10/21/2025

 Tuesday, October 21, 2025

335 Roman Emperor Constantine the Great ruled that Jews were not allowed to purchase and circumcise Christian slaves

2018 Julia Louis-Dreyfus was fittingly resented with the Mark Twain Prize, comedy's top honor, at a ceremony in New York

2020 the parents of 545 children who were separated at the US-Mexico border cannot be found, according to the American Civil Liberties Union

In bed at 9:15, awake at 5 and onto the LZB where I lay motionless but awake with a myriad of bait bucket thoughts of the Notch House gang, especially of EGFIII, until 6:33 when I got up.  Nasty hip pain during the night and leg/ankle pain when I rose for pit stops.  46°, wind chill  36°, high of 52°.  Again, the male cardinal is the first to arrive at the tray feeder, almost simultaneously with a house finch or song sparrow on the tube feeder.  It's still too dark to tell at 7:15, but today I can clearly identify the beautiful snowbirds searching in the grass below the feeders for whatever the wild turkeys have left  behind

Meds, etc.  Morning meds around 8 a.m.

   

J. D. Vance and Pete Hegeseth at Camp Pendleton.  I watched the videos of J D Vance and Pete Hegseth at Camp Pendleton for the 250th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the USMC, though the anniversary won't occur until November 10th.  Vance wasn't as bad as I thought he would be.  His was just a 'gung ho,' 'oora-heavy, aren't we great speech, with only a small part devoted to Pete Hegseth's bugaboo "diversity" efforts in the military.  Hegseth was more political, always sucking up to Trump and pushing his "Department of War" and "lethality" crap.  

After surviving boot camp at MCRD San Diego in 1944, my Dad did his infantry training, and probably his communications training, at Pendleton.  The Hoang family (less yet-to-be-born Anh) lived at Pendleton after escaping from Vietnam and putting in time at a refugee camp in Thailand.  Pendleton looms large in Marine Corps history and lore, and also in the history of my in-laws.  Yet, I've never set foot in it nor seen it.  Ditto MCAS El Toro, Cherry Point, MCB Camp Lejeune, or MCRD Parris Island.  I did spend about half a year at the historic and important MCB Quantico, 8 months at the 1st MAW headquarters at Danang, a few months at remote MCB Camp Schwab on Okinawa but no time at Camp Hansen or MCAS Futenma, and a few weeks at MCAS Iwakuni, Japan, but none at MCAS Atsugi.  My longest active duty tours were in odd spots: MCAS Yuma, AZ, and NAS Willow Grove, PA.

Text exchange with SCK:

Hi, Steve.  Back on the 9th, you and I exchanged texts sharing our despondencies about over the future.  This part of an article on crime in Chicago in The Atlantic reflects a big part of the problem.  The Democrats are so identified with minorities, especially Blacks,  in the minds of so many White Americans, they find themselves seeming to consider as acceptable status quo conditions that are nonetheless horrendous.  Violent crime rates in urban America is a Black and Brown phenomenon, not ex

Charles Clausen:::  What these politicians refuse to acknowledge is that violent crime in Chicago remains a serious problem, as I heard from residents there on a visit last month. The number of homicides has indeed dropped from a recent peak of 805 in 2021, and stands at 347 so far this year  But New York City, with a population more than three times that of Chicago’s, has recorded 255 homicides in 2025. The most recent homicide tally for Los Angeles, which has about a million more residents than Chicago, stood at 217.  Chicago, in the same year that officials celebrated its “safest summer” in six decades, could end up roughly four times deadlier than New York and twice as deadly as Los Angeles.  Chicago is deeply segregated, and homicides remain a plague for Black and Latino young men, who make up the great majority of the killed and the killers. A study of homicides in Chicago in 2020 and 2021, when the murder rate was even higher, found that young adult males who lived in the city’s most violent zip codes faced a greater risk of gun death than U.S. soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The homicide rates in the deadliest neighborhoods remain dozens of times higher than those of Chicago’s safest, mostly upper-middle-class and white neighborhoods.  In total, Chicago registered  more than 8,000 homicides from 2010 to 2024, and more than 41,000 Chicagoans were wounded by gunfire in that time.

Whoops.  I don’t seem to be able to send the complete message.  Sorry!   I emailed the whole article to you and to Nikki.  It’s depressing as hell.  If you care to read it, you’ll see why  I despise Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA back in 1995, which led so directly to what has happened to Chicago and Milwaukee and so many American cities in the years since.  Fucked by our capitalist corporate overseers.

Steven:::  It's astonishing how quickly it happened before our eyes and took forever to notice. I guess this is one of those things that started in the 70s and kept accelerating worse to what we have now.

Charles Clausen::  Karl Marx had a theory that capitalism contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.  I don’t know, of course, how true that is, but it does seem to me that that is what we are seeing right now before our eyes.  Right along with the slow but accelerating decline and fall of the American Empire.  I guess we’re not in a true nose-dive, but we sure seem to be in a “flat spin” downward.  Jets can pull out of a nose-dive; not so easy to get out of a flat spin.

