2/16/2026

Monday, February 16, 2026

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In bed at 9, awake at 4:10, up at 4:30.  35/27/56/33.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.    

E44%       

2/15/2026

Sunday, February 15, 2026

1936 Adolf Hitler announced the construction of the Volkswagen Beetle 

1968 John Lennon and George Harrison, plus their wives Cynthia and Pattie, and Pattie’s sister Jenny, traveled to India to study Transcendental Meditation for two months with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram; Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr joined them a few days later, Ringo only stays for 2 weeks

1975 Linda Ronstadt topped the US singles chart with 'You're No Good', and the US album chart with Heart Like A Wheel

1989 Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan ended as the last Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Afghan border

1992 Jeffrey Dahmer was found sane and guilty of killing 15 boys

2025  French President Emmanuel Macron announces an emergency summit in Paris, France, between European leaders following a controversial speech given by U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in which he criticized European leadership as the worst threat to Europe, particularly for imposing too much censorship and too little control over migration. 

In bed at 9:10, awake at 4:10, up at 4:50.  34/27/50/32.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  

The last paragraph of James Joyce's "The Dead"

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

2/14/2026

 Saturday, February 14, 2026

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In be at 9:15, up at 5:45.  30/42/29, mostly clear skies.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  

Two years ago today, I wrote:        

Rules for the Ruling Class is a long essay in the January 29 print edition of The New Yorker by staff writer Even Osnos.  He discusses social class in America, elitism, status, and wealth inequality.  It reminds me of so many things, but primarily the lottery of birth and my favorite little poem of William Blake: ' Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. . . . 

Excerpts from the essay:

The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not. Fussell quoted the working-class father of a man killed in Vietnam: “You bet your goddam dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country."

The crux of [Peter Turchin's] findings: a nation that funnels too much money and opportunity upward gets so top-heavy that it can tip over. In the dispassionate tone of a scientist assessing an ant colony, Turchin writes, “In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent.” 

Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” Between 1925 and 1950, the number of American millionaires fell—from sixteen hundred to fewer than nine hundred. Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains. 

But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history.

Turchin ends his book [“End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.”] with a sobering vision. Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.” 

Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.”  . . . Democracy is meant to insure that the élite continue to circulate. But no democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power—if a generation of leaders, on both the right and the left, becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it.  

2/13/2026

Friday, Febrauary 13, 2026

1943 The women's US Marine Corps was created

1945 Allied planes began bombing Dresden, resulting in a devastating firestorm that destroyed the city and killed over 22,000 people

2018 Israeli Police report recommended that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be prosecuted on bribery, fraud and breach-of-trust charges

2021 Donald Trump was acquitted in the second impeachment trial on charge of incitement of insurrection after senators voted 57 to 43 in favor of conviction, less than the 2/3 majority required for impeachment

2025 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., dingbat or /other fearmonger, was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary by the US Senate

In bed at 9:30, up at 7.  25/20/46/22.

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

2 Years ago on this date,  my journal entries remind me of how much chronic, often severe pain from polymyalgia rheumatica I was experiencing and had been experiencing for a couple of months.  I wasn't in the daily suicidal ideation stage yet, but that was on the way.  I was enrolled in the VA's 'Whole Health' program, trying everything from Healing Touch therapy, to acupuncture, to hypnosis, all unsuccessful.  From the journal this date:

Treadmill: pain.  Woke up with considerable shoulder and wrist pain, and not enough sleep.  I will see the hypnotherapist this morning, with my fingers crossed.  I believe I have been experiencing some incipient pain in my right shoulder for the last few days.  I hope it's not a sign of things to come.  I took a slow, short walk on the treadmill at 5 p.m., 20:02 & 0.38.  The painful wrist & shoulder situation has kept me off because I hold on to the side bars while I'm on it and tend to lean on my arms; not good but better than losing balance and falling off. . . 

Hypnotism!  I attended my hypnotherapy session with Erica this morning.  She's originally an occupational therapist by profession but also a certified hypnotherapist.  It was an interesting experience and one I will repeat.  Nothing spooky, nothing exotic,  very much like a guided imagery process with some personalization.  I took a ride on some of the 'back roads' of the VA campus, roads I haven't driven on before, and was again impressed by what a huge operation it is.  When I got home, I played the recorded copy of the session for Geri, Tom & Sue, who wanted to hear it.  I'll listen to it again, hopefully, several times.

Long nap this afternoon - almost 2 hours.  Two nights in a row waking up at 3:30 a.m.  My head has been at least semi-shut down since this shoulder/wrist arthritis or whatever pains.  Not many thoughts, even with much national and international news happening.

