Art is 80

It is hard to avoid talking about the two horrific events of yesterday. The attack at Brown University in Providence and the attack on Bondi Beach at the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney. It is interesting that both of these places have very tough gun laws, and that both have had very low numbers of gun homicides. It just shows you that you can’t protect against everything, no matter how hard you try to.

Hopefully, they have captured the right guy in Providence; he is unidentified as I write this. And, it appears that they have killed one and injured the other of two shooters (hopefully, the only two) in Sydney. We have no idea of the motive behind the shootings in the physics building at Brown while final exams were going on, but in Sydney it would appear that the attacks were Israel related.

Why do I say that? I say that because I read earlier that the Hanukkah candle lighting at Bondi Beach, sponsored by a local Chabad center, was billed as a celebration for Israelis living in Sydney. Not that others, Jew or Gentile, weren’t invited, but the Israelis were the target of the organizers and turned out to be, I would assume, the target of the attackers. Of course, even so, this event so far has been billed as antisemitic, not anti-Israel (at least from what I have seen) and it again brings up the relationship between the two. While it would probably be impossible to say that the shooters hated Israel but were indifferent to Jews, it is possible to think that, but for the Israeli actions in Gaza, this attack would not have occurred.

It will take a long time, as we know, for the strong feelings against Israel (for many, you can’t separate Israel from “Israel’s current government”) to subside. It will take even longer than it otherwise might if Israel continues on the course it is on – attacks on Hamas members in Gaza where collateral killings and damage is inevitable, delays in letting needed aid or needed rebuilding material into the area, attacks in Syria and Lebanon on Hezbollah targets,  increasing attacks by settlers, sometimes aided by IDF or security troops, in the West Bank and increased Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

As I have suggested before, all of this may, on the part of Israeli leadership or Israelis in general, be well thought out: Now is the time they can succeed because they have overwhelmingly superior force, and public opinion be damned, now is the time that they are going to take steps that might be very unpopular but, if successful, may create an Israel with truly secure boundaries once and for all. If they fail, Israel as an independent state may fail. If they succeed, irrespective of how they are seen or judged today, the current crop of Israeli leaders will, by future generations, be deemed heroes.

But all of this turmoil is not without spillover effects. And those spillover effects will include an increasing amount of anti-Israel feeling and anti-Israel actions around the world among many individuals, some or most of whom will not be able to parse the difference between Israelis and Jews. And there will be continuing random attacks on synagogues and Jewish events with killing and maiming, along with property damage, occurring each time.

While it is impossible to stop this, and difficult to figure out where it might appear next, it is worth noting that the State of Israel’s insistence that it be recognized as a “Jewish State” and maintaining that it is the State of the Jews, wherever they live and whether or not they have ever even traveled to Israel, along with the existence of a large Israeli diaspora around the world, adds to the problem. So does the position taken by many Jewish organizations which, regardless of their basic raison d’etre, have taken on the defense of Israel and Israelis as central to their mission, and the continuing displaying of Israeli flags inside synagogue sanctuaries and “we stand with Israel” signs on synagogue lawns. It may be impossible to change any of this, but it should all come with the recognition that it does increase the dangers that Jews find themselves in wherever they may be.

In the meantime, our thoughts, prayers and sympathies go out to the families of those killed, injured, or otherwise affected by all of these sad events, whether they be related to Israel and Jews, as is the case in Sydney, or not, as presumably is the case in Providence.

With regard to attacks on universities, like Brown, or other types of schools, better security is probably the best answer we have. It is my understanding that the building at Brown where the attacks occurred was unlocked. When I was going to universities, no one thought that buildings should be locked. But it appears that today, they need to be, just as there need to be more cameras and recording devices, more metal detectors, and more personnel trained in security.

As you might guess, this is not what I was planning to write about this morning. I was going to write about slavery. Maybe tomorrow. I have some thoughts about that (broad thoughts), too.

1. Donald Trump’s bone spurs were diagnosed in 1968 by Dr. Larry Braunstein. Dr. Braunstein rented his office space from Fred Trump, Donald’s father. Braunstein’s two daughters recently have said, according to an article in the Irish Times, that their father wrote up the diagnosis as a favor to Fred, and one of them went on to say that she doesn’t know that he ever even examined the future president’s feet.
2. After celebrating his eighth personally ended war, this one between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and holding a signing ceremony at the non-functioning Donald Trump Institute of Peace, it has been reported that the fighting has continued and an important Congo town taken by Rwanda. My question is: if Trump convinces the parties to come for another truce signing party, will he call this his 9th?
3. Trump called ABC reporter Rachel Scott stupid and “the most obnoxious” reporter when she accurately reported what he said earlier about the attack on a Venezuelan boat. “I didn’t say that! You said that.!” He either forgot he said it or just didn’t want to respond. The incident has been widely shown on media and the usual Trump critics have talked about. But again, I ask, why do the other journalists tolerate this? Irrespective of their politics, why don’t they walk out, send letters to the White House, state their positions publicly? Why don’t they do anything as this assault on female journalists continues?
4. I am not sure what American sanctions on the International Criminal Court would even mean, but Trump has threatened them unless the Court does him a favor. Unless the Court gives Trump and his advisors a free pass on anything they do. Why isn’t everyone outraged at this?
5. Trump wants to personally decide who buys Warner Brothers Discovery, which means, among other things, who will control CNN. One of the two contestants is about 25% owned by his son-in-law and Saudi and UAE funds. Anybody care?
6. Trump insists that Admiral Rachel Levine be identified as Admiral Richard Levine. Her legal name is Rachel. He can get away with this?
7. Trump wants Dulles Airport to be renamed for him, and maybe the Kennedy Center. And what will DC’s Union Station be called after the federal government redo? Welcome to the U. S.of T.

I did sit through the entire Congressional hearing on Homeland Security yesterday morning, and I must say….I never ceased to be amazed. There were three witnesses, Secretary Kristi Noem, National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, and the head of the FBI national security branch, Michael Glasheen. I felt sorry for Glasheen, who seems to be unable to speak well (or sometimes at all), a necessity for someone testifying before Congress and on television. As to Kent, for some reason, just looking at him scares me. I shouldn’t hold that against him, I know. But I do.

Now, it is true that everyone was yelling at everyone else and doing their best to insult each other, that no questioner was really interested in answers to their questions, and that the biggest game in town seemed to be to see who would stop speaking first when the questioner and answerer were speaking over each other as if the other wasn’t really there. I will put that all aside for now, although it obviously set the tone of, and controlled the information flow within, the session.

What I want to discuss are some real conflicts between Democrats and Republicans that should (but can’t be) narrowed or resolved, by parties sitting down, laying out facts and bases for the facts, and trying to reach a workable compromise that, in fact, may not satisfy anyone but will move several steps in the right direction. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Instead, the parties just double down on their positions.

For example, to a question about why ICE arrests and confines American citizens or people here on  legitimate work permits, Kristi Noem can’t give an honest answer, I guess. She responds by saying: We don’t do that; we don’t confine citizens or those authorized to be in the country.  Well, that just isn’t true. So why does she say it?

When given examples of people arrested without apparent cause, such as the California landscaper who has been in the U.S. for 30 years, raised three sons each of whom were U.S. Marines, and never was in any legal trouble, and asked for an explanation, she responds: We are enforcing all the laws; we make no exceptions. Say, what? What does that even mean? How does it fit into the mother of Trump’s silly spokeslady Katherine Leavitt’s niece, who was arrested and now was released. I guess it pays who you know.

And then, of course, there is the standard Republican answer to every single question: It was Joe Biden’s fault. I, for one, am a bit tired of that one. Maybe others are as well. But for the Republicans in the room yesterday? Maybe they have to put a quarter in the penalty jar if they answer a question without using Biden’s name.

One thing that did surprise me was that two Republican Congressmen (they will remain nameless because I don’t remember their names) talked about Muslim criminality, each of them saying that Muslims were much more likely to commit crimes than the restroom us. One of them mentioned the Somali-led COVID fraud scheme now unfolding in Minnesota, and both of them gave horrific statistics on Muslim crime. All of those statistics (whether they are accurate or not, I have no idea) came from various European sources and dealt with crime in particular European locations. I went back to my friends at Google AI to see about Muslim crime in the United States, and was told that not only is there no evidence that Muslims in the U.S. commit more crimes than others, but there is some evidence that they commit fewer crimes. This is similar, of course, to the oft heard Republican chant that immigrants commit more crimes, when statistics show the opposite.

But yesterday’s rants by these two nameless-to-me Congressmen went beyond typical showings of GOP bias. One of them showed a video, a compilation of man-in-the-street questions to (I assume) Muslims, who were asked either “What law do you follow, American or sharia?” or “Would you rather live under American or sharia law?” And, lo and behold, it was 100% opted for sharia. 0% for American. Just wait. Someone will soon show that each of the responders was paid for their answers.

To end this charade, one of the two Congressmen proudly said of Muslims: “I want to deport each and every one of them!!”. As usual, that’s a paraphrase, but this is “what he said”.

One more thing for today: I see that 95,000 photos turned over to Congress by the Epstein estate are now ready for public viewing. If I look at 100 per day, I will have seen them all by Thanksgiving 2028. I already saw about a half dozen this morning on Morning Joe.

My favorite? The one showing Woody Allen and Steve Bannon engaged in a friendly conversation. What could be better than this? In second place is Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein talking – with Epstein wearing a Harvard sweat shirt. Of course, Epstein never went to Harvard, but Dershowitz spent his entire career teaching there. So, can we assume that the sweat shirt was a gift from Alan to his buddy Jeffrey? Or do we think that Jeffrey wore that sweatshirt whenever he was visited by any of his Harvard friends, not only Dershowitz, but maybe Larry Summers when he was advising Summers how to pick up girls at a bar (or wherever): You have to be assertive, Larry, don’t hold back, exude confidence.