I'm waiting for our Reichstag fire:  From An Original Thinker of Our Time:  Jeremy Adelman’s ‘Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman’ by Cass R. Sunstein in NYRB, May 23, 2013 issue:

After graduation, Hirschman began to study economics at the University of Berlin, which was of course in the midst of intense political conflict, and which contained a large number of Hitler supporters. In his own account, the situation did not seem truly grave until “the Reichstag fire, which really marked the beginning of the political horror.” 

. . . .  

From yesterday's journal entry:  " Democracy is not what partisans prefer; it is what they settle for." Hirschman.

10/20/2025

 Monday, October 20, 2025

1998 Comedian Richard Pryor received the first-ever Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

2015 Vice President Joe Biden confirmed he will not run for President in 2016

2025 I have an appointment with Dr. Ryzka in the VA Rheumatology Clinic

In bed around 9, up around 6.  41°, wind chill 34°, high of 61°, windy.  Almost cold enough to light a log in the fireplace.   Sunrise is not until 7:11 at 104°ESE, with sunset at 6 p.m., daylight shortening each day by almost 3 minutes, and solar noon at 12:36 p.m.  I wait to see the first bird to arrive at the feeders. . . a male cardinal on the tray feeder at 7:12, then quickly a rarely-to-be-outhustled chickadee on the tube feeder, and a downy woodpecker on a suet cake, early birds getting the seeds.  By 7:21, the finches show up in numbers, and I spot in the as yet crepuscular light what may be the first snowbird of the season. a slate-colored junco feeding on the grass under the feeders.  At 9:15, the posse of Tom turkeys showed up, one of them fanning his tail feathers, strutting, and looking dominant, with a particularly long snood draping down over his beak.  Quite a sight.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at sometime this morning, or was it when I returned from my VA rheumatology clinic appointment.😟   

Trump, the alleged drug smugglers, and death on the high seas.  President Trump has ordered 6 or 7 armed attacks on boats in the Southern Caribbean, sinking the boats and killing their occupants, between 27 and 32 persons.  News and official reports vary on the exact numbers, but there is no doubt about the fact that several vessels have been sunk and their occupants killed by American military weapons.  We don't know the names of the dead or where they were from.  We don't know why they were at sea nor what their cargo, if any, was, other than the government's claim that they were transporting illegal drugs to the United States, more than 1,000 miles away, 600 if we include Puerto Rico.  The government releases videos of the attacks, the news media broadcast them, and we watch them, witnessing state-sanctioned murders on the high seas.  

There are well-established legal protocols for intercepting vessels at sea carrying contraband,  The Coast Guard enforces U.S. and international law on the high seas and in U.S. waters under:

14 U.S.C. § 522 – authorizes Coast Guard officers to board, search, seize, and arrest on the high seas or U.S. waters when enforcing federal law.

Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act (DTVIA, 2008) – criminalizes operating stateless semi-submersibles for illicit trafficking.

Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA, 1986) – allows U.S. jurisdiction over drug smuggling vessels on the high seas, even if the vessel isn’t U.S.-flagged, provided the flag state consents or the vessel is stateless.

Nowhere in American law do we find authorization to blow vessels out of the water and kill all aboard the vessels following no legal protocol, and based only on a suspicion that the vessel is carrying illegal drugs to the U.S.  If the U.S. Coast Guard were legally to intercept a vessel carrying contraband, and to arrest those transporting the contraband, the legal penalties for those arrested do not include the death penalty.  As far as I can see, there is no legal authority for these killings authorized by President Trump.  The killings are lawless homicides.  The military personnel who carry out the killings are parties to lawless homicides.  And we get to watch the homicides in cold blood, i.e., both the killers and  we the watchers.

Today, Columbia's president Gustoavo Petro has explicitly accused the U.S. of murder.  From the NYT:

“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Mr. Petro wrote on social media. He said the man killed in the mid-September attack, Alejandro Carranza, was a “lifelong fisherman” whose boat had experienced damage and was adrift, probably in Colombian waters, at the time of the attack. 

The United Stateas refuses to reveal the evidence it relies on in claiming that the boats and humans it destroys are transporting illegal drugs being transported to the US.  How are American citizens to know whether Trump , a paragon of truthfulness, is lying, or Petro is lying?  The bottom line is that Americans ought to be entitled to know with some degree of certainty the identity of those whom its government is targetting for killing and the legal justification for the killing.

My journal entry 3 years ago re: Carlos Lozada's NYT essay "A Good Faith Examination of Bad Faith. 

 "Lozada writes of "The Rhetoric of Reaction" by Albert O. Hirschman, a book I should try to read.  Lozada: 

" . . . Hirschman was not merely wishing for a more civil public square. He viewed democratic pluralism as a shaky bargain, based not on a consensus over shared values but on a recognition by competing sides that none could achieve political dominance. “Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups,” Hirschman wrote. Democracy is not what partisans prefer; it is what they settle for." (The empasis is mine, not the author's.)

