11/19/2025

 Wednesday, November 19, 2025

1863 Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg address

2021 A Kenosha jury cleared Kyle Rittenhouse (18) of murder for fatally shooting two people and injuring a third during racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin

In bed at 10, up at 5:30, with nasty pain in my right hip joint, wondering whether I should get the steroid injection.   33°, high 43°.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Kevzara injection at 9:45 a.m.  

LOD last night opined that DJT's vice-grip hold on every congressional and Senate Republican was broken by Thomas Massie's and MTG's success in gaining near-universal support among Republicans for the Massie/Khanna bill to release the Epstein files.  I suspect he is overly optimistic, but time will tell.  I still can't believe that either the Congress or the public will see nearly all of those files, even with victims' names redacted.  Trump has notoriously said that 'Nixon should have destroyed the tapes,' and I can't help believing that some of the materials in the Epstein files have moved from some FBI reviewer to Kash Patel and then either to Pam Bondi or directly to Trump for destruction.  Or, perhaps they were destroyed by Kash or Pam and never made it to the Oval Office, but in any event, they're gone.  "National security," and all that.   So it goes.   'Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

Geri's hunch/insight.  She notes Jeffrey's relationship with the modeling business and Melania Knauss Trump's entry into the US as a model.  Epstein’s closest associate in the modeling world was Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model scout and agency owner, accused by multiple women of rape and of procuring girls for Epstein. Epstein invested approximately $1 million into Brunel’s agency in the mid-2000s, which allowed Brunel to open offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. Victims (including Virginia Giuffre) have stated that Brunel supplied Epstein with girls as young as 14, sometimes flown in from abroad on visas arranged through his agency. Brunel was charged in France with rape of minors and organized sex trafficking tied to Epstein in 2020; he died in jail in 2022 (officially ruled a suicide). Epstein was friendly with Donald Trump in the late 1980s–early 2000s when Trump ran his own short-lived modeling agency (Trump Model Management.  Melania Knauss first entered the US on August 27, 1996 on an H1B visa, based on "extraordinary ability," and started dating Trump in 1998.  They married in 2005.  Trump owned and managed Trump Model Management (a/k/a 'Trump Models') from 1999 to 2027, when Trump started his presidency.  Geri's theory is that somehow, Melania is at the center of Trump's resistance to the disclosure of the Epstein files.  Did she have a relationship with Epstein?  Did she steer girls to him?  Were  Donald and Melania in a 'foursome' relationship with Jeffrey and Ghislaine?  Geri's theory is simply that somehow, Melania is significantly involved in the relationships with Epstein.  It seems reasonable to me, perhaps even likely.

Epstein was friendly with Donald Trump in the late 1980s–early 2000s when Trump ran his own short-lived modeling agency (Trump Model Management)

Morning readings:  (1) NYT: Tom Friedman, On Republican Neo-Nazism, Hamas and Israel: An Epidemic of Moral Cowardice:

I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum. . . Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.

The anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler’s henchmen shortly before his concentration camp was liberated by the Americans, is often said to have described the moral implications of this kind of behavior: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

. . . . 

Unfortunately, too many Israelis and diaspora Jews have put on similar blinders. A day does not go by without a report like this recent one from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“The attacks of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza also ignited a lethal conflagration of settler violence in the occupied West Bank. Over the same two-year period that Israeli forces killed more than 68,000 Palestinians in Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. New settler outposts have been constructed with rapid speed, displacing entire Palestinian communities — a process often facilitated by Israel’s army. … In the face of this reality, there appears to be a concerted campaign on the part of the pro-Israel right to deny it.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his fellow travelers — and here I include the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, which has flown air cover for Netanyahu in Washington, D.C., for his 18 years in office — have done more to undermine the long-term security of Israel and the Jewish people than any Hamas fighters.

And then there’s us. Politico recently broke the story about what was being said in a Telegram group chat involving leaders of Young Republican groups in four states: “They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. . . . Ho hum, said Vice President JD Vance, nothing to see here: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes.” . . . Of course, President Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. . . How far we have fallen. 

Heart problem.  I received a call from Nurse Kim Kitzke relaying a message from my PCP Kali Kisro, about a ventricular irregularity  (premature ventricular contraction) showing up in my stress test.  I think it's the 'bigeminy' or something like that and I'm not sure what it means, but apparently nothing in terms of medication or anything I should be doing.  The electrocardiogram showed an ejection fraction of 70% vs. 71% in 2020.  So no congestive heart failure.  Good news or bad news?