12/24/2025

 Wednesday, December 24, 2025

1865 Several Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennesse

1939 Pope Pius XII made a Christmas Eve appeal for peace during World War II

1992 US President George H. W. Bush pardoned former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for their roles in the Iran-Contra affair

2001 "Time Magazine" named New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani 'Person of the Year', for his leadership after the 9/11 attacks

Pope Francis opens the Holy Door of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, inaugurating the church's Jubilee Year of Hope

In bed at 10, up at 7:45, after a rough night, when Sarah texted from Thailand.  35°, w/c 28°, high 39°, low 32°, cloudy.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at   a.m. 

Text exchange with Sarah:

Merry Christmas from Thailand! We would have called but Christian is suffering what I hope is a cold and he fell asleep right after dinner. We will definitely call once we are home again next week. Hope all is well there with you and Geri. 🎄

Charles Clausen:

Hi Sweetie and Merry Christmas to you and Christian.  Sorry about the cold which is miserable any time and anywhere but doubly so away from home on vacation.   We are OK here.  The contractor finished the basement.  Steve and David et al will be here tonight and we will meet at Andy’s Saturday.  I hope you’re enjoying Thailand!

All Good, All Loving, All Powerful: The man with a plan for each of us.   I'm watching a Shriners Children Hospital appeal for donations featuring children with terrible physical & medical problems, and wondering 'Why?'.  Later, there will be ads featuring Marlo Thomas seeking help for St. Jude's Hospital, founded by her father, Danny, to treat and do research on childhood cancers.  Those ads will also show little children with cancers and will prompt the same question, 'Why?'.  Not 'Why do these terrible things happen?', but why so many of us believe in Christianity's all-good, all-loving, all-powerful God, and not in some form of Manichaeism or agnosticism?'. 

I knocked off my CGM overnight.   Only 2 days into its 15 day life.  Rats.

My journal thoughts two years ago this date:

I'm grateful for my wife, especially at Christmastime.  I'm grateful that she reminds me so much of the other two women in my life who have meant so much to me, my mother and my sister.  In my early morning, pre-dawn conversations with my sister, I would only half-jokingly refer to the two of them as Sts. Mary and Kitty of Emerald Avenue, or of Englewood.  So now I live with St. Geri of Oak Park.  Each of them was/is so incredibly strong, and so good, and their strength and goodness were especially visible at Christmastime.

    I don't remember much of Christmases when I was a little boy.  I was 10 days shy of my 4th birthday when Japan finally surrendered and WWII ended.  Three months later, my father returned from the war, wrecked.  I don't remember much of those Christmases in the late 40s and early 50s except that we always observed them.  There was always a tree with presents under it on Christmas Eve when we opened them.  What I do remember is that my father was an emotional and spiritual wreck during those years.  He had survived the brutality of the Marine Corps and the carnage on Iwo Jima, but barely.  He had no joy in living, even at, and perhaps especially at Christmas.  After the war in which millions of humans had killed millions of humans, he knew better than to believe all that "Joy to the world" and "God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay' stuff.  That my sister and I could still get excited every Christmas was attributable entirely to my mother who believed in the Christmas story, in the Church, and in God.  Like a mother hen, she protected Kitty and me from the dark place where my father's spirit dwelled.  We had no money during most of the time we lived in our 3-room basement apartment.  My father couldn't hold onto a job and our only reliable income came from my mother's job as a waitress, relying mostly on tips.  There was no bank account, checking or savings.  We paid our bills with money orders bought at the neighborhood 'currency exchange' on Halsted Street.  When I was old enough, my mother would give me the cash and I would purchase the money orders and bring them back to her.  She bought our clothes through Dave Fein, a 'factor' or middleman, a door-to-door, human credit card.  We sometimes didn't have enough cash for food, and I would be sent to Mr. Kelly's little grocery store on 73rd Street to get what we needed for lunch and dinner on credit.  He 'kept a tab' for us and when money became available, we paid the tab.   But there was always a tree and always presents on Christmas and somehow, in those very hard days, my mother managed to keep our spirits up, singing "Jingle Bells," "Santa Claus is coming to town," and our favorite "Silent Night."  My Uncle Jim, God rest his soul, gave me my first bicycle one Christmas, a green J. C. Higgins, from Montgomery Ward   But for my sister and me, it was our mother who was our hero, our guardian angel, our saint.

My sister Kitty followed in her footsteps.  She too was a mother hen to her son and daughter.  Thankfully their father was not the wreck our father had been but he admits to leaving all the child-rearing to Kitty.  My mother worked as a waitress most of our childhood; Kitty worked as a cleaning lady for elderly clients in Phoenix's West Valley.  Most of her elderly clients became her friends and came to rely on her for much more than cleaning services.  She got to know some of her clients' children who resided in other states and became the person those children would call to check on their parents.  She helped their parents as they dealt with cognitive decline and dementia.  She belonged to St. Raphel Parish and for many years was a leader in the parish's St. Vincent de Paul program, distributing money and food to people in need.  Her husband Jim would make the rounds with her, personally delivering bags of food.  I 'made the rounds' with her at least once during a visit.  As Christmas approached each year, Kitty managed an "Adopt a Family' program that matched families that needed help providing Christmas presents for their children with families that wanted to help.  Each year, Kitty spent countless hours on the telephone with each of the families, obtaining lists of what the children wanted and what they needed, including exact sizes for clothing gifts, and passing the information on to the families who went out and purchased the gifts and wrapped them.  Kitty and Jim delivered them and one year, during one of my visits,  I helped with the deliveries.  Every month, she traveled to downtown Phoenix to work in the kitchen at André House, a ministry to the homeless, preparing and serving hot meals to hundreds of men and women living on the streets or in shelters. She was a wonderful human being, a Christian in the Matthew 25: 31-46 sense of the word, and like her mother, a hero and a saint.  