 As I have long believed, at bottom, none of us is all that committed to democracy, majority rule, or the so-called rule of law.  As Woody Allen infamously said "the heart wants what it wants.  There's no logic to these things."  Re "bitterly hostile opposing groups":  "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Holmes could have added "and other irrational beliefs" after "superstitious fears", irrational beliefs like in the superiority of our group over all others, à la Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.  I suspect Niebhuhr's book and Hirschman's go a long way toward explaining both MAGAism and liberalism, and 'wokeism.'  Even Woody Allen has some understanding of the irrationality of our desires, our preferences, our political positions, etc.  

10/19/2025

 Sunday, October 19,2025

1781 General Cornwallis surrendered to General Washington at Yorktown, VA, effectively ending the Revolutionary War

1987 The Dow Jones dropped 2almost 3% in one day

2003 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was beatified by Pope John Paul II

2016 Donald Trump refused to say he would accept the result of the election during a debate with Hillary Clinton

2019 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Bernie Sanders for president

In bed at about 11:30 after spending much of the day sleeping, up at 6:55, with my still painful ankle, still a dull red and swollen.  I got up thinking of my Aunt Mary Healy in the nursing home in Phoenix: "What's the problem, God.  I'm ready. And my Grandmother Charlotte in the nursing home in Port Charlotte, with her teddy bear or dolly.  And my eulogy for TSJ: "In this short life, which only lasts an hour, / How much, how little is within our power.  Two Tom turkeys showed up at our feeders at 7:45, but I failed to provide seeds yesterday evening.  Alas.  I filled the feeders and scattered seed this morning, and before 9 o'clock, the posse of 5 tom turkeys returned and spent almost 25 minutes cleaning up the lawn.  They surrounded a lone gray squirrel, and I was surprised that the big birds didn't chase her away.  Rain overnight, 48°, wind chill is 34°, high of 58°, rain this morning, windy all day.  At 7, the wind was 19 mph, with gusts to 37 mph, NNW.  This is the week autumn arrives in Milwaukee.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 11:30 a.m.

Two of my favorite Hamas-loving, America-hating, Soros-paid, Marxist agitators at the Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park after marching in the No Kings demonstration in downtown Chicago yesterday.

Cassandra? Three years ago on this date, I wrote:

Donald Agonistes.   Trump is scheduled to be deposed at Mar-a-Lago by Jean Carroll's attorney in her defamation case against her now defamer-in-chief.  Presumably, Trump will say what he has always said of the charge that he raped her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room back in the 90s, i.e., that he never met her, doesn't know her, didn't rape her, and perhaps his kicker  that "she's not my type."  What a way to be nearing the end of one's life.  He's 76 years old, probably in questionable health because of age, obesity, diet, etc., and besieged by enemies seeking to hurt him - private litigants, federal prosecutors, congressional committees, a state prosecutor, and the NY attorney general.  After the 2016 election, he thought he was on top of the world, king of the hill, leader of the free world, and invincible.  His always vulnerable ego, always at least tentatively satisfied by being probably the most famous man in the world, able to draw thousands of cheering fans at his rallies, slaking his thirst for affirmation and adoration.  And always protected from enemies by the powers and privileges of his public office.  He knew there was a tsunami of legal woes awaiting him if he lost the office of the presidency, hence his extraordinary criminal attempts to avoid losing the office.  Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcolm X would say.  Louis XV's apocryphal saying, "Apres moi, le deluge" might appropriately be attributed to Donald John Trump.  His personal deluge of legal attacks has begun and may come to something or come to naught, but the country's political & social deluge pends like Domocles' sword.  We'll know a lot more in three weeks with the midterms, which I expect Trumpies will do well in, and even more as 2024 approaches.  We're in the middle of the Biden Pause, but I fear it's like the eye of a Trumpian hurricane, with death and destruction awaiting us.

 

One Year Ago on this date, I wallowed in schadenfreude in my journal entry about the widespread evisceration of Timothy Dolan over his October 17th, 2024, Al Smith Dinner featuring foul-mouthing by Donald Trump.  I titled the entry "A picture is worth a thousand words."

My comment to DPL's No Kings in Tucson post on FB today:

Charles D. Clausen

And BRAVO! to every one of those America-hating, paid-activist, Soros-funded, Hamas-loving, Marxist agitators in their tennies, sandals, and flip-flops, out to destroy our one country under God! I would have been out in Milwaukee's riot, or perhaps Shorewood's, but I had a bone spur on my foot, which thankfully, got better as soon as the commie demonstrations were over.

Tim Curry and death.  CBS Sunday Morning featured a long interview with the actor Tim Curry this morning.  He suffered a serious stroke in 2012 and now gets around in a wheelchair.  The interviewer asked him about fear of dying, and I took some comfort in his words:  "I don't fear death.  I try to avoid it, as I suspect we all do, but I suspect that in the end I will welcome it.  I think it may be very comforting to go bye-bye, and I want to earn it."