Brave New World: Three newspaper pieces caught my attention this morning.  The first was a New York Times prominently positioned article titled "The Epstein Files and the Hidden World of an Unaccountable Elite," by Robert Draper.  The second is an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof, "What Trump Is the Best at, Hands Down."  The third is Peggy Noonan's weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, titled "Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami."  I should add one more related to Peggy Noonan's essay, Ross Douthat's New York Times interview of Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, "Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious.’  All the articles about a common subject: the relatively few people who control unimaginable wealth and power and who operate outside of the behavioral, legal, and moral standards and controls that apply to the vast rest of mankind, Tom Wolfe's 'masters of the universe,' and those now referred to as the super-elites.  At the top of the heap is Donald J. Trump, a psychopathic, malignant narcissist with power over the entire world, not just what we think of as 'ours,' the U. S.  But the heap is a large one, including thousands with ownership of or access to great wealth, those like the UAE sheiks who gave him $500,000,000 a few days before his second inauguration so he could and would authorize the sale of hundreds of thousands of advanced microchips that they would predictably get to the Chinese.  It includes the Silicon Valley oligarchs who were seated near him at his second inauguration: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Sergey Brin.  It includes Wall Street hedge fund managers and the guys who control the burgeoning Artificial Intelligence world that threatens the world.  I'm sorry, Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that.  These people are running the world.  It's the world of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the suicide Robert Maxwell, of his longtime 'best friend,' Donald Trump, of Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Palm Springs, of plush private yachts and airplanes.  Jeffrey Epstein and his network of friends and social acquaintances right now symbolize this world, especially with Donald Trump right in the middle of it, according to The New York Times’ review of the DOJ releases, more than 5,300 of the released files contain a total of over 38,000 references to Donald Trump (including his wife and Mar‑a‑Lago). This count is from the January 2026 tranche of documents the DOJ posted.  The world of these masters of the universe is an immoral and amoral one.  Its denizens are not churchgoers.  They live by the Golden Rule, not the traditional Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but the American, Western, Capitalist one: He who has the gold makes the rules.  These are the people who select our political/governmental leaders.  They do it to a large extent in our general elections by their outsized campaign donations, but they do it mostly in our hidden elections, the pre-primaries that determine which potential candidates will have enough money to compete in a primary.  Emma Goldman was right when she told us that, if elections made a difference, they would make them illegal.

  

 

2/12/2-26

 Thursday, February 12, 2026

1935 First secret demonstration of radio signals detecting aircraft (radar)

28 January 1965 - 17 February 1966 Operation Double Eagle I, the largest operation to date,  in southern Quang Ngai province, a 2 battalion amphibious & vertical assault.  Marines claim 312 enemy KIAs & captured, with 24 Marine KIAs & 156 WIAs.

1993 Comedy film "Groundhog Day" opened across the US

2019 US national debt topped 22 trillion for the first time

2025 Tulsi Gabbard confirmed as DNI

2025  Three weeks into his presidency and after holding a telephone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump announced that negotiations to end the war would start immediately

In bed at 9, up at 6:30.  21/32/21.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  My left thumb muscle still sore and the skin is discolored from fall on 2/8.

Hard Fall SOS

Charles Clausen called emergency services from this approximate location after Apple Watch detected a hard fall. You are receiving this message because Charles has listed you as an emergency contact.

http://maps.apple.com/?Location=43.192240,-87.917770

Andy got this message from Apple on Sunday night when I fell on the driveway.  No response, which is dissappointing. 

h

2/11/2026

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

1905 Pope Pius X publishes the encyclical Vehementer nos

In bed at 9:10, up at 7.  26/14/35/25.

Morning meds  at 9 a.m.    

Wasted much of the day watching the Pam Bondi hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

Anniversary thought.  My favorite quote from any papal encyclical is from Vehementer Nos:

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

An American Reckoning

Ben Rhodes

Reviewed: 

McNamara at War: A New History

by Philip Taubman and William Taubman

Norton, 498 pp., $39.99

February 26, 2026 issue

Long after he served as secretary of defense, Robert McNamara carried the memory of Vietnam around like a cross, simultaneously punishing and redeeming himself through his statements on the war. Yet the limits of his reexamination help explain why America is now enduring a blend of the authoritarianism and imperialism that it once deployed abroad: McNamara—like the country he served, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—could acknowledge mistakes in Vietnam, but he never questioned the American exceptionalism that put us there in the first place. . .

What McNamara could not seem to challenge was why the United States was involved in Vietnam in the first place. What led men like him into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about? How could American officials so devalue the lives of the Vietnamese relative to our own, killing more than three million Vietnamese people before our chaotic exit? What innate confidence in our own special character leads the US government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy? . . .

There is nothing complex about the Vietnam War: it was wrong for the United States to be there in the first place. McNamara hid behind a story about complexity to avoid this full reckoning, which let his successors off the hook. By the time I saw the film, [Errol Morris' The Fog of War], the US political and national security establishment had internalized the idea that Americans were suffering from “Vietnam syndrome”—an aversion to fighting wars overseas because of the outcome in Vietnam. This was seen by elites as an irrational response to trauma: the mistakes were made in the way power was used, not in its use in the first place. 