Sigh.

We watched a film on Netflix last night called “The Abandoned”.  You might or might not give it a passing grade as entertainment, but you would give it a fairly high grade for social commentary, and an absolutely top grade for weirdness. The movie was filmed in Taipei, and makes Taiwan look like a place to stay away from. It looks like such an awful place that if I were Xi Jinping and I saw that movie, I would call my generals together and say, “Let forget that island.”

As for social commentary, the film focuses on the lives of undocumented female workers from places like Thailand and Indonesia who lose their lives, and undocumented males who work in the places that, if discovered, will be raided by authorities. Deportation is the fear, but the situation is different from the current situation here. Families are not targeted, people with work permits are not targeted, children feel safe going to school.

It shows that undocumented immigrants are not only an American problem, but one worldwide. I was surprised it would be a problem on an island like Taiwan, where border control seems comparatively easy. But I have learned there are almost 100,000 undocumented workers on Taiwan, most of whom entered legally and stayed after their initial work visas have expired. They then enter a dangerous black market job market operated by dangerous individuals and organizations, with dangerous jobs, inadequate housing, and strong financial pressures.

I have no idea why I am writing about this movie at all. I am not even talking about how weird it is.

Is there nothing interesting going on for me to mention? There must be something. After all, the US military has captured a tanker filled with Venezuelan oil. Why did they seize the ship? The only reason I can think of is that it was too big to sink.

The talk now is that the goal of all of this Venezuelan nonsense is to take control of the oil fields and give them back to Chevron. Do I remember correctly that the Bush neocons were planning on controlling Iraqi oil after that horrendous invasion, and that profits from oil sales would pay for the war, and not the American taxpayer? How did that turn out?

This morning, after a presentation on what was called the Department of Injustice at my breakfast group, I have started to watch Congressional hearings on the Department of Homeland Security. I was amused (I think that is the right word) when Bennie Thompson suggested to Kristi Noem that she resign before Trump fires her. He then asked the FBI counterterrorism chief what the biggest threat to American security is. His answer was “Antifa”, so Thompson asked him some specifics about Antifa. The witness was totally tongue tied.

Nothing will come from these hearings, as the Republicans, both those asking the questions and those answering them, are simply blaming Biden for everything. In fact, Biden will probably be mentioned more this morning in this hearing than Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files.

And he wasn’t blameless. I blame Biden, too, for taking the border approach that he did. From the first year of his term, I was suggesting that he was setting the stage for what would be the return of Donald Trump. For both of these things, or I guess it is the same thing, I do blame Biden.

So there you have it.

For decades now, when young people go out on first dates and want to learn about each other, they might ask: “What is your sign?” But starting today, there is a new question: “What is your font?”

It seems clear that if someone whose font is Calibri (meaning they are a “left wing lunatic”, as our President might describe them) learns that their date is New Times Roman (a true American font, regardless of the name), they might as well take the next Uber home. They are totally incompatible.

It turns out that Calibri is a DEIA font, easier to read than New Times Roman, and therefore makes immigrants from countries where English is not widely used more comfortable, as well as persons with certain disabilities . For this reason, Secretary Rubio is insisting that all official communications from the State Department be written in New Times Roman. Take that, Anthony Blinken!!

Now, I have never been font conscious until today, but I will be more careful from now on. For example, I now have learned, if I can believe what I read, that this blog is being brought to you in Samsung One font, and that when you Google something, your response comes in Roboto font. There is just so much to learn.

Did you know, for example, that Substack let’s you select your own font out of several they offer? Fascinating, no? No?

A tired looking, but persistent, Donald Trump rallied at the Mt. Airy Casino in the Poconos last night. He did about as well as he has historically done in casinos, I thought.

While I haven’t seen the fact checkers yet, and only watched some of his talk, there did not seem to be many new lies, only ones he has told multiple times in the past. One that I did focus on had to do with wind farms, which of course he hates. His claim was the almost all of the products that are used to make windmills come from China, but that China has no wind farms itself because the Chinese are too smart.

I thought that was worth a Google. Here is a map which shows where you can find wind farms in China.

I also was interested in how much he loves miners. You know what a miner is? According to Trump, it is someone who goes to work every day 10,000 feet underground. That was worth another Google. Yes, there is a 10,000 foot deep gold mine in South Africa. But in the US, most coal mines seem to be fewer than 2000 feet deep, and certainly none approaches 10,000 feet. But what is a little exaggerating among friends?

By the way, Trump also said that our miners love mining, and love burrowing 10,000 feet. I paraphrase slightly: “I could offer them a beautiful penthouse in midtown Manhattan, but they would turn it down because they love their mines.”

While Rubio was reporting, and Trump was mining his own business at the casino, Miami was electing its first Democratic mayor in 30 years, and electing her by 20 points. And the Democrats flipped a seat in the Georgia state legislature in a district that Trump won by over 10 points.

November 2026 is still 11 months away and much could happen, but…..

Signing off in Samsung One.

What am I thinking about right now? I am thinking how sorry I am that President Trump does not have a nose that grows every time he tells a lie. Because, as you know, if he did, his nose would now extend from the White House all the way to Mar-a-Lago. Why, you ask, would I want him to have a nose like that? I guess I could give you a number of reasons, but today I am thinking about this one:

I have noticed that Trump, in making the decisions he makes, seems remarkably short sighted. You tell him you have a problem and he wants your vote, he will immediately tell you what he is going to do to fix your problem (often one that he himself has caused), without thinking of the long term (or even mid-term) effects of his cure. And you ask why this is? It’s because Trump obviously can’t see beyond the tip of his nose. So, if the tip of his nose extended all the way to Palm Beach, he would, I assume, be able to make decisions based on much longer range thinking.

I am working my way through William Taubman’s lengthy Gorbachev. I am half way through. Gorbachev is now in charge and is finding that glasnost, or openness, is not always helpful to leadership, and that his perestroika, or reform, movement faces strong opposition from conservatives on the right (okay, in political terms, I guess they are leftists, but in sociological or psychological terms, they are conservatives and the equivalent of right wingers in America) led by Ligachev and Gromyko, and by those who want more reform on the left, led by the charismatic, but already unstable Yeltsin. These leftist reformers are those who, again, in political terms are on the right, wanting a system even more akin to our capitalism, but psychologically are leftists. I know that is confusing, but….think about it.

Continuing on this line, think of Gorbachev as a typical artis80 reader. Moderately liberal, politically cautious, seemingly pragmatic and so forth. If that is you and you lived in the USSR in the 1980s, you would think that Gorbachev was on the right path and you would wish him luck. And eventually, you would be disappointed. The political class in your country just wasn’t with you sufficiently, and Gorbachev was over ambitious and self confident.

So we have three points to make. First, Gorbachev had the right ideas. Second, the ship was too big to turn around so quickly. Third, he was so ambitious and self confident that he did not recognize this until it was too late. The result? Utter chaos and Vladimir Putin.

Now, move to the United States.  We have our own Gorbachev in Donald Trump. Their political thinking is totally different, but Trump, like Gorbachev, wants to change the political system of his country, and tear down existing institutions to do it. He is also facing opposition from all sides. And the ship he is attempting to turn is also very large. But his ambition and self confidence, like his Soviet counterpart, are equally large.

Trump will most likely fail. We know that. But what then? Will we be able to return to those wonderful days of yesteryear, or will that will that prove too difficult? Is it possible that we too will be caught up in our own chaos, a chaos we can not today know how to end, because we don’t know what it will contain?

Donald Trump is not the only one who cannot see beyond the tip of his nose. You don’t see American politicians or political thinkers or political journalists or pundits talking much about the post-Trump reconstruction that must take place. About the America of the post-Trump future. And by the time they do, we may be in our own Time of Troubles (to use another phrase from Russian history) and may discover that the strongest, not the best, man will come out on top.

If you go to the Jewish Museum of Florida, in the part of Miami Beach that I call (not knowing any better) South of South Beach, which is housed in an old synagogue, you see large stained glass windows which honor families and individuals who gave substantial amounts of money to the synagogue. One of the most prominent of these congregants was a man named Meyer Lansky.

Meyer Lansky, I assume, must have virtually commuted (not “virtually” as we think of it today) between Miami Beach and Havana as he acted as the financial brain (we would today call him the CFO, I guess) of the Mafia. But everything he did was not bad.

I mention this, because I recently was talking about this museum with a friend who winters in South Beach and knows the museum well. She told me another story about Lansky. I don’t remember all of the details, but the details are unimportant. So if you want to retell this story, feel free to alter it any way you want, as long as the main point remains. Here goes: My friend has a friend whose grandmother had a friend who rented an apartment in South Beach back when South Beach was not yet South Beach and the museum was still a synagogue. Lansky had an apartment in the same building. After her husband passed away, she found herself in financial difficulties. She had known Lansky from her building or  from the synagogue, although I don’t know if they were besties or only nodded to each other on the High Holidays (this detail may be important to a biographer, but not to us, and this is a detail about which, I am sorry to say, you are not free to speculate). But the point of the story is that Lansky took pity on her and helped her financially for the rest of her life. Not only that, but whenever he went grocery shopping, he would knock on her door and ask her what she needed. That Meyer Lansky! What a great guy!

Here is Meyer:

Now don’t think this is just a Jewish thing. Think of Alphonse Capone, an Italian Midwesterner with whom Lansky closely worked. Capone, it has been said again and again, was really good to his mother. But, it’s more than that. Capone established a large network of free soup kitchens throughout Chicago during the Depression. And (here is something you don’t know): It was Capone who pressed for expiration dates on milk bottles, after one of his relatives took ill. Don’t believe me? Google it.

