5/13/2025

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

D+167/112

1958, French settlers rioted against the French army in Algeria

1958 The motorcade carrying Vice President Richard Nixon was attacked in Caracas, Venezuela; several of Nixon's staff were injured

1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and critically wounded by a Turkish gunman  in St Peter's Square

I slept on the recliner with the eye shield on, awake at 5:15.  Unlike yesterday, the right eye was not sore nor did it feel swollen, but my eyelid kept drooping as I looked at the laptop screen. Muscle memory?

Prednisone, day 363; 1 mg., day 5/21; Kevzara, day 14/14; CGM, day 10/15; Trulicity, day 5/7.  Prednisone at 5:35 a.m.  Other meds at 9:05 a.m.   Kevzara injection at 7:40 a.m.  Eye drops at 6 a.m.,  11 a.m., 4:45  p.m., and  8:30 p.m.

Yesterday was sort of a lost day.  I woke up with a sore and seemingly swollen right eye that had undergone cataract surgery on Friday.  The rash on my left leg had climbed halfway up my calf and was inflamed.  I sent a secure message to my PCP at the VA with a photo of the leg and heard from her nurse, the terrific Kim Kitzke, within 10 minutes.  Because of the possibility of cellulitis, which can be fatal (believe it or not), she got me an appointment with an urgent care doctor at 2:30 that afternoon.  While talking with her, I also mentioned my sore eye.  She called the head nurse at the Eye Clinic, and they wanted to see me yesterday afternoon too and set an appointment for 1 p.m.  Dr. Saladi, who performed the surgery on Friday, saw me again on Monday, and all was OK, which gave me considerable relief.  Then I saw Dr. Helmer in the Gold Clinic, a resident, and his supervisor, who both examined my legs.  They were concerned about cellulitis, but more concerned about a possible DVT, deep vein thrombosis, or blood clot, in my leg because of the extreme swelling in my lower legs and feet.  They sent me down to the Radiology Clinic for VT ultrasounds on both legs.  That process revealed no clot(s), which was also a big relief.  They prescribed a topical hydrocortisone ointment and advised me to be alert to signs of developing cellulitis, which, of course, I will most certainly do.  I left for the VA at noon and got home at 5, relieved, thankful, and pooped.

In Gaza and Ukraine,  the wholesale killing and maiming go on, but we've lost interest.  We've lost empathy.  What used to be front page news and lead stories on the evening news has become boring, 'old news,' samo samo, in large measure because Trump's outrages crowds other stories out of the lead positions.  While it is still true as a general proposition that "if it bleeds, it leads," Trump dominates the airwaves and the front pages.  The Palestinians and the Ukrainians are just additional casualties from Trump's election.

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?  These were the great words spoken by Attorney Robert Welch to MULS alumnus and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in the infamous 1954 Army-McCarthy Hearings.   I had not yet turned 13 at the time, but I remember watching the exchange between the two men on a kinescope recording, in the days before videotape became available.  They were spoken in response to a very different indecency committed by Tail Gunner Joe, the former circuit court judge in Appleton, but I thought of them automatically when I read that Donald J.. Trump wants to accept, as a personal gift, a luxury Boeing 747 from the ruling royal family of Qatar.    From Charlie Savage's report in this morning's NYTimes:

During President Trump’s first term, the idea that special interests and governments were buying meals and booking rooms at his hotels set off legal and ethical alarms about the potential for corruption.  Mr. Trump’s second term is making those concerns look trivial.

The administration’s plan to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari royal family is only the latest example of an increasingly no-holds-barred atmosphere in Washington under Trump 2.0. Not only would the famously transactional chief executive be able to use the plane while in office, but he is also expected to transfer it to his presidential foundation once he leaves the White House.

The second Trump administration is showing striking disdain for onetime norms of propriety and for traditional legal and political guardrails around public service. It is clearly emboldened, in part because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that granted immunity to presidents for their official actions and because of the political reality that Mr. Trump’s hold on the Republican Party means he need not fear impeachment.

Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee raked in $239 million from wealthy business interests hoping to curry his favor or at least avoid his wrath, more than doubling the previous record, $107 million, set by his inaugural committee in 2017. There is no way to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on dinners and events, and the committee has not said what will happen to leftover funds.

Before returning to office, Mr. Trump also started a meme cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, which allows crypto investors around the world to enrich him. His family has already made millions on transaction fees, and its own reserve of the digital coin is worth billions on paper.

This month, Mr. Trump went further by auctioning off face-to-face access to himself through sales of the coin, announcing that top buyers would get a private dinner at one of his golf courses and that the largest holders would get a tour of the White House. The contest injected new interest in the coin, even though it has no intrinsic value.

The removal of such constraints extends to law enforcement.

In April, the Trump administration disbanded a Justice Department unit dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency crimes.

Earlier, Mr. Trump had also ordered the department to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a crime for companies that operate in the United States to bribe foreign officials.

And Attorney General Pam Bondi, herself a former highly paid lobbyist for Qatar, narrowed enforcement of a law requiring lobbyists for foreign governments to register such relationships and disclose what they are paid.

But the current moment, coming as Mr. Trump’s crypto gambit merges into his intended acquisition of a Qatari plane, is particularly remarkable for the openness with which the president, his immediate family and entities in his orbit are unabashedly leveraging his position to accrue personal benefits or to otherwise advance his personal agenda separate from governmental policymaking.

Mr. Trump has pressured several major law firms to donate tens of millions of dollars in free legal services toward his favored causes, using the threat of official actions, like prohibitions on them and their clients from government business, as a cudgel. (Other law firms have fought his directives in court, with growing success.)

He has also found other ways to extract money from tech companies. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for the rights to stream a future documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump.

Meta agreed to pay $25 million to the nonprofit that will build and run Mr. Trump’s future presidential museum, settling a lawsuit over Facebook’s suspension of his account after his lies about the 2020 election culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Corporate owners of news media organizations are also settling lawsuits with Mr. Trump that many media lawyers had considered winnable. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to the Trump museum foundation.

Wallowing in a bog of introspection.  My throne room reading of late has been the February 20, 2025 edition of The London Review of Books.  The lead essay in it is about the psychoanalyst and author Marion Milner.  One of her self-help,' how to live' books is titled "On Not Being Able to Paint."  She a[[aremt;u was an amateur painter, or painting hobbyist, and not all that good at it in her own estimation, but, like Elizabeth Warren in a very different context, "nevertheless, she persisted."  I, being a fellow believer that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly, ordered a used copy of the book on eBay.  

What first caught my eye in the long article was a reference to Milner's concern that, as a diarist, her keeping a diary might "simply encourage her tendency to wallow in a 'bog of introspection.'  That concern,  not surprisingly, made me think of myself and of my frequent wondering about my own note-taking or journaling, why do I do this?  What's the point?  Am I simply talking to myself, like an addled old lunatic? (Answer: yes.)  Why?  Usually, I conclude I do it because, like Flannery O'Connor, it helps me figure out my own thoughts.  " . . .   I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."  And, I write simply because it is what I do.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers gotta write.  Maybe introspectionists gotta introspect.  And I guess amateur painters gotta paint.

One of my favorite paintings, but in a real sense, all my paintings are favorites, else I would reuse the canvas and paint over them.  Each one is a physical remembrance of a time in life when I was engaged in a good and pleasing activity, unspoiled by ineptitude or unimportant failings.

Picasso!  Watashi-wa!  C;'esr moi, mais en plein air plutôt que dans mon sous-sol.