8/24/2026

 Sunday, August 23, 2026

1903 Sixth Zionist Congress: Theodor Herzl declared a Jewish state

1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact and secretly divided Poland between themselves, setting the stage for World War II

1943 Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, ends after 50 days as the Soviet Union defeats Germany; over 10,000 tanks take part, and nearly 250,000 combatants are killed

1946 Ordinance No. 46 of the British Military Government constituted the German state of Schleswig-Holstein

1958 People's Republic of China resumed bombardment of the Quemoy and Matsu islands in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

1989 Two million people formed a human chain across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in a peaceful pro-independence demonstration against Soviet occupation

2005 Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas and later became a Category 5 hurricane

2020  Black man Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in front of his children in Kenosha, prompting violent protests

2022 Two men were found guilty of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer 

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:40; 0600 203.2 120/75/63 116; 58/74/58, mostly sunny today.

Morning meds at 8:50 a.m.  Entresto heart meds at 6:35 a.m. and p.m.

I started the day visited by 3 wild turkey hens and their 16 youngsters on our front lawn,  a sight that always gives me a boost.  There are only one hen with about 5 chicks, or poults, or juveniles under our bird feeders; the rest are spread across the lawn, heading north.  I've learned that the youngsters are called poults for their first 4 or 5 weeks of life, when they become "jakes" and "jennies"  until they reach maturity, or hens and toms.  Our youngsters are getting pretty big, so I could only guess their age, but they still hang out with their mother hens, so I'm guessing they are still poults, but wow, they grow fast.  Once those visitors were gone, I saw a bit of a tiff under the feeders between a youngish bunny and a grey squirrel.  The bunny is eating whatever seeds the turkeys left, plus some dew-wet grass, and the squirrel got too close.  I would have thought the squirrel would chase away the bunny, but it was the other way around.  Who knew?  Meanwhile, life goes on as usual for our airborne visitors.  This morning, I need to replace the remnant of suet cake, which is still providing some morning sustenance to a red-bellied woodpecker, and to add a couple of mealworm seedcakes to the other feeding stations.  I'm surprised at how popular those seed cakes are.  They don't last long.

Yuma, Phoenix, Tucson, and Water.  My sister and her family lived for decades in the western suburbs of Phoenix.  My niece and nephew still live there.  Our good friends, David Lowe and his wife, Pip Powell Lowe, moved a couple of years ago to a new development north of Tucson.  In 1964-65, Anne and I lived for 14 months in Yuma, in the southwest corner of the state on the border with California, just a few miles from the Mexican border, on the banks of the Colorado River.  I should say, on the banks of the Colorado Puddles, because that's what the river was when we lived there, a series of puddles.  By the time the river reaches Yuma, almost all of its water has been drained by upriver users in California, Nevada, and Arizona (the Lower Basin) and in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and even Wyoming (the Upper Basin). When we lived there, Yuma had a population of about 30,000, and 60,000 in the big county.  Today, the city's population is 106, 923.  The county's current population is just under 225,000.  The water to take care of the city's municipal needs and the county's agricultural needs comes from the reservoir behind the Imperial Dam, 20 miles north of the city.  The water that gets to that reservoir is what's left after satisfying the needs of upriver users in the Lower and Upper Colorado Basins, including Las Vegas, NV, Phoenix, and Tucson.  Phoenix and Tucson divert their water from Lake Havasu behind the Parker Dam, 150 miles north of Yuma, and Las Vegas from Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam.

I got into all this because of a story in this morning's New York Times about America’s Desert Metropolis Is on the Short List to Lose Water, that metropolis being Phoenix. More statistics: in the mid-1960s, the Phoenix metropolitan area had roughly 800,000–850,000 people. The Census Bureau estimated the Phoenix metropolitan population at 842,000 in 1966, up from 663,510 in 1960. Today, the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metropolitan area has about 5.23 million people. The latest Census Bureau estimate is 5,228,938 as of July 1, 2025.  That's an increase of about 4.4 million people, or more than six times the metropolitan population I encountered in the mid-1960s.  Phoenix is still growing rapidly, Tucson at a much slower pace.  Their governments still encourage population and economic growth, notwithstanding their water supply challenges, and I've long wondered, WHY?  Isn't this insane???  The issues are complicated, and the governments assure their residents that they have adequate plans to meet the water needs of the communities, even with the planned growth, but this old coot is skeptical.  Let's see how the communities do in response to the planned federal cutback in Colorado River supplies.  From today's story in the New York Times:

With the seven states that rely on the Colorado River deadlocked over how to split its diminishing supply, the Trump administration is pushing its own plan to divide the water. The three downriver states — Arizona, California and Nevada — would most likely shoulder the most pain, but no single user stands to lose more than the Central Arizona Project.