Who else? Mussolini? He made the trains run on time. And this was no small feat. He did it in Italy, for God’s sake. Hitler? He built the autobahns, created national parks, and made sure the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth continued doing the darkest of times. And he gave Aryan women money when they had children. Okay, so his bad stuff massively eclipsed this and brought ruin to everything he touched, but still…..

This, of course, leads me to Donald Trump. Like all the other bad players throughout history, Donald Trump, you may be sure, has also done some good things. But the fact is…..I just can’t think of any.

Yesterday morning, we attended Shabbat services not at the synagogue we belong to, but at a different Conservative synagogue several miles from our house. We went to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of cousins and ran into a number of people we knew.

I told one of them that every time I am in their sanctuary, I am reminded of the most frightening experience I ever had in a synagogue, and that it happened in that very room, about 45 years ago.

The occasion was the bar mitzvah of the son of a first cousin of Edie. We went to the service, but the service was unlike anyone I had ever been to.

How could that be, you ask. Well, it was a Conservative service, and for the first almost 40 years of my life, I had only been to Reform Jewish services. St. Louis, where I grew up, had a greater percentage of Reform Jews and a lesser percentage of Conservative Jews than any other major American city. While there were a few Conservative Jews in my high school (I would bet were are talking about no more than 10 at most out of the 80 or so Jews in my class), none were close friends and I never was at their synagogues. When I was in college and high school, my Jewish life was pretty much limited to high holiday services, and I always chose Reform services. And when I moved to Washington and for the first several years after we married, we belonged to a Reform synagogue.

I remember, by the way, being very surprised, in college and law school, at the large number of my classmates who identified as Conservative or even Orthodox. The same was true of the people I met when I moved to Washington.

Edie’s father, born in Europe, went to an Orthodox synagogue, and her other relatives all seemed to belong to Conservative congregations. In those days, much more so than now, Reform and Conservative services were quite different, and you could be comfortable in one and lost in the other.

I was lost at Edie’s cousin’s bar mitzvah. The entire service was pretty foreign to me and the fact that everyone else at the service knew what was going on and seemingly could fully participate made me feel quite inadequate.

At some point, as I was trying to pay attention and get my bearings, someone (maybe Edie’s cousin, I don’t remember) came up to me and said something like “Go up to the bima. We have an honor for you.”

WHAT???? What could they possibly want me to do that I could possibly do? Read something in Hebrew? Chant a prayer? That seemed to be what others were doing. I was going to make a fool of myself.

But I gamely went up front. It was time to take the Torah, which had been read a bit earlier in the service, and carry it around the congregation and then bring it back up in the bima and place it in the ark. That is what they wanted me to do. No vocalizing required.

Well, that may sound easy, but I had never seen a Torah carried around a sanctuary in this manner. And I certainly didn’t know where, in this room which I had never been in before, I was to carry it. Right, left, back, front? No idea. And no GPS. I also didn’t know the cantor and the congregation would be chanting a prayer while I carried, that I would be leading a small parade, that people wanted to touch the Torah as I walked and I was to let them, or that the prayer would end while I still had a fairly long way to go and this didn’t mean I should have walked faster.

Somehow it all worked out, although I remember that I certainly did not feel a sense of accomplishment.

Well, that was then and this is now. What do I mean that it worked out? Not too long after that, we joined a Conservative synagogue, I became more than comfortable with the service, and I became an active congregant, a member of the board of directors and an officer. The synagogue we joined was not the one where I had been so petrified, but one closer to our home. And the bar mitzvah boy? He did all right, too. He is now the president of Hamilton College.

I wrote the title to this post before I had any idea what I was going to write about. The title seems to fit every possible topic.

The latest news about the drug boats in the Caribbean is being touted this morning by the media as if it is the latest news, but I remember it being discussed from the very beginning, although I did see a nuanced discussion yesterday. That is the apparently clear fact that none of the boats that we have attacked were coming to the United States. They were all going to much closer ports in other countries. So, it’s not like it is simply an alternative to the Coast Guard boarding a vessel in our territorial waters, capturing drugs and sending the boatmen back to where they came from. It is much different, and the difference is not only in the obvious different treatment of those men on the boats.

The focus has been on the one boat where the two “survivors” were de-survived. My assumption has been that this boat was on its way to Trinidad, where its cargo would be unloaded and somehow put on another boat, or maybe a plane, and brought to the United States, although how this would be accomplished was never explained. But I think it was clear that the boat(s) in question could not have gone far beyond Trinidad. It did not have the fuel to go that much further.

It was a mystery to me that, if the cargo was going to be unloaded in Trinidad, why Trinidad was not equally a target of ours as Venezuela was. But clearly, it has not been. But it looked like somewhere in Venezuela (not made public), there were folks packaging cocaine and putting it on small fishing boats, and sending the cocaine to Trinidad, where it was unloaded and, maybe, further processed, and then put on other vessels to come to the United States. Of course, we didn’t seem to be looking for those vessels making the second leg of the trip, which only made sense if we had zapped every one of the boats heading from Venezuela to Trinidad.

But then I heard two more things. I heard that most cocaine comes not from Venezuela but from Columbia. This might explain why we have also been shooting at boats in the Pacific, but does not explain why all of the Caribbean targets have apparently been Venezuelan. But there has been very little said about the boats attacked in the Pacific. Are they Colombian? Do they have anything to do with Venezuela (which obviously has no Pacific coast)? But Colombia has Caribbean as well as Pacific ports. Why aren’t we attacking Colombian boats in the Caribbean?

That was the first new thing I heard was that Venezuela is not the most significant source of cocaine by a long shot. The second is that cocaine which is trafficked across the Caribbean is usually not headed for the United States at all – that cocaine that comes here by boat in fact comes largely from the Pacific. The cocaine that goes to, say, Trinidad for processing is primarily then shipped across the Atlantic to Europe. If this is the case, then the idea that we are saving American children by sinking Venezuelan boats and killing Venezuelan crew members becomes even more absurd. And of course, the administration’s trying to tie this in with fentanyl is even sillier

To cap this off, yesterday I read that the boat that was “two-tapped” (or maybe “four-tapped”) was not even heading from Venezuela to Trinidad. I heard that it was going to Suriname, a somewhat longer trip than the short one to Trinidad, but one which hugs the shore and forms a standard stop on the way to Europe. This would mean that everything we had been told about the route of this boat before was false, and that if this boat (and maybe all the boats we have hit in the Caribbean) was heading east to Suriname and not north to Trinidad, it would (a) explain why we haven’t been hitting sites in Trinidad or boats leaving Trinidad, and (b) make it even more clear that this cocaine (assuming the boats had cocaine) was in fact destined for Europe, and not the United States.

So, what to make of all of this? First, that we really aren’t trying to save American children, who are not the prime cocaine customers anyway, but that for some reason we are tracking these Venezuelan ships rather than going after ships heading for the United States. Secondly and especially as we are building up our forces in the Caribbean, all this really is is a diversion for the American public while we prepare for war against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, with the Nobel-winning, Trump-supporting Venezuelan opposition leader waiting in Colombia for her opportunity to take over the country. The poor Venezuelan boatmen are just unfortunate and completely unimportant collateral damage.

Of course, attacking Venezuela to bring about regime change might just wind up to be another Bay of Pigs. And it just may cause our Peace President his Nobel Prize.

Worser and worser.

(Gotta run, late for our morning activities. No time to proof. Sorry.)

I will start with an admission: I have never played a video game. But millions, maybe billions, of people have and do, and some apparently have made it a centerpiece of their waking lives. Most play it, I assume, for entertainment, or maybe out of boredom, but others play video games as a part of their jobs, either as training exercises, or in their day to day work.

Job training through the use of video games can apparently have a lot of benefit. Games can teach concentration, strategic thinking, quick decision making, and so on. It can also teach skills that are specific to certain occupations. Take, for example, piloting an airplane, or sending a rocket into space. Job skills can be refined using these tools and, equally as important, they can allow one to meet a real life situation with the reaction: “I can do this. I have been here before.” That can be invaluable in the technological world in which we live.

In an era of drone warfare, or rocket warfare, or even some fighter plane warfare, video game training (also known, of course, as simulation training) can be invaluable. In the wars we now experience, such as the Russo-Ukraine war, military personnel sit in comfortable (or not so comfortable) locations and, looking at screens far from the actual battlefields, call in drone strikes or air strikes and see, in real time, the effects of their efforts. Many of these people, highly trained as they do their jobs, are using the same skills they used growing up, playing their video games.

There is a mirror-like effect in play here. The ability to successfully accomplish their goals has been greatly increased by their video gaming in the past. And their real life work, to them, is comfortable because, after all, it is simply an extension of playing these games.

This brings me to the Caribbean and our shooting boats out of the water with drones, one of the best examples of video games coming to life. Clearly, video game-like training was essential to creating the ability of our military to be able to attack these small boats moving through a vast body of water. I think all of this is obvious.

But now, let’s look not at the military personnel directing the individual strikes. Let’s look at the members of Congress or the administration, or members of the American public, looking at videos of the strikes, or even simply imagining what videos of the strikes would look like. They look like video games. And because they look like video games, the strikes seem normal, not extraordinary events. In video games, people get blown out of the water all the time on screens; that’s the purpose of the games. In the real attacks on boats on the Caribbean, it’s the same. Nothing unusual.

Not surprisingly, there is partisan difference in the way these attacks are discussed. Right wingers generally love them; people in the center and the left generally abhor them. To me, that brings up two things (at least). First, it raises the question: do people who are to the right politically play more video games than those who are more to the left? I haven’t seen (or looked for) much on this topic – but I did recently see a study that said that 48% of conservatives (I don’t know the age or gender of the people surveyed) and 38% of liberals played video games. This may be indicative of what I believe might be true.

And the second question is: who is more pro-life, liberals or conservatives? If you take away the question of abortion (which involves the definition of life, which is a separate question), and look at who is more pro-life with regard to humans who have been born, I would bet that people whose politics tend to the left are much more pro-life than those on the right. Again, a guess, but it seems to me one with experiential bases. Think death penalty, social services, etc.

