3/1/2026

 Sunday, March 1, 2026

743 The Council at Estinnes decreed that Christian slaves could not be owned by Jews, fearing that the slaves might convert to Judaism

1562 Blood bath at Vassy: Francois de Guise's troops open fire on Huguenot congregation, first event in Wars of Religion

1692 Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were interrogated after accusations that they were practitioners of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony

1845  President John Tyler signed a resolution annexing the Republic of Texas

1872 Yellowstone became the world's first national park

1953 Joseph Stalin suffered a stroke and collapsed. He died four days later.

1954 4 Puerto Ricans opened fire in the House of Representatives, injuring 5 members

1955 An Israeli assault on Gaza killed 48

1958 Samuel Alphonsus Stritch was appointed Pro-Prefect of the Propagation of Faith and thus became the first American member of the Roman Curia

1970 The end of US commercial whale hunting

1982, The New York Times raised its price from 25 cents to 30 cents

1985 The Pentagon accepted the theory that an atomic war would cause a nuclear winter

2014  President Barack Obama warned Russian President Vladimir Putin over involvement in Ukraine

2016 Forbes Richest List was released with Bill Gates No. 1 with $75 billion and the  number of the world's billionaires dropped to 1,810

2022 US President Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address, said Vladimir Putin has "badly miscalculated" by invading Ukraine 

2025   Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country's official language. 

In bed at 9:05, up at 5:55.   19/11/28/21 isolated snow showers then sunny.

Morning meds at  a.m.   

I slept well last night, after spending an entertaining evening watching two YouTube sites that Sarah alerted us to.  The first was by a young filmmaker who dubbed himself "The Anti-Chef" and set out to make all the recipes in Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking,  The second was by a couple, he an American and his wife a Calabrese, called Pasta Grammar.  Both series are very entertaining and informative.  While we and most other Americans ignored it, cheered it, or tsk-tsked it, the war against Iran forged on.

Musée des Beaux Arts,  W. H. Auden,  December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I woke up this morning wondering about American casualties of our 'special military operation' in Iran.  I checked the morning newspapers and the Sunday morning talk shows to learn how many of our military men and women had been killed or wounded in the bombing raids and missile attacks over the preceding 24 hours.  (I call the deployment of a third of our naval forces on missions of death and destruction against another nation a "special military operation" because I watched Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin deny that we are at war with Iran, only a mission to rid Iran of its evil leadership, much as Vladimir Putin and Russia have not been at "war" with Ukraine, only seeking a friendlier government there.)  There were no casualty reports until late morning, after the morning papers had gone to press and the talk shows were off-air.  Finally, the Pentagon announced that 3 American troops had been killed and another 5 seriously wounded.  

A day like this puts me in mind of this time of year 60 years ago, in 1966.  I was serving the last of my 4 years of active duty in the Marines, with memories of Vietnam never far from my thoughts.  The network news shows and daily newspapers brought fresh stories every day of battles fought, of body counts and body bags.  I was living in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and serving as an Inspector-Instructor at a Marine Air Reserve Training Detachment at the Naval Air Station in Willow Grove, PA.  And every sixth day, I was on call to serve as the Marine officer who informed the next-of-kin that their son, or husband, or brother had been killed or wounded in that God-forsaken land almost 9,000 miles away.  I hated the duty, of course, and have never forgotten it.  I wrote about it in my memoir:

My worst job, however, – the worst job I have ever had – came every 6 days when I was the Marine Corps’ Casualty Assistance Call Officer for the north side of Philadelphia and the northern suburbs.  When a Marine was killed or seriously injured while on active duty, whether combat-related or not, an officer and a senior staff NCO delivered the news personally to the next-of-kin, almost always the wife or the parents.  The information about the death or injury came into the Marine detachment at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.  If the family member to be notified lived north of Market Street, one of the teams in my rotation got the call to tell the family.  My team was myself and a staff sergeant who worked for me, a fellow named Schmidt from Antigo, Wisconsin.  The call would first go to Pete Powell, our admin officer, who would call me or the other officer on CACO duty.  I would call SSgt. Schmidt and pick him up at his home.  I would stop at the hangar to pick up the paperwork and Schmidt and I would drive, usually silently, to the home.  Each of us knew that if the circumstances were different, it could be his wife or parents receiving the Marine at the door.  As soon as the person visited opened the door, or saw us approach, he, or usually she, knew why we were there.  If the Marine was not dead, I would have to get that information out immediately.  If I wasn’t yelling “he’s all right” or “he’s alive and being cared for” or some such statement, I didn’t have to tell the wife or mom that the Marine was dead.  She knew it from my uninvited and dreaded presence in her doorway.  If we didn’t have information already about church membership, I would stay with the family while SSgt. Schmidt went to get a priest or minister or at least a friend or neighbor who could stay with the bereaved after we had left. Such misery! Such suffering!  How awful those encounters, how awful still the memories of them.

