Friday, April 4, 2025
D+149/75
1949 The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., establishing NATO
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis; riots broke out in over 100 cities in the United States
1984 Winston Smith in Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" began his secret diary in defiance of the totalitarian government of Oceania
1990 King Baudouin of Belgium, a devout Catholic, stepped down as monarch for 36 hours to avoid signing a bill legalizing abortion
2024 Joe Biden warned Benjamin Netanyahu that the US could shift its policy if Israel did not address humanitarian concerns in Gaza and work towards a ceasefire
In bed at 9:30, awake and up at 5:30 after a couple of hours of fitful sleep starting around 3:30. My last dream was of being a new teacher at an elite school and being assigned to teach a new elective course in introductory calculus, of which I knew nothing. About 8 students enrolled in the course and all of them had studied calculus before and knew more about the subject than I did. Vestigial memories of my first year of teaching at MULS? 34°, high of 43°.
Prednisone, day 349; 3 mg., day 8/21; Kevzara, day 3/14; CGM, day 2/15; Trulicity, day 1/7. 2 mg., at 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. Other meds at 7 a.m. Trulicity injection at 10:45 a.m.
I posted a comment on Ann Walsh Bradley on FB this morning, responding to JPG's post noting AWB's election as chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Charles D. Clausen
CJ Bradley's brother-in-law James Bradley is the author of FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, a best-selling book about the WWII Battle of Iwo Jima. When she learned, happenstantially, that my father was one of the Marines on Iwo Jima, and that he had suffered PTSD for years after the battle, she contacted her brother-in-law, asked him to sign a copy of his book, and to send it to me to give to my father on Father's Day, which he kindly did and I gratefuly did. My Dad never forgot it, nor have I. Indeed, it gave my Dad the courage to see the movie that was later made from the book. Afterwards, and for the last years of his life, he stopped having the awful dreams of the carnage on Iwo that had plagued him his entire life. It was an unsolicited act of kindness on the part of Ann Walsh Bradley, one that had profound consequences for my Dad, a stranger to her, and one that reflects her noble character.
‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America., an op-ed column in this morning's NY Times. Excerpts:
Lydia Polgreen: I had the surreal experience of watching the video of Rumeysa Ozturk being snatched off the streets near Tufts while I was in Damascus, Syria. I was there on a reporting trip for my series on global migration, and my notebook was already filled with stories of arbitrary detention by faceless agents of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. This was an omnipresent fear for millions of Syrians during the Syrian civil war who were suspected of disloyalty by the regime.
So it was striking how small an impression this video made on people I spoke to the next day. It depicted a woman in a hijab, being grabbed by a male agent while on her way to break the Ramadan fast. Of course Syria is in the midst of its own struggle to rebuild after the fall of the Assad regime, but I was struck by how irrelevant, even puny, the United States seemed to Syrians.
Patrick Healy: What did you take away from that, Lydia?
Lydia Polgreen: It’s useful to see your own country through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference. The question, it seemed, was less what the United States is becoming, than whether Americans realize what it already is.
David French: I also think it’s useful to consider what we’d think if we saw this same behavior in a foreign democracy. If a man who instigated an attack on, say, a parliament building to preserve his hold on power was able to hold office again and then immediately not only began pardoning the loyal militia that attacked the government but also denied due process and free speech rights to his political opponents, we’d consider that nation to be in the midst of an autocratic takeover.
Zeynep Tufekci: Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by people wearing masks who stuffed her into a car. It was such a revelatory moment. There is no credible claim that she broke any laws. It’s a clear example of how lines shift under one’s feet, like quicksand. A year ago, the very people who are now cheering on her treatment might have said newspaper opinion pieces were fine as freedom of speech. Free speech was fine until it wasn’t. Protests were fine until they weren’t.
. . .
A random thought: I have long thought that Trump's bizarre hairdo should have been enough to warn us off him.Masha Gessen: Gessen: I think it’s a mistake — a very tempting mistake to make — to take stock by looking at what we still have rather than what we have already lost. Two and a half months has not been enough time for Trump to quash every single opposition voice, dismantle the electoral system, successfully intimidate every single judge and bring every single publication to heel. Is that good? Of course. But there is no way he could have done all of that in less than three months. He has successfully destroyed more in two and a half months than even I, ever the catastrophizer, thought possible. He has enabled a secret police force, inflicting terror on millions of people in this country. He is rapidly normalizing disregard for the judiciary. He has brought a leading university and several giant law firms to their knees, and some large media companies have arguably assumed a supplicant position as well. That is a spectacular amount of institutional and societal damage, and I think damage is the more meaningful metric right now.
Fish Fry from Crave tonight. It's getting to be a habit.
Republicans are busy blaming China, Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries for cheating the United States by producing goods for American consumers. It wasn't these countries who were pounding on Congressional doors to pass NAFTA and other trade agreements so jobs could be shipped overseas; it was American capitalist corporations looking to lower the labor costs of their products. It's been the same since the start of the Industrial Revolution, with management always trying to reduce labor costs and maximize profits. The great Chinese manufacturing behemoth was created not only by the Chinese communists but also by American capitalists. Ditto Vietnam's position as America's 7th largest "trading partner." Ditto Mexico's maquiladoras. They couldn't exist without Western (mainly American) corporate capitalists feeding them. Now Trump and his Republican toadies and cronies accuse the creatures American capitalitst created and nourished of 'cheaing, robbing, looting, pillaging, raping, and plundering" us' poor Americans, 54% tariff on China. The loss of Milwaukee's great manufacturing business shouldn't be blamed on foreign competition but on domestic corporations' eternal quest for cheap labor.
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