Saturday, August 29, 2026
1833 Britain's first Factory Act became law to regulate the labor of children and young persons in the mills and factories of the United Kingdom
1883 The first Carnegie library, financed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, opened in Dunfermline, Scotland, as the first of 2,509 libraries built around the world
1943 Danish Navy scuttled its warships so as not to be taken by Germany
1945 WWII: US General MacArthur was amed Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Japan
1957 Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond ended the longest-ever solo filibuster after 24 hours and 18 minutes, speaking against the Civil Rights Act
2005 Hurricane Katrina made its second and third landfalls as a Category 3 hurricane, devastating much of the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 people and causing over $115 billion in damage
2013 Actor Gary Sinise was named an honorary Marine by the Commandant of the Marine Corps
In bed at 9, and up at 5:05; 0525 203.4 109/65/65 98; 62/78/62, rain expected this afternoon.
Morning meds at 7:30 a.m. Eliquis at 6 a.m and p.m.
Alex Pretti, 37, and Renee Nicole Good, 37. I started to write as a header to this entry, How Good Citizens Grow to Hate Their Government, Not Their Country, But Its Government. I was stirred to anger again when I watched reports of Alex Pretti's family protesting that 7 months have elapsed and nothing has been done by the federal government to bring those responsible for his murder to justice, or any kind of accountability. The same is true for Renee Good. Pretti's killing has become the more persistently troubling of the two, perhaps because he was a VA ICU nurse involved in an act of kindness towards a fellow Minnesotan when he was gunned down, but Good, the mother of three and a good citizen, needs to be remembered and mourned , too.
Both were shot dead on the streets of their city by federal ICE agents who had no reason to unholster their weapons and shoot them. The independent autopsy commissioned by Renee Good's family found three gunshot paths. One bullet struck her left forearm, another passed through her right breast, and the fatal shot entered the left side of her head near the temple and exited the right side of her head. The arm and breast wounds were described as not immediately life-threatening.
Regarding Alex Pretti, the Hennepin County medical examiner's publicly released finding says only that he died of “multiple gunshot wounds” and classified the death as a homicide; it does not publicly itemize the wounds. However, a physician who examined Pretti at the scene reported seeing at least three gunshot wounds in his back, as well as one wound in his upper-left chest and a possible wound to his neck.
How is it possible that there has been no public accounting for these homicides by our government? The answer is that our government has been under the control of Donald Trump and his myrmidons at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice since January 20th, 2025. It's possible because of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem and Markwayne Mullin.
I think back to Wayne LaPierre's notorious fund-raising letter for the NRA in 1995 attacking federal law enforcement agencies and the recently-enacted ban on automatic rifles. It warned NRA members about: “jack-booted government thugs, wearing black, armed to the teeth” who, the letter said, could “break down a door, open fire with an automatic weapon, and kill or maim law-abiding citizens.” He also referred to federal agents wearing “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” Who does this language remind us of? The big difference? Back then, LaPierre was attacking the Clinton Administration, Janet Reno, and the ATF, and the nation was reeling from Waco and Ruby Ridge, though a few days after the letter was distributed, the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murragh federal office building occurred.
Thinking of these murders and their cover-ups while reading Kurt Andersen's The Breakup is a painful and frightening experience, reminding me of where our nation seems to be heading, and why.
LTMW as I parted the curains this morning, I looked out on half a dozen healthy-looking tom turkeys enjoying some breakfast under our bird feeders and elsewhere on our front lawn. Some are showing signs of moulting, others aren't. They are mighty strong looking creatures, with nasty spurs on their legs. I say 'half a dozen' but they were part of a larger posse of younger and more mature birds, some looking pretty feisty, like that big tom the other day, doing his male dominance strutting circles around the one next to him. Such interesting creatures, with such interesting phyical features and behaviors. Interesting too to see them competing with our chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies, and occasioally whitetail deer for the sunflower, safflower, and millet seeds under our feeds.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran - Trump's version of a "forever war." Peter Baker has an opinion piece in this morning's New York Times, For Trump, the Iran War Is Stuck Between Combat and Genuine Peace.
President Trump the other day posted a heroic image of himself backed by an aircraft carrier, warplanes and American flags. In the lower left corner was former President George W. Bush and a sign, “Mission Not Accomplished 2001-2021.” In the other corner was a sign referencing himself saying “Mission Accomplished 2026. Except that it is not. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran, which hit the six-month mark on Friday, is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight. Mr. Trump, who came to power running against Mr. Bush’s “forever wars,” has staked his presidency on his own version.
For Mr. Trump, it may be the worst of both worlds. He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace. He is reluctant to resume an all-out bombardment despite his thunderous threats, yet has been unable so far to broker an agreement to end the war on satisfactory terms. He has no victory to take credit for, yet is paying the political price in terms of the toll on the American economy and his party’s chances in the fall elections.
This sort of in-between stasis could in theory extend for a long time, a far cry from the four-to-six-week lightning strike that Mr. Trump predicted when he ordered Operation Epic Fury at the end of February. With no breakthrough in sight, both sides are testing the other’s staying power . . .
