10/8/2025

 Wednesday, October 8, 2025

D+336/261/-1230

1775 Officers decided to bar slaves and free blacks from the Continental Army

1779 English engraver and poet William Blake began his study at the Royal Academy, Old Somerset House, London

1927 "The Second Hundred Years" silent short film was released, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the first Laurel and Hardy film with them appearing as a team

1967 Kitty Clausen wed James Reck

1969 Sarah Catherine Clausen was born, nunc dimittis

1998 House of Representatives voted to begin impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky

2001 US President George W. Bush announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security

2009 Lilly was born

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:15.  44°, wind chill of 33°, high of 59°.  I turned the heat on.

Meds, etc.  I took my second-to-last antibiotic at 6 this morning.  My left foot, without a compression sock, fit into its regular slipper.  'Morning' meds at 1:30 p.m.

Who to trust?  ChatGPT tells me there are 1230 remaining in the current criminal administration in Washington.  The app presidentialtermclock.com says 1200.  This seems like a mighty strange anomaly in the computer age.

Scattershot thoughts.  (1) Once a Marine, Always a Marine. On my way into the VA Medical Center from the parking garage yesterday, I was walking very slowly, in short and unsteady baby steps.  A pretty young woman on her way into the garage stopped and asked if I needed a wheelchair.  When I said 'no, but thank you', she then asked if she could walk me to the building.  I again declined.  Then she noticed my 1st MAW headgear,  smiled, and said she was also a Marine, a "WM," whereupon we had the normal schmooze: when were you in, where did you serve, etc.  She was the first WM I have encountered at the VA, by far the prettiest, and surely one of the kindest.  Semper Fi.  While waiting in the Prosthetics department for some 'arthritis gloves' to help my 'trigger fingers,' I met another Marine using a walker who spent years at Camp Lejeune and had been badly poisoned by drinking the water there, permanently sickened.  Waiting for an elevator up to Podiatry, I met another Marine wearing his Brewers cap, and we schmoozed about the Brewers being 2-0 against the Cubbies.  In the Podiatry waiting room, I sat next to and schmoozed with another Marine who served in Recon in Vietnam, Quang Tri, Khe Sahn, all over I Corps.  When my business was completed and I was baby-stepping out of the hospital, another younger Marine on his way in noticed my cap, smilingly greeted me with "Devil Dog," and a fist bump.  As usual, I left the VA feeling better than I did when I arrived, not so much for what I experienced in the treatment rooms, but from what I experienced in the corridors, elevators, and waiting rooms from other vets.

(2)  I posted the above on Facebook with the following addition: I add a less happy note.  My primary care doc at the VA for the last 8 years recently retired.  She has been replaced by a nurse practitioner.  I am advised that most of the primary care docs are being replaced by nurse practitioners.  I am a great believer in the value of nurse practitioners.  When I was the executive director of the House of Peace after I retired from MU Law School, we had a Nursing Clinic staffed by nurse practitioners from the UWM Nursing School who provided great services to our guests.  Nonetheless, I believe that replacing the VA primary care docs with nurse practitioners is a significant downgrading of medical services to the tens of thousands of Wisconsin and Northern Illinois veterans regularly served by our VA Medical Center.  It is also an egregious breach of promise from the President and his new Secretary of  Veterans Affairs that there would be no reduction of health care for veterans despite drastic cuts in the VA workforce and the VA budget.  Pay attention to what they do, not to what they say.  Semper Fi.

(3) Exchange of comments with JPG:

Janine Geske

Thank you Chuck for sharing your experiences and thoughts. It is heartwarming to read the strength and goodness of the military brotherhood and sisterhood at the VA. It is shameful that the VA is eliminating primary docs. I, too, am a strong believer in nurse practitioners but do not take away the docs.

Charles D. Clausen

Thanks, Janine. I didn't enroll in the VA Health System until I was 75 years old, and I regret that I waited that long. I've come to have a deep appreciation, even affection, for the program and the people in it. It is socialized medicine at its finest, which is why it is so disfavored by many on the Right. I do not believe it could be replicated society-wide and retain its special goodness, but as it is (or was pre-DOGE), it is a wonderful fulfillment of Abraham Lincoln's promise "to carry for him who shall have borne the battle." Those words were uttered in the inspiring last sentence of his Second Inaugural Address, along with "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." I'm afraid that, as a nation, we are currently failing on all counts.

(4) Exchange of texts with SCC:

Hi, Sweetie.  Happy birthday and ‘nunc dimittis’.🙏❤️  I hope you have a wonderful day, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.  I am slowly mending, leg still a bit swollen and maybe still a bit inflamed and a bit painful, but making progress.  Enough progress that I intend to go to the Bayshore Apple Store this morning to get a Genius Bar appointment.  I can’t do it online because Apple won’t accept my password.  I’ve had this problem before.  The password is accepted at the Apple store and not at home: go figure.  My other problem is that my laptop keeps kicking me off our WiFi.  Incredibly frustrating.  I’m thinking of you now when you were a little one and I would sing you sleep with Sunrise, Sunset, while gently rubbing your eyebrows.  As I may have told you before, I love you with all my heart, always have, always will.  Alles Gute zum Geburtstag.❤️

+49 176 20023048:

Thanks, Dad! Glad to hear you are on the mend. I am suffering a cold, so no big plans for me today. Love you lots! ❤️

Charles Clausen:

And thanks for the lovely essay about the Irish language and its absence of a simple “yes” or “no.”  It called to mind the lovely “T’is.”  It also called to mind wordsmithing, how important it was to me in lawyering, in everything from writing formal opinion letters to asking questions in a trial or deposition.  I taught an elective course on Pretrial Practice for a few years, in which I told the students the goal of the course was to learn how to ask a question.  It’s nowhere near as easy as it might seem to those not practiced in the art.  But wordsmithing is also vitally important in everyday life.  Words poorly chosen can destroy valued relationships, and those wisely chosen can preserve them.  ❤️

Morning visit to the Apple Store at Bayshore.  I got there a couple of minutes before its 10 a.m. opening.  There were already 8 people waiting in line.  I was thankfully able to park right in front of the store.  I was also seen quickly once in the store and was able to get served at the Genius Bar within 15 or 20 minutes.  They ran a diagnostic test on the laptop, made some changes to the 'location' setting, and saw that I needed to update from 'Sequoia' to "Tahoe,' an update that I suspect did not occur automatically for some reason when I was in the hospital last week.  So far, since I've been home, the machine hasn't kicked me off my WiFi connection, so hopefully my problem is solved.  Hallelujah. 

SCK sent me a Reddit video of a disrupted ICE abduction at 63rd and Kedzie.  The capture was prevented when the target resisted being thrown into an unmarked car,  onlookers (friends? neighbors?) intervened to help him, and the ICE thugs gave up and drove away.  The term "jack-booted thugs" gained national attention in 1995, when NRA executive Wayne LaPierre described federal law enforcement agents as “jack-booted government thugs” in a fundraising letter. The remark was highly controversial — especially after the Oklahoma City bombing that same year — and even prompted former President George H. W. Bush to resign his NRA membership in protest.  LaPierre was characterizing all federal law enforcement agents with his characterization.  Today, it seems to be a perfectly appropriate description of ICE agents.  Are there ICE agents who are not thugs?  Is thuggishness a requirement for getting hired as an ICE agent?  What are the job requirements?  Who does the training?  What doesm or do the training manual(s) say?  Why would anyone want to be an ICE agent?  What kinds of people are applying for these openings?  Are they thugs before they are hired or does the job make them into thugs?