Art is 80

We all see the polls that show that descent of MAGA, but we also see the continuous attempts, which may actually be successful, by Trump to rig the mid-term elections, so we remain nervous that what should be a relatively certain takeover of the House of Representatives by the Democrats, and the potential takeover of the Senate, may either be thwarted by immoral (who even has an idea these days as what is or not illegal?) actions of the Trump administration.

Our nervousness is increased by the increasing emphasis by the GOP that Democrats are Communists. As nonsensical as this is, there are those Americans who probably have always believed this (or at least believed this since the days of that great Commie, Franklin Roosevelt), and there are others who are less sure, but who just don’t want to take a chance that that this may actually be correct. And it does no good to counter by saying that the Trump crowd are fascists, because while right wing America is deathly afraid of Communism, they don’t even know what a fascist is.

This brings to mind something I learned long ago reading about Lithuania during the Second World War. Okay, here is a mini-history lesson. Between World War I and World War II, there was an independent country called Lithuania for the first time in centuries. Its boundaries were a bit different from today’s Lithuania (most importantly, Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno, today’s capital city, was in Poland, not in independent Lithuania, and Kaunas/Kovno was the capital of the country), but the country existed, a result of the Treaty of Versailles. Previously, it had been a part of the Russian (tsarist, not Leninist Russia) empire.

When Hitler’s Germany moved east in 1939, and arranged to divide up central and eastern Europe with the Soviet Union, Lithuania naturally fell into the area of influence of the Soviets, and stayed that way until the Germans broke their agreement with the USSR and moved their armies through Lithuania, east towards Moscow.

Let’s pretend that Lithuania had an option. Let’s say it had to decide whether to be dominated by Stalin’s USSR, or Hitler’s German Reich. What would it have decided?

The answer is clear. The Jews in Lithuania, and there were several hundred thousands of them who were very important to the Lithuanian economy, and who had a long history in the country, clearly would have favored the Russians. Why? Not because they had any love for Russia, or Stalin, or Communism, or the USSR, but because if the Germans took over Lithuania, they would all be murdered (as in fact the vast majority were when Germany moved through the country, and even before in anticipation of the German advance). The remainder of the Lithuanians felt very differently. They did not feel themselves targeted by the Germans (only Jews and Gypsies did – and of course intellectuals and opposition politicians), and they assumed that life under German occupation, while not ideal, would be livable. On the other hand, if the Communists moved in, their lives would be torn asunder, their property would be stolen from them, their freedom curtailed, and so forth.

In other words, Communism affects everyone, so most everyone is afraid of it and against it. Fascism, on the other hand, only affects those groups targeted as enemies by the fascists, and if you are not a member of one of those groups, your life will continue without change, and in fact may even in some ways be improved. If the United States becomes a fascist oriented nation (as Trump wants it to be, whether he recognizes that or not), his supporters will, they think, be the winners, so why should they be against it. On the other hand, if the Communists take over……

So, to a certain number of Americans, arguing that Democrats are communists will be a winning argument for MAGA. So, the Republicans, who don’t care at all if they lie, as we know, will call all Democrats communists.

So what will the Democrats do? In part, they will ignore the screaming of the Republicans. “No one will really think we are communists”, they will think (incorrectly). But, worse than that, they will ignore the attempt (against successful, I am sure, to some extent) to target some of the Democrats as communists, because some of the “progressive” Democrats, who are members of the Democratic Socialist faction of the party and who are winning elections here and there, are calling themselves not only Democratic Socialists, but socialists, pure and simple. And if you think you can explain the difference between being a Democratic Socialist, a socialist, or a communist to conservative Americans, you are kidding yourself.

And this panics those Democrats (by far the majority) who are not Democratic Socialists and who don’t even know what it means to identify that way. So the “moderate” Democrats start badmouthing the Democratic Socialists as if they are as dangerous as ….. communists!

We will now have the Democratic Party (it was Will Rogers, right, who said “I don’t belong to any political party. I am a Democrat.”) split in two, divided among itself, and playing right into the hands of the Republicans.

The Democrats should know better than that, but apparently they don’t. The fact is that the majority of political positions taken by the most moderate of moderate Democrats, and the members of the Democratic Socialists, are identical, including things like more support for housing, and education, and civil rights, universal health care. In fact the only reason the moderate Democrats are yelling at the progressive Democrats is that they fear that the Republicans calling the progressive Democrats communists will hurt the party. But what they are doing will hurt the party even more.

There is no reason why all Democrats (of course, all is too broad a word, I know that) can’t get together with general policy positions which are those of moderate and left wing Democrats alike, and which are policies that the majority of Americans do or should endorse. But it does not look like this will happen.

New York is one of the big battlegrounds here. That is where the majority of Democratic Socialist type victories have occurred. But New York is also the home of the Democratic leaders of both Houses, Schumer and Jeffries. This is another reason why, as I have been saying consistently, that to ensure victory in November, these leaders should be replaced. Of course, that won’t happen.

In addition to all the other problems we will have to face between now and November, we will get numb to Republicans calling all Democrats communists, we will see the Democratic party itself failing to separate itself from the claims, and we will see the likelihood of double Democratic victories in November narrow and narrow.

That’s it for today. It will be a busy one. Not going to take the time to proofread. Sorry about that. I will bear the slings and arrows of my wife’s criticism.

This will not be the first time I have written about my stamp collection. I wrote about it 1955, when I was in the eighth grade, when I was 13. I don’t remember what the assignment was. It was in Social Studies class and my teacher was one of my favorites, Mr. Coleman. I am sure I don’t have my essay anywhere, but I imagine it was only two or three pages, and I remember the subject, which I thought (at the time, and maybe still now) was brilliant. My thesis was something like: You can become a great historian through stamp collecting.

The reason I remember this is that, although I thought it was brilliant, Mr. Coleman didn’t. His red pencil remarks belittled my well thought out thesis and told me that I was exaggerating and that he did not assume that I was really being serious.

But perhaps the joke was on him. About 50 years later (and I don’t remember where), I found a well researched article that took the same position that I took as an 8th grader.

I don’t maintain that my 8th grade essay was correct, and Mr. Coleman was undoubtedly right in his criticism, although a conversation would have made my position more clear. But I was a kid who never traveled anywhere. I lived in my house, I could walk to school, we went to see relatives, and we rarely explored any new territory. I remember when after 4th grade, I went to Camp Ivanhoe, a day camp located in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood (on South Geyer Road). Living in University City, I was the second kid picked up by the yellow school bus, and we drove west and picked up campers in Clayton, Ladue and beyond. It was a revelation to me. Every day was like taking a trip, and the bus rides were by far the best part of camp.

All of this, I think, led to an early fascination about the rest of the world that I had never seen. Books about children growing up in exotic locations, and a real fascination with maps of all sorts. This was a natural path to collecting stamps, and my goal, of course, was only to get stamps from places I had barely (or never) heard of, or to get especially attractive stamps from all over. (By the way, I never studied the stamps to become an great historian. Not at all. But I knew that if I did ……)

I started collecting stamps when I was about 9 years old, about the time I went to Camp Ivanhoe. I kept at it (as kids then did) through junior high school, and then other things became more important. But, out of fashion that it became, I did go back to it for spurts of time over the years.

I collected stamps like I collect everything else (and I do collect everything else). Quantity over quality. The more the merrier. At some point (and I have no recollection of that point – was it during my high school years, college years, or later?), I bought a three volume Supreme Global Stamp Album, which was the Cadillac of stamp albums, to house my collection.

It replaced my original album, which I still have.

And my old album has my 4th or 5th grade informative message for anyone who finds this album if they happen to find it by the side of the road.

A. Margulis was my grandfather.

At most points, during my active collecting spurts, I subscribed to “on approval” services. The stamp companies would send you books of stamps, and you would simply remove those from their books and pay them a dime or a quarter a stamp, return everything and wait for the next shipments. Or sometimes, the stamps would not come in books, but in little envelopes (“25 stamps from Nigeria, $1.50”).

I would go years without touching my collection, and then something would happen, and I would be back at it.

For a while, during the 1980s, my philatelic activities took a new twist. I started buying entire collections. No longer 25 cents a stamp, I started buying old albums, paying (I don’t really remember) $50 or $100 per album or collection. I liked the albums as well as the stamps. How could you not?

My Supreme Global albums, by the way, date from 1965. I decided to limit my collecting to stamps that were issued in 1965 or before, and have pretty much done that. Since about that time, stamps have been issued more for collectors than for actual use; I have no interest in that.

All this is a preface to say that, as a part of cleaning up all the things that I have gathered over the years, I have pulled out boxes of stamps that have gathered dust over decades.

There are, for example, in this box alone, several thousand stamps (almost all pre-1965), which need sorting. Most may be duplicates. Most have no monetary value.

But sometimes you are surprised. As an example (and I know this is post-1965), yesterday I came across this “first day cover” celebrating the victory of Bangla Desh (then, two words, I guess) over Pakistan in its war of revolution and liberation. This retails for something over $100 apparently.

Where, you ask did I get this? I have no idea. Nor do I have any idea at all how most of these loose envelopes filled with stamps got here. I bought them? I got them from dead relatives? I really don’t know. But here they are.

By the way, did you know that Bangla Desh won its war of independence on December 20, 1971? No? Well, now you do. You are on your way to become a great hiistorian.

Take that, Mr. Coleman!

This is the basic question of human existence.

(1) I am sitting here thinking about Hannah Beech. That is highly extraordinary because until about a half hour ago, I don’t know that I had ever heard of Hannah Beech, and I still don’t really know much about her. She is a New York Times reporter, and she has an article on Page 1 of today’s newspaper, titled “Drumbeat of Death Surrounds Myanmar Rebels”. It is a story of the ongoing rebellion in Anyar Province, which she and a Times photographer visited, where an undersupplied rebel army was hanging out and “where the rebels say no foreign journalists had gone since the military had toppled the civilian government.” That was 5 years ago, in 2021. She also quotes a young rebel soldier (a “boy”, she says he is), who “had been told that an armed drone was prowling” and where the rebel leader said that “over the previous three days…..his men had evaded drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters and even paraglider pilots intent on chucking hand held bombs…..”

I looked up Hannah Beech in Wikipedia. I see she is American, born in Hong Kong, married with two children. She has been reporting for about 20 years, so although her age was not given in the article, I would assume she is in her late 40s or early 50s. Her husband’s name is Brook Larmer. He is also a reporter and for a long time was an Asian bureau chief for Newsweek. Her father was also a reporter, a war reporter who won a Pulitzer, and who reported on at least three wars – World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

So, maybe it is in her genes, but the concept of a mother of two going into the jungle of Myanmar where no western reporter had dared go for five years strikes me as hard to understand, and I don’t know whether she should be lauded, shamed, or both. Probably both. Maybe only lauded. I just don’t know.