    Even with all her commitments as 'the cleaning lady,' as the linchpin of the Adopt a Family program, and as a leader in SVDP, she made a big deal of Christmas in her home, decorating the house and hosting a big family holiday meal.  She had a large collection of Hummel Christmas tree ornaments that she had acquired over the years and, toward the end of her life, she was concerned about what would become of the little porcelains after she was gone.  Neither of her children wanted them and she offered them to Sarah, her niece and goddaughter, and was thrilled when Sarah accepted them.  Getting them to Germany turned out to be quite a project but the exchange was successful and the Hummels stayed in the family, as Kitty had hoped.  Sarah kindly gave three of them to us.

My wife, too, is an inspiration to me, especially at Christmas.  I admire her strength and her goodness.  I omit listing most examples here out of respect for her sense of privacy and her modesty, but I can at least make mention that she shares the mother-hen qualities of my mother and sister.  Her solicitude for her sons, her attention to their health and well-being and to their education as they were growing up has continued to the present day.  Each of them loves her deeply and she deserves it.  She has maintained many lifelong friendships, some going back 60 years, others 'merely' many decades.  Her friends are scattered from Dublin, Ireland to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Illinois, but they keep in touch by telephone and some come to Wisconsin and stay in our home to be near her and share time with her.  She often visits another friend in Milwaukee who is suffering from a serious illness and another recently widowed.  When her brother was widowed and alone in a distant state and dealing with age-related challenges, she wrote him a long, detailed, heartfelt letter inviting him to come to live near us and when he did, she cared for him for almost 4 years until he moved to be closer to his daughter and son-in-law.  In earlier years she volunteered at the Milwaukee Literacy Center, teaching others to read, and as a volunteer ombudsman at a nursing home.  She spent years working as a mediator and investigator for the Family Court in Jefferson County, doing all that she could to ensure the welfare of children in divorce cases.  She is a good and wise person and it is no surprise that her children, her friends, and I seek her counsel as we move through life.  I omit much from this note only because of respect for her sense of privacy which is more refined than mine but I assert that she shares much of the strength and goodness that my mother and my sister had and that though I am unworthy of each and all of them, I am grateful.  

    Geri and I have shared 36 Christmases and for 35 of them, she has assembled her Little Village under our Christmas tree, a tiny but elaborate collection of miniature buildings and accessories spread out on a bed of cotton snow.  Putting it all together is quite a construction project, accomplished by Geri lying on the floor and working under the tree.  This year, as Geri has completed her recovery from a recent case of covid but now is enduring a nasty cold, there is no Little Village.  I miss it but I'm glad Geri didn't jeopardize her health re-constructing it.  

12/23/2025

 Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Festivus for the rest of us!  The pole, the airing of grievances, & feats of strength!

1971 Richard Nixon commuted the remaining 8 years of Teamsters labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa's 13-year jail term for bribery and fraud

2016 UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. Resolution 2334 was passed 14-0, with the US abstaining.

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:20.  34°,w/c 28°, high 43°, low 30°.  SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY: Slick spots on untreated and elevated surfaces.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10:20 a.m. 

Morning errands.  I went to the bank to get the remaining cash for Chris, went to the hardware store to get some lighter fluid, and to the Hallmark Store for an apology card for Dr. Neary.   Paid Chris, burned some lavender incense in the basement, sent the card to Dr. Neary.

I spent a couple of hours in the basement this afternoon, mostly trying to get stuff sorted and organized.  I moved my old Marine Corps locker, full of paintings, under the television stand.  I also did 10 minutes of chair yoga.

Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank is a long, feature article in the December 20th issue of the New York Times by Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham and Fatima AbdulKarim.  I've been reading it along with a long article in Harper's Magazine titled Turning Point: How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked by Andrew Cockburn.  They both reminded me of how Israel has become a pariah state to so many people, both on the Left and on the Right in America.  I suspect that the main reason for this over the last two years has been moral revulsion at Israel's War on Gaza.  Regardless of Israel's litany of real and pretextual justifications for the continuation of the war, and the destruction and starvation of the Gazan people and the devastation of the infrastructure necessary to sustain life, a great many people, the world has looked on the news videos of dead and dying children, and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Israel's name has become shit throughout much of the world.

