11/28/2025

 Friday, November 28, 2025

1994 Jeffrey Dahmer was clubbed to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver in the Columbia Correctional Institution gymnasium

2024  More than 1 million Ukrainian households are left without power after a widespread Russian missile strike targets the country's energy infrastructure

2024  PRESIDENT BIDEN: “I hope Trump re-thinks the tariffs, I think it’s a counterproductive thing to do— we’re surrounded by 2 oceans and 2 allies: Mexico and Canada. The last thing we need to do is screw up those relationships.”

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:35.  22°, wind chill 6°, high 30°

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10 a.m.   Trulicity injection later.

Message exchange with Pip:

piplowe@yahoo.com:

I so appreciate your kind words, Chuck and am touched beyond words. I am grateful that you can feel my love for you and Geri as it has been there since the day I met you while dating David, and has only grown since then. I am thankful during this holiday season that you are part of our lives no matter the distance. You both are so sweet and unique and fun and interesting and we love your company and your love of us! Miss you and sending love, always ~xoxo 

Charles Clausen:

Thanks, Sweetie, and, like your husband, you are much too kind, but you warm my heart with your words and thoughts, just like with your hugs.❤️

Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, has died.  SSgt. Andrew Wolfe remains in critical condition, 'fighting for his life.' Is this what Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Stephen Miller have been hoping for?  I had thought that the shooting of an occupying National Guards(wo)man would be by a poor African-American from Southeast D.C, and that it would be used as a pretextual justification for the invocation of the Insurrection Act.  That the shooter was an Afghan immigrant rules out the Insurrection Act, temporarily at least, but it is being used as a pretext for  Trump's (1) 'permanently pausing' migration from all third-world countries, (2) reviewing all green card holders from "19 countries of concern",  and (3) removing 'anyone who is not a net asset to the United States.  DJT's address to American troops on Thanksgiving night: "This heinous monstrosity reminds us that we have no greater national security priority than ensuring that we have full control over the people who enter and remain in our country.  For the most part, we don't want 'em.  When you come in through asylum, when they're flown in, it's very hard to get them out, no matter how you want to do it, it's very hard.  But we're going to be getting them all out now."  To borrow Maureen Dowd's phrase from her last column, "step by slimy step", his acts become more deranged, hate-filled, and hurtful, both to the people they directly affect and to the nation.  Home of the brave and land of the free, and all that.  I read his entire speech and exchanges with the troops with whom he spoke last night, and wonder how anyone can doubt that this old man is not compos mentis.  He may or may not have dementia, but he's not all there.

Copied just because I wanted to note it and save it:

The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?

In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.  By Graham Allison, The Atlantic, September 24, 2015

As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half-century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable.

For example, in 1902, when British and German ships attempted to impose a naval blockade to force Venezuela to pay its debts to them, Roosevelt warned both countries that he would “be obliged to interfere by force if necessary” if they did not withdraw their ships. The British and Germans were persuaded to retreat and to resolve their dispute in terms satisfactory to the U.S. at The Hague. The following year, when Colombia refused to lease the Panama Canal Zone to the United States, America sponsored Panamanian secessionists, recognized the new Panamanian government within hours of its declaration of independence, and sent the Marines to defend the new country. Roosevelt defended the U.S. intervention on the grounds that it was “justified in morals and therefore justified in law.” Shortly thereafter, Panama granted the United States rights to the Canal Zone “in perpetuity.”

.. . . . 

The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation. Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger–Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

This was written the year before Trump won the 2016 election.

Black Friday coinciding with the day before the first big snowstorm of the season (8 to 10 inches) meant that, when I went to our local Ace Hardware to pick up two lightbulbs for Geri's bathroom, the big parking lot that accommodates both the hardware store and the next-door Planet Fitness had only 2 open parking spaces, and the checkout line in the hardware store wrapped around from the 5 active checkout clerks all the way back to the entryway.  Wow!