4/13/2026

 Monday, April 13, 2026

1861 After 34 hours of bombardment, Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederates 

1954 Robert Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist

1986 Pope John Paul II met Rome's Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff at the Rome synagogue

2025 Israel destroyed part of the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City, the Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which is managed by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem. No direct casualties are reported, but one child is killed due to interrupted medical care. 

2025 During Palm Sunday, two Russian ballistic missiles carrying cluster munitions struck the centre of Sumy, Ukraine, killing at least 35 people and wounding 117 others. 

In bed at 9, awake at 3:20, up at 3:50.  127/62/32 10; 60/53/71/56, partly cloudy day, more rain tonight.  

Morning meds at  a.m.  Ranolazine at 6 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.

What have we come to? Where are we headed?  

Pete Hegseth’s Gospel of Carnage, by Frank Bruni in this morning's New York Times.

I guess a zealot, by nature, can’t hide — too extreme are his convictions, too grand his designs, too consuming his arrogance. And so, over recent weeks, Pete Hegseth has fully revealed himself.

He has made clear that every missile the United States fires, every bomb it drops, every Iranian it kills, is for Jesus. Praise be the Lord, who has given America the power to wipe out an entire civilization. That’s what President Trump threatened to do — in an intermittently jaunty social media post, no less — and Hegseth gave no indication of unwillingness to execute that order.

He brandishes assertions about God’s will with the exaggerated brio of an electronics merchant pressing fliers on pedestrians passing by his new megastore: Have I got a holy war for you. Embrace the death. Exult over the destruction. What only looks like hell is a ticket to heaven.

Not everyone agrees. In this era of the extraordinary, Pope Leo XIV has taken the unusual step of publicly and specifically rebuking the Trump administration’s assertion of divine approval for the war against Iran.

In a social media post on Friday, he wrote: “God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”

That was hardly the pope’s first reprimand. During a Mass just before Easter, he voiced his concern that the Christian mission had been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” And before that, he cautioned that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

Pete Hegseth and Robert Prevost, a/k/a Pope Leo XIV, are men, human beings, members of the most destructive species on earth, and each purports to speak for a transcendent Christian God.

Queen bee and worker bee.  Geri is both.  She reigns over our house, making decorating decisions, ruling the kitchen at dinner time, keeping it clean, and generally tending to it when it needs tending.  I'm not irrelevant to domestic sovereighty.  She askes my opinion when partnering input is appropriate, but I almost always defer to her.  I tell her I am uxorious, but not in the negative way the term is usually used, if it is used at all anymore by anyone but me.  Rather, I defer to her because I've come to realize that she has better taste than I do, and about most things domestic, better judgment, but mostly because she does most of the work that is required around the house.  I think it is a mark of respect to defer to her on these matters.  My old partner, Bob Freibert, used to joke had he and his wife Susan had a division of labor understanding in their marriage: he got to decide on the family position on matter of foreign policy and she decided all the other stuff.

I thought of the 'queen bee and worker bee' metaphor for Geri as I watched her this afternoon working on flower pots on our patio.  She had worked hard for three hours or more this morning in the marginal garden on our lot, the one that extends the entire west boundary of our lot.  The temperature was in the 70s and she came in exhausted and looking a bit frazzled from the high humidity.  She wasn't able to nap during the afternoon because of work going on next door, but nonethless, there she was again working outside on one of her never-ending garden chores.  I looked at her through my bedroom window and thought again, as I have so many time, what a prodigious worker she is.

    I took a very short walk this afternoon with "Rachel," my high-boy rollator, from our house to the first east-west street in Mequon and back.  By the time I reached that street, I was SOB, short of breath and tired, so I turned around.  I have no idea how much of that was due to CHF and how much was due to not enough sleep.  Probably a combination of both.  Later, Geri and I had another serious talk about whether it's a mistake not to sell the house and about the daunting issue, if not here, where?  Geri turns 82 in 5 days,  I turn 85 in 4 months.  Quo ire debemus?