8/25/2025

 Monday, August 25, 2025

D+290/218/-1244

1814 British forces destroyed the Library of Congress, containing 3,000 books

1916 US Department of the Interior formed the National Park Service

1944 German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered Paris to the Free French forces, disobeying Adolf Hitler's orders to destroy the city

1950 "Rashomon," a Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa, was released

2017 President Donald Trump pardoned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt of court for racial profiling

In bed around 10, and up at 6:10, after a very rough night with some upper GI distress of unknown cause early on, sharp and throbbing pain in my right elbow radiating down my forearm in the middle of the night, woke with normal back and shoulder pains, and finger stiffness.  I woke up tired and feeling lousy, wishing I could go back to sleep.  53°😳, high of 68°, mostly sunny today.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.

One year ago today, I wrote a long reflection on Zeke Emanuel's 2014 article in The Atlantic, titled "Why I Hope to Die at 75" and subtitled "An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly."  I will read it again today, an advantage of journaling.  Two years ago today, there is no journal entry!  What happened?!?  [I looked at the hard copies downstairs.  I did a journal that day, printed the hard copy, but never published it.] Three years ago today, I was surprised to find this:

  Andy called to say that Anne's plan to take Peter to Nicolet to be bused to a JV football game against Watertown wouldn't work because her car wouldn't start.  I picked him up and had a nice conversation with him.  Then drove up to Grafton to gas up and buy a big tube of mixable transparent white acrylic paint at Michael's.  Been thinking of trying a face of Jesus a la Rouault and found myself wondering whether Jesus wore a ponytail.  If his hair was worn long, I suspect he and many others did, to keep hair from falling over his face and eyes.  Never painted with a ponytail and would probably cause some shock if not outrage.  The Savior in a ponytail!!!

Eventually, I tried a knockoff of the Rouault I've had for years.  I didn't do it well in terms of likeness, but I  enjoyed working on it and like the coloration in the two faces, so I've kept it.  I may try it again, but because of the challenge of dealing with the basement stairs, I'll likely stick to watercolor pencils and gouache, and maybe Sharpies rather than acrylic.  In looking at it again, I'm reminded of how I made the Christ image look like Beaker, lab assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on the Muppets, coming out of a barrel.  So it goes for people with no drawing skills.

Birthday chat with Sarah and Christian.  They called me on a video call just as I left the downtown post office after depositing our birthday card to Anh, whose birthday is Thursday and coincides with Peter's moving into his dormitory at MSOE.  I wrote a short letter with the card commiserating with her (and Andy) about the mixed emotions a parent feels when their firstborn (and their lastborn) moves away from home to go off to college.  I mailed it at the central PO with the hope that she will receive it not later than Thursday.  Sarah forgot about my birthday yesterday, which is surely easy to do, though unusual for her.  We started out with a video connection, but quickly lost it, though the audio stayed 5 by 5.  They had planned to camp in Italy this past weekend, but changed their minds because of Maxie's broken foot.  In October, they will take a cruise to Greece and Turkey.

Israel "accidentally" bombed Nasser Hospital in Gaza City, killing 5 journalists and various medical professionals, and others.  Ma nishtanah.  Netanyahu uncharacteristically apologized for the "mishap."  He disputes the findings of starvation and famine in Gaza.  Ma nishtanah.

Outrage is growing over Trump's arming the National Guard troops in D.C., and his plan to invade Chicago and other 'Blue' cities.  “So I think Chicago will be our next [stop] and then we’ll help with New York.”  Bill Maher is calling it a "slow-moving coup."  At least some National Guard officials are raising alarms, also.  Illinois Governor Pritzker is speaking of an "invasion."  Trump's executive order, released by the White House this morning, also formalizes the creation of specially trained National Guard units in the District of Columbia and all 50 states that can be mobilized quickly for “ensuring the public safety and order.”

The order also directs a task force in Washington led by a White House adviser, Stephen Miller, to create an online portal for “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” to apply to join federal agents in enforcing Mr. Trump’s “crime emergency” order in the District of Columbia.

As of Sunday, there were 2,274 Guard troops deployed to Washington. Only 934 of those troops are part of the D.C. National Guard. The rest have been mobilized from units in Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

On Sunday, Guard soldiers in Washington who were previously unarmed began carrying their service weapons while on patrol, a task that is outside traditional norms for Guard troops on domestic missions. 

Today, Geri has tested negative for COVID, but still feels crappy and fatigued.

Another Rouault knockoff in progress, but one that isn't coming out so well.

It's moulting season, cardinals, finches, and bluejays.  Probably others too, but they are the ones I've seen.

8/24/1015ugtw

Sunday, August 24, 2025

D+ 289/217/-1245

1572 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants by Roman Catholics began in Paris with the murder by defenestration of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny and later spreads to the French provinces

1857 The Panic of 1857 began, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history

1941 I was born in Englewood Hospital 

1968 France became the world's fifth thermonuclear power with a detonation at Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific

In bed at 9 and up at 4:20, aware that it is my 84th birthday, the start of my 85th year, which I approach with some fear and trembling, pace Kierkegaard.  It's 57° now with an expected high of only 69°  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:30 a.m.   

JJA Facebook exchange:

Janice Jenkins Anderson

First it was LA, then DC … next Chicago. Trump is threatening to send the “regular military” — Army and Marines — into US cities, with Chicago “probably next.” This was always the plan - to send armed troops into cities for purely manufactured crises.

