7/28/2026

 Tuesday, July 28, 2026

1915 Woodrow Wilson sent US Marines to Haiti, leading to occupation until 1934

1965 LBJ sent 50,000 more soldiers to Vietnam (total of 125,000)

2025  Donald Trump issued a new 12-day ultimatum to Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

In bed at 8:40, up at 4:55; 0510 204.2 115/66/64 106; 65/74/63, sunny day ahead Beach Hazards warning, 4 to 6 ' waves, dangerous currents  

Morning meds at a7:45 a.m. 

Bad news/good news.  Geri heard this morning from a dear friend, 84 years old, who has been hospitalized since Sunday with pulmonary emboli, blood clots in her lungs.  For many years, they traveled together and shared rooms in hotels and elsewhere on the annual law school recruiting marathons, where they first met and became friends.   They have stayed friends for decades.  Their long-continuing, mutually-supporting friendship reminds me of how much women are at forming and maintaining friendships than men are.  They share more, especially vulnerabilities.  We men tend to stink at this, or at least, I do.  No wonder so many men are lonely in their old age.  I think of Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt and George Segal in Bye Bye, Braverman.

This unexpected bad news calls to mind how very many ways there are to experience a serious health condition and how many ways there are to die.  Geri's friend's, thankfully, will be discharged from the hospital today with instructions to rest at home for the next month or so.  That's the good news, but she's 84 years old with an even older husband with very serious health challenges of his own.  Lindsey Graham, whose funeral is today, died from a tear in his aorta resulting from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, a/k/a hardening of the arteries.  He was only 71.  How have I managed to live so long, with my sedentary lifestyle and dietary and alcohol recklessness?  Men born in 1941 entered a world where life expectancy at birth was only about 62–63 years. By reaching my mid-80s, I've already lived more than two decades beyond that average. Today, actuarial tables suggest that I have a reasonable chance of living into my early 90s, with a smaller but still real chance of reaching the mid- to late-90s or beyond.  God forbid!  When I was a kid and a member of St. Leo the Great parish in Chicago, there was a Happy Death Society in the parish.  Knowing what old age is like, and how it will never get better, but only worse, I pray for a happy - and early - death.  God save me from further decay, diminishment, decrepitude, and dementia.

Note to LOA in response to his email about drone warfare & the Marines.

I get a headache just thinking about this shit.  I used to muse with my friend and brother-in-law Jimmy Aquavia, who just died at 92 and was an Army medic in the 1050s, that we were glad that we didn't have long to live.  Both of us were persuaded that the future is more frightening and promising.  I still feel that way.  Artificial Intelligence has me shaking in my boots.  I've been interacting with ChatGPT for the last couple of months.  I find it mind-blowing, and of course my interactions are on the most basic level.  Anthropic's CLAUDE CODE AI is already being used to hack highly protected national security sites.  The government's not able to regulate or control these systems because no one in the government is able to catch up with what the system developers, aided by the AI systems themselves, are coming up with 24/7/365.  I think it is, at best, an open question whether we 

as a species will control these systems or the systems will control us, and who among us will exercise whatever control we have, if we have any.  I have no faith in our own government's ability to deal with the challenge.  It's not only warfare that is being taken over by chip-driven machines.  The best current estimates are that more than 700 data centers are actively under construction across 38 states.  If you include projects that are planned, approved, or in development, the number rises to more than 1,500 projects nationwide.  If on your pilgramage this summer, you come down I-43 from the north, you'll pass a data center under construction north of Port Washington.  It's on more than 1,600 acres of land, and will require 1.3 gigawatts of electrical power at full build-out, the equivalent of enough electricity to power between 900,00 and 1.2 million homes, depending on how you calculate.  Just driving past it is a bit mind-blowing and it's one of 700  currently being built.  It's well beyond my brain housing groups for sure, but this stuff has me glad I'm about 85 and not 25, 15, or 5.

LOA: Bill: "I’ll just pull the power switch on you.”

HAL: "I can’t let you do that , Bill.”

     We used to laugh at that line. No more. In the meantime, a Marine plt cdr has to figure out how to survive a swarm of drones, and launch and control his own. First job is to shut down Putin in Ukraine and hire a bunch of their vets as instructors.

CDC: Right on.   "Open the door, HAL."  "I'm afraid I can't do that, Bill."  Scary stuff.

Watching the funeral of Lindsey Graham at the National Cathedral and thinking to myself, what a bunch of bullshit.  Watching J. D. Vance next to Trump, Trump not joining along in the hymns as Vance and the Secretary of the Treasury mouth them.  Various cabinet secretaries and agency heads in the second and third rows.  Netanyahu in the fourth row.  Graham's casket draped in a pall featuring a prominent Christian cross.  Trump is the first and featured eulogist.  If there are angels in Heaven, they must cringe to see the 80-year-old Trump, with his dyed hair and ridiculous hairdo, and his facial cosmetic foundation and bronzer,  at the pulpit of what purports to be the House of God. DJT 'eulogizing' LG:  "He never saw a war he didn't like, a true hawk."  'nuf said.  Pass the basin, please.  I need to puke.

 

How appropriate it is that Netanyahu should travel from Israel to the US to attend the funeral of Lindsey Graham.  He's been a Republican through and through from his time living in America.  He is the one Israeli more responsible than any other for the growing and widespread disaffection between the American people, especially younger Americans, and the State of Israel.  Back in 2015, he was invited to Congress by the Republicans to deliver a passionate speech against Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump ripped up as soon as he got into office.  That congressional speech was insulting to the sitting American president.  The current online issue of The Atlantic has an article titled "How Netanyahu Lost America," by Franklin Foer.  It's a damning account of Netanyahu's leadership of the Likud party, his opposition to Palestinian statehood, and his lifetime conviction that the whole world is anti-semitic, a conviction he got from his father, a rabid Zionist.