(2) I am sitting here thinking about Donald Trump. That is much less unusual, as you would guess.I do that a lot. I understand the frustration that Donald has as he tries to run the United States. Not that his ideas are ever permanently quashed, but sometimes there are bumps in the road, such as ……. (okay, I don’t remember any bumps recently; thank you, Supreme Court).

But this is not what I am thinking about this morning. I am thinking about Venezuela, and its one-two earthquake punch, and all the destruction in that already much-destroyed country. Several months ago, after kidnapping the political leader of that country, Donald announced that “we run Venezuela”. Of course, “we”, did not mean Donald and you or me, it meant the royal Donald. And he made no bones about it. He was in charge of their political leadership and he was in charge of their massive oil deposits which were, after all, never really theirs, but have really always been ours.

So now that Venezuela has suffered two earthquakes with over 1000 reported dead, many thousands injured and 50,000 or so (those are the figures that I saw) missing, what is the royal Donald going to do about the country we run/he runs? So far…..not that much. But that isn’t really surprising, is it? How much has he done in the 18 months or so that he has been president this term about the lingering problems in the remote mountains of North Carolina? If a big earthquake occurs in the United States (and I guarantee you that we are moving closer to, not further from, the day such a tragedy will occur), what will his response be? I hope we never find out. After all (although there has been reporting that he is being fired), Donald’s head of response and recovery at FEMA was once (maybe more that once? maybe whenever he gets hungry?) spontaneously teleported 50 miles from his home to a Waffle House. I submit that you really can’t give your all to a recovery effort if, at all times, you are subject to immediate teleportation.

(3) I am sitting here thinking about the 250th anniversary of the United States and how celebratory it could have been. I have long decided that I will not celebrate it under current circumstances. But is that wrong? Should I go down to the Fair on the Mall? (I understand from a few people who have gone that it is not at all worthwhile going to, but should I see for myself?) Or should I go back and see the green algae on the Reflecting Pool? Or maybe try to get a glimpse of the damage to the Ellipse caused by the UFC fight, or the damage caused on the White House grounds by the $400 trillion dollar ballroom construction? Should we go and see the tarp now covering the front wall of the Kennedy Center before it comes down? Or should we just drive down Constitution Avenue to see all the bigger than life size photos of Donald on the exterior walls of all of the federal buildings?

Yes, there are still ways to celebrate and we would have to do that now, because we are not going to be in town on July 4, when the biggest fireworks show in the history of the universe (barring a few supernovas, but they don’t really count) comes off near the Washington Monument. At least that will be fun, right? Bring the kids……

Well, don’t. The kids aren’t really going to be welcome, because the fireworks this year are not going to start until 10:30 p.m., so if you bring the kids, you have to assume that they won’t get to sleep at all that night. And, it’s going to be a bit tight. You won’t be able to see the fireworks from the Mall as usual – it is, after all, junked up for the Fair, and you can’t see it from the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial or the Reflecting Pool (gotta keep that algae clean). So unless you can get on the Monument Grounds, or know somebody with a tall roof, you are just plumb outta luck, as they say. (Oh, and if you do come, of course no alcohol, but this year, also no balls or frisbees, and nothing in a bag, unless it is a diaper bag or a clear plastic bag. Just like going to the ball park.)

(4) I am here thinking about the ball park………but that’s another story and, today, not a good one.

(People ask how much time I spent writing these blog posts. I started this one at 10:27. It is now 11:08. 31 minutes, with a few interruptions to answer questions from my better half.)

“Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses  yearning to be free,

The wretced refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

by Emma Lazarus

That was then (1883). This is now (2026).

In 1990, Congress passed the Temporary Protected Status Program into law, giving the Homeland Security Department the authority to allow into the country citizens of other countries whose internal conditions would not enable their citizens to return safely to their home countries because of national disaster, and that law allowed those displaced citizens to live and work in the U.S. on a temporary basis (read, for example, Haiti in 2010 after its earthquake) or armed conflict (read Syria in 2012). A well meaning law, to be sure, on sync with the thoughts behind Emma Lazarus’ sonnet (of which the above lines are the second, and better known, half).

But the law wasn’t perfectly written (what law is?) and undoubtedly assumed good faith on the part of those who would be administering it. For example, law was not explicit on when such temporary shelter could be reversed. In case of beneficiaries from Syria and Haiti, we are now about 15 years after the initial designation, and once refugees are here for 15 years, dislodging them can be very painful. They have not only lived in this country for a decade and a half, they have married (sometimes marrying U.S. citizens), they have had children (all of whom born here are U.S. citizens), they have bought houses (payment for which depends upon their income), they have had occupations (sometimes being heavily relied upon by employers, customers and others), and they have become threads in the fabrics of their communities. Perhaps the law never contemplated TPS (as it is called) for such a long period; I don’t know.

The law gave discretion of the Department of Homeland Security not only to give TPS, but to withdraw it, and that is what the Trump administration, under former Secretary Kristi Noem decided to do. The law did two more things, as I understand it. It set forth procedural steps that the Secretary was to take to determine whether ending TPS was appropriate, and it provided that the decision of the Secretary was not reviewable by the Courts.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Homeland Security Secretary’s ruling as to the Haitians and the Syrians, right or wrong, humane or inhumane, was by law not reviewable by the courts. Period. The three dissenting liberal judges said that, while the decision was not reviewable, the Secretary was required to go through certain steps to inform his/her decision, and whether these steps were followed was reviewable.

I haven’t studied this case at all, so frankly I don’t know, as a matter of law, who was right. But I do know that the position taken by the Court is going to create havoc not for a small number of people, but a larger number, and that the havoc was not necessary.

The case before the Supreme Court involved citizens of Haiti and Syria. There are about 330,000 Haitians in the United States with TPS, and about 6,000 Syrians. But the same reasoning would presumably apply to citizens of other countries whose status under the program could change at any time. The estimates of the entire number of people in the United States with Temporary Protective Status is about 1,300,000, from 17 countries. The largest numbers are from Venezuela (over 600,000), Haiti, El Salvador and Ukraine.

Because so many TPS beneficiaries have established social ties over their years here, it is estimated that the 1,300,000 TPS holders live with approximately 900,000 American citizens (spouses and children for the most part). So, like the other actions of the Trump administration with regard to other immigrants (those who came here legally, and those who did not), many, many, many, many Americans are affected, with families broken up because of loss of a parent, or thrown into poverty because of lack of an earner. The ultimate effects are on the children.

It was Gerald Ford who said in 1974, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He was of course speaking of Watergate and he was correct. But it may be worthwhile to see a little more of what he said: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over….Our Constitution works, our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. here the people rule. But there is a higher power, by whatever name we honor him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice, but mercy.”

I always liked the decency of Gerald Ford. His steady hand steadied the country at a time of crisis. Where is the Gerald Ford of 2026? We need to find him/her, because until we do……the nightmare continues.

Congress, by overwhelming majorities, Democrat and Republican, pass a housing bill. They do so because housing is very expensive, home ownership is out of reach for so many, especially for younger families. They work hard on it, they shed their partisan differences for the most part, and they hand the bill to the president for signature. The president has been supportive of their efforts and, clearly, there is smooth sailing ahead.

But no. The president cancels the signing ceremony and says that he won’t sign the bill until Congress passes the SAVE America (from the Democrats) Act. He reverses his previous positions on the housing bill and calls it just a “minor” bill. Big deal, just because 90% of Congress voted for it, and just because housing is now looming high as an economic issue and therefore as an election issue, you think he should sign it and get on with life?

I have not studied the housing bill carefully, but Trump may be right that, in the big picture, this bill is might turn out to be minor. It attempts to make the production of housing somewhat less expensive by eliminating or lessening some regulatory and construction requirements, and may encouraging loosening of zoning restrictions. And it limits the ability of corporate buyers to outbid home buyers and put new housing on the rental market, rather than put in under the ownership of first time family home buyers. In the grand scheme of things, that may be minor. But so what?

Trump said that the real stumbling block to more home ownership is high interest rates, and he may be correct. But the Fed, under its new Trump appointed chairman, decided to leave interests rates where they were, rather than lowering them, in order to fight continuing inflation. This was a disappointment to Trump, to be sure, and he assumes that the opening of Hormuz will lead to less, or no, inflation, and the rates may tumble.

The SAVE Act, if passed into law, would put more chaos into what will certainly be chaotic mid-terms in November. And it seems clear that the Senate will not pass the act, unless the filibuster rule is eliminated. There is no way the Senate will give it 60 votes, but with a 50 vote standard, passage would be possible. Most Senators have been against eliminating the filibuster rule on the “what goes around, comes around” theory. But I wouldn’t put anything past them at this point.

Now, it is also true that presidents can’t just ignore legislation passed by Congress. They have ten days to act. They can either let the legislation go into law by letting ten days pass, or they have to actually veto the legislation. There seems to be an assumption that Trump is not going to veto this bill, and that sometime next week it will become law without his signature and without the passage of the SAVE Act. But how can they be so sure? Why should he hesitate to veto a “minor” bill, saying to Congress: after you pass the SAVE Act, enact the housing bill once more and I will sign it. I wouldn’t put anything past him at this point.

I also found the reversal of Senators Tillis and Paul on the War Powers Resolution interesting (even if the War Powers Resolution was itself “minor”). The populace is clearly against the Iran War and everything about it, so on the one hand it is hard to understand why these two (of the four Republican votes) changed their position. (By the way, Tillis is not against the War Powers Resolution, while Paul now voted “present”.) On the other hand, while we are actively negotiating to get out of the mess in Iran, a statement by Congress that Trump should not do anything more to support his war does put at least one hand behind the back of his negotiators (and after all, they are our negotiators). So, on one level, perhaps it is understandable, even though Trump would have tried to ignore it anyway.

Finally today, and I need to start my daily activities soon, it seems clear that the Republicans are going to concentrate on the primary victories, especially in New York, by left leaning Democrats, calling them the new leaders and faces of the Democratic Party (which in some areas they are), but also calling them Communists. I have mentioned this before as something that is hard to believe that a major political party would actually do, but now it seems clear that the Republicans actually will, and that such assertions will become mainstream and soon seem not outrageous at all, even thought there is zero (yes, zero) relationship between even the most left wing Democratic Socialists and Communism. There is hardly even any relationship between Democratic Socialists and socialism.

Okay, two more things. Yesterday was Robert Reich’s 80th birthday. I may be a bit crazy in writing a blog post every morning, but Reich (reaching millions of people to my dozens) seems to post something two or three times each day. Much too much for me. But yesterday, he talked about his 80th birthday. I will say this: it was an awful and nasty post (you can find it and look at it if you want), and it surprised me.