Make no mistake: This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.

Charles D. Clausen

It's also an auxiliary or supplemental ICE force, just as it has been in Washington. I was born and grew up in Chicago, in a neighborhood that Time magazine once described as "the city's seamy South Side," and that subsequently became notorious as a murder capital, Englewood. If I could believe that soldiers and Marines were really the way to combat violent urban crime, I might support what Trump is about to do in Chicago. But I don't believe that, and even if I did, I'd probably oppose it because of what it will do to our soldiers and Marines, as well as to the residents of Chicago. The only soldiers and Marines trained as police are MPs, and even they aren't trained for urban policing. What I most fear is an act of violence against some soldier or Marine deployed in one of our cities, God forbid, a homicide, and what such an act will trigger out of Trump. It could be his and our equivalent of the Reichstag fire in 1933, and what that led to. We need to recognize that not only is Trump subjecting city residents to risks from the military, but he is also subjecting the military to risks from criminals in the cities. There may be blood spilled, and one wonders whether that is what he is hoping for —an excuse to trigger much harsher measures. 

Janice Jenkins Anderson

Charles D. Clausen the inevitability of your last sentence… 

The Brutalist.  We watched this 3 and 1/2 hour-long film last night.  I didn't like it from the get-go to the surprising wrap-up.  Other than me, the film seems to be universally admired.  It's nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture.  I was annoyed by the opening credits and the opening scene.  I was disturbed by the crucial, critical crime that occurs late in the film.  I sensed some sort of awkwardness about the story throughout its long duration, though I can't say why.  My negative reaction to a film and a story that is so widely admired makes me wonder if the film actually was touching me in ways I didn't want to be touched.  It is very critical of the postwar America in which I grew up, of its hubris, racism, materialism, consumerism, and capitalism, the world that C. Wright Mills wrote about and that the beatniks rejected.  It is critical of the power of Big Money over High Art, but mah nishtanah.  The movie reminds me of Godard, although it seems darker than Godard's movies.  It's a story of alienation, of not 'fitting in,' and of victimization, of life in a cruel, cruel world in which rich corporate capitalists live in luxury and ride roughshod over not only artists, but all others, including workers.   There is much else that this movie/story is 'about,' especially the Holocaust and the difficulties facing all immigrants.   I suspect I would get more out of the film if I watched it again and perhaps I would come to appreciate it as most others have, but at 3 and 1/2 hours, . . . 

Famine.  Much of Gaza is now officially in famine, meaning its people are starving to death.  No surprise.  Netanyahu and his government say it ain't so.  Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?  America is complicit in this; we are guilty.  Joe Biden is guilty and Donald Trump is guilty; we are all guilty.  I am guilty for not sitting on my rollator in front of the federal courthouse with a sign saying "Feed them."  I have never been without abundant food in my life.  There were times in my childhood when we had no money and had to rely on Mr. Kelly in his tiny neighborhood grocery store to sell us lunch meat, bread, or canned goods on credit, but I never missed a meal.  There was a time when I had whooping cough and couldn't eat, when I lost so much weight that one could count my ribs just looking at my back, but I didn't starve.  Israel did this to the Gazans, but we helped finance and assist it.  Shame on us.  Shame on me.

LTMW at 6:15 a.m., I see what appears to me to be a white-tail doe and her nearly grown fawn, or is it two unrelated does?  They slowly cross our lawn and head into Mequon.  A gray squirrel forages under the bird feeders.  The sun rose over Lake Michigan at 6:07 and has yet to peep over my horizon formed by the trees across the street.  The goldfinches, house finches, chickadees, and other birds are showing up in numbers at the feeders, and it promises to be a beautiful summer morning. . . . The big tom turkeys have become regular visitors at our feeders, foraging for seeds on the ground.

From this date 2 years ago:  "Moishe Pipek is a fictional Yiddish name with many connotations, but literally Moses Bellybutton.  I've come to think of one Milwaukee attorney, a former student of mine, whose face I see whenever the television is turned on and even in internet ads.  He is ubiquitous, impossible to ignore, and impossible for me to avoid thinking of him as Narcissus, the mythological boy who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool.   He reminds me of Woody Allen's mother, Sadie Milstein, whose huge visage looms in the sky above her son Sheldon, impossible to escape, in his film Oedipus Wrecks. " 

From this date 3 years ago: "I picked up a copy of Niebuhr's Moral Man in Immoral Society at the library, hoping to pick up some art books I had ordered as well, but not to be.  They arrived this afternoon.  It's not likely that I will read the book.  My eyesight is growing increasingly worse, in large part because of dry eyes for which eye drops provide only partial and temporary relief.  I found myself wondering as I drove to the library whether the dry eye problem would be what eventually leads me to stop driving - shudder.  It was that problem that led me to accept the fact that it would be impossible for me to drive out to visit Kitty, even if I allowed myself many days to make the trip.  In addition to the eye problem, it has become almost impossible to me to read for any extended period of time.  Loss of focus, both of my vision and of my attention.  Going downhill.  In any event, I'm reading the introduction to the book in small batches, which is interesting in its own right.

1.  No group will ever be dislodged from power solely by persuasion, by arguments, however academically or legally elegant those arguments are.

