7/30/2026

 Thursday, July 30, 2026

1945 After delivering the atomic bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58. 880 of the crew died, many eaten by sharks.

1965 US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. 

1967 'Race riot' in Milwaukee (4 killed)

1988 Jordanian King Hussein renounced sovereignty over the West Bank to the PLO, hours after dissolving Jordan's House of Representatives

2025  Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced that Canada would recognise Palestine as an independent country in September, conditional on the Palestinian Authority committing to certain reforms.

In bed at 7:30 with a nasty back/flank ache, I woke up at 1:10 and was up at 1:25; 0140 203.0 121/68/56 109; 62/84/61, sunny or partly cloudy day ahead.  Hoping to get back to sleep . . . Dozed off between 4 and 5, back in bed at 5 until 6:30.

Morning meds at a.m.    

Today marks the beginning of a 5th year of journaling, or maintaining this diary/chronicle/logbook/notebook of sorts.  It's both a good thing and a bad thing that there are no rules for personal journals; one can do with one whatever one wants.  This makes it easier to jot down whatever pops into one's mind at whatever hours one happens to be up and about, without concern over editing, proofing, or very much thought, but it also means the collection of thoughts can be pretty incoherent, not at all thought out.  So it goes.

I was still 80 when I started this, about to turn 81, and now I'm about to turn 85.  I was still smarting from my sister's death then, while now I live with a dull, mopey emptiness from her absence.  She was my daily interlocutor, my daily communicant, to borrow and enlarge an old Catholic expression.  Nothing has ever replaced those daily early-morning chats we shared; nothing could.  She was the last personal contact with our childhood, living with my Dad's war-related PTSD, my Mom's rape PTSD of her own, in our one-bedroom, three-room basement flat with the cockroaches at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue.  The building is long gone, along with the Clausens, the Jenkins, the Bradshaws, the Considines, the Baxters, and its other inhabitants.  It's now an empty lot, and I may be the sole survivor of all those who lived there during our tenure.  I wonder whether Ralphie Bradshaw, Jeananne Baxter, or either of the Considine girls or the Senrau girls next door is still alive.  Perhaps so, perhaps not.  In any case, I feel like a creature from Jurassic Park, a survivor from another age, another era, that period at the end of World War II, with Harry Truman in the White House, and Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, Germany and Japan under American and Allied occupation, and the fear of godless Communism and atomic warfare infecting daily life.  How far - or how little - have we moved from those days???

When I started this, the legislatively effective but politically feckless Joe Biden was in the White House, but Donald Trump still dominated national news and everyone's thinking.  He's lived in our minds for more than a decade now.  The January 6th hearings were still going on.  The Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24th.  Inflation exceeded 9% in June, and the price of gasoline averaged over $ 5 per gallon.  Political polarization was continuing and probably increasing, as was distrust in institutions.  We were coming apart at the seams then, and it's only gotten worse over the last 4 years, primed by Biden's ignominious decision to seek reelection in his dotage and Trump's reelection.  After a year and a half in office, he has turned America's name to shit all over the world, effectively destroyed NATO, alienated Europe and even Canada (?!?!), and gotten us involved inextricably in another war which will add to our growing list of wars the almighty, supposedly unbeatable US has lost: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran.

Two years ago, I wrote about the anniversary of the "riot" in Milwaukee in 1967, Medicare's 59th birthday, the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and the death of William Calley, including these thoughts:

What struck me in reading the story was the similarity between My Lai and Hamas's actions in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. but also what has been happening for the 9 months thereafter in Gaza, i.e.,, the killing of women, children, and elderly noncombatants, although on an industrial scale in Gaza.  I was also struck by how, by the beginning of 1968, less than 3 years after the 3rd Marine Division landed in Vietnam, the military was so hard up for leadership.  Calley was about 5' 3" tall and 130 pounds, child size.  He had to repeat 7th grade.  He graduated in the bottom quarter of his high school class.  He flunked out of Palm Beach Junior College after which he worked as a hotel bellhop and a restaurant dishwasher.  With that background, he was selected for Officer Candidate School where he graduated 120th in his class of 156.  What is most striking about Calley and his men and the My Lai massacre is that these American soldiers were ordered to kill hundreds of Asian civilians - women, children, and old men - and they did it.  They did it, much like the Hamas "terrorists" did it on October 7th, just like the Russian soldiers did in Bucha, north of Kyiv, in 2022, much like the Marines who killed 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

 

The latest polls show at least 60% of Americans disapprove of the war against Iran.  Some polls run as high as 72%.  Even higher numbers disapprove of Trump's performance as president generally, including on the economy (inflation, tariffs, cost of living) and immigration (ICE arrests, detentions, and deportations).  Yet we see no significant movement from Trump and Stephen Miller.  I think back to the  60s and early 70s, when LBJ decided not to seek reelection, and the electorate voted in Richard Nixon.  What's different between now and then?  Then our college campuses were in turmoil, Sterling Hall in Madison was blown up, students were shot down at Kent State, and demonstrations against the war (and the draft) drew tens of thousands of Americans to the streets and the Pentagon.  Now we have occasional "No Kings" rallies and demonstrations, populated mostly by older women, but little more in the way of public protest, all while Trump and his co-conspirators publicly and secretly lay the groundwork for controlling the outcomes of the mid-term and 2028 elections.

