Art is 80

Remember when Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? No one would describe Russia that way today. Certainly, I wouldn’t. But I might describe China that way. I have never been to China, and although I certainly see and read enough about it today, my knowledge of Chinese history (and I bet yours) is minimal.

For example: Han, Ming, Qin, Qing, Shang, Song, Sui, Tang, Xia, Yuan, Zhou. These are the Chinese dynasties. Can you even begin to put them in chronological order?

On October 7, 2025, my blog post discussed two books I had recently read. One, The House of Exile, by Nora Waln, was the memoir of an American woman who had gone to China in the early 1920s and stayed over a decade, and the other Two Gun Cohen by David Levy told the story of Morris Cohen, a British Jew who had become Sun Yat-Sen’s body guard. Waln’s book told me quite a bit about rural China before most of the political and economic upheavals of the twentieth century and about life in the European sector of Canton where European “concessions” allowed westerners to live very privileged lives, and Levy told me a bit about Sun Yat-Sen and the first attempts to create a unified, modern China.

I also knew about the early Chinese communists and how they had to retreat westward until they were ready to start the Long March which led to their takeover of the country. But I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about that beyond what I just said in the last sentence.

So, I decided to pick up another Penguin paperback titled Mowrer in China by Edgar Mowrer, an American journalist. The book was published in 1938, before the Long March occurred and during the fighting between Japan and China, well before Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war in the Pacific.

I was intrigued by the book because I had read another book by Mowrer (see my blog entry from April 4, 2025, titled So It Can’t Happen Here) called Germany Puts the Clock Back, published in 1934 and giving a history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, then newly installed as Germany’s chancellor. I found that book very well written and extremely informative, and I thought his book on China might be as well, even though Mowrer lived in Germany as the Berlin correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, and only visited China for the purpose of writing this book. And although Mowrer’s book did not give me any help at all in putting the Chinese dynasties in chronological order, it did give me a lot of context for China in the 20th and now 21st centuries.

This simple blog post is not going to be a history of twentieth century China of course, but let me give you a few thoughts that Mowrer imparted from his 1938 vantage point:

1. The Chinese/Japanese rivalry was long-standing. Like it went back over a thousand years. And Japan looked upon themselves as the superior power in terms of military might, organization and culture. And they might have been, for the most part, correct.
2. In the 19th century, China was devastated by the prevalence of opium (not only the west, but Japan too bore a responsibility here), was hardly a single nation, but rather one run by provinces and by warlords, and deservedly with a reputation of being backward and lazy.
3. The Chinese were, by and large, a peaceable people, not at all militarily strong or sophisticated, and were much more respectful of intellectual and literary greatness than military or political greatness. This gave the opportunity to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a physician and a philosopher who operated mainly while in exile, to create the Republic of China in 1911. (How he did this, I am not sure; this was not covered in the book.)
4. After Sun died, Chaing Kai-shek took over and was everything that Sun was not. Chaing was a doer, not a thinker, and in addition to being successful, Chaing had captured the imagination and respect of the Chinese people, and as of the writing of this book, except for the part of China occupied by Japan, China was for the first time truly a united country.
5. At one time, Chaing and the communists were allies, but they had broken apart and Chaing was clearly the winner, although in their quarters in the west, Chou en-Lei was still someone to reckon with. (Mao, on the other hand, was not mentioned).
6. Digression: in Theodore White’s early book about his visit to the Communists in exile as a Time Magazine correspondent, he met with Chou and, at a dinner prepared in his honor, was convinced by Chou that he should eat what was served him, whether or not it was kosher. White (who grew up in Boston completely Orthodox and who never had eaten anything no kosher, even when living in Harvard dorms) said that if Chou en-Lei could convince him to stop keeping kosher, he could convince anybody of anything. By the way, White never kept kosher again after that. End of digression.
7. With all of the turmoil in late 19th and early 20th century China, Japan thought it had its opportunity. It invaded and captured Manchuria, creating an independent vassal state there without much opposition, and decided that it could take more without fear of much response. It captured Beijing and it perpetrated atrocities in Nanking, and suddenly found itself fighting a somewhat unified Chinese military that had not previously existed.
8. The Japanese were much stronger than the Chinese in equipment – no comparison. But the Chinese had the numbers, and they had the patience, and with a combination of defensive fighting and guerilla tactics (which were new to China), they were able to keep the Japanese from running over the entire country
9. The United States was officially neutral, and there were apparently no restrictions on American trade with either party. Japan was by far the more favorable trade partner because it had the stronger economy and was able to purchase American goods, including American planes, which were used to attack China.
10. On the other hand, American sentiment at all levels favored China and, from what I could see, a surprising amount of Chinese government officials (at all levels) and military leaders (even in remote parts of the country) had American connections. Many were at least partially educated in the U.S., had family here, and spoke English. This was a surprise to me.
11. There was a lot of debate in this country about the dangers of an even more powerful Japan and the desire for a strong China with economic relations with western nations. This was also still the era of colonialism, Hong Kong was a British colony, and there were “concessions” to European nations giving them privileged positions of various sorts. The west wanted to see these concessions grow – they knew they would not exist if Japan took over. But of course, the Chinese themselves were not happy with the concessions, either.
12. I am going to leave it here with just a few other comments. Mowrer’s writing was as clear in this book as in his book on Germany. He traveled and met many Chinese officials and visited the “front line” under what turned out to be harrowing experiences. He had no idea whether Japan or China would prevail, he had no thoughts about the U.S. getting involved in actual combat although he thought we would cut off selling planes to Japan, he certainly had no idea that the Communists would prevail in China, forcing Chaing and his followers to retreat to Taiwan.
13. I would recommend this book, even though it deals with a time that is now long past. Or perhaps for that reason. I think it provides a fair amount of context, largely lacking in our memories today.
14. One last thing. Mowrer puts an interesting chapter at the end of the book, which he lists as optional reading. It is, in effect, a conversation between Mowrer and his conscience. The question is how does a reporter stay neutral (which seemed then to be an essential element of journalism) when he clearly has a favorite in the contest and believes one side to have right on their side. Another contemporary twist that you might find relevant.

(1) It was in March that I got the first of three tickets I received for running a red light at Fessenden Street at 39th (or is it 38th?). When I have tried to fight such a ticket (maybe three times over the past 50 years), I have always had watertight proof of innocence and lost, because the appeal process is stacked in favor of the police and against the ordinary citizen. So, why should I fight City Hall? I paid by $100 fine, and went on with my life.

In April, we took a trip to St. Louis and when I returned, I found an unexpected piece of mail from the DC Motor Vehicle Department. It was a statement telling me that they had reviewed my ticket (without my asking) and concluded that I had not failed to stop, and they were going to return my $100. They told me to be patient because it would take about 6 weeks.

Six weeks would have been about June 1. I put a little note on my calendar and, not surprisingly, June 1 came without my hearing anything more from the Department. I made a mental note to keep my eyes open, and if the check did not arrive within the next couple of weeks to follow up. I was not sure how to follow up, but I thought I would probably call the Mayor’s hot line; I had had pretty good luck with them before.

But time passed and I didn’t think about it. It just slipped my mind. But, lo and behold, when I picked up the mail today, I saw an envelope from the City Finance Office, and inside was a $100 check.

You know how they always say “Don’t spend it in one place?” I think we are going to spend it in one place.

(2) We are going out of town for a week on Sunday, and because we are newspaper Luddites and still get the Washington Post and New York Times delivered daily, we have to cancel the delivery for a week. Usually, this can be done with a brief phone call: you tell them your address and your name and maybe answer a security question (e.g., what color is your red Prius) and they say okay. This time, this is exactly what happened when I called the Post and spoke with their computer. When I called the Times, however, nothing seem to work. First, the computer asked me a totally unexpected question (unexpected because it had never asked me this before): what was our account number? I didn’t have an invoice with me and had no clue. The computer would not take “I don’t know” for an answer, and it wouldn’t let me speak with a person. It asked me what I wanted to do: I told it I wanted to pause my subscription for a week. It old me it could do that and asked me what I wanted to do. I could tell I was in a loop, so I picked another answer (I don’t remember what it was) and the computer got me confused and told me to hold on, and pretty soon it was obvious I was being sent to another computer.

This time the computer asked me when I wanted to start my pause and when I wanted to end my pause. I didn’t feel comfortable, because the computer had never asked me who I was or where I lived and I didn’t think my cellphone was connected to the account. I talked gibberish to the computer and that was enough for it to send me to a real person.

I told him what my concern was. He seemed to understand and was very apologetic. I told him that I now had my account number, and he liked that. He then asked me my address, which of course I told him, thinking that was a fair way to check that I was who I said I was. But he then asked me my name, which I wasn’t sure that he liked. He then asked me phone number. I gave him the cell phone number, and he asked me if I had any other. I gave him the land line number; he told me that was helpful, because for delivery accounts, they only went by land line numbers (I know that made no sense, but I let it pass). He then asked me for my email, which I gave him, and he asked me if I had any better email, and I gave him Edie’s.

At last he seemed satisfied, and he asked me when I wanted the delivery paused. I told him, and he said, okay, let me put you on hold a minute. Okay, I replied, and he went off and then came back on the line, and told me “Someone already called this in. The pause was already in the system.”

Now this had to be me. Couldn’t he have told me that before taking up about 20 minutes of my (and his) time with all of his questions? But I thanked him, and then told him that, the next time we went away, I did not want to go through all of this again. Could he tell me what information I needed – account number, what phone number, what email, etc.? I just wanted to make it easy on everyone. There was a pause. It was as if I could hear him smile. His response was “No, you have done everything just right.”

(3) While writing this post, I am watching the Nationals play the Rangers. Going into the 9th inning, it is Texas 5, Washington 0. I repeat what I have said before – the team management has ruined this season, taking a very exciting group of young players, disposing of three of them on trades that do not seem to be working out yet at all, demoralizing the fan base, and demoralizing the remaining players. Hard to say when they will really win me back.

Yes, that is an old saying, but it’s true.

I will say something else. Anyone who still supports Donald Trump is a deplorable. And they will remain a deplorable until they change their support or their vote. Hillary was right.

It is unimagineable how many ways Trump is destroying this country and, yes, much of the rest of the world. Every now and then, someone comes along who can do that, and he is one of them. And for us, he is the only one who counts. (Yes, there is Netanyahu as well. That is true.) (Yes, there are several of the Supreme Court justices, that is also true.)

I guess I could go on and on.

Who was it in The Mikado who had “a little list” of people who would not be missed? Today, his list would be large.  And Donald, in big, bold letters would be at the top.

