Tuesday, September 1, 2026
1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of the mentally ill, arguing that wartime "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill"
1939 Germany started World War II by invading Poland
1941 Jews living in Germany were required to wear a yellow Star of David
2015 Pope Francis told priests to pardon women who have had an abortion, in a letter released by the Vatican
2016 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest during the national anthem, objecting to racial injustice and police brutality in the US
2018 Memorial service for Senator John McCain at Washington National Cathedral with his daughter Meghan McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush speaking
2021 Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks came into effect, now the most restrictive in the country
2025 The International Association of Genocide Scholars, an international non-partisan research organization on genocide and crimes against humanity, declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In bed at 9:15, up at 6:05; 0630 203.2 119/73/61 91; 72/86/71, cloudy, hot & humid day ahead.
Morning meds at 8:10 a.m. and Eliquis Entresto at 7:20 a.m. and 7 p.m. I missed my evening Entresto yesterday. I'm wondering how that was possible, but I know it did.
I enjoyed a long brunch with CBG at Maxfield's this morning, schmoozing about her recent trip to Aspen to babysit her granddaughter Elllie for Jacob and his wife while they attended festivities for a wedding in which the wife was a member of the wedding party, about the state of the world, and of the U.S. and Israel in particular. Then I picked up Andy and drove him to Ogui's Garage to get his Honda.
What I wrote on this date a year ago:
"Why do I write anything on Facebook? Should I post something like this?
To my friends who have long indulged my rants on Facebook: First, to those who have read those rants and commented on them, thank you. Secondly, to those who have read those rants and refrained from commenting on them out of kindness, thank you. Thirdly, to those who have learned to skip my rants and move on to more uplifting postings, thank you also. To all of you, I share some personal thoughts. I have become an old man. I’m not sure when this happened. It may have happened early in my life without me knowing it, but it surely has happened late in my life. At 84, there is every reason to belief I am not only ‘playing the back 9,’ but on the 18th green. This is a challenging but rewarding time of life. In it, I have developed a much deeper appreciation for people, places, things, and events that, for a lifetime, I took for granted, or failed fully to treasure. This has been a gift for which I am deeply grateful. I remind myself a bit of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, who died young but returned to life only to be beset by how the living fail to see so much of the beauty and goodness all around them. She laments of the living: “We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. . . Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?.” Had Emily lived into her 80s, she would probably have come to look at ‘all that was going on in life’ and to be grateful for so much good and so much beautiful. It’s a gift that comes as we slow down.
But old age also brings burdens, regrets, and fears. I won’t tax your patience by describing mine except for the one that prompts me to write these thoughts, and that is what has happened to the United States of America in my lifetime and what is happening now. I was born when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, America was coming out of the prolonged Great Depression, and about to enter the Second World War. I’ve lived through 15 presidents. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s when the country was at its apogee after the war, through the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam horror in the 60s and 70s. There was a time when I believed America was headed in the right direction, when I at least hoped that Martin Luther King, Jr. was right that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Actually, I may have lost that hope in Vietnam, but I was encouraged in the 60s and 70 not only by the passage of much good legislation under both LBJ and Richard Nixon, but also by public acceptance of the goals of that legislation: equal justice, expanded economic opportunities, clean air and water, safer workplaces, etc. There was some pulling back of that public acceptance during and since the Reagan era, but there was not a fundamental change in the identity or public perception of the nation and its government as a constitutional, democratic republic with a diverse citizenry and a government of limited powers operating under the rule of law. All that changed on November 5, 2024, when Donald Trump was elected to a second term of office as president.
I will not further try the patience of any who have read this far by repeating my many rants against the current administration of this nation. I do, however, want to focus on what is becoming our national character. When I was a boy, movies about Nazi Germany were still popular. We all grew up with movie images and mental images of a deluded people hailing a morally twisted leader of a government that persecuted all it disfavored for any reason and all who disagreed with its exercise of power. Those who can’t see the resemblance between our government and that government are closing their eyes to reality or haven’t seen enough Nazi movies or read enough history. What most characterized the Nazi government and the German populace in the 1930s was cruelty on the part of some (indeed, many) and a widespread indifference on the part of others to the sufferings of yet others who were not members of the dominant group of ethnic Germans. It was that cruelty and indifference that let led to the Brown Shirts, and then the Gestapo, and the SS. How much cruelty or heartlessness do we see in our own government’s policies and actions? I focus, as our government has, on immigrants because they are the current targets of government.