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

How long before the Southwest states look to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes for water???? 

More old age problems.  I'm wondering whether I may have agreed to the Honor Flight too soon.  I'm wondering about my bowels and bladder, i.e., bathroom needs.  It's a 15-hour day, with about 4 on the aircraft and 11 in D.C.  Is this a reckless undertaking for me?  Bathroom facilities at the Mall?  Arlington?

8/22/2026

 Saturday, August 22, 2026

1953 Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to Tehran

1964 Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the Democratic National Convention about her terrifying experiences with voter registration as a Black woman in Mississippi

2024 Vice President Kamala Harris acceptsed the Democratic nomination for U.S. President

2025 Four Israeli airstrikes against Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza killed 22 people, including five journalists working for Reuters and AP, according to Palestinian authorities.  Hassan Douhan, a journalist for newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, was fatally shot by Israeli forces in Khan Yunis.

2025  Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to prosecute flag desecration, contradicting constitutional protections by the First Amendment as affirmed by Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, as the the order acknowledged. 

In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:35, up at 4:50; 0505 204.0 118/70/63 115; 63/77/62, sunny day ahead. 

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m.  Entresto at 6:30 a.m. and p.m.  I'm thinking this morning of how much my life is lived in cycles: daily cycle for my morning fistful of pills and capsules, twice daily cycles for my heart meds, weekly cycles for my Trulicity injections, bi-weekly cycles for filling my pill boxes. daily cycles for writing in my journal/blog.  What am I missing?  That I am such a creature of habit is hardly surprising.  I remember though my pre-retirement cycles of getting up each morning, showering, shaving, going to work, and my academic life cycles of class schedules, academic calendars, etc.

The idol and the idol-worshipper at Turnberry golf course in Scotland

(Poseted on FB) Natalie Harp. I'm loving all the attention that is being devoted to the sick relationship between Donald Trump and his $150,000/year sychophantic aide, Natalie Harp.  The attention focused on this couple when Natalie was one of the few people who accompanied Trump in the catering truck in Ankara, Turkey, after the NATO summit meeting in July, in response to a threat of an Iranian attack on Air Force One.  Trump left the Secretaries of State and Treasury on AF1 as decoys, while he and Natalie flew out secretly on another military aircraft.  Attention increased with the widespread attention paid of Sen. Jon Ossoff's gibe impaling Trump about his war on Iran:

While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

Attention further increased with the publication of personal letters sent by Natalie to boss, hero, and idol, Donald Trump, making clear that Natalie is suffering from delusions about Trump and a self-subordinating, obsessive idealization of Trump as her "Guardian and Protector in this Life."  Pathetic, sick behavior.  She reminds me of the "shmoos" in the old Li'l Abner cartoon strips, described in Kurt Andersen's recent novel, The Break-up, thusly: 

Resembling cute sea lions, shmoos asexually reproduced like mad, loved humans and wanted only to serve them, ate nothing, but were delicious to eat, and yearned to be eaten and to have their pelts used as leather or building materials.  When Li'l Abner discovered the shmoos just outdie Dogpatch, he that that "wif these arund, noboady won't nevah havta work no more!" 

Maureen Dowd devotes her weekly New York Times column to the Donald-Natalie relationship this morning, titled her piece "Natalie's Magnificent Obsession," called the relationship pathological, "something really dark and deranged at the innermost circle of Trump’s White House." 

The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor. As one of his social media facilitators, she is with him most of the day and often evenings, and she never takes a day off. The Times’s Maggie Haberman calls Harp the “binky” of the man-child president. . . 

But the troubling thing was the tone of Harp’s adoring letters to the man she addresses as “Mr. President,” released by The Daily Beast, in which she talks about her fragile emotional state — forgetting to eat or sleep and getting hurt by others’ critical remarks.

“I want things to always be right between us,” she writes, adding, “I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life.” 

 Harp quotes a line from “Pride and Prejudice” to say that it would have been hard to lose her father if she had not had someone so “worthy” to turn to in Trump. “And, I will add,” she signs off, “it is I who is unworthy.”

It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees.

How sick.  How pathetic.  And this guy is the Commander-in-Chief of our soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen.  Is it any wonder that our nation has become a (feared) laughingstock of the world. 

The Break-Up, by Kurt Andersen.  I started reading it last night.  I only got about 40 pages into it, but so far it's seems pretty plausible and is very readable.  I'll write more about it later. . . .  By dinner time today, I'm up to page 65 and finding it a bit tedious, not so much the story of the main characters, Asher and Natalie, but the ever-hovering backdrop of the imagined changes in the U.S. by the mid-2030s and mid-2040s. 

