3/18/2025

 Tuesday, March 18, 2025

D+131/58

1940 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met at Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agrees to join Germany's impending war effort in the west

1942 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signsed Executive Order 9102, creating the War Relocation Authority, which was charged with overseeing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

2005 Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is removed at the request of her husband

2014 Russia formally annexed Crimea, previously part of Ukraine

2018 First fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car hitting a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona

The view out our front door at 7:08 a.m.  Sunrise was at 6:56.

In bed at 9, awake and up at 5!  40° outside, high of 47°.  I did a big load of laundry at 6 a.m.  I watched Morning Joe for some time despite my aversion to his incredible rudeness and bombast.  

Prednisone, day 338; 4 mg., day 13/21; Kevzara, day 1/14; CGM, day 1/ -----.  2 mg. of prednisone at 5:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m.  Other meds at 6:45 a.m.  Kevzara injection at 11:40 a.m.    The continuous glucose sensor was applied at 12:40 p.m. I've been counting my days wrong for the Kevzara injections.  I inject the stuff every two weeks on a Tuesday.  Trulicity every week on a Friday.  The continuous glucose monitor is every 15  days. My right shoulder is slightly painful again, as it is every day, and it has me wondering again whether it's a return of the polymyalgia rheumatica, which seems unlikely, or osteoarthritis, or maybe rheumatoid arthritis, or frozen shoulder (adhesive capsulitis) which Geri experienced several years ago.  

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 movie starring Spencer Tracy and other stars and directed by John Sturges.   It is set in 1945 and is about anti-Japanese racism in a small, remote, California town.  One of the townsmen killed a Japanese farmer after Pearl Harbor and the whole town, including the sheriff, has lived with and covered up the crime for four years.  I watched the movie years ago and thought of it this morning while watching Morning Joe's discussion of the White House's defiance of Saturday's court order requiring a temporary halt to the deportation to El Salvador of alleged Venezuelan gang members, today's phone call between Trump and Putin to divvy up Ukraine, and yesterday's news of the Pentagon removing pages on its website honoring Ira Hayes, a member of the Pima tribe,  and the other Native Americans (Navajos) who served as code talkers on Iwo Jima.  We are living in very dark times, a bad day at Black Rock.  We are being firehosed with lawless or otherwise bad acts by Trump and his henchmen.   On top of all that, Israel has staged a massive attack on Gaza, ending the ceasefire that started at the end of the Biden administration, Trump has posted a call for the impeachment of the judge in the Venezuelan deportation case, and Chief Justice Roberts has issued a public statement responding that the way to address court decisions with which a party disagrees is to appeal the decision, what Bob Friebert would call 'a fight in the leper colony.'

Border czar Tom Homan said he doesn’t care what the judges think about the deportation flights of Venezuelan gang members as the administration faces a legal battle over the flight.  “I’m proud to be a part of this administration. We’re not stopping,” he said Monday on “Fox & Friends.”  "“I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”  We don't have a fully-fledged constitutional crisis and perhaps won't have one unless and until the Supreme Court gets involved in the case, but Homan's belligerent statement reflects, I believe, his boss's view.  It's hard to believe we won't eventually have a full-blown constitutional crisis with this president and administration of true-believing yesmen.  Or unless all three branches of the federal government join in embracing Trump's view of government, i.e., authoritarian, oligarchic, plutocratic, and fascistic.

Trump's scheduled telephone call with Putin today will be a modern-day version of the conversations between Hitler and Stalin preceding the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 divvying up Poland and recognizing "spheres of influence" in Eastern Europe.  Of course, the treaty between these two autocrats meant nothing once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, as Hitler had intended to do all along, just as Putin intends when the time is right to seize all of Ukraine, and, he hopes, the Baltic states and perhaps Poland as well.  One thing we can be sure of is that any deal that Trump and Putin can agree to will be a dirty deal in which both Ukraine and the United States will suffer, and Putin and Russia will be rewarded.  Trump sold out our allies the Kurds in Syria and he is selling out the Ukrainians.  Nancy Pelosi was right: with Trump, "all roads lead to Putin."

The Pentagon's cravenness in removing the Ira Hayes/code-talker pages from its website makes me sick.  When my Dad, who served in Iwo's 1st JASCO or Joint Assault Signal Company with the code-talkers, was alive and moving between Wisconsin and Arizona with the change of seasons, he and I would drive through the Navajo Reservation in north-east Arizona as he transitioned between Kitty's house and ours.  There was (and probably still is) only one radio station up there and it broadcasts in the Navajo language.  He would be reminded of his 27 days on the landing beach near the code-talkers.  Ira Hayes was an infantryman, trained as a Marine paratrooper and not a code-talker,  but he and  my Dad both came out of the war and the slaughterhouse of Iwo Jima, wrecked, 'mutilés de guerre.'  My Dad lived to age 86, bothered by 'bad dreams' until late in life, indeed until he left Florida to live with us in Wisconsin and Kitty and Jim in Arizona.  Ira Hayes died at age 32, an alcoholic, dead from exposure to cold, lying alone, outside on the ground.  Johnny Cash sang of him:

Call him drunken Ira Hayes

He won't answer anymore

Not the whiskey drinking Indian

Nor the Marine that went to war

There they battled up Iwo Jima's hill

Two hundred and fifty men

But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over

And when Old Glory raised

Among the men who held it high

Was the Indian, Ira Hayes.

Poor Ira Hayes, abused by the federal government before the war, used in the war to kil and to sell war bonds, and after the war forgotten, like my father and his young family,  by the government.  So it goes.

Huge victory for Trump!     In their 90-minute telephone conversation, Putin agreed with Trump not to attack Ukraine's energy infrastructure, leaving them free to concentrate on bombing and missile strikes on hospitals, apartment buildings, schools, and shopping centers PLUS, even this small concession to Ukraine is dependent on Ukraine agreeing not to mobilize any more soldiers,  nor can they bring in any more weapons and the U.S. must agree not to provide any more intelligence information to Ukraine.  More happy horseshit.

Geri is feeling better again today.

Who does this remind us of?  Feeling few, if any, emotions; Sadism (pleasure from causing pain to others); Lack of care for others; Pathological lying;; Charming personality;  Lack of fear; Risk-taking behavior; Inability to love;  No remorse for wrongdoing;  Poor judgment;  Lack of life goals; Using relationships purely for gain.  Traits of psychopaths.;  What do psychopaths look like?  Just like the rest of us, maybe better.

The SpaceX capsule landed successfully and thrillingly this afternoon.  Just amazing, astounding, no word to describe it.  Another great accomplishment for Elon Musk's company.  Would that he would get out of politics and government and stick to  the business of his companies.  The world would be better off.