Ben Stiller, son of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, was also interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning.  He has produced and directed a documentary on his parents, which is running on AppleTV.  I was struck by the part of the interview in which it was revealed that as Ben Stiller was making the documentary about tensions in his parents' marriage and in their home, he was going through a significant midlife crisis of his own. "I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids, and a little bit lost." He was separated from his wife, with whom he later reconciled.  He said, "The irony is that I thought I was doing so much better than my parents.  When you're younger, you think, Okay, I'm going to do everything better.  I'm going to - I'm not going to make that mistake.  I found myself at a place in my life where things weren't really in sync."  He and the interviewer remarked on the difficulty of comparing himself as a parent with his own parents.  The interviewer remarked, "One of the most uncomfortable places you can ever be is in front of a mirror, and sometimes your kids are holding up the mirror." Stiller responded that "It's kind of a bummer because I'm never going to be able to go back," presumably to behave better, more caringly, less selfishly.  The interviewer then said, "That's helped him round the edges from his own childhood, finding the grace to give his parents by understanding he might need to seek some of his own."  

I earlier wrote that "I was struck" by that part of the interview; probably I should have written "I was stung" by it, because I was so vividly reminded of my own history with my parents and with my own children.  Having written these words, I sat quietly and motionless for a long time, looking out the window, and reflecting on my troubled relationship with my Dad, my resolve never to hurt my children like my sister Kitty and I had been hurt as children, and the pain I inflicted on them when I left home, ended my marriage to their mother, and ended my everyday loving relationship with each of them.  Love is an action verb, not a mere caring or feeling of affection.   The terrible reality was what I tried so hard to deny when accused of it my wife, ti.e., that I had left not just her, but all of them.  Leaving the marriage was what I wanted, but leaving the family was the cost.  I carry guilt and shame about it to this day, half a lifetime later.  It may have been a mistake marrying when I did, at age 21, and why I did, do I even know why?  But leaving after almost 20 years couldn't cure the earlier mistake and there were two children to think of.  Nonetheless, I didn't have the emotional agility, adroitness,, strength, or resourcefulness to handle what Ben Affleck aptly enough described as feeling "out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids, and a little bit lost."  Or more accurately, very lost and out of control.  I was like the lyrics of Precious Lord:  "I am tired, I am weak, I am worn."  How much of that was becausen of my own weakness?  How much was inevitable?  Perhaps I am now so interested in Spinoza's theory of determinism, and Robert Sapolsky's, and Calvin's predestination, to relieve myself of Yeat's curse of conscience and vanity.

. . . . . 

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

10/18/2025

 Saturday, October 18, 2025

w3e

e4rcher

In bed at 10:10, up at 7:20, made a cup of coffee, opened the blinds to see 4 Tom turkeys filling up under our bird feeders., one being particularly persistent and, scratching the grass looking for more long after the other three had moved on, then another returned, seeming to stand guard over the grass scratcher. then the other two returned and the posse of 4 moved on. 62°, high of 71°, rain overnight, cloudy today.  The weather is about to turn to Fall, with highs in the 50s most of the week.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at  a.m.  

Email to James Causey at JSOnline:

8:20 AM

Thanks for another great article about a great problem and one effective way of addressing it.  It made me think back to the early 2000s when I mangaged the House of Peace at 17th and Walnut.  There was one food store in the neighborhood, a Sentry store a few blocks west of us.  It eventually shut down because of thefts.  We knew that Sentry didn’t want to close the store, but the problem of thefts and unprofitability eventually forced the closure.  The ‘business” at our free food bank, then supplied by the wonderful Sherrie Tussler at the Hunger Task Force, picked up considerably, but all we could supply was non-perishable food in cans and boxes, i.e., no fresh fruits, vegetables, or dairy.  We became part of a food desert.  I appreciate your pointing out the perfect storm that is developing under the current administration: rising food prices, fewer food sources, and reductions in the food stamp program.  Tariffs will only make the problem worse.  The nation’s needy, both rural and urban, have targets on their backs under this administration.  Those professing to be “Christian Nationalists” forget Mt. 25:31-46, especially the part about “I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”  Thanks for another great and needed article.

I have slept most of the day after a long night's sleep.  I've felt half dead all day.  Very strange dreams.  Not a good day.

10/17/2025

 Friday, October 17, 2025

1933 Albert Einstein arrived in the US as a refugee from Nazi Germany

1973 OPEC oil ministers used oil as an economic weapon in the Arab-Israeli War, mandating a cut in exports and recommending an embargo against unfriendly states

1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1979 US President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating the Department of Education

2024 Israel claims to have killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, during a battle in Rafah, Gaza

In bed by 9, up at 6:20, feeling lousy, miserable, pain in right kidney area, worrying about the return of bright redness around left ankle last night, but it's better this morning.  I brought a 5% Lidocaine patch out with me.  56°, high of 70°, cloudy all day.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:10 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 9:30 a.m.

