3/26/2025

 Wednesday, March 26, 2025

D+140/66

1945 Marines secured Iwo Jima

1953 Dr. Jonas Salk announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine to prevent polio, 

1967 Pope Paul VI published encyclical Populorum progressio

1997 39 bodies were found in the Heaven's Gate cult suicides in California

1999 A jury in Michigan finds Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of second-degree murder for administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man

2016 US primary elections: Bernie Sanders wins Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska

In bed at 9:20, awake and up at 3:15.  32°, high of 43°.  

Prednisone, day 340; 4 mg., day 21/21; Kevzara, day 8/14; CGM, day 8/15; Trulicity, day 5/7.  2 mg. of prednisone at 5 a.m. and 4  p.m.  Other meds at 2:30 p.m.

Major accompllshment of the day:  We took our mail-in ballots to the village hall, with our votes for Susan Crawford for the supreme court and Jill Underly for superintendent of schools.  Our fingers are crossed but we're placing no bets.

Should Pete Hegseth be fired?  Of course.  He never should have been nominated.  He never should have been confirmed.  Perhaps he is doomed already and his head will roll after some of the heat dies down over the Signal Principals Committee chat re the air assault on the Houthis.  There are worldwide repercussions from the Signal incident and what it reveals about the lack of competence and lack of judgment in the U.S.'s top national defense team.  The U.K., toadie that it has long been to the U.S., insists that it will continue to share intelligence freely with the U.S., but how about other European allies, or Australia, or Canada, or Japan, or even Israel?  Trump's team, starting with Hegseth, reminds me of children playing with new toys.  We expect a lack of experience in people starting a new job.  By definition, they are new to the job, i.e., inexperienced.  But we don't expect lack of judgment and gross incompetence, and yet that is what we have with Trump's national defense/intelligence team.  

One wonders how Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe could testify yesterday and how Trump and Mike Waltz could repeat that there was no classified information in the Signal chat.  Or were Gabbard and Ratcliffe just saying there was no classified 'intelligence information' as opposed to 'defense information'?  Will we ever know or will further comment be shrouded by Gabbard's ploy before the Intelligence Committee: no comment because there is an investigation being conducted by the National Security Council?  I expect that the controversy won't die down for a while and that the opposing sides will harden as time goes on.  The MAGAies will circle the wagons and hold tight to "no harm, no foul.'

I listened to John Meacham this morning suggest that the underlying problem revealed in this Signal scandal is that 40.9% of the American electorate chose to place the tremendous power of the federal government in the hands of people who are shameless.  Trump and his people have no sense of shame, and thus they don't learn from their shameful acts, their shameful mistakes.  Trump's shamelessness was abundantly clear all his life, and certainly during his first term in office, and knowing it, the voters nonetheless empowered him.  I am reminded of the American voters returning George W. Bush to office even after the wrongfulness of his invasion of Iraq was well known.  They chose Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld over John Kerry, 50.7% to 48.3%,  fully knowing what a huge blunder and deception they had engaged in with the Iraq invasion.  What does this, and Trump's reelection in 2024, tell us about "who we are"?

Closing rant: Trump's failure to fire Pete Hegseth reminds me of Joe Biden's failure to fire his secretary of defense Lloyd Austin after Austin's secret hospitalization between January 1 and January 5, 2024.  Neither Austin nor senior leadership at the Pentagon informed President Biden or the National Security Council of Austin's incapacity during that period or that he had transferred authority to his deputy.  It was a tremendous case of profoundly, egregiously bad judgment on Austin's part, yet Biden declined to replace him, another case of profoundly bad judgment providing Trump's people another "what about . . ." excuse.  I liked General Austin, and still do, but his lapse of good judgment in not informing Biden and the national security team of his "out of commission" status should have resulted in his firing.

God is on our side.  Little noted comments in the Signal chat by J. D. Vance and Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles:

Vance: I will say a prayer for victory.

Wiles: Kudos to all - most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM!  Really great. God bless.

With God on Our Side, lyrics by Bob Dylan

Oh my name it ain't nothin', my age it means less

The country I come from is called the Midwest

I was taught and brought up there, the laws to abide

And the land that I live in has God on its side

Oh the history books tell it, they tell it so well

The cavalries charged, the Indians fell

The cavalries charged, the Indians died

Oh the country was young with God on its side

. . . . . . 

The Second World War came to an end

We forgave the Germans and then we were friends

Though they murdered six million in the ovens they fried

The Germans now too have God on their side

But now we got weapons of chemical dust

We note that the Houthis are a religious group as well as a political and military one.  They are Shia Muslims.  Their official name is Ansar Allah, the Partisans of God.  They are led by a Shia Muslim cleric, Hussein al-Houthi.  Their religious ideology is complex, but it is definitely religious. I suspect that their leaders, like ours, pray for victory over the Small Satan Israel and the Great Satan America.  

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.”  Mark Twain, The War Prayer 

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. Psalm, 137:9

I do not disagree with the decision to strike the Houthis.  They attack international shipping heading to or from the Suez Canal.  They strike U.S Navy warships.  They need to be at least controlled, if not destroyed.  I take issue with the ham-handed way they attempt to defend the Signal chat and note how feeble J. D. Vance's "I will say a prayer for victory" sounds. 

The Folks Who Live On The Hill is a song from 1937, lyrics by Jerome Kern and music by Oscar Hammerstein.    For some reason, it has been in my thoughts lately.  I used swooned to the song on an album by Tommy Edwards while dancing or making out with my First True Love Charlene Wegge in her basement.  We of course identified ourselves as the Darby and Jane/ Jack and Jill in the song, and our home on the hill was in our fantasized Berlin, New Hampshire, but that's another story.  Now I think of Geri and me as the old couple who live on the hill, "when the kids grow up and leave us, we'll sit and look at the same old view, just we two."  I'm grateful to have had Charlene in my life and to have known that passionate, deep, youthful first love.  I'm more grateful to have Geri in my life, sharing the joys and challenges of middle age and old age, just we two.         

Many men with lofty aims,

Strive for lofty goals,

Others play at smaller games,

Being simpler souls.

I am of the latter brand;

All I want to do,

Is to find a spot of land,

And live there with you.

Someday we'll build a home on a hilltop high,

You and I,

Shiny and new a cottage that two can fill.

And we'll be pleased to be called,

"The folks who live on the hill".

Someday we may be adding a thing or two,

A wing or two.

We will make changes as any fam'ly will,

But we will always be called,

"The folks who live on the hill".

Our veranda will command a view of meadows green,

The sort of veiw that seems to want to be seen.

And when the kids grow up and leave us,

We'll sit and look at the same old view,

Just we two.

Darby and Joan who used to be Jack and Jill,

The folks who like to be called,

What they have always been called,

"The folks who live on the hill".