And finally one more time, Mayor Mamdani insulted AIPAC by calling it, its officials or its supporters (not sure which) “monsters”. Okay, he didn’t say it quite like that but almost – he referred to a larger group of organizations as “monsters”, but AIPAC was his “example”, the one he called out by name. I think he chose his words very badly, but today that is my point. He said that he was quoting Antonio Gramsci, Italian anti-Fascist who wrote something like (I don’t have time to get the actual quote): the old world is past, the new world is in the future, and this is time of monsters.

I actually talked about Gramsci and used that exact quote to describe the Trump administration about a month or so ago. You can search the blog and find it if you want.

Gotta run.

This is one of those days when I started a post only to decide that I didn’t really like it and it wasn’t going anywhere, and I should start over. So here I am, and where we will go, nobody knows.

Remember when someone called Barack Obama (now known as Barack Hussein Obama if you listen to the current president) an Arab, and John McCain interrupted the caller and said something like, “No, Ma’am, he isn’t an Arab”? I admit to having a mixed reaction to McCain. While he was courageously responding to a false description of his opponent (strange that this simple correction could be construed as “courageous”, but that is what it was), he was also, I thought, doubling down on the idea that calling someone an Arab was an insult, identifying them with a lower rung of humanity. Maybe I am reading McCain’s remark incorrectly, but that was (and is still, I think) my reaction. After all, McCain’s response included the words: “he’s a family man and an American citizen”. As if an Arab could be neither.

Now the woman who called Obama Arab so long ago would not have done so had she not heard, in her right wing circles, others say similar things. And of course, Obama’s father (but not his mother) was Muslim (but not Arab), and he spent some of his early years in a Muslimv(but not Arab) environment. But it was clear that he was not a Muslim, unless he was a deeply hidden Muslim which, I believe, as Islam is such a public religion, would be pretty much impossible. But in any event, many of Obama’s opponents had no second thoughts about calling him a Muslim, just as they had no second thoughts to keep them from claiming, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Obama was born, not in Hawaii, but in Kenya, his father’s home country.

You would expect that leaders of major American political parties would speak out against this, as John McCain did (he also spoke out against the Kenyan “birther theory”), and some did, but many did not and of course one of those who did not was Donald Trump who, in fact, was the originator and main propagator of at least the “birther theory”. And even today, Trump cannot mention Obama without throwing in his middle name, because he believes that identifying Obama with the name Hussein somehow taints all Democrats. And, for some, it does.

Today, it looks like nothing has changed. In fact, perhaps things have grown worse, as the MAGA world, while not overtly referring to Democrats as Muslim or Arab (although Mayor Mamdani’s Muslim faith does provide them with an opportunity), are now referring them as Communists. And of course, members of the Democratic Party, even left wing members of the Democratic Party, are no more Communists than Obama was an Arab.

Just last night, in a 2:30 a.m. rant, the Man Who Can Not Sleep said that he would never let the United States become a Communist country. And just yesterday, at a rally in deepest Pennsylvania, I heard Donald describe Democratic candidates as not just socialists, but full blown Communists (he especially noted “that guy” in Maine with the “Nazi tattoo”, the Nazi tattoo somehow being proof). And on my Facebook feed, I get posts on a regular basis from a site (manned by members of the right wing, or manned by Russian bots, I do not know) called simply “Democrats are Communists”, which posts some of the more outrageous posts possible not about some Democratic politicians, but about all Democrats.

This is not really new. In scrolling on my phone, I see that in 2012, then Congressman Allen West (how did he ever get elected in the great State of Texas?) said that “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party….it’s called the Congressional Progressive Party”.

Again, you would expect that true leaders of a party would denounce such a statement. I don’t know if anyone did at the time, but I am sure that today, Donald Trump probably would have agreed completely. You are either with him, or you are a Communist.

The 1917 takeover of Russia by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was an extraordinary event. Even today, with everything known about the weakness of tsarist Russia, it seems impossible. In fact, at the time, Communism seemed more likely to take over countries in central Europe, countries such as Germany, and the potential takeover of Germany by the Communist Party was as great a factor in Hitler’s rise as was his antisemitism. But the Communist Party has never posed a threat to the American government and today, where Communism of the 20th century variety hardly exists anywhere (certainly not China, not Vietnam, maybe a bit in Cuba), it poses less of a threat to this country that at any time within the past 100 years.

Nevertheless, you say “Communist” to those in what Hillary Clinton described as part of the “basket of deplorables”, and they shiver and shake and hate and fear any of their neighbors who dare to question the lunacy of MAGA.

We are stuck with this, one way or another, until the next presidential election, although hopefully the midterms in November will provide some respite. And thrown into this Time of Troubles (an illusion to a much earlier Russian period when no one knew who the tsar really was), is the 250th anniversary of the United States. In fact, July 4 is just about 10 days from now.

Trump has planned all sorts of festivities, I guess, and – although much is behind schedule or off schedule – he is making many physical changes to the city of Washington. It would be nice for this important day to be celebratory, but I am not in a celebratory mood, and will ignore it all. I know there is a Jewish tradition that external circumstances should not keep you from celebrating celebratory holidays, but it is a tradition that I can not embrace. For me, and for many, July 4, 2026 will be a sad day. Hopefully, July 4, 2029 will be different, and hopefully I will be able to  then to celebrate accomplishments without  fear or dread.

Here are some before/after pictures of the south side of the White House before Trump’s birthday fight between the Christians and the Lions and after.

What more can one say?

My memory was that the UFC head said that the company would repair all damage. Today, I read that Miracle-Gro said they will do it. Will anyone? And when?

Of course, the restoration of the ground will not end the disrepair at the White House. Hete is how the former East Wing looks today.

Well, not really today. This photo was taken before the UFC fiasco. Trump wanted to live in a construction site, I guess, but he is stuck in the muck of a demolition site. And of course he has more plans. I certainly have not heard him say that “the muck stops here”.

And even before he starts construction on the Arc d’Drumpf, we have the continuing fiasco of the Reflecting Pool, made unbelievably worse by the arrest of five citizens who dared to put their hands in the water, by his threats against ABC and its reporter Jonathan Karl (“I love their money”, says the Supreme Grifter), and the plight (rather than the flight) of three dead ducks.

And then there is the Kennedy Center, whose physical destruction is only its surface problem, where there is apparently no plan to remove the tarp covering up the destruction caused by the removal of the Mr. Trump’s illegal spoilation of the facade.

Well, today is Tuesday and four more states have their primaries, including Maryland and New York. I am interested in New York’s 10th where 2 term Congressman Dan Goldman is running against former NYC controller Brad Lander. I feel for Goldman because he has done a fine job, but will probably be soundly defeated.

Here are the candidates, first Goldman, then Lander.

I have no problem with either candidate, although Lander’s foreign policy views and mine are not completely aligned, but I fully support his courageous actions regarding Dump’s immigration policies. And we have (sort of) a connection. As you may know, Brad is from St. Louis. I have known Brad’s uncle since pre-bar mitzvah Sunday School, and we were college roommates and remain friends today. Through him, I met Brad’s father, and we became friends as well, although it has now been a while since we have seen each other.

Decades ago, I received a phone call at my office from a young Brad Lander (at the suggestion of his father, who was thinking about going to work for a housing non-profit in Brooklyn. In that this was by field, he thought I might have some advice for his son. We had a nice conversation. I don’t recall most of the specifics, but I remember telling him that I thought the job would be a good one as a career starter. But I warned him against New York City. I tolld him it was a very unique and provincial place, and that a young guy from the midwest would never really be accepted as a New Yorker. Once again……

Of course, Brad Lander is no longer a young guy. He is 56. It reminded me of a conversation at the Lane and Edson reunion last Friday. Bruce Lane told me his son Chuck (former Washington Post reporter Charles Lane) was now 65. I view Chuck as still a young journalist with his entire career ahead of him. After all, I was already a practicing lawyer when I attended his bar mitzvah.

We saw Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre yesterday (between Fathers’ Day brunch at Hannah’s and dinner at Michelle’s) and the production was, as expected, very good. Good acting, good directing, good staging, good choreography, good entertainment.

But I must say that, although Othello has been around for over 400 years, performed over and over again, I don’t think it worthy of its success. Okay, who am I to say this? I know virtually nothing about the play and its history, which has been studied and studied.

But I know how simplistic it is. Othello himself is a Venetian general (originally from North Africa) who marries a noble woman, Desdemona, and his chief aide, Iago, decides to poison their relationship and convince him that Desdemona is unfaithful to him (she is not) and is having a relationship with a rival of Iago, a soldier named Cassio. Othello falls for it, and everybody (almost) dies. That is the entire play. This worn out story that repeats itself through history and theater over and over. And it makes it easy to watch and comprehend, which may be why, among all of Shakespeare’s work, this early one is so often put on the stage.

Now, I must say that, although the plot is trite (and, pretty unique for Shakespeare, there are no complicating subplots), the script is quite good. Filled with memorable lines about wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve and loving “not wisely but too well”. And many more. I’m not denying the guy had talent.

And there are a couple of unusual twists (I don’t think that is the right word; I am not thinking of unexpected plot twists, of which there are none, but of unusual idiosyncratic – oxymoron, I know – elements). I will list three of them.

First, Othello is “Black” and a “Moor”, and he is from North Africa. Now, Venice in the 17th century was a pretty cosmopolitan place, and there were certainly Blacks in Venice. There has been scholarly work on the Black gondoliers, and on Venetian Black slaves and freed slaves, and even on Black/White marriages and relationships. There were also obviously Moors in Venice; this term applied to people from North Africa and did not refer to skin color. The term Moor also did not delineate religion, and Othello was a Christian. Whether he was born and raised in Venice as a Christian, or whether he came to the city-state as a Muslim and converted, we obviously don’t know. We do know he had no hesitation in leading the Venetians against the Muslim Ottomans.

We also don’t know whether Shakespeare wrote this play as a study in race relations, although it has certainly come to be performed and discussed as if he did. There are relatively few references to to Othello’s “blackness” during the play (after the initial scene discussing his marriage) and had he been, say, a Spaniard or a Greek in Venice, you could imagine the play written just as it was with the references changed. Black, White or whatever, Othello was accepted by his Venetian compatriots. And, in fact, we don’t even know what Shakespeare has in mind when he calls Othello “Black”.

The second oddity (that is probably the word I should have used above) is why Iago (called over and over and over and over again, in the script, “honest”) is out to get Othello. There is no hint that it is related to skin color or ethnicity. In fact, there is not hint that it is related to anything. There has been 400 years of speculation (he was himself in love with Desdemona, he was jealous of Cassio’s position in Othello’s eyes or in Desdemona’s eyes, he did it for sport, etc., etc.). Perhaps some view this lack of evidence of a motive as a strength in the play, inviting speculation and conversation. But to me, it is a weakness.

