10/18/2026

 Sunday, October 18, 2026

1767 Boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Mason–Dixon line, was agreed upon

1867 US took possession of Alaska from Russia, after paying $7.2 million in the Alaska Purchase

1878 Edison made electricity available for household use

1900 Count Bernhard von Bülow became Chancellor of Germany, famously referring to Germany's need for a 'place in the sun' and a global empire

1952 The first issue of Mad Magazine was published

1961 Emergency crisis was declared in South Vietnam due to communist attack

1988 Israel's Supreme Court upheld ban on Kahane's Kach Party as racist

2023 At least 500 Palestinians were killed in an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, with local officials blaming an Israeli missile attack and Israelis blaming a misfired Palestinian rocket

2025 A series of No Kings protests against the Trump administration were held across the United States. Additional protests were held worldwide before several US embassies

In bed at 9, up at 2:05, sleepless; 0230 203.2 114/69/64 96; 41/29/62/40, sunny, windy day ahead.  Back to bed at 6:30, but I was unable to sleep to continue reading about Nan Goldin, and to write about he below.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.  Entresto at 5 a.m. and p.m.  I missed the evening med again, yech!😖

LTMW at 7:45 a.m., first I notice the plethora 😊 of birds above, on, and below our feeders.  On the ground, the doves and snowbirds are busy feedng on the abundance of seeds I spread last night. I'm surprised by how very many snowbirds there are.  do they travel in flocks?  At the feeders, there are mostly finches and chickadees on the tube feeder, with doves and cardinals on the tray feeder, and a sparrow going at the suet cake.  Every so often, a bird of one breed or another perches of the down-dipping branches of the locust tree above the feeding station.  It's cold outside and the suet cake is drawing much more traffic than usual.  I'll probably put out a second cake today (if I ever get dressed!)

While watching the birds and squirrels, I saw my Lebanese neighbor Ghasson walking his bull mastiff, Athena.  For some reason that I'll never understand, Athena has a habit of stopping on their walks where County Line Road bends onto Wakefield Court.  She stops walking and sits down, always looking west, down County Line.  What touches me when I so often see this, gazing out my window, is that Ghasson always stops too, and patiently wait while Athena looks back down County Line.  When his patience wears thin, he doesn't tug on Athena's leash, pressuring her neck.  He just walks up to her to pat her on the head or shoulder, reminding her that it's time to go home, whereupon Athena stands and resumes passeggiata.  On other occasions, I see other neighbors with small dogs that balk at walking simply pick their dogs up and carry them.  Yet other neighbors are pretty rough with their pups, yanking on their leashes and forcing them to stop resting, or sniffing whatever it is they find so worthy of sniffing on our or the neighbor's lawn.  On the day of the Honor Flight to Washington, I saw a dog owner pushing his dog in a stroller.  I'm reminded that when I would walk with my dear cat Blanche DuBois to Geri's house to visit her before we were married, Blanche would ride on my shoulder.  When we returned from our honeymoon trip to Ireland, our friend who was tending her in our absence informed us that she had gotten out somehow and was missing.  A week later, she showed up on Geri's front porch, never having walked there herself.  There's no particular point to any of thes, just some memories and observations.  The photo show what Blanche and I liked to do when we weren't walking.  She's been gone for almost 20 years now, and I still miss her.

Nan Goldin was not my favorite photographer, by any means.  She took photos of her own life and the lives of the LGBTQ+ 'tribe' with whom she lived and consorted, but she's a courageous person by anyone's reckoning,  Last night and early this morning,  I watched Laura Poitras's 2022 documentary about her, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.  The film is mostly about Goldin's semi-successful fights to force some modicum of justice from the Sackler family for their murderous marketing of Oxycontin, but it also contains some footage about Goldin's troubled early life and the effect on her at age 11 of her 18 year old sister Barbara's suicide.  Barbara died by lying down on a railroad track and being run over and torn up by the train.  In her pocket, she had a quote from Joseph Conrad's Hear of Darkness:

“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”

That thought gave me pause.  It still gives me pause.

Goldin, already famous for documenting marginal lives and later for her campaign against the Sackler family and opioid philanthropy, becomes for Moser a model of Jewish dissent expressed through moral witness. In the chapter, her anti-Zionism is presented less as an abstract theory than as a response to what she sees happening in Gaza in real time. The title comes from her formulation that Gaza is, in effect, “the Holocaust on our phones”—an intentionally shocking comparison rooted in the fact that images of destruction and suffering are now visible continuously and immediately. 