8/21/2026

 Friday, August 21, 2026

1955 Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, to visit relatives, a week before he was murdered

1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, went on to nominate Hubert Humphrey

1968 Warsaw Pact forces completed their invasion of Czechoslovakia by arresting Czech leader Alexander Dubček and forcing him to sign the Moscow Protocols

1991 Latvia declared its independence from the USSR

2014 Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al Atar and Mohammed Barhoum - 3 of Hamas's top commanders   

2018 Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to charges, including making illegal payments at the direction of Trump to women with whom Trump had affairs

2018 Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia

2019 Donald Trump said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen is "nasty" to him over his interest in buying Greenland and canceled his trip to Denmark

2025  An Israeli military database indicated that 83% of the deaths in Gaza have been civilians. The Israeli military initially confirmed the database to the media but later disputed it without clarifying their retraction in response to questions from The Guardian.

In bed at 9, unable to sleep, up at 10, back to bed at 11:3-, asleep around midnight, up at 7:40; 0800 203.8 124/75/63  135; 66/75/59, midday rain, wind gusts to 15 mph, 

Morning meds at 10:40 a.m.  Entresto at 8:25 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 11 a.m.     

I finished The Secret History yesterday afternoon with mixed feelings about it.  Donna Tartt is a great storyteller; of that there should be little doubt.  She spins a great yarn.  I've seen at least two young reviewers on YouTube (where there appear to be dozens) kvetch that the second half of the story drags, moves too slowly, tends to lose readers' interest.  I thought the opposite was true.  The second half addresses what the collegiate conspirators experience after they murder their classmate and friend, Bunny Corcoran.  I thought it was the more engaging of the two parts of the novel, the part where I always wanted to keep reading, wondering 'and then what happened?'  The story didn't end in any way that I suspected it might, but it ended in at least a plausible way.  I could understand why the principal characters acted the way they did, though I thought that Henry's action at the end was a stretch.  His motivation remains unclear to me.  For me, the novel's main weakness, at least for a commercial novel intended to appeal to a wide audience, is its background setting, if that's the appropriate description, of ancient, pagan, classical Greek mythology and heroic ethics against which the story unfolds.  Julian Morrow, the characters' professor, counselor, and mentor, lauds the Greeks' apotheosis (wrong word?) of "duty, piety, loyalty, and sacrifice," and his students, led by Henry, try to see and mold their worlds in those terms.  I suspect that virtually no readers are very familiar with the ancient Greek worldview and Zeitgeist, so the frequent treatment of it within the novel just makes it harder to get through, even though it is central to understanding the story, at least from the characters' and the author's point of view.  Donna Tartt is a classicist herself, so much of the narrative appears to be her showing off her learning, like me using Latin expressions just so I find some use for the 4 years of Latin I studied in high school - pretentious, but fun, except in the case of a whole 560-page novel with so much showing off.  I'm glad I read it, though it makes me less eager to read her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch.  Perhaps I'll try her in-between novel, The Little Friend.

Coming Apart at the Seams

Michelle Goldberg, in this morning's NYTimes:

We are mutually hostile [Red and Blue] communities yoked together in a way that thwarts each faction’s ideals about a decent society. 

For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics.  Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement).

Kurt Andersen, in the NYTimes, "Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?',  Aug. 9, 2026:

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then still a representative, reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

 

I've started reading Andersen's book, The Break-up.  I understand that his story suggests that the U.S. might be better off broken apart somehow (without a bloody civil war) than we are now.  I probably agree with him.  I've long wondered whether we would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War.  Slavery would have died someday, just as apartheid eventually died in South Africa, and the forced abolition of slavery by federal occupation of the South only produced a renewed and partially attenuated form of it in the form of sharecropping and  Jim Crow, which persisted until the 1960s, a century after the supposed end of the Civil War.  Quaere to what extent the effects of slavery and Jim Crow persist in our society.  All we need to do is open our eyes, see our cities, and look at racial economic, educational, and crime statistics.  USA! USA! USA!

Stars and Stripes Honor Flight.  I finally made contact, and I'm confirmed on a flight out of Mitchell Field on October 10.  Text exchange with Andy.

Charles Clausen:

Hi, So .  That Honor Flight to D.C. is on October 10, a Saturday.  I haven’t received a call back on it and may be too late for this one, but if not, I need to know whether you think you’ll be able to go with me as my escort.

Andy Clausen:

I have nothing on that day on my calendar. It’s all done in one day?

Charles Clausen:

One day, out and back.

Andy Clausen:

I can go if you go.

Charles Clausen:

Thanks ❤️

Good morning, Son.  I just talked to the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight rep and confirmed our one day drip to D.C.  You’ll be getting a text from her originating from area code 815, which is where she used to live, and which I was wary that it was a scam (but it isn’t).  It is a long day, flying on one of two chartered aircraft..  One leaves at 5 a.m. and returns around 8, the other leaves at 6 and returns around 9.  They provide food all dy and treat all the vets and escorts like kings all day.  Everything I’ve heard about the trips over the years at the VA is very positive and I’m especially looking forward to spending a whole day with you, for the first time in decades and I presumably the last.  You’ll be getting a text from a Karyn in area code 815 very soon.