It has not been Israel's behavior in Gaza after October 7th that has led me to give up hope for it, but rather its behavior in the West Bank, and not just for the last two years, though its depredations against the resident Palestinians have dramatically worsened since that date.  I am seven years older than the State of Israel.  I first knew Israel as a struggling, young, socialist democracy peopled by survivors of the Holocaust, living and working in kibbutzim, turning the desert green.  That view was naive, but commonplace.  It was the Israel of Leon Uris's Exodus, of David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, and the Labor Party.  Today, and for many years, Israel has been Benjamin Netanyahu, the religious and nationalist parties, Likud, and the settlers.  For Israeli Jews and, to a lesser extent, Israeli Arabs, Israel is a democracy.  To the Arab Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, it is a military dictatorship under foreign occupation, persecution, and ethnic cleansing.   I believe nothing that the Israeli government says about its behavior in the West Bank, nor about Palestinian behavior in the West Bank.  Israel's government is no more interested in speaking the truth to its people and to the world than is the United States government.   We are, in too many bad ways, doppelgängers.  So it goes.

12/22/2025

Monday, December 22, 2025

Days grow longer, Spring draws nearer, rough months ahead

1894 Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison

1984 Bernhard Goetz shot 4 black muggers on NYC subway train

2001 British Islamic militant Richard Reid attempted to ignite explosives hidden in the soles of his shoes aboard a passenger airplane.

2010 Barack Obama signed the legislation repealing the military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell', clearing the way for gay Americans to serve in the military

2023 UN Security Council voted to speed up delivery of desperately needed aid for Gaza 13-0 with Russia abstention

In bed at 9, up at 5:35.  31°, w/c 22°, high 37°, low 28°, a little snow   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 6:30 a.m.  

 Freedom of the press under Trump: In this morning's New York Times, a story by Michael M. Grynbaum, "‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’

In a move that drew harsh criticism from its own correspondent, CBS News abruptly removed a segment from Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes” that was to feature the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador.

CBS announced the change three hours before the broadcast, a highly unusual last-minute switch. The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment. CBS News said in a statement that the segment would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.

But Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, rejected that criticism in a private note to CBS colleagues on Sunday, in which she accused CBS News of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

. . .

Sunday’s unusual events have once again placed “60 Minutes” at the center of a media and political fracas.

Ms. Weiss was appointed in October after David Ellison, the owner of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, acquired her independent news and opinion site, The Free Press.

Mr. Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount earlier this year was approved by the Trump administration after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit that President Trump had brought against “60 Minutes.”

Mr. Ellison is currently making a hostile bid to outmaneuver a rival company, Netflix, and acquire the media behemoth Warner Bros. Discovery. He has been courting Mr. Trump’s support for his bid, but the president has used recent episodes of “60 Minutes” to suggest he is displeased with Mr. Ellison’s stewardship of CBS.

“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.

The segment was focused on Venezuelan men who were sent by the Trump administration to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a notorious prison in El Salvador. In a news release on Friday promoting the segment, CBS News said that Ms. Alfonsi had spoken with several men now released from the prison “who describe the brutal and torturous conditions they endured.” 

One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff. 

So it goes in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Money makes the world go around.  To believe that we have a government 'of the people, by the people, and for the people' is to be a fool.  And they have 3 more years to work their wickedness and destruction. 

What should civics teachers be teaching in our schools now about America and democracy?  about 'the land of the free'?  about what is happening in this country?  Do they pursue the truth?  Can they?

Art toss.  I bit the bullet and tossed some old art projects into the trash cart this afternoon, including a nude I dated "81".   I suppose I ought to toss a lot of other ones, and maybe I will.   Not much sense waiting until both the paintings and the painter are ready for the landfill, Omega Hills for them and Forest Lawn for me.  I made progress in setting up my 'studio' and could probably start painting now.  Whether I have the motivation to do so is another question.

Looking at my paintings from the early 80s, I could see that I have managed to get better at applying paint to a surface, no increase in talent or creativity, just in applying paint to a surface, but I'm glad for that.

Frank Bruni's essay in today's NYT is "The Most Important Thing We Learned From Susie Wiles", about her now infamous Vanity Fair set of interviews.  I was first struck by these words:

Briefing Whipple on Trump’s tropisms, she observed: “He’s said it a million times — ‘I judge people by their genes.’” That nugget drew less notice than the digs at Vance and Vought. But it’s a doozy, especially given Trump’s frequent rants about immigration and I.Q.

Trump is at heart a racist and a eugenist.  It's part of his nazism.  He's a believer in genetically superior people and families, and races.  He deep-down believes in shithole countries and shithole people.  Most shithole countries are in Africa.  Most genetically superior countries and people are in northern Europe, especially Scandinavia.  In mid-twentieth-century Germany, eugenics led to Auschwitz.  Where will he lead twenty-first-century America?

I was also struck by these words in the same paragraph:

But when Trump beckoned [Wiles] to join him as he returned to the White House, she came. She came despite her awareness of how quickly he’d cycled through chiefs of staff and other senior aides during his previous term. She came despite knowing — as does any sensate creature even casually observing America over the past decade — how vicious and volatile he can be. She came with eyes open to his biases, having worked on all three of his presidential campaigns. 