If I am (more or less) right on all the above, it is no surprise that conservatives don’t care that we are killing people whom we really know nothing about (or may actually really like it), and liberals find our actions unconscionable.

You could expand this conversation, I think, also to questions of purpose. What are we really trying to do in the Caribbean and close-by Pacific? What is our goal regarding the Maduro regime in Venezuela? Are we keeping drugs from America (remember, none of these boats are heading directly here)? Are we setting the stage for a ground operation to accomplish regime change in Caracas? Are we just showing power? Are we just having a little sport? Are we just playing a video game (which by chance happens to go beyond simulation)?

If our problem is fentanyl, our actions in the Caribbean are irrelevant. If we are going after cocaine smugglers, how do you explain the pardon of former Honduras president Hernandez? Nothing makes any real sense here with regard to purpose.

But, and apparently this is important, many of us are enjoying the game. Not because we think we are engaged in anything that will lead us to a stated goal. But just because the game itself is fun.

And that’s the thing about President Trump and his merry players, isn’t it? It is all fun and games. If you look at his administration any other way, you will just go crazy.

The Good. We stumbled upon a Netflix series that I think is one of the best we have watched over the past few years: The Survivors. I hadn’t seen much publicity about it, but it looked interesting in part because it was filmed in Tasmania, a place I have never been, undoubtedly will never go, and did not have a mental picture of. It turns out that the part of Tasmania where the story is set, on the upper eastern coast, is very attractive, even if the small towns located there seem to have the most plebeian forms of small town architecture and design. The coast is rugged, but with broad beaches, providing very attractive views.

The story is based on events taking place 15 years earlier, when a teenage boy has wandered into off-limit coastal caves that flood at high tide. An unexpected and very strong storm arises, and he is feared lost, but his older brother and a friend venture out in their boat to rescue him. He does, in fact, survive, but the rescuers’ boat capsizes, and the two rescuers are lost. On the same night, in the same storm, a 14 year old girl from the town also disappears; her back pack washes up on shore, but her body is never found.

Fifteen years later, a young female student from “the mainland” comes to spend the summer in Tasmania, just to chill, learns of the tragedy, and also learns that the death of the two young men is remembered, but the death of the young girl ignored, and decides to make it her mission to rectify that, to tell the story of the 14 year old, and to discover, if she can, what happened to her. That is where all the trouble begins.

The Survivors has eight episodes, each between 45 and 55 minutes long. I found the story line interesting, and the acting and cinematography superb. I think you would like it.

The Bad. Pete Hegseth. My assumption is that Hegseth will be out of a job soon. Of course, until that happens, you can’t be sure, because Trump will support him until that happens. But I bet Trump is now having an internal debate: Should I (a) cut him off at the knees, or should I (b) throw him under the bus? Once he decides, we will all find out Pete’s fate. Or perhaps we won’t find out his ultimate fate until 2029, when the Department of Justice comes again into being, and the Department of Injustice is no more.

The Somewhere in the Middle. I really am not sure what to think about the special election held in Tennessee on Tuesday for the vacant House of Representatives seat. The Republican won by 9 points in a District that Trump carried by 22. Both sides claim victory.

I hadn’t paid any attention to the details of this campaign. I know nothing about either of the candidates, except for their party affiliation, so I don’t know how much the results depended on the particular qualities of the candidates, and how much was a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term performance.

But two things are clear. One is that a 9 percent spread is still a healthy spread. The second is that a performance by the Democrats 13 points better than their performance a year ago is quite significant.

We will have to see what happens, but apparently if the Democrats do 13 points better nationwide in 2026 than in 2024, they will flip about 35 House seats.

See you tomorrow. I may know more. And it may be snowing.

President Trump had a meeting of his cabinet yesterday and, nice guy that he is, he let everyone sitting around the table (and there were a lot of them) speak for five or ten minutes. They could apparently say whatever they wanted (and they wanted to say a lot), as long as they began and ended by praising their boss to the skies, marking him as the best president imaginable, and giving him credit for all of their successes. And, listening to them, you would learn that their successes were extraordinary, and were particularly extraordinary because they took over a failing country run by a President Biden, who was as bad a leader as Trump is good.

Vice President Vance said, for example, that the country has recovered 1/3 of the losses suffered under Biden in only ten months. Treasury Secretary Bessent hesitated a bit in giving a rosy picture of the present, but was rapturous about the future. Basically, his message was that, if 2025 seemed to be a bit problematic, just wait until 2026. In 2026, everything won’t be coming up roses, everything will be roses.

I don’t have the ability to fact check all of those who spoke. But I must say that we are really lucky to have a cabinet of this caliber. After all, how many countries can boast of a cabinet that goes from success to success, with never a failure, never a misstep, never an erroneous move?

There were a few things that did surprise me. For example, I had no idea that the Trump administration was planning a major redo of Dulles International Airport, which the President described as a “terrible” airport, although designed by one of the greatest architects of all time. Trump said that they were about to unveil the plans, and that they were unbelievable. We (all of us) will love them; Dulles will be the most spectacular airport in the country.

The plans must be fairly well developed. If I heard him correctly, Transportation Secretary Duffy said that the government was ready to go out for bids. I assumed this meant for design bids, but then Trump made it look like the design was already set. In any event, having heard nothing about it earlier, I was certainly surprised.

Later, however, I learned that I was not the only one who was surprised. The 17 members of the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and the MWAA staff were equally surprised. The MWAA runs Dulles airport. Only 3 of the 17 board members are appointed by the President (with the advice and consent of the Senate); the others are appointed by the Governors of Maryland and Virginia and the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Apparently no one in the White House or the Department of Transportation bothered to tell anyone at the MWAA that these plans were afoot.

Under normal times, these conversations would have been going on extensively by now. But this time, I assume, they will not go on at all, until the board of the MWAA agrees to whatever plans the administration develops under penalty of receiving no more federal funding until it does. I also assume that there would be a lot of money to be made in the rebuilding of Dulles. Anyone want to bet against my assumption that Trump’s friends (and maybe Trump) will share in the profits?

And of course, this is not all. From what I read this afternoon, it looks like the redone Dulles will no longer be Dulles, but will be rechristened as The Donald J. Trump International Airport. Donald Trump did not mention this proposed name change in what I heard at his cabinet meeting. That was another surprise. But perhaps he assumed that would be obvious.

In the meantime, as the American war machine readies an assault on Venezuelan land (Trump said this was coming very soon), and attacks on ships continue, along with the buildup of American forces in the Caribbean, what does Secretary of State Rubio say? He says that he is so lucky to be working for the “peace president”. And he said this even as so much hubbub has been stirred up by the second attack on one of the 21 boats so far hit by American troops, this one apparently to make sure that two “survivors” of the first hit were killed.

As to that now infamous event, what did President Trump and Secretary Hegseth say? Trump said: I saw no evil, I heard no evil, and did no evil, and Pete told me that he didn’t either. Hegseth said: I watched the first strike on video, but I wasn’t there for the second strike; instead I took a walk. He went on to say that he never saw two people hanging onto the side of the boat, and is sure that Admiral Bradley, in charge of the whole thing, made the right decision to hit the boat again. Did Bradley know there were people hanging onto the side of the boat? It appears that Hegseth hasn’t asked him yet! All Hegseth knows is that Bradley operated within the scope of his command responsibilities and that he made the right choice.

One reason that Rubio was at the meeting, by the way, was that he wasn’t in Moscow with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. They were there to settle the Russian-Ukrainian War. Hard to see how they will do it, since Russia still maintains that it will only negotiate a peace if it gains four Ukrainian provinces, and Ukraine will only agree to a peace that restores all territory now under Russian control to Ukraine. From what we can see, although Trump’s position on this war changes more quickly than his opinion on tariffs on China, the last approach to Ukraine was based on a 28 part plan that some say not only favored Russia, but was written by Russians. In negotiations with the Ukrainians, those 28 points were apparently knocked down to 19, and it was those 19 brought back to Moscow.

Assuming that Russia will not agree, what will Trump’s representatives do? I read something yesterday that assumed that the Trump position will always favor Russia. Why is that? Not because they think Russia was either right or wrong when it invaded Ukraine (the probably don’t care), but because Russia offers a better business climate for Trump, his family, and his friends. Remember the high rise Trump wanted in Moscow? I bet you anything he still thinks about it. Keep your eye on this one.

And remember the tie-ins between the Trumps, the Kushners and others with the Saudis, the Qataris, and others in the Arab world. Don’t think that these extensive personal financial relations don’t influence our steps (and the steps of the Saudis and the Qataris) in developing plans for the future of Gaza.

And then there were Trump’s comments about the Somalis in Minnesota. He started by talking about MN governor Tim Walz, whom he called earlier this week “seriously retarded”, and then he went on to call Somalia-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar “garbage” and then call all other Somalis “garbage” and their country stinking and a “garbage country”. He concluded with, although he acknowledged that saying so was politically incorrect, that he didn’t want any Somalis in his country. In addition to being “garbage”, he said that Omar was an “incompetent person” and a “really terrible person”. And his cabinet sat there as he said all of this, joining together afterwords in what looked like it could have been a silent “amen”.

Omar put out a statement after the press conference. What does she think of Trump. She thinks he is a bit obsessed and she “hopes he gets the help he needs’.

I myself think he is beyond help and needs to be sedated and put out to pasture, where he can spend the rest of his days chewing his cud “to his little heart’s content”.

That last line is a quote from Donald, speaking of how Zelensky should fight on if he does not accept Trump’s peace proposal.

Finally, did you see this drawing from the New York Times this morning? And, no, it is not satire.