Anniversary Note:  My memoir's treatment of Milwaukee's "race riot" in 1967:

By 1966, Father Groppi had been appointed advisor the Youth Council of the Wisconsin chapter of the NAACP.  The focus of demonstrations shifted for some reason from the segregationist school board to the most powerful fraternal organization in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Aerie of the Fraternal Order of Eagles.  The Eagles excluded blacks from membership but included within its membership 17 county and circuit judges, 10 county supervisors, the district attorney, the county treasurer, the circuit court clerk, half of the city aldermen, the city attorney, the city treasurer, the city comptroller, the city clerk and so on.  Youth Council members started out picketing the Eagles Club on Wisconsin Avenue, but soon were picketing the homes of targeted public officials who were members of the club, starting with the Wauwatosa home of Judge Robert Cannon, a Catholic, a member of St. Jude parish, and the father of my later friend, former Marine, Vietnam vet and faculty member at the law school, Tom Cannon.  As you might expect, the picketing of the homes of public officials, some in Milwaukee, some in the suburbs, caused tremendous tension in the community.  Picketing at the Eagles Club or at City Hall or the County Courthouse was one thing; picketing in front of homes is Wauwatosa was quite another.

Approaching the summer of 1967, the picketing of school sites and homes of public officials continued, with anger and frustration and vituperation increasing in both the white community and black community.   Father Groppi, Mayor Maier, and Police Chief Brier were, of course, the principal lightening rods during this period, and each one of them was an in-your-face fighter.

 Milwaukee’s Uprising

. On Monday morning, July 31st, your mother and I were sleeping in the bedroom of our new home, a fifth floor apartment in the northernmost Juneau Village building at 1129 N. Jackson Street.  The phone rang between 5 and 5:30.  Half-asleep, I dragged myself out of bed to get to the kitchen and answer it.  It was my father who responded to my croaky “Hello?” with a worried “Are you alright?”  I said “We’re fine.  What’s wrong?”  (My Dad is an early riser, but he was not in the habit of calling at daybreak simply to inquire about our general well-being.)  “There’s a riot up there and they’ve closed off the city.”  That was how I learned that Milwaukee had joined the list of the other cities in having what was called either a “civil disturbance” or a “race riot,” depending on one’s purpose, one’s level of excitability and one’s tendency to look at the world through race-tinted lenses.  I woke up your mother and turned on the Channel 6 news which confirmed my father’s report.  

It took some imagination to characterize the trouble in Milwaukee as a “riot.”  The disturbance was pretty much restricted to a 5 hour period on the night of July 30-31.  Starting at about 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, the 30th, a group of young blacks went on a vandalism rampage on North 3rd Street, starting north of State Street and proceeding up to Center Street, Burleigh Avenue area, breaking windows and raising hell, but without gunfire or arson or significant looting.  As the vandalism on Third Street raged, Father Matthew    left the St. Francis rectory at 4th and Brown and tried to calm down th. e vandals.  He came close to getting beaten by one of the participants, but others protected Matthew, whose peacemaking efforts however proved inadequate to the challenge of what was occurring.

A few blocks north, on Center Street, a white yahoo drove up and down the street, calling the on-looking residents “niggers” and, according to witnesses, shooting a weapon out the car window.   One of the residents was a 55 year old man of limited mental capacity named John Oraa Tucker, a janitor at Shorewood High School.  Tucker went into his house at 134 West Center Street, grabbed his shotgun, came back outside and shot at the white provocateur, who drove away.  A short time later, however, another car with 4 white men pulled up and, when the riders started to get out of the car, Tucker believed them to be threatening troublemakers.  He discharged his shotgun at them.  As it turned out, those men were plainclothes detectives.  In what quickly became a shootout between Tucker and responding police officers, one officer was killed by a shotgun blast, 6 others were wounded, and a bystander was killed by a police bullet.  Two of the injured officers were to become my law students later: John Carter, who was blinded, and LeRoy Jones, whose torso was peppered with shotgun pellets.

Mayor Maier got governor Warren Knowles to call out the Wisconsin National Guard, who set up their headquarters at Garfield Avenue School at 4th and Brown. Chief Brier established his tactical headquarters in the Gimbel’s-Shusters building kiddy-corner from the school.  Maier declared a state of emergency and put the entire city under curfew.  None of us was permitted to leave his or her home on either Monday the 31st or Tuesday, August 1st.   On August 2nd, the curfew was eased to 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.  It stayed in place through August 8th.  In the days immediately after the disturbance, Maier also quarantined the city, permitting no one in or out.  (This was to keep those ubiquitous fomenters of urban uprisings, the “outside agitators,” i.e., Chicago blacks.)  

The Aftermath

Milwaukee has yet to recover from that one night of vandalism and violence four decades ago.  The black uprising was followed by open housing marches led by the increasingly-in-your-face Father Jim (I’m No Martin Luther King) Groppi and his NAACP Youth Council “Commandos.” I haven’t checked the census data, but I suspect that white flight increased after the uprising, and spiked after the school desegregation decree in 1976.  The 3rd Street shopping area, the North Side equivalent of the once- thriving Mitchell Street area on the South Side, has never regained the vitality it had before the uprising.

The uprising, the state of emergency, the curfew, the National Guard troops patrolling the city, the quarantine or blockade: such was our welcome back to Milwaukee.  It would be too much to compare it to life on the airbase in Danang, of course, but there we were, confined to close quarters at night for fear of encountering hostile forces, with the area occupied by armed troops (the equivalent of about 2 ½ Marine infantry battalions), access controlled at check points, and a sense of fear and anger and resentment and distrust and suspicion afoot throughout the city.  It wasn’t all that different from Vietnam.  So much for gemeutlichkeit! 