How many outrageously expensive, debilitating, devastating strategic losses must our nation endure before we realize that something has been wrong in post-WWII America for decades., and is only getting worse? Should I have started my list with Korea? Was it a strategic win in the sense that we repelled a communist invasion from the North and South Korea has thrived, free from dictatorial rule by North Korean communists? Or was it a strategic loss in the sense that there has never been a peace treaty between the two Koreas, and about 2,200,000 American troops have been stationed south of the DMZ over the 73 years since the truce was signed, almost all on "unaccompanied tours", i.e., without their families? If this was a big victory, it was a Pyrrhic one. Of course, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were even worse outcomes. What will we say down the road about this war with Iran?
Every Effort. I started reading Barbara Mullen Keenan's book about her experiences after her husband Bill was shot down over Laos. I bought a used copy of the out-of-print book for $6 from Abe Books. It was published 40 years ago, and 20 years after "Moon" was shot down. Reading it has been a bit of an emotional trip already, though I'm not yet through with the first chapter. She dedicated the book to Bill, and wrote in her "Acknowledgments," that it was intended as a tribute to all who shared in the experience of our long war in Southeast Asia.
Reading her Prologue, I thought to myself that the Prologue alone was worth more than the price I paid for the book, though the value of the $6 and the value of the book and the memories associated with it are incommensuable. She was a patriotic, volunteer worker for the Voice of American, stationed in Thailand, when she first met Bill in Japan during one of his overseas tours. They were two young American patriots, and she started out her Prologue thus:
There was no indication during m growing-up years in Michigan that I would one day publicly oppose the President of the United States. In fact, I remember the day I first leasrned about patriotism in grammar school. Lydia Thompson, my third grade teacher, . . . stood in front of us and smiled. "Today," she said, " We're going to talk about patriotism." . . .[She related the story of Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 in his single-engine airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis.]. Finally she got to the point. "You are the luckiest children in the world," she said. . . "You are American," she announced. "God has blessed us all. Everyone in the world wishes he were American. And we are the fortunate ones. Honor this privilege, children. Never take it for granted."
There was much truth in what her third grade teacher told her class, then in the 1940s and 1950s when Barbara was a schoolgirl, and even now. Many people all over the world envy Americans, our standard of living, and form of government, our relative freedom. That we have so many people wanting to immigrate here can be no surprise. Ditto that we have so relatively few people as expats. And, when Barbara, and Bill, and I were young, the state of mind was commonplace that America was the greatest country in the world, and the exemplar of national goodness to the rest of the world. Thus, she wrote of her time in the VOA:
In the late 1950s we were zealous as missionaries. There was a sense of urgency and camaradery among those of us representing America overseas. We wee battling against time and the spreading evil of communism in order to bring the hope of democracy to backward countries. We were teachers of the underdeveloped: if everyone on earth couldn't be Americans, they could be like Americans.
I daresay that was the feeling of most Americans at the start of the Vietnam War, not of all, but of most. I recall the sign someone had posted above the doorway of the hooch I lived in after I graduated from living in my strongback tent in DaNang: Better Dead Than Red. And I recall that on July 28, 1965, when Bill Mullen and I were serving in Vietnam, Johnson announced the truly consequential escalation—raising American forces from about 75,000 to 125,000, with more to follow, and more than doubling monthly draft calls. He told Americans and the world: "We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.” Time Magazine's January 7, 1966 Man of the Year issue, was devoted to General William Westmoreland and the escalating Vietnam War, was titled “The Guardians at the Gate,” but by the date of that issue of Time, many of us in Vietnam sensed that 'this is not going to end well." And of course, for Bill and Barbara Mullen and their two sons, and for America, it didn't. She ended her Prologue with this:
I thought about all this on an October afternoon in 1971 as I walked back and forth in front of the White House shifting my picket sign from one shoulder to the other. The vision of Lydia Thompson loomed before me, her one-time smile lighting up her face. "God bless us. We are American."
Powerful writing about powerful experiences. I'm looking forward, though a bit apprehensively, to reading the body of her book.
A Year Ago Today I wrote: How fortunate I am to have grown old with Geri. We married in our 40s, energetic, active, strong, knowing nothing of what lay ahead, including some hard times that we had to get through, and now we are in our 80s, an elderly couple, old people. We have partnered through 38 years, our children are in their 50s, and the oldest grandchild is now off to college. We are in our 4th home, not counting Lake Mills and Seattle, each one a treasure. We were able to provide a home to my Dad for a few years and to Andy, Anh, and Peter when he was a toddler. 'O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!' Aeneas ait, et fastigia suspicit urbis. Vergil, Aeneid, I: 437-438. I remember Brother Birmingham in our Latin 4 class, emphasizing these lines, "O you fortunate ones, whose walls are rising," referring to the Carthaginians who had a home while Aeneas had none. I not only had these lovely homes, but also Geri to share them with. O fortunatus! Indeed.
Among men aged 65 and older, about 10% are widowed; among women, the figure is about 30%. Among those in their 80s, the figures are, of course, much higher. O fortunati!
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