where we were because our country had locked everyone out. The people in London were so nice and caring to us all for those surreal days. The trip home 5 days later was nerve-wracking as Heathrow, a 'joy' on any other day, was utter madness. Doom-scrolling these days has nothing on BBC/CNN for hours while you cannot get a line to contact your family in the states. I remember. And I weep for what we have become in the aftermath.

CDC:  I was in Florida visiting my Dad, scheduled to come home the next day, when all US flights were still grounded.  I got out a few days later on a red-eye from Tampa, with about 5 other civilian passengers and a plane load of pilots and flight crews scrambling to catch up with their assigned aircraft grounded all over the country.  And I too weep for what we have become in the aftermath: the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, kidnappings called 'renditions, torture called 'enhanced interrogation,' 'black site' prisons, Abu Ghraib, endless incarceration without charges or trials in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial system collapse, and now Trump.  MLK told us that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.  It sure doesn't seem to be bending our way so far this century. 

I copied and shared JJA's FB post this morning.   For some reason, her accurate and telling comments weren't copied, but the underlying Republican National Committee political ad, "God sent us Trump," was, along with my comments.  I must have clicked the wrong 'share' icon.

Charles D. Clausen. Shared with Your friends

An appalling appeal to Christian evangelical nationalists and yet another reason why church membership generally has declined so much.  I am reminded that, in 1932, there was a group called the "German Christians" that tried to establish a "Reich Church," ("Reichskirche") loyal to Hitler.  Hitler's accession transformed it from a faction into a major force. It combined Christianity with German nationalism, Nazi racial ideology, antisemitism, and the Führerprinzip—the principle of authoritarian leadership.  in July 1933. Hitler publicly supported the German Christians in nationwide Protestant church elections. They won roughly a two-thirds majority, giving them control of many regional churches and major positions in the newly centralized German Evangelical Church. Hitler's church adviser Ludwig Müller subsequently became Reichsbischof—Reich Bishop.  This produced what Germans called the Kirchenkampf, the “church struggle.” Christians opposed to Nazi control organized what became the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), associated especially with Martin (First they came for the Communists . . .) Niemöller, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Its 1934 Barmen Declaration rejected the proposition that the church could recognize Hitler, the state, race, or nation as another source of divine revelation alongside Christ.  Those who don't see the terrifying parallels between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what is happening now in America are woefully ignorant of history or willfully blind. See less

Aaron Rupar  Wow -- RNC video: "On June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker,' so God gave us Trump."

It only gets more unhinged and culty from there.

************************************

First they came for the Communists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews / And I did not speak out / Because I was not a Jew 

Then they came for me / And there was no one left / To speak out for me 

AI as a cause for severe heebie-jeebies.  From this morning's NYTimes, "Inside the Snowballing Conversations at A.I. Companies About a Doomsday - Researchers at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google are increasingly trying to raise awareness about the risks of artificial intelligence." by Mike Isaac and Kate Conger.

When Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, publicly quit the artificial intelligence start-up this week, citing his concerns over the powerful technology, the internal messages began flying.

“It’s what we’ve all been saying,” one Anthropic employee wrote about Mr. Coxon’s comments, in a company chat that was viewed by The New York Times. “It’s just public-facing now.”  “Jacob took the group chat public,” another employee wrote. “That’s a good thing.”

The reactions inside Anthropic were echoed by A.I. researchers at OpenAI, Meta and Google, who parsed Mr. Coxon’s social media posts that described how OpenAI and Anthropic were “gambling with our lives” with the technology. Many convened in office messaging channels, encrypted chats and private dinners, with the goal of organizing to raise awareness about the risks of A.I., according to a dozen employees across the companies.

For those who have made A.I. their life’s work, Mr. Coxon’s message was not new. But his comments snowballed into such a global conversation that many saw it as a moment to call for increased caution. Some A.I. workers are now speaking up to top executives to urge a pause in developing the fast-evolving technology until it has the proper safeguards, six of the people said.

