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Sunday, March 8, 2026

3/8/2026

 Sunday, March 8, 2026

1917 US Senate introduced the Cloture Rule, requiring a two-thirds majority to end debate, at the urging of Woodrow Wilson

1934 An Edwin Hubble photo showed as many galaxies as the Milky Way has stars

2018  President Donald Trump authorized tariffs on steel and aluminium, excluding Canada and Mexico

2025  China announced that it would implement 100% tariffs on several Canadian agricultural exports and 25% tariffs on pork and aquacultural products in retaliation against earlier tariffs instituted by Canada on Chinese electric vehicles and metal exports.

In bed at 11, after Geri returned from her MSO date with Micaela, up at 6.  34/19/56/32  120/73/59  207.6  

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  

Glassland, which I watched last night, was a 2014 movie directed by Gerard Barrett and set in urban, working-class Dublin.  It tells the story of Jack and his alcoholic mother.  He loves her and tries hard to help her before she kills herself with 'the drink.'  That part is clear enough.  What is much less clear, to me at least, is that Jack supports himself as a nighttime taxi driver who works part-time for a human trafficking, human organ harvesting gangster.  He picks up and delivers mostly young Asian women who are financially needy enough to be willing to sell one or more of their organs, usually a kidney.  The work stresses and distress him because he is not a man without a conscience.  Indeed, he has a pretty sensitive conscience.  He is commendably loyal to his friends, his mother, and his younger brother, who has Down's Syndrome and was rejected by his mother.  As the plot moves along, John himself needs 8,000 euros to get his mother admitted to an alcoholism rehabilitation facility, borrows the money from his gangster employer, and gets more deeply involved in the grisly organ harvesting business until he is so sickened by it that he saves one of the intended victims, delivers her to the rehab facility that is treating his mother, and offers his own kidney to pay off his debt to his boss.

The acting in the movie is excellent, especially by Jack Raynor playing the son, John, and by Toni Collette, playing his mother, Jean.  The writing, directing, and filming, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired.  The subplot about the organ harvesting activities wasn't at all clear to me as I watched the story unfold.  It's a harsh film, much of it filmed at night, inside John's taxi, and in the non-scenic parts of Dublin.  None of the victims of the organ harvesting has a speaking role.  The gangster-boss is only heard on the other end of phone calls with John and it's never very clear what they are talking about.  The story is intended to show the harsh, claustrophobic, constrained lives of poor, working-class, urban Irish, and it succeeds at that, but at the cost of its viewing being quite an unpleasant experience for its audience, at least for this one.

Brutal Schadenfreude could be the headline title for Maureen Dowd's weekend column on the relationship between Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski.  Instead, it is "Wuthering Heights, MAGA Style."  Excerpts: 

Eat your heart out, Emerald Fennell.

You may have the alluring stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi cavorting on the moors in your crimson adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.” But for radioactive romance, you can’t beat Washington.

Emily Brontë’s Cathy and Heathcliff are selfish, manipulative creatures, destroying each other and all around them as they indulge their passions and egos. But their damage was kept to one windswept village.

With MAGA’s version of “Wuthering Heights,” the far less alluring but equally intertwined Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski have been cavorting over the swamp, scandalizing the capital as they’ve spread their cruelty far and wide. (To Lewandowski’s credit, he didn’t try to kill a dog like Heathcliff did. That’s Noem’s department.)

Holiday Barbie, as Robbie’s Cathy has been dubbed for her ostentatious dresses and hairstyles, pales in comparison with the costumes and Rapunzel extensions of ICE Barbie. Imprisoned in her marriage to Edgar Linton, Robbie’s Cathy gleams in elaborate gowns and necklaces. But Noem topped that. When she went to see migrants in prison in El Salvador, she sported a baseball cap with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement logo — and a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona that’s worth $50,000.

Like Heathcliff, Lewandowski is known as a menacing presence who has been accused of having some dark physical exchanges with women. (Now there’s a dog Noem won’t put down.)

President Trump had rejected the plea of Lewandowski — who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign until he got fired after dust-ups with the Trump family and others — to be Noem’s chief of staff, because Trump was disturbed “by the optics of Lewandowski working as chief of staff to someone with whom he had reportedly been romantically involved,” as The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer put it. (Noem and Lewandowski, who are both married with children, have denied the affair.)

