5/20/2026

 Wednesday, May 20, 2026

D+174/119

325  First ecumenical council of Christian bishops at Nicaea, Asia Minor

1969 US troop captured Hill 937/Hamburger Hill in Vietnam

1970 100,000 marched in NY supporting US policies in Vietnam

1980 710 families in Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York were evacuated due to the lingering effects of prior use as chemical waste disposal site

2017 President Donald Trump began his 1st foreign trip  to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

2025 The United Kingdom suspended negotiations on a new free trade agreement with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador amid the then-recent Israeli offensive in Gaza

In bed at 9, up at 4:15; 0430 151/68/E 130 205.2, 0445 126/74/54 110; 48/54/45.  SEVERE WEATHER ALERT; BEACH HAZARDS, Life-threatening waves 3 to 5 feet and dangerous currents expected from 7 pm to 10 am Thursday.

Morning meds at 8 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:20 a.m.

"Barn Raising" is the heading of the chapter in Traveling Mercies in which Anne Lamott introduces her readers to her friends Sara  and Adam who have a two-year old daughter Olivia who has cystic fibrosis.

I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked.  They must live with the fact that their younger daughter has this disease that fills its victims' lungs with thick sludge that harbors infections. Two week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotics are common.  Adulthood is rare.  Twice a day, every day, her parents must pound her between the shoulder blades for forty-five minutes to dislodge the mucus from her lungs. . . . 

This is, I think, her introduction to the problem theologians and philopsophers call theodicy, or the problem of how to understand, and justify, a God who voluntarily created a world - and us - that is so full of evil and suffering.  How can a God who is supposedly simultaneously All-Good, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and All-Just create innocent little Olivia with cystic fibrosis, along with countless other undeserved sufferings all over his world.  He's got the whole world in his hands, right?  His eye is on the sparrow, right?  Anne Lamott writes: 

I looked up at God, and thinking about Olivia, about how badly scarred her lungs are already, I said, "What on earth are you thinking?

She doesn't attempt to answer the question, at least not in this chapter, or in the first 170 pages of the book that I've read so far, but no one who has tried has done a very satisfactory job so far, and the list includes St. Augustine, St. Iranaeus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Rebbe Schneerson of Chabad Lubavitch.   I remember sitting at the kitchen table in Geri's cousin Sue's house during a visit several years ago and suggesting that it's easier to make the argument that God is a mean prick than it is to argue that S/He/It is an all-powerful and all-loving Father to our species.  Anne Lamott gave us a living example of the conundrum in the form of 2 year-old Olivia with cystic fibrosis.  There are millions, perhaps billions, of other examples all over the world.  The answer I learned in my Catholic education was that it's a mystery of Faith, like how what is bread and wine in one moment actually turns into human flesh and blood  when certain words are spoken by certain persons who have been ordained to accomplish the feat.

An observant Jew would, I suppose, tell me to read the Book of Job, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah.  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, said the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9.   Anne Lamott is smart; she leaves the 'splainin' to the prophets instead of taking on the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Robert Sapolsky, and Christopher Hitchens.  Most Christians are wise enough not to wrack their brains trying to figure out stuff like this.  As my old pal Vicki Conti so wisely told me long ago, "It's a heart thing, Chuck, not a head thing."

I've watched a few of lamott's interviews and speeches on YouTube and she sings the same tunes in all the ones that I've watched.  I can see why she is so popular because she popularizes Christianity.   She is a kind of homespun, religious Will Rogers, or Herb Shriner, or non-cynical Mark Twain.  She expresses her personal participation in the religion in everyday terms from everyday life, especially in metaphors and similes that are clever and catchy, but again I find myself wondering what she really believes about this God about whom she writes so familiarly, and as important, what the belief is based on.  That said, I confess that I have shared some of the religious experiences she descibes.  For example, she wrote a book I haven't read yet, titled Help, Thanks, Wow in which she says those three words in the title are the most essential forms of prayer.  I agree with that and I've often been moved to engage in those very prayers.  I'm reminded, as I am so often, of the 4th and 5th stanzas of W. B. Yeats' poem Vacillation

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

V

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

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

The fourth stanza seems a form of prayer of thanksgiving and of awe and wonder, of "thanks" and "wow," while the fifth is a prayer of loneliness, desperation, of "help."  I've had all those feelings, sometimes all jumbled together almost simultaneously.  I suspect that religous instinct or impulse is in all of us.

I'm not sure why, but I find myself thinking of another old favorite poem of mine, one loaded with memories, The Marshes of Glynn, by Sydney Lanier.

Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven

2With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven

3   Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, --

4          Emerald twilights, --

5          Virginal shy lights,

6Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows,

7When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades

8Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods,

9Of the heavenly woods and glades,

10That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within

11The wide sea-marshes of Glynn; --

12Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, --

13Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,

14Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves, --

15Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,

16Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,

17Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good; --

18O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,

19While the riotous noon-day sun of the June-day long did shine

20Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in mine:

21But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,

22And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,

23And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem

24Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream, --

25Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,

26And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke

27   Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,

28   And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,

29   And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,

30That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn

31Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore

32When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,

33And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain

34Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, --

35Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face

36   The vast sweet visage of space.

37To the edge of the wood I am drawn, I am drawn,

38Where the gray beach glimmering runs, as a belt of the dawn,

39   For a mete and a mark

40       To the forest-dark: --

41          So:

42Affable live-oak, leaning low, --

43Thus -- with your favor -- soft, with a reverent hand,

44(Not lightly touching your person, Lord of the land!)

45Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand

46On the firm-packed sand,

47         Free

48By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.

49   Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band

50   Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.

51Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl

52As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the firm sweet limbs of a girl.

53Vanishing, swerving, evermore curving again into sight,

54Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.

55And what if behind me to westward the wall of the woods stands high?

56The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!

57A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade,

58Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a light or a shade,

59Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain,

60To the terminal blue of the main.

61Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?

62   Somehow my soul seems suddenly free

63From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,

64By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.

65Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free

66Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!

67Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,

68Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won

69God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain

70And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain.

71As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

72Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:

73I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies

74In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies:

75By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod

76I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:

77Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within

78The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.

79And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea

80Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be:

81Look how the grace of the sea doth go

82About and about through the intricate channels that flow

83      Here and there,

84          Everywhere,

85Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,

86And the marsh is meshed with a million veins,

87That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow

88In the rose-and-silver evening glow.

89Farewell, my lord Sun!

90The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run

91'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir;

92Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr;

93Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;

94And the sea and the marsh are one.

95How still the plains of the waters be!

96The tide is in his ecstasy.

97The tide is at his highest height:

98And it is night.

99And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep

100Roll in on the souls of men,

101But who will reveal to our waking ken

102The forms that swim and the shapes that creep

103Under the waters of sleep?

104And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in

105On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of Glynn.

I first encountered this poem in the winter of 1964, when I attended air defense school at the Naval Air Station, Glynn County, outside of Brunswick, Georgia.  Legend had it that Lanier was inspired to write the poem, and perhaps wrote some of it, while sitting under a live oak tree between the outskirts of Brunswick and the tidal marshes that lie between the city and the barrier islands to the east of them: St. Simon Island, Sea Island, Jeckyll Island, etc..  The tree is still standing and is known as The Lanier Oak, but it's located in the median strip of U.S. 17 running from Savannah to Jacksonville.

5/19/2026

 Tuesday, May 19, 2026

1961 Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev makes his Paris stage debut with the Kirov Ballet

1962 "John Birch Society" single by Chad Mitchell Trio hit the pop charts

1983 36th Cannes Film Festival: "Narayama Bushiko" (The Ballad of Narayama ) directed by Japanese director Shohei Imamura, won the Palme d'Or

1992  Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for being a single mother, a poor example of family value

2025 Russia bansned Amnesty International as an undesirable organisation, accusing the group of openly supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:45, up at 4:15; 0430 117/69/55 108 206.2; 63/58/74/53, cloudy, and another windy day..

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m., and half-dose of Biseprolol at.5:30 a.m.

From Traveling Mercies, the essay "Ladders," p, 76-77:

Tom and I ended up going [snorkeling] together.  The little cove was near a beach with grsas huts and umbrellas on the white sands; cactuses on ancient neighboring hills framed it all.  We donned our gear and jumped in.  The water is not crystal clear, and there are not a million brilliantly colored fish to watch, but if there is a heaven - and I think there really may be one - it may be similar to snorkeling, soft, bright, quiet.   