As I was starting law school, the open housing marches led by Father Groppi and his Commandos started with a warm-up on Monday, August 28th followed by a big one – about 1,000 marchers – on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, September 2nd.  Predictably, there were hecklers and worse taunting the marchers as they crossed Milwaukee’s Mason-Dixon line, the 16th Street viaduct.  Also predictably, with all the drama of an Italian American Catholic priest leading a cadre of young blacks calling themselves “commandos” and with other marchers elbow to elbow for three city blocks, there was national press coverage.  Mayor Henry Maier and Police Chief Harold Brier were both pugnacious and stubborn, traditional German Milwaukeeans whose personal qualities ensured that there would be no real peace between the black community and the white governmental establishment in Milwaukee as long as they were in office.   Unfortunately, both remained in office a long time, Maier from 1960 till 1988, Brier from 1964 until 1984.

7/29/2026

 Wednesday, July 29, 2026

The completion of 4 years of journaling

1921 Adolf Hitler became leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party

1993 Israeli Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk 5-0, stating there was insufficient evidence he was Concentration Camp guard Ivan the Terrible

2016 Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for President

2025 The Netherlands banned Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from the country and called on the European Union to support a ceasefire in Gaza. 

In bed at 8:40, up at 5:15; 0540 116/70/62 116 203.6; 61/76/60, sunny.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.

Further to my notes yesterday on Netanyahu and two days ago on Israel and Zionism.  Bret Stephens' column in this morning's NYTimes, titled "A Blunt Warning for Israel":

[I]t’s tempting for the Jewish state’s stalwart defenders, including me, to downplay its failings. . . But anyone who cares about Israel’s well-being shouldn’t be silent about anti-Palestinian settler terrorism in the West Bank and the nothing-much-to-see-here policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. That’s not only because the terrorism is a menace to Palestinian lives and property, or an affront to Jewish ethics, or a stain on Israel’s reputation — though it’s all those things. It’s also a direct threat to Israel’s security and statehood, and thus to Zionism itself.

That’s the point of a public letter to President Trump, issued Sunday by Matan Vilnai, a retired deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, on behalf of an organization that includes hundreds of retired senior Israeli officers.

“Whereas our security agencies excel in dealing with Hamas and other West Bank Palestinian terror groups, they are severely constrained when it comes to Jewish terrorists,” the letter notes. “It is no secret that certain members of our current government orchestrate much of this chaos, including by shielding their followers — who are armed and driven by messianic impulses — from the law and its enforcement.”

That reality was again brought home last week, when extremist settlers went on a rampage in several Palestinian villages, reportedly setting fire to a home and two mosques, attacking a stonecutting factory and committing other acts of outright terrorism. That followed an incident in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after a confrontation involving a group of Israelis who, without prior coordination, had trespassed into an area under Palestinian civil control.

This sort of episode has become routine. As The Times of Israel reports, “the I.D.F. recorded 867 incidents of nationalistic crime and settler violence in 2025.” That’s up from 682 the previous year.

Netanyahu’s answer to all this, as he told CNN’s Dana Bash, is that the violence is the work of about 150 “juvenile delinquents” and that he doesn’t accept “vigilantism.” But it’s preposterous to think that a government that can assassinate a Hamas leader in a Tehran guesthouse finds itself unable to contain a wave of Jewish thuggery. If the prime minister wanted to end the problem, he could. Like Bartleby, he would prefer not to.

And we, the United States, Democratic and Republican administrations alike, have supported this Israeli terrorism for decades, all the time wringing our hands and clutching our pearls while bemoaning it.

Four years of journaling.  I started keeping this daily journal 4 years ago, thinking at the time that I would see if I could keep it up for a week, and then a month, but here I am 4 years later.  I started this effort as a sorry substitute for the long, daily, early morning chats by text messages that I had with my sister Kitty.  I had become so accustomed to venting, ranting, ruminating, and otherwise schmoozing with her every day that, for several days after she died on March 3, 2022,  I continued sending her texts sharing what was on my mind about what was going on in the world, and in my world.  Force of habit, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers gotta write.  By the end of July, I thought  I would give journaling a try.  I despaired of keeping a handwritten journal in a notebook because my handwriting is not good, and the more I write, the worse it gets, so I opted instead to use Blogger or Blogspot, because I had used it to save rants I had posted years early, during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in the 'comments' sections of Washington Post articles.  I ranted mostly about Alberto Gonzales, "W"'s attorney general and Tim Geitner, Obama's secretary of the Treasury.  I also did some sharing of serious thoughts about legal education after more than two decades on the faculty of MULS. The posts started in 2007 and I used the moniker P[ercy] Boswoth Slogthrop because I wanted to avoid getting crank mail, i.e., counterrants, like ones I received years earlier when one of my letters to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal about the handslapping of Army Lt. William Calley was published.  I started with the pseudonym "Percy Bysshe" but changed the middle name to "Bosworth" after the father figure, Howard Cunningham,  in Happy Days played by Tom Bosley. "Slogthrop" was just a corruption of the name of the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Army Lt. Tyrone Slothrop.  I corrupted the "Sloth . . . ' to "Slog . . ." thinking of Donald Rumsfeld, W's secretary of defense, description of our stupid invasion of Iraq in 2003 as "a long, hard slog."  Rumsfeld said the U.S.-led coalitions would win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not without "a long, hard slog."  He was right about the long, hard slog, but wrong about our winning th war.  I suspect the P. Bosley Slogthrop, like Rumsfeld, is right about some things, and wrong about others.  So it goes.  

