8/13/2026

 Thursday August 13, 2026

1942 The Manhattan Project commenced with the aim of developing an atomic bomb

2004 Hurricane Charley devastated Punta Gorda

2025 Israeli forces launched a massive aerial bombardment on Gaza City, killing 123 people across the Gaza Strip, amid reports that the Israeli Army was about to enter the city.

2026 Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank continued, aided by the IDF.

In bed at 9:15, awakened by the alarm at 6:20;  0635. 202.6  120/75/64 135; 67/77/66, Cloudy with dense fog, visibility 1/4 mile or less till 10 a.m.  Rain is expected most of the afternoon.

Morning meds at 8:15 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:45 a.m. and p.m.

Nikki Onorato (Kevil) wearing the bishop's mitre that Steve received at yesterday's Chicago White Sox game honoring Chicago native and White Sox fan Robert Prevost.  The Sox management distributed thousands of them, calling them 'Pope hats',  to the fans who attended the game, including Steve.  Below is one of my favorite drawings, a graphite pencil drawing I did from a photo I took of Nikki 2 years ago.

Six Degrees of Separation.  I thought of this play that Geri and I saw at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York decades ago.  The play was based on the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.  I think of it when I see Nikki in Steve's "pope hate" from the Sox game.  Pope Leo XIV and I share some connections.  He was raised in Dolton, Illinois, which is next door to Riverdale, IL, where my sister and her husband and my Mom and Dad owned townhouses.  His family and mine attended the same Catholic Church in Riverdale, St. Mary of the Assumption.  His parents both graduated from DePaul University, which I would have attended had I not won the NROTC scholarship to Marquette.  Geri attended DePaul for a while.  His mother taught and was a librarian at Mendel High School, a Catholic boys' school on the South Side that I would have attended had I not chosen Leo, which was walking distance from our home(s), whereas Mendel, at 250 E. 111th St., would require 2 bus rides each way.  Mendel was taught by the Augustinians, Prevost's order, whereas Leo was taught by the Irish Christian Brothers, the "ICBs" or, as we called them, the International Child Beaters.  Prevost attended the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago, where I was sent by Brother Coogan, the best and most influential teacher in my life, to do English literary research in my senior year at Leo.  Prevost and I were both altar boys in grade school and attended only Catholic schools.  With those kinds of backgrounds, not surprisingly, we each considered taking up a religious life.  He followed through with it; I gave it up when I discovered girls and lust, though two of my best friends in high school joined the ICBs, Johnny Flynn and Jack O'Keefe.  Both of Prevost's parents were immigrants.  My maternal grandparents and paternal great-grandparents were immigrants.  I was surprised to learn that Prevost has some Creole ancestry on his mother's side and that among his ancestors were both Black slaves and slaveowners.  His family history may explain much of his solicitude towards migrants and minorities.  Of course, that solicitude is wholly consistent with Christ's teachings.

An interesting comparison.  In today's NYTimes, a guest opinion piece by Trump aide Peter Navarro:

The recliner really is made in Vietnam. The plant, just north of Ho Chi Minh City, is legit — it’s got thousands of workers making real furniture. The motor inside the recliner is another story.

The motor arrives from China finished, branded and boxed, shipped by the container load from a factory in the same corporate family as the furniture maker. Workers unbox it and bolt it into the recliner. Within 90 days the recliner sails from Vung Tau and lands at Norfolk, Va., where the Chinese mechanism is declared as Vietnamese. If the paperwork holds, that “Made in Vietnam” claim erases 25 percentage points of American tariff that would otherwise be levied.

It is not an isolated case. On Thursday, the White House is releasing a report documenting the great transshipment scam: a shadow network of more than 40 countries enabling sleight of hand to deceive American consumers and customs officials about where their exports really originate. In the process, these countries are robbing the United States of tens of billions of dollars a year and countless manufacturing jobs.

From the NYTimes on August 6, 2026, an article by Jesse Drucker and Dylan Freedman, Crocs Has A Trick For Dodging Taxes, A Tiny Office in Malta. 

Welcome to Malta. The tiniest country in the European Union, with roughly the population of Milwaukee, it is home to turquoise water beaches and a raging nightclub scene. It is also the world’s hot new corporate tax haven.

The accounting firms KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY are aggressively marketing the strategies that Crocs and other companies are using to push profits to Maltese units with ghost offices and no employees. A KPMG presentation reviewed by The New York Times laid out a byzantine arrangement for prospective clients to slash their tax bills by arbitraging U.S. and Maltese rules.

“The choreographers are the Big Four,” said Michael Hamersley, a former tax lawyer at KPMG and EY. “They seek out the opportunity to exploit the tax system.” 

The leak of offshore law firm records known as the Panama Papers linked Maltese politicians to companies enabling tax evasion and money laundering. In 2017, a remote-controlled car bomb killed the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in her driveway after she exposed those connections.

After Malta said in 2023 that it would delay joining an international tax crackdown for six years, American companies including Victoria’s Secret, Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo flocked to the island, setting up hundreds of shell companies to exploit its near-zero tax rate. The number of Maltese subsidiaries established by U.S. companies has soared, up nearly 70 percent over the past three years, according to U.S. securities filings and Maltese corporate records.

The Trump administration turbocharged Malta’s tax appeal. On his first day back in office, President Trump withdrew the United States from the international effort to enforce a 15 percent global minimum corporate tax. This past January, the United States completed an agreement with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development largely exempting American companies from the pact. With more than 130 countries signed on to enforcing a minimum tax, Malta’s tax laws became particularly attractive.

Officially, Malta levies a 35 percent corporate tax, but firms can drive that rate to nearly zero. Accounting firms supply local tax advisers to serve as board members for the shell companies, while colleagues at the same firms audit the entities’ financial statements.

Navarro, a Trump lackey, condemns the avoidance of tariffs, which are sales taxes, while enabling the avoidance of income taxes.  What a surprise!

Crime and Punishment.  I'm making slow progress into the novel, only getting in Part I, chapter 4 at midday today.  In chapter 3, Roskolnikov received the very long letter from his mother that serves as a counterpart to Marmelodov's long, drunken, woebegone rant in the tavern in chapter 2.  The latter gave us the background story of Marmelodov's family, especially the plight of poor Sonya, and the mother's letter gave us the background of Roskolnikov's family, especially the plight of his sister, the poor Dunya.  Sonya's poverty reduced her to prostitution, and Dunya's poverty was forcing her into a loveless marriage to the lout of a lawyer, Pyotr Luzhin.  Both the tavern rant and the letter are literary devices used to establish concisely the backgrounds and plights of principal characters in the novel, and to reinforce Raskolnikov's motive to murder the pawnbroker, which hasn't happened yet.  Both devices strike me as contrived and melodramatic, perhaps excessively desperate, plighty, and exaggerated, but I'm probably too harsh in my judgments.