Kristi slid Corey into the Department of Homeland Security as a temporary special government employee and made him her powerful aide-de-camp. He has stayed long beyond his allotted 130 days, thanks to scheming workarounds. For a time, Trump let it ride, even though, according to The New York Post, he cringed when he saw them flagrantly taking sips from the same can of soda — an unmistakable tell.

An Atlantic story called Lewandowski and Noem “the First Couple of a Dysfunctional D.H.S.” As Noem’s enforcer and promoter, Lewandowski had a hand in every decision.

An upcoming book by the NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley reveals that senior officials held a secret meeting in 2025 after Trump was sworn in to discuss what they saw as the toxic romance warping — or wuthering — the agency’s plans as it embarked on the barbaric roundup of illegal immigrants. The rough manhunt drained the department of compassion as it attempted to build up Noem and capture headlines. Lewandowski tried to think of ways to redeem Noem after she disgustingly called Renee Good and Alex Pretti, victims of her ICE run amok, domestic terrorists.

I know its uncharitable of me, and petty, to derive pleasure from the misfortune of Noem and Lewandowski, but I do, just as I hope for misfortune for Donald Trump and other members of his fat cat cabinet.  Flip Wilson's character, Geraldine, always blamed the Evil One for her sins: "The Devil made me do it."  I have to take responsibility for my own schadenfreude.  Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  It's been a lifetime since my last confession.  


More on This is Happiness.  I arrived at chapter 20 of the novel this morning, in which Noah's mother suffers what appears to be a stroke, bringing on the loss of her ability to walk and to speak.  It occurs while she is taking Noah to buy him a new pair of long trousers to go along with his new secondary school leather shoes.  The short narration triggered two, really three, significant memories in me.  
    The first was of my mother taking me to the big clothing store on Roosevelt Road, 12th Street, in Chicago, to get me the clothes I needed to head off to college in Milwaukee the Fall of 1959.  The only item I remember purchasing that day was a beautiful green pinwale corduroy sport coat that I wore for years, until it was almost literally falling apart.  I know we purchased other items; I just can't recall what they were.  In any event, the thought that struck me this morning was how my mother must have felt that day, preparing her firstborn and only son to leave home.  I, of course, was excited and a bit daunted by the prospect, but I suspect my mother had some very different feelings.  I'm sensitive to this fact now because of the second memory triggered by the novelist's story: that of my sister telling me, in our old age, that she cried on the way home to Chicago after she and my parents dropped me off at my dormitory at Marquette that Fall.  
    She was broken-hearted that I was leaving home.   With all we had gone through in our young lives, we were important to each other, a mutual admiration society and mutual support for each other.  Once again, I was oblivious to her pain, my attention consumed by the excitement and nervousness of starting my life as a college student, no longer living with my family, putatively independent.   The story of Noah and his mother drove home to me how focused I can be on my own feelings at any moment and oblivious to the feelings of those close to me, sharing in the event and the consequences of that very moment.  Noah was 12 years old when his mother fell, and I was barely 18 when I left home, but the challenge of self-absorption is a lifelong one.  Perhaps it even gets worse as we move through life and our lives get more demanding, complex, and cluttered.  
    The third memory was not of something I was a part of, but rather something of which I was informed, i.e., when my sister called me in 1973 to tell me that our mother had collapsed in her backyard garden, and was in the intensive care unit of the Blue Island Hospital.  An aneurysm in her brain had ruptured, and she would die from it 9 days later.  She was 51 years old.  My Dad would live another 34 years without her, Kitty another 50 years, while I am still living.  None of us ever got over the loss of her, which I've often written about, and more often spoken about to Kitty and my Dad during their lives.  What a cosmos the four of us were, at least for a brief time!  We all lived together only between 1945, when Dad returned from the War, and 1959, when I left for college, less than 15 years,  yet our lives were ever interconnected and 'entangled' so that none of us could be described wholly independently from each of the others, even when we were separated by time and distance.
    What I wonder about as I write these thoughts is whether all, or most old men, go through thoughts like these just from reading a novel set in other lands at other times with other people, re-living experiences from their own lives, from eons ago.  

Another 84 year old has died.  Jesse Jackson and Chuck Mangione recently.  John McGregor yesterday.  Country Joe McDonald today.  Will I join the club, or make it to 85?
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

************

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