Using Blogger permitted me to do some things I couldn't do in a handwritten journal.  First was typing rather than scribbling.  This let me write more than I otherwise would have.  Secondly, incorporating photos and other images into the texts. And, lastly, copying and pasting, which has been, I suppose, a good thing and a bad thing.  It lets me save texts from newspapers and elsewhere that I want to save and refer to later, whether I'm mentally prepared to comment on them at the time or not.  On the negative side, copying texts written by others lets me avoid writing my own thoughts.  It's an easy out from writing any original thought.  The older I get, the fewer original thoughts I have to even try to express, with sometimes days going by in at least a semi-brain fog.  So it goes.    

 I've given up on To the Lighthouse and started Man in the Holocene,  a 1979 novella by the Swiss Max Frisch.  Woolf's book, I am told, is "a classic", and "one of the greatest novels of the 20th century," but I could only get up to page 51 or so, struggling with her difficult syntax (sentence structure, ugh), before admitting that I no interest whatsoeveer in any of her characters, so why should I care about what they were thinking, how they were thinking, the things that Virginia Woolf was interested in.

There's a story in today's Washington Post, "As the cost of aging soars, families’ wealth is evaporating."  It addresses, or at least adverts to, all the factors that make growing old in the United States so daunting.  It calls to mind two films that deal with the problem of us old people: The Ballad of Narayama (1958), and Plan 75 (1922).  Each is a Japanese movie about old people being a drag on society and a drain of vital resources from younger people.  In Narayama, a village had a custom whereby when villagers reached age 70, they would climb a nearby mountain to a spot where they would die from starvation, exposure, or neglect.  In Plan 75, told in a modern setting, the Japanese government adopts a policy of providing large cash payments to its citizens who choose to be euthanized.  I think too of Peter Freuchen's book Eskimo that relates the Eskimo custom of enclosing old family members who can't keep up with the family's never-ending search for food into igloos to await their inevitable death.  The story in the Post brings home to me my rather long-held realization that I have outlived my usefulness to the world and to myself.  I wonder seriously, "Why go on?"  To what end?  For what purpose?  With what meaning?  Hardly idle questions, but what are the answers?  Are the practices in Narayama, Plan 75, and Eskimo so unthinkable?

"Jack & Diane"

Little ditty about Jack and Diane

Two American kids growin' up in the heartland

Jackie gonna be a football star

Diane's debutante backseat of Jackie's car

Oh yeah, life goes on

Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

Oh yeah, life goes on

Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

Gonna let it rock

Let it roll

Let the Bible Belt come

And save my soul

Holdin' on to sixteen as long as you can

Changes come around real soon

Make us women and men

7/28/2026

 Tuesday, July 28, 2026

1915 Woodrow Wilson sent US Marines to Haiti, leading to occupation until 1934

1965 LBJ sent 50,000 more soldiers to Vietnam (total of 125,000)

2025  Donald Trump issued a new 12-day ultimatum to Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

In bed at 8:40, up at 4:55; 0510 204.2 115/66/64 106; 65/74/63, sunny day ahead Beach Hazards warning, 4 to 6 ' waves, dangerous currents  

Morning meds at a7:45 a.m. 

Bad news/good news.  Geri heard this morning from a dear friend, 84 years old, who has been hospitalized since Sunday with pulmonary emboli, blood clots in her lungs.  For many years, they traveled together and shared rooms in hotels and elsewhere on the annual law school recruiting marathons, where they first met and became friends.   They have stayed friends for decades.  Their long-continuing, mutually-supporting friendship reminds me of how much women are at forming and maintaining friendships than men are.  They share more, especially vulnerabilities.  We men tend to stink at this, or at least, I do.  No wonder so many men are lonely in their old age.  I think of Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt and George Segal in Bye Bye, Braverman.

This unexpected bad news calls to mind how very many ways there are to experience a serious health condition and how many ways there are to die.  Geri's friend's, thankfully, will be discharged from the hospital today with instructions to rest at home for the next month or so.  That's the good news, but she's 84 years old with an even older husband with very serious health challenges of his own.  Lindsey Graham, whose funeral is today, died from a tear in his aorta resulting from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a/k/a hardening of the arteries.  He was only 71.  How have I managed to live so long, with my sedentary lifestyle and dietary and alcohol recklessness?  Men born in 1941 entered a world where life expectancy at birth was only about 62–63 years. By reaching my mid-80s, I've already lived more than two decades beyond that average. Today, actuarial tables suggest that I have a reasonable chance of living into my early 90s, with a smaller but still real chance of reaching the mid- to late-90s or beyond.  God forbid!  When I was a kid and a member of St. Leo the Great parish in Chicago, there was a Happy Death Society in the parish.  Knowing what old age is like, and how it will never get better, but only worse, I pray for a happy - and early - death.  God save me from further decay, diminishment, decrepitude, and dementia.

Note to LOA in response to his email about drone warfare & the Marines.

I get a headache just thinking about this shit.  I used to muse with my friend and brother-in-law Jimmy Aquavia, who just died at 92 and was an Army medic in the 1050s, that we were glad that we didn't have long to live.  Both of us were persuaded that the future is more frightening and promising.  I still feel that way.  Artificial Intelligence has me shaking in my boots.  I've been interacting with ChatGPT for the last couple of months.  I find it mind-blowing, and of course my interactions are on the most basic level.  Anthropic's CLAUDE CODE AI is already being used to hack highly protected national security sites.  The government's not able to regulate or control these systems because no one in the government is able to catch up with what the system developers, aided by the AI systems themselves, are coming up with 24/7/365.  I think it is, at best, an open question whether we 

as a species will control these systems or the systems will control us, and who among us will exercise whatever control we have, if we have any.  I have no faith in our own government's ability to deal with the challenge.  It's not only warfare that is being taken over by chip-driven machines.  The best current estimates are that more than 700 data centers are actively under construction across 38 states.  If you include projects that are planned, approved, or in development, the number rises to more than 1,500 projects nationwide.  If on your pilgramage this summer, you come down I-43 from the north, you'll pass a data center under construction north of Port Washington.  It's on more than 1,600 acres of land, and will require 1.3 gigawatts of electrical power at full build-out, the equivalent of enough electricity to power between 900,00 and 1.2 million homes, depending on how you calculate.  Just driving past it is a bit mind-blowing and it's one of 700  currently being built.  It's well beyond my brain housing groups for sure, but this stuff has me glad I'm about 85 and not 25, 15, or 5.