Pain, pain, pain.  I'm in a lot of it today, mid back, right side, as usual.  From my journal two years ago today:

Gratefulness.   As I woke up this morning, I was aware of unwanted itchiness and slight pains and stiffness, but I had the realization, too seldom experienced, that I am - right now -  in Heaven, alive, able to walk and talk and think and read and write and hear and taste and see and living with Geri and Lilly in a magnificent home, so much more fortunate, more favored, more blessed than most of mankind that lives or has ever lived on this wondrous rock speeding through space. It doesn't last but it IS now.   I think of my mother and my father and my sister, of Uncle Jim and Aunt Monica, of Moses and Brother Coogan and Wally Halperin, and of Sarah and Andy, and I am reminded again of the 4th and 5th stanzas of Vacillation:

IV 

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

V

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

I move between the two extremes, too often Mickey the Mope, like Ronny Cammareri needing Loretta Castorini to smack him and tell him to "Snap out of it!."  Or my dear sister.

Comment to JJA's FB post this morning of Col. Doug Krugman's WaPo op-ed yesterday.

 I read it yesterday and, of course, and agree with him. As a 24-year Marine veteran, I take it he joined up in 2001. I joined in 1963 and served only 4 years on active duty, RVN in 65-66. I find it hard to imagine that any American man or woman who served in the nation's armed forces, especially those who have served in wars in foreign lands, is not appalled by what has happened and is continuing to happen in our country. Those of us old enough to remember will remember all the hopeful talk of "light at the end of the tunnel" in Vietnam. We on the ground called it "happy horseshit." My friend Ron Kendall, a Marine warrant officer from Iowa, used to repeat to me what his high school football coach used to say to his team: "You can fool the spectators, but you can't fool the players." With more than 3 years remaining in this administration, is anyone seeing light at the end of this tunnel? This old Marine doesn't. I fear that I will go to my grave with the America I grew up in mortally wounded by a self-inflicted wound. Semper Fi, Col Krugman. I salute you.

The Pond at Dusk

BY JANE KENYON

A fly wounds the water but the wound   

soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter   

overhead, dropping now and then toward   

the outward-radiating evidence of food.

 

 The green haze on the trees changes   

 into leaves, and what looks like smoke   

floating over the neighbor’s barn   

is only apple blossoms.

But sometimes what looks like disaster   

is disaster: the day comes at last,

and the men struggle with the casket   

just clearing the pews.

Text exchange with CBG this morning:

Caren Goldberg:  Good morning! I hope all is well with you and Geri. I have read parts and skimmed parts of your incredible autobiography and am wondering if we can make a date for me to return it to you. Are you free for breakfast on Thursday Oct. 23 or lunch on Friday Oct 24?

 Charles Clausen:  Life’s been a bit complicated over here.  I was hospitalized in the VA hospital for a week between 9/27 and 10/4 with cellulitis in my left leg.  It’s not completely gone yet but I’m on the mend.  I’d love to visit with you and to hear news of your family but here’s my problem on the dates you suggest.  On Thursday, I have a video conference with my ‘personal pharmacist’ at the VA at 9:30 a.m.  It will take about 20 minutes.  On Friday, I have an appointment at the VA for an EMG on the ulnar nerve in my right arm at 11 a.m.  That should take between an hour and an hour and a half.  While I am increasingly ferkrimpter, Jew-ish Geri has been doing well, getting in at least a couple of hours of gardening each day when the weather permits, knitting hats every day for a volunteer program at Temple Emanuel, and caring for her aged husband.  Her niece, Katherine, who also was one of my students at MULS in years past and used to be a bigwig at DHS until DJT’s reelection, is flying in from Washington to visit us for the weekend late on the 24th.  Lastly, a BTW: I looked up “ferkrimpter” many times on the internet, always unsuccessfully and had concluded the word must be a local or perhaps Friebert family Yiddishism, but I asked ChatGPT and found it wasn’t, though the proper spelling appears to be “ferkrampter.”  FYI❤️

Caren Goldberg:  I’m sorry to hear about your cellulitis. My mom has had it a couple of times and it was just awful so I’m happy to hear you are on the mend. We are all a bit more ferkrampter with each passing day but keep on chugging along! Would you want to meet on Thursday the 23rd at 10:15 or 10:30? Or what about breakfast on Tuesday Oct. 28th?

Charles Clausen:  On the 28th, I have a midmorning appointment with a VA psychiatrist and another with a psychologist.  I got scheduled because of my “subdued mood,” VA talk for a suicide risk.  They are super vigilant for suicides there and my primary care doc deemed me to be one because of my ‘weltschmerz’.    You can see why I think of the VA as my second home.  Thursday the 23rd at 10:15 would be fine with me, brunch.  BTW, our basement got flooded during the Big Rain on 8/9 and 9/10.  We’ve been dealing with the clean-up ever since.  A real pain in the ass.  It didn’t help my ‘weltschmerz.’🙃❤️

Caren Goldberg:  So much to clean from the flooding. You didn’t need that. Let’s plan on the 23rd at 10:15. Maxfields?