It was the memories of the mothers and wives that were with me as I watched George H. W. Bush gushing over the Gulf War in 1991.  “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula. . . It’s a proud day for America – and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”  I couldn’t help thinking: “What an asshole.”  Those memories remained with me as I watched “H. W.’s” idiot son “W” and his band of neocon chickenhawks prove Daddy wrong in the desert sands of Mesopotamia.  Bush and Cheney and Paul Wolfewitz and Richard Perle and almost all of their legion of neocon supporters never stood in a doorway in front of a shrieking, terror-stricken mother learning that her son is dead, never spoke with a young wife about the logistics of returning her husband’s body through the Philadelphia Navy Yard and of the need for funeral arrangements.  While others were making these casualty calls in north Philadelphia and all across America, George W. Bush was getting inducted into Skull and Bones and enjoying his last year at Yale under his student deferment while Richard Bruce Cheney was on his fourth or fifth deferment, working in Madison for Governor Warren Knowles while working on a Ph.D. at the UW.  Richard Perle was working on his master’s degree at Princeton afterwards attending the London School of Economics while Paul Wolfowitz was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago after graduating from Cornell.  These men were all privileged.  They were not the type to get their asses shot off in a messy war in Asia.  They were not the type to let military service alter the trajectory of their privileged lives.  Like the vice-chickenhawk-in-chief Cheney, they “had other priorities in the 60s than military service.”  Very few of the Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors who did serve came from such backgrounds.  John Kerry was a notable exception.  They came from backgrounds much like mine: blue collar, the so-called ‘working class.’  They did not have estates in Kennebunkport.  Their homes were apartments and modest frame houses on small lots.  Their list of educational attainments usually stopped at high school, boot camp and infantry training.  These were the men the United States sent to kill and be killed, not the likes of Bush and Cheney, Wolfewitz and Perle.  And it was the wives and children, the parents and siblings of such men who would live with the consequences of their service.  For them, it wasn’t “the specter of Vietnam” that was “buried forever,” it was their son, their husband, their father, their brother.  For them, the “Vietnam syndrome” has never ended, any more than World War II “syndrome” or the Korea “syndrome“ has ended for those who suffered the deepest losses.  Below is a poem that the Bloody Bushes would have perhaps entitled “The Civil War Syndrome.”  It is, to me, the saddest poem ever written. 

_________ 

Come Up From the Fields, Father

Walt Whitman

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ‘tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

 

Down in the field all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call.

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashed with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas, poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be

better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

___________

I think of those days again again today.  Instead of the chicken-harks Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld sending our troops into an unnecessary war, a war of choice, it is the draft-dodger Donald Trump, Captain Bonespurs, the guy who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.  

2/28/2026

 Saturday, February 28, 2026

1933 On Adolf Hitler's advice, German President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree after the building was destroyed by fire in Berlin; this eliminated many civil liberties in Germany

1953 Crick and Watson discovered the chemical structure of the DNA molecule

2013 The brains of two rats were successfully connected so they could share information

The 2022 UN Landmark climate change report warned that climate change is outpacing human efforts to adapt, with a best-case scenario rise of 1.5C, and 14% of species face a "very high risk of extinction." 

2025  A 24-hour consumer spending boycott takes place across the United States, in protest of wealth and income inequality, high prices of essential goods, and the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives by the Trump administration. 

2025  The Social Security Administration announces it will lay off over 7,000 jobs to align with President Donald Trump's executive order, despite its workforce already being at a 50-year low. 

2025   Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended their talks early after their Oval Office meeting turned into a "heated" exchange. Trump rejectsed any discussion of security guarantees for Ukraine, expressing interest only in a Mineral Resources Agreement.   Their lunch was cancelled and Zelenskyy was escorted from the White House, hungry.

In bed at 9, up at 0615.  28/15/40/22  122/77/57   205.4  111   

Morning meds and half-dose of heart med at  a.m.

US and Israel Start War with Iran

Who is he talking about, the Iranian government or ours?  Or both?

Who runs America, Netanyahu and AIPAC, or Putin?  And, BTW, what's with that stupid baseball cap?