LOA: Bill: "I’ll just pull the power switch on you.”

HAL: "I can’t let you do that , Bill.”

     We used to laugh at that line. No more. In the meantime, a Marine plt cdr has to figure out how to survive a swarm of drones, and launch and control his own. First job is to shut down Putin in Ukraine and hire a bunch of their vets as instructors.

CDC: Right on.   "Open the door, HAL."  "I'm afraid I can't do that, Bill."  Scary stuff.

Watching the funeral of Lindsey Graham at the National Cathedral and thinking to myself, what a bunch of bullshit.  Watching J. D. Vance next to Trump, Trump not joining along in the hymns as Vance and the Secretary of the Treasury mouth them.  Various cabinet secretaries and agency heads in the second and third rows.  Netanyahu in the fourth row.  Graham's casket draped in a pall featuring a prominent Christian cross.  Trump is the first and featured eulogist.  If there are angels in Heaven, they must cringe to see the 80-year-old Trump, with his dyed hair and ridiculous hairdo, and his facial cosmetic foundation and bronzer,  at the pulpit of what purports to be the House of God. DJT 'eulogizing' LG:  "He never saw a war he didn't like, a true hawk."  'nuf said.  Pass the basin, please.  I need to puke.

 

How appropriate it is that Netanyahu should travel from Israel to the US to attend the funeral of Lindsey Graham.  He's been a Republican through and through from his time living in America.  He is the one Israeli more responsible than any other for the growing and widespread disaffection between the American people, especially younger Americans, and the State of Israel.  Back in 2015, he was invited to Congress by the Republicans to deliver a passionate speech against Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump ripped up as soon as he got into office.  That congressional speech was insulting to the sitting American president.  The current online issue of The Atlantic has an article titled "How Netanyahu Lost America," by Franklin Foer.  It's a damning account of Netanyahu's leadership of the Likud party, his opposition to Palestinian statehood, and his lifetime conviction that the whole world is anti-semitic, a conviction he got from his father, a rabid Zionist. 

7/27/2026

 Monday, July 27, 2026

1890 Vincent van Gogh shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise and died of his injuries 2 days later

1944 Thomas William St. John was born

1980 A Palestinian threw a hand grenade at Jewish children in Antwerp, Belgium, killing one

2014 Obama reaffirmed Israel's "right to defend itself" but condemned civilian casualties in Gazaeded

1944 Thomas William St. John was born; died January 18, 2023

2025  Trump and the EU announced a trade deal that would set a reciprocal 15% tariff on all exports and promise to boost EU investment into the U.S. by $600 billion. The EU also promised to purchase $750 billion in American energy products over an unspecified period of time.

2025 At least 73 Palestinians were  killed while seeking humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip

2025 The Israeli Air Force began humanitarian aid drops over the Gaza Strip amid growing international pressure to allow food into the Palestinian enclave.

In bed at 9, up at 5:10; 0525 118/72/66  106 204.0; 72/86/70, Beach Hazards warning, waves 4 to 6 feet, dangerous currents; Dense fog advisory, mostly cloudy; thunderstorms expected around noon.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.

Another brain-numbed day.  With no printable thoughts in my head, I repost what I wrote last year on this date:

What are we to think of Israel now?  It's getting harder to pick up a newspaper or news magazine without feature stories about Palestinian children starving to death in Gaza, or about Palestinians shot to death by rifle or tank fire from the IDF while attempting to obtain food from one of the four Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution sites.  There are some statistics available about the number of children who have died from Severe Acute Malnutrition, the medical term for starvation, but the data are misleading.  Most children who are starving die from severe diarrhea and dehydration, or some other disease that is listed as the cause of death, but it is the starvation or SAM that makes them unable to ward off the lethal effects of diarrhea or other diseases.  If they weren't starving, the children would live; starving, they die, but starvation is not listed as the cause of death.  Thus, there may be thousands of dead Palestinian children who have died in fact from starvation but are not counted, like the presumed thousands of Palestinians buried in the rubble of buildings collapsed by Israeli bombs, rockets, mortars, artillery shells, and missiles.

I know something of the history of Israel and Palestine.  I have made a point of studying that history and of learning from sources on both sides of the historical conflict.  I have known (and loved and admired) many Israel-loving American Jews and a few Palestinians, former students of mine, especially Othman Atta.  I have never discussed Israeli-Palestinian relations with any of them because it is too hot a topic, tending to arouse deep emotions and frustrations.   For much of my adult life, I've had a pro-Israel bias, influenced by my Jewish friends, by Leon Uris' Exodus, by admiration for early Israel's socialist politics and economy based on kibbutzim, by official U.S. support, and by opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the unattractive-in-so-many-ways Yasser Arafat, and terrorism.  I was duly impressed by the dashing Moshe Dayan and Israel's stunning victory in the Six-Day War and again, though less impressively, in the Yom Kippur War.  My enthusiasm for Israel began to diminish with Israel's turn to the right with the election of Menachim Begin in 1977 and the ascendancy of the Likud Party.  It nosedived in 1995 with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the rise of Netanyahu.  I have long thought that the assassination of Rabin ended any realistic hope for peace between the Palestinians and Israel, and nothing that has happened since has changed that judgment.  If there had been even an iota of hope for some accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it was dashed by the formation of the coalition government between Netanyahu's Likud Party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, which was sworn in on December 29, 2022.  282 days later, Hamas staged its genocidal attack in southern Israel.  21 months later, Israel is still killing Gazans daily, some with bullets, many by starvation and disease.  Throughout those 21 months, the United States has been Israel's main supporter and supplier of weapons.