These words reminded me of what I posted on Facebook during the hearings of the January 6th Committee about the witnesses from the first Trump administration who testified before the Committee:

On July 22, 2022, I posted on Facebook the following:

Donald Trump is a bad man. He was a bad man on January 6, 2021. He was a bad man on January 20, 2017, when he was inaugurated, and on November 8, 2016, when he was elected. He was a bad man on June 15, 2015, when he magisterially rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy and to denounce Mexicans as criminals and rapists, though "some, I assume, are good people." Trump's personal wickedness, dishonesty, and perfidy have been open and notorious throughout his adult life. I am mindful of that every time I watch the Republican witnesses called by the January 6th Committee. They are all Trump enablers. Pat Cipollone, his White House counselor, is the most flagrant, successfully fending off Trump's first impeachment in 2019-2020, enabling Trump to stay in power, to run for reelection, and to put all of us through the wringer of the 2020 election and its aftermath, especially January 6th. That said, while I acknowledge the testimonies of Cipollone, Pottinger, Matthews, Hutchinson, and the other Trump administration officials, I never lose sight of the fact that they were all voluntary Trump enablers. Ditto the 'Christian first, conservative second, republican third' Mike Pence.  Each hitched his or her wagon to the evil star of a bad man, a very bad man. Forgive me if I don't applaud them.

Ditto for Susie Wiles and every other enabler of DJT in his infinitely more dangerous second term.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article titled "America’s Seniors Are Overmedicated", by Anna Wilde Mathews, Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty and Josh Ulick.  Excerpts:

One in six of the 46 million seniors enrolled in Medicare’s drug benefit, which pays for most drugs taken by older Americans, were prescribed eight or more medications. . . . In 2022, 7.6 million seniors were simultaneously prescribed eight or more medications for at least 90 days.  Of those seniors, 3.9 million took 10+ drugs at once.   Among the seniors in the Journal analysis who were taking eight or more drugs, 3.6 million had prescriptions for at least one medication that geriatricians say elderly patients should generally avoid.

I'm one of those taking 8 prescription drugs every day, and I suspect that the number will increase after the results of my pulmonary function tests, Holton monitor, and perhaps referral to the Cardiac (congestive heart failure) clinic are known.  Blood pressure -2; gout -1; prostate -2; TIA - 1; cholesterol - 1; GERD -1.  In addition, I use a number of prescription creams and lotions and eye medications, as needed.  Plus, a doctor-prescribed multi-vitamin, a potassium horse pill, and an OTC dry-eye medication. and eye drops.  Plus, the most expensive stuff:  once a week Trulicity injections for diabetes and bi-weekly Kevzara injections for polymyalgia rheumatica.  What am I missing?  Yikes.  I used to wonder whether all these chemicals were killing me, but now I am persuaded they have probably kept me alive for as long as I've lived, particularly the blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes drugs.

After my PFT this morning, I stopped at the Gold Clinic to see whether I could get a Covid vaccination.  No luck.  I needed an order from my primary care provider, Kali.  This afternoon, I got a call from VA scheduling office to set a date for the vaccination, January 2, after the Holton monitor mounting and my urology appointment.  I decided that it was irresponsible not to get the vaccine since, if I caught Covid, I could spread it to Geri, or anyone else.

Lunacies, Obscenities

New battleships: President Trump announced on Monday that the Navy would build two new “Trump Class” battleships, with the eventual goal of acquiring 25. The announcement by Mr. Trump was the latest example of the president rebranding an aspect of the federal government in his image. 

Greenland: Mr. Trump renewed his call for the United States to take over the semiautonomous Danish territory of Greenland, saying it was necessary for national security. “We have to have it,” he said.

The blue gizmo was the pincher the med tech puts on your nose while you breathe through the white gizmo during the PFT.

12/21/2025

 Sunday, December 21, 2025

Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year

1948, the State of Eire (formerly Irish Free State) declared its independence

1956 Montgomery bus boycott ended after the Supreme Court ruled segregated buses unconstitutional

1970 Oregon v. Mitchell Supreme Court case was decided, lowering the minimum voting age in U.S. federal elections to 18

1978 Police in Des Plaines, Illinois, arrested John Wayne Gacy for murder

1988 A terrorist bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 mid-air over Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 people on the ground

1991 Soviet Union formally dissolved as 11 of 12 republics signed a treaty forming the Commonwealth of Independent States

2016 Carl Icahn was announced as Special Advisor to the President on Regulatory Reform, under President Donald Trump

2017 UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 to denounce US decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital

2024  The United States Senate passed a funding bill, with President Joe Biden subsequently signing the bill into law, thereby averting a government shutdown. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:40 from a distressing dream about TSJ, MLS, and me.  12°, wind chill 4°, high 27°, low 12°, clear skies all day. 

Newgrange, Ireland, on the solstice

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 11 a.m.  

Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith, an op-ed by David French in this morning's New York Times.  Excerpt:

Religion is one of the most dangerous forces on earth.

If you’ve ever encountered true fundamentalists, you know why. When you combine eternal stakes with absolute certainty, it produces the kind of people who are happy to be cruel in the name of God.

In fact, they can view their cruelty as a form of kindness. If they treat you with decency, doesn’t that make you comfortable in your sin? It’s important for them to take opportunities to confront people when you can — in other words, to tell people that they’re wrong, often in the most strident of ways. How else will they understand the gravity of their own sin?

To the fundamentalist, disagreement is proof of apostasy. But it can be even worse than that — if you’re wrong, then you might lead other people into error, and that makes you dangerous.