 

 

8/12/2026

 Wednesday, August 12, 2026

1950, Pope Pius XII published the encyclical Humani generis

1965 Race riot on the West Side of Chicago

1978 Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley suffered a spinal cord injury, leaving him with quadriplegia from a hit by Raiders Jack Tatum in a preseason game

2021, Phoenix became the US's fastest-growing city (+11.2%), overtaking Philadelphia to be the nation's fifth-largest at 1.6 million, according to the US Census

2021 US Census revealed the country grew more diverse, with growth in Hispanic (+23%) and Asian (+36%) populations, and the first-ever decline in the White population

2025 Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American man to death in the West Bank.

In bed at 10:15, up at 5:45; 0605 107/67/67 124 202.6; 68/79/57, cloudy, rainy conditions around 1 p.m.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and p.m.

In the partisan primary,  David Crowley beat Francesca Hong, but by less than half a point, so there will probably be a recount.  I fear neither can beat Tom Tiffany, the Republican Trumpie, in November.

Looking back.  Each day I try to look back to what I wrote in this journal in each of the past four years on that date.  I do it, in part, to see what I was thinking and writing about on those days, and how my mental and physical health were doing, but also to see whether I'm embarrassed by what I wrote or whether I no longer think or feel the same way as I used to.  I usually find that my thinking hasn't changed much over the last 4 years, though sometimes I'm a bit more or less exuberant about whatever I wrote.  Today I was struck by what I wrote on 8/12/2024, before Trump proposed his $1.5 trillion defense/war budget for FY2027, and before he started his on-again, off-again war against Iran, which will almost be another strategic loser to pile on top of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

WISN radio.  I listened to this right-wing station while driving home from the VA.  It was the Mark Belling show hosted by some other guy whose name I didn't catch.  He spoke of the danger of nuclear wars or other wars between the great powers in today's world and much of it made sense to me.  Ukraine has invaded Russia.  Israel has conducted an assassination in the capital of Iran and is awaiting a lethal response in Israel proper from Iran and from Hezbollah.  The US, joined at the hip to Israel and its fascist, apartheid government, has sent another aircraft carrier and a guided missile submarine to the area.  We are overstretched in terms of our military-industrial capacity to continue to arm Ukraine's fight against Russia and Israel's fight against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.  Plus, America is as deeply divided at home as it has been since the days of the Vietnam War and civil rights demonstrations and riots.  Israel is also deeply divided and distressed. It has become an international pariah, at least outside the U.S. and Western Europe.  Thus, it's a good time for China to take on Taiwan if it chooses.  Who are we hoping not to use tactical nuclear weapons now?  Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.  Why do we suppose either of these wicked men would decline to use some of their many nuclear weapons if it served their nationalistic and personal purposes?  Why would we think that Joe Biden, Tony Blinken, or Lloyd Austin can contain or control a crisis in the Ukraine War, the Middle East, or the Taiwan Straits?  I think back to the first and second Taiwan Straits crises in the 1950s and the great tension over the fate of Quemoy and Matsu, tiny islands off the coast of mainland China, claimed by both China and by Taiwan and within artillery range of communist howitzers.   President Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons against China over the islands which led directly to China starting a nuclear weapons program of its own.  From Wikipedia: "During the crisis, American leadership risked the alienation of the American public, relations with key allies such as France and Japan, and even nuclear war. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued that while the status quo result was a victory, the American government could not permit such a situation to arise again."  The memory of this period and those tiny islands reminds me again of my view that the greatest threat to world peace is the United States, its capitalist economy and government, and its military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about on January 17, 1961. Before and during the Second World War, American industries had successfully converted to defense production as the crisis demanded, but out of the war, what Eisenhower called a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions emerged. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry was new in the American experience.   Eisenhower warned, "[while] we recognize the imperative need for this development...We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Eisenhower cautioned that the federal government’s collaboration with an alliance of military and industrial leaders, though necessary, was vulnerable to abuse of power. Ike then counseled American citizens to be vigilant in monitoring the military-industrial complex, but of course, we never have.  About half of the world's wealth is now controlled by American transnational corporations, many of which are part of the so-called "defense," which is to say, war industry.  Their control over our government's foreign and economic policies is so patent that when Joe Biden pitches more arms for Ukraine and for Israel, he points out that the cost of the aid will almost entirely go to American war industries. Just the other day we learned that the small-diameter, 250-pound bomb that killed more than 100 displaced Palestinians sheltering in a school complex in Gaza City was manufactured by Boeing.  We paid for it with our tax dollars and escalating debt and Boeing and its shareholders profited.  They can't be counted on to make safe aircraft anymore or to be able to bring their astronauts back from space, but they can make weapons to kill Palestinians during their morning prayers.

Many years ago, while sharing lunch with the other lawyers in our firm, we were discussing national security, and I argued that the greatest threat to world peace has long been our own government and economy.  Our huge economy, especially after World War II, means we have a huge need for natural resources from abroad and a huge need for friendly foreign markets for our products.  That produces a huge need for a huge military to protect both the required access to foreign resources and the required foreign markets.  That's why our troops, and no other nation's troops, are stationed all over the world. I should have expected my colleagues' reaction, which was as if I had questioned their mothers' virtue.  No, America is the world's great peacemaker, notwithstanding Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Venezuela, Iran, and perhaps Cuba.   I don't think so, and haven't, at least since Vietnam.

Anniversaries thoughts:  First, why mention Pius XII and Humani genris?  Because he and it were the reason I had such a cramped education in philosophy and theology at Marquette University between 1959 and 1963.  I and my classmates were indoctrinated, literally, with the Scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas developed in the the 13th century.  Humani generis forbade the teaching - or thinking- of philosophical and theological positions that any way deviated from the official teaching of the Catholic Church, doctrines and dogmas.  The encyclical was written in the years following the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Holocaust, i.e., following the cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century that shook to the core our understanding of human nature, human life, and history.  It was the era in which Existentialism developed and old understandings of human nature and of history and of good and evil were questioned by all serious thinkers.  It was that questioning that Pius wanted to put an end to and to a large extent he succeeded.  At Marquette, in both theology and philosophy classes, I learned Thomism and neo-Thomism, the officially sanctioned teaching of the Church issued under its Magisterium, or Teaching Authority granted by God Himself.  I believe I am recalling correctly that even non-Catholics were required to take Philosophy 50, The Philosophy of Man, a thoroughly Scholastic interpretation of human nature.  I remember Dr. Simmons, my Epistomology professor, and Dr. Connell, who taught other philosophy and theology courses, following the party line: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Summa contra Gentiles.  I still get disgusted just thinking about it.  Propaganda, indoctrination, wasted educational and growth opportunities.

