7/2/2026

 Thursday, July 2, 2026

1949 The State of Vietnam was internationally recognised, governing the southern half of Vietnam, with Bảo Đại as chief of state

1962 Sam Walton opened his first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas

1964  Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law

1976 Formal reunification of North and South Vietnam

2014, Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was criminally charged with corruption by French prosecutors

2025 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the indefinite suspension of air defense and weapons shipments to Ukraine, including Patriot interceptors and other missiles and ammunition

2025  Iran ordered the suspension of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency following the Iran–Israel war and the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites

In bed at 9, half-awake at 4 and up at 5; 0515 123/73/62  07. 202,6; 70/89/70, rainy morning, thunder/lightning.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.,  and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 6:45 p.m.

The president who cleaned up while in office.  There is much clutching of pearls and wringing of hands over the fact that Trump, his family, and his cronies have made fortunes during his first year in office.  Trump disclosed $2,200,000,000 in income.  There's no telling what Jerod Kuschner, Steve Witkoff, and Howard Lutnick took in.  Or how much 'inside tippees' are made in the securities markets and online prediction markets, like Kalshi.   Trump apparently believes it's not corruption so long as it's disclosed on the federally required financial disclosure reports.  Time may prove him right.

The former guy who painted.  Or the guy who used to paint for enjoyment.  That seems less pretentious than calling myself a "painter."  I mention it only because this late morning I picked up some paint brushes, mixed some paints and glazing liquid, and did some touch-up work of a large canvas I painted - when?  Over a year ago?  It's a knock-off of a full-length portrait by Klimt, and I tried it only because I liked the colors, it seemed easy enough that maybe I could approximate a copy, and because I had a hankering to work on a big canvas.  I had to get Sarah to stretch the canvas for me, having been unsuccessful in attracting my grandson Peter with offers of pay.  Shortly after I painted it, we experienced the Big Rain over August 9-10, 2025, receiving 11 inches in our backyard and an abundance in our basement.  We had to have our new basement floor ripped up and replaced, as well as the sheetrock on our walls, and I lost the drive to paint after that.  (Plus, my health and heart went downhill, and negotiating the basement stairs became an unwelcome challenge.).  In any event, I never really finished the painting and decided this morning (in the midst of a sour mood) that I would try to perk up the lady's face.  I reddened her face with a bit of Brilliant Red and a lot of glazing liquid, added some Cerulean Blue glazing to her skin, and darkened her eyes with a black Sharpie and a tad of blue glazing.  I got some pleasure from sitting at the work station again and messing around with brushes, tubes of paint, and a big jar of glazing compound that I had to open with a big wrench.  I discovered I had no rags down there anymore, a big absence.  They all got soaked in the flood and were tossed with so much else.  I also lost the big walking stick that my brother-in-law Jim Reck made for me out a saguaro cactus.  He had wrapped a rattlesnake skin around it, suggesting manly adventures, but I used it as a painter's mahl stick to stabilize my hand when working on a large canvas.  

It's a curious congruence of anniversaries.  In 1949, the State of Vietnam was recognized as governing South Vietnam, while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh governed the North.  The French served as the "patron" of the State of Vietnam, maintaining their role as colonizers.  The French fought Ho and his main general, Vo Nguyen Giap, who kicked their asses at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, despite a lot of American support.  On this date in 1976, after the ignominious fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the two Vietnams were reunited under "Uncle Ho."  It is painful to me to this day to remember those days. 

7/1/2026

 Wednesday, July 1, 2026

937 Rev Martin Niemöller was arrested in Nazi Germany for activities against the State

1968 The CIA's Phoenix Program was officially established

1971 Twenty-sixth Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, was ratified

1974 General Augusto Pinochet became the president and dictator of Chile

1987 President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court 

2002 The International Criminal Court was established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression

2019 Japan resumed commercial whaling after a break of more than 30 years

2024  Supreme Court ruled that presidents have criminal  immunity for all official acts,

In bed at 9:45, up at 5:55; 0615 128/75/69 123 202.8; 78/91/76 EXTREME HEAT WARNING.

Morning meds at 8 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and p.m.

Polymyalgia rheumatica?  My left shoulder has been bothering me for a week or more, slightly painful and with no apparent cause.  Keeping my fingers crossed that this isn't a recurrence of the PMR that had me knocked out of commission for months before it was diagnosed (by me!) and treated with daily prednisone for more than a year and the biologic injections of Kevzara for another year. (?)  

Unable to quit my ArmorATD external backup drive again this morning without a lot of help from ChatGPT.  It seems the Apple Books app was the problem.  I wish I could get rid of it, but ChatGPT recommends against trying it, since the Books app is part of my laptop's operating system and deleting or uninstalling it could cause other and worse problems.  Thank goodness for ChatGPT and for Sarah's advice on how to deal with problems like this.