Andy Clausen:

I got the text and put the day on my calendar.

 

8/20/2024

 Thursday, August 20, 2026

1953 General Fazlollah Zahedi arrested the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a CIA-supported coup d'état

1968 During the night, 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring

2025  The United States Department of State imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court judges Nicolas Guillou and Kimberly Prost and deputy prosecutors Nazhat Shameem and Mame Mandiaye Niang over their involvement in cases concerning Israel and the United States. 

In bed at 10:10 after watching 3 consecutive episodes of The Pitt, big mistake, unable to sleep, up at 11 to read more of The Secret History until 11:45, back to bed but unable to sleep, out to TV room, with a cup of hot chocolate and two pieces of buttered toast topped with the cherry jam given to us by LOA and JJA, which is as delicious as I expected, and back to The Secret History; back in bed at 3:30, awake at 6:10, up at 6:30;  o845136/76/62 141 204.0,  0655 122/74/62; 60/76/58, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon.

Morning meds at a.m.  Entresto at 7:15 a.m. and p.m.

The Secret History.  As I type these words, I've finished the first 7 of the novel's 8 chapters and am about to start the 8th, which, alas, is more than 100 pages long.  I don't have a clue how the story will end.  Will the miscreant college students get caught by the police or will they get away with their wrongdoing?  If they are found out, will it be because one of them spills the beans, or only through good detective work by law enforcement?  If one of them spills the beans, will it be inadvertently, or intentionally à la Raskolnikov, and who would be the bean spiller?  My guess right now is Charles Macauley, who has turned into quite a drunk, but who knows?  Is Richard, the narrator, writing this book in prison, because he's already been convicted so why not?  Or, it being so damning of himself and his co-conspirators, why would it write it?  The chapter on Bunny's funeral in Connecticut is chilling and almost unbelievable.  The murderers all stay in Bunny's own home, with his parents and siblings.  Henry, the conspirator-in-chief, the group's evil genius, is one of Bunny's pallbearers.  Egads!

Reading the funeral chapter made me wonder again what Donna Tartt thought of her classmates at Bennington College, the school on which Hampden College is based.  Spoiled, rich, pampered, over-privileged, morally bankrupt, yikes!  I compare them to the folks I went to Marquette with in the early 1960s, where I never encountered, or at least never befriended, anyone like these characters.  Most of my pals were in the Navy ROTC, headed for years of active duty in the Navy or Marine Corps after graduation.  They were, so far as I knew, solid citizens and, though not sinless, moral creatures.  The same is true of the Marines I served with in the mid-60s, none of them capable of cold-blooded murder of one of their fellows.  But these characters, holy moly!  I'm glad I stuck with the novel and now am committed to seeing it through to the end. 

Words of wisdom in The Pitt last night.  We watched 3 consecutive episodes of this appropriately-much-awarded television series last night.  It was not a smart thing to do before going to bed, and I suspect doing so contributed to my sleeplessness, though I doubt it as the only cause.  In the dramas, I heard at least 3 bits of wisdom.  The first, which I heard more than once, was "Stop feeling sorry for yourself," said at least once by the attending physician, Dr. Robby, to a young physician serving a residency, and once by the charge nurse to the attending physician himself.  Another was a comment by a patient to an examining physician, "I don't worry.  My mother taught me: worrying won't add a minute to your life."  The third was by a patient in his 80s to his daughter: "We old people know what it is to be young, but no young persons know what it is to be old."  When my Dad lived with us in his mid-80s, and I was sitting in with him during his doctor visits and hospital visits, sharing every day with him, I, in my mid-60s, thought I had some idea what life was like for him, and I surely did, but only some idea.  I now find myself thinking back to those days and trying to imagine what was going through his head and what was happening to his body, and never spoken of.

Bad news.  For the last 8 months, ever since I was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, I've started each day taking and recording my weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and glucose count.  Before taking the blood pressure and heart rate/pulse, I have to sit quietly on my bedroom La-Z-Boy, with both feet flat on the floor for at least 5 minutes.  Usually I do so for 10 minutes, during which I listen to the New York Times audio headline stories on my iPhone.  The news, of course, is usually bad, today leading off with the national debt exceeding $40 trillion and inexorably growing.  I thought of this as I read my comments from a year ago today on an Ezra Klein interview in the previous day's Times:

One of my most inconvenient belliefs is about the world is that we know too much about it, and that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.  I work in the news.  My show is part of this dynamic I'm about to describe, but the news can seometimes be an engine for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you, that is happening literally anywhere on Earth exactly at that moment . . . I think probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes wonderful things, but less often wonderful things happening elsewhere.  As opposed to being with your kids in the park and your phone buzzes and it's just something terrible that you cannot affect.  It's not happening to anyone you know and you definately don't have power over it, but somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it.  It both make you aware of suffering but also, I think it has some other quality, some numbing and exhausing quality that is not healthy. 