The ridiculousness of Pius's edict is clear in his attack on the theory of polygenism, that the human species developed from a number of different groups of progenitors, not just from Adam and Eve.  Pius wrote:

[T]he faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Pass the basin, please. 

Second, in August of 1965, there was a Black riot in the Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago.  It lasted 3 days and occasioned 80 injuries and 169 arrests. Still, it received relatively little attention because it started the day after the much larger Black riots in Los Angeles's Watts district, where 34 died, more than 1,000 were injured, more than $40 million in property damage occurred, and 14,000 National Guard troops were deployed.  I learned of the many riots and demonstrations going on in America while I was in Vietnam with tens of thousands of other American troops doing all we could to practice our profession of killing their people and destroying their stuff while at home America was burning.  Talk about cognitive and emotional dissonance.

Third, I reflect with some shame on Darryl Stingley's paralysis caused by Jack Tatum's 'hard hit' in a preseason exhibition game on this date in 1978.  Tatum's nickname was "The Assassin," which tells us all we need to know about him and about the game of football, especially professional football.  I stopped watching football several years ago because I didn't want to support the game even as a statistic, i.e., viewership.  I stopped because of disgust with the NFL owners' denial of CTE in their players but I should have stopped back in 1978 when brain-concussing 'hard hits,' especially on quarterbacks and wide receivers, were euphemized as getting "his bell rung" by guys like Jack Tatum. 

Lastly, Phoenix is America's fastest-growing city.  Insane!  

Crime and Punishment.  I read Dostoevsky's novel many decades ago and liked it, mainly because of the relationship between Raskolnikov and his mother and sister on the one hand and the young prostitute Sonya on the other.  I think I re-read it years later, but I'm not sure of that.  Maybe I only wanted to re-read it. In any event, I've started reading it again this afternoon, but without a firm commitment to work my way through all of it.  Early on, as I read in Part I,  chapter 2, I thought how contrived it seemed, with Marmeladov drunkenly laying out his and his family's history of hardships and poverty.  "Contrived" was the criticism I leveled against the concluding chapters of East of Eden just the other day, and one that I've thought several times while reading several novels over the last several months.  I invariably have to remind myself that all novels are 'contrived,' since they are works of fiction, made up, or contrived by their authors.  I was also a bit surprised by my emotional response to Marmeladov's tale of woe, how sorry I felt for him and his family, especially his daughter Sonia, and I wondered if I had the same emotional reaction when I read it before, as a much younger guy.  I realized that Dostoevsky was using Marmeladov's family as a stand-in for millions of poor families in 19th-century Russia, especially in the cities.  I know, though, that the reason I enjoyed the novel in earlier reading(s) was my emotional involvement in Raskolnikov's relationships with Sonya and with his mother and sister.  

Dr. Neary.  I spent part of the morning getting a filling replaced by Anne Neary.  The filling is in one of my front teeth, and as I lay supine in the dentist's chair, I thought of a song from my youth:

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth

My two front teeth, my two front teeth

Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth

Then I could wish you "Merry Christmas"

And it seems so long since I could say

"Sister Susie sitting on a thistle"

Gosh, oh gee, how happy I'd be

If I could only whistle

All I want for Christmas is my

(Two front teeth, two front teeth, two front teeth)

Gee, if I could only have my two front teeth

Then I could wish you "Merry Christmas"

 

    

8/11/2026

 Tuesday, August 11, 2026

1919 Green Bay Packers football club was founded by George Calhoun and Curly Lambeau - named after  their sponsor, the Indian Packing Company

1954 Formal peace treaty ended over 7 years of fighting in Indochina between the French and the Communist Viet Minh

1984 During a radio voice test, US President Reagan joked that he "signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever.  We begin bombing in 5 minutes."

2022 AG Merrick Garland said he personally approved the FBI search of Trump's property on the same day a Washington Post source said the FBI search was for missing documents on nuclear weapons

2025  Trump placed the District of Columbia police under federal government control and ordered 800 National Guard troops to enter Washington, D.C., allegedly to fight rising crime rates. review

In bed at 9:35, up at 6:15; 0630 116/72/62 116 203.2; 68/78/67, rainy conditions expected between 10 and 3.  It's a foggy morning in Bayside town.

Morning meds at 11:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:45 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

 I'm sure I first encountered these lines by William Wordsworth when I was in high school, when I didn't particularly like it.  I still don't particularly like the poem except for these lines and the seventh line - "The Child is Father to the Man."  I thought of it, however, when I looked out my window after dinner yesterday and saw a young father pushing a baby buggy along Wakefield Court.  He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a white baseball cap on the warm evening.  I more commonly see young mothers, or sometimes grandparents, strolling with babies or young children, but I see a good number of fathers as well.  Sometimes the kids are on scooters or being pulled in a wagon.  I suppose they remind me of the happy days half a century ago when I would walk my children down Newberry Boulevard to the Lake Park pavilion on weekend mornings, or when I would take them to playgrounds in Back Bay Park or Cathedral Park.  Or when I would take Sarah out with our cameras on a photography expedition to the Milwaukee harbor area or some other interesting, off-the-road venue.  In any case, my heart does indeed leap up when I behold young children.  I've written about this a few times in these pages.  I suppose the sight of young children, or of children with their young parents, reminds me that life goes on, and that, for most of the world, life is very much worth living, despite my senescent, octogenarian pessimism about the nation and the world.  Alas, I have become too like Ebenezer Scrooge in my closing years, mumbling Bah, humbug! when I should be shouting Alleluia!  I forget the truth in how Kate Bowler, suffering from advanced cancer in her mid-30s, remonstrated with an older friend who complained to her of the indignities of old age: "Old age is a fucking privilege!" 

On the other hand 😓, regarding my geriatric pessimism, two articles (really many more) in this morning's newspapers give me shivers.  The first is "America Is Atomizing: A nation of us versus them and them and them" by Jesse McKinley in the New York Times.  The other is an editorial board opinion in The Washington Post, "When America’s budget will break, disastrously," about our inexorably growing national debt.  I read these pieces with eyes that have seen where the country has been heading over the last several decades, especially in our current Trump era, and I despair for our grandchildren, and even our children.  My generation is like the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

[The photo above is of Sarah, fully equipped for one of our photo outings, with my Uncle Bud's 35 mm. Agfa camera that he brought back from Germany after the Big War, her camera bag, etc.  I suspect that her dramatic sunglasses may reflect me taking the photo with one of my early Nikon 35 mm cameras, in those days before digital cameras and iPhones took over most of the photography world.  Sarah's interest in photography has continued throughout her life.  She has long been an expert technical and artistic photographer.]