Thirdly, the story line begins in Venice and ends in Cyprus. It appears that Venice has defeated the Ottomans, although this is not clear. In fact, the military aspects of this play (as well as the time line) is also very confusing and impossible to understand, it appears. In real life, Venice and the Ottoman Empire fought a major series of battles over the Island of Cyprus about 30 years before Shakespeare wrote Othello and Venice lost control of the island forever. But obviously this is not what happened in the play.

Enough criticism. Did I enjoy the show? Yes, for the obvious reasons. Well performed and entertaining. Just like watching any battle of the sexes. Just like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, another ridiculous, but entertaining show, where you can always enjoy the performance.

If I had reviewed Othello in 1604, and if I had liked the performance, I would have praised it, and said that the play itself would have a short half life. It’s the opposite of what I said when I saw Liza Minnelli in her very first public performance at the initial New Haven premier of Flora the Red Menace. My conclusion was that Minnelli had no future in theater, but that Flora, the play, was going to be a big time hit. Shows you what I know.

This is a picture of my father when he was four or five in Kansas City. The year was probably 1908. And, no, everything was not up to date in Kansas City. Or maybe it was.

Last night, we had dinner with 9 of the 12 friends we have supper with three or four times a year, and the discussion turned (after many other subjects) to computers and smartphones and AI, and their effects on the education and socialization of children. One of the group had recently done a lot of research on, and given a presentation on, the use of computers and AI in schools around the world, and its effects, which seem to be generally harmful and universally so, not just in the United States.

I am not sure I had too much to add to the discussion, which dealt in part with how difficult it will be (and is) to regulate artificial intelligence in today’s environment, except to say that no matter what we try to do, we won’t be able to stop “progress” and that the world is going to change and become unlike anything we know today. Chances are that will be good for some, and less good for many others.

So, take my father. I view him as a contemporary of mine, just one generation back. He was born in Kansas City MO in 1903, and died in St. Louis in 1979, obviously too early. But look at the changes that he saw. Clearly, in 1908 when he was a young boy, horses and buggies were the main ways around town. In 1903, the year he was born, the Wright Brothers first took to flight at Kitty Hawk. The world still was enjoying peace in its time; it was 12 years before the start of World War I which changed everything. Teddy Roosevelt was the president, the trusts and robber barons were being tamed, and uncontrolled immigration from Europe was at its height. Not only did television not exist, radio was still almost 20 years away. And, although telephones were invented in the 19th century, in 1903, probably about 5% of homes had a telephone in this country; and you can be sure that the home of my grandparents were not included in that number.

I remember sitting, on July 16, 1969, with my grandmother, in the common room of the Delmar Gardens Nursing Home in University City MO watching the first moon landing on the television, and talking about the changes she had seen in her life. She was born in Lviv (then Lemberg, later Lvov) in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1872. She remembers her first (or one of her first) jobs as a very young girl, helping to stuff bullets for the Emperor’s army. But even compared with Kansas City of 1908, Lemberg in the 1870s was quite primitive.

I was born in 1942. In a sense, I don’t think one realizes that changes that they have seen over their life. My memories over the past 83 years lead me to think that things were always up to date. But think of these things that I remember (especially, you who are much younger than I am).

1. I remember when no automobiles had automatic shifts, and when now and then you saw cars from the 1920s driving down the street.
2. I remember an ice man bringing ice to our house, a knife sharpener coming down the street ringing a bell, mile delivered in the morning, and eggs in the afternoon.
3. I remember when there was no TV in St. Louis and when there was only AM (no FM) radio.
4. I remember when the first supermarkets opened.
5. When I first went to school and learned to write, I remember dipping a quill into an ink well, writing a few letters and dipping again.
6. I remember when a fountain pen seemed a luxury, and the extraordinary invention of the ball point pen which changed everything.
7. I remember, throughout my youth, mimeograph machines, and carbon paper
8. I remember never being able to really figure out slide rules beyond the basics, and I remember when there were adding machines, not calculators, and they were almost as large as a typewriter.
9. I remember when all airplanes had propellers, and how travel changed when commercial jets began to appear.
10. I remember when dictating machines were introduced, and the first time computers were available in the office, and how bulky they were then.

And I remember a day in the early1980s, when I was working on a real estate transaction in San Juan PR, and a bunch of us were meeting in the office of the contractor, when he pulled out his pocket calculator that could do all sorts of tricks. We were all mesmerized. What would they think of next? How is this thing even possible?

Of course, every major society change changes society. From the time that hunter/gatherers became agriculturalists, to the time that agricultural Britain became industrial Britain and on and on. With artificial intelligence and super computers and quantum computers and who knows what else being developed, there are clearly going to be some consequences that will be negative, some foreseeable, some not. And there will also be improvements, benefiting most but not all. The nature of education may change, the nature of social interactions may become much different.

The one thing that will remain constant, as they say, is that there will always be changes. The society that our grandchildren will know will be such that they will look back at the pictures of my life and feel sorry for all that we missed. Will the future be better than the present? We don’t know. We may have lived in a golden age. But perhaps our age was not as golden as it has seemed, and the next generation may see progress in many spheres beyond our wildest dreams.

When I read that Donald has concluded that the problems with the algae growth and peeling paint at the Reflecting Pool were caused by Vandals, I naturally wondered if we had seen any Vandals when we visited the pool last week.

So, I wondered what a Vandal looked like, how I could recognize one. I asked my usual sources, and they sent me this picture….

I can honestly say that, on the day we visited the Reflecting Pool, there were no Vandals present.

I think Donald may be barking up the wrong tree. There are, as you may know, many beautiful trees lining the Reflecting Pool, and these trees are undoubtedly infested by baby lantern flies. Yes, only babies this time of year and, like all babies, baby lantern flies are hungry, active and do not know right from wrong.

In addition, baby lantern flies are very cute.

Now, I took this picture on our front porch, not at the Reflecting Pool, but they are all over and, because they are so cute, people would rather watch them than send them to Lantern Fly Heaven. So it is my guess that armies of baby lantern flies have taken over the Reflecting Pool, encouraged the growth of their allies, green algae, and are still feeding on that delicious American Flag Blue paint. And nobody has tried to stop them.

Actually, I am kidding. I know that Vandals no longer roam the earth, and that baby lantern bugs do not thrive on blue paint. So, who is to blame?

I have an unusual answer to that question. I think the person to blame is Donald John Trump, who just could not see the forest because of the trees. What do I mean?

It is simple. Donald John Trump, wanting to turn the water of the Reflecting Pool blue, went out and hired two companies to do the work, one of which is named (ta da!) …. Green Water Solutions!

Donald, you should never ignore the obvious.

Similarly, you should realize that a war has never been ended by a Memorandum of Understanding, especially one like the one you signed with your signature flourish the other day and one which Iran signed with the equivalent of an autopen. It is not surprising that Israel and Hezbollah, which had as much influence on the MOU as I did, are still fighting. And it is not surprising that the Strait of Hormuz, sort of a little bit but not too much open the last few days, is closed again.

The next move is yours. What will you do about the closed strait? Send in the Vandals? The baby lantern flies? Green Water Solutions?

Remember that Woody Allen film where the seemingly world’s worst punishment would be to take the accused and lock him in a tiger cage with a mutual fund salesman? Have you thought about threatening the new Iranian leader with capture, followed by an indefinite imprisonment in an ICE cage somewhere in deepest Louisiana with J.D. Vance as a companion? That should do it.

On my agenda today is a get-together with about 15 former principals of Lane and Edson, PC, the small law firm I first joined in 1972, two years after it was founded. I was then the 7th lawyer in this newly established law firm, which eventually grew to over 100, with lawyers not only in Washington, but in New York City and Los Angeles. A victim of its own success (see below), it disbanded in 1989, and its hundred or so lawyers went in many different directions. 1989 is now 37 years ago, and if you think that it is extraordinary that, 37 years after the dissolution of the firm, so many of its principals still occasionally get together, so do I.

Digression: the law firm I founded with Tim Aluise in 1991 is still going strong (without me or Tim at this point) in 2026. I practiced with that firm for more than 20 years, and it is now in its 35th year of operation (twice as long as Lane and Edson), but I am pretty sure there will never be a get together of all its former principals. Just won’t happen. End of digression.

Lane and Edson was founded by Bruce Lane, Chuck Edson and Stanley Frosh, and was first named Frosh, Lane and Edson. But Stanley left the firm after a few years when he was appointed a Circuit Judge in Montgomery County, MD, and the firm was renamed in 1975. The primary thrust of the then new firm was to serve what was a fairly new industry in the United States, the construction, development and financing of government assisted and regulated housing for low and moderate income individuals and families. And it kept that specialty (as it added others) through the years, becoming predominant in its field.

One of the facets then and now in the development of affordable housing was the sale of equity interests in partnerships that developed the housing. These limited partnership shares were sold to wealthy individuals who were primarily looking for tax write-off against other income (this is what the federal legislation provided for as a way to encourage investment in these types of properties), as opposed to cash distributions (which were limited both by the economics of the properties themselves and by governmental restrictions. Structuring these investment vehicles was, to a great extent, a niche practice, but it obviously had a lot in common with other investment structures, each of which had to comply with similar securities laws regulating the sale of such interest to the public.

The professionals who actually marketed these interests are known as real estate syndicators, and we had many clients who could be described by this term. One of those clients became involved with someone in the business of marketing interests not in affordable housing partnerships, but more broadly in entities which would acquire other types of business, both manufacturing and distribution organizations. This was a very lucrative business, and expanded into what is still known as the merger and acquisition business, where older companies would be purchased by new companies.

Digression #2. The merger and acquisition business, as practiced by certain segments of the industry, became very controversial and remains controversial until today, as the result of these acquisitions undoubtedly led to extremely large fees for the organizers and purchasers, and often burdened the acquired business with an enormous amount of debt which led to either or both of the acquired company having to shed some of their branches in order to raise money to pay the debt, or even to go out of business, resulting in job losses, etc. End of digression #2.

Representing the new entities created by our syndicator client and his new business partner led to not only an increase in Lane and Edson’s business, but an increase in the levels of legal fees being earned by the firm. You can imagine that the fees available through the restructuring of some very large companies outran the fees earned through the sale of interests in a partnership operating a small affordable housing project in a mid-sized city somewhere in America. And it was this business that led us to the establishment of a significant office in New York City, where virtually the entire merger and acquisition world lived. In fact, we were I believe the only m and a firm at the time in Washington.