The war started with Hamas's genocidal attack, but it was immediately followed by Israel's defense minister saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.  We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu said, "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible."  Netanyahu's reference was to the Book of Samuel, where the Israelites were commanded by God to destroy Amalek completely, men, women, children, animals, and possessions.

Where are we after almost 2 years of relentless warfare?  From this morning's New York Times: 

No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Baby Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals

In several of the hospitals still functioning in Gaza, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborn babies, in some cases giving them water alone.

And at least three major hospitals lack the nutritional fluids needed to properly treat malnourished children and adults.

Those scenes were described in interviews starting Friday with seven doctors — four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the United States. All of them worked this past week in four of the territory’s main hospitals.

After months of warnings, international agencies, experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months. At least 56 Palestinians died this month of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on Saturday by the Gaza Health Ministry.

As starvation rises, medical institutions and staff, already struggling to treat war wounds and illness, are now grappling with rising cases of malnourishment.

Weak and dizzy, medics are passing out in the wards, where colleagues revive them with saline and glucose drips. Persistently short of basic tools such as antibiotics and painkillers, doctors are also running out of the special intravenous drips used to feed depleted patients.

After all we have seen over the last 21 months, after all that has been reported, what are we to think of Israel?  of the United States? of Judeo-Christian morality and ethics?  of our species?

I have written before about the following bit of wisdom from Ezra Klein that he shared during his interview of Kathryn Schulz in the New York Times on May 30th of this year, but I'm prompted to advert to it again in light of what I wrote above, and also in light of what I wrote yesterday about being so often miserable and wondering whether I'm going crazy.

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.

I work in the news. My show is part of this dynamic I’m about to describe, but the news can sometimes be an engine for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you that is happening literally anywhere on Earth at that exact moment.

It’s not that it’s not, on some level, good to know — I don’t want to go to the point where we never know about it — but I often think that probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes, but less often, wonderful things happening elsewhere.

As opposed to being with your kids in the park, and your phone buzzes, and it’s just something terrible that you cannot affect. Not even happening to anybody you know. You definitely don’t have power over it. But somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it.

And it’s strange. It both makes you aware of suffering, but also it has some other quality, some numbing and exhausting quality that is not healthy.

I repeat also what I said of these thoughts back on May 31:

I think of that Vietnam veteran I chatted with in Senkik's yesterday and his complaint or bewilderment over his nephew who kissed off living in America and moved to New Zealand.  He didn't say where in New Zealand he moved to, whether an urban or a rural area, nor how the nephew was supporting himself there, or what it is about life in America that he found so intolerable, but it wouldn't surprise me if at least part of what he wanted to escapte from was what Klien described, constant exposure to terrible news about which one can do nothing.  There is much more about curent American culture, including politics of course, that can make one feel like the man on the bridge in Edvard Munch's The Scream, but Klein has put his finger on a significant cause of modern misery, the daily awareness of human suffering, of death and destruction, about which we can do nothing.  Klein says it tends to make us numb and exhausted, but I suspect it's even worse.  It coarsens us and makes us indifferent to the suffering of others. After a while, it becomes boring.  We can become like Donald Trump when he says of the Ukraine War or the Gaza War, as he did before professing to be concerned about the slaughter in those places, "it's not my problem."  Or, as J. D. Vance said to Steve Bannon during his campaign for the Senate, "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."  The hard question, for Ezra Klein and the rest of us, is what to do about this dystopian situation we live in, especially we relatively highly-educated, highly-informed individuals who religiously follow 'the news.'

Perhaps I should say that they are the fortunate ones who become indifferent to the suffering of others, especially the incredibly widespread suffering of children in Gaza.  Indifference = no personal suffering over the suffering of others, no pain, no anguish, no shared or empathic suffering. "Not my problem.'  Jesus directed his followers to 'love your neighbor as yourself.'  Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote, 'love, love changes everything,  days are longer, words mean more.  Love, love changes everything, pain is deeper than before."  Love hurts.  To love is to open yourself up to hurt, to pain, to suffering.  One cannot love the children of Gaza, or the adults of Gaza, without deeply hurting.  One cannot love the Israelis without feeling their pain, their fears, their anxieties from lifetimes of constant threat from enemies, and without understanding their wrath over the slaughter of innocents on October 7th.  There is no lack of arguments and theories justifying Israel's war on Hamas, but I see no way of justifying Israel's total war on the Gazans, especially the children.  I'm way past quibbling over the legal definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  The International Court of Justice will tell us at some time whether it holds Israel guilty of legal genocide.  Our eyes and consciences tell us that it is guilty of moral genocide.