I read this section last night before turning off the lights and going to bed.  It made me think, of course, of my old friend TSJ, who died from cardiac arrest or a heart attack while snorkeling in the US Virgin Islands.  I would never say that it was fortunate that Tom died  as he did; I'm confident that, had he been given a choice in the matter, he would have chosen to go on living.  He enjoyed life probably more than many, perhaps most, of us do.  He was a lot smarter than most people, and he liked that about himself.  He was also better looking than most of us, even in his old age, and he liked that too.  He was happy in his own skin, as they say.  He even took some pride in his family name, St. John, named after an original evangelist, or perhaps the Beloved Disciple whom Jesus loved, and this despite the fact that he was  a Jew, by conversion rather than by birth or upbringing, and the former treasurer of Congregation Sinai.  No, I'm pretty sure he would have chosen life over death if given that choice on January 18, 2023.  But he wasn't given that choice, and his 78 year old heart stopped beating as he floated in the warm Carribean waters watching the undersea creatures while his wife Micaela and son Saul, waited on their nearby boat.  That said, I've often thought that his death was an awfully nice way to go.  Better than being eaten by a shark, certainly, but also better than dying in a hospital or nursing home, especially after a long, painful, or debilitating illness.  Better than most of the ways of dying that I can think of.  I think of Tom and of his death while snorkeling in tropical waters when I consider the question asked of me before every surgery and hospitalization at the VA: do you want us to try to try to resuscitate your heart if it stops beating?  The first time I was asked, I said 'yes,' but now I say 'no', for reasons I've often reflected on in these journal pages, but basically because, considering all the dreadful alternative ways of dying, dying under anesthesia or otherwise cared for is not such a bad way to go.  One thing is certain: life will not get any easier the longer it continues past age 85.  Maybe I should book a vacation to the Virgin Islands.

Random thoughts about Anne Lamott and her God.  Traveling Mercies is the first thing I've read of her voluminous writing, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.  I enjoy that she writes of everyday events and circumstances of living.  As I write these words, I'm in the middle of her description of living with colds, flus, and headaches, and comparing her crabbiness with her neighbor's cheerfulness despite his stage 4 metascicized lung cancer. ("Fields"). I wonder, however, about a couple of things.  First, how much of her reporting is factual and how much is made up to craft a better, or at least, more marketable story.  She's a professional writier writer, published in such worthy venues as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, National Geo, Time, and other widely-read journals.   Her stories are crafted to be sold or otherwise accepted for publication and I suspect some, maybe much, of it is made up to make a better story.  Second, she writes a lot about God and how she prays.  I have to wonder how much of whaat she writes she really believes.  Of course, I tend to wonder about this with respect to all believers, like Reinhold Niebuhr and Thomas Merton, all clergmen, and church-goers generally - the people at the pulpits and the people in the pews.   I don't wonder about these things out of any sense of my own intellectual or spiritual superiority, to neither of which I lay any claim, but because of my own difficulty in coming up with a sense of a God, at least a personal God like the kind Lamott seems to believe in, one who is attentive to the prayers of his (or her or its) believers and supplicants here on Earth, one whose "eye is on the sparrow."  Here's a sample from the essary I'm in the middle of now:

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, "Well, isn't that fabulous?  Because I need help too.  So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff."  Maybe Rick had told God (as he understands God) that he needed some energy that morning, and God had said, "Well, great, because Sam Lamott needs a ride to school.  Could you do that for me?  And I'll be getting you some strength."

I realize of course that she is simply trying to make good points with her imagined two-way conversations with God and God's imagined conversation with Rick, but with all the imagined stuff about God in her writing, I have to wonder what she really believes, and why she believes whatever she believes.  As I write these words, though, I recall the wisest thing ever said to me about Faith, by my old friend Vicki Conti, at our last lunch together.  I was kvetching about my problems understanding the idea of God operating in our world, and Vicki said, "It's not a head thing, Chuck.  It's a heart thing."  'nuf said.  She was wise.  I'm a dope.

 

5/18/2026

 Monday, May 18, 2026

1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state triggered the largest landslide in history, killing 57 people and causing over $1 billion in damage

1994 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip

In bed at 9:20, awake at 4:15, up at 4:45; 0510 124/62/30 120 204.8; 62/77/50, cloudy, awaiting a thunderstorm around 6 a.m..   