Our affordable housing business continued, and we had added a conventional real estate finance business that complemented it, and earned comparable fees. But we also added some business lines whose fees were perhaps closer to those earned through our merger and acquisition clients, including a fairly large energy finance business, which was becoming international in scope.

In the mid-1980s, we began to realize how much the firm was changing, and how we had to change with us. We had for over a decade been a firm that prided itself on treating each of its partners fairly equally when it came to compensation, but now we had some partners generating much more income, and some of those partners lived not in DC, but in New York City, where expectations were different. They began to demand more.

At the same time, we had been hiring law firm associate lawyers at the same pace as most firms in DC, but the skills developed by our associates dealing with merger and acquisition, and energy finance, clients were in demand by bigger firms (largely in New York) who were willing to pay them much more. We could not compete, and began to lose associates. Something had to happen.

What began to happen was that some of the members of the firm began to peel off, to leave us (often with associates) and move to other and larger firms with deeper pockets, both in DC and in New York. And those of us who would have wanted to stay with a Lane and Edson more like the firm that existed before these other practices grew quickly found that this would not be possible, largely because by this time Lane and Edson’s infrastructure had grown to support the bigger firm. We had a first class Park Avenue office that housed over 25 lawyers and could have housed more. We had recently signed a lease for an additional floor in our office building in DC in the expectation of increased growth. All this had occurred when all of the office talk was about staying together, before the first groups split off.

In late 1989, amidst a lot of Sturm, Drang and turmoil, and a lot of publicity, Lane and Edson disbanded.

End of story.

(Of course, not really the end of story, but the end of story for today.)

But most of those who departed the firm departed in clumps – 3 went here, 5 went there and so on. Fewer, like me, went out on our own. But, I should say, that three former Lane and Edson lawyers eventually did work for Hessel and Aluise for a number of years. And somehow, most of us remained in contact, and organized occasional lunches and reunions, and then Zooms, and for a while now more lunches and get-togethers. And one of those is today. Two hours from now. And yes, there are a few of us who are no longer walking the earth but, I think, surprisingly few. Bruce and Chuck, now both in their 90s, will be in attendance today, and hopefully for many more in the future.

I don’t know about my friends and relations who support Trump or Trump’s “programs” these days. They have become relatively silent, so I do not know what they are thinking. I did watch a bit of Trump in Europe over the past few days. I noted two things that seemed to me to be a bit different.

For one thing, he looked exhausted. Big bags under his tired looking eyes. Even a fresh coat of yellow in his hair and paste on his face could not make him look anything other than worn out. For another, when I watched his press conference yesterday, which went on interminably, he sounded manic during his presentation (speaking much faster than usual, his voice pitched a bit higher, breathing every two sentences rather than every sentence), and during the question period from the journalists, he sounded less sharp in his answers, again what I thought were signs of exhaustion.

No reason to go over everything in what is apparently a Memorandum of Misunderstanding between the U.S. and Iran. Lawrence O’Donnell last night made the most important point, I think. The MOM begins with a sentence that says that the two parties will “refrain from the use or threat of force against each other”. Trump violated that first sentence before the ink was dry (or whatever the electronic version of dry ink would be), when he said that if Iran tried to impose fees or charges on ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, he would simply “bomb them”. And things got worth from there.

So it appears that the United States will leave the Strait of Hormuz, will end sanctions on Iran (over a time period to be determined), will guarantee that there will be $300 billion to repair war damage in Iran, will release many billions of dollars of frozen Iranian money, will allow oil exports from Iran, will exert no control over Iranian missiles or delivery systems, will not move to restructure the Iranian government or provide any democratic or civil rights to the Iranian people, etc., etc. In the meantime, the United States will spend millions or probably billions of additional taxpayer dollars to restore our military hardware after using so much up in the war. From the perspective of the United States and of Iran, this is a lose-win situation.

As to 60 days of negotiations between the two countries, does it really make a difference as to what will be decided (or not decided)? The MOM says that Iran will refrain from charging boats in the Strait for 60 days; Trump says that means that they never will (or we will, as said above, bomb them). It says nothing about them supporting their proxies. Trump says but they won’t support them…..or we will take military action against Iran.

The United States and Iran are going to talk about how to dispose of the current stock of enriched uranium, and Iran says what it has always said: that it will not develop or procure nuclear weapons. There are no restrictions on Iran having a peaceful nuclear energy program.

Tired Trump will have a hard time explaining all of this here at home. From the look of things, J.D. better start preparing for his short presidency.

Let’s change the subject.

Once a month, the Avalon Theater (our community owned movie theater) has a French film. Last night, the film for June was Deux Femmes (Two Women), which had won an award at Sundance. So we went to see it.

We didn’t really research it; it just seemed like a good idea. But disappointment developed quickly when we learned that the film was not French. It was “in French”, but the movie was filmed in Montreal. They may speak French in Montreal, but Montreal is a Canadian city, not a French city. Was this false advertising? Or should we have read beyond the Sundance award line?

French films are always (no matter the subject) imbued with French culture. This is what makes almost all French films worth watching. This film seemed to have been purposely made to avoid all culture. Yes, they spoke French. Yes, Montreal is a French speaking city. And, yes, I am sure that Montreal has its share of culture indigenous to the city, but this film reflected none of it. In fact, you only knew you were in Montreal because of the some time background skyline.

The majority of the film took place in the ugliest cooperative housing development in the world. There were two neighboring families – one with a 10 year old and one with a baby. The father of the baby was having an affair with a woman from work; the father of the ten year old was not having an affair with anyone, including his wife. The women decided that the world was passing them by and monogamy was not for them (in fact, that it was invented) and they were going to change their lives.

Digression: It was Dorothy Parker, wasn’t it, who had a dream one night, woke up and scribbled something on a note pad by her bed, went back to sleep and in the morning saw what she had written: Men are monogamous, women polygamous? End of digression.

So the women had sex with the plumber, the exterminator, the cable guy, and the house cleaner. And it was all (to the viewer, or at least to these two viewers) pretty boring.

Why do I say there was no culture? Because you know nothing about these four people (or any others). What was their background? How did they earn a living? Did they have any other friends or relatives? Nothing.

One more thing about Deux Femmes. It was only 100 minutes long. But it felt like it was three hours. That’s a trick in and of itself.

In Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey dreams of leaving Skid Row, and living in a little house “somewhere that’s green”. I would suggest that she pitch her tent next to the Reflecting Pool just to the east from the Lincoln Memoral, on the grass, under the trees, and next to the water, all three being green.

As you probably know, the Trump administration has spent $16,000,000 on “improvements” to the Reflecting Pool, including a new filtration system, and the repainting of the gray bottom of the pool a shade the president calls American Flag Blue. The idea was to change the color of the water to a cleaner looking color, a refreshing blue. No longer a hard to describe color, made harder to describe by omnipresent algae, but a color that is beautiful.

So far, it has been a failure. Whether the color of the bottom paint will ever influence the visible color of the water, I don’t know. It certainly hasn’t made a difference yet. And the reason it seems hard to tell about the future is that the green algae which the old filtration system let remain seems to be equally happy with the new filtration system.

I know this because we went down to look at the Reflecting Pool yesterday afternoon. The algae was visible up close, and gave the water a greenish tint when viewed from afar. Here are a few photos.

Not that the Park Service is just sitting idly by. They have apparently first tried to solve the problem using a nanobubble ozone treatment. But that, at least by itself, did not do the trick, so they are now pouring in hydrogen peroxide. Yes, a bleach, just like what Trump thought would probably choke off Covid-19. Here are the hard at work NPS employees.

Another question was whether or not the pool would still reflect. It does seem to, although the reflection is damaged by the condition of the water.

So, perhaps this was one more example of Trump’s ways to waste money. Or perhaps a cure will be found for the algae. But even if the algae is gone, my guess is that the pool will still not look like an Alpine lake.

But guess what? Nobody will care. It will be fine as-is. The Lincoln Memorial and the surrounding grounds are what counts. Not the color of the water.

Of more concern is what will happen on the other side of the Memorial, where Emperor Trump wants to build his 250′ arch.

A disturbing line in yesterday’s Washington Post article about a trademark infringement case brought by clothing company Patagonia against a drag queen named Pattie Gonia. The line read: “The apparel company is suing her for $1 for alleged trademark infringement, although experts say legal fees could easily surpass $1 million.”

I don’t have any idea who Pattie Gonia is, and I don’t depend on Patagonia for my clothes. That isn’t the point. But what kind of a legal system do we have when a large company can (and does) sue an individual for $1 (that is, not seeking any compensation for a measured loss) but expect her to have to expend up to $1,000,000 on lawyers and legal costs. Somehow, this should not be permitted.

Of course, it is not only Patagonia. It is also the Trump administration, which spends so much energy bringing actions against political enemies. Think John Bolton. Now, I am not a fan of John Bolton’s view of international affairs. The allegation was that Bolton retained some classified documents when he left his White House post. We don’t know the details, but apparently Bolton did not take any documents, but retained some on his computer and shared some with his wife. How many? On purpose or by accident? We don’t know. What we do know is that Bolton settled the case, in order to avoid jail time, by paying a fine of over $2 million. And of course this would be in addition to whatever Bolton has already paid his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, and will continue to pay him until the settlement is ratified by the court, presumably later this month. Had Bolton not reached this deal, he may have had to pay a considerably larger fine, and considerably more in penalties or fines, as well as having the risk of jail time.

And then there are cases like Trump’s case against CBS/Paramount for the “alteration” of an interview with Kamala Harris. I know of no one who believes this case had any merit, yet Paramount settled the case for $16,000,000 (which they say will go Trump’s future Presidential Library, if you believe that). This is another case where there was no admission of guilt (there undoubtedly was no guilt), but where the settlement of a case for an outrageous amount of money was deemed a better result than seeing the case move forward (in this situation, not only legal fees, but the entire future business of the defendant was at stake).

And of course, this is how the legal system works time and time again in even routine criminal cases. You are accused, you cannot afford a trial (and/or don’t trust the results), so you pay a large fine to end the case. Anyone with a deep pocket, be it the United States government, Donald Trump himself, Patagonia – yes, anyone – can use their financial strength to wrest money and a change of behavior from the economically weaker.

Of course, there is nothing new here, but things have reached an extreme not reached before, it appears.

And the focus should not only be on the ability of a well-heeled plaintiff to bring a lawsuit, but on the costs of defending that law suit. The focus on the plaintiff is related to ethics or morality. This is in fact the focus on the defense costs as well. Take Abbe Lowell, as an example. Lowell (whom I worked with years ago on at least one complex matter) apparently charged over $1500 per hour for his time as a partner last year at Winston & Strawn (he has since left that firm and formed his own, smaller firm). Associates at that firm charge between $450 per hour to over $1,000 per hour (all these numbers come from sites on the internet). You can see how these add up. And judges, who are interested in giving all parties as much opportunities to make their cases before the court as possible, generally do not give consideration to legal costs as they set their court’s schedules or briefing or discovery requirements.