My thoughts on America two years ago today.

(Actually, from this journal, February 29, 2024, Leap Day!)

The State of the Union.  I'm trying to remember a time when America was more riven by factionalism, Left v. Right, Democrat v. Republican, Red State v. Blue State, neighbor v. neighbor, family member v. family member. Evangelicals v. seculars, etc.  The only times that come close to our current era were the late 40s and 50s with the big Communist Scare (McCarthyism, John Birch Society, HUAC, black lists, bomb shelters and air raid drills in schools) and the mid and late 60s and early 70s with the Vietnam invasion, and the draft, civil rights demonstrations, the pill and the Sexual Revolution, and Watergate.  These were the times of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), ghost-written by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, and None Dare Call It Treason (1964), written by the evangelical minister John A. Stormer.  Those were the days of my adolescence and young adulthood.  I feel shame in admitting that for a while I fell for all the right-wing propaganda that was all about.  I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was the era of the Warren Court from 1953 to 1969 including revolutionary cases like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Miranda v. Arizona in 1966.  It was the era of the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965 with its seemingly revolutionary changes in liturgy, doctrines and practices, ecumenism and relations with Jews, and religious freedom.  They were heady times to be a working-class young guy born during FDR's New Deal and raised 'in the bosom of' the Church' during the turbulent, triumphalist days between the end of World War II and the debacle of Vietnam.  I went from naïvely voting for Goldwater in 1964 to returning from Vietnam less than 2 years later in a state of culture shock, feeling morally depressed, isolated, disillusioned, and at best skeptical or cynical about most political, social, and religious "isms."

Are the days we are living in worse than the 50s, 60s, and early 70s?  I think so.  I would be the last guy to refer to those earlier days as "the good old days."  They weren't good.  Americans were deeply polarized then over civil rights, racism, military adventurism, sexual mores, religion, and certainly politics.  But I never felt the country was "coming apart at the seams" as I do now.  I never felt that Richard Nixon Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, or either of the Bushes was a fascist, intent on fundamentally changing the nature or structure of the American government toward one-party rule or dictatorship.  I never thought that my conservative Republican colleagues on the law faculty at Marquette were fascists.  Even during the days of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Sterling Hall Math Center bombing in Madison, I never felt we were on the verge of widespread violent attacks on agents, organs, and instrumentalities of democratic government.  I never thought that the leaders of the Republican Party, or their supporters, were mentally deranged and evil.  Although I thought that the values and policies of the Republicans were mistaken, selfish, or even dangerous, I didn't think that Republicans were actually delusional, unable to distinguish reality from imaginings, and unable to surrender false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence disproving those beliefs.  Donald Trump is deranged, mentally unbalanced and unhinged.  There is every reason to believe he is a sociopath with a narcissistic personality disorder.  He is a bad man, wicked, amoral and immoral, depraved and contemptible.  His millions of followers are delusional, insisting that Trump was cheated out of winning the 2020 election despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Many of his followers are disposed to believe whacko conspiracy theories spread by QAnon and others.  And they are well-armed, some of them organized into quasi-military militias.  They believe the apocalyptic rhetoric spouted by Trump and others about Americans being at risk of 'losing your country' to "the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."  With the country awash in lethal weapons, including assault weapons, most of them probably owned by 2nd Amendment gun nuts, we are all in trouble worse than we ever were during the turbulent days of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.  Or am I the delusional one, the paranoid one?

I confess these thoughts were triggered by the decision of the Supreme Court to review the decision of the D.C. Circuit Court rejecting Trump's claim of immunity.  As a practical matter, the Court's action almost certainly means Trump's trial in Judge Tanya Chutkan's court for the attempted coup will not occur before the November presidential election.  The public will not learn of all the evidence the Special Counsel has amassed.  Was that the Republican Court's purpose in taking the case and in delaying the argument until sometime in the week of April 22?  Can there be any doubt?  In law, In tort an individual is considered to intend the consequences of an act—whether or not she or he actually intends those consequences. 

2/27/2026

 Friday, February 27, 026

1933 Nazi Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, was destroyed by fire, possibly set by the Nazis, who blamed and executed Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe

1962 South Vietnam President Ngô Đình Diệm's palace was bombed by dissident air pilots in a failed assassination attempt

1968 Walter Cronkite delivered a scathing editorial on America's chances of winning in Vietnam 

1973 American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota

2014 Unmarked Russia special forces invaded neighboring Crimea, Ukraine to assist pro-Russian nationalists, occupying government buildings in preparation for annexation

2025  The Trump administration banned NASA scientists and US government officials from attending the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference that started this week in Hangzhou, China, which are focused on the seventh IPCC Assessment Report on climate change. 