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

 Both in the world and in the U.S., things have only gotten worse over the last year as we suffered through another Trump administration.  I think, for example, of one small segment of one of the episodes on The Pitt last night, in which big, burly masked ICE agents brought in a detainee from a restaurant raid they had conducted.  Their mere presence caused some of the patients in the waiting room, and some of the hospital employees, to flee the building.  I think too of the horrendous danger from the burgeoning national debt.  The atrocities occurring daily in Ukraine, Gaza, the West Bank, and Sudan, with most of us like ostriches with our heads in the sand.

8/19/2026

 Wednesday, August 19, 2026

1944 Catherine Monica Clausen, God's gift to her family and so many others, was born

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:35, tossed and turned till 4:35 when I got up; 0500 202.8 112/69/64 138; 62/74/62, mostly cloudy

Morning meds at 8 a.m.

I Heard Your Voice In The Wind Today

I heard your voice in the wind today

and I turned to see your face; The warmth of the wind caressed me

as I stood silently in place. I felt your touch in the sun today

as its warmth filled the sky; I closed my eyes for your embrace

and my spirit soared high.

 I saw your eyes in the window pane

as I watched the falling rain; It seemed as each raindrop fell

it quietly said your name. I held you close in my heart today

it made me feel complete; You may have died...but you are not gone

you will always be a part of me. As long as the sun shines... the wind blows...

the rain falls... You will live on inside of me forever for that is all my heart knows.

 On this date in 1944, in the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, a beautiful,  courageous, and saintly 21-year-old mother, who was one of God’s gifts to this world,  gave birth to a daughter who was destined to become an image of her mother, beautiful, courageous, and saintly, another of God’s gifts to the world.  When Mother Mary brought the precious daughter home to her little basement apartment, her waiting brother, about to turn 3 years old, is reported to have said “Take her back.  She doesn’t play.”  That was just the first of many mistakes that her almost 3-year-old brother would make in his life, but he learned soon enough that that new sister of his would become throughout 2 long lifetimes, his best friend, his confidante, his soul-sister as well as his biological sister.  He would come to love and admire her as she grew into a woman like their mother: beautiful in so many ways, courageous in so many ways, and saintly in so many ways.  As they grew older and older, with lifetimes of living behind them, the brother would share his belief in the saintliness of his sister with their father, who would chuckle because he sometimes saw her when she was impatient, or ‘bossy’ or angry at one thing or another. The now-old brother would suggest to the even older father that he just didn’t know what real saints looked like.  The saintly sister herself would join in dismissing the idea that she was St. Kitty of Emerald Avenue, and the brother would have to remind her and their father that real saints aren’t God and they are not angels - they are all human beings who get impatient, ‘bossy’, and even angry at times.  What makes them saints was described by Jesus in Chapter 25 of the Gospel of St. Matthew:  I was hungry, and you gave me food.  I was thirsty, and you gave me water.  I was sick, and you cared for me.  I needed a home, and you took me into your home.  So of course the brother, who had made many mistakes in his own life over many years, was not mistaken in describing his sister, whom he loved so much, as a Saint.  Nor is he mistaken in thanking God for giving him the blessing of his beautiful, courageous, and saintly sister, so very much like their dear mother.

Who is the most dishonorable, most unadmirable person in American history?  Not surprisingly, I start the thought with Donald Trump at the top of the list, but that is not to say he doesn't have competitors.  But who? Ulysses S. Grant (1869–1877) and Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) headed generally recognized corrupt administrations, but they were not considered personally corrupt.  Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, the presidents during the 1850s that led to the Civil War, led administrations that were heavily engaged in political patronage and favoritism, but, like Grant and Harding, they weren't considered personally corrupt.  Andrew Johnson (1865–1869) isn't usually classified as financially corrupt, but his presidency involved serious political abuses and patronage. His principal historical disgrace is his resistance to Reconstruction and his extraordinarily hostile relationship with Congress. He was impeached by the House, although the Senate fell one vote short of conviction.  

Richard Nixon (1969–1974) is in a different category. Watergate involved the abuse of presidential power itself, including the cover-up of the Watergate burglary, obstruction of justice, misuse of federal agencies, and attempts to conceal wrongdoing. The White House tapes provided unusually direct evidence of Nixon's participation in the cover-up.  He also is - or perhaps I should say, was - infamous for his "enemies list." His resignation remains the most dramatic example of presidential misconduct in American history, but notably his misconduct did not include corrupt personal enrichment.