Moser follows Goldin through public protests and art-world confrontations, especially in Germany, where memory of the Holocaust has produced an unusually strong identification of support for Israel with postwar moral responsibility. Goldin attacks that equation. She argues that criticism of Israel, and even anti-Zionism, is not antisemitism, and that Holocaust memory should lead Jews and Germans toward solidarity with victims of state violence rather than toward automatic defense of Israel.  The chapter  shifts from the historical figures in the earlier parts of the book to a very current conflict over memory, Jewish identity, censorship, art, and political speech. Moser portrays Goldin as someone refusing what he sees as a central Zionist claim: that Jewish historical suffering necessarily validates or morally privileges a Jewish nation-state. Instead, her argument is that Jewish history imposes an obligation to recognize Palestinian suffering, even when doing so places her in conflict with Jewish institutions and with Germany’s official culture of Holocaust remembrance.  Like the other Jewish anti-Zionists discussed throughout the book, Goldin pain a price from Zionist Jews for her courage.

It was a very good ending to a very good book.  I'm glad I read it.

AI's effect on legal education.  The lead op-ed in the NYTimes today is titled " I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down."  I read a portion about it and saw it was a polemic about how business students quickly lose whatever altruistic goals they that may have led to business school in the socialization processes that occur with the school.  The same thing happens in law schools for sure and perhaps, I don't know, in medical and dental schools.  I've written about that elsewhere, though I don't know whether I could find it.  What the article and its headline made me think about is what radical effects AI will have on highter education and professional education generally.  A million years ago, make that maybe 30 years ago, when I was still on the faculty of MU's law school, I recall sitting on a sofa in front of the fireplace in our home on Newton Avenue grading final exams in a Civil Procedure class I taught.  As I did so, I recall thinking how incredibly inefficient and unnecessarily expensive legal education is, and how I and others in the professoriate and in law school administration profited from the inefficiency, and law student bore the cost.  That was 30 or more years ago, before most of us had an inkling of what was coming down the pike in the form of Artificial Intelligence.  Now anyone with an interest and access to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini should be able to get a professional legal education cheaply and at his or her own pace, at home.  Correction: I don't know whether any of the 'systems' or 'models' have been trained to replicate a typical law school curriculum, but I have no doubt whatsoever that could be.  Which will be the first law school, or first university, to experiment with AI-taught courses?  When it happens, which seems inevitable, how will the ABA, still the dominating accrediting authority, react?  Could legal education be radically restructured in ways that would make it both more effective in training new lawyers and less expensive and time-consuming?  That also seems inevitable.  The ABA (and most professional accrediting agencies) has long seen its role as protecting protecting the profession by establishing entry barriers, i.e. by making very hard to get into.  Ditto state bar associations who control bar examinations.  Abe Lincoln got admitted to the Illinois Bar by clerking for an already-admitted lawyer for a period of time, 'reading law,' and passing the bar exam.  Now most jurisdications require a 4 year undergraduate degree and 3 years of law school before a candidate is even eligible to 'sit for the bar exam.'  Legal education and the entities that govern eligibility to practice law have long needn't a swift, hard kick in the ass.  Let's see whether AI may deliver the boot.

As a relevant aside, I note that when I applied to law school in my last year in the Marines, 1967, the tuition was $500 a semester, $1,000 a year.  When I arrived, I discovered the tuition had risen to $575, or $1,150 a year.  Today tuition is $53,000, total estimated costs for a year at the law school, more than $76,000.  If the school's tuition had merely kept pace with inflation since 1967, it would be around $11,500 today, not $53,000.  In other words, the cost to obtain a Marquette law degree today, in inflation-adjusted terms, is 4.6 times as expensive as it was when I scraped together the money needed to attend from 1967 to 1970.  Are today's students 4.6 times better prepared to practice law today than Tom St. John, Tom Brown, Larry Anderson, and I were when we graduated in 1970?  I wouldn't bet on it.

After spending most of his adult life as a Marine, Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler wrote a book called War is a Racket.  After 25 years on a law school faculty, I would say the same thing about American legal education.

More memories

My only journal entry a year ago: Email to James Causey at JSOnline:

Thanks for another great article about a great problem and one effective way of addressing it.  It made me think back to the early 2000s when I mangaged the House of Peace at 17th and Walnut.  There was one food store in the neighborhood, a Sentry store a few blocks west of us.  It eventually shut down because of thefts.  We knew that Sentry didn’t want to close the store, but the problem of thefts and unprofitability eventually forced the closure.  The ‘business” at our free food bank, then supplied by the wonderful Sherrie Tussler at the Hunger Task Force, picked up considerably, but all we could supply was non-perishable food in cans and boxes, i.e., no fresh fruits, vegetables, or dairy.  We became part of a food desert.  I appreciate your pointing out the perfect storm that is developing under the current administration: rising food prices, fewer food sources, and reductions in the food stamp program.  Tariffs will only make the problem worse.  The nation’s needy, both rural and urban, have targets on their backs under this administration.  Those professing to be “Christian Nationalists” forget Mt. 25:31-46, especially the part about “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”  Thanks for another great and needed article.