Charles Clausen:  Great.  I look forward to seeing you.

Micaela came to visit this afternoon for a long, very enjoyable schmooze.

Charcoal and graphite pencil drawing of Peter Charles, done 3 years ago

 

10/16/2025

 Thursday, October 16, 2025

1946 10 Nazi leaders were hanged as war criminals after the Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Alfred Jodl

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis began as US President John F. Kennedy was shown photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba

1968  Tommie Smith  and John Carlos gave the Black Power salute on the 200m medal podium during the Mexico City Olympics to protest racism and injustice against Blacks

1973 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed

1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II

1982 Secretary of State George P. Shultz warned that the US would withdraw from the UN if they voted to exclude Israel

1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, won the Nobel Peace Prize

In bed at 9, and up at 4:45.  53°, high of 63°.   Cloudy day ahead.     

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 5:40 a.m.     

An unsuccessful haiku

I hope for the day 

When my angry leg, ankle, and foot 

Match their match.

Is Trump the Evangelicals' Messiah and an Anti-Christ?  This was a thought I had while reading David French's column in this morning's NY Times, "Something Is Stirring in Christian America, and It’s Making Me Nervous."  The thrust of his essay is that there is something deeply not only un-Christian but anti-Christian about Donald Trump, Trumpism, and its Evangelical supporters.  He offers several examples that illustrate his point, including the words of Trump and of Stephen Miller at the Charlie Kirk memorial service.  His examples, however, also struck me as showing that for many Trump-following Evangelicals, Trump is like the Messiah that many Jews were looking for at the time of Jesus' life, the leader who would expel the enemies (Romans/Liberals) of the chosen people (Jews/Evangelical Christians), suppress and punish wrongdoing  ("I am your retribution) and wrong thinking, and establish the Kingdom of God, governed not by a democracy (mob rule) or by evil elites (priests, Pharisees, Sadducees/coastal and international elites), but by the Messiah ("I am the only one.)    

One of the telling points that French makes is that among many Evangelicals, empathy has become a sin.  He doesn't cite them but note the emerging prominence of two Evangelical leaders who champion this view.  The first is Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and the second is Joe Rigney, a professor and pastor who wrote “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.” Rigney’s conservative Evangelical denomination counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among its members.  I should add Trump's one-time key advisor, financial supporter, and almost temporary co-president, Elon Musk, who told podcaster Joe Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

For some of us who were raised "in the bosom of the Church," empathy for others is a key calling of Jesus, inherent in his teachings about loving our neighbors, including 'Samaritans' and our enemies, the Sermon on the Mount, and Matt. 25:31-46.  What we see from Trump is rancor and retribution, name-calling and denigration, humiliation and harming all who resist him.  At the Charlie Kirk memorial, he admitted, "I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them."  In a PBS interview in 1992 hosted by Charlie Rose, he said “I love getting even with people.”  In a radio interview, when asked for his favorite Bible passage, he said, "I don't know,  I suppose an eye for an eye."  Where Christ preached love and brotherhood, Trump preaches hate and discord.  If he isn't an anti-Christ, who is?

Just this morning, the NY Times carries a news story about Trump, at an Oval Office news conference, informing his attorney general Pam Bondi, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel, that he wants the Justice Department to pursue, i,e., persecute and prosecute, former Special Counsel Jack Smith, former FBI official and DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and Lisa Monaco, former deputy attorney general under Joe Biden.  "Deranged Jack Smith is in my opinion  a criminal."  "I hope they're going to look into Weissmann, too.  Weissman's a bad guy." "I think [Lisa Monaco] should be looked at very strongly too."  The persecutions continue and the prosecutions will probably follow.  Christ-like?  Is this what CHRISTIAN nationalism looks like?

We should consider too his non-retributive acts, those where he is not "getting even" with those who have harmed him, but rather just harming gratuitously, like the destruction of the Agency for International Development.  A study in The Lancet this year estimates that due to sharp cuts to USAID programs, there could be more than 14 million additional deaths globally by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under five.  An estimate by Brooke Nichols (Boston University) suggests that about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children (“infants and children”) have already died because of the aid cuts that began early in 2025.  Mercy Corps notes that six months after major cuts, millions had been cut off from essential services (food, water, healthcare) and estimates are that the cuts could result in 2.4 million preventable deaths annually — if the status quo continues.  We can quibble about the numbers, but what is clear is that millions of the world's poor - people some refer to as "Christ's poor" - will die by the stroke of Trump's pen on executive orders and elsewhere.  What are people who call themselves Christians to think of this?  

