Friday, December 12, 2025
1961 Adolf Eichman was found guilty of war crimes in Israel
2000 The US Supreme Court released its 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore
2017 Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore for the Alabama Senate seat in an upset win marked by allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore
2023 U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza, amid reports that 18,000 Palestinians had been killed, 70% children and women, with over 80% now homeless
In bed at 9:30, up at 6:25, spent an hour or so on the LZB. 12°, wind chll 4°, high 28. SEVERE WEATHER ADVISORY- very cold wind chills expected down to -25 from midnight tonight til noon Saturday.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 7:45 a.m. Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
This may be Frost's most popular poem, and perhaps the most memorized, especially the closing stanza, I've enjoyed reading it many times. The images are lovely. The iambic octameter and rhyme scheme (aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd) carry the reader or speaker fluidly from beginning to end. Everything about the poem is lovely, but I've never thought much about why Frost wrote it, what he had in mind. Why did he stop on a cold, dark, snowy night ('the darkest evening of the year') to stare at trees alongside the road he was on? His horse thought it "queer," and shouldn't we? The horse wondered 'if there [was] some mistake', which should lead us too to wonder why Frost stopped when the time and weather should have had him and the horse hieing home to warmth and shelter. The concluding quatrain suggest an answer, though it's buried. Was he perhaps wishing to be relieved of the responsibilities, or even of life itself, that awaited him at home? Do the woods "lovely, dark and deep" signify death in which he could "sleep"? Is he weary of life, suffering weltschmerz? Was he rueing and putting off, temporarily, his "promises to keep" and the "miles to go before I sleep"? Or am I simply reading the poem through the prism of my own recurring weltschmerz? Just wondering.
David Stillman Branch 11/29/1945 - 3/19/1999. I was finally successful yesterday in learning the date of David Branch's death. In a series of searches, ChatGPT discovered it as March 19, 1999. I pause as I'm typing these notes and as I remember sitting in my office at the law school when I received the call from a former student of mine who was another friend of David's, telling me of his death after a long, painful struggle with untreatable amyloidosis. He was a good friend of mine when we both worked at the law firm, both of us struggling with our tenure there. He was miserable at the law firm, especially with two of the senior partners, and left to take a position with a much larger firm in Boston. He and his wife Anne lived in Brookline until he died at age 53. His children, Will and Abby, were contemporaries of our children at Shorewood High School. He was the first of my good friends to die, followed by my beloved sister in 2022 at age 77, Tom St. John at age 78 in January, 2023, and Ed Felsenthal at age 83 in June, 2024. My law firm contemporaries Bill Guis died at age 74 of cancer in Medford, OR, in November , 2019. and Bill Roush died at age 59 of complications of alcoholism on July 3, 2013. Bob Friebert died of a heart attack at age 75 on September 5, 2013.
Rub a dub dub, some men in a tub; America and the men on the boat.
Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker,
All put out to sea.
I've been thinking that the killing of the two men murdered on the flotsam of the boat sunk by the U.S, on September 2nd of this year will become a defining event for the America my children and grandchildren will live in after I'm gone. America will be either a society and a culture in which what was done to those men is acceptable, tolerated, and even expected - Trump's, Hegseth's, and Admiral Bradley's world - or a society and a culture in which what was done alerted and shocked us enough to turn away from and reject the cruelty that has characterized the Trump administration from its first days. I have no confidence that it will turn out to be the latter, but I dearly hope so.
Yesterday I started imagining writing a scenario in which one of the two men murdered, make that 11 men murdered, was Santiago, the old man in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, imagining that he was a coastal fisherman pressed into service on the boat by real drug traffickers, perhaps by threats or perhaps because, like Santiago in the novella, he hadn't caught a fish in 84 days. One of the big questions in my mind is why were there 11 men on that boat, secondarily who were they, and thirdly, why was each individual on the boat? What were the circumstances that led to their presence? Each one was an individual human being. Each one had a history. Each one had some family. Each one had life circumstances that led him to be on that boat on that day. If they had been captured and tried as criminals (assuming they were), due process would have provided them the opportunity to explain their presence on the boat and to explain whatever mitigating circumstances might bear on their culpability and on any criminal sentence that might be imposed on them. Due process is another term for fairness, and fairness is what they were denied when the American government summarily used high-explosive weapons to dismember and kill them. How can we reasonably defend this? That is the issue before the American people right now and how we respond to it will tell what the future of America will be.
I also find myself being thankful that I was not the military lawyer advising Admiral Bradley about the legalities of the 'second shot.' I wonder what I would have advised and how my personal conscience would have impacted my advice. I believe that conscience plays a dominating role in war crime decisions. I don't believe that soldiers and Marines, sailors and airmen go through a legal analysis when faced with an order to commit what may be a war crime, which is usually an atrocity of some kind. They are not lawyers or judges. Their decisions to obey or disobey the order will not be based on thir understanding of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but rather on how they were raised as children, how their characters were formed (or deformed.) Oughtn't we to wonder how our Commander-in-Chief's character was formed? and our Secretary of Defense War?
FB exchange with JJA:
Janice Jenkins Anderson
Christmas came early for one of the biggest drug suppliers convicted in the US, responsible for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine — unlike for the 89 alleged drug mules that they’ve murdered so far. We can board and seize massive oil tankers but apparently not small fishing boats. Make it make sense. It pays to be rich while Trump is in power.
Charles D. Clausen
I don't know whether to click the ❤ icon because I enjoy your writing so much, and your choice of graphics, or the 🤬 because I am so appalled by Trump's venality and hypocrisy. Will we ever know what the payoff was for the pardon? Will we ever come colose to knowing just how corrupt and criminal our own government is? I've lived through every president from FDR till now and I've never experienced anything like this. I remember the huge scandal during the Eisenhower years when his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was fired for accepting a vicuna coat from a Boston textile manufacturer. To Trump, Adams would be an amateur, a pisher, and Eisenhower, a sucker and a loser for spending most of his life in the Army.
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