Of course, I am not the only one who says this. Everyone talks about Donald Trump and nobody does anything about him.

The entire Republican party is so cowed that all they can do is say that Democrats are Communists who will take away everyone’s private property and destroy the country. That’s all they say now. Their entire campaign is: “You think we are bad? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” That’s it.

Isn’t there a way to get him out of office before January 2029? I can think of several. I think that so can many others. Soon, everybody will be talking about and, if past is prologue, nobody will do anything about it. Including me.

I gotta run. Full day ahead.

I guess the Congressional race in Virginia’s 2nd District will be close. The incumbent is a one term Republican Jennifer Kiggans. The Democrat is former Congresswoman Elaine Luria.

On a short drive this morning, I turned on C-Span radio and heard part of a press conference being given in Virginia Beach by Kiggans and Majority Leader Mike Johnson. Kiggans started off by saying that this race was crucial in order to prevent the Democrats from controlling Congress and putting into action their Marxist and Communist programs.

I chuckled when she introduced Johnson and he said how important it was to elect her because she had such great ability to work in a bipartisan manner. I thought someone got their wires crossed.

But, no, I guess not. Because Mike Johnson, the Majority Leader of the United States Congress, now (as he says) on a 30 day, 34 stop, 18 state trip supporting Republican candidates, spent the next ten minutes or so asserting that the Democratic party “is in the middle of a civil war”, “does not know who its leaders are”, and “is controlled by Marxists and Communists”. And these Marxists and Communists, now that they control the Democratic (he of course says Democrat) party, if they get to control Congress will put into place a Communist agenda which will take away our civil rights and, what might even be worse, abolish private property. Are you a small business man? Well, you won’t be under the Democrats, because they want to take over your business.

Now, few things can shock me today regarding the action of Republicans in the federal government. But I must say this one did. If I hadn’t been driving in my new and still very clean car, I might have given into my first instincts and and thrown up onto the passenger seat.

I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to fall for this, but I know that between 30% and 50% of the country will.

Heaven help us.

I haven’t read this book, but think I will make it my next one after I finish Walter Bernstein’s I8nside, Out, about a writer’s experience with the Hollywood and Broadway “blacklists” in the 1950s.

I am not sure what Good Muslim, Bad Muslim says, but it is by Zohran Mamdani’s father, who teaches or taught at Columbia, and I thought it might give me some insight as to the mayor’s thinking. Or at least some context. The book is an explanation for the rise of Islamic terrorism, and was published 22 years ago, in 2004. (Am I the only one who has trouble realizing that 2004 was over 20 years ago? In 2004, Zohran was 12.)

In looking quickly at the introduction to the book, it seems to focus on nationalism, not religion, and not to necessarily equate Islamic terrorism with other forms of nationalism, but to show how closely related they are, and how it is western culture that paints it as very different. And, while certainly condemning the Holocaust, he also seems to define it as a not unusual phenomenon (the phenomenon of one group deciding to annihilate another), but large in size and European. He says that if you look at other parts of the world, particularly in Africa (remember, Mamdani is from Uganda), there are many such examples. But Europeans (and I guess Americans), he says, look at European wars very differently than they look at wars elsewhere. What he says about Israel, I don’t yet know, or about the Palestinians.

Looking at the world as a battleground between rival nationalities is of course the way Timothy Snyder talks about Nazi philosophy and perhaps you can also equate it with Trump’s stated MAGA philosophy, which seems to have defined an “American” race, which should have dominance over competing cultures around the world, and which should keep itself as pure as possible, hence the strong anti-immigrant and strong border policies.

Just like the Jews got in the way of Hitler’s concept of racially pure European societies structured in a pro-German hierarchy, the Jews in Israel get in the way of Arab nationalism in the Middle East. Always the Jews.

As to Walter Bernstein and the blacklist, I must admit that his name meant nothing to me when I found the book. He was a Hollywood (and New York City) writer, a fellow traveler of the Communist Party from his college days on, and member of the party starting in the later 1940s, after the end of World War II. I am only about halfway through the book (it seems to becoming a habit for me to write about a book before I have finished it; probably not a good habit), and I haven’t really got to his being blacklisted yet.

He describes his New York City background as being impoverished and his immigrant father as both a teacher and a writer, but he seems to have been privileged in many ways. He went to summer camp, his parents went to a summer family retreat on a regular basis, and he met, through his parents, some well know New York intellectuals. He talks about being a poor student, but somehow got into Dartmouth, and spent the summer before college living with a family in France. So it is a bit confusing.

He graduated from Dartmouth in 1940 and was soon drafted in the army, spending time at Ft. Benning for basic training, but then being put into a journalist/entertainer unit where he spent the remainder of the war years working for an army newspaper called Yank!. He got into this unit with some strings pulled, and his Communist background (clearly not hidden) did not seem to affect his assignments, including his appointment (aborted before it could actually take place) as the Moscow correspondent of Yank!. (It was Moscow that decided that they did not want the paper to have a Moscow office.)

Bernstein clearly had one knack that I lack. He had the knack of meeting famous people, while my only knack is consistently finding good parking spaces. For example, he, as a military reporter, is flying to Naples and he is sitting next to General Benjamin Davis, leader of the Tuskegee Airmen. He gets on another plane in Naples to fly to Bari, and the other passenger is Ernest Hemingway’s wife, or ex-wife, Martha Gellhorn. His buddy in basic training is future China expert, Robert Conquest. It goes on and on.

The most interesting portion of the book that I have read involves his being sneaked into Yugoslavia and having the first interview with Tito in his wartime headquarters. This comes from his having met two Yugoslav partisans when he was stationed in Cairo (“stationed” is not the right word, because as a journalist in the military, he seemed to be able to go anywhere he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted; strange military service in the middle of a war), who told them they could smuggle him into meet Tito and that, especially because of Bernstein’s communist connections (which again did not seem to affect his military service), Tito would be happy to talk to him. Getting him to Tito turned out to be far from easy. He had to wait for a plane going to the right place, and then sneak onto the plane and be left on a coastal island where there were villagers and partisans, to trade his American uniform for a partisan uniform, and hike for over a week up and down mountains, hiking at night, hiding during the day, with a group of partisans.

The interview came off, but Yank! wouldn’t publish it because (a) Bernstein was not authorized to go into Yugoslav territory, and (b) there were two civilian reporters who had already been promised by the U.S. army that they would have the first interview with Tito. Bernstein was threatened with severe punishment (perhaps a court martial), but he sent the article he wrote to The New Yorker (for whom he had done some freelancing when he was still at Dartmouth) and they published it. Although he was afraid this would cause even more problems, it turned out to work in his favor, because the article was so well and widely received, that the army apparently did not dare carry on with its promised discipline. He heard nothing about a potential court martial, or any other form of punishment, again.

Okay, that’s all I know right now about Bernstein. Well, one more thing. He lived until he was 101.

Going back, for a minute, to the importance of nationalism in recent world events, you could conclude that the fight against Hitler was a fight against nationalism, and that the post-war split among the allies was solely related to ideology.

Or could you?

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”, said Captain Renault, tongue-in-cheek. Of course, he wasn’t, nor were we. But there are other things that may (or, I guess, may not) shock us, and should.

The latest in this list of shockers is the apparent decision by ICE to use electric shocking gloves (pardon me: conductive distraction and de-escalation devices, or generated low output voltage emitters) as they go about their work rounding up people legally and illegally in the country at their whim. What, I ask you, are we coming to?

I just saw a demonstration of these devices on TV. Clearly, they are effective. If someone holds out their hand to you in a friendly fashion and you shake it, before you know it, you are on the ground, writhing in pain, although the pain seems to vanish or at least substantially subside once you hit the ground and are not longer being fingered by the glove. Some of the victims also emitted some sound, and got up slowly shaking their hand to rid it of any leftover discomfort. Others got up laughing heartily, as if they were part of the joke. The entire video looked like the equivalence of a paintball match, or some such thing, just a big game being played for the camera.

But this is not a game. This is dead serious. I had never heard of these gloves before yesterday or the day before. But I can see them becoming the latest fad for the unscrupulous and for the wary. Let’s say you are stopped at a stop sign and a car-jacker comes up and tells you they want your car. You want to object, but they put their electric glove on your shoulder and before you know it, you are on the ground in pain. Or, on the other hand, the car-jacker tells you to get out of your car, not knowing that you are the one with the shocking gloves and before he knows it, he is on the ground. Or – the most extreme scenario – you and car jacker come after each other with your shocking gloves and find yourselves both on the ground, laughing and laughing at the unexpected circumstances.

Who can use these gloves? High school or middle school bullies? Teachers? Wrestlers? Parents? What are the laws covering electric gloves, I ask you, for the general public? And for ICE enforcers (or other government law enforcement personnel)? Can they only be used in defense (and how would they really be used in defense), or can they be used willy-nilly? For example, an ICE man sees someone who they think might possibly be from elsewhere and might possibly not be in the country with the right credentials? Assume, he has no evidence, just suspicion. He walks up to the person, holds out his hand friendly-like and says, “Hi, my name is Jake, and I’d just like to talk to you for a minute.” The foreign-looking individual holds out his hand, also in a friendly fashion, and finds himself in serious pain, writing on the ground. Is that okay?

ICE will say that it was necessary to keep the individual from running away, right? That, if he ran away, the ICE man would have to react with something even more dangerous, endangering others, as well as the target. That there is no harm done, because once you take the glove away, any residual pain quickly vanishes.

Remember the 1960s, and cattle prods being used, mainly in the South, against Civil Rights marchers and protesters? Is there any difference here?

I have not taken the time to look up individual cases and court decisions, but let me quote Google AI: “Using a cattle prod on a human is universally recognized by U.S. courts as a violation of the Eighth Amendments’ prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. When correction officers, law enforcement, or institutional staff use electric shock devices like cattle prods on incarcerated individuals or detainees, the act constitutes the unnecessary and deliberate infliction of pain.”

Is there any difference here?

The answer is “perhaps, not”, but there are also cases that clearly permit law enforcement to use tasers and other forms of stun guns, and many law enforcement agencies do. But the use of such weapons is generally tightly controlled by the agencies. Policemen don’t walk their beats tasering everyone who looks like they might possibly have committed a crime in the past ten years. But no one (at least I think no one) assumes that all ICE men will be so circumspect, or so disciplined. I would guess that ICE’s use of the electric shock gloves will be more akin to the use of cattle prods in the South 60 years ago than to the disciplined use of tasers by city and state law enforcement personnel.