Another victim of Netanyahu and the New Israel.  Diana DeGette, the 57-year-old, 15-term liberal congressional representative for Denver and its suburbs, was defeated in Colorado's Democratic primary yesterday by a 29-year-old Democratic Socialist, Melat Kiros, an immigrant from Ethiopia.  The biggest difference between DeGette and Kiros: DeGette is a supporter of military aid to Israel, Kiros is an opponent.  Kiros argues that criticism of Israel and Zionism is not automatically antisemitism, that Israel is a settler-colonial state, that Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza has been genocidal, and that Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was an "inevitable consequence of apartheid and decades of occupation."  She has also argued for a "one-state solution" to the decades of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with all citizens in historic Palestine, Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs, treated equally.  She would cut off all military aid to Israel, unlike DeGette.  A sign of the times among younger Americans, or at least younger Democrats?

There is a guest opinion in this morning's NYTimes by the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman.  He wrote:

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people possess the right to live freely in their ancestral homeland, to shape their future, defend their dignity, preserve their civilization and contribute their values and wisdom to humanity. A Jewish homeland is understood as the primary vehicle for Jews to build a flourishing society, with all its residents, non-Jews and Jews alike, that manifests and broadcasts the core Torah values of human dignity, justice and compassion. The term predates the modern state of Israel by decades. And the origin story of Zionism began centuries before that.

In the Book of Genesis, we are told how God blessed Abraham and his descendants with a land from which they would be a blessing to “all the families of the earth.”  . . .

None of this means one cannot criticize the policies and practices of an Israeli administration. Anti-Zionism, however, goes much further and rejects the idea of Jewish self-determination entirely. Those who would deny the Jews the right to a Jewish state, in a world that comfortably accepts Muslim and Christian states, are discriminating against Jews. It is here that anti-Zionism crosses over to antisemitism.  

I don't copy and paste the whole essay here, but I have to note that, as the writing of a university president, it is mighty nearsighted and Pollyannaish.  It speaks of the Holocaust and utterly ignores the Nakba.  While extoling the desires of Jews to have a land of their own, it utterly ignores the fact that other people, non-Jewish people, had for centuries occupied the land that the Zionists wanted for themselves.  It mentions Biblical writings from almost 4,000 years ago, without acknowledging that most of the people in the world consider those writings mythical and indeed political.  While appropriately condemning the Holocaust and European savagery against Jews, he offers no reasoning that Middle Eastern Arabs should forfeit their land and their right to self-determination because of the desires of  Jews, mostly immigrants and settlers, to deprive them of it.  Rabbi Berman speaks of the "right" of "the Jewish people" to have a land of their own, but ignores the necessary corollary that others with the same and competing wish have a "duty" to recognize that "right."  It's easy enough to claim a right, but quite another thing to establish a duty on others to recognize and defer to it.  Moreover, we oughtn't to be so glib about 'the Jewish people, as if all persons with some Jewish heritage were the same or fungible.  What higher law gives the right to a Jew with long family roots in Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, New York, or Vilnius a right to self-determination in long-Arab and Muslim Palestine?  A Jew who lives in Milwaukee has a "right of return," but a Palestinian in a West Bank refugee camp doesn't?  What's up with that?   I'm not saying that a case can't be made for a Jewish state in Palestine; I'm just saying that this op-ed doesn't do it, and I haven't seen yet the argument that does. 

Running errands during the "extreme heat warning."  I drove up to the Saukville Walmart early this afternoon to pick up some Bonne Maman preserves and safflower seeds, and while there, picked up some dishwasher detergent, celery, and a red bell pepper for Geri.  My Volvo's thermometer told me the outside temperature was 95℉ heading north and 99° heading back south.  When Geri suggested I put off the trip until the heat wave broke, I reminded her I would only be out between my air-conditioned car and the air-conditioned store. Actually, the outdoor temperature and humidity seemed perfectly fine to me during that walk of a few minutes.  I thought the same when I was out filling the bird feeders and getting the mail yesterday.  I'm wondering whether I'm so comfortable in the hot weather because I'm usually so cold in what others consider to be warm weather.  I've become like my Dad when he lived in Florida and my brother-in-law Jimmy when he lived in the Newcastle retirement complex.  On ordinary summer days, I often wear a heavy hooded sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, even indoors.  I could easily be a snowbird if it weren't for my reliance on the Milwaukee VA medical center.  Maybe I should just move to St. Petersburg, FL, and transfer to the big Bay Pines VA Medical Center, where my cousin Doug has received treatment for decades.  It's a huge outfit, with close to 10,000 admissions and more than 100,000 outpatient visits each year.  Also, it's a teaching hospital, like Milwaukee's Zablocki.