Winston and Strawn had gross revenue of about $1.4 billion last year, and the profits per partner was over $4 million. The average partner (average…..not the highest paid) made over $2 million. Is this necessary? Is this ethical?

Let’s go back to the start. Pattie Gonia is being sued for $1 by Patagonia for trademark infringement. If she pays $1 and changes her name (and pays whatever her lawyer has charged her to date), all will be well (except for the career that she had put together and is identified with her name). If she decides to defend the case, she will pay up to $1 million in legal fees and court costs which will allow (if she uses a major firm) her lawyers to earn more than that per year. Either way, she is a victim unless she defends the suit, wins the suit and gambles even more legal fees in an attempt to have the court assess her legal fees to Patagonia. That can happen, sure. But it is a gamble that most would not take.

The entire system needs a good rethinking. But it isn’t going to happen any time soon. You know why? It is because everything, absolutely everything, needs a good rethinking.

I don’t think I usually look at the credits of a Netflix series as they flow past me, except perhaps to look at the names of the lead actors. But, I guess, I don’t ignore them completely, and if something familiar passes by, it appears that my mind reacts and says to the rest of me, “What was that?” This is what happened last night when we watched the first two episodes of Bodkin, promoted as an Irish noir comedy thriller. I said “What was that?” to myself because it looked like I saw the names of Barack and Michelle Obama flash by. I backtracked and, yes indeedy, there they were, listed as Executive Producers.

What do Executive Producers do? My guess is that no two Executive Producers do the same thing in the same way, but Google AI says about the Obamas and Bodkin: “While they did not write, direct, or physically film they show, they championed and greenlit the project, helping it land on the streaming platform as part of their broader creative partnership with Netflix.” They did this through their company Higher Ground Productions. Nice work if you can get it.

Well, maybe I previously heard that the Obamas had started a production company, but I didn’t know that was going to have a partnership with Netflix, and I certainly did not know that it was going to sponsor Irish noir comedy thrillers, like Bodkin, a show with some entertainment value, to be sure, but no value beyond that.

Now, when this show first was seen on Netflix, the reviews were not all positive. For example, the Irish Times review said “Yet another entry in the worst genre ever – the Irish rural picaresque where booze flows, nuns scowl. A deeply annoying show that thinks it is critiquing cliches about Ireland when actively adding to the stockpile. Let’s ignore it and hope it goes away.”

The Irish Independent, on the other hand, said that the show might at first seem to be a bit of paddywhackery, but it turns out to be a “deliciously offbeat concoction of the intentionally silly and the sinister that delights in setting up more shamrock-laden cliches than you can shake a shillelagh at, and then gleefully shredding them.”

Digression: I keep thinking that I should keep a record of the first time I use a word in this blog. I can search and check before I do. Maybe one new word a day. Today: paddywhackery. End of digression.

In any event, what do the Obamas do as executive producers, at least of this series? Anything but lend their names? What makes that any different from Trump lending his name to a building or a bottle of vodka?

And let me add this, Obamas. You would have been better off paying a little more attention to the external architecture of your presidential library. The interior may be great, but where is Moshe Safdie when you need him?

By the way, I think the same about the Lyndon Johnson library, which is also great on the inside.

The Trump library will be different.

Of course, it will be placed in the laundry room on the 53rd floor of a hotel.

Speaking of libraries, there is a nice looking one in Episode 2 of Bodkin. It is a Carnegie Library. If the Obamas had paid attention while they were executive producing, the south side of Chicago may have looked better today.

By the way, did anyone watch the White House fights last night? Did everyone walk away in one piece? As for me? I was watching Bodkin.

Well, I wasted a lot of time this morning on the NYT crossword puzzle. I also realized that I didn’t do the daily Wordle yesterday, which means (although I did it along with today’s today) that they have once again set me back to Zero. In addition to that, it is the president’s birthday, also known, in my mind, as the Nakba.

Of course, Nakba normally refers to the days when Israel won its war of independence, and Palestinians were displaced (sometimes violently, sometimes through deception, sometimes out of fear, and sometimes not at all) from their homes in what became the State of Israel.

Those of you with a good memory (I don’t think any of my readers – mostly elderly – have good memories any more) may recall that times that I have suggested that the term “Zionism” be dropped, that it has become both an incendiary term and an unnecessary one, and should be relegated to words of the past, words depicting history but not the present. If you not only have a good memory, but keep up with such things, you may notice that a number of people with larger audiences have said the same thing, such as Nadine Epstein, editor of Moment magazine.

Today, I want to go the other way with the word “Nakba”. I do not want it to be dropped from the vocabulary; I want it to be expanded and become part of the normal English vocabulary (even though it is an Arabic word). My reason is simple. The Palestinians use “Nakba” the way the Jews use “Holocaust”. They use it to connote a particular occurrence, a particular experience, and they claim that the use of the word for any other occurrence is both wrong and demeaning. But the fact is that, throughout history, as a result of wars (irrespective of who has started the wars, or whether the wars were necessary or wars of choice), people have been required to give up their homes and move elsewhere. Even in recent years, of course, in places such as Syria, there has been much displacement.

Historically, there have been many examples. Between 12 and 20 million were displaced when Britain left India and the Raj broke up into India, Pakistan, and (eventually) Bangladesh. In Turkey, after hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Kurds were displaced during World War I (not to mention the Armenians, who were killed in another genocide, another Holocaust), in 1923, there was a “peaceful” displacement and exchange of over a million Greeks living in Turkey and several hundred thousand Turks who were living in Greece.

And, of course, these are only examples. Many of those who are now being chased by ICE in the US and deported were themselves victims of displacement from their home countries, victims not of ethnic Nakbas, but political or personal Nakbas.

I think each of these forced displacements should be termed a Nakba. The forced removal of Jews during the Nazi years was a Nakba and showed that, in extreme circumstances, the result of, or a part of, a Nakba can be a Holocaust. The forced removal of Jews from so many countries in the Middle East and in North Africa after the formation of the State of Israel was a Nakba, if not a Holocaust.

The purpose of all of this would be, of course, to normalize the human experience. Jews are not the only people to have suffered through a Holocaust. Palestinians are not the only people to have suffered through a Nakba. Both words should be used more generally than they are; they should be used over and over. For after all, Holocausts and Nakbas are not unusual; they are with us all the time, all the times throughout human history.

Zionism is something different. There is no other people than the Jews who created a nation on the basis of a political (okay, more than political) philosophy like Zionism. But the purpose was to make the Jews no longer a people without an ethnic homeland, and to make them more like other peoples. That was the basic idea of political Zionism – to eliminate antisemitism in the lands were Jews were living, and to give them their own land where they could become like other peoples, no longer exceptional, no longer the outsider, no longer the hated.

Well, that worked and it didn’t work, as we know. And we don’t yet know how it will end (if it ever will). But if the idea was to make the Jews into a people like all other peoples, that is what we should be doing. And doing that means getting rid of the term “Zionism” and all that it connotes.

Of course, this won’t solve the entire problem. We still have two peoples wherein large segments of the population want exclusive control “from the river to the sea”. There is still much that has to be hashed out, unfortunately. But to use the terms “Zionism” as creating a special position (often deemed a God given position) for Jews, and “Nakba” as providing certain rights (also often deemed God given) for Palestinians, muddles and muddies that water. Zionism should be dropped, and Nakba should become a term to describe all peoples (and all individuals) who have been subject to forced displacement.

Being a victim of a Nakba does not give one eternal rights of return. But once you have been a beneficiary of the opportunity to return, you have returned. An additional Nakba is certainly not called for.

Finally, you ask if I knew that this is what I was going to write about when I sat down this morning after my struggle with the crossword puzzle. The answer is “no”. I had no idea what I was going to write about. And, although I was unable to complete the puzzle, I don’t call that a Nakba. The word needs to become universal. But not that universal.

This is birthday weekend. Not the birthday of the United States. That comes next month. But the birthday of someone more important than the United States. Donald J. Trump.

And not only is it his birthday. It is his 80th birthday. And that is something special. When I turned 80, I decided to write a blog. When Donald turns 80, he wanted something even more spectacular. He wanted a program of seven UFC matches. And he wanted them to take place on the White House lawn.

So, I know, you have questions, starting with “what does UFC stand for?”. I am here to give you the answers: Ultimate Fighting Championship. Next: do UFC fights include women, in addition to men? Answer: yes. Are women fighting at the White House? Answer? No. Question: Why not? Answer: That would involve DEI.

The main lightweight fight will be between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethie. Topuria has never lost a fight. He is the “champion” currently and (believe it or not) he is only #2 in the “UFC men’s pound for pound rankings”.

I am obviously curious about Topuria. What is his story? Well (and all is from Wikipedia), he is 29, just about my height, and (unlike me) speaks, in addition to English, Georgian, Spanish, and Mingrelian. Mingrelian?

Well, I guess Topuria is Mingrelian. He was born in Germany, his parents came from Abkhazia, and they are Georgian. The Mingrelians are a subgroup of Georgians (perhaps), their language is related to Georgian (I think). There are about 400,000 Mingrelians, of whom Topuria is only one. When Topuria was 7, his family left Germany and moved back to Georgia and then, when he was 15, they moved to Spain, where he trained and where he apparently still lives.

If you are wondering how Topuria got into mixed martial arts, perhaps you should look to his older brother, Alexandre, who is also a UFC fighter. If you are wondering what Topuria was doing on January 7, 2026, I can tell you that he was in Spain appearing in the Court of Violence Against Women, answering a complaint filed by his ex-wife (whose name, if you are into such details, is Giorgina Uzcategui). You can see why Trump likes him. He is a dual citizen of Georgia and Spain. In 2025, among his other honors, was being voted the “Fan’s [sic] Choice Knockout of the Year Award” winner.

So what about his opponent, Justin Gaethje? He has lost 5 fights and won 27. He is 8 years older than Topuria and 3 inches taller. He is American, born in Arizona, trained (at the Grudge Academy) in Colorado. He mother is Mexican, his father German. This would mean that you would pronounce his last name Get-ya, which sounds about right for an UFC fighter.

Get-ya actually has a college degree (good for him) and at one time had eye sight so bad that he fought only by touch, not by sight. He had a photorefractive keratectomy, which improved his vision.

I understand that 4,000 spectators will be in the temporary stands built around the temporary eight sided mat, and about 120,000 fans will be on the lawn.