We shall see. In the meantime, just remember that when that masked ICE man cometh towards you and holds out his hand to shake yours, put your hands in your pocket and give him a slight (the slightest) nod.

Digession. You know who Captain Renault? No, he was not the African Explorer. That was Captain Spalding. He was the African Commissaire de police in Casablanca. End of digression.

I am going to ignore our president’s most recent comments this morning. I am not going to talk about how he wants American sailors trapped in the Strait of Hormuz to stay there even longer, how he denies that recent suicides among those on the ship have anything to do with conditions on the ship, or how he plans on adding the Strait to those American territories which will include Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Gaza, Panama, and, yes, Canada. I am not going to mention any of those things this morning. You will not even see a listing of them here. I promise.

Instead, I am going to the first page of today’s New York Times, but I am not going to talk about the dam recent immigrants (beavers, not people) have built in northern Quebec which is “as tall as a city bus and even longer”, which journalist Norimitsu Onishi calls “hydraulic attenuation”. And I am not going to talk about the comments of murderer Luigi Mangione, except to say that you should never confuse him with my wonderful law school classmate Lou Mangione, who is as opposite Luigi as it is possible to be.

I am going to talk about the State of California and the article headlined “California Mulls Recognizing ‘Jewish’ as a Formal Ethnicity”. The gist of the article is that California is thinking about listing “Jewish” along with, I guess, African-American, French, Samoan, Hispanic, Native American, etc., as ethnic groups on all state documents where you have to, or have the opportunity to, state your ethnicity. Yes, Judaism is more than a religion, and “more than a bagel”, but what is it? This is a question that has confused the confusable since time immemorial.

We know you can be Jewish and an atheist. We know that you can not be Christian or Muslim and be an atheist. They are both religions. If Judaism was just a religion, one who disavows the religion would no longer be Jewish. But we know that is not the case (although some very Orthodox Jews think that any Jew who is not at least as Orthodox as they have ceased to be Jewish, but who cares about them?)

I saw a comedian on a Facebook reel the other day. I don’t know his name. He was clever. I think he is from Toronto. He said that he is Jewish, but not religious. That he doesn’t have any respect for Judaism’s religious structure. But….he said….his Judaism is like his belief in the Toronto Maple Leafs, whose organizational structure he doesn’t think much of, either. He identifies as a fan (as he does of being Jewish) and, if a miracle does happen to occur, he will be the first to be there wearing his jersey.

I also listened to most of the first session of a class called “Hitler and Stalin”, being taught by former Yale professor Timothy Snyder at his new home in Toronto to a bunch of Canadians. The course is built around his now aging, but still eye opening, book Bloodlands about the effect of Hitler on the lands between Germany and Russia. I remember a fair amount about that book, including Snyder’s belief that Hitler and the Nazis saw world civilization as a continual, repeating clash of nationalities or ethnicities, one against the other and, in each instance, there had to be a winner and a loser. He (Hitler) thought that the Germans (the Aryans) were destined to be winners as he pushed in all directions for more Lebensraum. And ethnicity was built up over the centuries both by genetic and physical connections and by a set of shared beliefs of one’s identity with a group.

To Hitler, the Jews did not fit into this worldview. Because they had no homeland (Hitler was really a kind of Zionist, you know, for some time), they lived everywhere as infiltrators, spoiling the purity of the ethnicity which would exist if they were not around, so they had to be disposed of.

This is not what is happening in California, of course, but the thought process is not that foreign to Hitler’s thinking. Of course, the premises are opposite. The goal of Nazi Germany was ethnic purity, and the goal of California is to protect various ethnicities, the ethnic groups that make up California’s enormous melting pot. In order to protect the Jews in an era of growing antisemitism, should the Jews be defined in such a way as to enable them to come under the protection of all of California’s anti-discrimination laws. (I know, the federal government is now against anti-discrimination laws; that’s for another day.)

I am in the middle of reading Rachel Cockerell’s fascinating book Melting Point, published just a few years ago. It is fascinating because Cockerell didn’t write any of it, other than the introduction. The entire book is composed of excerpts of books and speeches and newspaper articles from the time periods that the book is covering.

Melting Point‘s stated focus is on the movement of European (mainly Russian) Jews to the United States through Galveston, Texas in the early 20th century. Her great grandfather was one of the organizers of that movement. But the book (and I am only a little over half way through it, but it fits with this column) covers more than that. It covers the Zionist movement starting with the calling of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 in Basle, Switzerland.

The goal of the Zionists was to establish Jewish settlement (a state? maybe, maybe not) in then Ottoman and soon to be British mandate Palestine. When it became clear that this was not going to happen in short order, the next question was whether there should be an attempt to create a Jewish homeland somewhere else, either as a temporary measure or permanently.

Digression: One thing leads to another. I read the Times article about California, and it reminds me of Timothy Snyder, whom I just heard yesterday, and that takes me to the book I am reading now, and it leads to something else. Where does it lead me? It leads me to a book I just finished reading a week or so ago, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which presupposes such an alternative homeland. In Alaska, on Baranof Island, home of the city of Sitka. End of digression.

You may have heard about the possibility of creating an alternative Jewish homeland in British East Africa, in today’s Kenya, then a part of a larger Uganda. The British were apparently willing to permit large scale Jewish settlement there and, with pogroms running somewhat rampant in Russia, this was viewed as a realistic alternative to waiting until the Sultan decided he could open up Palestine to large scale Jewish immigration.

Of course, it never came off, but until I read Melting Point, I don’t think I realized how serious the proposal was, how seriously it was taken, how much effort went into deciding the practicality of such an effort, and how much it was debated at two separate Zionist conferences before it was voted down, both for ideological and for practical reasons, to the great distress of Theodor Herzl.

And, I didn’t realize that there were then alternatives proposed that also were seriously considered and studied and which also proved to be impractical. One such place was in today’s northern Libya, then called Cyrenaica. Another was in Portuguese Angola.

And still another was in the United States. In 1900, there were already many, many Jews in the United States, and most of them seemed stuck in New York City and Brooklyn. The goal was to spread them around. To direct the ships bringing refugees somewhere else. One possibility was Baltimore, but it was deemed to close to New York. Another was Charleston, SC, but it was thought that there weren’t sufficient economic opportunities there. A third was New Orleans, but New Orleans was deemed to be such an attractive place that no one would leave and it would become another New York City.

But then there was Galveston. And Galveston became for several years at the beginning of the 20th century an entry point for tens of thousands of Jews coming to America. Successful at first, it didn’t last. Many Jews did not want to go to Texas, did not want to take the month long ocean voyage from Bremen or Hamburg to Galveston. Many were afraid that they would be spread around an unwelcome country where they knew no one or, conversely, that they would become so American that they would no longer be Jewish. And then there were unanticipated opposition from American immigration authorities which had to be overcome.

All this is history. But it all connects to today. Who are the Jews? What is their role in the world? Why are they so different in so many respects from other groups who seem to fit into a very different pattern? And where is all this heading today?

Michael Chabon had the Jews going to Sitka (at America’s invitation) because the Jews lost their battle to the Arabs in 1948. He rewrote history. But that battle of course continues today. As Timothy Snyder said in the lecture I heard yesterday, no one knows what will happen tomorrow, but it will only happen because of what happened yesterday and what is happening right now, and, he says, no one knows what is really happening right now either.

I heard Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries talk about the Supreme Court yesterday, and in particular about all the evil that the Court, in recent years both before and during the current Trump presidency, has visited on the country. He could have talked about any number of items which have changed our direction, but he stuck to Citizens United dealing with campaign finance, to several decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to the decision relieving the president from liability for just about anything. He suggested that the Democrats, if they control Congress after the midterms, would work on preparing proposed constitutional amendments that would reverse these decisions, and on changes to the structure and composition of the Court itself.

I think that Jeffries is 100% correct on his position as to the problems created by the Court, and I think that his proposed paths to solution deserve careful consideration, but I think, not surprisingly, that his remarks are politically 100% wrong.

The Democrats have enough problems trying to present a united front to the voting populace. The elections of several “progressive” candidates have already raised questions in a part of the voting public that did not really know what the Democrats stood for (other than being against the Trump administration) even before recent voting results, and is more confused now.

My own suggested next step, while quite complicated in practice, is not complicated in thought…..I think the Democrats need to create a mechanism that will develop a party platform that all candidates can buy into. What is the party’s position on Iran and Israel, on immigration, on national debt, and so on? Some of those topics are quite divisive, which is why they must be addressed. And, on the difficult questions, the party platform does not have to provide full answers. For example, on immigration, there could be statements on keeping families together, protecting children, ending ICE’s strong arm tactics such as detention centers and sweeping people off the streets, finding a way to really judge asylum claims, giving those in suspended animation working privileges, controlling borders, encouraging immigration of individuals who are needed by our economy, or by our educational institutions, etc. On Israel, there could be recognition of the importance of Israel as an American ally in the Middle East, the necessity for Israel to remain strong, but also for fair treatment of Palestinians and a connection between major U.S. support and how Israel reacts to its aggressive neighbors. I would hope that the platform would not threaten Israel as an independent state, but be more open to candidates criticizing Israel in the occupied territories.

On other areas, there is less contention, and it is these areas that are often not spoken of at all in the Trump era. Climate change and environmental protection being two of them.

The final platform should be completed in time to influence the 2028 elections, because the 2026 midterms are too close, but the beginning of the process itself could influence the midterms.

I think the reasons for this step are clear. They are to blunt attacks on the Democrats as being radical or out of control or anti-American. And yes, I would expect all Democratic candidates to buy into the process, understanding that they are all part of a political party with people of various views attempting to come together on important issues.

The problem with Jeffries’ attack on the Supreme Court is not only that it does not speak to attempts to unify Democratic job seekers, but it feeds into the overall sentiment that Democrats are anti-American and want to destroy American institutions. What is the purpose of saying that if the Democrats are in control, they will work to amend the Constitution, or they will work to amend the Supreme Court. Maybe (and it is only a maybe) they will want to do that once they are in power and if so, once they have a thought-out program, let them put it forth for consideration. But to say to the public which is already nervous about the Democrats as a party that they want to change the constitution and restructure Court only promises chaos of the Democrats are elected.

Jeffries would be better off going to see the progressives on the ballot, such as Abdul El-Sayed, and saying: what are you going to do to help Democratic moderates to be elected? And going to the Democratic moderates and say: how are you going to help get El-Sayed in the Senate? These conversations would be a great start to the process of putting together the party platform that I think it so badly needed.