Let us assume the following:

1. We are not at war with Venezuela.
2. We have attacked over 20 Venezuelan and other South American boats and killed over 80 people who we say were bringing drugs into the United States.
3. We have attacked one of those boats twice because there appeared to be two survivors that we did not want to survive.
4. The policy to do this was established by President Trump or Secretary of Defense Hegseth.
5. The policy was implemented by Secretary of Defense Hegseth.

Assuming this is so, is there any way that these killings could not be described as murder?

Assuming we have 80 plus cases of murder, is there any reason why Trump and Hegseth should not be indicted for murder and related crimes?

Assuming we have 80 plus cases of murder, is there any way to look at the orders leading to these murders were illegal?

Assuming they were illegal, should the active military members (from the general in charge, to the lowest ranked individuals involved) be court martialed for obeying illegal orders?

At the same time, assuming all this is correct, is there any question but that Trump and Hegseth should be impeached, convicted and removed from office?

Whether Trump can be charged with a crime is questionable, due to the unfortunate Supreme Court ruling, but certainly Hegseth can be.

(And, by the way, today’s rumor is that we already have boots on the ground in Venezuela. Small, elite military groups behind the lines ready to go into operation when our full assault begins.)

What a mess!

That is it for today. What a mess! (Did I already say that?)

Remember when I was bemoaning Washington’s sports teams a few weeks ago, and said it was surprising that the Capitals were in last place in their NHL division? Well, rest assured. The times, they’ve been a-changing. The Caps are now only 2 points out of the division lead.

The Commanders, however, have continued to lose week after week. Well, I guess that isn’t correct. They did not lose last week because they didn’t play. But they lost yesterday to a first place team, the Denver Broncos, by 1 point, in overtime. The thing is…they did not have to lose. They lost because they made the decision to risk a loss by trying a 2 point extra point. And they failed. I think that was the wrong move. I thought that even before they failed.

The game wasn’t over until after midnight. Edie thought I was nuts to stay up for a game that I (being honest) really didn’t care about. Of course, she was right. But what about those 65,000 fans who, after midnight, first left their seats and headed for their cars. I think, if they lived in our house, they would get here about 1:30.

It’s cold here. 35 this morning. I guess that’s because it is December already, making 2025 the quickest year on record. I didn’t leave the house yesterday, except to pull out the trash.

I did make an ambitious move. I started to read William Taubman’s biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, all 700 pages of text. I am on page 50, and Misha has left his cold, impoverished small town home, having been accepted at Moscow State University, a move that will change his life, for sure.

I should also mention that I finished reading Dan Glickman’s memoir, which was both a fairly quick read, and surprisingly interesting. Who? Having grown up in the small Jewish community of Wichita with a father who owned a Cubs minor league affiliate, he went to the University of Michigan and then came to DC, where he attended the George Washington University Law School. He worked for two Republican Congressman before returning to Kansas as a Democrat.

Glickman served 9 terms in the House of Representatives, then as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, head of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and its Institute of Politics, and finally for 6  years he led the Motion Picture Association of America. A very interesting career.

On the screen, we finished watching Claire Danes’ The Beast in Me, an eight episode thriller teaching you never to trust your neighbors (a lesson to be learned not only by one neighbor, but by both). I recommend it for the complexity of the plot which is nevertheless comprehensible, as well as the acting. I also finished watching a Spanish film called A Widow’s Game, apparently a dramatization of a true story of a young woman who convinces a co-worker to kill her husband, and then proves not to be what he thinks she is. It’s pretty good, too, as a story of police work. Of course, the real star of the show is the City of Valencia. It has been my treadmill film.

Enough of this. Time to face the week.

It is so difficult for me to understand so much. Yesterday, on Facebook, I mentioned this bit of seeming confusion: The National Guard was  brought to DC to assist the police, to be visible and discourage crime, and allow the police to concentrate on more important duties, but now – after the shooting of the two Guard members – the police are being diverted to protect members of the Guard. Say, what?

And now, he is pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted serious drug trafficker, while blowing up boats and threatening war against Venezuela, because its president, he alleges, is a drug trafficker.

Nothing he does makes any real sense, yet people let him do it. Just as they have let dictators and mentally disturbed political leaders do it from time immemorial.

I am not going to list anew everything he has done that has been harmful to the country and the world. But I will mention one more thing. What is his goal in shaming and insulting female journalists? And shouldn’t at least one of them stand up to him?

I am thinking about the woman who asked him yesterday about the asylum approval for the DC shooter with the impossible to remember name. The asylum approval was given three months into the Trump second term. He blamed it on Biden, held up a barely relevant photo, and responded “what are you, stupid?” And then he repeated “stupid” several more times. I saw the clip of this a few times yesterday and each time, I wanted her simply to respond with, “I’m not the one who is stupid”. But she didn’t.

I wanted the reporter he called “Piggy” to say, ” Say that to me one more time, and every reporter in this room is going to stand up and walk out.”

Or what about when he posted on his private social media site that an NYT reporter was “a third rate reporter, ugly inside and out.” The Times responded with a “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” response. But that just is not enough.

Polite, written responses are inadequate. They normalize the abnormal. They are read by few, and the few who read them already think Trump a pitiful lowlife. People need to stand up to him publicly right in his face. “You call me Piggy? I call you a banana slug!” Make some news; it won’t hurt your career. And organize as many of those journalists as you can. He insults a woman, they all stand up and walk out. Or they all stand up, yell and scream until he walks out. Do something!

And print media, don’t just report what he said and bemoan it. Every time you write his name, preface it with “Banana Slug” or something. “Banana Slug Trump says he will attack Venzuela. Refusing to give any specifics, the big Slug instead decided to play a little golf…”   Or put his picture on your front page, with a piggy head, and have him say, “Oink, oink”. Make it your entire front page. For a week. Or a month.

Let’s shame the guy. Keep him on the defensive. Get him angry. Make him explode. Don’t let him off the hook for a minute. Make him look like the four year old he emotionally is. There is nothing he can do to you that he won’t do anyway, hasn’t done already.

End of rant.

Can I get an “amen”?

Thanksgiving weekends can be very long. For me, of course, they are often broken up by my birthday, which can add something to the otherwise idle stretch of time, but the holiday period can drag on, nevertheless.

When I was growing up, I remember we had a big Thanksgiving meal, followed by a day off of school where the main activity was eating leftovers, and then came the weekend, a weekend like others. Back in those days (1940s and 1950s), my memory of Thanksgiving was that it was a holiday that began when school let out after regular Wednesday classes. In those far off times, I don’t remember my friends doing much traveling. I guess that was in part due to the (or so I thought) relatively isolated location of St. Louis. I actually don’t remember any of my friends having grandparents outside of St. Louis; they were all there. And certainly no one had divorced parents with one of them having moved across the country to far away cities. So, everyone stayed put.

When I went to college a thousand miles away, I would come home for the Christmas break (that is what it was, no matter what you might have called it) and, I think, each year for Spring Vacation (maybe). It never occurred to me to come home for Thanksgiving. Today, I think, things are much different. People jump on airplanes and fly to Taipei and Bangladesh and Sydney for Thanksgiving. Not then.

(Of course, Thanksgiving no longer starts at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. Now, schools are closed on Wednesday, attendance is sparse on Tuesdays, and many families take off the entire week. Not then. At all.)

Each year (I think each year) of college, I had Thanksgiving dinner with many of my roommates at the house of one of theirs in Belmont MA. Always a good and warm time, with good food and conversation, and sometimes other guests). As I recall, nothing ever went to waste because one of my roommates would eat everything left on the table, much to the amusement/puzzlement of our hostess.

Things changed in law school. During my first year, I was invited to come from New Haven back up to Belmont. Not much of a schlep. I could get there in just a couple of hours, and my trusty 1964 VW was undoubtedly anxious to get on the road, but I declined (and declined a couple of other invites). I found law school to be a bit of a mysterious journey, and I didn’t feel like I had as of yet caught on, so I decided to stay in New Haven for the long weekend, and catch up on all of my class work.

Big mistake. New Haven (back then and to a great extent now) had a major university and (to me, at least) really nothing else. Very few people I knew lived there, and most were from other parts of the east coast, mainly the New York area, but also New England, Philadelphia, Washington and the like. Everyone was going home for Thanksgiving. (And no one was going to Taipei, Bangladesh or Sydney.) But I decided to stay.

After all, I figured, I wouldn’t be alone. There would surely be someone to have a nice Thanksgiving dinner with and spend some idle time with.

Wrong. I seemed to be it. Yale Law School had been abandoned. And, what is more, the entire city of New Haven seemed to have closed down, at least that part near the university. Needless to say, the following happened: (1) I got very depressed, and (2) I got absolutely no work done.

That year, 1964, Thanksgiving fell on my birthday; I was 22 years old. No one even wished me happy birthday.  Even with no one else around (all Yale food halls were closed), I thought I could pick up my spirits by going out for a nice breakfast, a nice lunch and a nice dinner. It would break up my day, I would see other people, and who knows what might happen. It never occurred to me that every restaurant within walking distance, including those places where you got a cup of coffee and a pastry, would be closed. But they were. My breakfast, and my lunch, came from the Yale Law School vending machine room. And, no, these weren’t vending machines where you could get a sandwich or maybe soup you could microwave (what, microwave? what’s that?). These were candy bars, peanuts, and crackers. And, of course, while feasting on these treats, no one else came into the vending area. Obviously not. No one else seemed to be there.

As I remember it, Thanksgiving Day was also gray and very, very cold. And, at dinner time, it was very dark outside. But I was determined. I walked and I walked and I walked. And then…….an open restaurant. A Chinese restaurant (name forgotten, probably not there 61 years later) and it was open for business. I, it turned out, was their business. No other customers all the time I was there.

When Friday came, things started to improve. Restaurants and shops were open, there were cars on the street, and one-by-one people began to return to campus.