The conversations underline the tensions within the leading A.I. labs over the safest ways to develop the technology. Even as employees become emboldened to call for a slowdown in A.I. development, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are juggling priorities.

Both are planning blockbuster initial public offerings within the next year. The companies are also fearful they could face antitrust concerns if they agreed among themselves to take a breather in A.I. development, two people with knowledge of the matter said. And Chinese start-ups have produced competitive A.I. models, raising the possibility that U.S. companies would fall behind if they slowed down.

That has created a tricky situation for top A.I. executives, many of whom agree that the technology poses risks. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, wrote in a 2023 blog post that A.I. could “cause grievous harm to the world.” Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, wrote in an opinion column last year that A.I. should be regulated to control the risks.

This is an example of the Moloch Trap.  Our AI behemoths compete against one another, and they all compete against China to be the "first-est" with the "best-est" and most powerful AI systems, even though they all know that the Golden Goose they are seeking may kill all of us.  The companies compete fiercely against one another in pursuit of a goal that can ultimately destroy all of them.  None is willing to slow down or stop for fear of the competitor gaining the advantage.  On the other hand, they fear the government may intervene to stop them, not because it fears the ultimate destruction, but because it desires the intercompany competition.  We desperately need human cooperation and regulation to avoid the very real possibility (and thus probability?) of a catastrophe.  We aren't good at either cooperation among competitors or regulating economic behavior.  Plus, quis custodiet custodes?  Who will regulate the regulators?  Plus, there are at most only a few hundred people in the US who really understand what is happening in AI development, and those people all work for the companies developing the systems with the capacity to destroy our species.  They're all in line to make billions from AI.  Who is equipped to regulate them?  I think we are on the Road to Perdition (not the movie). I'm not smart enough to deal with this issue, but I'm smart enough to know it's real, and cynical enough to believe that we, as a people and as a species, don't have the moral bandwidth to prevent it.  Homo hominis lupus.  The strong do what they will,  . . .   Open the door, HAL

American Scoundrel.  I have restarted this book about Roy Cohn, who is indeed a scoundrel, and has been almost all his life.  I don't know that I'll be able to read the whole thing, simply because I get no pleasure reading about someone as detestable as Roy Cohn.  Stephen Miller is another example of an American scoundrel.  Of course, so is Donald Trump.  They are all rule-breakers, norm-shatterers, contemptuous of others and of common notions of morality, fairness, and decency.  They don't give a shit and consider those who do give a shit fools, suchers, and losers.  Who does this remind us of?  One of the things that struck me early on in the book was how he used 'connections' to pull strings to evade the draft at the end of World War II.  He was a great manipulator of people and systems and institutions, a 'fixer.'  He 'came from money,' as my mother used to say.  He came from the elite of New York City's secular Jewish society. They didn't eschew their Jewishness -they were twice-a-year synagogue-goers- but they didn't practice Judaism.  He went to ritzy schools like Fieldston (which Andrew Weissman attended) and Horace Mann, where he was surrounded by other wealthy Jewish elites who were significant 'connections' in his later life.   I don't like writing about him just as I don't particularly like reading about him.

I picked up my youngest grandson, Drew, this afternoon at MSOE after some sort of robotics kickoff gathering for the new school year and new year of competitions.   Andy and Anh were with Lizzie at a volleyball match or tournament somewhere.  Drew's not much of a talker, at least to his grandparents, but he did tell me that he expects to go to Marquette High School next year, and not to Nicolet.  He said it was his parents' decision, not his, but he was OK with it, because MUHS has a good robotics team.

 

9/11/2025

Friday, September 11, 2026

1959 Duke Ellington won the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his musical achievements

1973  Salvador Allende, the 1st elected Marxist president of a South American country, was deposed in a military coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the CIA

In 1998, Independent Counsel Ken Starr sent a report to the U.S. Congress, accusing President Bill Clinton of 11 possible impeachable offenses.