A digression: Heard a funny joke this morning. An elderly lady sells pretzels on a New York City street corner for $1. She has been doing this for years. A young man walks by her stand every morning on the way to work, and gives her $1, but doesn’t take a pretzel. He never says anything to her, and she never says anything to him. But he has been doing this for several years. One day he walks about her corner, takes a dollar out of his pocket, and lays it on her counter. She looks at him and says something for the first time: “the pretzels are now $1.25; the price has gone up”. End of digression.

Do you know who Paul Toboni is? Maybe not. Paul Toboni is the new (less than a year) general manager of the Washington Nationals.

I have this to say about Paul Toboni. For a while now, I have been convinced that the worst deal maker in the world is the former New York City real estate mogul and TV star Donald Trump, but now I think that I may be wrong. Donald Trump may be a genius when compared with Paul Toboni.

Going into the the halfway point of the 2026 MLB season, Toboni’s Nationals were playing .500 ball, winning and losing about the same number of games. This was unexpected, as the Nationals are such a young team and in the middle of a much-too-long rebuild. And they were doing this in a unique way – they were the team with the best offense (batting average, runs scored, home runs, etc.) of the 30 MLB teams (that’s how they won half of their games), with a pitching record that stood at 27th of the 30 teams (that’s how they lost half of their games).

It was obvious that, to be contenders, they needed to improve their pitching drastically, but because they were such a young team, they seemed to have a little time to do that.

August 3 (just ten days ago) was the MLB 2026 trade deadline. All trades for the year had to be completed by that date. No one knew what the Nationals were going to do. But the assumption was that they were looking for pitching and would not be trading any of their offense unless they could obtain pitchers who would be worth the price. For good pitchers, some of their offense might be expendable, because they had hitters, and power hitters, in abundance.

By sad coincidence, the week before the trade deadline saw the Nationals play two of the best teams in the league, the division leading Atlanta Braves and the always dangerous Philadelphia Phillies. The week proved a disaster for the Nationals. I think that was in part because the young team (no position player was over 29) was just plain nervous, not know what was going to happen to this offensive machine that they had built together. And, before the trade deadline passed, three Nats were traded away.

The first trade (with the Red Sox), infielder Curtis Mead for pitcher Connelly Early might have been a good trade. Mead was a surprise fan favorite and doing well, but was not going to be more than a platooned player, and Early is a young pitcher with a very promising future. It looked like each team got what they needed. (As an aside, Early has been on the Injured List with an inflamed elbow, and has yet to pitch, and Mead suffered a finger stress fracture in his first – and so far only – game with the Red Sox.)

A second trade was with the Cleveland Guardians.  The Nationals picked up three pitching prospects:  Josh Hartle, Will Dion, and Kendeglys Virguez, and an outfielder whom they didn’t seem to need, Nick Mitchell. They gave up their only All-Star pitcher, Foster Griffin, whose won-loss record was 12-3. What was the argument that this was a good deal for the Nationals? Griffin, who was signed by the club after he pitched in Japan the last three years, is 31 years old (old for the Nationals) and was signed to a one year contract only, which meant that he would have been free to go anywhere he wanted after the year ended and (as the Nationals’ ownership is so tight-fisted) some team would have probably seriously outbid the Nationals if they tried to keep him. So by trading him now, they got something in return. If they waited until the fall, they would just have lost him.

One of the new Nats pitchers, Will Dion, who is 26, is on the Nats’ current roster and has pitched three innings in relief and done well. The most touted of the three pitchers, 23 year old (6’6″) Josh Hartle, has yet to make the majors, nor has the other, 22 year old Kenderglys Virguez. The outfielder, 22 year old Nick Mitchell, probably (my guess) will never see the majors.

But the assumption was, with Griffin probably leaving at season end, the Nationals did well getting Hartle for the future and Dion to help with the bull pen today.

So, that too may be a good trade, although losing both Griffin and Mead was clearly a blow to team spirit and morale.

But then there was trade three, where Toboni traded second baseman Luis Garcia, Jr to the Yankees, this time for four (not three) pitchers of dubious quality. Garcia is only 26, has been with the Nationals organization for close to a decade, was hitting .283, had 23 home runs and 76 RBIs, and was leading the National League in slugging percentage. He will immediately be a star for a Yankee club that already has more than its share of stars. It was probably a long-run great move for Garcia (but unexpected), bringing him back to his home town of the Bronx. But for the Nationals?

Yovanny Cruz is in his first Major League season at age 26 (almost 27), and has pitched in a few Nats games, with decidedly mixed results. Yesterday, against the Cubs, he got one batter out, walked one, and allowed two hits, and two earned runs. Jack Bird is older than Cruz (30) and has been a regular Major League reliever since 2022. His record has been far from outstanding, with an over all ERA (earned run average, per game) of 4.89. What do we think he will bring to the Nats? Jack Cebert is a 24 year old prospect with potential upside, but little experience over last year and this, none of it overly impressive. Ben Grable, also 24, has probably the best upside of the four, getting very strong reviews from the Scouts. Cebert and Grable are still in the minors, and whether either will see a Nats uniform this year is not clear.

So maybe one day Cebert and Grable will make the Garcia deal look brilliant. But that day is not near, and what the trade has done to prospects for this year, and to team and fan morale is disastrous.

And this is especially true, because your can look at other major league stars, Harper, Turner, Schwarber, Scherzer, Soto and more, all former Nats.

So it is same old, same old in DC. Over the past two days, the Nats have lost twice to the Cubs, 8 to 6, and 12 to 6. When you score 6 runs, you are supposed to win. Losing with great offense is what led to these three trades. Nothing seems to have changed. And we are tired of it.

I like old maps, and have a number framed hanging around the house, including this map of the United States, dated 1834. If you count them, you will find 24 states. If you look, for example, at the State of Illinois, you will see that the capital is Vandalia. The capital of Georgia is Milledgeville. Detroit is capital of Michigan, and Tuscaloosa the capital of Alabama.

But this isn’t the oldest map of the country that I have. The oldest, which I have just taken to be framed, is from 1784.

Here there are only 13 states, and their western boundaries are a bit uncertain. (The photo is of a portion of the map, not the full map.) It is interesting to me that St. Louis is not on the map, although every history dates its founding in 1764. Nor is Ste. Genevieve, 75 miles or so down river from St. Louis, founded in 1735. In 1785, this area was controlled by Spain, and it looked like the cartographer might not have been welcome. The entire Mississippi looks to be the domain of various Indian tribes, and you can see that the land just to the northwest of where St. Louis should be is simply marked “full of buffalos”.

Between 1784 and 1834 is only 50 years (like 1976 and 2026), but look at the changes.

I have some other maps from the late 1700s, including this 1794 map of Jamaica.

Jamaica then had about 25,000 Whites and about 250,000 Black slaves (and a few thousand free Blacks). There were about 700,000 enslaved people in the US then, close to 20% of the US population. If you look at, say, South Carolina in 1790, over 40% of its population was enslaved.

Here is another map of North America that lives here in one of my closets. I haven’t researched it yet. Not sure why. I assume it is older than the 1784 map, and shows colonies of Britain, pre-independence. It is probably worth something and shouldn’t be rolled up. I should know more about it than I do.

That is all for today.

A few things you should know about me. (in addition to the fact that I am in hurry and didn’t proof read this)

First, with my own children and grandchildren, when they have differences of opinions with me, I am always on my side, not theirs. But whenever I hear argument between a parent or grandparent (other than me) and a child, and when I can hear enough to sense what is going on, I am inevitably on the side of the child. The child always seems right to me.

Second, if a young woman gets in trouble (and I must admit it helps of they are attractive), I always assume that they are being wronged, and that they are in the right. Remember Casey Anthony, whose trial for the murder of her three year old daughter was televised, gavel to gavel, about 20 years ago? I watched most of that trial and I was sure (as was the jury) that she was innocent. No, let me correct that. I was sure she was innocent; the jury found her not guilty.

Another case, from about the same time, was the arrest and conviction of Amanda Knox in Rome (Italy, not Georgia or New York) for the murder of her roommate, both students (one from the US, one from the UK). Knox was imprisoned for several years, and then the conviction was overturned (I don’t remember why) and she was released and went back to her home town in Washington State. I was convinced that she was innocent throughout. Still am.

I am not claiming that this is a matter of gender. I was convinced, for example, that O.J. Simpson was innocent, basically on the theory of “nobody in his right mind would do that”, not realizing that Simpson (even though not convicted) was clearly not in his right mind and undoubtedly murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. On the other hand, that Murtaugh guy (if that’s the way he spells his name) in South Carolina? He has never seemed innocent to me.

I bring this up because just this morning after finishing the New York Times crossword puzzle (who has ever heard of the Wutang Clan?), I glanced at the article above it and saw that Amanda Knox, now at age 39, not 19 any longer, has decided to become a stand up comic (a long term ambition of mine) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and that at least part of her humor centers around her experiences in jail in Italy. I wish Knox the best, but I am not certain that she has chosen the right career or the right subject matter, but the idea that she was arrested for murder, convicted for murder, jailed for murder, later freed, and then decided to turn that into a comedy routine, did give me some ideas.

For example (and this is, I think, today’s only example), what if Donald Trump, after his bit part as president is over, decided to turn his experiences into a comedy routine and try them out in 2029 in Edinburgh?

The highlight of the routine, of course, would be his escape from Turkey in a caterer’s cart (not that I know what a caterer’s cart really is, but I could make up a description that you could believe, because you don’t really know, either), when it turned out that the airplane he got from Qatar was less than meets the eye, and that he couldn’t get on the old Air Force One because……..[you fill in the blank]. So, he had to get into a caterer’s cart and travel by cart, along with several dozen parfait glasses and a bunch of dirty napkins, all the way to London (on a Fedex plane), where he finally could transfer to a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis and head west, Greeley style, to Washington.

Of course, he would have other routines as well. Cheating at golf is a good one. What he really thinks of the pillow king, Mike Lindell is another. How he fooled the leaders of Iran into thinking that he really was going to beat them at war was a third. How he beautified Washington DC could make up an entire evening – how crime has disappeared, how a city where you were afraid to go to a restaurant became one where you wanted to open your own, how the monuments were being painted gold, or were being beautified with a peel-off American Flag Blue non-sealant. He could restage the UFC White House fights with himself playing all of the parts.

You could go on and on.

My guess is that Trump would win the Best in Class award in Edinburgh and that the Guinness Book of World Records would certify that he was the oldest and most senile comedian ever to win at the Fringe.

Well, this is not going to happen. But, boy, if I were a comic writer, what material I could put together for a Trump look-alike actor!! And there sure are many of those.