Three years ago today, in the second week of Israel's war on Gaza, prescience?

How much is too much?  Most of the world was horrified by the news of Hamas' depradations, desacrations, and depravities in southern Israel on October 7th.  Throughout the world, but especially in the Western world, there were expressions of sympathy and support for Israelis and Israel and recognition of Israel's right to defend itself.  Knowing the history of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, I wonder whether the statements of American officials been so supportive as to give a green light, and more, to Netanyahu's government to engage in mass murders of civilians in Gaza?  Defense Secretary Austin has said that America's support of Israel is "ironclad"  and ""So, make no mistake: The United States will make sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself," essentially making the U.S. the partner not only the Israeli people, but of Israel's government, i.e., Natanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, et al.   "In terms of conditions that we would place on the security assistance that we're providing to Israel, we have not placed any conditions on the provision of this equipment," Austin said at NATO headquarters in Brussels.  "This is a professional military, led by professional leadership, and we would hope and expect that they would do the right things in the prosecution of their campaign," he said.  As he traveled around the region over the past week, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, making a point to Israelis and the world that he is a Jew, signaled that the Biden administration would have a high tolerance for whatever resulted from Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks.  And now President Biden has flown into Tel Aviv to appear with Netanyahu and publicly side with Netanyahu's version of who attacked the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.  I'm wondering if this is an example of the idea that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.  I believe there is much mutual hatred on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian abyss, that much blood has been shed and lives ruined by hostility and violence.  We know there are radical elements in Netanyahu's government and perhaps (I don't know) in the IDF.   Am I just a faint-hearted friend of Israel and the Jewish people?   Can we be permitted to wonder about religious and nationalistic extremists in Israel as freely as we wonder about such people in the U.S.?

Paradise Drive, rustic road.  I drove the balance due on our gutter and downspout replacement to C&K Services in Newburgh this afternoon and drove down to Paradise Drive on my very roundabout way home.  It's still beautiful, as is so much of the land in northern Ozaukee and Washington counties.  There are hardly any unharvested corn fields left; all the remains is stubble.  Some alfalfa or other crop is still in some fields but mostly the fields are brown and the surrounding trees yellow, gold, cerise, deep red, and green.  I drove through the Sugar Bush at Riveredge and down County O past Deerfield Drive.  So many beautiful farms and beautiful homes, so close to Milwaukee and never seen by most city dwellers.

More sad news.  Bill H. responded to my email about Lyn Felsenthal and told me Paula just got a positive report on a lung biopsy.

10/17/2026

Saturday, October 17, 2026

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

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

1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

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

2024 Israel claims to have killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, during a battle in Rafah, Gaza

2025 Israelis fired at a vehicle carrying a displaced family in Gaza City, killing eleven Palestinians, including seven children. The IDF claims it crossed the ceasefire demarcation line.

In bed at 9, up at 5; 0530 201.8 115/75/62 96; 34/27/55/34, sunny.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.  I've missed my evening meds each of the last two nights.😱 The alarm on my Apple Watch is not sounding.😧

Where and why I stopped reading. I only read this far in Nick Kristof's NY Times op-ed this morning:

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian,” Paul McCartney has said.

Perhaps for that reason, slaughterhouses and factory farms have not only thick walls but also often barbed wire fences. Yet every now and then we catch a peek of what goes on behind those walls. One glimpse comes from video taken by an undercover investigator who worked at a chicken slaughterhouse in Dobson, N.C., from June through September.

The investigator, an employee of the nonprofit Animal Outlook, shared the video with me, and it can also be seen on the Animal Outlook website. The scenes underscore the frantic pace of the assembly line — except that in this case it’s a disassembly line, in which the birds come apart.

My takeaway from this glimpse is that the inside of even a well-run slaughterhouse is a sickening sight and that the comforting narrative of humane slaughter — as federal law terms it — bears little relation to the horror that livestock and poultry often endure in their final moments on the way to our dinner plates.