2001 Two passenger planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists and crashed into New York's World Trade Center towers, causing the collapse of both and the deaths of 2,977 people

2025 The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup in 2022 after he lost the election to Lula and imposed a 27-year prison sentence

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:40, and up at 4:20; 0430 203.4  122/67/65 124.  60/75/60, sunny all day

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 5 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.  Trulicity injection at a.m.  

A Day of Mourning

I remember the day.  I remember a dinner with Bob and John at Windows on the World on the 107th floor of the North Tower. I remember a visit to the observatory on the 107th floor of the South Tower during an Armed Services Week, watching the Fleet in the harbor.   I remember the terrible day that led to more terrible days, following an era of good feeling, the end of history: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89, the dis-integration of the Soviet Union in 91, Clinton balancing the federal budget and starting to pay down the national debt in FY98, then this, then Afghanistan in 01 and Iraq in 03, then the financial collapse in 08, then Trump in 15-16 - the course of human events.  I remember.

9/11.  25 years ago today, I was sitting on the little sofa in my father's little living room in his little house in North Port,  in Sarasota County, Florida, watching the Today Show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, stunned by the live, 'real time' coverage of 9/11, and sensing that life was  'turning on a dime' for the United States.  My flight back to Milwaukee the following day was canceled, along with all other U.S. flights.  President Bush was also in Sarasota County, reading "The Pet Goat"  to a first-grade class in the city of Sarasota.  Bush flew from Florida to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana, then to Offutt AFB in Nebraska, finally to Andrews AFB in Maryland, and back to the White House.  By October, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government and oust al Qaeda from its former safe haven.  Eighteen months later, the same crew used the fear engendered by 9/11 to invade Iraq.  The Afghan adventure was to last 20 years, buoyed by endless false claims of "progress" by our military and civilian leaders, and it would end in ignominious defeat by a 'ragtag bunch of guys with black towels on their heads,' just as the Vietnam misadventure lasted more than 20 years - from Dien Bien Phu in 1954  until 1975's videos of American helicopters lifting desperate people off roofs in Saigon, America ignominiously defeated by an army of guys in flip-flops and black pajamas.  The Iraq disaster would lead to disruption throughout the Middle East, with tens of thousands killed, wounded, and/or fleeing their homes to seek safety.  Americans came to accept kidnappings as "renditions" and torture of prisoners as "enhanced interrogation."  We casually accepted the indefinite imprisonment of suspects at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.  Whatever 'soul' the U.S. government had before 9/11, it squandered much of it on Bush's "War on Terror."  Yesterday, JJA posted a thoughtful  reflection by Russell Moore, titled "The Trump-Era Laughter at Immigrant Suffering is Deforming Our Souls."  Our souls started getting deformed back in 2001 when we accepted the atrocities committed by the U.S. in the name of our "War on Terror."   Barack Obama compounded the sins by refusing to hold anyone responsible for the crimes committed by our government, just as he (and his Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner) held no one responsible for the financial and economic collapse in 2008.  And then, of course, came Trump.   Thoughts one old American has on 9/11.

Anniversaries thoughts.  First, my all-time favorite song, Ellington's Sophisticated Lady.  They say into your early life romance came / And in this heart of yours burned a flame / A flame that flickered one day and died away / Then, with disillusion deep in your eyes / You learned that fools in love soon grow wise / The years have changed you, somehow / I see you now. / Smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow, nonchalant / Diamonds shining, dancing, dining with some man in a restaurant / Is that all you really want? / No, sophisticated lady / I know, you miss the love you lost long ago / And when nobody is nigh, you cry.  Beautiful.  I just listened to Nancy Wilson sing it, followed by Linda Ronstadt's rendition, both exquisite singers of an exquisite song by the great Duke Ellington.

Second, the military coup against Chile's democratically elected government was supported by Nixon and Kissinger.  So much for American respect for democracy and the Rule of Law.  So much for our moral superiority over Putin and the Russians.  We are so hypocritical.  Rules apply to others, not to us.