Lesson learned.

If you do the daily New York Times crossword, stop reading right now until you have finished with today’s. The NYT Wordle and crossword usually fill part of my mornings. If I hadn’t written my blog post the night before, they often get done before I write in the morning. That is what happened today.

Not that there was anything special about today’s crossword. It was a typical Friday. I looked it over, decided it was beyond me, finally found one short entry I could make with some confidence, and then things began to fall into place. This one, IMHO, turned about to be challenging, but doable in a reasonable period of time.

After I finish a puzzle, I often go to see what Rex Parker (not his real name) thinks about it. (Rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com.) He called this one Easy-Medium.

Rex analyzes the puzzle, entry by entry, with a mix of erudition and humor. You will have to decide which this is:

This is St. Denis as he may have looked in the 3rd century after he was decapitated when he walked around Paris, head in hand, preaching to the masses. St. Denis is an answer in the puzzle.

Rex points out that his decapitation made St. Denis a cephelophone, a word I didn’t know. It also made him the patron saint of both Paris and France.

Moving on…

There was one other item in the puzzle that intrigued me. The answer is “cheese curls”, and the definition includes the words “junk food”. I know little about cheese curls, but my basic research this morning shows me that it is not a copyrighted name, but a name used by multiple food brands. Also, when you look up cheese curls, generically or individually, they are called a “snack food”, not a “junk food”.

That got me to ask Google AI to tell me what a junk food is. Google gave me a generic definition (you know, sugar, bad fats, salt, high in calories, and low in nutrients). It then goes on to give examples. It doesn’t specifically mention cheese curls, but cheese curls definitely fit the definition, but guess what it also included in what they mention? Burgers and fried chicken. Really?

Okay, did I take your mind of Donald Trump? Something has to. Unless you just want to go out in the street and yell and scream. I am thinking about his statement today that he will permanently pause any immigration from countries which are filled with people who, for their own safety, need to emigrate, whether or not they are qualified to enter this country. And that he is going to examine existing green cards and asylum determinations for everyone already in the U.S. who come from those countries. Yes, only White Europeans (or White residents of former British colonies), with perhaps an occasional Asian, will be allowed in and, of those, people with $1million or more to invest here will be favored.

There is a lot being written, of course, about Trump’s declining mental condition. Perhaps, it has declined enough that one could say that Trump has, in fact, lost his head.

This would make him our first cephelophone president. I asked ChatGPT to draw me a picture of a headless Trump carrying his head, and guess what? It refused.

What do you think of that?

I am waiting for the morning press conference to learn more about the shooting of the two National Guard members here in Washington yesterday. An obvious tragedy and, just as obvious, our insightful president is responding in the absolutely wrong way.

It seems that the attacker was an Afghan national who had worked for a considerable period of time with the United States during our military action in Afghanistan, was admitted to the United States during the Biden administration as part of a program to allow in Afghans who had worked with us and consequently would likely be targeted under Taliban rule and who, it has been said, had recently been granted permanent asylum under the Trump administration. What caused him to do what he did is, I believe, unknown at this time. But it seems that he clearly targeted his victims. And, moreover, he did not live in Washington, DC, but lived across the country in the State of Washington.

This means a couple of things. First, he is not part of any perceived (or real) DC crime problem. Second, it seems highly unlikely that he would have shot anyone had the National Guard not been patrolling our streets.

The National Guard currently assigned to Washington apparently number about 2,000. You see them now and then walking around, loitering at Metro Stations, talking to passers-by or on their cell phones, harming no one, but also not really adding anything to local security or the local scene. Some are armed, some are not, but they are limited in their authority. Most importantly, they are not seen as law enforcement officers, and they are not even permitted, as I understand it, to help local or federal police in apprehending criminals. Hence, as has been reported, they are sometimes assigned tasks (not necessarily unimportant, but…..) like picking up trash.

You would think that the reaction to a shooting such as the one which occurred yesterday would, in part, to analyze whether having the Guard patrol the streets is just putting the members of the National Guard in harm’s way, especially now that it is possible, if unlikely, that there will be copycat attacks. But, no, the reaction of the Trump administration is to call up more members of the National Guard and put another 500 on the DC streets, saying this is necessary as part of the plan to decrease DC crime. To me, it seems obvious that this has less possibility of decreasing crime on the streets than it does setting the stage for more crime. And, I point out again, that this shooting had nothing to do with “DC crime on the streets” at all; it was one person who lives 3000 miles away who decided to shoot two members of the National Guard and drove across the country to do it.

This, of course, was not the only perverse reaction of Mr. Trump. Again, from what I think I heard, this man was one of 75,000 Afghans allowed into the U.S. as part of the program directed to those who were allied with us during the fighting, and one of about 200,000 Afghans allowed into the country on various programs after the U.S. left the country. I haven’t seen anything even hinting that the Afghans allowed in have been participating in criminal activity at any abnormal level. But of course, this is irrelevant to our Immigration Enforcer in Chief, who has now said that there will be no more Afghans allowed in and that there will be some sort of investigation of those already here. ICE: one more disgusting task for you, it appears.

Well, he probably didn’t realize it, but the shooter did sort of spoil my birthday. It was a low key day, anyway. Our only scheduled activity was to pick up a turkey and deliver it to our daughter who is hosting today’s dinner. And that went off without a hitch. I still wonder how Moti’s Kosher Supermarket works. You tell them in advance that you want a turkey and give them a size, and tell them when you plan to get it. You go to the store at the appointed time, they don’t ask you your name, and they have a rafter of turkeys in the meat counter and, in effect, say “take what you want”.

I like a “rafter of turkeys”. AI tells me that is the correct term.

We did have two restaurant  meals  yesterday, something we normally do only when we are out of town. Both were excellent. Lunch was at the not-very-well-named restaurant, Hello, Vietnam!, on Veirs Mill Road in Rockville, and dinner at Le Chat Noir, just about a mile to our west. Le Chat Noir has become our go-to birthday restaurant, and we both had a delicious river trout dinner (along with soup, salad, dessert, and a glass of sparkling rose). Could not have been better.

I heard from many friends and relatives yesterday, and appreciated every one of them. They say that socialization is important as you age, and although I probably socialize more than most at 83, I would like to keep in contact with friends and relatives more often than once a year. It’s harder than you would think, though.

I also want to point out that a group of neuroscientists from the University of Cambridge yesterday published a study of brain aging. They said that brains do not change every day, but seem to have significant changes at particular times over a lifetime. The last change, what the study terms as “Late Aging”, occurs at age 83. Not that I understand the brief published description of what happens when you reach 83, but that it is a shift from “global to local” while “whole brain connectivity declines even further and it relies on certain regions as others fade”. Whatever that means, it probably is not good.

While writing, I have watched U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and FBI Director Kash Patel talk about yesterday’s attack. Their comments were totally misguided and disgusting. Pure and simple. Why? Because they both turned this tragedy into political speeches – it is all the result of the Biden administration’s disastrous departure from Afghanistan, and as a result of Biden letting all these Afghans in the country without vetting them at all. Of course, this is completely false and disgusting but, to some listeners (many listeners) undoubtedly convincing.

I looked at what I posted last year on my birthday, and I don’t think I can top it. So, here it is again, with one number changed in the title.

Yes, it’s my birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to. After all, 82 is a pretty big number. I’d much rather be 28 (I think). And, no, I am certainly not crying.

I thought about the birthday parties my parents gave me when I was young, today. Or rather, I thought about thinking about my early birthday parties, but the truth is I really don’t remember them. Did I have birthday parties? I mean real birthday parties, with friends and classmates, not just birthday cake and candles with my family. I am not sure. Michael Bobroff, do you remember?

Actually, I do remember one party. I don’t know how old I was, but I was in elementary school, and my memory is that the party was the party that I wanted to have. My guess is it was a Saturday afternoon, and I think we all went to see a matinee at the Tivoli or the Varsity, the two theaters then operating in the Delmar Loop area in University City, Missouri. And then we went down the street to the Velvet Freeze Ice Cream Store, and had ice cream. My memory is that I became very upset while I was at Velvet Freeze, and that my party was ruined. But I don’t know why I was upset. Maybe because my friends were more interested in the ice cream and in each other than with me. But that’s just a guess. And now that I am thinking about it, maybe there was no movie, just Velvet Freeze. I have no idea.

Since I couldn’t remember much about my other birthdays, and I only remember Velvet Freeze (if you aren’t from St. Louis, or maybe Kansas City, you have never heard of Velvet Freeze), I decided to look up Velvet Freeze. The article I saw at losttables.com, a website devoted to old St. Louis restaurants, was very informative. The article started with the invention of the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair (an accidental invention to be sure, when someone took a waffle from the waffle man and wrapped it around his ice cream, and everyone said: “Voila, you have invented the ice cream cone.”

Well, in fact, we don’t know the name of the guy who wrapped his waffle around his ice cream (it was probably not Voila), but we do know the name of one guy who decided that this might be a business opportunity, and quickly became a large manufacturer of cones in the city which then supplied most of the cones made in America, and shipped them around the country. His name was Grosberg. Oscar Grosberg.

Now, until today, I didn’t know anything about Oscar Grosberg and his cone factory. I found it interesting that Grosberg was spelled with one “s”, not two, which is not typical. And then I remember that my father’s sister, Mary (I called her Aunt Mary, by the way) had a very good, long time friend named Roz Grosberg, and I just looked her up on findagrave.com, and – lo and behold – she was a one “s” Grosberg. Could she have been the daughter of the cone king? Is this something you would like me to look into further?

Well, back to our story. It turned out that another Jewish immigrant to St. Louis, Jacob Martin, started what he called the Union Ice Cream Company (later the Original Double Dip Ice Cream Company), which operated at the same time that Oscar Grosberg was making cones. And, wouldn’t you know it, Jacob and Oscar decided to join forces and make both ice cream, and they named their new company: Velvet Freeze, Inc.