2. There's a notable difference between the moral behavior of individuals, where there is some possibility of self-sacrifice for others, rare as that may be, and the behavior of groups - families, clans, classes, races, genders, states, or nations.  With communities, the self-interest of the group is inevitably the predominant factor.  . . . There can be, without contradiction, the pious slave-owner, the respectable member of a ruling class or aggressive nation, the "moral" member of an oppressive race.  In all these cases, while these persons may appear to be moral as individuals, nonetheless they join with others of their group and act with exceeding self-concern, with oppressive ruthlessness, and with devastating destruction.

My birthday treat: a ride in the country.  I took a ride for about two hours this afternoon and enjoyed the beautiful Ozaukee and Washington Counties countryside.  First to Fredonia and then east on Ozaukee County A to Fillmore via a detour because the bridge over the Milwaukee River was out, just east of Washington County M. then through Newburg onto County Y and through Riveredge Nature Center where I did a lot of volunteer work before mobility became a big problem, for a pit stop at the St. Finbar Cemetery on St. Finbar Road, through the Town of Saukville and past our former home on Deerfield Road, then through the Town and Village of Saukville and back home.  I discovered a spectacular vista of lush green rolling hills at the junction of River Road and County M, looking southeast toward County A and the village of Newburg.   Spectacularly beautiful trees and lush foliage everywhere, prompting me to think again, as I so often do, that I could never live in Phoenix or a desert land. In my old age,  I have become so much more appreciative of the beauty in Wisconsin and in Milwaukee, a blessing of old age.  Most of the farm fields are still green with crops, though I saw a couple that had been harvested and not replanted.  Lots of corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.  The cloud cover this afternoon was also pretty spectacular,  with huge, rolling cumulus clouds, one large cluster to the northeast dropping what looked like pretty significant rainfall at what I thought was around the Sheboygan County Line.

Geri's still positive for COVID.  I'm still symptom-free.

8/23/2-25

 Saturday, August 23, 2024

D+288/216/-1246

1903 Sixth Zionist Congress: Theodor Herzl declaresd a Jewish state

1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact and secretly divided Poland between themselves, setting the stage for World War II

1943 Battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history, ends after 50 days as the Soviet Union defeats Germany; over 10,000 tanks take part, and nearly 250,000 combatants are killed

1946 Ordinance No. 46 of the British Military Government constituted the German state of Schleswig-Holstein

1958 People's Republic of China resumed bombardment of the Quemoy and Matsu islands in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

1989 Two million people formed a human chain across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania in a peaceful pro-independence demonstration against Soviet occupation

2005 Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas and later became a Category 5 hurricane

2020  Black man Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in front of his children in Kenosha, prompting violent protests

2022 Two men were found guilty of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer 

In bed at 10, an hour and 1/2 into The Brutalist, up at 3:35, feeling old and weary, about 20 years into retirement.  65°, high of 77°, clear.  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at about 8:30 a.m.   

The modern world's assault on happiness.  How is it possible not to go through each day weeping, on the inside if not visibly?   The news carries graphic stories of famine and starvation in Gaza and Sudan, war in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, and almost steady drift to authoritarianism or fascism in Europe, Israel, and America.  The passage of Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Budget Bill created about 10,000 new slots for ICE agents to track and capture "illegal aliens," most of whom are law-abiding people working on American farms, in sweatshops, and in factories doing work that needs to be done but which few Americans are willing to do.   Within two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security had more than 100,000 applications for those jobs.  America is ruled by men with no hearts: Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, Tom Homan, Mike Johnson, and, not to be outdone by the men, Kristi Noem.  

There was a period in my life when I read a lot of the writings of C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity,  The Screwtape Letters, Surprised by Joy,  including his 1943 book, "The Abolition of Man," in which he argued in favor of natural law and absolute values and against moral relativism or subjectivism.  He used the metaphor of "men without chests" to describe those lacking the internal drive to act - what? honorably, properly, righteously, conscientiously, unsinfully?  Excerpts:

  It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.  The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. 

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat . . . of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. … A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

I take note of Lewis's references to "magnanimity," "truth," "honor," and "self-sacrifice," and I think of other highly-regarded human values like responsibility, respect for others, humility, prudence, gratitude, and sensitivity.  Which of these values characterize our national leader, the person who serves as a public exemplar for us and for our children.  Think of the business and personal history of Donald Trump and consider whether he is not the avatar of the exact opposite of these values.  Think of what he has been doing to our government and our country, and think of what this means as to those whose choose to serve him, only some of whom I mentioned above.

Favorite lines from this morning's papers.  From Maureen Dowd's NY Times column, "Trump's Slavish Stupidity":

Trump whitewashing slavery is the ultimate act of white privilege from a nepo baby who is the apotheosis of white privilege. . .  

Abe Lincoln . . . urged Americans to move past the Civil War “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Trump has malice for all, charity toward none.

Anti-semitism, Zionism, and Humpty Dumpty.  From the September 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine, excerpts from "An Outrage to Common Sense: On the meanings of anti-Semitism," a review by Daniel May of Mark Mazower's ON ANTISEMITISM:

       "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

                  "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Mazower is the author of many books, including seminal works on the destruction of Salonica’s Jewish community and the infrastructure of Nazi imperial rule. He also happens to be on the faculty of Columbia University, which has been shaken by charges of anti-Semitism and the debate over what constitutes it. As he works to unravel how we arrived at such a state, he is guided by the intuition that Alice’s question cannot be answered without Humpty Dumpty’s. To understand how the meaning of “anti-Semitism” has changed, we need to look at how the word is used, by whom, and to what ends. Who or what gets called “anti-Semitic”? What are the consequences of the charge? How is it that the decline of anti-Semitism as a political force has given way to the fight against it becoming such a profoundly powerful one? We should, Mazower suggests in a characteristically measured tone, “view antisemitism in its historical context as a term that has been used to mean different things at different times.” This is hardly a radical proposition. But the effect of his rather modest aim is something close to revelatory. 