Looks are deceiving - an unexpected candid shot at a heartwarming, uplifting gathering with LOA and JJA.  LOA and I have been pals for 59 years.   He's dearer to me now than ever, a real mensch. God threw away the mold, and all that.  One of a kind.  Geri prepared her Mediterranean chicken casserole, green beans, and a homemade cherry pie.

 

8/10/2026

 Monday, August 10, 2026

70 Second Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire by the Roman army under Titus during the capture of the city (approx)

1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice

2022 Donald Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination repeatedly during a deposition into his organization's business by the NY attorney's office 

2025 We received 11inches of rain yesterday and overnight; power outage, basement flooded

2025 Seven people were killed, including five Al Jazeera journalists and prominent Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif, in an Israeli strike near the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

2025  Donald Trump announced that he would meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska for talks on August 15 to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

2025 We received 11inches of rain yesterday and overnight; power outage, our basement flooded

In bed at 9, awake at 4:10, up at 4:30; 0450 113/70/62 124 2 203.2; 68/81/67; mostly partly cloudy day, 0.7 inches of rain in the last 24 hrs., 0.05 inches expected in the next 24 hours.

Morning meds at 9:45 a.m.  Eliquis at 6 a.m. and p.m.

I finished East of Eden last night and was disappointed in the concluding chapters.  The novel is a celebration of his family history on his mother's side, the Hamilton family descended from its patriarch, Samuel Hamilton, the one hero in the book (unless we consider Lee a hero).  More broadly, however, Steinbeck intended the book to be a study of good and evil, or, more precisely, of free will versus determinism.   He used Caleb /Cal Trask to represent free will, and Cathy/Kate Ames to represent determinism.  Cal recognizes the wicked tendencies in him, his jealousy, vengefulness, and capacity for cruelty and worries that he has inherited these traits from Cathy, his father or uncle Charles, and from Cain.   He's like the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor: "I yam what I yam what I yam and I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam 'cause I yam what I yam." In his initial confrontation with his mother, Cathy reinforces the notion that he is her son, carries within himself her wickedness, and can't escape it.  Steinbeck, through Cal, rejects this view, at least the inescapability aspect.  He believes, like Solszenitsen, that every human being has some good and some evil within him.  He doesn't deny the strong influence of genetics, heredity, upbringing, hormones, circumstances, etc., in human decision-making, but he argues that we all ultimately must make choices about what we will do with who and what we are.  When Cal recognizes this, Cathy loses her ability to manipulate and control him, which contributes in part to her decision to commit suicide.  He disagrees with Robert Sapolsky, who argues pretty persuasively in favor of determinism and against free will.  Some of his quotes from his tome Determined:

Thus, essentially every aspect of your childhood—good, bad, or in between—factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have.

“The first few years of life are massively determinative of who you become.” 

“Determinism doesn’t make life meaningless; it makes meaning something we create.” 

There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”

[W]e are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me. 

Steinbeck and his creation Cal Trask disagree with Sapolsky's conclusion.  So does society as a whole and most of us.  We believe we make choices and that when we do, we are free to choose otherwise.   We have consciences and a belief in right and wrong.  When we do something we consider wrong, we call it a sin, and society may call it a crime, or at least a tort.  Our legal system, especially our criminal justice system, is based on the belief in free will.  Determinism undermines all that.

Robert Sapolsky is probably the most prominent opponent of what he calls "the myth" of free will, but he stands at the top of a long line of those sho have questioned its reality.  Arthur Schopenhauer famously put the determinist intuition into a wonderfully compact sentence:

"A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." 

Friedrich Nietzsche was also deeply hostile to the traditional notion of free will, particularly the idea that people are "causa sui"—the ultimate cause of themselves. Nietzsche thought the concept of free will had been developed partly to make people morally blameworthy.

Baruch Spinoza was also a determinist, arguing that God and Nature are the same.  For Spinoza (1632–1677), everything that happens follows necessarily from the nature of God/Nature (Deus sive Natura, "God or Nature"). There is no realm of events that could have unfolded differently in exactly the same circumstances.  His famous proposition is essentially: "In nature there is nothing contingent," and that includes human beings.. He thought that our ordinary feeling that we are free comes from ignorance of the causes that determine us.

And then there's the psychologist B. F. Skinner, who attacked free will from the standpoint of behaviorism. His Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) argued that human behavior is shaped by environmental contingencies and that the traditional concept of autonomous human freedom is largely an illusion. 

The reason I was disappointed with the way Steinbeck wrapped up East of Eden is that it is so clearly tendentious, if that's the right word.  It's clear through much of the novel that his belief, expressed usually through Lee, Adam Trask's Chinese servant, is that men do have free will, that our behavior is not controlled by our background, influenced certainly, but not controlled.  He believed, like Solszenitsen, that 

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

The denouement of the novel, starting with Adam's rejection of Cal's gift at the family's Thanksgiving dinner, Cal's jealousy and resentment acted out on Aron by taking him to Cathy/Kate's whorehouse, and Aron's flight and death in World War I, seemed so contrived and predictable as to be almost ham-handed and melodramatic. 

East of Eden made me think of Elizabeth Strout's novels, especially The Things We Never Say, and her questioning whether we have, or the degree to which we have, free will.  In an interview with Katie Couric, she would not admit to being a determinist, but she readily admitted to believing that we have a lot less really free will than we think we do.

I listened to the concluding chapter of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee while out for a walk down Wakefield Court this afternoon.  It relates the story of the 7th Cavalry's massacre of approximately 250 Lakota Sioux, including women and children, on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota.

Thoughts and photos from a year ago today.