I am confident that what Kristof wrote was accurate.  He's a careful and reliable reporter, not prone to making stuff up.  He's a Big Lib, a lefty with a capacious and aching heart that he often shares with his readers.  He seeks out and reports on the great injustices and suffering in the world.  He pricks our consciences, or perhaps I should say, pierces our consciences about our indifference to all that injustice and suffering.  He reminds me of what the fairies say in Yeats' The Stolen Child:  

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

He reminds me of an Ezra Klein interview of Kathryn Schulz on May 30, 2025, in which he said:

One of my most inconvenient beliefs about the world is that we now know too much about it and that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.”

And of course I thought of Ecclesiastes, ch. 1;

16 I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17 Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

And so I stopped reading, unable to burden myself with what Kristof promised: more knowledge of  "the horror that livestock and poultry often endure in their final moments on the way to our dinner plates."  And thus I don't know what his purpose was in writing the essay.  Was it to turn us all into vegans?  Or perhaps just to urge more rigorous enforcement of regulations intended to require "humane" slaughtering practices? Or to urge the promulgation of new and more effective regulations?  Regardless of his purpose, as I read his words, I thought to myself, "No.  I can't bear any more guilt."  Not every time I have a hamburger, a chicken sandwich, or a bratwurst.  Every time I eat meat.  Or, for that matter, every time I eat an egg, I've seen reports of terrible conditions for the hens at egg factories, even for the so-called "cage-free" birds.  

We are an omnivorous species, and for most of our history we have preyed upon other animals. Some religious people justify this by citing Genesis 1:26-28: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth…" and, after creating us male and female (a topic for another day) "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion…”   Most of us never think about it.  We need to eat, and we need protein.  Even Jesus ate fish, didn't he? And served it to his followers.  Can't we assume he also ate meat, prepared according to kashrut?  

Now there are about 350,000,000 people in the U.S. and more than 8,000,000,000 in the world.  In the  US, about 80% of the population lives in urban areas; in the world, about 58% lives in urban areas.  Reliance on factory farming and factory slaughterhouses has become the norm and may be a necessity for survival.  I surely believe that slaughtering farmed animals ought to be as "humane" (there's some irony in that term, isn't there?) as "practicable," and I suppose that is one of Kristof's points in his op-ed, but I recall the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which one of the hominids realizes that a large animal bone can be used as a tool and weapon.  The sequence shows him smashing animal bones, then using the bone to kill a tapir-like animal for food. The group subsequently eats meat. Soon afterward, the same tool is turned against a rival hominid group, and one of them is beaten to death.

As a species, we have been killing each other since long before the dawn of civilization.  We possess almost absolute power over the animals we breed, confine, transport, and kill for food, and with that power comes, for at least some of us, a moral obligation to minimize their suffering. Yet our history gives no reason to be confident about how "humanely" we use power. We have inflicted extraordinary cruelty even upon one another—upon members of our own species, who can speak, protest, remember, grieve, and beg us to stop. If we so often fail the human beings over whom we acquire power, it should not surprise us that we so often fail the animals, who are even more completely at our mercy.

 The snowbirds are back!!!  So beautiful!  Back in great numbers.

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History by Benjamin Moser.  An excerpt from  page 318 of chapter 11, "In bed wwit Apartheid: Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa," one of the most interesting chapters of the book.

Israel’s warm relations with the apartheid regime took many forms. The two countries saw themselves as part of the same struggle for civilization. “The Jordan Valley and the Zambezi Valley are alike frontiers today of the free world,” Radio South Africa declared in 1972. Sometimes, Israel’s equations would go too far even for the tastes of apartheid. In 1973, Ha’aretz, often viewed as a liberal publication, published a cartoon of African leaders as cannibals, only to find its “sheer racialism” decried and compared to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.” This was an uncommon slip. Israeli leaders were usually careful to respect the appearance of anti-racist language toward a regime shunned by most of the world. But after the 1973 war, which exposed Israel’s weakness, such caution was abandoned.

Moser, Benjamin. Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History (p. 318). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Israel’s warm relations with the apartheid regime took many forms. The two countries saw themselves as part of the same struggle for civilization. “The Jordan Valley and the Zambezi Valley are alike frontiers today of the free world,” Radio South Africa declared in 1972. Sometimes, Israel’s equations would go too far even for the tastes of apartheid. In 1973, Ha’aretz, often viewed as a liberal publication, published a cartoon of African leaders as cannibals, only to find its “sheer racialism” decried and compared to “the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.” This was an uncommon slip. Israeli leaders were usually careful to respect the appearance of anti-racist language toward a regime shunned by most of the world. But after the 1973 war, which exposed Israel’s weakness, such caution was abandoned. In 1975, South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, was welcomed to Jerusalem. Vorster was considered far-right even by the standards of Afrikaner nationalism. A Nazi in all but name, he held views that were so extreme that he had been interned in South Africa as a potential saboteur during World War II, and he took a harder line with regard to racial matters than even Verwoerd had. This was the man who was welcomed to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; praised by The Jerusalem Post as one who had “recharted his country’s racial and foreign policy”; lauded by Yitzhak Rabin, remembered as a liberal, for embodying “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”; and embraced by Shimon Peres, later prime minister and president, for “their common hatred of injustice.”

