6/29/2025

Sunday, June 29, 2025

D+214/146/1300

Day 16, Block party day

1776 Patrick Henry was elected 1st governor of Virginia

1956 DDE signed the Interstate Highway Act

1964 Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed after an 83-day filibuster in the US Senate

1966 US planes bombed Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time in the Vietnam War

2002 Dick Cheney served as Acting President while "W"  underwent a colonoscopy

2023 Supreme Court outlawed 6-3 college race-based admission programs

In bed at 10:30, too much daytime napping, up at 7:05, 71°, 85°,  sunny

Kevzara, day 614; Trulicity, day 3/7; morning meds and Blink pill at 11:20 a.m.; Eye wipes at 7:45 a.m. and  p.m.; Eye mask at p.m. and   p.m.; Ketoconazole wash and cream at a.m. and  p.m.  Eye ointment at bedtime.  Zyrtec at .  I am a klutz at applying the ointment to my eye, worse than my ineptness with the eye drops.  Last night I was pathetic, with ointment all over my eyelid.

I sat on the patio this morning, listening to robins, cardinals, crows, a bluejay, goldfinches, and a red-bellied woodpecker.  I found myself grateful for the birds and all the greenery, of course, for the warm, sunny weather, for the patio and backyard, but also for depth perception, three dimensionality.  I noticed the sun illuminating plants in Debby and John's backyard, plants that I saw through a darkly shaded opening in the greenery along our common lot line.  I was peeping through a dark hole at a bright beyond and it was beautiful.  Then I made myself mindful of the depth of everything around me, all the branches on the pear tree, the depth of field between the pear tree and the pine tree, and the cedar trees to the south.  Glory be.  Not exactly on point, but I'm reminded of Hopkins' Pied Beauty:

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

I was also reminded that two-dimensional drawings, paintings, photos, etc., can't come near the beauty of the real thing. 

Two years ago today:

Yesterday's driveway news.  We need to get our culvert pipes replaced by the village before the driveway can be repaved.  Cost anywhere from $6500 to $10,000.  The joy of home ownership. Grumble, grumble.

We put it off for two years.  Now we're contracted with Pablocki Paving for the replacement of both driveways ($13,314), new culvert pipes ($4,510), and lawn restoration ($1,872). 

Facebook exchange with JJA:

Janice Jenkins Anderson 

Everyone understands this is a concentration camp, right? The cruelty is the point. Yet, I fully expect to see the Christian evangelical right wing cheering this on. And they wonder why people are leaving organized religion in droves…

Alt National Park Service

June 27 at 8:16 PM  · 

We’ve talked about “Alligator Alcatraz” before. Here are more details.

Starting the first week of July, when South Florida’s heat index regularly hits 100°F, they plan to detain up to 5,000 people in tents. No A/C. No real shelter. Just suffocating heat, choking humidity, and swarms of mosquitoes.

The location? A remote airstrip deep in the Everglades, surrounded by marshes, alligators, and invasive pythons.

Florida officials are calling it a “detainment camp.” They say it’s fine because “We are swamp creatures,” and even brag that nature will “do us some favors.”

This isn’t policy. It’s cruelty plain and simple. And it’s happening on U.S. soil.

Charles D. Clausen

Agreed: cruelty is the point. I've voted Democrat almost my entire adult life. I voted against Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. I disagreed with the overall policies of all those Republican presidents. I don't believe, however, that any of them, other than Trump, was intentionally cruel. The worst I could say of any of them, other than Trump, was that he was indifferent to some human need that Democrats sought to relieve, and I am not sure that even that was true of most of them. I don't forget, for example, that some great environmental and worker protection legislation was passed during Nixon's administration, or that it was in Reagan's administration that the Immigration Reform Act of 1986 was passed and signed, granting amnesty to millions of undocumented workers. Reagan also signed an Executive Order in 1987 protecting the children of undocumented workers who applied for amnesty, a precurson to Obama's DACA protection. Cruelty is a defining characteristic only of the Trump administration and it's this characteristic, more than any other, that reminds us of fascism.

Janice Jenkins Anderson

Charles D. Clausen I completely agree. I’ve always been a Democrat and disagreed often with the GOP on tax or trade policy and on social issues but never before have I believed that a Republican president didn’t have the country’s best interest at heart or was primarily seeking to personally profit from the office or would be intentionally cruel. I wholeheartedly believe those things about Trump and perhaps the most disturbing thing about his time in office has been that a third of the country actively supports the hate he spews towards the most vulnerable.

Charles D. Clausen

It's even more disturbing that so much of his most fervent support comes from people who identify as Christian, people of Faith, people of the Book, etc. Love your neighbor as yourself, love one another as I have loved you, the Good Samaritan, "neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," Matthew 25:31-46, and all that. How does any of that fit in with the intentional cruelty and hatred that so clearly animate this government

Janice Jenkins Anderson

Charles D. Clausen 🎯