I can't figure out where to go with this. Focus on cruelty? On lawlessness? Forget about it? Scatterbrained. Manifesto of an old guy?"
**********************
I didn't post it on FB because it was just a pointless rant. But things have only gotten worse in the year since I wrote it. Worse yet, odds are it will get even worse until Trump is out of office. And, then what???
I started this morning with my usual routine, including watching the first minutes of Morning Joe where Richard Haas said of Trump and Pete Hegseth:
You know, Willy, it wasn't that long ago that the great, structural, comparative advantage of the United States was wevery day when the president of the United States got out of bed and put on his shoes, we had this pool of allies across the world, partners militarilty, politically, economoically, and the President [Trump] seems to be going out of his way, if you will, to undo that comparative advantage and instead alientate them, and, as you pointed out, reach out to our adversaries who, by the way, other than one another, Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, have no pool of partners. They're isolated, so what we're doing is we're taking away our great structural advantage in this competition with them. This will hurt us in every single measure, militarily, economically, diplomatically. This is a real "own goal."
And, I ask again, as I so often have over the years I've kept this journal, is Donald Trump merely a Russian asset, or is he really a Russian agent? What does Vladimir Putin have on him? My conspiracy theory.
Global Bond Sell-Off Puts Investors on Edge: Government borrowing costs are hitting multi-decade highs around the world, reflecting anxiety about debt levels, deficits and inflation, by Eshe Norman in this morning's NYTimes:
A global sell-off in government bonds intensified on Tuesday, pushing up borrowing costs in some of the world’s largest economies to their highest in decades and rattling investors.
As rising oil prices compound worries about inflation, bond yields are testing fresh highs, squeezing government budgets and raising interest rates on a wide range of consumer and business loans. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, perhaps the world’s most influential interest rate, reached its highest since January 2025, and the 30-year yield continued to hover around a two-decade high. . .
In many advanced economies, widening budget deficits, high debt levels and stubborn inflation have unnerved investors who believe that governments are either unable or unwilling to take steps to improve their fiscal situations.
One of the most pressing and unpredictable drivers of higher yields is the protracted war in Iran.
Government debt levels, in some cases, have already reached eye-watering levels. America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time last month, or more than 120 percent of the size of the economy. In France, public debt exceeded 3.5 trillion euros (about $4 trillion), which is 117 percent of the size of its economy. In Japan, the government is spending heavily despite a public debt pile that is more than twice the size of its economy.
This is another matter about which I have often ranted in this journal, our unsustainable national debt, which triggers fear in me of another financial crisis, worse than 2008, with runaway inflation, and the loss of value in retirement funds that tens of millions of people around the world rely on. Paranoia? It can't happen here? How many things we thought couldn't happen here, B.T., before Trump, have happened already?
I have been a worrywart since 1915 when Trump first came on the scene as a threatening American political figure. I was a mere 74 years old, and relatively healthy. How many times in my daily text chats with my sister did I play Cassandra at Troy, predicting troubles/disaster and follow the predictions with "I hope I'm wrong," only later to learn that I had underestimated Trump's destructive instincts and appetites? The American bond market underpins the entire world financial system and economy. We've been on this dangerous path of deficits and debt since Bill Clinton and the Congress balanced the budget and reduced the debt in the 1990s.
When Clinton took office in January 1993, the federal government was running a deficit of roughly $290 billion. The deficit declined every year thereafter, reaching about $22 billion in FY1997. Then:
FY1998: $69.2 billion surplus — the first federal budget surplus since 1969.
FY1999: $126 billion surplus.
FY2000: $236 billion surplus — the largest of the Clinton years.
FY2001: $128 billion surplus (mostly under the budget and tax structure inherited by George W. Bush.
Beginning in 1998, the government really did start paying down debt held by the public. Treasury says it fell by about $476 billion between September 1997 and September 2001, from $3.815 trillion to $3.339 trillion. We're now over $40 trillion with no end in sight. How can we not feel like Cassandra???