An unwelcome reminder: How long can we or either of us live in this house that we have been happy to make our home for the last 14 years?   I am next to useless around the house.  My contribution to taking care of the house consists of (1) filling and emptying the dishwasher with our eating and cooking utensils, (2) keeping the kitchen counter tidy and clean, (3) doing some grocery shopping, and (4) taking out the trash and recycling, i.e., kitchen chores.  I keep my bedroom and bathroom clean, do my own laundry, and make my own bed, my own breakfast, and my own lunch.  Everything else, Geri does.  If it weren't for Geri living here with me, I'd be either in an assisted living facility or only a step or two away from one in a so-called 'independent living' facility for old folks..  It's a daunting reality.  Geri mentioned today, on a short rest from back-breaking cutting of wet rugs, etc., that we should be looking at apartments.  I'm sure it was a statement borne of disappointment, frustration, and exhaustion from the flood, but it's only a matter of time.  I don't have to remind her that I am next to useless around the house, unable to climb a ladder or get up from the floor, but I do have to remind her that she is 81 years old and from a family with a history of heart disease, i.e., not a person to be lugging soaking-wet carpeting up basement stairs.  I don't want to move from here, and I'm sure she doesn't either.  It would signal, for me at least, the beginning of the end of independent, autonomous living.  Next step, giving up the keys to my car?  Or worse yet, some form of institutionalization, Bosky Dell Home for Broken-down old Marins and Law Professors Who Can No Longer Take Care of Themselves or Anyone Else.  F word.   I hear my dear sister shouting down from On High, SNAP OUT OF IT, BUSTER!  Stop feeling sorry for yourself!  You're in much better shape than most old guys in terms of family and security.  My beloved Mom chimes in with "Enough with Micky the Mope!" All true, but when I snapped the photos of the wet cardboard and wet carpeting this afternoon, I lost my balance just standing there and almost fell down on the driveway.   I wondered what I would do if, as would have been likely, I couldn't get up.  Geri was inside, taking a well-deserved nap, sound asleep.  Would I be able to get help from my MedAlert doohickey around my neck, or from my Apple Watch, or iPhone (did I have it with me?), or would I crawl down to County Line Road and wait for a passing walker, jogger, or driver to give me a hand, as Tom Mara did when a took a header on Wakefield a few years ago?  Not a day goes by without a near fall.  Am I catastrophizing?  I suppose so, but still . . ., it's not a pretty future.

Alas, things have gotten only worse over the year since I wrote the above, including having to be rescued by the EMTs of the North Shore Fire Department when I took a header in March while taking the recycling cart.  The good news was that, to my surprise, my Apple Watch detected my tumble and my location and notified the NSFD of my plight.  It was my 5th fall and 2nd rescue by the EMTs since we moved in here 15 years ago.

Among the damage from the flooding were canvases, painted and unpainted, that I had resting on the basement floor.  I thought many times over the years that I ought to raise them off the floor in case of flooding, showing how smart I was and how dumb I am.  I suspect they will all end up being trashed because of the likelihood of mildew/mold.

Soaked cardboard, including two nudes I painted decades ago on canvas board, one with her toes reversed, a matter TSJ pointed out to me when he first saw the painting, a regrettable form of belittling.

 

8/9/2026

 Sunday, August 9, 2026

1253 Clare of Assisi's rules confirmed by Pope Innocent IV for Clare's Order of Poor Ladies

1854 American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau published "Walden."

1945 Nagasaki

This is a photo I took of myself and a mural I painted on the wall of the bedroom I used as a studio when we lived on Newton Avenue in Shorewood.  I took the photo after we put the house up for sale when Geri took a position in Seattle, and I moved into our condo in the Knickerbocker Hotel.  I copied it from the cover of a Time or Newsweek or U S News magazine during the Balkan wars.  I was struck by the power of the image, which depicted an American airman who was shot down and captured during the war.  I also had an urge to paint something big, on a big surface.  To sell the house, I had to paint over the image, though, if I could have, I would have had the plaster wall removed and saved, and a new wall installed.  Alas, not to be.  I was about 57 years old when I took the photo.

In bed at 9, up at 5:30; 0545 201.0  117/75/63 109;  62/79/61, cloudy/partly cloudy morning, thunderstorms expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and p.m. Weight loss suggests dehydration as the urology nurse told me on Friday.  I finally measured the weight of water in my water bottle at 22 ozs., so drinking 2 full bottles and a little more would get me to the recommended minimum of 48 ozs.

More thoughts while working my way through East of Eden. (1). I started the morning reading chapter 39, which cuts too close to the bone for my comfort.  Steinbeck deals with how fathers may know little of their sons, and vice versa.  He also deals with the consequences of the sins of the fathers being visited on their sons.  It brings to mind of course the main theme of Elizabeth Strout's novel, how little we know of one another, even in our intimate relationships.  Both authors tackle the truth famously recognized by Alexandr Solszenitzen in The Gulag Archipelago: 

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained” 

It reminds me too of something Tracy Letts, author of August, Osage County, said in an interview and which I made a note of:

"I think there comes a point in your life where you own your damage.  You don't necessarily get over it, you don't necessarily have it all figured out, you just say this is mine, these are the things I have to be aware of, take care of, work around."  Tracy Letts, NY Times Magazine, 3/23/2014  

(2) Cathy/Kate Ames is incredibly, almost literally, evil as this story moves along.   She's a murderer and a thief and filled with hate, but I don't have a sense of why or how she got to be this way.  She was a bad actor even as a child and I'm wondering whether Steinbeck has created her as an exception to his personal philosophy that there are no all-good or all-bad human beings.  Cathy/Kate is the big mystery in the novel, at last so far, 80% through the plot.

 Test to SCC:

Hi, Sweetie.  I just read in the Times that Europe is expecting its 5th heat wave since May, but when I checked the weather report for Geretsried, it appears that you are already in it.  I hope you and the rest of the family are holding up in it.  It’s been pretty pleasant here, though we are expecting thunderstorms this afternoon, with the possibility of a train of storms, one following another.  It was a year ago this weekend that we had the 1,000 rain that flooded our basement, causing a lot of stress and expense.  We got 11 inches of rain here over two days.  That event, plus all the news of droughts and wildfires around the world have made me too aware of the dangers from climate change, and the fact that none of us is protected from it. . . . My old pal Larry Anderson and his wife will be visiting us on Tuesday.  I’ve become quite a FB friend with Jan, who regularly posts nastygrams about Trump.  Currently, they are traveling with their dog in their RV, staying last week outside of Penisula State Park in Door County.  Larry is retired as a bird colonel from the Marine Corps reserve and both he and Jan are former career assistant US attorneys, disgusted with what Trump (and now Blanche) has done to the Department of Justice.  Larry is 80 years old and during their stay in Door County, drove his classic Triumph motorcycle 150 miles to a lake outside Waupaca to attend a reunion of AUSAs from the Milwaukee office.  The ride persuaded him that his days of long distance travel by motorcycle are now over. . . .  I’ve been reading and mostly enjoying “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck, which I hadn’t read before, nor seen the movie in which James Dean made such a splash.  It’s over 800 pages long and I’m only through 75% of it, but I’m looking forward to the last couple of hundred pages.  It’s quite dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, but an interesting study of human nature, especially father-son relationships.  Some of it is painful or troubling for me to read, triggering memories.  I’ve seen nothing of Andy or his family all summer except for giving Lizzie a ride to work one afternoon.  I hope he’s weathering  his job change OK. . .  Stay safe, stay cool.  Love you forever.❤️

Charles Clausen:

Hi, Sweetie.  I just read in the Times that Europe is expecting its 5th heat wave since May, but when I checked the weather report for Geretsried, it appears that you are already in it.  I hope you and the rest of the family are holding up in it.  It’s been pretty pleasant here, though we are expecting thunderstorms this afternoon, with the possibility of a train of storms, one following another.  It was a year ago this weekend that we had the 1,000 rain that flooded our basement, causing a lot of stress and expense.  We got 11 inches of rain here over two days.  That event, plus all the news of droughts and wildfires around the world have made me too aware of the dangers from climate change, and the fact that none of us is protected from it. . . . My old pal Larry Anderson and his wife will be visiting us on Tuesday.  I’ve become quite a FB friend with Jan, who regularly posts nastygrams about Trump.  Currently, they are traveling with their dog in their RV, staying last week outside of Penisula State Park in Door County.  Larry is retired as a bird colonel from the Marine Corps reserve and both he and Jan are former career assistant US attorneys, disgusted with what Trump (and now Blanche) has done to the Department of Justice.  Larry is 80 years old and during their stay in Door County, drove his classic Triumph motorcycle 150 miles to a lake outside Waupaca to attend a reunion of AUSAs from the Milwaukee office.  The ride persuaded him that his days of long distance travel by motorcycle are now over. . . .  I’ve been reading and mostly enjoying “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck, which I hadn’t read before, nor seen the movie in which James Dean made such a splash.  It’s over 800 pages long and I’m only through 75% of it, but I’m looking forward to the last couple of hundred pages.  It’s quite dramatic, sometimes melodramatic, but an interesting study of human nature, especially father-son relationships.  Some of it is painful or troubling for me to read, triggering memories.  I’ve seen nothing of Andy or his family all summer except for giving Lizzie a ride to work one afternoon.  I hope he’s weathering  his job change OK. . .  Stay safe, stay cool.  Love you forever.❤️

Hi Dad! It’s warm here, but not bad for August. I have always felt somewhat bad for the Bavarian kids who get summer vacation so late (August until mid September) and how the ‘nice’ summer weather typically peters out into rain for their time off. It is very dry here though, and lawns are brown and crunchy for the most part. I’m slowly working through a book on the establishment of the American Museum of Natural History by Douglas Preston. It’s quiet this time of year because so many folks are out on holidays, but we’re at work until our cruise in November. Give Geri my best and greetings to Larry. I can vaguely remember my first motorcycle ride with him many years ago. Love to you always - ❤️ 

 A fuzzy photo taken through the window and screen, wet from a heavy rain, of a flock of wild turkeys, 3 hens and about 15 youngsters, cleaning up every seed in the grass under our bird feeders.  The chicks are growing pretty fast.  They are trailed by a posse of 4 big tom turkeys, presumably up to no good. 

8/8/2026

 Saturday, August 8, 2026

1973 Vice President Spiro Agnew said reports he took kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland are "damned lies" and vowed not to resign.

1974 Richard Nixon announced that he was resigning the presidency the next day.

2022 FBI conducted a search of Donald Trump's Florida home over his handling of classified government documents

2025 Germany announced it will halt weapon shipments to Israel that could be used in Gaza "until further notice" in light of Israel's plan to fully militarily occupy Gaza.   The Israel Defense Forces began massing troops and tanks on the border with Gaza ahead of an expected major ground offensive.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:45; 0555 202.2 118/69/62 123; 66/79/66, sunny

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

Comment on JJA's elegant Facebook commentary on Door County:

I truly enjoy your writing, certainly your political commentary, but especially your travelogues, and most especially your writings about the Upper Midwest, including my adopted home state of Wisconsin. Ezra Klein interviewed the journalist Jasmine Sun,f or his column in the New York Times a few days ago. She has been investigating local opposition to new data centers being constructed, including the huge one outside Port Washington, Wisconsin. She started his comments with this: "I think one of the most important things about rural Wisconsin and rural Michigan is how beautiful it is. I felt like I was in Eden. I felt like I was in Paradise. It's incredibly lush and incredibly green." Yesterday, I took one of my regular drives through northern Ozaukee County, near the Sheboygan County line, just to look, to see, to take in and feel how beautiful it is - the farms, the woods, the fields of corn, and beans, and alfalfa, and the softly rolling hills. I had the same feeling that Jasmine Sun described, like being in Eden, in Paradise, literally awesome. I hope you keep visiting and keep writing and posting your beautiful photos.

Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attonrey General.  A national disgrace.  Blanche, a disgrace to the legal profession.  

Trump, Musk, DOGE, the VA and veterans.  Our current, and hopefully temporary, Commander-in-Chief proclaims his profound love for the nation's military men and women and its veterans, even though he made sure to see to it, through a certification of a physician who was a tenant of his father, that he had bone spurs on his feet, that he wouldn't wear a uniform and serve in his nation's controversial war in Vietnam.  Thus he is not a veteran himself, nor one enrolled in the VA's Health program for veterans.  Nonetheless, as Commander-in-Chief, he is entitled to a government-provided, government-paid personal physician, indeed a team of them.  And he receives services and treatments at the government-owned and operated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 

 Nonetheless, one of the C-in-C's first actions in his second term was to appoint the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, as head of a pulled-out-of-his-ass organization dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, whose purpose was to slash government employment, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  His handpicked Secretary of Veterans Affairs is Doug Collins, a former George congressman famous for his right-wing politics while in Congress.  From ChatGPT:

The VA lost more than 40,000 employees in FY2025, its first annual net workforce loss in its history. About 88% of those departures were in the Veterans Health Administration. The losses included approximately:

1,000 physicians

3,000 registered nurses

1,500 schedulers

hundreds of mental-health professionals

thousands of other clinical and support personnel.

Importantly, this wasn't simply DOGE firing 40,000 people. The reduction came through a mixture of hiring restrictions, deferred resignations, retirements, attrition, dismissals, and decisions not to refill vacant positions. That distinction matters.

The VA itself initially argued that it could reduce its workforce by roughly 30,000 without impairing care because many of the positions were administrative or non-mission-critical. It also said that more than 350,000 positions were exempt from the hiring freeze.

But what happened subsequently is more troubling.

The problem became vacancies, not just layoffs

One of the most consequential developments has been the VA's decision to eliminate large numbers of unfilled medical positions rather than recruit replacements.

An analysis of VA internal records found that the VA eliminated roughly 14,400 vacant medical positions, including more than 1,500 physician positions and 4,900 nursing positions. That's roughly 5% of the VA's medical staffing capacity.

That is potentially more consequential than the original headline number of employees dismissed. A vacant position doesn't immediately deprive a patient of a doctor—but eliminating the position means the VA has decided that it won't necessarily replace that doctor when one leaves.

And there are measurable consequences

The most disturbing evidence concerns mental health care.

By January 2026, the national average wait for a new individual mental-health appointment was reported at more than 35 days, compared with the 20-day threshold at which a veteran becomes eligible for community care. Some states were reporting waits of 40–60 days. One California VA clinic reportedly had a 134-day wait after seven of its twelve mental-health providers departed.