As I write these words, I am aware of how arrogant and judgmental they are.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.  But we must make judgments in life, certainly with respect to the act of our own government, which claims to act on our behalf, and of the acts of other governments and other human actors.  Our entire legal and regulatory systems are grounded on judgments.  Our moral and ethical choices in life are grounded on moral and ethical judgments.  God knows (in a manner of speaking) that the United States has been guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  Our history is full of wrongful conduct by our government, done with or without the approval of the majority of our citizens.  God knows that the Marine Corps, of which I was a volunteer member, has been guilty of war crimes.  God knows that the Vietnam War, in which I volunteered to serve, is viewed by many, perhaps by most, as a horrendous crime against the Vietnamese people.  Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.  But what is the alternative to forming a judgment against Israel over its actions in Gaza (and the West Bank for that matter)?  And against the United States over its deep and enabling complicity with Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their allies?    More death, more destruction, more children starved to death, more lives ruined, and an implied acquiescence in the acceptability of these actions and consent to their continuance.   How can that be acceptable?

7/26/2026

 Sunday, July 26, 2026

1948  Truman issued Executive Order No. 9981 to desegregate the US armed forces

2023 Sinead O'Connor 12/8/55 - 7/27/23 

My attempt many, many years ago to paint a portrait of Sinead O'Connor, perhaps after her frontal assault on the Church and the Papacy on Saturday Night Live on October 3, 1992.  I drew the undersketch largely freehand and failed completely in terms of likeness, but I liked the painting nonetheless and have it hanging on my bedroom wall.  Although it doesn't look at all like her, it reminds me of her and of her troubled journey through life.

In bed at 9,, up at 4:55; 0505 126/74/64. 144 205.4; 70/85/69. cloudy.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  

I started To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this afternoon.

Anniversaries thoughts.  First,  Sinead O'Connor was also a hero of mine, like Frank Petersen whom I recall below.   She was an extraordinary, powerful singer, of course.  I still enjoy listening to her first two albums, The Lion and the Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Do Not Have. She was also a rebel.  From Wikipedia: 

O'Connor drew attention to issues such as child abuse, human rights, racism, and women's rights. During a Saturday Night Live performance in 1992, she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II to protest against abuse in the Catholic Church, sparking controversy. Throughout her musical career, she openly discussed her spiritual journey, activism, socio-political viewpoints, and her experiences with trauma and struggles with mental health. After converting to Islam in 2018, she adopted the name Shuhada' Sadaqat while continuing to perform and record under her birth name.

 On October 3, 1992, Sinead appeared on Saturday Night Live, sang a version of Bob Marley's War, and tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II, saying "Fight the real enemy."  It was only 9 years later that JPII admitted the problem of child abuse within the Catholic Church.  Meanwhile, Sinead suffered abundant abuse from those offended by her protest.  She died of unspecified natural causes at age 56.  During the last decades of her life, she was a mess: psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.  She endured much suffering in her life and it showed in her erratic and confused behavior, but she has long occupied a warm place in my heart and I will make a point of listening to and enjoying her albums again today.

Second, about segregation in the military: I was almost 7 years old when Truman desegregated the Armed Forces, the Armed Forces that another Democratic president,  Woodrow Wilson, had made it a point to keep segregated.  "During Wilson’s presidency, he allowed his cabinet to segregate the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Navy, the Interior, the Marine Hospital, the War Department, and the Government Printing Office. This meant creating separate offices, lunchrooms, bathrooms, and other facilities for white and Black workers. It also meant dismissing Black supervisors, cutting off Black employees’ access to promotions and better-paying jobs and reserving those jobs for white people."  The Navy and the Marines were the slowest of the service branches to integrate.  The Navy actually used Philapino and Black sailors as servants, or "stewards" as they were called, waiting on Navy officers in their wardrooms.  I recall no Black midshipmen or officer candidates in my T&T Regiment at Quantico in 1962 nor at the Basic School in 1963.  The only Black Marine officer I encountered in the Marine Corps between 1963 and 1967 when I was discharged became of friend of mine, then Major and later General Frank Peterson,  We served together at the Marine Corps Reserve Detachment, NAS, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.  He was a fighter pilot.  We drove together to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to enjoy a performance by the great Nancy Wilson.  Frank was a remarkable man, a remarkable aviator, a remarkable leader,  and a remarkable Marine,  He was the first Black Marine aviator and the first Black Marine general.  He retired as a 3-star Lieutenant General.  And he was the only Black felllow Marine officer I encountered in 4 years of active duty in the mid-1960s.  I hadn't thought of it before, but he was not only a friend during my last year of active duty, he was also a hero.

7/25/2026

 Saturday, July 25, 2026

306 Constantine I was proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops

1941 FDR banned selling benzine/gasoline to Japan

1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical "Humanae vitae (Of Human Life)" which rejected any artificial forms of birth control

2019 US Justice Department resumed the use of the death penalty, scheduling five executions

In bed at 9, up at 5:35; 0555  0555 132/74/59 XXX 204.0, 0606 115/71/60, 0616 110/70/60; 64/79/59, cloudy

Morning meds at 9 a.m.   

I finished A Confederacy of Dunces this afternoon.  Actually, I was listening to the last chapter and dozed off during a good portion of it, but didn't bother to go back and start again.  Basically, his mother finally gave up on Ignatius and was taking steps to have him involuntarily committed to a mental health facility when his former girlfriend Myrna Minkoff showed up from New York City, deus ex machina, and rescued him and his abundance of Big Chief notebooks containing the deranged fragments of his magnum opus, and spirited him away from New Orleans.  I was glad to be done with it, not because it was all terrible, but it became terrible at some indefinite point when it became boring.  There's only so much of Ignatius J. Reilly that an ordinary reader can take, and the book contains too much of his rantings, his deprecations, his unending hyperboles both in belittling others and in promoting himself.   I came to realize as I read and listened to the narrative that Ignatius reminded me of Donald Trump, his hyperbolic name-calling of his ubiquitous enemies and hyperbolic and narcissistic self-promotion.  