This was no small company. It had two ice cream factories, one in South St. Louis on Gravois (do you know how to pronounce Gravois?), and another in the north of the city. And, according to the article, by 1936, it had 50 stores in the greater St. Louis area, and then expanded into Kansas City and elsewhere.

The company continued to thrive through the 1970s, under different ownership, but eventually the stores began to close and, in 1986, the Velvet Freeze factory stopped making ice cream. A major St. Louis dairy, Pevely (“white in the bottle, pink on the cheeks”) began to manufacture ice cream under the Velvet Freeze name, but it really didn’t catch on.

Today, November 26, 2024, there is only one Velvet Freeze ice cream store left. It is a homey looking place on West Florissant Boulevard in the suburb of Jennings. You can’t go there today, because they aren’t open on Mondays or Tuesdays, but they should be there tomorrow, opening at 2 p.m. Next trip to St. Louis, I may try it out. They have over 50 flavors, and they make their own ice cream using the original Velvet Freeze recipes, on Saturday nights.

By the way, the “lost tables” website is a great one, if you are interested in old St. Louis restaurants. I did also read the write up of Rinaldi’s Pizzeria, located just a few blocks from the Velvet Freeze on Delmar, where I spent much of my high school years with dates and friends and the likes, eating the square cut, extraordinarily greasy, pizzas with home made (I think home made) sausage. And – and this is true – I tasted every bit of that pizza as I read the article this afternoon. It was that good.

Rinaldi’s is not there anymore either (in fact the block that it was on has been torn down I saw a few weeks ago, getting ready for something big, I assume), and moved from University City west to Creve Coeur in the early 1970s. It’s not there any more either. I don’t think any of Al Rinaldi’s kids wanted to take over a pizza business.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly was a Captain in the U.S. Navy, retiring about 15 years ago after 25 years of active service. Now, he may be called back into the Navy for the sole purpose of facing a court martial for giving “illegal orders”. This goes into the category “if it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny”.

The “illegal order” was given by Senator Kelly when he participated in that (in my mind, not very well thought out) video with five other Democratic legislators, purportedly telling current members of the U.S. military that they do not have to follow illegal orders.

The thing that is weird is that it is obvious that members of the military do not have to follow illegal orders. How this works in practice is another, and more difficult, question – how does someone decide if an order is illegal; if someone believes in good faith that an order is illegal and it turns out they are wrong, are they liable for failing to respond to a legal order; if someone follows an illegal order, believing it to be a legal order or arguably a legal order, and it is turns out that the order was indeed illegal, can they be liable for their activity (whether or not it could constitute a war crime). And so on, and so on.

But that is for another day. Today, the question is whether someone can be called back into active duty to be court martialled for giving an “illegal order” when what they said was neither an “order” nor a misstatement of a legal rule. And, if Kelly gets a notice that he is again active duty Captain Kelly, how does he argue against such a notice? Is that a civil or a military question?

Pete Hegseth was also in the military. He was on active duty three times, for a total of ten years or so. He became an Army Major, several ranks below a Navy Captain, but that isn’t really relevant. Could he be called back for crimes committed after he left the service? This goes into the “Who knows?” category. But it might be a relevant one.

Going back for a minute to substance…..Does Hegseth, our wanna be War Secretary who is in fact Secretary of Defense, think that this is a false statement: “Members of the military can disobey illegal orders”? Does that mean that he thinks that this is a true statement: “Members of the military must obey illegal orders”?

If it can be construed that the answer to that question is “yes” and, in his current position, he is in fact telling members of the military that they must obey illegal orders, isn’t he in fact giving an illegal order and, when the administration next changes, can’t he be called back into the military and court martialled for giving an illegal order? It seems that this situation and Senator Kelly’s situation are pretty parallel. Only one major difference. Kelly’s “order” was not illegal, but Hegseth’s “order” was clearly illegal.

But all of this nonsense (and I think it is truly nonsense) fades when compared to the real problem that today exists and tomorrow may become exacerbated: war against Venezuela.

Members of the military are now being ordered to take actions that are resulting in the deaths of civilians allegedly engaged in the drug trade, and there is the clear possibility that the concentration of military forces in the Caribbean is a prologue to an invasion of Venezuela for the purpose of deposing the Maduro regime (a regime that has destroyed the Venezuelan economy and Venezuelan society). The American Congress seems firmly opposed to this action, is not going to issue a declaration of war, and may take action, by resolution or otherwise, to try to stop the Trump regime from pursuing this path. There are and will be members of Congress who will loudly claim Trump’s actions, on various grounds, to be illegal.

In this instance, what are members of the military expected to do? And what are officers leading troops expected to do if they have troops under their command who refuse to obey orders on this basis? These are real questions.

As the Trump administration goes from failure to failure, dangers abound. Will questions like these discourage young Americans from joining the military? This is a serious question, as recruitment is always a challenge. Similar questions are being asked in other contexts. What if potential immigrants stop coming to the United States, or are not allowed in? Farm workers, construction workers, nurses, doctors, scientists? Jobs will remain unfilled, tasks undone, the country vastly weakened.

Eliminating Trump and MAGA from power is more necessary than ever, and I suggest we all work to do just that.

And here is the final question of the day. Having suggested that regime change is crucial in the United States, and that all Americans should work to advance that goal, have I given an “illegal order”? I was discharged from the United States Army Reserve in September of 1973, having fulfilled my six year obligation with distinction (okay, not with distinction). Can they call me back into active service to court martial me? I’m not scared. Sergeant Hessel, reporting for duty.

It is the start of Thanksgiving Week. What does it mean in the year 2025, a year of so much national turmoil? What did it ever mean?

The first Thanksgiving, surrounded in myth and undoubtedly distorted, was premised on a feast hosted by a group of illegal immigrants, arriving from foreign shores, speaking a different language, and bringing with them a culture totally at odds with the natives whose home they were invading. The year was 1621, there had been some accommodation made between the two groups, and there may, or may not, have been a feast with meat, fish, fowl, and all the trimmings. And while the invaders, a/k/a the Pilgrims, might have been giving thanks their God for their safety (and their turkey), you can be certain that the minds of the natives were directed elsewhere.

While Thanksgiving-type ceremonies continued on behalf of the growing number of European immigrants and refugees, it quickly ceased being celebrated by the natives, who were quickly at war with most of the newcomers, and who were outclassed both in weaponry and amorality by their White neighbors.

In 1789, first President George Washington issued a Thanksgiving proclamation which actually made great sense for the times. It was thanks for a new country, a new and unique government, with great hope for the future. Again, the thanks were given to God. And why not? And again it was Thanksgiving by Whites. After all, Blacks had recently been counted each as 3/5 of a White, and indigenous Americans, well on their way to removal or extinction, so it appeared, hardly were counted at all.

Apparently, the real start to an annual Thanksgiving holiday came in 1863 at the behest of President Abraham Lincoln. I don’t know what others think, but I find his Thanksgiving proclamation to be bizarre. After all, what was there to be thankful about?

Let’s see. Even though we are killing each other unmercifully in a Civil War, we are not fighting with any foreign nations. Thankfully, our industry is supplying us with enough war making materiel. And we have farms supplying us with enough food even as our armies are destroying farms wherever they are fighting.

I guess it’s always been this way. Those of us lucky to have food and shelter are thankful that God has chosen us to be the ones with food and shelter.  There, but for the grace of God, go we.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same? ICE is picking people off the streets, putting them in detention, sending them to remote parts of the world, breaking up families, and we celebrate Thanksgiving.  There but for the grace of God, go we. Thank you God for making it them who suffer, not us. You must be Great.

In fact though, the circumstances of 1621 and of 2025 are not the same. In 1621, Thanksgiving demonstrated the possibility, the potential, that natives and invaders could get along. In 2025, the natives (formerly the invaders) are circling the wagons and expelling the new iterations of themselves out the country as brutally as possible. And for this, we are to be thankful and to thank our God.

Let’s not be thankful for the flawed country we have today. Let’s define the country we want, work to see it come into being. Then, we can celebrate a true Thanksgiving.

Not a sermon, just a thought (as somebody says).

Yesterday, we went to see the new film Blue Moon, the sad story of lyricist Lorenz Hart of Rodgers and Hart fame. You will either like the film or not, but you will have to admit that it is not your normal biopic, and you will have to give it credit for what it tried to do (whether or not you think it succeeded).

First, some background. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart first met at Columbia University, collaborating on writing for some student shows. Later they became a song writing duo, with Rodgers writing the music and Hart the lyrics. “Blue Moon”, “My Funny Valentine”, “The Lady is a Tramp”, “This Can’t Be Love”, “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, and many, many more. They worked together for over 20 years, and their work included the music for many Broadway hit shows, like Pal Joey and The Boys from Syracuse.

Richard Rodgers seems to have been a quite normal guy with a lot of talent. Lorenz Hart also had a lot of talent, but normalcy was not one of his most obvious traits. Lorenz Hart was one sad fellow. He was barely 5 feet tall (if that), was probably attracted to men as much or more than he was to women, never had a true romantic relationship, and lived with his mother. All of his wishes and deepest desires he put into his lyrics. His lyrics seem to have been his life.

During their successful years, Hart made a lot of money and gained a lot of fame. I think people liked and respected him, and he was always a welcoming friend and hosted party after party. But hosting parties where other guests got the girls or the guys was not healthy, particularly if you were an alcoholic. Lorenz Hart was an alcoholic. And as Hart’s alcoholism got worse, his ability to work with Rodgers (or anyone else) became more and more troubled.