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.,  and half-dose of Besoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I've started reading Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, a memoir about her life and her adventures (for want of a better word) with Faith and religion. As I write these words early Monday morning, I'm only on page 38 of the 276 page book.  She is still in her 20s, living in the San Francisco Bay area, her first book already published by a New York publisher, and seemingly heavily into alcohol,  marijuana, cocaine, psychodelics, sex, and sleeping with other women's husbands.  Her mother left the family years ago to go to law school and then practice law in Hawaii and her father, a writer, has died from a brain cancer.  She is a bit acquainted with Roman Catholicism from her early friendship with one girl, Christian Science from another friendship, and Judaism from some college friends, and she believes in a god/God of some sort.  I am looking forward to reading on.   . . .  By noon, I've read what she call the book's Overture: Lilly Pads,   The lilly pads are metephors for stages in her life during which she moved from having no religious beliefs to becoming a Christian.  Here parents were not only non-religious, but in her father's case, fervently anti-religious.  What struck me most about her early life (she's 72 now) was how dissolute it was.  She makes no effort to minimize it.  Indeed, one wonders whether she exaggerated it to emphasize the significance of her conversion, but I'll take her at her word: she was a diry bird.  What resonated (there's that word again!) most with me was her being attracted to Christianity through a Black church in a ghetto outside Sausalito, and specifically about how moved she was by gospel music. It reminded me of course of my return to Catholic practice, if not belief, at St. Francis of Assisi parish in Milwaukee's inner city (We don't like to call our ghettos ghettos), and of the significance of gospel music.  My friend Roland Wright, about who I wrote yesteday, was a member of the St. Francis choir; indeed, he was one of the only three male members.  I've written more than once about the sterility of most Catholic religious music, at least in my youth.  "Tantum ergo makes your hair grow," "Holy God, we praise thy name," and "Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest, in in our hearts take up thy rest."  Compare these with Protestant gospel songs, Black and White, like "Nobody Know the Troubles I've Seen," "Oh, Happy Day," "Wayfaring Stranger," "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and so many, many more that come into us through our ears and reach down to our hearts and souls.  They're all simple, all powerful, and all somehow comforting.  One of my favorites is "When He calls, I'm going to live with Jesus," sung by Emmylou Harris:

When darkness fills the valley

Fear and dread strive deep within us

But our burdens soon will be lifted

When these old homes turn to dust

When He calls I'm going to live with Jesus

In His kingdom He welcomes everyone

I shall not fear no more earthly perils

For He will carry me home  

Thy lyrics are so heimish, or heimishe, as it is said in Yiddish.  Not just litteraly "homish," insofar as they speak not of going to Heaven, or onto the Beatific Vision, or to one's Eternal Reward, but rather of 'going to live with Jesus,' who 'welcomes everyone,' and 'will carry me home,' but also in its broader sense of friendly, welcomingn and accepting   Can anyone fail to understand those images, those thoughts?  Can anyone fail to understand, and be moved by the lyrics of "Precious Lord, take my hand"?  "I am tired, I'm weak, I am worn."  I was touched by the fact that it was what she saw and heard (the music, not the sermon) in the little Black congregation in Marin City that opened her up to the fact that there is comfort to be found in religion and religious community.  It's not always true for all of us, but it's surely true for many and probably most of us.

. . . . 

Early this afternoon, I started what Lamott called Part 1 of her memoir, which struck me as sort of denigrating the long "Overture" I had just read, but, in any event, in reading it I could see why she is such a popular author.  Among other reasons, she's very funny.  I laughed as I read the following about an airplane ride she took:

I was in row thirty-eight, between a woman slightly older than I, with limited language skills, and a man my own age who was reading a book by a famous right-wing Christian novelist about the Apocalypse.  A newspaper had asked me to review this book when it first came out, because its author and I are both Christians - although as I pointed out in my review, he's one of those right-wing Christians who thinks that Jesus is coming back next Tuesday right after lunch, and I am one of those left-wing Christians who thinks that perhaps this author is just spiritualizing his own hysteria.

"How is it?" I asked, pointing jovially to the man's book, partly to be friendly, partly to gauge where he stood politically.

"This is one of the best books I've ever read," he replied.  "You should read it."  I nodded.  I remember saying in the review that the book was hard-core right-wing paranoid anti-Semitic homophobic misogynistic propaganda - not to put too fine a point on it.  The man smiled and went back to reading. 

It got funnier from there. I think I'm in for a very enjoyable reading experience.   (She later described her born-again seatmate as "rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon" and the other as possibly from "one Latvian parent and one Korean.  She sounded a little like Latka Gravas, the Andy Kaufman character on Taxi . . ." 

