3/22/2025

Saturday, March 22, 2025

D+135/62

1349 Black Death Massacre: Townspeople of Fulda, Landgraviate of Hesse massacred Jews, blaming them for the Black Death; part of many pogroms across Western Europe

1965 US confirmed that its troops used chemical warfare against the Vietcong

1972 In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the US Supreme Court ruled that unmarried people have the same right to contraception as married people

2004 Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and leader of Hamas, and bodyguards were killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli Air Force AH-64 Apache fired Hellfire missiles

2019 Special Council Robert Mueller submited his findings on the 2016 election to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General William Barr

2022 Microplastics were found in human blood for first time through new research [1]

In bed at 9:30 and up at 6.   Sunrise is at 6:49 but at 6:59, it is still mostly dark on the west end of Bayside when the birds first arrive at the feeders, three chickadees first, one each at the sunflower tube, the niger tube, and the flat feeder.  Then male cardinals, on the ground nd at a suet cake, and then finches.  It's 30° outside, wind chill 19° and the first dogwalkers are out in the cold with the wind blowing in from NNE over Lake Michigan.  Yesterday, I saw a young woman in short shorts walking on Wakefield on a 60° windless afternoon.

Prednisone, day 335; 4 mg., day 17/21; Kevzara, day 4/14; CGM, day 4/15; Trulicity, day 2/7.  2 mg. of prednisone at 6:20 a.m. and  5 p.m.  Other meds at 7:25 a.m.  

My FB post today:

I hope my FB friends will forgive my ranting about what is happening to our country, and my focus on the Veterans Administration.  (Not that I expect these posts, especially the longer ones which I know are tedious, to be read.)  But I confess that it both hurts my heart and infuriates me to read stories like this one in this morning's New York Times.  Trump and Musk, with nary an opposing peep from the Republicans in Congress, are proposing to cut 80,000 people from the staff of the VA Medical Service, despite the fact that the program has long faced critical personnel shortages.  Every year since 2014, the Medical Officer and Nurse occupations were identified as severe shortages in the VA Inspector General’s annual determination of occupational staffing shortages reports.  The new administrator of the VA, a former congresman from Georgia, insists that services to the veterans enrolled in the program won't be affected, and that they will not be firing doctors and nurses, but they are firing critical medical support workers on whom the doctors and nurses (and patients) rely and cancelling contacts for services on which these health providers (and thus their patients) rely  This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for these healers to do their work in a professional and ethical manner.  The effect of this is to make the VA an unsupportive and undesirable workplace and to induce these docs and nurses to take positions in the private medical sector.  We should not be hoodwinked about the ultimate goal of all these pernicious changes at the VA.  It is not "efficiency."  It is not getting rid of "waste, fraud, and neglect." It is to  'privatize' the program, which will be a huge, indeed inestimable, loss to most of the 9 million vets enrolled in it.  Although it is true that the health care services provided by the VA are available in the private sector, nowhere are they available in a comprehensive, coordinated system like the VA's, precisely geared to the needs of military veterans.  Most of the vets in the system now served in the Vietnam era and the era of the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan.  They were promised, and have earned, VA provided health care after their service.  What the government is doing now to the VA is shamefully and shamelessly breaking that promise.   Many veterans will be hurt, some profoundly.  It's a national shame.

Inside the Turmoil at the V.A. Mental Health System Under Trump: Inside the Turmoil at the V.A. Mental Health System Under Trum: A chaotic restructuring order threatens to degrade services for veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Geri went shopping today!  Great news.  She's feeling considerably better.  I drove her to the UPS store for an errand, then up to Metro Market for a considerable shop.

Aguirre, The Wrath of God by Werner Herzog.  I watched it this afternoon.