In bed at 10, awake at 2:30, up at 3:00.   32/22/53/31.  03"10  207.2  124/68/59  94.

Morning meds and 6th half-dose of Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency, an article in this morning's Washington Post by Isaac Arnsdorf.  Excerpts:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections, and the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue. The White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s plans.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” said Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for the draft executive order. Ticktin attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and was part of his legal team that filed an unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit accusing Democrats of conspiring to damage him with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin went on. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The emergency would empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference, Ticktin argued.

The idea of claiming emergency executive powers based on allegations of foreign interference attaches new significance to the administration’s actions to reinvestigate the 2020 election. Trump has never accepted defeat, while never finding evidence of widespread fraud. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is leading a review of election security that officials said focuses on foreign influence.

A 2021 intelligence review concluded that China considered efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.

. . .

“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” Trump said on social media Feb. 13. “I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he added the same day. 

Sarah arrived this morning for a weekend visit, a first visit in months.  She returns in June. 

 

 

2/26/2026

Thursday, February 26, 2026

D+111

1935 RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) is first demonstrated in Daventry, England

1973 Triple Crown horse Secretariat was bought for a record $5.7m

2023 One of the most violent incidents of revenge by mobs of Israeli settlers, who burned 200 buildings in Palestinian villages and killed at least one person after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in the northern West Bank

2025 First death from measles in the US occurred in Texas in a decade, and the first child to die in 22 years amid an outbreak affecting 124 people 

e4r

In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, moved to LZB till up at 3:30.  18/39/16.

Morning meds and 5th half-dose of heart med at  10:30 a.m.  

Whatever happened to the accusations of Trump's BJ and the assault on the teenagers who bit his schwantz?  Have non-governmental investigators now surfaced 'the smoking gun'?  Not of the truth of the charges of Trump's participation in a sexual assault on one of Jeffrey Epstein's underage harem, but of the FBI and DOJ illlegal coverup of the fact of the accusation?  And of Attorney General Pam Bondi's perjury when she testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the government files contain no "evidence" of criminal behavior by Trump.  I am reminded of the tension I and the rest of the nation felt back in the Spring and Summer of 1974 as the noose tightened around Nixon's presidency.   It took more than two years from the time of the first Woodward and Bernstein article about the Watergate burglars' connection to the Nixon White House and the Committee to RE-Elect the President before Nixon resigned in August, 1974.  We can't expect Trump to resign of course, but God only knows where this evidence of a criminal blowjob may lead.  Hold on to your seat.  Meanwhile we can enjoy the thought of a brave young teenager biting the Big Prick's prick.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

My journal/blog entries last year on this date:

Browsing Facebook this morning, I see JPG's regular sunrise photo taken with her trusty iPhone.  Sarah Smarsh, a crush bunny for years, announced that she is leaving social media for a year to concentrate on writing a book she has committed to writing.  Her post referred to her writing as "an act of resistance against political and corporate forces that seek to siphon our lifeblood for their profit."  She attached an article on the significance of the U. S Postal Service to rural Americans and adds"As with public schools and every other struggling component of our government system, the main issue behind its struggles is intentional underfunding and onerous burdens devised by those who profit from privatization."  In another post, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Pete Buttigieg: "A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”  He was referring to the upcoming Budget Bill and the basic differences between Democrats and Republicans over (1) how to raise money to support government programs and (2) what to spend the money on.  Richardson notes that "Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt."  Richardson went on to explain, as she does so well, what exactly is going on in Congress over the Budget Bill, and how the Republicans proposed to fund the tax cuts for the wealthy by cuts to (1) Medicare and Medicaid, and (2) food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  It is hard for me to believe what is going on in America now, but it shouldn't be.  For years, we have been unwilling to tax ourselves at sufficiently high rates to pay the nation's bills with only a sustainable level of annual deficits and national debt. Joe Scarborough in one of his morning rants accurately points out that from the founding of the American Republic until 2001, over those 220 years, the United States accumulated $5 trillion in debt.  In the last 20+ years, we have accumulated up to $36 trillion.  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells us that if the Republicans pass what they are proposing to pass, the debt is going to increase another $23 trillion over the next decade.  Scarborough says, accurately, "We are in meltdown mode."  He points out that we spend more money on interest on our national debt than we do on the defense budget, which is the highest war budget in the world.  THIS IS MADNESS.  What kind of world are we leaving our children, grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren?  If Congress and Trump follow through on this budget, America will be less great, less secure, less wealthy, and less healthy - all the "MAGAs" upside down.  More rural hospitals will shut down.  More elderly people will be tossed out of nursing homes while Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Trump will be wealthier and probably living on their massive yachts in offshore Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or perhaps in penthouses in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

Russian asset or Russian agent?  I've asked this question before about Donald Trump.  In Thomas Friedman's column today, we find this: 

The drama going on between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine raises one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever had to ask about my own country: Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? “I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine. It’s only fair.”