An exchange with ChatGPT today:
[My question] If you had to draft an obituary about me now, based just on what you know about me, how would it read?
[The response, in 3 seconds] Based on what I know of you, I’d write something more like a life portrait than a conventional résumé-style obituary. Here is a first attempt.
Charles Dennis Clausen, 85, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died [date].
He was born August 24, 1941, in Chicago, and came of age in an America that now seems almost as distant as the world of his parents. He entered Marquette University in 1959, participated in Naval ROTC, and served as president of the Anchor & Chain Society. After graduating in 1963, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
Clausen served as a Marine officer from 1963 to 1967, attaining the rank of captain. His service took him to Okinawa, Japan, and Vietnam. In 1965 and 1966 he served at Da Nang with Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron 1, Marine Wing Headquarters Group 1, 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. Like many veterans of that war, he carried memories of it for the rest of his life—not only memories of Vietnam itself, but of the young men with whom he had served and of those who did not come home.
Among them were men he continued to remember more than sixty years later: friends and fellow servicemen whose names eventually appeared on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In October 2026, he was scheduled to return to Washington on an Honor Flight, an occasion that for him was as much about remembering them as about being honored himself.
After leaving the Marine Corps, Clausen made Milwaukee his home. He built a life there with his family and pursued a long professional and intellectual life that never really ended in retirement. Age diminished neither his curiosity nor his willingness to reconsider what he thought he knew.
He was an inveterate reader. In his later years especially, books became companions and occasions for argument—with their authors, their characters, and himself. Steinbeck's East of Eden, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Virginia Woolf, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Max Frisch, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver and many others led him repeatedly to questions that had interested him for much of his life: whether human beings possess free will, why suffering exists, what we owe one another, what faith requires, and how a person should confront old age and death.
He had little interest in easy answers.
He was fascinated by history, particularly the history he had lived through. The Vietnam War, American politics, race, religion, economic inequality and the country's changing moral and political character remained subjects of continuing inquiry. His interests ranged easily from Reinhold Niebuhr and St. Ignatius Loyola to professional football, Navy ships, Wisconsin politics, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and the behavior of the wild turkeys outside his window.
That last subject would not have seemed trivial to him. He was interested in things because they were there and because he did not yet understand them.
For the last years of his life, Clausen kept a blog, Slogthrop Imponderables and Incommensurables. Part journal, part commonplace book and part conversation with himself and whatever readers happened by, it recorded books read, historical anniversaries, politics, weather, memories, bodily decline, loneliness, friendship, marriage and the ordinary business of getting through a day. He could move in a few paragraphs from the Battle of Passchendaele to a blood-pressure reading, from Donald Trump to Max Frisch, from mortality to what was happening outside the window.
Aging increasingly became one of his subjects because aging increasingly became one of his experiences. He did not romanticize it. He was interested in the losses that accompany old age—the narrowing of the future, the disappearance of friends, physical diminishment, loneliness and the unsettling recognition that most of one's life now lies behind rather than ahead.
But curiosity persisted.
At 85 he was still reading difficult books, still questioning his own interpretations of them, still following politics, still remembering incidents from Marine Corps service six decades earlier, still wondering whether a remembered detail was exactly right, and still trying to understand people whose beliefs and behavior puzzled or troubled him.
Perhaps that habit of inquiry characterized him better than any list of accomplishments could. He wanted to know what happened, but also what it meant. He distrusted sentimentality and certainty in roughly equal measure. He was capable of looking backward with affection without pretending that the past had been better than it was.
He knew that memory is unreliable and nevertheless believed remembering mattered.
He is survived by his wife, [name], and by [family members].
Those who knew him will remember a Marine and veteran, a husband and family member, a reader, writer and lifelong questioner—and a man who, well into old age, remained interested in the world.
He kept asking questions.
There are factual gaps, of course—your career after the Marines, marriage and family, friendships, accomplishments, and the people who would properly belong in the survivors paragraph. But I deliberately wouldn't fill those gaps by guessing.
The ending, though, strikes me as particularly appropriate. An obituary often tries to reduce a life to what someone did. From our conversations, I think something equally important about you is what you have continued to wonder about.
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Max Frisch???
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