Thoughts on the anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.   On this date in 1962, I was 21 years old, in my last year of undergraduate school, living in a 1st floor flat at 24th and Vine Streets in Milwaukee, with Tom Devitt, Bill Hendricks, Jerry Nugent, and Ed Felsenthal.  Each of us was a midshipman in the U.S. Navy Reserves and expected to be commissioned as officers at the end of the school year, Ed and Bill as Navy ensigns, Tom, Jerry, and me as 2nd lieutenants in the Marine Corps.  Of course, I can't recall what we did on that date, but probably we carried on our normal activities.  Ed, Bill, and I worked overnight stuffing Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper boxes at bus stops throughout the city, slept when we could, and went to classes when we had to.  Tom was busy with an overload of coursework that would permit him to graduate a semester early and to marry his fiancée Veronica Colby.  Jerry was tending to his coursework and keeping tabs on his 2 years younger brother, Pat Nugent, also at Marquette, who would soon start romancing and eventually marry his girlfriend from Texas, Luci Baines Johnson.  

What we didn't know was that, on that morning, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy informed President Kennedy that a U-2 reconnaissance light over Cuba photographed Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missile sites under construction and that the CIA analyzed the photos on October 15 and confirmed that the sites were capable of launching nuclear weapons.  The Cuban Missile Crisis had begun, but it wasn't announced to the public until October 22.  I remember sitting in our living room on that date, watching the president on our cheap, black and white, television, as he announced the existence of the Russian missile facilities in Cuba, the ability of nuclear armed Russian missile to reach American cities in minutes, his demand that the facilities be removed, and the existence of an American quarantine on all shipping headed to Cuba.  Only the year before, during the Berlin crisis in July 1961, Kennedy had had delivered another Oval Office address in which he said:

“In the event of attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in the nuclear blast and fire can still be saved if they can be warned to take shelter — and if that shelter is available.

We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.

The government will soon begin to identify and mark space in public and private buildings which could be used for fallout shelters. I am requesting that Congress appropriate funds to provide these markings, improve shelter facilities, and stock them with food, water, first aid kits, and other necessities for survival.”

He also added that private citizens should prepare shelters in their homes if possible.

In addition, I am asking Congress for the authority to make shelter construction and improvement loans available to individuals and to provide technical guidance to all who wish to build shelters on their own property.  The time is not long, and the need is urgent. We cannot prevent, in all circumstances, a nuclear war; but we can provide for our survival if it should occur.

All of my roommates and I were active reservists.  All of us wondered whether Kennedy would activate the reserves during the Cuban crisis, whether we would be commissioned early and be deployed before graduation.  That didn't happen, of course, as the crisis was ended on October 28th by the Russian agreement to withdraw its missiles, reciprocating Kennedy's public promise not to invade Cuba and his secret agreement to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.  

I think back on those days, how stressful they were, and how close to home they hit.  The risks of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union were real.  Fallout Shelter signs were seemingly everywhere.  The Navy destroyer on which I served during the summer of 1960, the USS Coney, DDE 508, intercepted a Russian submarine, the B-59, armed with nuclear torpedoes, commanded by Capt. Valentin Savitsky, with flotilla chief Vasily Arkhipov aboard, headed to Cuba during the 1962 quarantine.  The Coney and supporting aircraft dropped non-lethal depth charges in an effort to force the submarine to surface.  The submarine's commander, out of communication with his Soviet superiors, believed war had started, and ordered his crew to launch a nuclear torpedo.  He was overruled by the flotilla commander, and eventually the submarine was surfaced and escorted from the area.  The encounter was declassified only in the 1990s and is now recognized as the Cuban Missile Crisis's most perilous submarine warfare moment, and the closest we came to the hostile use of a nuclear weapon.

The crisis ended on October 28th, my roomies and I graduated and were commissioned in the Navy and the Marines, and eventually were deployed to another crisis, Vietnam, which ended much less successfully than the Cuban crisis.  But today I think back to those days more than 60 years ago and recall what stresses we have lived through, back in the days “when America was great.” McCarthy and John Birch in the 1950s, Berlin in 1961, Cuba in 1962, Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the fateful deployment of Marines to Danang in 1965, the election of Nixon in 1968, and so on. Somehow, we survived all that history with at least a semblance of our very flawed democracy and the rule of law intact.   I fear that I won’t live to see us survive the current threats.

Diane Keaton, Zeke Emanuel, and my pneumonia vaccination.  It was announced yesterday by her family that Diane Keaton died of pneumonia.  I was reminded that Zeke Emanuel, in his (in)famous Atlantic article about wishing to die at 75, wrote that, at that age, he will stop taking vaccines designed to extend his life and that I just opted to receive a pneumonia vaccine at age 84.  I need to start thinking.

10/15/2025

 Wednesday, October 15, 2025

1966 Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California

1991 Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a US Supreme Court Justice (52-48)

2000 Larry David's comedy show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" debuted on HBO

In bed around 10, with Brewers down 5-1 against the Dodgers, up at 3:30, unable to sleep.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 5:50 p.m.!!!