That’s one reason fundamentalists of all stripes are often such zealous censors. A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. And don’t think for a moment that fellow believers are spared the fundamentalists’ ire. They’re a chief target. They have no excuse for their errors, and they receive the most vitriol of all.

The same principle can be applied to secular fundamentalists. Perhaps you’ve met them — the people who define themselves through their individual politics, who show a kind of sneering contempt for dissent, and are very, very concerned with who is platformed and who is not.

Nothing I’m saying is original. I’m relaying an observation that’s been true since the first spark of faith in the human heart. There is a quiet, dark voice that whispers: “You are right. They are wrong. It is best for everyone if you rule.”   

I plead guilty, to the secular part.  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  Aleksander Solzynitisin: "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years."

David French is a believing, practicing Christian who is on the faculty of Lipscomb University in Nashville.  Lipscomb is a Christian university affiliated with the Churches of Christ, not to be confused with the United Church of Christ (my favorite Protestant denomination)😇).  Until 2024, he was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America. Due to conflicts with his church and its members over political issues, and after personal attacks against him and his family, they switched to another church in Nashville.  

I enjoyed this excerpt from his essay: 

When I think of the contrast between Jesus’ life and ministry and the will to power that has consumed so many Christians, I’m reminded of the words usually attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

That’s a fair critique. And by that metric, every single one of us will fail. Who among us is truly like Christ? But Gandhi’s critique contains a potential fallacy. There is an unspoken implication that people would actually like Christians if we behaved more like Christ.

But no. That’s demonstrably wrong. It’s true that people want to receive love and compassion, and that when they encounter Christians who love them and serve them, they tend to like them.

Many people do not, however, appreciate it when a Christian loves and serves their enemies. They absolutely do not like it when a Christian refuses to join their political crusade.

Venezuela, Trump, Oil, and Imperialism.  Smedley D. Butler was a U. S. Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor winner who retired in 1931.  After retirement, he toured the U.S. giving speeches entitled "War is a Racket."  The speeches were so popular that he expanded his remarks and turned them into a short book with the same name.  The theme of his book is that American corporate business interests profit enormously from America's wars.  He wrote:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

and

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. [Emphasis added.]

I read Butler's book a few years ago, more interested in it than most people because of my years in the Marine Corps, though reading it did not instill any feelings of pride in my Marine Courps heritage.  My last duty station in Asia was at Camp Smedley D. Butler on Okinawa.  What mainly triggered my memories of Smedley D. Butler and his War is a Racket was President Trump's comments on Wednesday:

“You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”

and 

The blockade will remain, he wrote on Truth Social, until the South American nation returns “to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” 

This claim is a typical Trump lie.  Venezuela (following Mexico, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia) did nationalize its oil in 1976 and again in 2007, but the oil interests -  Exxon, Mobil (Chevron), Shell, ConocoPhillips, and others - were compensated.  There was no 'stealing.'  It was all a part of formerly economically colonized countries attempting to free themselves from Western, i.e., primarily US, economic imperialism.  So here we are again, with US Marines on US Navy ships, and in Puerto Rico, awaiting a call to attack a South American country in the interest of acquiring ownership and control of its natural resources.  War is a Racket, and Donald Trump is happy to serve as Racketeer-in-Chief.  The rest of us should be ashamed of our country.

If I had a 'bucket list,' I think Stonehenge would top the list.  Sarah and I visited Newgrange many years ago in December, year unremembered.  We flew to Dublin for a long weekend visit using bargain-rate Aer Lingus tickets purchased at IrishFest the prior summer & spent the first day in the Boyne Valley at Newgrange and the Hill of Tara, which tradition holds as the inauguration site of the ancient High Kings of Ireland.

 

 

12/20/2025

 Saturday, December 20, 2025

1935 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdotii on the importance of priestly celibacy

1983 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and 4,000 loyalists evacuated Lebanon

In bed around 9:30, up at 5:30.  30°, wind chill 15°, high 37°, windy.

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

    Another National Obscenity

Alas, that I should live to see such days

Today's Predictable Headlines

Redactions and Unanswered Questions: First Look at the Epstein Files

Victims Upset About Lack of Transparency in Newly Released Files

Lawmakers Criticize Justice Dept. for Not Releasing All Epstein Files

Have I become a conspiracy theorist?  My hunch is that the main reason behind the Epstein files cover-up is that Epstein may have been an agent or an asset of the CIA or of Mossad or of both.  I may be placing too much importance on Epstein's close business and personal relationship with Ehud Barak, who was Israel's prime minister from 1999 to 2001. and who had a long, significant leadership role with Aman, the Israeli military intelligence organization prior to becoming prime minister.  He was also in charge of both Mossad and Shin Bet during his prime ministership.  He and Epstein first met in 2003.  Epstein's "sweetheart deal" with federal prosecutor Alex Acosta occurred in 2007-2008.  Between 2013 and 2017, Epstein’s calendars and emails indicate that Barak met with Epstein approximately 30–36 times at Epstein’s homes in Florida, New York, and possibly elsewhere.  Beginning in December 2015, they reportedly had monthly meetings for about a year.  In 2015, Barak set up an Israeli limited partnership to invest in a tech startup, which developed emergency-tech systems. Epstein provided a significant portion of the capital for that investment, making him a business partner in the venture.  Barak broke off from Epstein after the latter was charged with sex trafficking in 2019, when Barak was attempting a political comeback in Israel.  His friendship with Epstein was a liability and Netanyahu made much of it, though Barak has consistently maintained that he never took part in any of Epstein's nefarious misdeeds.  Was Epstein an agent of Mossad, through Barak, or at least an asset?  Was he an agent of the CIA, or at least an asset?  I suspect we will never know.  I hesitate to even mention the possibility of such relationships, especially with Mossad, since any negative suggestions about the Israeli government result inevitably in charges of anti-semitism.  Nonetheless, I wonder.