We should remember that Israel was not alone in supporting South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s.  Except for during Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency, the US also supported apartheid South Africa, though not with military support as we do with Israel.  Both Nixon and Ford promoted continued trade, investment, and diplomatic relations rather than isolation.  Reagan adopted what his administration called “constructive engagement.” Rather than isolate South Africa economically, Washington sought to maintain diplomatic and economic ties while privately pressing the government toward reform. The administration viewed Pretoria through the Cold War lens, particularly because South Africa was fighting Soviet- and Cuban-backed forces in Angola (including Ronnie Kasels, the subject of chapter 11 of Moser's book, and opposing communist movements in the region. Hard-line anti-communists in Washington continued to favor relations with Pretoria.  By the mid-1980s, however, U.S. public and congressional opposition to apartheid had become very strong. Universities, churches, cities, pension funds, and activists pushed divestment, and Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, imposing economic sanctions. Reagan vetoed it, arguing that punitive sanctions would hurt black South Africans and obstruct peaceful change, but Congress overrode his veto—a major rebuke to his policy.

It's true that Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is not the same of Africaaners' treatment of Blacks and Colored in South Africa, but differnt doesn't mean better.  If it wasn't before, since 1967, Israel has become a racist, apartheid state.  The situation has been worst under Netanyahu's current coalition government that took power at the end of 2022, but the racism, apartheid, and oppression existed long before that.  I have opined that Israel passed its 'tipping point' in 1995 when Rabin was assassinated by another Israeli, a supporter of settlements and dispossession of the Palestinians, but perhaps I should have gone back to 1967 and the decision to become an occupier of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.  Or perhaps before that when the country moved from government dominated by its Labor Party, to one dominated by Likud, by the likes of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon.  Or perhaps to 1948 and the Nakba.  Or perhaps with the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat,

Email to Chad M.

Hi, Chad.  I'm wondering whether you received my text message with the long entries from my journal.  I didn't get a "delivered" notification under it.  It's very long and probably too long for you to do anything with it with so many students, but I mainly wanted to let you and your students know how grateful I am for all your and their thoughtfulness and kindness.  I also wanted to mention that I was particularly touched by the letters from Colt Bergeeman, Alexander (no last name given), Katie Kanopa, and Saphora Vang.  I may not have gotten the spelling of those names right and I certainly don't want those students singled out publicly, as that might serve to diminish my appreciation for all the letters, but if it seems appropriate and you have occasion to let them know privately, I would appreciate it.  I hope I'm not becoming a nuisance.  Thanks again for all that you've done.

10/16/2026

 Friday, October 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II

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

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

2025 An 11-year-old boy is fatally shot by Israeli soldiers near Hebron

2025 The US struck another alleged drug smuggling boat, with survivors reported from the boat. 

In bed at 9, up at 3:35; 201.6 127/78/62 109; 51/41/56/40:40, wintry day, cold, more raining, wind

Morning meds at 5:45 a.m.  Entresto at 5:40 a.m. and 5:40 p.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m. I missed my evening heart pill yesterday.  

A favorite photo by Aaron Johnson that I found on Facebook.  Two Milwaukee treasures, the Old Soldiers Home and Brewers Stadium.

I'm grateful for my wife.  She's been my partner for 40 years now, standing by me, having my back.  We were middle-aged when we married, taking on more challenges than we had anticipated.  Now we're that elderly couple who live in the corner house in our neighborhood.  We were both self-sufficient, able-bodied, working professionals when we met and later married; now I'm remembering all the times she has taken me to the ER at the VA Medical Center, the times she's cared for me through some protracted and painful illnesses, and the times she's helped me up when I've fallen, or summoned the EMTs to get me help.  I'm doubly conscious of all this today as she leaves for a weekend with two of her lifelong college buddies, leaving me with enough food in the refrigerator and freezer to last me for a week, all prepared by her.  She used to do the same for my twice-widowed Dad when she visited him in Florida.  She takes care of me as she used to take care of him when he lived with us in his mid-80s, and as she took care of her widowed brother when he lived up the road from us in his mid-80s.  When she leaves on one of her infrequent short trips out of town, I turn up the temperature on our thermostat and the volume on our TV.  Then I sit in my recliner and count my blessings. 