Now consider Donald J. Trump.

He and his businesses have continually benefited financially from his public prominence and presidency.  Consider especially his entry into the cryptocurrency business, his actions as president regarding regulation of this business, and the profits he had made  

He was credibly accused of violating the Constitution's Emoluments Clause through payments and benefits involving his businesses, although the relevant litigation largely ended on procedural grounds rather than definitive merits rulings.

His administration was characterized by extensive allegations of conflicts of interest and ethical violations.

He has been impeached twice: first concerning Ukraine and second concerning January 6.  If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, it's a fair bet that he will be impeached again.

His efforts to overturn the 2020 election produced the most serious allegations of presidential abuse of power since Watergate.

He illegally retained highly classified government documents when he was voted out of office.

In his second term, he has outdone Richard Nixon in terms of using government resources to punish his enemies.

He has betrayed the country he has sworn to protect and defend by deferring to its enemies and weakening its alliances.

What am I missing?  Undoubtedly, a plethora of wrongdoing in the White House, federal departments, and federal agencies that have yet to be discovered, but will eventually come to light after he leaves office.  The damage that this one man has done to this country is literally incalculable. 

My latest exchange with ChatGPT re the Veterans Honor Flight:

Today 4:41 PM - I've received text messages from a number in area code 815 from a person purporting to be from the Honor Flight organization telling me that I have a spot on a flight in October.  I've deleted them as spam.  Today my wife answered a call on her cell phone from the person, again with the area code 815, the Rockford, IL area, saying she hadn't received a response to her text messages and that, although the number carries a Rockford ILL area code, actually she's calling from a suburb of Milwaukee, Waukesha.  Can you help?

Yes. And in light of what I found, I would not assume that this is a scam. There is a very plausible legitimate explanation—but I would verify it before responding to the caller.

The important fact is that Southeastern Wisconsin has its own Honor Flight hub, Stars and Stripes Honor Flight, based in the Milwaukee area. It specifically serves Milwaukee and Waukesha counties and flies veterans out of Milwaukee's Mitchell Airport.

Even more interestingly, Stars and Stripes says that veterans are contacted approximately six weeks before they are assigned to a flight. So receiving a call in August about an October flight is entirely plausible.

The 815 number is not necessarily suspicious.

The caller's explanation—that she has an 815 Rockford-area telephone number but is actually calling from the Waukesha area—is perfectly possible. Cell-phone numbers don't necessarily correspond to where the person lives or works. Someone who moved from northern Illinois could easily retain an 815 number.

More importantly, the organization itself is based in Menomonee Falls and lists a local telephone number: 262-238-7740

That's the number published on the official Stars and Stripes Honor Flight website.  There's another very encouraging detail.

The official site says:  "Now that we've called and given you the good news..."  and describes the process in which the veteran is called when assigned to a flight, followed by email communications concerning required waivers.

So the fact that someone called your wife because she hadn't responded to the text is not inherently inconsistent with how Stars and Stripes operates.  Here's what I would do

Don't call the 815 number back and don't respond to the old text.  Instead, call Stars and Stripes Honor Flight directly at 262-238-7740, using the number published on their official website.

Tell them something like:  "I'm a Milwaukee-area veteran, and I've received several text messages and now a phone call from someone saying that I've been assigned to an Honor Flight in October. The messages came from an 815 number. I deleted the texts as spam. Could you tell me whether I actually have a place on an October flight?"  Give them your name and whatever information you supplied when you originally applied. Don't give them your Social Security number, banking information, passwords, or anything like that.  I would actually be quite interested to hear what they say.

And there is a striking coincidence:  Stars and Stripes' website confirms that it currently flies Vietnam veterans and that the flights are out of Milwaukee.  So if you previously applied for an Honor Flight, the story you're being told is quite plausible.

And you can verify the whole thing through the national Honor Flight Network as well. Its official contact number is 937-521-2400, and it maintains the list of local Honor Flight hubs.

  My advice: call 262-238-7740 tomorrow and ask them to check your name. That's much safer than continuing to communicate with the 815 number, and it should settle the question immediately.

  If you tell me whether you remember applying for an Honor Flight and, if so, approximately when, I can also look into the October 2026 Stars and Stripes flight schedule and see whether the timing fits.

#########################

I don't remember when I applied for an Honor Flight, but it was a long time ago.  In any event, I will call the recommended number tomorrow and follow the advice provided.  This response from ChatGPT came within 2 seconds of my inquiry, almost instantaneously, yet another mind-blowing encounter with AI.