    The Epstein scandal, and the continuing, intense cover-up, can and probably has given rise to endless conspiracy theories, including the one I just wrote about.  There is an ever-present risk of innocent people getting hurt by perceptions of guilt by association.  Everyone who ever accepted one of his many invitations to dinners, parties, or other social or professional engagements is now forced to deny wrongdoing.  Just yesterday, I watched David Brooks, of the New York Times and The Atlantic, explaining on The PBS News Hour, a photo showing him and Epstein both present years ago at some affair at which Brooks had been a speaker.

    Regarding the risk of accusations of anti-semitism, I deny the charge and note my anger at those who always and everywhere conflate the State of Israel and its government with the Jewish people.  It is a favorite deceptive political tactic of Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, and of various Israel-support groups around the world.  I say Israel-support groups, not Jewish-support groups, because I refuse to conflate the State of Israel and its government with worldwide Jewry.  I believe that a good many Jews, at least in the diaspora, perhaps especially in the United States and in Western Europe, do not support the current government of Israel, though they do support the State of Israel.  Some Jews, though relatively few, don't even support the State of Israel or Zionism.  Indeed, most European Jews did not support Zionism when the movement began, perceiving it as a way for real anti-semites to rid their countries of unwanted Jews.  The rise of Nazism and the Holocaust changed everything.  The Six Day War and subsequent occupation of conquered lands didn't change everything, but it has, I think, changed the world's understanding of Zionism today.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned Israel's leadership not to occupy the conquered territories.  He warned against what the occupation would do to Israelis, but his warnings have been ignored for 58 years.  And for 58 years, the occupied Palestinians, the Jewish Israelis, non-Israeli Jews, and the rest of the world have been paying the price of the occupation.   Perhaps I may be forgiven and not be accused of anti-semitism for thinking that Zionism was a mistake from the start.  

The Shrinking Catholic Church.  I watched a half-hour mini-documentary on this subject this afternoon.  It seemed like a review of my life.  It used 1965 as a baseline and sometimes 1970 and compared statistics from that era to dates in this century, comparing drastic decreases in the number of parishes, the number of priests and seminarians, the number of nuns, the number of Catholics who regularly attended mass, etc.  It highlighted the effects of changes wrought by Vatican II and the effect of Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which, over the recommendation of the Vatican's advisory council, reaffirmed the Church's moral teaching forbidding artificial birth control including 'the pill,'   I wrote about Humane Vitae in my memoir: The Church, the War, and the Pill

            The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’[1] without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of Church authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.[2]  The report was leaked to the press in 1967 and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, on July 25, 1968, Paul VI rejected the commission’s recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.

            The opening lines of Humanae Vitae were priceless, words that could have been written only by a celibate and childless male who had spent his entire adult life in a misogynistic power structure, i.e., the self-proclaimed Holy Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church:

To His Venerable Brothers the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See, to the Clergy and Faithful of the Whole Catholic World, and to All Men of Good Will

Venerable Brothers and Beloved Sons [quaere:  how about the sisters? daughters? mothers?]  The most serious duty of transmitting human life [humanae vitae], for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

The words of the encyclical as well as its substance were patronizing and arrogant and essentially untrue.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives (like the future John Paul II) wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best, mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of the shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

            From my point of view, the United States’ position on the war in Vietnam and the Church’s position on contraception flowed from the same source.   Johnson and his advisors and Paul VI and his advisors were more concerned with institutional interests than with the lives of their “subjects.”  Not losing face, nationally and personally, was more important to Johnson than the lives of the thousands of Americans and Vietnamese who were suffering in the war.  Better that thousands should die or be horribly wounded than that the United States be seen for what it inevitably was in Vietnam, an arrogant and feckless loser.  Nixon and Kissinger, of course, had the same value system at work as they kept the war going until 1973 and indeed they were more immoral and corrupt than Johnson.  Kissinger had been privy to the 1968 peace negotiations in Paris and fed information to the Nixon election campaign that it looked like the negotiators were going to arrive at a settlement before the election.  Nixon communicated with South Vietnamese President, Thieu, advising him to boycott the peace conference because ‘we are going to win.’  Thieu refused to attend, the efforts to end the war came to naught and three days later, Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey by less than 1% of the popular vote.  Between 1969 and 1973, tens of thousands of Americans would be killed in the war and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.  To Nixon and Kissinger and to millions of other Americans, American “honor” was more important than American lives, and infinitely more important than Vietnamese lives.  For Paul VI, the Church’s magisterium was more important than the lives of millions of Catholics affected by the Church’s teaching on birth control.  Better that Catholics, especially women, should face the choice between (1) bearing children they did not want or could not properly care for, or (2) the fear of eternal damnation (“Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?”) than that the authority of the boys in laces and brocades be questioned.