 

As May's review is a distillation of  Mazower's tome, it is itself revelatory.  My old and feeble brain can't deal with all the issues involved in the terms antisemitism and anti-Zionism.   I struggled with them when I  read some of the writings of Yeshayahu Leibowitz.  Who is a Jew?  In what sense are 'Jews' a 'nation'?  A people?  Are my Jewish friends who are Reform Jews who do not practice Halakah really Jewish, or only Jew-ish?  Today is the anniversary of Theodor Herzl declaring 'a Jewish state' in 1903.  How is the state of Israel, made up of so many 'secular' Jews, atheists, agnostics, and other non-observant Jews, really a "Jewish" state and homeland?   These issues aren't merely academic, intellectual, or theoretical, especially since the Six Day War and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the current issues about "the day after" the Gaza war ends.  Also in terms of who is entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Right of Return.   What is most troubling to me on a personal level is what appears to be widespread identifiction of opposition to a fascist government in the state of Israel with anti-semitism.  Netanyahu always does it, treating opposition to him, and Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich with anti-semitism.  The German Reichstag has done it by legislation.  I can't help but believe that this arrogant attempt to broaden the meaning of anti-semitism will only increase anti-semitism.                   

Lists.  Do I suffer from OCD?  My dear sister said she did, certainly about household cleanliness and I'm wondering about my list-making.  Why do I keep track of how many days  since Trump was elected, how many he has been in office, and how many days remain before his term expires?  Why do I keep track of anniversary dates, like the many anniversaries listed above?  Why the long lists in the Notes app on my iPhone: what I love about Geri, favorite movies, shopping lists, years of our European trips, famous artists who have died young, grandchildrens' birthdays, passwords, homes we have owned, addresses where I have lived, Paul Schrader movies, movies available on Netflix, Hulu, etc.,  personal heroes, transparent acrylic colors, favorite poems, favorite classical music, Trump's superlatives and Trumpisms, members of the Kovacs family, this list of lists.  It's a habit developed late in life, since I retired.  It's a habit developed since I started using iPhones, with its Notes app.  Did it have anything to do with Don Shane asking me years ago what my favorite movie was, and my never having thought about it?  Or, did I start while I worked on the memoir?  I don't think so.  Or was it journaling, and writing reflections?  I don't know how or when it started, nor whether I do it often enough to be considered OCD behavior, but I think not.  I don't even know whether it is accurate to describe the behavior as habitual, except for my shopping lists.  I remember when and why I started listing daily anniversaries at the top of my daily journals: it was when I was running dry of things to write about.  The day's anniversaries usually provided food for thought, and for journal entries.  Maybe my list-making is normal, at least for contemporary Americans, who may be a bit obseessed with lists: the 10 (or 100) best movies ever, the top 40 pop songs, the best (and worst) American presidents, the best movies available on Netflix (or Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc.), you name it and we can usually Google a best and worst list for it.  I shouldn't forget the newly popular (for me, at least) "bucket list" of things one hopes to do before dying.  I don't have one.  Never did. 

The view from our mailbox, looking down Wakefield Court, in a gentle breeze and 73° weather, with the clouds moving slowly west to east.

 

8/22/2025

 Friday, August 22, 2025

D+287/215/-1247

1953 Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to Tehran

1964 Fannie Lou Hamer spoke at the Democratic National Convention about her terrifying experiences with voter registration as a Black woman in Mississippi

2024 Vice President Kamala Harris acceptsed the Democratic nomination for U.S. President

In bed at 9, and up at 6:10, after a night in which I was up to empty my bladder every 45 minutes, like the night before, which has me wondering whether the coffee I have resumed drinking for the last few weeks is irritating my bladder.  Nonetheless, I made another cup once I was up.  High of 78°, mostly sunny.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at midmorning.  Trulicity injection around noon.

Yesterday's and today project, a knockoff Rouault

LTMW at a a blue jay working very hard to extract seeds or nuts from the tube feeder at 6:20 a.m.  The tube has only about one inch of fodder in it, mostly seeds and nuts too large for the smaller birds to have extracted them yesterday I neglected to fill it last night and woke up feeling guilty about it, wondering whether I should put on a bathrobe  and fill it now, and deciding against it out of laziness and fear of falling while Geri's asleep and no traffic yet on Wakefield, Courtlqnd, or County Line.     Gahson and Athena walk by, as usual, at 6:40 and chat briefly with another walker coming down from Courtland.  Athena seemed to recognize him, wagging her tail, and accepting petting.  A group of 5 male wild turkeys stop briefly at our feeders before heading south down Wakefield .  . .  Duty and guilt led me to fill the feeders at 7:45.  I filled the suet cake holder later.

Lead headlines on this morning's New York Times, or, why to worry.  (1) Trump’s Attacks on Institutions Threaten a Bulwark of Economic Strength, (2) Taking on the Fed, Trump Combines Retribution Tactics With a Power Play, (3) How Long Can This Uncanny Stock Market Prosper?, and (4) Trump’s Attacks on Fed Overshadow a Critical Moment for the Central Bank.