Well, in fact, I doubt all of this. Why? First, because I can not imagine 120,000 people in greater DC (I guess some might trickle in from elsewhere) wanting to see any of this. In fact, national polls show the approval of these fights at just 16% which is, as they say, a smaller percentage than those who think the moon landing was faked, or that the earth is flat.

But secondly, because the weather report for Sunday night is for extreme thundershowers. Over the time set for the fights, the rain prediction is from 50% to 75%, so who knows if this event will even take place?

If it is too iffy to fight on the White House lawn, what are the options? Calling off the fights would be an insult to the president, of course, but what about a last minute move, say to the former Trump-Kennedy Center, now the Kennedy Center. My understanding is that the Opera House is free tomorrow night (as it is every night for the rest of history), and that seems an appropriate setting for a no-holds barred fight. While I don’t expect anyone to die during the fighting, the Opera House stage has certainly seen its share of deaths, so everyone would fell right at home. (By the way, there never have been any deaths in a UFC match, in case you were wondering).

Now a little about the fights: 3 minute rounds, with 1 minute between rounds, but fights are only 3 to 5 rounds (boxing matches usually are 6 to10 rounds, sometimes more). In a UFC fight, this is what you can not do (I think you can do anything else you want): no eye gouging, biting, hair pulling, mouth pulling or groin strikes, rabbit punches (to the back of the head), downward elbow strikes, kicking or kneeing the head of a downed fighter, and no holding on to the cage for leverage.

You want to watch (and think they won’t be rained out), but can’t make it to the Ellipse? You can stream the matches on Paramount. That means that these fights on the White House grounds can not even be seen unless you have a subscription to Paramount+ on your TV or computer.

UFC, of course, and Donald Trump have a long alliance (in fact, Donald would be a UFC fighter had he not been diagnosed with bone spurs), and Paramount? Well, look at the headline on the front page of this morning’s New York Times: “Officials Clear Merger’s Path at Paramount”.

And you think the fix is in?

Well, this is the last day that I have to avoid talking about the person about whom I have a lot to say. Since the no-you-know-whom week started on Monday, “how does it end just on Friday?”, you might ask. Well, the answer is “just because”.

I guess I really don’t have a lot today this morning about anyone else. This week has been graduation week. Michelle’s two step sons, Oli and Ian, graduated from high school and middle school. Hannah’s two children, Joan and Izzy, graduated from elementary school and preschool. Yesterday, I put something on Facebook congratulating Joan, and I received about 50 likes. The amazing thing about Facebook (with all of its many, many, many flaws) is that it does put you in contact with people with whom you would otherwise have little or no contact, even if fewer and fewer of my “friends” seem to post things of their own (and, I assume, fewer and fewer of them look at Facebook very much, if at all). But the likes I received are so widespread that it is a shame that Facebook has let itself be captured by disinformation bots and worse. The responses to Joan’s graduation that I received come from (in no particular order): Pennsylvania, DC, Washington State, Ontario, Missouri, Illinois, Denmark, New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Germany, Indiana, Michigan, Virginia, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas.

This all makes me wonder how many of these “friends” read my daily blog, if at all. I can’t answer that question because there are two essential sets of facts I don’t know. While I get statistics each day that shows me how many people go to my site, and while I know who has “subscribed” to my blog and receive it via email, I don’t get the identity of those who open it up, and I don’t see how long they stay on the site after opening it. Or, perhaps better would be to say that if these statistics are available, I don’t know how to retrieve them. And I am not sure I would want to. I also don’t know how many of my Facebook friends receive daily notices of my blog posts in their news feeds. It may be that those who have not opened them on a regular basis do not see them at all. Because Facebook’s algorithms are obviously necessarily arcane, I don’t know how to check this, and I am not sure how to expand my readership among my Facebook friends.

Obviously, the goal of this blog is not to join the million readers crowd. Far from it. I don’t mind strangers reading it (or I would not be putting it on WordPress as I do), but I would rather have more friends and relatives look at it. Or friends of friends, of course. But I am not trying to compete with those who have a bevy of readers, who have to carefully fact check everything they do, who rely on their blogs for income, or who draw in the biggest numbers. In fact, drawing big, big numbers would require a different kind of writing, I think.

All this reminds me of something that Rabbi Jacob Neusner said years ago (and I paraphrase): if you compare the Jewish population with the Chinese population, we lose. And that’s fine.

The other big news today, of course, is that Elon Musk, through the Space-X IPO, is positioned to become the world’s first trillionaire. In fact, being a trillionaire is so rare, that WordPress does not even recognize trillionaire as a word. I don’t at all understand how someone so weird and unlikable can reach this summit ($1,000,000,000,000 is a big number and a lot of money), and because I view Musk as at least 50% evil (and maybe more so), I don’t see him handing out $$s to the groups I would support.

Of course, $1,000,000,000,000 is not what it used to be. The United States National Debt, after all, is now approaching $40,000,000,000,000. Musk, even if he wanted to, couldn’t put a dent into it.

One of the enticements to investing in Space-X is putting a colony of about 1 million people on Mars. Remember those who wanted to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge?

But if you suspend your disbelief for a minute and imagine 1 million Martians, maybe those million will all be Trumpublicans, and the city named MMGAville. And maybe that would be good for everyone.

Uh-oh! I am getting too close to my self-defined limits. So…good-bye for today.

1. I am committed to continue this week to make sure that my posts do not concern or name the President who loves inflation. So, in spite of all the temptation, I am not thinking about that president at all. I have to concentrate on other things.

We have watched the first four episodes of a Netflix series titled Untamed. It is pretty good so far – a mystery of how a young woman fell or was pushed off the top of El Capitan in Yosemite Park. This is not a review of that series, but I am mentioning it only to tell you something that I learned watching. I can’t really call it a tidbit or a factoid because it’s is larger than what those words conjure up, and I can’t call it an interesting piece of trivia, because it is far from trivial. Here it is:

Do you know that Yosemite Park and the State of Rhode Island are just about the same size? Rhode Island is about 1,214 square miles and Yosemite is about 1169 square miles (corroborating source: Google AI). I have never been to Yosemite, and very little of Yosemite is available for the general public to see, but it never occurred to me that it was that large. Even though Rhode Island is small, as we know.

Digression: This is perhaps an unimportant and completely unnecessary digression (in fact, you can strike the word “perhaps”), but do you know that the name of Rhode Island was not Rhode Island until sometime in 2020? Before that the name of Rhode Island was Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It took a constitutional amendment to shorten the name. End of digression.

But enough about Rhode Island. Let’s talk about Yosemite. Having realized how large Yosemite is, I went to a list of National Parks and discovered that Yosemite is not the largest (I never thought it was, but I never thought it was as large as it was). In fact, the United States has 15 National Parks larger than Yosemite. The largest (one which I guarantee you have never set foot in) is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. which is about 13,000 square miles, or the size of ten Rhode Islands. And Gates of the Arctic National Park (never heard of that one either, huh?) is almost the same size.

Of the 15 largest National Parks, 7 are in Alaska. Of the others, Joshua Tree in California and Big Bend in Texas are only slightly larger than Yosemite, and Olympic in Washington, Glacier in Montana, and Grand Canyon in Arizona somewhat larger than those. But by the time you get to the Everglades, you have significantly exceeded the size of Rhode Island, and when you get to Yellowstone, you have doubled the size of the State of Rhode Island. Death Valley National Park is the size of four Rhode Islands.

Yellowstone and Death Valley are, in fact bigger than not only Rhode Island, but bigger than Delaware or Connecticut. And Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is larger than eight states.

By the way, the source I used for the National Parks used kilometers squared, while the source for the States used square miles, so I had to convert them all to square miles, and there is a reason I am not a mathematician. So, don’t quote me without doing your own research.

I find these statistics as interesting as I find thinking about the President who is attacking Iran in self defense because they are not negotiating fast enough during a ceasefire. But, of course, I am nothing thinking about that President at all.

2. I guess this post is long enough as-is, but I had a second subject I was going to write about. The very mysterious death of author/activist/monk Thomas Merton in 1968. He was 53, in Thailand to give a speech, and found dead in his hotel room. While I am not sure that he was naked, he had just showered, had a severe wound in the back of his head which had bled a lot, and had a large fan across his body, still spinning. The story given was that he fell bringing the fan down with him, hitting his head and being electrocuted by a faulty wire. The death report says he had a heart attack. There was no autopsy because the US Embassy would not allow it before flying the body back to his monastery in Kentucky. There were persistent rumors that he was murdered, either by a Belgian bishop who disappeared on the day Merton died, or by CIA operatives. Nobody knows.

If that doesn’t clear your mind of 47, nothing will.

I saw an article this morning on my Google page that listed the best museum cities in the world, starting with Paris, Madrid, London and New York. Washington was not on the list, and frankly I don’t understand that.

Just off the top of my head, Washington has the following first class art museums:

1. National Gallery of Art
2. National Portrait Gallery
3. Smithsonian American Art Gallery
4. Phillips Collection
5. Renwick Gallery
6. Hirshhorn Museum
7. Kreeger Museum
8. Hillwood Museum
9. Art Museum of the Americas
10. Rubell Museum
11. Glenstone Museum
12. National Museum of Women in the Arts
13. Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art
14. Smithsonian Museum of African Art
15. Freer Gallery
16. Katzen City American University Museum

Then there are the history museums:

1. National Museum of African American History
2. Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
3. Smithsonian Museum of American History
4. Capital Jewish Museum
5. Spy Museum
6. National Museum of the American Indian
7. National Air and Space Museum (two locations)
8. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
9. Museum of the Bible
10. National Building Museum
11. National Postal Museum
12. National Archives
13. Library of Congress
14. Children’s Museum
15. Planet Word
16. DAR Museum
17. Dumbarton Oaks Museum
18. National Geographic Museum (about to reopen after renovation)
19. George Washington U. Textile Museum
20. National Law Enforcement Museum
21. The Society of Cincinnati Museum
22. Jewish War Veterans Museum
23. Navy Memorial Museum

And there are those that I have forgotten about, and many more smaller ones that I have not mentioned.

Have I visited all of these? No, but I should. Would a visit to each of these make a good series for Artis80.blog? Yes. Is such a series likely. Not really. Too bad.

Will watch the Nats game on TV this afternoon as they try for a sweep in San Francisco. The Nats, predicted to lose 100 games this season, now stand at at 35-33. We have tickets for Saturday’s game.

Trying hard to avoid you-know-who this week. And why isn’t it you-know-whom, anyway? But…..

If you-know-whom has his way, there will be, if nkt another museum, a new site/sight to behold as you cross the river heading to Arlington Cemetery. Here it is (hold your nose!):

Well, we are dog sitting this morning, as Michelle and family are off to Oli’s high school graduation. For reasons unknown, Montgomety County high schools are all holding their graduations in Baltimore this year, and Michelle didn’t want Zeke to wonder where everyone was while he was locked up in his cage. In fact, graduation is also being streamed, and I asked Zeke if he wanted to watch. He gave me his “are you kidding me?” look and just walked away to the closest window.