            1968 is still considered by some to be the worst year in American history.  Others consider it the best year, at least in some ways. The common element that dismayed the former group and delighted the latter was the widespread rejection of Authority.  Princes and potentates, presidents and popes – all were seen to have feet of clay.  The late 60s was an anarchic period, especially for the young.  No person or ism commanded respect.  Imperial capitalism and imperial communism were both seen as deeply flawed.  Religion was rejected as exploitative and practically useless.  Christianity was not able to keep Christendom from mass murders in World Wars I and II; nor was it able to keep American Christians from killing hundreds of thousands of Buddhists in southeast Asia and poisoning the earth in the mid and late 60s.  Nationalism was rejected as mere chauvinism and as the cause of wars.  American capitalism, American imperialism, American militarism, American nationalism, American exceptionalism, American religiosity including Catholicism were all viewed as interlocking conceptual systems ultimately producing personal and global oppressions.  Unlike earlier periods of social turmoil, there was nothing around to take the place of these pillars of American and Western society.  Catholicism could not be rejected only to embrace a purifying Protestantism, for all Christianity was rejected.  If any religion had any appeal, it had to be exotic and non-Western, non-deistic Buddhism or polytheistic Hinduism.  Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll replaced God, Family and Country.  Turn on, tune in, drop out

  The Church’s position was mocked by Monty Python troupe in The Meaning of Life.

Every Sperm is Sacred

DAD:

There are Jews in the world.

There are Buddhists.

There are Hindus and Mormons, and then

There are those that follow Mohammed, but

I've never been one of them.

 

I'm a Roman Catholic,

And have been since before I was born,

And the one thing they say about Catholics is:

They'll take you as soon as you're warm.

 

You don't have to be a six-footer.

You don't have to have a great brain.

You don't have to have any clothes on. You're

A Catholic the moment Dad came,

 

Because

 

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted,

God gets quite irate.

 

CHILDREN:

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted,

God gets quite irate.

 

GIRL:

Let the heathen spill theirs

On the dusty ground.

God shall make them pay for

Each sperm that can't be found.

 

CHILDREN:

Every sperm is wanted.

Every sperm is good.

Every sperm is needed

In your neighborhood.

 

MUM:

Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,

Spill theirs just anywhere,

But God loves those who treat their

Semen with more care.

 

            For millions of Catholics, however, Humanae Vitae, was no laughing matter.  It confirmed that conscientious Catholics who exercised responsible control over the creation of children were sinners, guilty indeed of “a grave sin,” something against “the natural order” created by God Himself!  The great 20^th century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner said of the Church’s moral theology

 

But it is a part of the tragic and irreducibly obscure historicity of the Church that in both theory and practice it used bad arguments to defend moral maxims based on problematic, historically conditioned pre-convictions, ‘prejudices’ . . . This dark tragedy of the Church’s intellectual history is so burdensome because we are dealing here, in all or very many cases, with questions that penetrated deeply into the concrete lives of human beings, because such false maxims, which were never objectively valid . . . placed burdens on people . . . that from the standpoint of the freedom of the Gospel were not legitimate.

 

Among the people illegitimately burdened by the Church’s false maxims was my mother, one of the faithful whose ‘concrete li[fe]’ was ‘penetrated deeply’ by the Church’s valuing more dearly its claim to Authority than any respect for Truth or for real spiritual and material ‘burdens on people.’  Wretches, anti-Christs!

            1968 was a very bad year and it set the country up for another bad year under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and J. Edgar Hoover.

---

[1] The Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” mocks the absurdity of all the apocalyptic and hyperbolic rhetoric about the so-called defense of  South Vietnam in a piece with the headline U.S. Loses Vietnam War; Ford Urges All Americans to Salute Our Vietcong Rulers: ‘We Must All Get Behind New U.S. President Le Duc Tho,’Ford Says.  The story carried a by-line of “New Hanoi, D. C.,” and this text:  After nearly a decade of fighting and more than 58,000 American casualties [sic] the U. S. lost the Vietnam War.  President Ford officially announced an unconditional surrender Wednesday in a formal ceremony in Haiphong, North Vietnam, then ceded full control of the U. S. to its Communist foes. ‘We are defeated,’ said Ford, bowing before Vietcong military leaders.  ‘The United States of America is now under your control, O valiant conquerors.  On behalf of the American people, I salute you. . . .  Ford rose from his desk and handed a ceremonial key to the White House to his successor, new U.S. President Le Duc Tho.  President Le then ordered members of his elite Red Guard to shackle Ford and remove him from the White House.  Ford is believed to have been taken to a North Vietnamese POW camp.  Numerous other key members of the Ford Administration have also been relocated to camps, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary William Simon and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.”

[2] “If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). 

“It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]

[3] Cardinal Wojtyla’s warning took root in Paul VI’s thinking, for in the ensuing encyclical, Paul wrote:  “However, the conclusions arrived at by the Commission could not be considered by Us as definitive and absolutely certain, dispensing Us from the duty of examining personally this serious question.  This was all the more necessary because, within the Commission itself, there was not complete agreement concerning the moral norms to be proposed, and especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church.”  