ProPublica has also documented veterans losing established therapists and, in some cases, waiting as long as six months for therapy.

There are reports of similar problems in other specialties. In Wisconsin, for example, the VA secretary recently acknowledged that some medical centers had become understaffed after the workforce reductions and said they would be allowed to hire where necessary.

But there is another side to the story

I wouldn't conclude that "DOGE wrecked the VA." That's too simple.

The administration argues that the VA had accumulated excessive bureaucracy and that reducing administrative positions and consolidating operations can actually put more resources into direct patient care. It points to improvements in disability-claim processing and says that mission-critical positions were protected.

And there is at least one striking piece of evidence supporting the administration's contention that the VA hasn't simply collapsed: VA reports that 82% of veterans who used VA services in the first quarter of FY2026 said they trusted the VA to fulfill its commitment to them—a record high.

So the picture isn't uniformly negative.

My assessment

I'd characterize the evidence this way:

The cuts have produced genuine staffing shortages in portions of the VA, particularly in health care, and those shortages have produced longer waits and reduced continuity of care in some places. The evidence is particularly strong for mental-health services.

But the evidence does not support saying that VA health care as a whole has been destroyed or that every veteran is experiencing worse care. Some administrative reductions may indeed have eliminated unnecessary bureaucracy, and some VA performance measures have improved.

The bigger concern, in my view, is the loss of institutional capacity. A VA hospital can continue operating reasonably well for a while after losing personnel. But if it loses experienced physicians, nurses, schedulers and therapists and then eliminates the vacant positions, it becomes progressively harder to recover.

And that is especially consequential for the VA because the VA's principal advantage is that it provides an integrated health-care system. Losing a patient's established physician or therapist isn't quite equivalent to losing an employee somewhere else in government. It can disrupt an ongoing relationship and require the veteran to start over.

I thought about these issues yesterday as I waited - and waited -  for an operator to answer the phone at the Zablocki VA Medical Center so I could ask to be switched to the Urology Clinic to schedule an appointment.  Before Trump II, DOGE, and Collins, when I called the medical center switchboard, the call was answered promptly.  Now there is inevitably a long wait for an operator to pick up the phone.  When I finally got through and was switched to Urology, I connected with a recorded message, and my call was returned about 5 hours later.  I was able to schedule an appointment with a urologist, but I was advised to 'reach out' to my primary care provider to alert her to my situation.  My primary care provider for about 8 years pre-Trump was a physician; now she is a nurse practitioner.  My advisor in the Congestive Heart Failure Clinic is another nurse practitioner.  She tells me that, pre-Trump, she was able to concentrate on heart failure patients; now she is spread out over other departments within the Cardiology Clinic.  I admire nurse practitioners, and trust them, but they are not physicians, and replacing doctors with NPs is a marked step downward at the VA.  We had a nursing clinic at the House of Peace when I was executive director for about 2 and 1/2 years.  It was staffed by nurses from the UWM School of Nursing and headed by a very capable nurse practitioner.  That clinic, along with other services we offereed, was a very valued resource in Milwaukee's inner city.  Maintaining it wouldn't have been feasible if we had needed an M.D. at its helm.

I'm reminded too of when I was hospitalized for 5 days in March of this year for bradycardia, or very low blood pressure and slow heart rate or pulse.  I was wheeled into the Emergency Department in the morning by the Infectious Disease doctor I had come to see on a follow-up appointment after my cellulitis hospitalization in September/October 20025.  I wasn't able to be admitted into the hospital as an inpatient until 11 o'clock that night because 'the house was full,' i.e., there were no beds available.   This has become too common a problem at Zablocki because of the substantial increase in demand for VA services with the aging veteran population, plus the impact of the PACT Act, passed in 2022, and staffing shortages.

I, and literally hundreds of thousands of other vets, am fortunate in that Zablocki has weathered better than most VA facilities the storm created by the simultaneous increase in demand for services and decrease in staffing, but I don't fool myself by thinking that Donald J. Trump, draft dodger, is a friend either to current service members or to veterans.   

Yesterday's ride to Hilltop Road in the Town of Fredonia; another exchange with JJA:

Janice Jenkins Anderson. I stopped on the side of the road to snap this in Bailey’s Harbor - it just felt like a scene in an impressionist painting to me.

Charles D. Clausen. You have an artist's eye.

Janice Jenkins Anderson  I joke that I see the world through a view finder in my mind’s eye and often make Larry pull over so I can stand in a road and snap a pho

Charles D. Clausen. On my drive along Hilltop Rd in the Town of Fredonia yesterday, I pulled off the road to get a photo of 3 elegant cranes in a field of soybeans. I've tried to get a good photo of the rolling hills one sees from that vantage, but the photos never capture how breathtakingly beautiful the sight is to the eye.. I have a hunch that you are probably the only person I know who would say "Sure!" when I'd suggest a ride in the country. Most look at me with a look that suggests I must be nuts.😄

Janice Jenkins Anderson.  Wonderful!

 ·

 

8/7/2026

 Friday, August 7, 2026

1957 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

1964 US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

2025  Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, saying his capture and extradition to the United States was vital for national security.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:15; 0530 202.2 115/72/63 123; 66/83/66 sunny.  

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6 a.m. and 6:20 p.m.;  Trulicity injection at 11 a.m.

Some thoughts while reading East of Eden.  (1).  I was struck by this passage in chapter 9:

Every once in a while a story would start about how young girls were stolen and enslaved by the controllers of the [whorehouse] industry, and perhaps many of the stories were true.  But the great majority of whores drifted into their profession through laziness and stupidity.  In the houses they had no responsibility.  They were fed and clothed and taken care of until they were too old, and then they were kicked out.

That's a mighty simplistic and negative view of women in the sex trade.  Is it true that the great majority of them are lazy and stupid?  That they are in the business of prostitution only because it's an easy way of avoiding personal responsibility?  I very much doubt that.  It ignores factors like poverty and lack of economic opportunity, childhood abuse, neglect, or trafficking, addiction, coercion by partners or organized crime, and limited education or employment options.  The novel was published in 1952.  I suspect, and hope, that the statement did not reflect Steinbeck's personal view but rather that of the story's narrator.

(2)  There are quite a few interesting characters in the novel, but the one I'm most fascinated with right now, i.e., less than 1/3rd of the way through the novel, is Cathy Ames Trask.  I described her in an earlier comment as 'a psychopath,' and perhaps she was, but I now suspect that description was too dismissive of her.  In any event, I'm struck by Steinbeck's not very flattering portrayal of women, at least in the first half of the book, where the women (except for Cathy) are all secondary characters and none is particularly heroic, unless it's the narrator's mother, Olive Hamilton, or his grandmother Liza Hamilton.  Again, other than Cathy, it's a book about men among men: the weak Adam and Charles Trask and the heroic Samuel Hamilton, the narrator's maternal grandfather.