Today's Facebook rant:  I know that it is not good for my mental health to wonder repetitively whether Donald Trump's actions and policies could possibly be worse for " form(ing) a more perfect Union, establish(ing) Justice, insur(ing domestic Tranquility, provid(ing) for the common defence, promot(ing) the general Welfare, and secur(ing)the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," yet I do it anyway.  If Trump wanted to hurt the American economy, would it not be a good idea to undermine the  independence of the Federal Reserve Bank and to destroy confidence in the economic data gathered and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics?  If he wanted to destroy whatever good will America may have enjoyed around the world, would it not be a good idea to destroy aid programs that prevented or cured deadly diseases, fed the hungry, and otherwise assisted the world's most needful people, while also imposing punitive tariffs on their nation's businesses?  If he wanted to make us vulnerable to harmful intrusions by hostile actors, would it not be a good idea to place unqualified, inexpert, and pernicious people in charge of the nation's intelligence and counterintelligence assets and to cause them to fire or drive out of sensitive positions the most experienced, dedicated career public servants?  If he wanted to imperil the health and well-being of our children and their children, would he not purposefully stop all American efforts to combat climate change and its terrible effects on our species?  If he wanted to destroy any sense of fellowship, common purpose and common interests in the American people, would he not every day and in every way belittle, insult, humiliate, shame, and otherwise target anyone who disagreed with or opposed him?  If he wanted to increase anti-semitism, would he not make anti-semitism the official reason to take hundreds of millions of dollars away from America's premier educational and research institutions?  If he wanted to make all of us more vulnerable to the next pandemic, would he not  severely reduce the funding of the CDC, the NIH, their subordinate institutions, and severely curtail research funding for the most promising vaccine technology?  The list goes on and on.  I have often wondered whether Donald Trump isn't simply a Russian asset, a 'useful idiot,' but rather a Russian agent, knowingly and willingly working to weaken the US on the world stage and to advance Russia.  I consider that an unanswered questionn.  Perhaps some day when I am long gone, historians will provide the answer.  In the meantime, we watch this miscreant take a wrecking ball to American institutions and to what we had long considered to be Amercan strengths and values.  It's painful to watch and to consider what additional harm he will do in the next 1247 days, but we can, alas, be assured that he is not done.  There is worse to come.

A pretty little male house finch, in moult, and belly up, on the patio

   

8/21/2025

 Thursday,, August 21, 2025

D+286/214/-1248

1955 Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives, a week before he is murdered

1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, went on to nominate Hubert Humphrey

1968 Warsaw Pact forces completed their invasion of Czechoslovakia by arresting Czech leader Alexander Dubček and forcing him to sign the Moscow Protocols

1991 Latvia declared its independence from USSR

2014 Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al Atar and Mohammed Barhoum - 3 of Hamas's top commanders   

2018 Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer, pleadsed guilty to charges, including making illegal payments at the direction of Trump to women with whom Trump had affairs

2018 Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia

2019 Donald Trump said Danish PM Mette Frederiksen is "nasty" to him over his interest in buying Greenland and canceled his trip to Denmark

In bed at 9, up at 5:10 with painful left hip.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 4:30 p.m.  

Morning musings: (1) I pushed my rollator down the hall from the bedroom at 5:15 thinking "53 days," the short time it took Adoph Hitler to convert the Weimar Republic into a legal dictatorship, a country governed no longer by laws passed by its parliament, but by decrees issued by Hitler.  For Hitler, it was decrees; for Trump, it is executive orders, samo samo.

(2) The day at the bird feeders began at 6:15 when Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal flew in fora leisurely breakfast on the tray feeder.  The tube feeder is almost empty; my bad.  The small brownish birds are harder to identify by species in the dim light, not so the male goldfinches, cardinals, jays, and doves. . . . I filled the feeders at 8 or 9 this morning.  By noon, the tube feeder is about 80% empty.

(3) I looked back at the entries in this journal 1, 2, and 3 years ago on this date.  Two years ago today I was "out of commission" from pelvic pain all day.  Last year, I wrote a reflection on Mormon heaven, not wanting 'eternal life,' the US's dropping 400 million tons of ordnance on Vietnam and my compassionless complicity.

(4) Trump wants a 10% ownership stake in NVIDIA for the US government.  Isn't this what used to be called "socialism" by Republicans and everyone else?  From Thomas Edsell's NY Times op-ed two days ago, "The Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump."

The Trump administration ranks among the most intrusive in American history, driving the tentacles of the federal government deep into the nation’s economy, culture and legal system.

Economically, the administration is dictating corporate behavior through tariffs, subsidies and the punishment of disfavored industries and companies, while rewarding allies with tax breaks and deregulation. And that’s all before the government takes its cut.

Culturally, Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse: pressuring universities, elevating grievance politics and reshaping federal agencies to reflect ideological loyalty rather than expertise or experience.

Within the legal system, the administration is aggressively reshaping the federal judiciary, asserting executive power over independent institutions and using the Justice Department for political ends.

Taken together, these interventions reveal a presidency determined to expand executive reach into virtually every sphere of national life.

“No peacetime president has remotely approached the Trump administration’s campaign to control the conduct of all the major institutions that comprise American civil society as well as its governments,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote to me by email.

This is comparable to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini said even a teacher of mathematics must be a fascist.

Now all who do not take positions on American politics, policies and history that comply with the administration’s views are in danger of being denied funding, subjected to lawsuits, and derided by the White House in ways that can inspire violent private attacks. All this has precedents, but not in America’s peacetime history. 