Either way, my fellow Americans and our friends abroad, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.

. . .

[There's] a benign interpretation of Trump — that he is just besotted with Putin, Russia’s Christian nationalist, anti-woke crusader, and not applying the common sense that he promised. But then there is also another explanation: Trump does not see American power as the cavalry coming to rescue the weak seeking freedom from those out to quash them; he sees America as coming to shake down the weak. He’s running a protection racket.  

The American and world common weal gets only worse with each day Trump and his gang of mobsters remain in office.

2/25/2026

 Wednesday, February 25, 2026

1932 Austrian immigrant Adolf Hitler obtained German citizenship

1994 Israeli extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred at least 55 Palestinians at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, with an assault  rifle

2024 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died fighting in the two years since Russia invaded

2025  Ukrainian Justice Minister Olha Stefanishyna announces that Ukraine has reached a deal with the United States on mineral resources. (Kyiv Independent)

2025  Federal judge  temporarily blocked Trump's executive order suspending the Refugee Admissions Program, ruling that President Trump cannot nullify the law passed by Congress

In be at 9 during Trump's SOTU rant, up at 6,  22/4/29/19  Sunny, windy again.  Sick of freezing temperatures and wind.  Lebanese neighbor Ghasson out, as always, walking his bull mastiff Athena, at 6:45, Ghasson all bundled up, Athena with no protection.  How do they do it?

Morning meds and 4th half-dose of Bisoprolol fumarate at  10:30 a.m.

Out of sorts much of today, innards and back.

2/24/2026

 Monday, February 24, 2026

1208 Francis of Assisi, 26, is said to have received his vocation in the Portiuncula

1803 US Supreme Court 1st ruled a law unconstitutional (Marbury v Madison)

1977 President Jimmy Carter announced US foreign aid would consider human rights

2022  Russia invaded Ukraine

2025  The United Nations General Assembly votes 93–18, with 65 abstentions, to pass a resolution condemning Russia's war against Ukraine. The 18 countries that voted against include the United States, Russia, Israel, Belarus, and North Korea. 

2025  Texas placed several major cities in the state on high alert due to a measles outbreak that spread to 99 people in Texas and New Mexico, the third-largest outbreak since it was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

In bed at 8:45, awake at 4:35, up at at 4:50.  22/8/36/17.  SSW 192° wind at 11 mph, gusts to 25 mph.  Sunny, windy, cold.

Morning meds and 3rd half-dose of Bisopolol at 9 a.m.

Much to write about today, but side-tracked by news of Trump cover-up.

Visit with Dr. Patel.  I saw Dr. Patel, a VA psychiatrist, for the third time this morning while Geri was representing the two of us at Richard Goldberg's burial service.

The artist at the VA yesterday.    

Finished The Last Sweet Mile.

NPR disclosure re DOJ non-disclosure: Cover up.

From 2 years ago today:

"I'm grateful that I was able to write a memoir about my first 30 or so years of life and that I had and have access to so many other memoirs and other histories of various experiences in my life.  I'm grateful that at some time somehow I came to derive some pleasure or satisfaction from writing, (or is it a need to write?).  When did this occur?  Not in high school or college, for I don't recall ever taking pleasure in writing an academically-required essay or report.  I suspect it started during my last year in the Marines at NAS Willow Grove when I had among my ancillary duties the job of Public Information Officer and I became familiar with Fowler's Modern English Usage, Follett's Modern American Usage, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and a NYT newsletter that collected misusages from the newspaper that got past the copy editors.  After that, I found out in law school that I was pretty good at writing those 3-hour essay exams that were then de rigueur.  On top of that, I was Lead Article Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of the law review and had a job as the editorial assistant for two faculty-edited (really edited by me) commercial law publications.  In the following year, as a new faculty member, I was the Legal Writing professor for about 120 1L law students, a cruel and exploitative assignment but one that made me an expert on how poorly many, perhaps most, college graduates write.  In any case, over those 5 years, from 1966 to 1971, I became a frequent and usually careful writer.  And of course, as a faculty member and later as a practicing lawyer, I did a lot of writing.  I relied on my good friend and law office colleague, David Branch, to edit some of my work and found out from him that I was (and still am) wordy.  I use too many words to say things that can be said more concisely.  His edits were always correct and useful, and I usually accepted them but often opted to stick with my wordy excesses simply because it was the way I expressed myself then and still do, with lots of surplusage.  Plus, in writing these daily journal entries that I know will be read by no one but me, I easily fall into run-on sentences, inappropriate hyphenation and capitalization, misplaced modifiers, and awkward constructions.  David Branch's red pencils would need frequent sharpening for editing of my daily musings.