The Social Network (2010) and The Social Reckoning (2026), both by Aaron Sorkin, both about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.  I watched the last half hour of so Network after Geri left this morning.  I'm a bit surprised that neither Zuckerberg nor any other person portrayed in either film filed a defamation suit against the producers and director.  Zuckerberg can't have been pleased either by his portrayal by Jesse Eisenberg in Network or by Jeremy Strong in Reckoning.  It's easy to hate the guy after watching either film, double so after watching both films close to each other.   Easy too to loathe the social and work worlds he inhabited at Harvard and in Silicon Valley.  Meta did put big pressure on Sony before Reckoning was filmed and released, threatening lawsuits and demanding script access during filming, but nothing came of it.  Sony reportedly hired an outside law firm to fact-check the film because of concern about litigation from Meta. Business Insider: The movie draws heavily on Frances Haugen’s leaked internal documents and the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files,” including material about algorithmic amplification of extremist content, inconsistent moderation, teen-girl body-image harms, and the dismantling of Facebook’s civic-integrity team.  In any event, the films provide some insight into the characters of the computer whizzes and VCs, or venture capitalists who have succeeded the bond traders on Wall Street as "masters of the universe," funders of Trump's ballroom and other pet projects, entitled to front row seats at his inaugurations and state dinners.    Writing of Catholic popes to an Anglican bishop in 1887, the Catholic Lord Acton famously observed that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,"  He further commented that “Great men are almost always bad men.”  I consider both statements to be truisms, ones we should keep in mind as more and more power is transferred from limited governments controlled by elected representatives to corporate entities run by private individuals, like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei.

10/15/2026

Thursday, October 15, 2026

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

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

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

2025: Uruguay became the first country in Latin America to decriminalise euthanasia

In bed at 10:30. up at 7; 0720 201.4 133/84/64. 95;  56/49/61/55, cloudy, rainy most of the day.

 Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Entresto at 7:45a.m. and p.m.

Trump = Turncoat, Betrayal, Treachery.  I started the day with the NYTimes and WSJ informing me that the Ukrainian military was suddenly facing restrictions on its military-grade Starlink terminals.  Ukrainian officials were already suspecting the worst: that President Trump had ordered Elon Musk, who owns the company that operates Starlink, to throttle Ukraine’s access to the satellite systems.  The Ukrainians need Starlink to help them defend their civilian population against savage and criminal Russian attacks on purely civilian targets.  Trump is betraying them as he betrays anybody and everybody who doesn't kowtow to his wishes.  He has turned America from an ally of the Ukrainians into an ally of the Russians in its completely unjustifiable and illegal invasion.  His name should be synonymous with Shame and Dishonor, Quisling.  Consider too his weakening or destroying of NATO, and his threat of military force against NATO partner Denmark re: Greenland.   Republican campaign manager and strategist Rick Wilson wrote a book titled Everything Trump Touches Dies.  That is true of our democracy, flawed as it was, our freedoms from governmental thuggery, and our relationship with the entire rest of the world, save perhaps with Russia, North Korea, and China.

Text exchange with Karyn Roelke:

Karyn: Thank you so much for sending us your journal from your Honor Flight. I will be taking it to our board meeting tonight so everyone can appreciate it. Thank you so much!

Also I noted your mention of Chosin Marines from the Korean War. In 2017, I was standing at the Korean War Memorial on flight day with a Marine who broke down in tears. He had been at Chosin. At the time I was recording podcasts with veterans for SSHF and a few months later I talked him into sitting down with me and telling his story. I was extremely heartbreaking and intense, but we got through it together and I was so proud of him. After that, he told me that he could never talk about it again… he had gotten it out once but I needed to never ask him to tell it again. I felt terrible that I had asked him to tell me in the first place. While I think in the end he needed to get it out, I think it cost him to do so. He passed away a few years later. I have never forgotten him.

 Me: Thank you, Karyn.  I did a bit of editing on the journal entries and sent them as part of a thank-you letter I sent to the teacher of the students at Wauwatosa West High School who sent me ‘letters from home.’  He’s a veteran himself, 10 years Army Reserves, and Kuwait. It was long and I told him to do with it what he thought best with the more than 30 students, so long as they know my deep gratitude to each of them.  And, if it’s appropriate, convert my gratitude to the other board members.

RE the ‘frozen Chosin,’ the fact that most tugs at my heart from that “strategic withdrawal,” was of Marines tucking their feet under each others armpits to keep them from becoming frozen.  Those guys all served under incredibly horrible conditions and, as I said in my journal, no Marine with any knowledge of that war’s history will ever forget them.