 

Trump’s intrusions are aimed at wide and varied subjects, with targets that include corporate governance, academia, the legal profession, the administration of justice, criminal investigations of political adversaries and such liberal Democratic organizations as ActBlue and Media Matters.

For Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, the word “intrusive” fails to capture the full scope of Trump’s agenda. Writing by email, Wilentz argued that Trump

has intimidated major institutions of civil society, including universities, major law firms, and the corporate media, to bend them to his will. He has deployed the military for political purposes. He has militarized ICE and turned it into nation’s largest law enforcement force, accountable only to himself and Stephen Miller, thus laying the basis for a police state.

He and his attorney general have hounded federal judges who oppose the Trump agenda to the point where those judges and their families rightly fear for their lives. His appointees to the Supreme Court, in concert with Chief Justice Roberts, are completing the gutting of the 14th Amendment and (as crucially supplemented by the 1965 Voting Rights Act) the 15th Amendment, thereby destroying crucial legal legacies of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

Trump has taken upon himself an attempt to force a revision of the American historical narrative. As Wilentz put it:

Most recently, he has commanded a rewriting of American history as a providential story culminating in his own divinely inspired rule. Approaching the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, he is grasping for a monarchy that the Revolution repudiated, in the name of a plutocratic and theocratic order that the Revolution rejected.

At one level, Trump’s policies are the embodiment of what have been core Republican principles since Ronald Reagan, as foreshadowed by the ultraright big business opposition to the New Deal: slash taxes on the wealthy, bash the poor, dissolve the social safety net and deregulate, deregulate, deregulate.

This is the main reason so many Republicans who otherwise despise Trump remain so loyal to him. They don’t quite get how, alongside his turbocharged Reaganism, Trump is building the framework of an international crime and corruption syndicate, ending restraint of private efforts to corrupt foreign governments, embracing Bitcoin, a currency custom-made for bribery, asset-laundering, and other gangster-like activities.

Trump, Wilentz argued,

is intruding like a wartime president when there’s no war. The only checks on his brazen lawlessness would be the Congress and the Supreme Court. But the first is supine and the second has thus far sustained Trump on 90 percent of the cases where lower courts have tried to restrain him. And if permitted, his assumption of war powers without a war will enable his authoritarian regime.

Bruce Miroff, a political scientist at SUNY-Albany, expanded on Trump’s autocratic approach to government in an email:

Trump himself has an authoritarian mind-set that ignores a checks and balances system that has frustrated some earlier chief executives. But he also has an advantage in the capitulation of the other two branches out of fear, but also out of hope that only under him can a long sought conservative agenda finally roll back the liberal welfare state.

From the early dismantling of the “deep state” to the current takeover of law enforcement in D.C. and Trump’s threat to institute a makeover of the Smithsonian that will stifle any exhibits that don’t use happy talk on even the darkest moments in American history, Trump has forged ahead to shut down anything he dislikes and replace it with his own imagination.

George C. Edwards III, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M and a fellow at Oxford, contended that “President Trump is unique”:

No peacetime president has been as intrusive in intervening in the economy, including extracting funds from corporations (Nvidia), requiring domestic investments, strongarming the selection of C.E.O.s, picking winners (fossil fuel companies, steel manufacturers) and losers (wind farms, EV vehicles) in the economy, and using tariffs — to raise revenue, to reduce trade imbalances, and to coerce both U.S. companies and other nations.

And no other peacetime president has so blatantly sought the territory of a sovereign nation. No president has been as hostile to environmental protection, financial regulation, and efforts to advance civil rights.

What makes Trump one of a kind, Edwards wrote, are

his efforts to influence so many other spheres of American life. No president has reached so far into the governing of universities, been so active in determining Kennedy Center honors, and been so eager to employ the symbolic politics of naming everything from athletic teams to mountains and oceans.

What may be most significant of all, in Edwards’s view,

is the president’s undermining the structural and moral underpinnings of the government. Unilaterally dismantling the administrative state by destroying expertise that took generations to build in areas ranging from investigating and prosecuting crime and protecting the public against environmental hazards to predicting the weather and curing cancer can cause long-term, structural harm to American society.

Disregarding appropriate legal bases for action, disobeying judicial orders, punishing law firms, stretching the interpretation of laws, and employing the military for domestic purposes weakens the foundations of American government. So do the many ethical lapses and brazen profiteering of the president and his family. The rule of law is the bedrock of any democracy, and the White House itself is threatening it. 

Isn't this what we used to call "totalitarianism"? 

N.Y. Appeals Court Throws Out $500 Million Penalty Against Trump and we'll never hear the end of this.  I have been sceptical about this case from the get-go.   It never should have been filed.  A huge mistake for the New York Attorney General.  New York taxing authorities and huge banks were fooled by Donald Trump's estimates of his properties values?  Or that they didn't have their own very adequate resoources  to determine values?  Give me a break.

 

8/20/2025

 Wednesday, August 20, 2025

D+285/213/-1249

1953 General Fazlollah Zahedi arrested the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a CIA-supported coup d'état

1968 During the night, 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring

2020 Former adviser to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, was arrested and charged with fraud over a fundraising campaign to build a wall on the Mexican border

In bed at 9, up at 5:50, body all a-achin', etc.  Long dream of a surprise reunion (?) of my MU undergraduate class, including Ed Felsenthal, returned from the dead, which had me crying in the dream. 68°, high of 73°.