DNC: Want to know how to win for sure in 2028? Hire me to write the script. I asked Google AI who should play Trump. They suggested James Austin Johnson, Shane Gillis, Alec Baldwin (I could make my own one man show based on him, so let’s leave him out of this one), Darrell Hammond and Phil Hartman.

Your choice.

The summer exhibits at American University’s Katzen Center Art Museum were on display for about two months. So why is it that we do not go until the very last day? It can’t be distance. We are talking about a museum a mile from our house. It can’t be cost. The museum is free. It certainly can’t be the quality of what they show.

This summer featured seven different artists in the large three story museum. All were worthwhile to see, but I will focus on two. There is, by the way, extensive information on all seven on the museum website.

Bonnie Lautenberg was married to Senator Frank Lautenberg of Ohio. Let’s say she is a photographer (because she is) with an imagination and a very creative eye. I am not sure how to describe this exhibit concisely, but here is attempt: she took a still from a film of a given year and paired it with a piece of art from the same year. Some times, she paired it because of color.

Sometimes, because of theme.

Sometimes, because of composition.

This is just a small portion of what was on display. Okay, since you asked, here is one more.

The other exhibit that was equally creative, if not more so, was called “Ghost in the Machine”, works by artist Timothy Makepeace. Let’s see if I can explain that one.

The art is based on NASA’s James Webb Telescope, and was created as the telescope was being assembled at the Goddard Space Center. It builds on Makepeace’s long concentration on (my words) the border between imagination and reality in looking at the solar system and beyond.

The top drawing is of the stars in Sagittarius, which I accept as a personal portrait. The middle drawing is one of a portion of the telescope itself. The bottom is a drawing of an orbital path across a sinusoidal rake of the stars (you probably have to look that up).

And here is Orion.

If you go on the Katzen website, you can read the entire brochure explaining the Makepeace exhibit.

Yes, there was more, including work by the late A. Brockie Stevenson.

And by Richard Dana

And more.

Sorry we did not go earlier. Sorry you did not get there at all.

Something you should know: J.D. Vance’s grandmother, when she died, had 19 loaded handguns. That explains a lot, I think.

Something else you should know: Gavin Newsom’s father’s best friend was J. Paul Getty and Newsom says that as he started a number of different businesses over his early life, the Getty family were always there to invest in them.

Here I am on a Sunday morning, with C-Span2’s BookTV on, having finished the Sunday NYT crossword (which I really liked today), writing this blog post.

As you can see, I have watched two interviews this morning – – J.D. Vance and Gavin Newsom. Now, what do the two of them have in common? Yes, they are both politicians, but something more than that. They both come across as highly smug and appearing to feel superior to others. And they both talk about how important humility is to them.

Clearly, being humble is not either of their strong suit. But is there anyone who is more haughty than the two of them (other than Donald Trump)? The answer is “yes”, and that person is someone named Kara Swisher, whom I knew nothing about until I heard David Rubenstein interview her this morning before the interviews of Newsom and Vance. She is probably the cockiest person I have ever come upon.

What goes along with cockiness (especially when it isn’t backed by anything), is the appearance of insincerity. The most insincere politician in the past several decades has been, I think, Mike Pence. No matter what Mike Pence says, I am sure he doesn’t believe it. And, it turns out, I have the same response to everything J.D. Vance says and everything Gavin Newsom says. It is obviously clear that I would never support J.D. Vance as a presidential candidate, I think I could say the same thing about Newsom. I had always thought that Newsom should not be the Democratic candidate in 2028, and I think the interview I watched this morning has convinced me of that. If he is the candidate (and I guess there is a fighting chance he will be), I may sit out the entire campaign.

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a twelve hour story.” That’s a direct quote from Vance on this interview (June 2026). I would suggest that this interview, well reported at the time, should be re-aired and re-aired if Vance is the candidate, but along with commentary, because almost everything he said is utter nonsense, but stated in a very cocky (and therefore insincere appearing) way. Perhaps, some people would listen to Vance and agree with him, being seduced by the hubris that I find so off-putting. So, just re-airing the interview is not enough. His nonsense must be pointed out and explained.

Before I leave this, I should say one other thing. The interviewer of Kara Swisher was David Rubenstein. If I could pick someone to be in my next life,I would probably choose David Rubenstein. And one remarkable about Rubenstein is how humble he does appear. And therefore how unique.

I will never be David Rubenstein in a subsequent life. But one thing I would like to do in this life is interview David Rubenstein. Anyone know how to make that happen?

One last thing before we stop today. Did anyone see the quote from the Pakistani Foreign Minister after the signing of the Saudi-Pakistani-Turkish mutual defense treaty? He said:

“The Islamic world must united to confront the common threat posed by Israel. Israel poses a threat to all of us. Islamic countries must adopt a coordinated approach to address this threat.

“Israel is a product of the Balfour Declaration, which was established in the 1940s as an illegitimate state, and it could post a direct threat to any of the countries in the region.

“No matte who comes to power in Jerusalem – whether it is Bennett or any other leader – the differences are only marginal. Their attitude towards the Palestinians and their anti-Islamic mindset will not disappear. They continue to incite Muslim countries against once another, and as long as the Palestinian issue is not resolved, the Islamic world must stand against them as one.”

So, the problem continues. On both sides. Even where you have a country like Pakistan which (a) does not come close to bordering Israel, (b) is not an Arab country, (c) has been acting as a “neutral” (?) mediator between the U.S. and Iran, and (d) has nuclear weapons.

Where is the leadership we need?

If you are looking for good news….

look elsewhere.

The topic for my Thursday morning breakfast group this week was the war trials that took place in Japan following its surrender after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Earlier this year, we spent two Thursday mornings on the Nuremberg trials that followed the surrender of Germany. So we were pretty well filled with information and thoughts about war trials – how defendants were chosen, how judges were chosen, how crimes were defined, and so forth and so forth.

But I began to think about a different aspect of all of this. I began to think about what happened to Japanese and German society when the war ended. Both countries were completely militarized, both countries were completely ruthless, and both countries were highly expansionist. Both peoples were very nationalistic, and they each had a belief in their own ethnic (and, yes, physical) superiority. Before and during World War I, I would guess it would be hard to find an American who had a good word to say about either people. Jerries and Japs were the worst. So much so that Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in remote prison camps, and many German-born Americans were imprisoned.

But then something happened. Within a relatively short period of time, the Germans and Japanese stopped being monsters. Today, over 80 years after the end of the war, they are still two of our strongest (and, yes, in some ways most powerful) allies. Their societies have been remarkably unmilitaristic, and no one is afraid that one day they will run into someone from Germany or Japan in a dark ally.

What happened? I don’t have an answer to that question, I just have the question. Yes, there were decisions made by the allies not to “overly” punish those who were defeated. Those who fought for their governments, those who supported the ideologies of the government…..they were let alone, not punished for the most part, unless they were determined to have been specifically guilty at a high level of war crimes. It is also true that both Japan and Germany were “occupied” by foreign powers for a period of time, and it is true that the Allies (in Europe) and the United States (in Japan) did expend much effort and money to bring about a change in German and Japanese society. And, clearly, something worked. Both societies underwent a 180, very quickly.

This has happened in other places as well, for different reasons. For example, in today’s Turkiye after World War I, the rigid Ottoman Empire was replaced by the Turkish Republic led by Kamal Ataturk, whose goal was to westernize Turkish society, and end all of the mythology of Islamic society. Women could wear western clothing, men no longer wore a fez, secularization became the rule of law. Society (at least in the urban areas) was turned on its head almost immediately. This was all accomplished internally.

The same could be said about several other Muslim countries. Iran, even before the last Shah, had become a relatively free Muslim country, as had Afghanistan. Beirut was as free as could be – the Paris of the Middle East. None of these places are like that today. They each underwent at least two complete social revolutions.

And then look at the USSR. In early 1917, in spite of obvious tensions, Russia was a tsarist empire and everyone knew their place. In November, Russia was no longer and the USSR was a presumably monolithic Communist empire. It stayed that way for over 70 years and then it changed once again, this time to a money driven oligarchy, which it is struggling to maintain.

The list goes on. Think of Cuba, never a paradise, but once a capitalist country, and then a socialist country. After 80 years of socialism, is it absurd to think that may change? What about Iran and other countries of the Middle East? What would be needed to bring about changes there?

Of course we are now at war with Iran (sort of), and we are trying our best to destroy Cuba’s already destroyed economy. Is it unheard of to think, for better or for worse, that we might succeed one day in helping create a secular Iran or a capitalist Cuba? What would we have to do in order to accomplish this? What would be the ethical questions involved? Ethical considerations have changed drastically. In the colonialst mid-20th century, it seemed natural for countries like Britain and the U.S. to take control of other countries and set them on what seemed to us to be proper paths. This is certainly not the case today.

Perhaps in 1945 we and our allies had the moral strength and the will to accomplish these major tasks, as well as general world-wide support, but now we don’t.

If individual societies will have to reform themselves, where will their leaders come from? How would replacement governmental structures, replacement economic systems, be developed and agreed upon and adopted with a minimal of economic or social disruption? Can it happen internally without the existing internal structure totally disintegrating (Russia and Turkiye)? Do we need a major war, not the kind we currently are involved with in Iran, with atomic bombs and firebombed cities before a society today is ready for change, and only then with outside guidance?

It seems to me that a total societal change cannot take place until after any internal or external war that sets the stage is ended. If a war is still going on, you cannot redo society. Instead, you need to fight the war.

It’s really a conundrum. You feel for the people living under control of the Iranian or Afghan or Cuban governments today. But without something cataclysmic, perhaps nothing can happen. And today, no one really accepts an externally driven cataclysm as acceptable. So perhaps we are stuck.

There are other things we have learned as well. At one time, the United States and its allies, even with the differences between them, could all be viewed as men (the multi-gendered term “men”) of good will. But now that we see that our own government can be taken over by people who do not fit in that category, can we even presume to think that we can play the role we played in 1945?

You can see the goal that I would like our world to strive for, you can see the place where it would be nice to wind up. But it looks like while we suffer under that old “Chinese curse” of living in interesting times, we are also constrained by that good old American saying:

You just can’t get there from here.

(1) You are all wondering how the new Prius is doing on gas mileage. We had the first real try to see how it would perform on the road, as we drove 75 miles (each way) yesterday to Orange, Virginia, to have a very nice visit and lunch with our old friends, Jeff and Karen Dwyer. When I say we are old friends, we realized that we have known each other for 51 years. Does that qualify?