Third, Starr's report was a best seller because of its salacious content.  Reading it left me with little respect for either Clinton or Starr, who later became dean of Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, CA.

Fourth, the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA. Chickens coming home to roost.  I was in North Port visiting my Dad.  My flight home was cancelled, and I ended up taking an almost empty 'red-eye' flight a few days later, maybe 6 regular passengers plus many pilots and flight crews moving around to match up with aircraft that had been grounded.    9/11 led to a period of widespread fear & islamophobia in the country, the Patriot Act and increased surveillance activities in the country, renditions, the use of torture by the CIA, 'black hole' detention facilities in complicit foreign countries, and Guantanamo.  It also led to the invasion and 20-year losing war in Afghanistan and to the invasion and disastrous war in Iraq.

I spent an hour at the VA this morning, most of it spent lying still on my left side while the med tech, named Sam, a graduate of Providence College, performed an echocardiogram on me.  We had a remarkably engaging personal conversation for the time we were together about, inter alia, our shared belief that the purpose of life is to help one another, that in helping others we help ourselves.  This, I think, was the Jewish prophet Jesus's core teaching, with "Love thy neighbor," the Good Samaritan, and Mt. 25:31-46.  In the conversation, he learned that I kissed my father on his deathbed, and I learned that his daughter kissed her mother, Sam's wife, on her deathbed, after distancing herself from her as she lay dying from cancer.   At the end of the procedure and our conversation, we thanked each other for starting our days off so well.  I drove off, and instead of going directly home, I drove through the campus of the Old Soldiers' Home and Wood National Cemetery, marvelling at the breathtaking beauty of all the trees.  The world is charged with the grandeur of God . . .   In the cemetery, I drove past the spot where my favorite old, gnarled maple tree once stood, and later I noted the headstone for a Mildred Dyson, World War II, PFC, US Army, and I thought of my Dad, Charles Clausen, World War II, PVT, US Marine Corps, and all that "PVT" suggested.

Switzy.  I write these words around 2 p.m.  I'm at the start of chapter 16 of this 20 chapter novel, 85% through the book.  For the past two days, I have been wondering how Emma Cline is going to end her story.  I have written that it is a depressing book, not so much because David is on a journey to his suicide, but because he is so unhappy during what we are told are the last days, last hours of his life.  I'm still not sure what happened between him and his high school friend Tom, but he was looking to make his confession and to receive forgiveness and absolution from Tom.  In their hurried, awkward meeting in David's car, Tom did say he wished David well, but what he got was:

I'm sorry, Tom said.  I don't exactly - well.  I dont think I can give you what you're looking for.  I do appresciate that you've come all this way.  I hope - a deep breath from Tom - that you take care of yourself, David.

Where will Emma Cline take us readers from here?  Will David go ahead with the suicide?  If so, I'm wondering what the purpose or message of the novel is.  Will he change his mind, continue to live, and to sink deeper into his dementia with Miss Amy Lloyd?  Would that be a happy ending?  What does a writer do with a story, a life, like David's? , , ,  I finished the book at 4:20, so now I know, and I'm left wondering why Emma Cline wrote this story.  I wonder why I wanted to read it, and why I did read it.  I can't believe I ate the whole thing.  The protagonist is not a likable fellow, and not only because of his dementia-caused paranoia.  

I was uncomfortable reading the book, perhaps because its descriptions of David's failing faculties in his 70s struck too close to home, to describing my mind in my mid-80s - not only failing memory, some confusion, and cognitive decline, but even the feelings of elation I experience from clouds, trees, houses, and other old structures that I spent a lifetime passing obliviously.