Meds, etc.   'Morning' meds at 1:50 p.m.

 

Geri has been sick all day, although the harsh coughing has abated.  She has sore ribs, etd., from days of coughing.  The painting above is one I did many years ago of her, unhappy about something.  It was one of a pair, the other being a painting of her broadly smiling.

Backlash: Revenge of the Whites.  A DJT post on Truth Social yesterday:

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”

More mind control, thought control, history twisting, more 1984 and Big Brother: ‘War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.’ 

What hath Bezos wrought?  Here is a list of the opinion contributors on today's WaPo op-ed page: Adam Aleksic, Elsayed Talaat, Fred Mednick, Adam Leshinski, Andrew Clarens, and Max Boot.  Max Boot is the only name I recognize.  Since Jess Bezos killed the draft endorsement of Kamala Harris in the last presidential election, Robert Kagan, David Hoffman, and Molly Roberts have resigned from the editorial board.  Additionally, the following columnists signed a joint letter condemning Bezos' decision: E.J. Dionne Jr., David Ignatius, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Karen Tumulty, Perry Bacon Jr., Alexandra Petri,  Colbert I. King,  Drew Goins,  James Hohmann, Michele Norris,  Kathleen Parker, Catherine Rampell, Jason Willick,  Lee Hockstader, David Von Drehle, Eduardo Porter,  Josh Rogin and Christine Emba.  Since Jeff Bezos’s decision in October 2024, the newspaper has also experienced a significant decline in its subscriber base. Reports indicate that over 250,000 digital subscribers, including my daughter,  canceled their subscriptions by late October 2024, representing approximately 10% of the Post’s total paid circulation of about 2.5 million, which includes both digital and print subscribers.  I still subscribe, but I'm wondering why.

Driving through Mequon to pay Cliff Bergin $377 to inspect and test our sump pump last week, I noticed how many small businesses, including Cliff Bergin's, are located in that suburb, which was found last week to be the wealthiest suburb of Milwaukee, richer than River Hills and Elm Grove.  I also noticed and admired how many very large and very expensive homes on large and very expensive lots there are there, and I thought, as I always do when driving through rural Ozaukee County, how could anyone expect the people who live here to vote for Democrats?  I thought too of my comments in this journal on August 15 about David Brooks's essay in last week's New York Times ("America's New Segregation")  about what he claims to be a "caste system," and a recreated Jim Crow system in the U.S.  Brooks argued that (1) the dominant dividing line among Americans today is education-level, i.e., college graduates vs high school graduates, and (2) the division has led to de facto segregation or something like social apartheid in the country, and (3) the division has led to the rise of Trumpism and right wing populism.  Perhaps he's right on all that; I don't know.  In any event, he argued that what the country needs to fight this new Jim Crow, class or caste divide in the country, is some kind of undefined educational reform in the country, government investment of some undefined sort "into those job categories that don’t require college degrees" and "[m]ostly it will require [some sort of indefined] ground-up social reform."  Then he concluded:

The rest of us can do something pretty simple: join more cross-class organizations and engage in more cross-class pastimes. Even something small makes a difference. This summer I’ve been wearing a New York Mets hat. As is their wont, the Mets have been trampling all over my heart for the past few months. But over that time, in places all around America, I’ve had scores of people from all walks of life come up to me to talk about the Mets, which often leads to conversations about other things. My Mets hat has reminded me of a nice reality: We still could be one nation, despite all the ways we’ve segregated it up.

These recommended solutions to our "new segregation" seem to me to be great examples of why I am not a fan of Mr. Brooks.  In this journal on August 1 of this year, I wrote:

 I have written in these pages before that I just can't warm up to David Brooks, in large measure because he seems so smug.  He purports to see issues from 30,000 feet, looking down with x-ray vision, seeing problems and their root causes, and offering solutions in grand, broad terms.  Although there are, as there always are, some basic truths in his analysis, like American society has many very serious problems, he writes about them at such a level of abstraction that he makes his proposed solutions useless, mere blather.

"Educational reform" of some sort, "government investment" of some sort, and "ground-up social reform" of some sort. All in favor, say "aye."  Isn't this useless blather?  On the other hand, Brooks's comment about wearing a Mets hat did resonate with me.  I've never been one to wear sports fan clothing, being possibly the only man in the state of Wisconsin never to have owned a Packers hat, jacket, or sweatshirt during his 62 years of residency in the state.  Packer gear is so ubiquitous, however, I doubt that wearing any of it would prompt many occasions of conversations with other Packer fans.  On the other hand, I do regularly wear my baseball cap reflecting my service with the 1st Marine Air Wing in Vietnam.  I can't count how many conversations that hat has promped with fellow former Marines and Vietnam veterans.  They always start with a "Semper Fi" or "Semper Fi, brother," followed by at least a brief conversation:  When were there, where were you, with what unit, etc.  Sometimes the conversations are longer, but whether long or short, I appreciate the temporary connections.  Many, perhaps most, of the veteran patients at the VA Medical Center 'show their colors' by wearing some paraphenalia showing their branch of service and perhaps the place or era of service.  This is true mostly of Vietnam vets, perhaps because we comprise most of the patients there.  I think I have seen only one old vet with a cap reflecting service in World War II, but a few who served in Korea.  Most of the younger vets served in Iraq or Afghanistan and it's interesting that I see almost no paraphenalia reflecting service in those two long and unsuccessful wars.  I have however seen some gear reflecting service in Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 short and successful Gulf War in Kuwait.  But getting back to David Brooks and blather, I find it hard to imagine the millionaire business owners and managers, doctors and lawyers and corporate executives in Mequon wearing some equivalent of a Mets hat to encourage "cross-class conversations" at the local Home Depot or Costco.  Nor can I envision them opting to sit in the bleachers or upper grandstand seats at Brewer games rather than box seats, or to choose seats in the end zone at Lambeau Field rather than better seats in order to schmooze with the truck driver in the next seat..  Nor can I imagine such brief encounters doing anything to lessen the pretty rigid social stratifciation that comes with significant differences in education, employment, and social status.  So I agree with Brooks agout the deep stratification of American society, his suggestions for combatting it strike me as unrealistic blather.