My thanks again to you for going out of your way to help me about Moon Mullen’s gravesite, and for all your other service to so many old vets, and thanks to all the board members as well.  Semper Fi.

Email to Chad Mateske:

"Hi, Chad.  Here's the letter I wrote to your students.  I don't know if the photos will copy on this email or not.  [After pasting it, I see that the photos didn't transfer.  I will try it also as a text message.  And of course I can mail a hard copy to you, if desired.].  I also don't know whether it's way too much, TMI, which I'm prone to.  I did a copy-and-paste job from my journal, which is also available as a blog on the Blogger or Blogspot platform under the heading of Slogthrop Imponderables and Incommensurables.  I used that platform simply because it allowed me to incorporate photos and images into my journal.  In any event, you can do with it as you see fit for your students, and I won't be offended.  My main purpose and goal have been simply to let your students who wrote me those letters know how very much I appreciate their efforts on my behalf.  I say the same to you, for your efforts.  Thank you!

To: The thoughtful students at Wauwatosa West High School who wrote me

From: Charles D. Clausen, former Capt., US Marine Corps 

RE: Stars and Stripes Honor Flight, October 10, 2026

Date: October 15, 2026

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the kind and thoughtful letters that you sent to me as my “letters from home” at the end of our day on the Honor Flight to Washington, D.C., last Saturday, October 10.  They were very touching and very much appreciated.

I’m an 85-year-old former Marine officer who served in Vietnam in 1965-1966.  The following year, I was stationed outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where my duties included informing loved ones whose Marines had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action in Vietnam.  That was my worst experience during that long war.

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and went to college at Marquette University, where I was a midshipman in the Navy ROTC.  I decided to take my commission in the Marines rather than the Navy because my father was a Marine during World War II.  He fought in a famous battle for the little island of Iwo Jima.  He returned from the war with significant PTSD.

After my 4 years of active duty in the Marines, I went to Marquette Law School where I subsequently served on the faculty for about 25 years.  When I retired, I worked as executive director of the House of Peace Community Center at 17th and Walnuts Streets in Milwaukee.  I’ve been fully retired for about 20 years.

For any who may be interested in my experiences and thoughts about the Honor Flight, I include the following notes from a personal journal (or diary) that I’ve  kept for the last 4 years or so: "

I omit from here the long edited narrative from the journal(s).

Text to Chad Mateske:

Hi, again.  The photos didn’t copy onto the email, but I thought I’d try texting.  In any case, I realize the narrative and reflections are simply too long to deal with at your end, so do with this what you think is best for your purposes.  If the photos don’t copy here and if you’re interested, you can check my blog at Slogthrop Imponderable and Incommensurables on Blogger..  Anyway, here goes. (rest omitted.

Miserable weather day today.  I drove up to the Saukville Walmart for some medical stuff this morning, intending to beat the predicted rainfall all afternoon.  No go: it rained all the way up there and continued all day.  Later I went to Sendik's to pick up some carrots and other stuff, and the rain was worse.  Tomorrow will be worse yet. GALE WARNING tomorrow.  12 to 20-foot waves on Lake Michigan, winds from the north at 25 mph, gusting to 45 mph.   I'll have to try to get to the lakefront somewhere to see it, but it might not be possible.  The worse news is that Geri will be driving from Milwaukee down to Churbana tomorrow for her weekend visit with Kate Donovan and Tuz Healy, in from Dublin, Ireland.

 

10/14/2026

 Wednesday, October 14, 2026

1964 Martin Luther King Jr. was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

1986 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel for his efforts to ensure the Holocaust was remembered

1991 Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize

1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres

2025 Donald Trump awarded himself and Benjamin Netanyahu the Nobel Peace Prize😊

2025 In response to the limited release of bodies on Monday, Israel notified the United Nations that it will not open the Rafah crossing and will only allow 300 aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip daily, instead of the 600 agreed to in the ceasefire agreement.

2025 Israeli troops killed nine Palestinians in Gaza, saying those killed violated the IDF's withdrawal line as established by the peace agreement

In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, and up at 3; 

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Entresto at 4:45 a.m. and 5 p.m.

What I wrote a year ago has only gotten worse.😞   

We are living in a dystopia right now.  Our children and grandchildren will live in this worsening dystopia when I am gone.  