(3) The story of East of Eden is built upon and around the enigmatic story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis:

Adam made love to his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.  She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” 2 Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.  In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord.  And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering,  but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7 If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.  Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.  When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear.  Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

But the Lord said to him, “Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

What a curious story!  What does it suggest about God?  About human nature?  About life outside of the Garden of Eden/Heaven?  Why did God favor Abel's offering and ignore Cain's?  Does God play favorites?  Wasn't God responsible, at least in part, for provoking Cain? He knew Cain was vulnerable: "sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."  Is enmity and violence built into human relationships? Why does God protect Cain with 'the mark'?  What was 'the mark'?  Does it tell us anything about justice in our East of Eden world?  About capital punishment?  Is this tale, following the tale of the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden, the origin of our idea of "free will" - 'sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it'?  What was meant by "Cain went out from the Lord's presence"?  Subsequent passages tell us that Cain built cities after his move east of Eden.  Is this a suggestion that great achievements are accomplished by sinners and criminals, not by pious shepherds like Abel?

In the Catholic tradition, Abel is treated as a precursory figure of Jesus Christ (innocent, offering a sacrifice acceptable to God) and Cain as Everyman, prone to sin but, with Grace, able to resist it, i.e., having free will.  Pope John Paul II gave the Cain story renewed prominence in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life").  He saw Cain's question—"Am I my brother's keeper?" —as echoing throughout modern society whenever people deny responsibility for the vulnerable, the poor, the unborn, the elderly, or victims of violence.  For John Paul II, God's implicit answer is: Yes. Every person is his brother's keeper.  Jesus taught the same in his parable of the Good Samaritan.

Steinbeck addresses the questions raised by the Cain and Abel fable in chapter 22 of East of Eden, but of course his characters can't answer or resolve them any better than we can.

Worthy of note in this morning's Wall Street Journal:

(1) Putin’s War and Kirill’s Blasphemy: The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church betrays his faith to support the state. By George Weigel

As Russian missiles and drones continue their assault on Ukrainian civilians, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, has just published “War: Beyond the Visible Causes and Consequences,” doubling down on his campaign to justify in religious terms Russia’s war of extermination against Ukraine.

Issued by the official publishing house of the Moscow patriarchate, the book casts Vladimir Putin’s war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world. Patriarch Kirill lurched into heresy when he promised Russian soldiers immediate entrance into heaven, their sins forgiven, if they die in Mr. Putin’s “holy war.” Now Patriarch Kirill asserts the “great responsibility” of the Russian people is to win the war because “our earthly vocation is to be warriors of the Lord, to resist evil.” God has determined the war’s outcome, he writes, “and victory belongs to those who stand on the side of the light.”

In the first decades of Soviet communism, Russian Orthodoxy gave a great witness of martyrdom, even as its exiled thinkers enriched Christian theology and fostered ecumenical dialogue. But since 1943—when Stalin, trying to strengthen patriotic resistance to the Nazi war machine, relegitimized the Orthodox Church—the church’s leadership has been under the Kremlin’s thumb. Its leaders, including the current patriarch, have had strong connections to Moscow’s security services. Perhaps as a result, all of them have had a special loathing for Ukrainian national consciousness. The Moscow patriarchate worked hand in glove with Soviet spymasters to orchestrate a spurious Ukrainian church council in 1946, which legally abolished the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a custodian of Ukrainian culture and identity. 

Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of the Military Vicarate during the Vietnam War, said very similar things to us American troops during that war.   

(2) Socialism Is Here—and It’s Serious: As religion recedes, politics takes its place. As confidence fades, political movements grow radical.  By Peggy Noonan

Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Michigan on Tuesday by racking up huge margins in progressive enclaves and university towns.

Socialism’s opponents imagine there is safety in its poor track record, which is obvious to everyone. No it isn’t. Many of its proponents wouldn’t know the history and many wouldn’t care: Our version will be better.

Here is some of what that version involves, from an interview two weeks ago by Shannon Bream of “Fox News Sunday” with Megan Romer, national co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America. Normally socialists are evasive or euphemistic regarding their policy goals. Ms. Romer wasn’t.

Bream: “Just give me sort of a true or false on these. Abolish the Senate?”

Romer: “True.”

Bream: “Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?”

Romer: “Yep.”

Bream: “Abolish ICE?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

Bream: “Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the United States illegally?”

Romer: “As a long-term plan, yep.”

Bream: “Defund the Pentagon?”

Romer: “Absolutely.”

Bream: “Abolish prisons, at least in large part?”

Romer: “Yeah—again as part of a long-term program, yeah.”

Bream: “Government or public ownership of most large corporations?”

Romer: “Yeah, absolutely.”

I joined the DSA years ago because it supported single-payer medicine, i.e., its opposition to our health system run, in large measure, by private insurance companies.   It's inconceivable to me how some form of government-paid health care can succeed throughout the industrialized, advanced world everywhere but in the United States.  None of the systems is perfect of course, but I fully suspect that every one of them, for all its flaws, is better than the system we have in our own country.  My daughter has lived with, and used, the German system for the last 15 years, and wouldn't dream of trading it for what we live with in this country.  That said, I dropped my DSA membership some years ago when the group got really radical and grossly unrealistic, as it is now.  Our problem is that Republicans and right-wingers conflate any government-sponsored, government-financed, or government-managed social program with Socialism and Socialism = Communism.  They have long targeted the Veterans Administration Health Care System since it is government-sponsored, -financed, and -managed.  It surely has problems, but the vast majority of us veterans are happy with it and grateful for it, to the endless consternation of its right-wing critics.

A more mundane mystery than the story of Cain and Abel.  I walked into the kitchen at about 6 o'clock this morning and saw the loaf of sourdough bread that Geri bought yesterday on the floor next to the refrigerator.  I left it there for Geri to see when she got up later and asked her if she had put it there, knowing of course that she wouldn't do that.  She said she put it in our breadbox last night and it must have fallen out somehow.  But it's not below the breadbox.  How did it get to where it was?  In the photo, the breadbox is on the third shelf, above the microwave oven.   Did that loaf of bread walk from under the breadbox to next to the refrigerator?  Did this soft loaf of bread bounce over there?  Roll over there?   Is it really likely Geri would have placed the loaf in the breadbox in so haphazard a way that it could fall out????

 We voted today.  We dropped off our absentee ballets at the Village Hall this morning.  I voted for Milwaukee's County Executive Crowley and Geri voted for some other candidate (but not DSA member Franscesca Hong), neither of us thinking the Dems have a chance at holding the governor's office  in November.