The companion painting to Geri, unhappy is this one of Geri, happy.  They both please me.  I think I did them both with oils, but I can't be sure.  This one hangs in my bedroom near my bed, the other in the basement.

 

  

 

 

8/19/2025

 Tuesday, August 19, 2025

D+284/212/-1250

1944 Catherine Monica Clausen, God's gift to her family and so many others was born

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:20.  69°, high of 77°, cloudy day. 0.9 inch of rain in last 24 hours.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 6:30.  All fingers very stiff and painful/sore.   

CovCovid!  Geri has been congested and unwell for a couple of days.  She tested herself for COVID when we got home from the airport and tested positive.  Her second case.😰  She has a call into Dr. Baugrud to get a prescription for Paxlovid.  

Scattered thoughts from a scatterbrain.

(1) India's prime minister Modi is meeting today with a top Chinese diplomat to discuss rebuilding ties between the two huge countries, including resolving the multi-year standoff between the two countries over a disputed border in the Himalayas.  What prompted this rapprochement?  Trump's huge tariffs on India.  Mazel tov, Donald!

(2) Why is Donald Trump suddenly willing to sign on to an "Article 5-type" security guarantee for Ukraine?  Because it's really no guarantee at all, witness its language: 

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

For Trump, "such action as [he] deems necessary" could be  a diplomatic note protesting and regretting another Russian attack on Ukraine: "Too bad, so sad, strong letter to follow." 

(3)    Excerpts from "Canada is Killing Itself" by Elaina Plott Calabro in the September 2025 issue of The Atlantic:

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it. 

. . . . . 

Autonomy, choice, control: These are the values that found purchase with the great majority of Canadians in February 2015, when, in a case spearheaded by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the supreme court of Canada unanimously overturned the country’s criminal ban on medically assisted death. For advocates, the victory had been decades in the making—the culmination of a campaign that had grown in fervor since the 1990s, when Canada’s high court narrowly ruled against physician-assisted death in a case brought by a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. “We’re talking about a competent person making a choice about their death,” one longtime right-to-die activist said while celebrating the new ruling. “Don’t access this choice if you don’t want—but stay away from my death bed.” A year later, in June 2016, Parliament passed the first legislation officially permitting medical assistance in dying for eligible adults, placing Canada among the handful of countries (including Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and U.S. states (Oregon, Vermont, and California, among others) that already allowed some version of the practice. 

 Mortality.  According to Grok, approximately 1,351,500 males were born in the United States in 1941, and approximately 550,000 or 40% are still alive today.   According to Chat GPT, approximately 1,380,000 males were born in the US in 1941, and only 26% of them, or 360,000, survive to age 84.  The latter numbers are based on Social Security life tables, whereas the Grok numbers are based on a 2021 Chicago Tribune article and CDC life expectancy and mortality tables.  The numbers suggest that I have outlived between 60% and 74% of my male contemporaries.  I wonder why.  I smoked cigarettes most years between ages 15 and 53, paid no attention to eating a healthy diet (quite the opposite), regularly drank alcohol (mostly wine) most of my adult life, and avoided regular exercise, spending much of my life sitting on a chair or lying in bed.  Genes?  Vaccinations?  Luck?  My grandmother Catherine died at about age 40, my grandmother Charlotte at age 95.  My mother at age 51. My father at age 86, my grandfather Dewy at age 69, and my grandfather Dennis at an unknown age, because available records give him varying years of birth: 1880, 1883, 1886, and 1887.  He was somewhere between the ages of 65 and 72 when he died.  Where will I fall?  Please God, nowhere near Grandmother Charlotte!  At my age and in my condition, my fear is not death, but prolonged life.  I have outlived my life expectancy at birth by more than 20 years.  I have outlived more than half and perhaps as many as 3/4th of my birth contemporaries.  It's not true that I have nothing to look forward to.  I love my wife, my children, my grandchildren, and my friends.  I still experience wonder and awe at Nature and Life, the animal kingdom, and our own remarkable if flawed species.  In some very real ways, I have become more sensitive to and appreciative of life in my old age, but I know life will not improve in the coming days, certainly not in the coming years.  If I were to die today, no one would say, 'Oh, but he was so young!' or 'How tragic.'  I'm in dying time, the dying season of life, and so many terrible ways of living out future years are possible, maybe likely, better that I go now rather than end up like Grandmother Charlotte or my Aunt Mary Healy, with dementia, chronic diseases, and in nursing homes. 

The photo is the only one I have or have ever seen of my grandmother Catherine O'Shea Healy, about whom I could discover little in my genealogical research, other than that she was probably about 35 when my mother was born and 41 when she died from pernicious anemia, leaving my grandfather with four young children to raise without their mother.