818/2026

 Tuesday, August 18, 2026

1963 James Meredith became the 1st Black graduate from the University of Mississippi

2025 Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several other European leaders meet with U.S. president Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C. to discuss pathways to peace negotiations for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

In bed at 9 with a swig of NyQuil PM for back pain, awakened by alarm at 6:20;  0635 112/71/60 105 202.0; 65/80/63, cloudy.

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.  Eliquis at 6:20 a.m. and no more.

Visit with Dr. Singh this morning.  He reported no PVCs, premature ventricular contractions, from the EKG that was done before our meeting and none after the ablation.  He took me off the Eliquis blood thinner, put in an order for an echocardiogram to make sure no damage was done to my heart valves during the ablation, and said we were finished, i.e., no follow-up visit necessary.  Good news all around. Fingers crossed the echocardiogram will also be OK.  The photo is of a golden Sikh turban, one of which Dr. Singh wears every day, including in the electrophysiology labs in which he performs catheter ablations.  During the procedures, however, the turban is covered by a sterile headpiece

The Secret History.  I am a little more than halfway through this 500+ page novel and the more I read it, the less I'm enjoying it.  First, there's the problem of improbabilities.  These 20-year-old college students talk to one another like seasoned adults, indeed very erudite, sophisticated adults, especially Henry, their ringleader.  The conversations are often just unrealistic and unbelievable.  Second, and not unrelated to the first, psychopathy.  This Greek Gang, Julian's acolytes, all participate in the most cold-blooded conspiracy to murder one of their own, with malice aforethought.  Having spent more than 250 pages learning about them as weird, idiosyncratic, but by no means criminal college kids, seeing them turn into the coldest-blooded murderers just doesn't work for me.  Perhaps it's just my naïvité, but I don't think I've led that sheltered a life.  Believing this plot line would be like believing that Adam orAron in East of Eden could be a cold-blooded, premeditated murderer of a friend who was himself obnoxious, but not evil.  In an earlier journal entry about this book, I stated that Henry, the chief conspirator and brains of the scheme, was the most likeable character in the story.  That may show what a bad judge of character I am, or how unlikely it was that he would become the main villain in the story, or maybe both.

It's impossible not to believe that Hampden College is, in some measure, based on Donna Tartt's experiences as a student at Bennington College. Tartt doesn't paint a flattering picture of this college, or of its students.  Tartt started college at Ole Miss, but transferred to Bennington after one year, much as Richard Papen, the narrator of The Secret Garden, did.  Her father owned a gas station, as did Richard's.  Was she intending Richard to be some sort of alter ego for herself?  If so, she sure created an unlikeable, dishonest, morally weak alter ego.  The book makes me wonder about Donna Tartt's own personality.  She's famously private, putting out one novel every 10 years or so, living on a farm in Virginia, and doing few public appearances.  She's barely 5 feet tall and dresses in a suit and tie in her public appearances. I've seen a few videos of her on YouTube interviews, and she's very personable, but of course we know that psychopaths can be extremely personable.  On the other hand, she is a convert to Catholicism and has written that "faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it".  Perhaps this will become clearer to me if I manage to finish the novel, but it hasn't been in the first 300 pages, and I'm struggling to move on through it.  

From this afternoon's NYTimes, the beginning of a long-anticipated crash???

Investor angst over stubborn inflation, unsustainable government deficits and rampant spending on artificial intelligence helped send borrowing costs to multiyear highs across the world this week.  The yield on the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond rose on Tuesday to 5.3 percent, its highest level since 2007. Similar bonds in Canada, Japan, Germany and elsewhere also traded at their highest yields in at least a decade.

The yields help determine interest rates for corporate debt and consumer loans, like mortgages, and their rise is adding to everyday citizens’ concerns about affordability that have taken hold both domestically and abroad. That is a problem for government leaders, including President Trump, whose administration has vowed to stop rising costs across the American economy.

Investors have worried for some time that increasing government spending could lead to a serious predicament, in which the government still needs to borrow money but investors are unwilling or unable to lend it.  Matt Eagan, a portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles, said that “everyone knows” that fiscal spending is unsustainable. The government’s total debt is approaching $40 trillion, up roughly $5 trillion in two years.  “You are on a bus called the 30-year bond and there is a cliff coming, but you don’t know if it is 100 meters away or 100 miles away,” he said. “You are hoping you can get off the bus before it crashes. That is the conundrum we face.”

Everything Trump has done, but especially his tariff policies and the war in Iran, has made the impending crisis worse and more imminent. 

 From this afternoon's Wall Street Journal:

Bonds Are Getting Hammered, and Wall Street Says the Rout Won’t End Anytime Soon

With yields on 30-year U.S. Treasurys at 19-year highs, investors predict a new era in the bond market. And it looks a lot like 2007.