Speaking of high school graduations, mine was on June 6, 1960. Maybe someone remembers it better than I do. Everything I write about may be fiction, but I recall it as a two part event. The first part was called baccalaureate. AI tells me that a baccalaureate ceremony is an “intimate, reflective” ceremony held a day or two before graduation. I don’t remember it that way, and I don’t even remember if we got our diplomas there or at graduation, but I remember we participated in some sort of procession at the baccalaureate ceremony, I think in cap and gown. I was paired in the ceremony and the preceding rehearsals (we marched by twos) with Linda Weissman (I have changed her name to protect the innocent. Her real name was Linda Weisman. Oops.) This felt a bit weird, maybe to both of us, because I don’t think we had ever said one word to each other before that. But it turned out we got along very well. As I recall, our caustic senses of humor complemented each other’s and we had a surprisingly good time. Of course, we never spoke to, or saw, each other again. Such is life.

I turned on the basketball game last night, and lasted about 45 seconds. Let’s be honest. When you are 7’4″, it is not difficult to put a ball in a net that you can reach just by standing up and raising your arm. Hardly a sport.

Of course, the highlight of the evening was Avery Wilson’s courageous rendition of “Oh Say, Can You Boo?” But I can’t talk about that. This is still no-Trump week.

The facade of Metro headquarters has some interesting, if hard to explain, protrusions (is that a word?).

We were there yesterday to get a new Senior Smartrip card for Edie after the mysterious disappearance of her original one. I assumed that would take 30 seconds, but no. It is a process. Like waiting at the DMV, or a doctor’s office. They first have to agree that you are at least 65 years old. Once assured, they can proceed.

Digression. A week or so ago, for the first time in quite a while, I bought a bottle of wine at Whole Foods. The clerk asked me for my ID. I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation about the possibility I was younger than 21, so I gave her my driver’s license. She took it, and scanned it into the Whole Foods data base. Now, researchers of the future will be able to affirm all of my personal data (eye and hair color, et al) and tell you what kind of wine I bought and how much I overpaid for it. Big Brother Jeff B is watching us all. End of digression.

Back at Metro headquarters, where they too seem to know too much, they make you sign an affidavit (“lie and you die” sort of thing). And then they tell you that they are cancelling your old card, so if you find it, destroy it, or else!

I never thought of how much WMATA must know about my Smartrip card? They must know every trip I have taken on the 15+ years when I have used that card.

My question is. If I demanded to see my Whole Foods wine records or my Metro trip records, would I be allowed to? It seems to me that I should be able to know as much about me as they do.

Back to graduations. Of course, 1960 and 2026 are very dissimilar. But if Oliver Curtis is marching today along side of a 2026 version of Linda Weissman, is their marching and their conversation being recorded for future use? Will it be shared with Jeff Bezos? Will it one day be encrypted on their Smartrip cards?

This talented group of singers, each an experienced performer and member of the Washington theater community, last night put on the 11th annual Congregation Har Shalom Cabaret.

Here are the women of the group, with Michelle Hessel at the far right. There were 26 numbers. The performers chose the songs. The rules were simple. You had to select a role that you always wanted to play, but never had the chance to. Michelle chose songs from Peter Pan, Rags, Mame, and City of Angels.

So, it was a busy weekend. Friday night services honoring Rabbi Luxemburg’s 50 years of service, a 60th anniversary party in Annapolis, and the Har Shalom Cabaret. This week promises a lunch with a Haberman advisor, the Haberman Institute’s Annual Meeting, a half day of dog sitting, two graduations (one from elementary school and one from pre-school), a Haberman lecture by Rabbi Fred Reiner on “What Do Jews Believe Today?”, and a baseball game Saturday afternoon. Rabbi Reiner’s talk will be on Thursday at 2 p.m. EDT on Zoom, and you can register (no charge) at http://www.habermaninstitute.org. I would love to see some of you register and watch (I do see a list of everyone who does). Fred Reiner is the rabbi emeritus of Temple Sinai, the first congregation in Washington that Edie and I joined. He developed a statement of beliefs during the early days of the Trump administration that has been signed onto by over 600 rabbis and cantors. I am curious to know what it says. How can any statement of beliefs attract so many signers?

Temple Sinai is located on Military Road NW, just a few blocks from our first house, also on Military Road. When we joined in the 1970s, the chief Rabbi was Gene Lipman, best known for his solid devotion to human and civil rights, and (at least known to me for) his “my way or the highway” approach to most issues. Beloved by some and turned off by others, he had a “kitchen cabinet” that met together on Sunday mornings where he could pick up ideas of what those he trusted thought he was doing right and doing wrong (I guess they could tell him what he was doing wrong). Edie was a member of that kitchen cabinet and used to go to Sinai for an hour or so almost every Sunday (I think almost every Sunday). She could never quite figure out how he selected her (I could, of course). She said it was a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and her.

We were very young then, of course, but somehow my law partner Ed Berkowitz, who was fairly active in the congregation, got me nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of the temple. It was the first time I was ever on a board of a real institution, and let me tell you how I felt: completely and totally lost. I understood absolutely nothing that was being discussed, and certainly didn’t understand the budget (or any budget). I don’t remember who the treasurer was, but if he had croaked and I had been thrust into his position, that would probably have been it for Temple Sinai.

I did learn during the two or three years I held that position that synagogue politics was nothing to get involved with. I saw how tempers flared when the sensibilities of board members were offended, and that for every opinion, there was an opposite opinion. For example, I remember that there was a very active congregant who did everything that you would want a congregant to do, and she did it with great knowledge and a smile and unflagging energy. So it was not surprising when she was elected to the board of directors. Only then was it discovered that she wasn’t Jewish (I think she was brought up Quaker or some such thing), but that her husband was and her children were being raised Jewish, and no one knew until after her election. You don’t think that started a controversy?

And then there was the time when the part time Associate Rabbi broke a clause of his contract by officiating at (in a far off location, I believe) a mixed religion wedding. Now, what? Continue his contract, or fire him? For once, Gene Lipman did not appear to have a firm opinion, so he said (and the board agreed) or maybe the board said (and he agreed) to put it to a congregational vote. Can you believe that? A big congregational meeting with hundreds in attendance and speeches about whether this Associate Rabbi should be retained or let go? You can imagine it if you try hard enough. At the end of the meeting, there was a secret vote (little tabs of paper handed to the ushers), and the Associate Rabbi was fired by (if I remember correctly) a vote of several hundred people with a difference of three. Something like 175-172 (I don’t really remember the numbers; we are talking over 40 years ago. Both rabbis and most congregants are long gone.)

Other than that, Temple Sinai was a fine place, and still is. Rabbi Reiner replaced Gene Lipman, and served the congregation for 25 years before retiring. Of course, Lipman had been rabbi for 26 years. He won. After he retired, Lipman became a vegetable farmer, growing vegetable for local homeless shelters. Not sure how Fred Reiner spent his time; perhaps we shall find out. My guess is he has not been farming.

I will say this about the positions I held at Temple Sinai. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who remembers I was on the board or the assistant treasurer. And I don’t remember anything about my service other than being in a daze the whole time and wondering how I got there. But when we moved to Adas Israel and I became a board member and then vice president (until I was asked to step aside – that’s even a juicier topic), I guess my Sinai service gave me a hint of what was going on.

Which brings me to the last story of the day, tying in the treasurer position I first held at Temple Sinai (I have since, by the way, been treasurer both of Haberman and of American Associates for Ben Gurion University of the Negev), with my service to Adas Israel and with last night’s cabaret at Har Sinai.

At Adas Israel, I was for a while on the board’s budget committee (not as treasurer, but as a board liaison) and I remember a day when various Adas employees came before us to explain their departments’ budget requests. Each one came in with charts showing how funds were to be spent, what was needed, what the past years’ expenditures were like and so on. Quite detailed. But then the director of the congregation’s pre-school came in. She had no charts, no figures, no nothing. Except for a scrap book with a picture of th.e pre-schoolers. Here is why I need the money, she said, pointing to the pictures And she got every penny.

Her name was (still is) Shelly Remer. Her husband, Stuart, is one of the two long time producers of the Har Shalom Cabaret, where they now belong. So, yes, it is a small world.

Okay, two days. No Trump. Will I make the week?

The NYT crosswod this morning was a real slog. How I got through it, I don’t know. The theme was a total mystery to me, which meant I couldn’t rely on six of the horizontal lines and had to solve it relying on the “down” clues. If you are thinking about starting to do the Times Sunday puzzle today…..don’t. Wait until next week.

The small amount of rain that fell last night did not get in the way of Don and Gail Kohn’s 60th annivesary party at their waterfront home outside of Annapolis.

Music by Elixir, led by Nils Fredland, son of college roommate Eric Fredland. Of course, Eric had help from Wendy. Actually, four of us college roommates were there last night…besides Eric and me, Doug Frame was there (about to take off for his annual four months in Nova Scotia) and Bob (and Nona, of course) Nicholson.

The post-shower sky was beautiful, and we left early enough to get back on Highway 50 before dark.

I thought we had a quiet at home day today, but it turns out we have 2 p.m. theater tickets. And tonight, it’s off to Congregation Har Shalom or an evening of Broadway show tunes, sung by Michelle Hessel and others. 7 p.m. Y’all come.

I have as usual been reading books no one else reads. Now, it is the autobiography of Mark Van Doren, long time Columbia University professor and literary critic and editor. He was also the father of  Charles van Doren. Those of us 80 or older remember when Charles, who won the equivalent of well over $1 million on the NBC quiz show, Twenty-One, admitted he had been given all the answers in advance.

Mark was born in Hope, Illinois in the late 1890’s. Don’t know where Hope is? It was a stop on the railroad, right between Faith and Charity. Faith and Charity, by the way, are gone. Hope lingers on, but is hanging by a thread. Its current population is (drum roll!) …. 18.

Van Doren’s book is a pleasant read, mentions many New York intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century, especially those who were connected to Columbia, orvwho contributed to The Nation when van Doren was its literary editor.

I am not mentioning Donald Trump today. Not even thinking about Donald Trump today. Donald Trump is the furthest thing from my mind.

The highlight of next week will be Tuesday’s Maine primary. Both Graham Platner and Janet Mills will be on the Democratic ballot. It will be interesting to see how many Democrats now decide to vote for Governor Mills, who suspended her candidacy weeks ago. And even if Platner wins, which he probably will, on Tuesday, the question of who will be on the November ballot may still be open.