Geri gets home today after her 6-day visit with her dear buddy Kate Donovan.  I'll be glad to have her home, but I wish I were in better shape for her return.  I was in a bit of a funk when she left and am the same way today, disspirited, emotionally listless.  I watched Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt last night, and the sad sack that he played in that film reminded me of myself.  His character retired at age 66 after serving 40 years as an actuary for an insurance company and discovered that he was an empty shell.  He had no hobbies, no friends, no reading habits, and a distant relationship with his only child, his daughter.  He was emotionally alone and lonely, pathetic.  I'm not nearly as bad off as Schmidt is in the movie, but I can't say I'm enjoying life, either.  My birth family's all gone, as are most of my good friends, the guys I used to work with, golf with, and fish with.  I've got Geri, thank God, and Sarah and Andy, but Sarah lives in Europe and Andy's busy with three very active kids, a wife, and a new job, all making demands on him.  Thinking of him makes me think of the singer in "The Cat's in the Cradle."  I'm throwing a pity party for myself while realizing that doing so only worsens the condition. Pathetic.  . . . Geri got home around 3:30 and my spirits were lifted within minutes.  I'm so fortunate to have her in my life.  Indeed she is my life.

An anniversary note re Humanae Vitae, from my memoir:

The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’  without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.¹  The report was leaked to the press in 1967, and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, Paul VI rejected the recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best. mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of its shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

From my point of view, the United States’ position on the war in Vietnam and the Church’s position on contraception flowed from the same source.   Johnson and his advisors and Paul VI and his advisors were more concerned with institutional credibility than with the lives of their “subjects.”  Not losing face, nationally and personally, was more important to Johnson than the lives of the Americans and Vietnamese who were suffering in the war.  Better that thousands should die or be horribly wounded than that the United States be seen for what it inevitably was in Vietnam, an arrogant and feckless loser.

¹“If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). 

“It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]

Reading these words today, 20 years or so after I wrote them, puts me in mind of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, in which he argues, persuasively, that we are much more likely to sin, to act selfishly, as members of a group than we are as individuals.  His theory explains our tendency to "circle the wagons" whenever group integrity, identity, cohesiveness, safety, standing, or privilege is attacked.

 

7/24/2026

 Friday, July 24, 2026

1943, the RAF began bombing Hamburg, creating a firestorm and killing 42,600 people

1952 "High Noon", starring Gary Cooper and Thomas Mitchell, was released

1967 The first modern hospice was founded in London, beginning modern palliative care.

2019  Robert Mueller reported that President Trump was not exonerated of obstruction of justice and that Russia interfered in the US election to benefit Trump

2024 Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a defiant address to a joint session of US Congress re Gaza 

In bed at.9"30, up at 5:55; 0605 115/64/64 166 203.8;62/77/61, cloudy   

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.

Approaching the end of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I don't know quite what I think of it.  Much of it is funny, but mostly it's the clever name-calling that Ignatius engages in in his frequent engagements with other human beings, all of whom he considers his intellectual inferiors.  He is like a combination of Don Rickles, Don Quixote, and Oliver Hardy.   The problem I'm having getting through the whole book is that there's not much of a plot, mostly just Ignatius in various settings acting ridiculously and berating those around him.  I love Laurel and Hardy movies, but not hour after hour of them.  

The more I learn of John Kennedy Toole, the clearer it becomes that Ignatius J. Reilly is based largely on him.  Each was an only child with a very pushy mother, and each was a medievalist.  Toole even struggled with his weight and with overeating.  

I found a January 5, 2021, review of the novel in The New Yorker by Tom Bissell that includes this:

I suddenly recalled why I found the novel so repellent the first time I read it. It’s not that I “don’t like” or “can’t relate” to Ignatius; no serious reader should care about such things. It’s more that, at every turn, Ignatius is exactly the character you expect him to be. Late in the novel, one character asks him, “Don’t you ever shut up?” He doesn’t. That’s the problem.

That is indeed the problem.  So much of the novel consists of the same scenes played over and over again, variations on a repeated theme.

An anniversary thought.  The Hamburg bombing and its firestorm killing thousands reminded me of a memo written by Winston Churchill on March 28, 1945, shortly before the end of the European war.  He wrote: 

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.  Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.  We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves.  The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.  The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."  I included a photocopy of the memo in my memoir in the chapter in which I described my visit to Hiroshima and its War Memorial.  I wrote:

I found this letter from Winston Churchill while doing some research on strategic bombing.  It is notable for its bald acknowledgment that a prime purpose of strategic bombing of cities was “increasing the terror, though under other pretexts” and for its reluctant abjuring of “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”  The German military, of course, were past masters of Schrecklichkeit or terrorism at least from the inception of World War I and its invasion of Belgium, the bombardment of historic Louvain and torching of its priceless university library.  However, it did not take long for the British and Americans to get into their own brand of in terrorem tactics on civilians, especially the firebombing of cities in Europe and Japan, including the precious medieval city of Dresden, which Churchill mentions as a “query against the conduct of Allied bombing.”  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the pinnacle of terror bombing.  

Have we made much moral progress since then, either as a species or as a nation?  We're more than 80 years past the firebombing of most Japanese cities, bombings for which Curtis LeMay accurately said of himself that he would be prosecuted for war crimes if the US had lost, rather than won, the war.  We see what Russia is doing in Ukraine, what Israel has been doing for decades against Palestinians, and now what Trump and his henchmen are threatening against Iran and what Iran is doing against US allies in the region, and we wonder.  "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."  Homo hominis lupus.