Because I can get a bit neurotic about mileage on a Prius, I made sure to hide the calculation as we drove. Otherwise, I would be adjusting my speed and so forth continually to try to maximize my efficiency, and I just wanted to see how it would do on its own. Going down, the mileage was 61.4 mpg, and coming back 63.5 mpg, so I think it is doing just fine.

(2) So, we just got the July jobs report and, rather than increasing by an anticipated 85,000 or so, employment in the nation fell by 23,000. To make matters worse, job numbers for the past two months, May and June, were revised down over 100,000, which I think is about a 40% decrease. And to make things even worse than that, the average wage increases were below inflation.

Obviously, this is a bad sign for the economy, right? Certainly a bad sign for those Americans who can not find jobs, and for those employers with technical positions open who can not find enough Americans. But….

Clearly, all is not bad. Upon hearing the news, the stock market rises. Companies’ payrolls obviously are lower than anticipated; more for the investor class. And by the way, as the majority of the readers of this blog are of a certain age and have managed to put away a certain amount of savings, it is important to remember that 93% of the stock market (latest figures) are owned by the wealthiest 10% of the population. And you wonder why the Democratic Socialists are gaining votes.

(3) For those of you who are interested, I would strongly suggest that you go to the Haberman Institute website and click on the “Program Recording Archive” and watch/listen to our last two programs, both of which are very interesting. The two sessions are:

1. With Pen and Pistol: Heroines of the Holocaust by Prof. Lori Weintrob of Wagner University. It’s the story of the role of women in Holocaust resistance, and I think you will be surprised at much of what she says.
2. Mordecai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist Vision: What Panned Out? What Fell Short, by Rabbi Bradley Artson of the American Jewish University. It is a beautifully composed essay not on the Reconstructionist movement per se, but on Kaplan’s vision for a reconstituted American Jewish community, creating theological adjustments to conform to modern life.

http://www.habermaninstitute.org.

(4) I have thought about it long and hard. I think that Paul Toboni’s three moves at trade deadline time for the Washington Nationals are disastrous, especially sending Lius Garcia, Jr. to the Yankees. Now, everyone on the team feels like they have been ripped apart, they all know that they probably have no long range future with the club, and they know that the club will be on the losing end of things for some time to come. We received 9 players (8 of them pitchers, none of them seasoned) for two reliable and much loved infielders and one pitcher. I understand that the pitcher, Foster Griffin, was only under a one year contract, but you would think that we would fight to keep him, not trade him for four unknowns.

I know: we will see. But even if we see that we have acquired some strong pitching (which we obviously need), the destruction of what was building this year was not worth the price.

(5) The goal of the Repugnantcans in crucifying Fauci is not to jail him, but to make him spend the rest of his life and all of his money defending himself. What could be more sickening?

(1) The Day of My Discontent started with my determination, once and for all, to resolve my differences with T-Mobile. It started when I decided it was time for a new phone and I wandered into a store called Metro by T-Mobile, which in my naivete I thought was the same as T-Mobile. After I had arranged for the phone, the salesman told me they were affiliated with T-Mobile, but they were not T-Mobile. I still don’t know what this really means, but he told me that my phone number would be transferred to the new phone, but that my future bills would come from Metro by T-Mobile, not from T-Mobile. My service, though, I was told would remain T-Mobile. Okay, I said.

Everything was fine until I opened my next credit card bill, and saw that there was an auto-pay charge on it for $140 from T-Mobile. Like nothing had changed. (I was also getting billed by Metro, of course.). I called T-Mobile and told them what was happening, assuming there was a mistake. No mistake, they said. They told me I had two lines, I only transferred one of them, and I still had the other, and there would be no reduction as long as I had the other one. I told them that the other line was given to me as a “free” line, which “there was no reason not to take”. I had never used it; it had never been connected to a phone. Too bad, they said, it’s yours.

This was about a month or so ago, not long after I got the new Metro phone. I told them that I wanted to cancel it, and they said “okay, give me your PIN”. I told them I had been with T-Mobile for probably 20 or more years, and I didn’t even know I had a PIN. They told me they needed a PIN to cancel my account, that they couldn’t give me a new PIN on the phone, because they needed to see my personal ID to know I was I (me was me? I was me?), so I had to go to a store where they could see my ID and change my PIN. I told them that I was going to be away for over two weeks and could not do that until I returned. The nice lady told me she put an extensive note in my file, and the lapse of time should not be a problem.

On Monday, I went to the T-Mobile store in Silver Spring and got a new PIN. The store, of course, told me that they could give me the PIN, but they could not cancel the account and I would have to call T-Mobile back. I did that today.

To make a long story shorter than it otherwise would be (if not short), I was on the phone with a T-Mobile lady (who is clearly one of their best employees – she should be CEO) who told me that she understood my predicament, but that I owed two months service for the phone number I didn’t use, for service they did not provide me. I told her that was ridiculous; she agreed. I told her I shouldn’t have to pay anything for a free number that was never even connected to a phone. She agreed. In fact, she agreed with everything I said. But she told me that the “system” did not allow the account to be cancelled if there was an outstanding balance, and that as long as I held on to that balance, it would increase every month. She understood and agreed with what I was saying, but it was not allowed by the “system”. The “system” said I had to pay. When I asked her who else I could talk to, she told me I could talk to every employee and officer of T-Mobile and that they would all tell me the same thing, because they were all bound by the system and it didn’t matter how much they might agree with my position.

I knew when I was beaten.

(2) My credit card bills are usually not a problem. I look at everything, and usually I understand everything. In the rare times when I can’t figure something out, I usually pick it up again later in the day and finally understand the charge. I also always pay the bill on time to avoid late fees and/or interest.

My current bill came while we were out west, and by the time I got it, it was almost the due date, so I simply wrote a check covering the amount of the bill, and sent it on the next day. This was about 10 days ago. Today, I took a closer look at the bill, and saw two charges (which I have already paid) that totally baffle me:

Freeshipping.com. $19

Simple Life, Dover DE $44.90

Going on the two websites tell me nothing. And the days the bills were posted were July 4 and July 6. Where was I then? I was on the Eurodam heading to Alaska on the 4th, and in Juneau on the 6th. What could they possibly be, and do I really even care, since I already paid the bill?

I will keep looking.

The Day of My Discontent

(I know this isn’t much of a post, but I needed to be out of the house this morning before 8 a.m. for a 9 a.m. meeting and then coming home so we can leave by 10:30 to drive a few hours into the Virginia countryside to meet some friends for a nice lunch. Hopefully today will not be another day of discontent.)

In 1986, there was a major change to the United States Tax Code (In fact, there were many changes, but I am just referring here to one of them). Before this change, if you purchased a property on December 31 of a given year, you could depreciate it as if you had owned it the entire year. After the change, depreciation would not start until December 31.

I remember a quote from a real estate investor right after the law was changed. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal as something like: “We have all been riding our bicycles very fast downhill, thinking we were great athletes.”

I know it’s far from a perfect analogy, and I know that I have no idea if what I am saying bears any relationship to reality, but when I think of that quote today, I think of Blake Butera, the manager of the Washington Nationals. Blake Butera is only 33 (almost 34) years old, and obviously has never managed a major league team before. He is the youngest manager in major league baseball today, and the youngest manager in the league in over 50 years.

Going into mid-season, Butera’s Nationals were outperforming everyone’s expectations, playing 50-50 ball, and having an offense that basically topped the league. It’s win-loss record was affected by a sub-par pitching and particularly by very sub-par relief pitching.

This past Monday, August 3, was the MLB trade deadline. If you wanted to trade any players, it was then or never (this year). What were the Nationals going to do? Traditionally, teams that think they have a chance to make the playoffs will hold on to what they have. Those that don’t will often trade good players for others they feel can fill some longer term need, or trade those whom they think may opt to go elsewhere when their contracts run out (if they only have this year or maybe one more on their present contract).

As it turned out, the Nationals offloaded three quality players. For a week or so before the trade deadline, it was unclear what the Nats were going to do. There was rumor after rumor.

Let me back up a minute. A couple of points. For the past few years, the Nats have been comfortably in last place. Towards the end of the last season, virtually the entire top tier management of the Nats was fired and replaced. A few deals were made over the summer and some of the younger minor league players who had been in the Nats system had matured to the point where they were ready for the big league.

Not only were the 2026 Nats more ready than assumed, but – as you can guess – they were a very young team. Hardly anyone was even 30. And when you added them to their 33 year old manager, they were ready to show the baseball world what they could do, and they did.

But I believe, in part because they are so young and relatively inexperienced, and because they had formed such a successful and cohesive group, they were scared to death as the trade deadline loomed. And it showed in their performance, a four game series against league leading Atlanta. The Nats lost all four games. And they lost three players.

One of these players is Luis Garcia, Jr, who had become the regular first baseman and had been in the Nationals pipeline for ten years, who is now a Yankee. A second was Curtis Mead, an infielder from Australia, who happened to have been brought to the Nats primarily, as I understand it, by Blake Butera with whom he had worked in Tampa Bay. A third, pitcher Foster Griffin, was the team’s steadiest pitcher, his first year with the team coming after three years pitching in Japan, but who only had a one year contract with the Nationals.

All three were fan favorites. Big fan favorites.

In return for them, the Nats picked up one outfielder and nine or ten pitchers, only a few of whom are ready for the major leagues today, although none of them are beginners and all of them are good prospects. One one level (or two levels) this all makes sense. The Nats actually had more good hitting fielders than they need, perhaps, and not enough pitching strength. They figured they were going to lose Griffin anyway (someone would outbid them when he became a free agent), that the Mead trade for a well thought of young pitcher Connelly Early was worth it, and that the four pitchers they received in return for Garcia were also going to pay off.

But, as one reporter put it (don’t remember who or where), Paul Toboni (the Nats’ general manager) traded this summer’s fun for potential longer term stability.

I assume the Nats’ brass decided that the Nats were not going to make the playoffs (they certainly were not supposed to), and that they should think about 2027 or 2028. This was the original plan anyway.

Now, I have no idea how these decisions were made. I don’t know how closely Toboni listened to Butera in deciding what to do. But I do know that the two brief post-trade deadline interviews with Butera that I have watched show a much less perky, confident guy than the one who managed the team the first part of the year. And I can only imagine what the effect of losing three teammates and friends, so rapidly and unexpectedly, is on the overall morale of the team.

Of course, everyone has resilience, but it takes a while for the resilience to show itself. It hasn’t shown itself yet, as the Nats are (as I write this) losing their second game to the Phillies, 5-0, and their seventh in a row (unheard of for this year before now).

But I can tell you one thing. It is up to Blake Butera to bring his team together. He is no longer a great athlete pumping downhill. The terrain has changed.