I think back to the days when Jimmy Aquavia and I would smugly and culpably take some comfort in the fact that we are not long for this world, ignoring, temporarily at least, that our loved ones have presumably long lives ahead of them in the world we will leave them.  I think back on all the many Cassandra-like predictions I made to Kitty in our early morning conversations, ending them feebly with "I hope I'm wrong," but the evidence of where we were heading, i.e., where we are now, was too strong to be ignored or denied.  I think too of the last Republican administration that we had pre-Trump: that of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and George Tenet.  It was the era of extraordinary renditions, 'black sites', 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' i.e., torture, and of Abu Ghraib. the U.S. Army prison where Iraqi prisoners were regularly subjected to sadistic, cruel, and illegal treatment by U.S. Army troops.  Donald Trump was not the first president, certainly not the first Republican president, to ignore "the rule of law."

 

 Text from PCC:

Hi Grandpa, I’m so glad you had a great time in DC, I’m thankful for choosing my dad to have this great opportunity. I wish your flight wasn’t delayed so I could have seen you at the airport but a delay was expected to be honest. Anyways, thank you for the wishes and I hope you enjoy being back in Wisconsin.

Sometimes I wonder why I spend time every day, sometimes quite a bit, making entries in this journal.  Sometimes I joke that it's to keep me out of trouble (as if!), or to keep me off the streets (as if!), or, not so facetiously, to record some memories of each day before my memory further deteriorates with age, or to provide "proof of life,"  like a secreted kidnapping victim, since I lead such an indoor, interior, sedentary, stationary life.  But this morning, while going through my bi-weekly sorting of pills and capsules for my pill boxes,  I recalled for some reason how I started the journal - as a poor substitute for my daily, early morning text message conversations with my sister.  It reminded me of Duke Ellington's great song, beautifully recorded by the Ink Spots in the 1940s, Don't Get Around Much Anymore.  The "you" in the lyrics referred to a lost sweetheart; in my case, it would refer to my lost sister.

Missed the Saturday dance

Heard they crowded the floor

Couldn't bear it without you

Don't get around much anymore

Thought I'd visit the club

Got as far as the door

They'd have asked me about you

Don't get around much anymore

Darling, I guess my mind's more at ease

But nevertheless why stir up memories?

Been invited on dates

Might have gone but what for?

Awf'lly diff'rent without you

Don't get around much anymore

I shared Phil Klay's op-ed in this morning's NYTimes, Pete Hegseth’s Bloodlust Doesn’t Hide His Military Failures, with this comment:

God bless Phil Klay, another former Marine.  We need to recognize and call out bloodlust when we see it, as we often see in our own government, the people who purport to act on our behalf and in our name.  We have seen it often from Hegseth, who gained fame largely from his vocal defense of war crimes committed by our own troops, but also in our "homeland security" forces, including ICE and Border Patrol agents, who we've seen acting like Hitler's Gestapo and Mussolini's Blackshirts.  We see it in more digestible form in our political leaders, who show indifference and defense of those who commit deadly wrongs in our name.   We see it most prominently in the blithe indifference of our Commander-in-Chief to the death, destruction, and suffering he has caused by his policies and his politicos.  I cringed on Saturday when I saw on the pediment of the entryway into the Memorial Amphitheater facing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the words from one of Horace's odes, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," or "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."  The English poet Wilfred Owen wrote a devastating poem called Dulce et decorum in WWI, calling the words "the old Lie."

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori. See less

I also requested Klay's collection of short stories, Redeployment, and a book of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings.

The Social Reckoning, directed by Aaron Sorkin, starring Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen,  Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg.  I watched the 1:30 showing of this film at the Marcus North Shore Theater.  It was, not surprisingly, powerful and well executed: Sorkin's scriptwriting and directing, the cast;s acting, the whole schmear.  Jeremy Allen White is a gifted actor.  I suppose Jeremy Strong is also, but the characters he plays are so thoroughly unlikable that it's hard to warm up to him.  His Zuckerberg is particularly spooky.  The plot is simple.  Howwitz is a WSJournal investigative reporter sniffing around Facebook, Haugen is his source, a leaker of information and secret documents, and  Zuckerberg is a money and power hungry tech nerd trying to hide behind the cover of being a "free speech absolutist."  He is indifferent to the harm his service products (FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp caused, despite his company's full knowledge of that harm to children, to social unity, and to democracy.  The film suggests boldly that he is responsible for the Trump Insurrection on January 6th.  So there were no big surprises in the plot, only an engaging retelling of the story of Frances Haugen's service to humanity by breaching her non-discolosure agreement with Facebook, her employment contract, and probably some criminal law.  Terrific strory.

A letter I received from a freshman at Wauwatosa West High School.  I've sent thank you letters to those who wrote Honor Flight "letters from home" to me, but not yet to the members of the We The People Club at the hight school.  I'll try to finish the 31 letters tonight and to draft an appropriate thank-you response tonight and tomorrow.