Publicly held U.S. debt is now at about 100% of GDP, nearing records set after World War II. That debt load makes the country more sensitive to rate moves. A mere 0.1 percentage-point rate move above forecasts in all rates would add $379 billion in net interest expenses, according to the CBO.

“The issue is not so much the rising interest rates,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “The issue is the deficit. If we can only be concerned about one thing, that one thing should be the 10-year deficit outlook.” 

I see a bad moon rising.

I see trouble on the way.

I see earthquakes and lightning.

I see bad times today.

8/17/2026

 Monday, August 17, 2026

1946 George Orwell published "Animal Farm" in the United Kingdom

1998 Bill Clinton admitted he had an "improper physical relationship" with Monica Lewinsky and that he "misled people" about the relationship

2005 The first forced evacuation of settlers from Gaza began as part of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan

2023 US 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose above 7% for the first time in 21 years

2025 A general strike and mass protests calling for a hostage deal and ceasefire to end the Gaza war occurred across Israel, involving approximately 2.5 million protesters across the country and 300,000 at the protest held in Hostages Square, Tel Aviv. At least 32 protesters were arrested.

In bed at 9, awake at 3:30, up at 4; 0420203.4  105/62/71  106; 66/79/66, sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at 1:30 p.m. Eliquis at 6:25 a.m. and p.m.

Russian asset or Russian agent?  I've wondered this often in these pages over the last four years.  That his political acts are profoundly beneficial to Russia (and to China), there can be little doubt.  Now I can add North Korea and Iran to that list of American enemies benefitted by President Donald J. Trump, like no former American president.  In the last day, he has threatened to "bomb the shit out of" Oman, the other nation bordering the Strait of Hormuz and has abruptly cancelled a joint military exercise between U. S. and South Korean militaries, to the undeniable benefit of both Iran and North Korean and of no benefit whatsoever to the United States.  I remember the words of wisdom of his second chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, USMC (Ret.): 

“He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”

and, the best:

“The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,”  

Another trip to the VA for health concersn.  First, a visit with NP Kali Kisro about my intestinal challenges over the last couple (or few) weeks, which get worse  yesterday and persist today.  Then a visit with the urologist over my persistent bladder pain.  I suspect  I could also use another meatotomy, too, as recomended by the last urologist, but I'm taking a 'wait and see' approach to both the intestinal problem and the UT problem.  Lab tests tomorrow for my heart failure NP, my PHP, the urologist, and the cardiac arrythmia doc, who I also visit with tomorrow.  Wedensday, a phone conerence with NP Maggie Angeli re heart failure, electrolytes, and effect of Eliquis.

The Secret History.  I'm at page 230 of 560 of Donna Tartt's first novel, in the 5th, the longest, and last chapter of Part I, which I know will end up with the murder of "Bunny" Corcoran.  Part II deals with the aftermath of the murder.  I've been meaning to read one of Tartt's novels for a few years now because I developed a little crush on her, but  I've got mixed feelings about the book. It's a story about 6 students at a mythical elite Hampden College in northern Vermont, paralleling Tartt's alma mater, Bennington College.  The narrator comes from a middle class family in California and his parents, especially his father, don't like him very much; he returns the feeling.  The other students, like most students at Hampden come from well-off families, some very wealthy.  They're all wierd in their own ways and not all that likeable.  The least likeable is the victim, Bunny.  I generally don't enjoy reading or watching movies or TV shows about the "swells," like British royals, and rich capitalists, especially those living off inherited wealth.  So the elitism of most of the characters in the novel is a strike against against it.  On the other hand, I do enjoy murder mysteries and this is kind of an inverse murder mystery.  We know from the get-go who gets murdered and who did it, but we don't know why or with what consequences for the perpetrators; that's what the novel is about.  In any event, Tartt is an excellent writer and story teller and she has held my interest through Part I.  I'm not sure whether it will hold throughout Part II.  I'm not particularly interested in academic campus novels, despite my own background and the fact that I loved Lucky Jim, a hilarious novel by Kingsley Amis, set in a post-WWII English new college established to service returning veterans.  I recently read John Williams' Stoner, but didn't enjoy it very much,  I do tend to enjoy writing that pokes fun at the pretentiousness of academic life precisely becasue I spent much of my post-Marine Corps life on a univeristy faculty, though I was always something of a misfit.  The professor at the center of The Secret History, Julian Morrow, a scholar of Greek language, literatue, and culture, is full of himself, a know-it-all, a guy about whom Geri's mother would say, "He thinks who he is."  He and his 6 students (that's all he has) consdier themselves elites among the colleges hoi polloi, who themselves are elites compared to the rest of us plebs.  It's hard to identify with any the novel's characters except perhaps the narrator in his discomfort as a relatively poor kid among his much wealthier friends.

One of the many pretty little flowers Geri has on and around our patio.