“You made me love you

I didn’t want to do it

I didn’t want to do it

You made me want you

And all the time you knew it

I guess you always knew it

You made me happy sometimes,

You made me glad

But there were times, dear,

You made me feel so bad.”

I dedicate this song to John Cornyn and Thom Tillis (and to Susan Collins and even Lisa Murkowski and all the others), who really don’t like Trump, but really do, because he made them (and continues to make them) love him. As they will show, probably today, when they vote the nomination of Todd Blanche out of committee to become our next real, as opposed to acting, Attorney General. Even as they leave office. Even as they continue to be castigated by the president. It makes no difference.

Why? What it is that binds them?

“That old black magic has them in its spell

That old black magic that he weaves so well

Those icy fingers up and down their spines

The same old witchcraft when his eyes meet thine.

The same old tingle that they feel inside

And then that elevator starts its ride

And down and down they go

Round and round they go

Like a leaf that caught in the tide

They should stay away, but what can they do?”

[pronouns changed in this one]

Yes, they don’t write them like they used to. And yes, what they wrote back then takes on new meaning today.

In the meantime, as the Republicans go lockstep into an abyss, as they usually seem to, the Democrats too are playing to character as they are standing in a big circle firing weapons at each other, hoping that they remain standing while their so-called comrades in arms fall. Tonight, we will hear the results of one of the last big primary days of the 2026 mid-terms. All eyes will be on Michigan, and the race in the Democratic primary for Senator between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and former Detroit health officer Abdul El-Sayed.

It looks like El-Sayed is going to win, although the polling has been a bit here and there. But he certainly has captured the interest of younger Michiganers and of Michigan independents. He is a good campaigner, attractive, well spoken and appealing. She seems to be none of those things, and that is a problem. In part, it’s a problem because, they say, he might have difficulty beating the Republican in November in this close, battleground state, and, those same “they” say, she would have less of a problem. That of course supposes that those who support El-Sayed in the primary would vote for Stevens in the final race with the same enthusiasm, rather than just sit it out at home. To me, that is not obvious.

El-Sayed is no Ilhan Omar, struggling into the country from her birthplace in Somalia. El-Sayed is a Detroit area native, a graduate of the University of Michigan, a Rhodes Scholar with a degree from the University of Oxford, and an epidemiologist with a medical degree from Columbia. No slouch, El-Sayed. Haley Stevens is a native of the same Detroit suburb as El-Sayed, went to American University here in Washington, and has worked for Democratic political campaigns (Clinton, Obama) since her graduation and before her 2018 election to Congress.

As usual, the contest centers around the Jews. What else? Stevens is a moderate and, as I understand it, a firm supporter of Israel (not necessarily of Netanyahu), and a major recipient of funds from AIPAC. El-Sayed is a progressive (his word), but not a socialist (he repeats this again and again) and not a member of the DSA. El-Sayed, perhaps obviously, is a Muslim and, if elected, would be the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Senate. His position on Israel is fairly typical for the left wing of the Democratic Party – the war in Gaza was/is a genocide, Israel should not receive (unlimited, at least) military support from us, and Israel should treat its Palestinian citizens as it treats its Jewish citizens.

But it gets tricky when El-Sayed is asked (1) whether Israel should exist, and (2) whether Palestinians outside of Israel should have a “right of return”. His answers on these two questions are more equivocal, and as you parse through his words, you tend to reach that never-never land of one big Middle East country filled with Muslims and Jews, where everyone has equal rights and one vote, and where they all get along, irrespective of whether a particular government cycle has more Muslim or Jewish participation. Of course, this could never happen, which makes the concept of one big state (from the river to the sea for both groups) impossible.

On the other hand, on all other issues, I think that El-Sayed would play a much more important and helpful role in the American Senate. So, it’s a tough choice. Glad it’s a decision that I don’t have to make.

Michigan song?

“Oh, I got a gal in Kalamazoo,

Don’t wanna boast,

But I know she’s the toast

Of Kalamazoo.”

And then come the best lyrics of all time?

“K-A-L-A-M-A-Z-O-O,

Oh, what a gal, a real pipperoo,…

Zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo

Kalamazoo”

Yes, they don’t write them like they used to.

Starting with the most important news that I saw this morning. “Arthur” is this year the 5th most popular name for a boy baby in the U.K. In this United States, lagging far behind, it is number 87.

British Arthurs will, I assume, largely be Arthurs. I don’t think that many of them will become Arts, although I have no way of really knowing. I believe that some of them will be Arties to their upper tier families. And many of them, I bet, will decide……..to go by their middle names.

Remember Sir Arthur Treacher? At some time, of course, he became a fast food fish house, but well before that he was an English actor who was the archetypical English butler. I guess, as he aged, jobs became scarce and he financed his retirement by allowing an American fast food company to use his name. I was never very sure of that.

But at one point, when I was younger but not underage, I saw Sir Arthur on a TV variety show where the host pronounced him to be “one of the seven lively arts”, and listed the other six. This was well before Treacher was a chain of fish houses, and when he still had about him at least an air of respectability, and he stood up very tall (he was about 6’4″ when he was just slouching normally), and said: “I am not an art. I am an Arthur. Nobody calls me Art”. (Of course, I don’t remember it word for word…..)

I resembled that remark.

Digression. Who first said: “I resemble that remark”? It was probably someone like Shakespeare or John Milton, but I identify it with Steve Allen and my Aunt Lee. End of digression.

I resembled that remark. I was always Arthur, never Art. I guess I always had a bit of the Treacher in me. I thought that calling an Arthur Art was a form of degradation. No one was going to do that to me.

And no one did…..until someone did. That someone was Kenneth Koger, my sixth grade teacher at my new school (now the Reed School, then the Ladue Elementary School), who on the first day of class stood up in front by his desk and said “There are only two people new to the school today. Art and me.” I almost crawled under my desk. I didn’t know anyone in the room, I had to spend at least the next year with all of them, and they thought my name was Art. What was I to do? I thought about correcting Mr. Koger before he could do more harm, but that would set me off as either an arrogant or impolite oddball. I was in a jam. I did nothing. I became Art.

I know I have said some of this before, but I also know that you don’t remember any of it, so that is okay. My family kept calling me Arthur, my friends and acquaintances all called me Art. I don’t remember how I introduced myself in those days. Some times I resented Koger, sometimes I was glad he did what he did, uncomfortable as it was. Maybe it made me “more of the gang”.

After that, other than family, everyone pretty much called me Art. The exception sometimes was girls who I either took out on a date or was otherwise friendly with. Some of them called me Arthur, or switched back and forth. If I were then the person I am today, I would have asked them why they did that, and when they did that. I would have been disappointed at their answers, I am sure. My guess is it was all unconscious and they didn’t even realize they were doing it.

And then there was Edie. When I called her up for the first time at the suggestion of a mutual friend and asked her out, I wasn’t certain that she got my name, so I asked her if she did. She was (maybe embarrassingly) uncertain and said, with a question in her voice, “Artie”? That almost ended it. I felt like my old friend Treacher.

Now, I don’t really pay attention to whether anyone calls me Arthur or Art. I do know when people call me Artie. That would be Edie’s old friend Linda Ward Smyth, or my college classmate David Reisen. That’s pretty much it.

Until David Reisen in the early 1960s called me Artie (we were not even close friends; he had been a high school classmate of one of my roommates), it never occurred to me that anyone would, and it was too rare of an instance for it to both me. Today, I sort of like it.

My mother had a first cousin named Artie Weiss. Of course, he was really Arthur (never called Arthur to my knowledge), but was always Artie. Way back when, I did notice that this did not bother him, and I wondered why. But of course, I never asked. Too late now, by far.

And then there was the old (?) Italian tailor in St. Louis who used to shorten my pants (I went there with my father many times), Angelo Tucci. He called me (because he thought it was cute? because he didn’t know any better? because his Italian childhood language did not allow him to pronounce a “th”?) Artur. With an emphasis on the second syllable. ArTUR. Like that. How did that make me feel? Important. It sounded important.

And then there was/is my old friend/client/fellow attorney in California, Rick Tell (haven’t talked to him in about 20 years), who always (not frequently, but always) called me Arturo. I liked that, too.

As I have often said, Arthur is too formal, Art is too informal, and Artur and Arturo are both a little too cutesy. What will the new thousands of British Arthurs wind up being called? I think they will by and large remain Arthurs. I think that the fewer Arthurs born in the United States will be Arts. As we know, two countries, two languages.

Okay (on another topic), nothing is new. Trump loses a golf tournament and says he wins, falls down in the polls and says he is on top, says negotiations with Iran started today while Iran says they haven’t, lets Todd Blanche says “no money for Jan 6 demonstrators” while he says “yes, there will be”. Nothing is new.

And Luis Garcia, Jr. is a Yankee.

The Relecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial has once again been drained, and is totally closed and fenced off,

Donald is still claiming vandalism the problem at the rather than incompetence. In the same neighborhead, Donald has also spent 5 million dollars regilding two statues that frame Memorial Bridge as you drive to or from the Lincoln Memorial. The restored monuments appear ugly and garish to most people, but apparently not to Donald, who finds them beautiful.

Whether they were also gilded with incompetence, by the way, we will see. Check back in a few weeks and we will see how they look.

But back to the reflecting pool.  In spite of her earlier outlandish assurances that the reflecting pool was destroyed by vandalism (something we always knew was false), U.S. Attorney Pirro has now concluded that vandalism played no role, and that the fault lay in the way Trump’s friendly installers screwed up the job. This is probably true, and, and was probably always the case. And Pirro’s original claim that Olympic star David Hearn and certain others destroyed the Pool was inexcusable.

But Trump, who doesn’t care who suffers because of his uncalled for conclusions as to who was at blame, continues to lie about what happened with no factual basis.

He is one sick president. And the people who continue to support him are equally sick.

We spent several hours with friends last night bemoaning Trump and his supporters, wondering once again how so many bad things are happening.  The group of us were on average about 80 years old.

Younger Americsns are not spending their time complaining like we are last night. One reason is that they are spending their time working and raising their children. We aren’t doing either of those things. We have time to complain about how the world is changing. And we spend a lot of times talking about how sad we find the world to be. We are impatient for things to improve.

At age 80, we hope to see who  the next president elected in 2028 will be, and if the next president will help bring things get better. If the president elected in 2028 is successful, he/she will likely be re-elected in 2032 for a second term. In 2032, I will turn 90 years old. Whether I will still be alive, I don’t know.