2/10/2026

 Tuesday, February 10, 2026

1954 President Dwight Eisenhower warned against US intervention in Vietnam

2019 Sexual abuse investigation into US Southern Baptist churches revealed 400 church members implicated with over 700 victims

2023 A World War II-era bomb found in Great Yarmouth, England exploded in "unplanned" detonation as experts attempted to disarm it 

2025  President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a 25% tariff on all aluminium and steel imports.

In bed at 9, up at 5:15.  33/27/37/28.

Morning meds at 7:45 a.m   I missed all the meds yesterday, distracted by hand and back pains from the fall.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but I'll append the words from my memoir about my memories of Bishop Sheen to this excerpt from this morning's New York Times.

The Vatican will allow an American archbishop, who was one of the best-known Catholic clergy of the last century, to be beatified, ending a six-year delay and placing him one step away from sainthood.

Archbishop Sheen, once called “the greatest communicator of the 20th century” by the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, headed a radio broadcast for 20 years before hosting the television series “Life Is Worth Living” in the 1950s and a similar program in the 1960s. He won an Emmy for most outstanding personality in 1953, besting nominees including Edward R. Murrow and Lucille Ball.

Some experts credit Archbishop Sheen’s popularity with paving the way for the election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president in 1960. 

Beatification, a key step in the process of becoming a saint, means the church has investigated and verified a miracle connected to the person, and determined that he has either been martyred or demonstrated a “heroic” level of virtue. The next and final step is canonization, a rare honor that signifies a deceased person is worthy of veneration by the entire church. 

 Before his beatification was postponed, Pope Francis formally approved the attribution of a miracle to Archbishop Sheen, opening a path for him to gain that status. Three other American-born men have been beatified, but the timeline to canonization can vary widely, and not all who are beatified reach that height. (Canonization usually requires a second verified miracle.)

The miracle attributed to Archbishop Sheen involved a stillborn boy in the diocese of Peoria in 2010. His parents had named the boy James Fulton after the archbishop, and they began praying for the archbishop to intervene. After just over an hour of prayer and medical intervention, the boy came to life, according to an account in the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor.

From my memoir:

Until my exposure to Wally and Dave at the liquor store, my world was thoroughly Catholic: Catholic church, Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, Catholic friends, Catholic (in a manner of speaking) family members.  The ‘best’ hospitals were the Catholic hospitals, like Little Company of Mary.  The ‘best’ old age homes were the Catholic old age homes, like the Little Sisters of the Poor.  The only movies we could attend were those that passed muster with the Catholic Legion of Decency, whose movie ratings were published every week in the archdiocese’s Catholic newspaper, The New World.  When television arrived on the scene, the programs, unlike post-war movies, were family-oriented and non-threatening (Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Howdie Doodie, I Remember Mama, etc.), but on Tuesday nights we all watched Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s network program Life is Worth Living, even though it ran opposite The Milton Berle Show.  Sheen was an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of New York, under the powerful Cardinal Spellman.  It speaks to the size and influence of the American Church in the 1950’s that the first national televangelist was a foppish  Catholic hierarch and not a Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson or even Billy Graham.

My footnote comment on Bishop Sheen:

My mother, who was a devoted fan of Bishop Sheen, would be disappointed that I call him a fop, but a fop he clearly was.  He appeared each week wearing his most dramatic episcopal finery: the basic garment a black cassock gown with red piping and red buttons, topped by a black shoulder cape with the same red piping and an underside of red, all the red matching his zucchetto or skullcap and his dazzling Superman/Batman/Captain Marvel cappa magna¸ a flowing bright red floor length cape draped across his shoulders and tied with thin red sashes about his neck, directly above what appeared to be his platinum pectoral cross secured on a long, platinum or silver or white gold chain, while his midriff was secured by a broad red cincture that perfectly matched his piping, his buttons, and his zucchetto.  He was, in a word, DAZZLING!  In the Church’s sumptuary laws, the color red was normally reserved to cardinals, bishops ‘owning’ the color purple.  Why Sheen wore red rather than purple in his television heyday is a mystery to me, but it may account, in small part, to the personal enmity between him, a mere auxiliary bishop, and his superior, the formidable Cardinal Spellman of New York.  In his later telecasts, in the early 1960s, he wore the traditional purple, actually a shade of lavender.  In the pre-Vatican II Church, in the Church before the pre-pedophilia scandal Church, these dazzling, feudal, European, ostentatious displays of capes and cassocks, satins and velvets and laces and brocades seemed to work their magic on the ever-obedient Faithful, who seemed to think it not bizarre to drop to one’s knees to kiss the ring of the episcopal dandies who ruled the Holy Mother Church.  Indeed, to kiss the bishop’s ring and to receive his blessings was considered quite a privilege.  How pathetic! 

Regarding Sheen's foppishness (and the foppishness of the Church hierarchy generally), I refer anyone who might read these words to the photo of Sheen that I posted with this entry.  All that's missing is an ecclesial Superman/Batman cape.  My favorite exemplar: Cardinal Raymond Burke, below.

The Unclenching of Fosts, Russia, North Ossetia, watched this afternoon.