The closest I've gotten to asceticism.  All my life I have been drawn to read about ascetics, especially Christian ascetics, like the early Church desert fathers, monks, Thomas Merton, but also the Jewish Essenes, and the Muslim dervishes.  I have sometimes daydreamed in these pages of living in the North Woods, on the Chain of Lakes, and living a semi-ascetic live, no TV, smart phone, internet, or radio, a more isolated Thoreau at Waldon Pond and Annie Dillard at Tinker Creek.  It's all imaginary, of course, because in real life I have always been terribly self-indulgent.  From the time I was a child stuffing my face with Hostess cup cakes up until the present, I have failed at self-discipline of all sorts.  I've never liked exercise qua exercise.  As a kid, I enjoyed playing baseball and basketball, and as a young adult, I enjoyed playing handball and racketball, but I never got into excercise as such, exercise for exercise's sake, like jogging or pumping iron, or responsible eating for health's sake.  For long periods of my life, I drank too much alcohol, especially wine.  For much of my adult life, I was way overweight, rotund as a hot air balloon.  I still am way overweight.  When I underwent the physical examination for the NROTC scholarship in my senior year of high school, in 1959, I was 2 pounds under the minimum weight requirement for my height.  The hospital corpsman lied on my record, and told me to eat a couple of bananas went I got home.  I don't know how long it took me after I was discharged from the Marine Corps to become a Humphrey Pennyworth, with bottons popping off my shirts, but once I blimped out, I never returned to my "imperially slim body," as my Marine friend Dick Coffman used to describe his physique. (Dick seemed to disappear into the CIA when he was discharged from the Corps.). In any event, I think of my historic self-indulgence this morning as I reflect on the fact that I wantonly allowed myself  a breakfast of three medium-sized slices of sourdough toast with butter and strawberry preserves rather than my normal two I restrict myself to, not to reduce my intake of calories, but to control my intake of sodium, which is to say, salt.  I've been on a low-sodium diet for 5 months now.  Today marks the 5 month anniversary of my daily recording of my weight, blood pressure, pulse, and glucose count every morning upon waking up.  Regarding the weigh-in, it's to see if I "note a 2-3 pound weight gain over 1-2 days or 5 pounds in a week."  If I do, it's a sign of fluid retention in my heart and/or lungs signaling a problem and I'm supposed to call my CHF nurse  practitioner at the VA, Maggie Angeli.   >Sodium/salt = >fluid retention = >ongestive heart failure trouble.  Since almost everything that is "processed" contains salt, restricting sodium means avoiding a lot of stuff I've regularly overindulged in throughout my libertine life, including bread.  Now I even consume Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted No Salt bread that tastes like cardboard but serves as a salt-free vehicle for salt-free butter and salt-free preserves.  This is what my life has come to.😨 I eat a lot more fruit than I used to: oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes, and I've come to very much enjoy them, but they no way take the place of salami sandwiches or of Campbell's or Progresso canned soups😱 or my corned been hash with melted cheese I used to each almost every morning. 😰. In addition to rationing my sodium intake, I also have to ration my water intake, no more than 64 ounces each day.  My fear is that I may be taking in even less than the ration amount of both sodium and water which makes me dehydrated.   The congestive heart failure is complicated by cardiac arrytahmia problems, ventricular tachycardia and bradycardia.  That's what landed me as an in-patient at the VA hospital for 5 days in March, that or more likely the medication prescribed to address it.  The condition itself and its medication leads to another grim step on the way to total asceticism: no wine!  No nightly glass of California zinfandel, sipped slowly over a period of 3 or even 3 hours!  Egad!  Gadzooks!  How much asceticism can an old sybarite take?!?

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Joseph N. Welch, June 9, 1954 to Joseph McCarthy.  Most of the world today to Donald Trump, Todd Blanche, and the American government in which they 'serve.'

Justice Department Creates Unusual $1.8 Billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’, Wall Street Journal, today.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration created an unusual settlement fund valued at nearly $1.8 billion to compensate people who claim the federal government weaponized the legal system against them, a move announced in tandem with President Trump’s decision to withdraw a lawsuit seeking billions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service.

Trump is also dropping two other claims against the government that he runs, one that sought damages for the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and another about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which loomed over much of his first term.

The president—along with his namesake company and sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—will receive a formal apology but no monetary payment or damages as part of the settlement, the Justice Department said.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will appoint a five-person commission to administer the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which will last through Dec. 15, 2028, and have the power to issue apologies and pay people who submit claims. Trump will be able to fire commission members. 

The Justice Department offered few details about who would qualify for payouts, but Trump allies and supporters—including many charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol—are expected to seek slices of the fund. A memo signed by Blanche doesn’t specifically address whether members of the Trump family can make claims from the fund. 

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done while ensuring this never happens again,” said Blanche, who previously worked as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump, including in a pair of cases brought by former special counsel Jack Smith.

This is happening right in front of our eyes.  Words fail me. 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.