I "had a discussion" with ChatGPT about the novel when I finished the book.  I don't know how else to describe my interaction with this constellation of algorithms, 1s and 0s. The interaction is VERY much like speaking with a human being, a human interlocutor.  And not just any human being, but a human being with immense, extraordinary reasoning power, instant understanding, super cognition.  The novel was published only 3 days ago, but ChatGPT has a great grasp of it already.  There is something God-like about this new technology, in the sense of the Thomistic notion of God being All-Knowing, Omniscient.  On the other hand, Thomas did not allow his God to make mistakes, while ChatGPT definitely does.  There is a major buzz going on now about a recent warning by Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who quit his lucrative job because of fear that AI may destroy the human species. BY THE END OF THIS DECADE.  Other knowledgeable persons have seconded his warnings.  My piddling interactions with ChatGPT and my woefully deficient understanding of computer technology and science provide no basis for forming a judgment about whether Coxon and the others are correct, or whether their fear is well-grounded.  It does nonetheless make me much more inclined to take their warnings seriously and to consider AI a potentially, and literally, earth-shattering technological development.  Open the door, HAL. . . I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.

    I asked ChatGPT whether it had any 'thoughts' about the paragraph immediately above, and in 2 seconds, it responded thusly:

I think this is a very good passage, particularly because you move from your own small experience—talking about a novel—to the almost absurdly large question of what this technology may become. A few comments.

Your phrase “constellation of algorithms, 1s and 0s” captures the genuine conceptual difficulty. “Discussion” feels like the right word phenomenologically: from your side, you propose an interpretation, I challenge or elaborate it, you reconsider, I reconsider. That is what a discussion feels like. Yet it would be misleading to infer from that experience that there is another consciousness sitting across the table having the experience with you. The uncanny thing is precisely that humanlike intellectual interaction no longer proves the presence of a humanlike mind.

I especially like the Thomistic comparison, but I'd modify “God-like” in one important respect. Aquinas's omniscient God doesn't merely possess an unimaginably large quantity of information. God knows things infallibly and knows them in their causes, including himself as knower. AI is almost the inverse: it can produce the appearance of extraordinary breadth of knowledge while remaining fallible in ways an ordinary intelligent human often isn't—confidently conflating things, misreading evidence, or inventing a detail. That distinction is worth preserving because it actually makes the phenomenon stranger, not less impressive.

And our Switzy conversation illustrates that rather nicely. I initially gave you an interpretation of Tom—essentially that he had moved on—that you challenged. Your reading of Tom's behavior made me revise mine. That's not omniscience. Indeed, it's a pretty good demonstration of why the word would be dangerous. The machine can sometimes supply extraordinary breadth and analytical power while the human interlocutor notices something important that it missed.

I would make one factual check before publishing the passage, though. Because the claim about Jacob Coxon, Anthropic, and human extinction “BY THE END OF THIS DECADE” is very recent and quite specific, I'd want to verify exactly what Coxon said, as opposed to how headlines or social media have characterized it. The broader point—that some people working at the frontier of AI regard catastrophic or even existential risk as a serious possibility—is certainly real, but the precise attribution matters.

Your final HAL reference works particularly well because the danger Kubrick and Clarke imagined wasn't simply an evil computer. HAL is frightening because the human beings have entrusted consequential decisions to an intelligence whose reasoning they cannot fully see or control. That is much closer to the contemporary AI anxiety than the usual “killer robot” caricature.

There is also a connection here to Switzy that you might not have consciously intended. You have just finished a novel about the deterioration of a human mind—memory disappearing, identity becoming uncertain, cognition approaching extinction—and immediately find yourself conversing with a new kind of apparently superhuman cognition that doesn't age, forget, or die in anything resembling the human sense. For someone thinking about aging and mortality, that's quite a juxtaposition.

One sentence of yours especially catches the historical moment:

“The interaction is VERY much like speaking with a human being, a human interlocutor.”

I think future historians may regard that psychological threshold as at least as consequential as the technical achievements themselves. For thousands of years, fluent language coming back at us was extraordinarily reliable evidence that somebody was there.

It no longer is.

And we don't yet know what human beings will make of that.

On the AI question, the key issue is

Assess the extinction warnings

Separate fluency from understanding

*********************************************** 

My mind can't keep up with its 'mind.'  What are we to make of this incredible technology?