But if I were 45 years old, I  would most likely live to see about 10 more presidential elections. I would look towards the future differently than I view it when in my 80s. I would be much more patient.

Am I making any sense?

It turns out that the new car is fine. In my 2019 Prius, the default was to show the mileage of your current trip, and to get the total car mileage, you needed to push the odometer button 2 or 3 times. In the 2026 Prius, the full odometer is the default, and when you hit the odometer button once, you get the number of miles before your next maintenance appointment, which is 9700 miles away. A common mistake, they say.

Live and learn.

THIS IS A FASCINATING POST, BUT THE PROBLEM MIGHT BE SOLVED.

Brief background: You may recall that we leased a new 2026 Prius LE and picked it up a week ago today. It is a snazzy red car, and the dealer, Jim Coleman in Potomac, had to search for one, found one outside of Philadelphia at another Toyota dealer and sent someone up a week ago Friday to drive it down. (I wrote about the car earlier this week in this blog.)

We traded in a 2019 Prius LE, which we owned, and the value of that car enabled us to have a pretty good lease deal – about $250 a month for 36 months. I actually think they should have given us more for the car, but to avoid aggravation, I only talked them up $1000 from their original offer. I didn’t want to argue nickels and dimes, and I didn’t want to spend my time shopping other dealers, and this is the 6th car we got from Jim Coleman, so I made the deal.

I did not like our salesman, but that’s who we got; I found him rather ignorant about a lot of things he should have known about, but he told us that he had worked for Coleman for 17 years. He is from Nepal and his English was not quite fluent and I put his verbal confusion to that. His boss (I don’t know what the title is, something like “sales manager”) told us that he didn’t want to send someone 150 miles away to get the car unless we signed the lease agreement first, telling us that, if the car did not meet our satisfaction, we didn’t have to take possession. I said that was fine (I trusted Jim Coleman) and signed the lease agreement with one line left out – that line was the odometer reading, which our salesman said he would fill in when he brought the car down.

That was last Friday, and last Saturday we went in to pick up the car (it looked like it should) and sign the many other pieces of paper that required a signature.

As I said in my post last week, although our 2019 Prius and our new 2026 Prius were the same model, they were far from the same car, and especially the dashboard was entirely different and I had to learn new everything. The screen about the steering wheel was crowded with all sort of information – perhaps too much. On the lower left edge of the screen was the figure “160”, which was a mileage reading, and I assumed was the odometer reading. It made sense, since this was a new car just driven down from Philadelphia, about 140 miles from DC.

Throughout the week, each time I drove the car, I learned something else about the display and controls. Most of my concentration was on the GPS function, and the radio and Sirius settings. I drove about 120 miles over the course of the first six days, and the “odometer” setting as expected increased to close to 300.

Yesterday, I took the 400+ page user manual and went through to see what more I could learn. To my surprise, I learned that there was an odometer button on the dashboard, through which I could go from the full odometer setting to specific trip settings. It, and another button controlling the brightness of the dashboard panel, is located away from all of the other controls, and is in fact hidden from sight by the steering wheel. In other words, you have to look for it to find it, but once you find it, it is right there.

I pushed that odometer button to see how many trips I could record, and saw I could record the current trip, and two others. This solved a problem I had because, especially on road trips, I use all those buttons, to see how far I had gone since the last stop, how far that day, and how far the entire trip. Then, I pushed the button one more time, knowing that would get me to the full odometer reading which I assumed would be about 300.

The reading was more like 9600 miles!!!

I went back to the documents I signed on Saturday, and the dealer inserted the number 200 whenever asked the odometer reading on several documents, including some which are recorded with the DC motor vehicle office and one which says “Federal law (and State law, if applicable) requires that you state the mileage upon transfer of ownership. Failure to complete or file a false statement may result in fines and/or imprisonment.” In then states that the “odometer now reads 200 (no tenths) miles….”.

I have written the Coleman business manager, who led us through the paper work, and asked him what the next step was. It is now about 11 a.m. on Saturday and I have not heard back. Maybe he is not in today; maybe he is trying to figure out first what happened.

I actually have no problem with the car (even with the 9000 miles), as it is a three year lease and not a purchase. But as I spent a great deal of last night tossing and turning and trying to figure out how to approach this, I find a number of problems and can not just say “no problem”. It is a problem.

Here are the things I have come up with. If I forgot anything, let me know.

1. We have totally inaccurate information certified to public agencies (in addition to my contract with Coleman), and they are exposed to disciplinary action and possible criminal responsibility.
2. Our three year lease agreement provides for 36,000 miles before we have to pay 1 1/2 dollars for each extra mile. If we drive 12,000 miles a year, when we turn the car in the mileage will be at about 45,000, and the documents will show us responsible for extra mileage charts.
3. On one of the documents (perhaps it is the one that transfers title), Coleman had a choice of putting an “X” in a box that says “new” or a box that says “old”. They put the “X” in “new”.
4. We have been charged for leasing a new car, not a used car, and I think almost 10,000 miles on a car makes it used. No question about that. I think our lease price must be adjusted. Where to adjust it, I don’t know. Our payments are now about $260 a month. They had told me that without the trade-in or an up front payment, they would be about $600 a month. That would be about $7200 a year, rather than $3200 a year, a difference of $4,000. Maybe a used car knocks 20% of the value, so the $3200 would be reduced by about $1440 a year? That would bring our monthly payment from $260 to about $150 a month. Any one have other thoughts on this one?
5. The lease says that we have the typical Toyota new car warranty, which would be 3 years, or 36,000 miles. The 3 years hasn’t changed, but again we would probably drive about 45,000 miles over the three years, so need an extension to the warranty period.
6. Each lease agreement has a “buy-out” price, representing the amount that the lessor can pay if they want to take full title to the car. We bought on the lease on our 2019 in 2022. The buy-out price would also have to be adjusted to reflect a car that already had over 9,000 miles on it.
7. We obviously don’t know who has been driving the car over the past year. My bet would be that it was someone who worked at/owned the dealership. But we don’t know the history of the car – we don’t know the maintenance history, or if it had been involved in any accidents. That, too, is important to know.

Going back to the title of this post, buying a car should be easy. Very easy. I have no idea what Coleman will suggest we do. Every option is complicated.

A photo gallery:

We went to the National Gallery of Art yesterday to see the three room Mary Cassatt exhibit. Cassatt was an American, born into a  wealthy family, who decided she wanted to be an artist. She went to Paris to study for a while, and a while turned out to be more than 50 years. She hobnobbed with the Impressionists and gained more than a modicum of fame.

There are about 40 pieces in the show. Most of them belong to the National Gallery which has more Cassatts than any other museum. I did not know that.

I was not overwhelmed by the paintings. That does not mean I did not like them, but somehow I felt they looked  worse in real life than in reproductions. Here are three I liked the best. You will of course be seeing them in reproduction.

First, her mother.

Next, a young girl.

Then, a young woman

The exhibit also included many prints, a discipline in which Cassatt did much work (but nobody ever told me). She was often influenced, apparently, by Japanese print making. That serms obvious.

But not always.

Did she ever paint a man? I am not sure.

We saw two other special exhibits. One was perhaps the most unusual exhibit I have ever seen at the museum. 140 photographs, taken as early as the 1850s, to demonstrate mining and minors mainly .. but not exclusively in the United States. If you want to see it, you only have a few months before it moves to Milwaukee. Here is one example.

Here is another.

There are 138 more.

The one just above was take at Granite Silver Mine in Montana. Now a ghost town, then it had a population of 3000. Granite is about 100 miles south of Garnet, the gold mining ghost town we visited last month, which once had 1000 residents. This is a photo I took of Garnet.

Next to this exhibit, there is a smaller exhibit on art devoted to Niagara Falls. It is centered around Frederic Church’s well known painting.

Washington artist Sam Gilliam painted a tribute to this painting, which he called “Niagara on the Potomac”.

Go figure.

This is not really about BM.

Do you remember those films of Adolph Hitler speaking to crowds in Germany? He would start off slowly, but as his speech went on, he would pick up speed, his tone would change, his look would become more intense, and soon he was like a 33 rpm recording being played at 333 rpm, seemingly totally out of control. To most, he seemed like a mad man. But to about 1/3 of Germany, he made perfect sense, and due to the political indifference of another third of Germany, that was enough to propel him to power.

It has been said by many, including me and maybe you, that the analogy here between Hitler and Trump are clear.

But yesterday’s hearing (not really a hearing, but more like a roast without humor), with Tony Fauci as the only person called to testify, showed that Trump is not the only Republican who manner of speaking can be compared to Hitler’s. The party is full of them.

And like Iran still has a nuclear program after it has been obliterated, so the Republican party will have a strong odiferous residue of Trump-smell after Trump’s reign is obliterated on January 20, 2029.

I have trained my Facebook algorithm to send me many right wing sites. Whether they are people or bots, I do not know, but they say vicious things, and the comments responding to the posts are equally vicious, often more so. Of course, Meta does nothing about this, because “both sides must be heard”.

But now we see that it isn’t only deluded or depraved Facebook users, it is also a large portion of Republican party leadership. If you have doubts, turn on any portion of yesterday’s hearing.

When Hitler came to power, the evening where his National Socialist party first went after political opposition with no holds barred is known as the Night of the Long Knives. Fauci is still alive and in one physical piece after yesterday, but only because we have a constitution that protects against self-incrimination. The knives have been out for Fauci since at least the waning days of the Biden administration, so Biden, to protect a man with a 50 year career as a dedicated and, for most of that time, universally respected government scientist, Biden pardoned him prospectively for anything he did prior to the date of the pardon, January 20, 2025.

Other than yelling at him and making absolute fools of themselves, the Republicans can’t do much to Fauci, other than try to get him for crimes committed after that date. The most likely allegation of criminal activity would be for perjury. And that is why Fauci had no choice but to take the 5th over 100 times.

Committee chairman Rand (Rant?) Paul, a man who doesn’t get along with most of his fellow Senators or his Kentucky neighbor seems to recognize this and says he intends to hold Fauci in contempt for taking the 5th. Lots of luck there, Randy.

But Paul wasn’t the only Republican shaming himself. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a first class imbecile (that is true) is still spouting fake cures for Covid-19. Josh Hawley is trying to trap Fauci into answering fake questions (like, what color is my tie?) on the theory that if you answer one question, you have waived your right to plead the 5th. And Bernie Moreno of Ohio, with his WTF screed, hopefully accomplished nothing but give a helping hand to Sherrod Brown in their Senate race. So thank you, Bernie Moreno.

Oh well, that was yesterday and today is another day. Unfortunately, time for another verse, same as the first.