 

 

12/19/2025

 Friday, December 19, 2025

1946 War broke out in Indochina as Ho Chi Minh attacked the French in Hanoi

1971 Stanley Kubrick's cult classic "A Clockwork Orange," based on the book by Anthony Burgess, premiered

1988 Unexploded WW II bomb found in Frankfurt, Germany - 5,000 evacuated

2024  Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing "acts of genocide" in Gaza by damaging water supply infrastructure and depriving civilians of clean water.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:25.  15°, w/c -8, high 23°, low 14°.  Wind gusts up to 37 mph.  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9:30  a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10:15  a.m.

Hannah was found guilty of obstruction.  After six hours of deliberations, jurors in Milwaukee found Judge Hannah Dugan guilty of obstructing law enforcement, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison, but acquitted her on a charge of concealing a man wanted by immigration authorities.  I had expected a hung jury and was surprised and disappointed to read the headline this morning.  It seems that Hannah was, as the Irish say, 'too clever by half.'  Unless the verdict is rejected by Judge Adelman, which is unlikely, or overturned by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is probably also unlikely, this result is a devastating loss for Hannah.  She will be a convicted felon and will be removed from the bench, losing her $175,000 per year salary and generous benefit package.  I assume she would be entitled to some pension and health care benefits after 9 years of service as a circuit court judge and wonder whether they may be forfeited as well.  She spent her life working for the Legal Aid Society and for Catholic Charities, not pursuing more lucrative employment.  She never married and lived in an upper flat of a duplex on West Wisconsin Avenue, which she may or may not have owned.  In any event, she is 66 years old, single, and not a wealthy person.  Losing her ample salary and generous fringe benefits, along with being labeled a federal felon, will be a major setback in her otherwise commendable life.  The crime of which she was convicted also carries a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment, though I can't imagine Lynn Adelman sentencing her to prison.

    Hannah, Geri, and I were pretty good friends for several years.  Judge Patricia McMahon and Lynne Oehlke, who ran St. Catherine's Residence of Women, for whom I did some consulting work during my House of Peace days, were close buddies of Hannah.  Lynne retired from St. Catherine's in 2013 and died from cancer two weeks ago.  Pat McMahon retired from the bench in 2010 after 25 years on the bench.  I noted that Tom Barrett was called as a character witness for Hannah in her trial, and I was reminded of a Christmas holiday party at Pat's house in the Washington Highlands neighborhood.  Barrett was one of her guests, as were Geri and I.  Tom was Milwaukee's congressman at the time, a locally very famous and well-liked guy.  When he left, he waved goodbye to a small group, including Geri and me, and I warmly replied, "Goodbye, Steve."  What a doofus.

Epstein documents disclosure: diamonds in dungheaps and scrambled eggs.  We are, as expected, hearing complaints from journalists that the Epstein file disclosures are incomplete and unsearchable, in violation of the Epstein File Transparency Act, and redacted up the wazoo.   I am reminded of Louis, the police chief in Casablanca:  “I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”  My Facebook post one month ago today:

One of my proclivities that I’m not proud of, that indeed causes me some shame and embarrassment, is pessimism.  I don’t know when I developed this trait, perhaps in childhood, perhaps when at age 19 I returned from a couple of months of active duty in the Navy to learn that my One True Love had dumped me, but surely by the time I served in Vietnam and the time I returned from Asia to experience culture shock from my own homeland.  Pessimism and its related attitude of cynicism provide some measure of protection against bitter disappointment.  It is an outgrowth of fear, an unadmirable psychological defense mechanism, but one that I confess to having.  As George Will has written: “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.  I think of my idiosyncrasy as I witness the celebration over the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (H.R. 4405).  A warning: First, we must remember that the legislation provides many reasons for non-disclosure of information, including identification of victims, records that depict or contain child sexual abuse material, information that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution,” materials that include “images of death, physical abuse, or injury,” information that is “specifically authorized … to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy,” and is “properly classified” under an executive order.  Each of these grounds for non-disclosure will require some level of interpretation and implementation by Kash Patel’s FBI, Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice, Marco Rubio’s State Department, the CIA, and Donald Trump’s White House.  Knowing what we do of Trump and his loyalty-based political employees, I cynically and pessimistically suggest that (1) the most incriminating or embarrassing materials may already have been purged from the files, deep-sixed, and (2) we would be foolish to expect good faith on the part of the FBI, DOJ, CIA, State Department, or the White House in deciding what materials to withhold on the basis of the grounds authorized by the EFTA and how expansively to swipe the blackout Sharpie.   The legislation ended Phase 1 of the Trump team’s gamesmanship and started Phase II.  We have years of gamesmanship, cover-up, obfuscation, and litigation ahead of us.  Don’t expect any reasonableness or good faith or cooperation on the part of the Administration.

Big Basement Day.  Geri and I spent part of the afternoon moving stuff out of the storage area and the workroom in the basement back out to the finished area.  Tomorrow, Andy and Peter will come over to move the heavy butcher block table.  Then, we'll (mostly, I'll) have to deal with the more difficult and time-consuming job of deciding what to keep and what to finally discard, and where to put whatever I/we keep.