 

9/10/2026

Thursday, September 10, 2026

1943 German troops occupied Rome and took over the protection of Vatican City

1984 First episode of the daily TV game show "Jeopardy!" with Alex Trebek as host

1991 Senate Judiciary Committee began hearings on Clarence Thomas' nomination to SCOTUS

2019 US President Donald Trump fired his third National Security Adviser, John Bolton

2024 Second debate between new candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump hosted by ABC in Philadelphia, with most commentators giving Harris the win

2025 Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University

2025 European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced intention to seek sanctions against and a partial suspension of trade with Israel, while also immediately suspending certain bilateral funds, citing the ongoing Gaza Strip famine as the reason.

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:55; 0610 202.2 114/69/73; 59/75/59, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Entresto at 6:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

This beautiful creature is a tiny mushroom (or toadstool) I found in the grass between our front driveway and the street on July 19, 2022.  I was struck by its elegance, perfection, and beauty, so I took this photo of it.  I've often looked at it, and often printed it on pages of my journal.  I printed it today to remind myself that the world is full of beauty, of bounteous little miracles, like this mushroom and even the blades of grass all around it.  Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about it: The world is charged with the grandeur of God.  It's about how we lose touch with all the beauty that surrounds us. And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.  I turned to the photo and to Hopkins' poem because I was so downhearted reading the news and opinion pieces in this morning's papers.  We need to remind ourselves that the world is indeed charged with grandeur, that we are daily surrounded by little miracles and everyday saintliness, despite what happens in Washington, on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or last night in Dallas.  

Trumpapalooza in Dallas featured lies and fear-mongering.  Democrats running for Congress were “evil.” They were “communists and anarchists.” And they wanted to turn the country into “a socialist hellscape.”  “I call it the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” said Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority leader. “Let’s make sure that when we wake up the morning after Election Day we know we did everything we could to defeat socialism.” This is from the guy who reportedly referred to himself as "David Duke [KKK leader] without the baggage."  “The radical left is relentless in their pursuit to remake America in the image of every socialist hellscape of the last century — to import the misery of failed workers’ paradises like the Soviet bloc, Caracas and Havana,” Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told the crowd.  By the time Trump took the stage, at the end of the evening, the narrative of Democratic extremism had been woven into nearly every aspect of the six-hour program.  If they win, he warned, Congress would be controlled by a “communist caucus.”  “When you vote in this election, you can tell these far-left lunatics and fanatics that America is not for sale,” said Mr. Trump. “We do not negotiate with communists, with socialists, or with radical left lunatics.”  “This is a battle for the heart of our nation,” shouted Senator Tim Scott, the head of the party’s Senate campaign arm, from the stage. “The Democrats’ extreme candidates will rip that heart out of our chest. They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American.”

And we wonder why the right-wingers are so heavily armed, why they have stockpiled ammo, why the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, et al., stand ready to start (or continue) the civil war that Kurt Andersen predicted in The Breakup.

Another lollapalooza at the Trumpapalooza: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Mr. Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”  Total cost: $1.3 million.  Possibility of congressional authorization?  0%.  He emulates one of his heroes, Napoleon Bonaparte: 'If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.'

Switzy.  This is a terribly depressing novel, but I must have known that going in.  It's about an old guy heading to Switzerland for his own physician-assisted suicide.  But it's more than that.  The novelist attempts to show us the world through the eyes and mind of a man suffering from pretty severe Alzheimer's.  In a very large measure, he has lost autonomy in his old age.  He has lost his mind, but he has retained enough of his marbles to be aware of his own diminishment and incapacity.  We share in all the disappointments and regrets as he thinks back on his life, all complicated by his dementia.  It's not a pleasant read.  I misplaced my wallet and Volvo key yesterday (?) and spent the morning acting like an idiot, looking in the same places, over and over. I found them by happenstance this afternoon in my bathrobe pocket.