    What prompted these reflections was reading Hillary Kelly's review of the several memoirs of Diana Athill  in the 2/21/2024 New Yorker titled "A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing."  I especially enjoyed this quote about old age from one of Athill's late-life memoirs:

We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so.  We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.

It made me wonder, only momentarily, whether my "general pessimism about life" is just attributable to my old age rather than to real conditions in the U.S. and in the world.  I don't think so since there appear to be so many much younger people who share my pessimism."

2/23/2026

Monday, February 23, 2026

1945 US Marines raised the flag of the United States on top of Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Joe Rosenthal later becomes iconic, inspiring the Marine Corps War Memorial sculpture

1954 First mass inoculation against polio with the Jonas Salk vaccine took place at Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1967 Noam Chomsky's anti-Vietnam war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was published by the New York Review of Books

1971 US Army officer William Calley confessed & implicated Captain Medina during his trial for the My Lai Massacre

2025  The Israel Defense Forces deploy tanks into the West Bank for the first time since 2002, declaring that the 40,000 Palestinians who fled refugee camps in the region cannot return

In bed at 9, awake at 4:15, and up at 4:35.  19/-1/25/18.  The wind blows at 18 mph from 345° NNW, with gusts up to 31 mph.

Morning meds and 2nd half-dose of Bisoprolol heart med at 7:15 a.m.

Jesus of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, Theo of Golden, and the Levi Boys of Hamilton, GA.  There is a story in this morning's New York Times about the supposed bones of Francis of Assisi, now on public display at the large basilica erected in his name in the hilltop town of Assisi in Umbria, which Geri and I visited more than 20 years ago.  Francis has long been my favorite Catholic saint, though I've never quite been sure why.  He was certainly a wierdo by today's standards, and probably by any standards.  He had a great and deep belief in God, the God of the Catholic Church, the church of Jesus.  He also had a great and deep love of the natural world as God's creation, the world he depicted in his Canticle of the Sun.  Like Jesus, he also lived a life of austerity, indeed seemingly more austere than Jesus, who attended weddings and ate with sinners.  But as I read Allen Levi's memoir The Last Sweet Mile, I was mindful that both the author and his brother, Gary, a model we are told for Theo of Golden, were lifelong bachelors, like Francis and (supposedly) Jesus.  Also, all 4 of them were great and deep believers in God.  It's not clear, to me at least, what kind of God Jesus himself believed in, but his followers, Francis, Allen, and Gary, believed in a Christian God.  What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that none of these guys ever married?  Personally, I have also harbored a suspicion that Jesus was married before he started his 'public life' around age 30, and that his wife died, perhaps in childbirth.  All Jewish men of his era were expected to marry, to go forth and multiply.  Just as a matter of social probabilities, it is surely more probable than not that Jesus was married long before his 30th year.  If so, why did he never remarry?  Why did Francis, the son of a wealthy textile merchant, never marry?  Why did both Allen and Gary  Levi never marry, while their sisters did?  It seems to me to be a fair question, one worthy of some thought, and some stabs at possible answers.  No only did none of them ever marry; neither did any of them seem to have a girlfriend or a lover, at least none that is referred to in writings about them.  (Unless we consider a lot of speculation, unsupported by evidence, of Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene or 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'[John 13:23, 19:26, and 20:1]).  If I recall correctly, in one of the chapters in Theo of Golden, Theo refers to a saying: "A man who loves all women, loves no woman.  A man who loves one woman, loves all women," or something like that.  Why is it that men who are held up as holiness incarnate and God-filled, like Jesus and Francis and Gary Levi have no room in their lives for a partnering woman?  Gay?  Incels?  So God-obsessed they leave no room for a partner?  Repelled or disgusted by sex?  Whazupwidat?  What are we to think of the Catholic Church's adherence to priestly celibacy???