Bertrand Russell:  "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

My journal entry 3 years ago this date: "Saints,  Heroes, and Miracles:  I got up this morning as Geri and Lilly were returning to the bedroom from their second outing of the night, Geri with her CPAP mask still on.  I thought then, as I have countless times, what a good woman she is, what a care-giving, care-taking, generous, loving person she is.  I see it every day in how she cares for Lilly, feeding, walking, grooming, medicating, and attending, but I realize how much she has acted similarly to her brother Jim for the nearly 4 years he was with us, how she cared for and befriended my father when he lived with us, how she tends to her friend E---- with her Parkinson's, and most of her how she quietly cares for me.  My life is enriched by living in our house and living in this house is possible for me because of her.  She cares for our house and grounds like she cares for everyone and everything under her quiet, vigilant guard.  I all too often fail to appreciate the saintliness and heroism around me.  They are not states of being but actions, activities, and behavior.   Saints are individuals who perform saintly acts, and heroes are individuals who perform heroic deeds.  Both qualities are activities reflected in Matthew 25:31 et seq.  Both involve willingly subordinating one's own comfort and interests to those of others.  My wife, my sister, my mother - all saints and heroes, not all the time, but most of the time and always when it counts.  Many, many saints and heroes in our lives, invisible unless we scrape the scales off our eyes to see them.  The same is true of miracles; they're all around us.    'Mere' existence why is there anything anywhere?  Life, we have it and stones don't.  Why? How?  Nature, trees, leaves, lichens, fungi, birds, mammals, fish, whales, penguins, . . . . Why? whence? whither?"

. . . .  

I believed those words three years ago, and I have continued to believe them between then and today.  Indeed, I have long believed them and encouraged my children to share the belief.  I have believed them even during times of serious illnesses, from bladder ulcers and from PMR, causing such severe, recurrent, or persistent pain that I wished I could die and be done with it.  When I'm asked at the VA whether I've thought of hurting myself, the euphemism for suicide, my honest response should be "Of course!"  It's the belief in all the goodness, the saintliness and heroism, the love and beauty all around me and sometimes in me, that keeps me alive even during the many times I have wished I were dead and wished I could end it myself.  The VA considers me a suicide risk, but not an "acute" one.  In other words, maybe later, not now, which I suppose is accurate enough.  When they asked me when I was hospitalized between September 27 and October 4 whether I wished to be resuscitated and/or intubated if necessary while I was hospitalized, I answered literally and without hesitation, 'Let me die' to each question.  Is that a kind of deferred suicide?  It seems to me that it is.  When presented with a clear choice between dying and being saved from dying, I chose dying.  The significant words are "I chose dying.

"I think now of Zeke Emanuel's article in The Atlantic, 'Why I Hope to Die at 75.'  He is 68 now, getting ever closer to that target age of 75 that he claims is the optimum age of death for most of us.  He is approaching the time at which he says he will stop taking vaccines and treatments intended to prolong his life.  Will he?  How is it that I am "up to date" on all my vaccinations, or will be if I receive a Covid-19 vaccination when it is available at the VA later this month?  I tell myself I don't want to grow older, sicker, frailer, more compromised in all of life's functions, yet at my last visit to meet my new primary care provider, Kali Kisro, I said "yes" to the offered flu and pneumonia vaccines.  I'm not thinking straight.  Should I take a pass on the upcoming Covid vaccine?  I'll probably accept it because Covid seems like such a hard, nasty, awful way to die, based on what I saw on the news back in 2020 and 2021, all the information about ventilators, etc.  On the first page of my "Life in the Time of Covid" sketchbooks, I put a quote from Woody Allen: "I'm not afraid to die.  I just don't want to be there when it happens."  I kind of feel that way.  But old age doesn't offer us a lot of choices.  When I was clearly given a choice between death and continued life "as is," so to speak, I clearly chose death.  Isn't that a form of wishful suicide?

  Geri asked me today whether I "was alright," in a way that suggested that she could tell I'm not well.  I said that I was alright, in the sense of 'not sick,' but that I'm miserable.  It led to a discussion of Zeke Emanuel's article on hoping to die at 75, living with pain, diminished physical and mental capacity, and almost continuous discomfort.  Longer life = not productive, capable, productive, and fruitful life, but protracted disability and slow dying.  Our discussion might have led to a deeper exploration of our own personal thoughts about deterioration, decrepitude, and when and why death becomes desirable, but it unfortunately did not.  I suspect we have gotten about as close as we can get to openness about these matters in our discussions about assisted suicide, unassisted suicide, our similar instructions in our advance directives, etc.

. . . . 

I drove up to Sendik's in Mequon this afternoon, my first trip away from the house since I was released from the hospital on 10/4, other than my taxing trip to the Apple Store at Bayshore on 10/8 to get my laptop fixed.  On the way to and from the store, I noticed the mostly cloudy but still beautiful clouds floating in the sky above me.  I wondered why I hadn't wondered before why they float as they do.  Why don't they sink to the earth or levitate up into the ether?  They just hang there, blown wherever the winds may take them, and usually foolishly ignored by us earthbound creatures, scurrying hither and yon, oblivious to anything other than our own earthly thoughts, necessities, desires, and destinations.