Finally, Rodgers had enough and collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein II, already a well known lyricist and librettist, who had written the book and lyrics for Show Boat with Jerome Kern. Their first production was Oklahoma!, which won universal praise, won a Pulitzer Prize, and ran for more than 2200 performances on Broadway. Lorenz Hart, who had nothing to do with Oklahoma!, attended the opening night performance, and the party given in the show’s honor that night. The film Blue Moon takes place the night Oklahoma! opened, at a party given at Sardi’s Restaurant in New York.

Whether there was a party that night at Sardi’s is not known, apparently, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the Sardi’s in the film is a mythical place, where (until the Rodgers crowd arrived, for some reason hours after the performance ended) the only human beings were Hart, the bartender, a cigarette girl, a pianist named Rifkin who went by the name of Rafferty, and journalist/writer E.B. White, sitting at a table all by himself. Hart, drinking “just one drink” several times, goes into a monologue that lasts almost an hour, talking about himself, his career, Rodgers, Hammerstein, a girl who is a student in a Yale arts program in New Haven with whom he is madly in love (she is 20, he is 47), beauty in all genders and more. The others in the room are “extras” in his life, there to listen to and to respond to Hart’s far ranging speech.

Eventually, Rodgers and Hammerstein arrive, as does his 20 year old “protege” from New Haven, and the monologue becomes often a dialogue, sometimes with Rodgers, sometimes with Elizabeth, his young friend. Rodgers is very patient, promising to continue their 20 year partnership, but saying (basically) that he wants to date others, like Hammerstein. He tells Hart that he wants to collaborate with him on a redo of an earlier show, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Hart talks about wanting to do a serious musical (not a frivolous one like Oklahoma!) about Marco Polo, with samples of music from everywhere Polo visited on his journey to the Far East.

The party ends, the film ends.

In real life, though, things did not end. The year all this happened was 1943. Later that year, Hart’s mother died. Still later that year, the revised Rodgers and Hart Yankee in King Arthur’s Court did open on Broadway. The night of the opening, there was of course another party. Hart got drunk, his sister took him to her home, he wandered away, drank some more, and was found collapsed in an alley. He was taken to a hospital, he developed pneumonia, and four days later, he was dead. He was 48. What could be sadder?

Rodgers and Hammerstein developed hit show after hit show. Hammerstein was easier to work with, probably even more talented (he was the librettist as well as a lyricist, which Hart was not), and much taller than Hart. Yes, as I said, Hart was maybe an even 5′. Hammerstein was 6’3″. This led to one of the better lines of the film. At the Oklahoma! party, Hart goes up to Hammerstein to congratulate him, saying as his opening greeting, “Oscar! You get taller every time I see you.”

(The other memorable line was when Hart was going on about choreographer Jerome Robbins, who started life as Jerome Rabinowitz. Hart said that Robbins had “circumcised his name”.)

I enjoyed and admired the film. I thought that Ethan Hawke, who lost about a foot in height through various director’s tricks, did a masterful job, as did pretty much everyone else, although Hawke was really the only one who mattered. But the film, as a basic monologue, does drag a bit. I think they could have done with a little less of the interplay between Hart and Elizabeth (but every film needs a pretty girl, I guess, and their relationship does bring more ambiguity into Hart’s sexual preferences).

Should you see it? Yes. And I think you should see it on the big screen. It is not a “big” film, and seeing it on your home screen may make it seem a bit too small.

(As to this post’s title……when you remember Blue Moon, you remember Rodgers’ music, not Hart’s words, am I right? I think that’s so.)

I always thought that the best talent to have was to be able to take a blank canvass, or its equivalent, some paints and brushes, and create a work of art. I recently read that a painting by Klimt sold at auction for more than $240,000,000, and this morning in the New York Times, I see that a self portrait by Frida Kahlo just sold for $55,000,000. If I could just sit down for a few minutes at an easel and create something equivalent, I wouldn’t have to work any more.

Yes, I know, I am not working any more, but you know what I mean. Then, I realized that neither Gustav Klimt or Frida Kahlo are around to enjoy the value of their talent, so I guess I have to think about other ways to make my fortune out of nothing. One way, I guess, is to become a friend of Ari Melber, although I am not sure how this friendship translates into dollars. What it does translate into is the ability to appear regularly on his MSNOW (or is it MS NOW?) show, exhibit no talent or serious intellect whatsoever, and answer his relatively inane questions with your own relatively inane answers. Another, of course is to become Donald Trump. If I were Donald Trump and I wrote a daily blog (obviously at this point we have no proof that Donald Trump can write at all, much less write daily), I could simply say: Give me $10 million, and I will put your name in my next blog post. And I would be inundated with suitors.

You know, this is what Art Buchwald did for his column. But he did it much more altruistically. He did it at charity auctions. I remember this as a rather regular “gift” to the charity, and people would pay hundreds (if not millions) of dollars so that the next Buchwald column would start with: “I glanced at the briefcase of the man sitting next to me. It identified him as A_____ H_____. I watched him get off the bus……”. Easy, no?

Speaking of MS NOW (or MSNOW), I don’t think this is a very good name that they chose, and they probably spent millions of dollars choosing it. After all, Pepsi Cola Company (whatever its original name was) spent millions to convert to Pepsico, and United States Rubber became Uniroyal, and so on, and so on. Do you have any idea how much American Associates, Ben Gurion University of the Negev spent to become Americans for Ben Gurion University of the Negev?

But the MS part of MS NOW sounds like a disease you would just as soon not get. NOW, although it connotes the present (and that may be good) is a very ugly word (not as beautiful as, say, tariffs), and if you put the letters together, without a space between letters two and three, it looks like you are talking about SNOW and if you are not going skiing, that just means annoyance.

To make matters worse, they are putting these little MS tag lines in the lower right hand corner of your screen and one of them, MS WORLD, just looks like they have combined their energies with Donald T’s to sponsor a beauty contest that it would be best to forget about.

I know that so far I have not provided you with much information this morning. Or with much of anything else. There are those days, you know.

It’s just that I can’t compete with the world as it is. The two great populists, Donald Trump, and Zohran Momdani hitting it off. Who would have guessed? Whatever could have been on Trump’s mind? And poor Elise Stefanik! Planning to run a campaign for governor of New York based on her love of Donald Trump and her determination to destroy Zohran Momdani, she now finds herself pledged to destroy her biggest supporter’s best friend. Yes, I feel sorry for these Venezuelans who are nuked out of the water by American drones, but I don’t feel sorry for Elise Stefanik. She deserves to know how much more complicated the world is than she figured it out to be.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene? She only has one life (so far) to give to her benefactor turned enemy. Time for her to go back to northern Georgia, where people are people, it seems. MAGA has turned against both Greene and Stefanik. And that reminds of me of something else I have been thinking about.

What the hell is MAGA anyway, other than complete devotion to Donald Trump? If Trump says “let’s put on tariffs; it won’t cost Americans anything”, MAGA is putting on tariffs. If Trump then says “let’s take off tariffs; they are costing Americans too much”, MAGA is taking off tariffs. It is that simple.

We who are not MAGA know that Trump’s tariff policy is, at best, contradictory, and perhaps even more, is really no policy at all. We have known that for some time. But guess what? It looks like people who self-define as MAGA are beginning to realize that, too.

My own thinking is that MAGA really doesn’t exist, and if Donald Trump disappears from the scene for whatever reason (which he will undoubtedly do), there will no longer be a MAGA for a number of reasons. First, because there is no overall MAGA platform or policy. You can’t tell me what MAGA believes, other than to agree with everything Trump says. This is why the Republican platform, for the past two elections, didn’t really exist. MAGA, and therefore the Republicans, have no platform, have no policies. Sure, there are the things put out by Heritage, Project Twenty Twenty Whatever It Is, but they are only the MAGA policy because Trump adopts them.

The other reason that MAGA will disappear is that there is no apparent successor to Trump. Certainly not negative charisma Vance and, if not Vance, who? There was a chance it could have been Charlie Kirk, I think, if he had grown further into the role and given some positions of responsibility and visibility, but that didn’t happen. And it couldn’t be Stefanik, who shares the negative charisma of our Vice President, and maybe it could have been Marjorie Taylor Greene, had she been a man. But it won’t be any of them and there is no one else.

Barring cataclysm, the Democrats will control the House of Representatives for Trump’s last two years, and in order to salvage anything of his legacy, Trump will have to play nice to the House Democrats. Maybe he realizes that and is testing the waters with Momdani. We will see.

But whatever the reason, Trump clearly surprised his supporters yesterday. Andy Borowitz might have said it best. The headline he posted yesterday was “Totally smitten Trump converts to Islam”.

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Remember Shabtai Zvi? I know you don’t, but you can look him up. Borowitz would have had fun with him, too.

I paraphrase:

“No man should be above the law”, says almost everyone since the days of ancient Greece.

“If the President does it, it isn’t illegal”, says Richard Nixon.

“If the President does it and it is illegal, he can’t be held responsible”, says Chief Justice John Roberts.

Every individual is responsible for war crimes and the like, even if they were “just following orders”, says the Nurenburg War Crimes tribunal.

(Lincoln Caplan has an article about John Roberts in the latest edition of Harvard Magazine where he says that, when Roberts decided as he did in the case involving Trump’s scope of liability, ruling that the threat of being held accountable could cripple a presidency, he never even considered that a president could act the way President Trump has been acting. He says that not to excuse Roberts, but to try to explain his thinking.)

Along with “no one should be above the law”, a lot of folks have said over the years, “Don’t poke the bear”. In most cases, this seems to be good advice. But if you are going to poke a bear, I would suggest one more thing you should keep in mind: “Don’t hit a wrong note, if you don’t know what note to hit next.” That is a variation on something that jazz pianist Erroll Garner once proclaimed, and which I keep in mind.

There is no question but that the words of Donald Trump (who for the purposes of this post should be considered the bear) proclaiming that six Democratic members of Congress should be arrested and held for sedition, punishable by death are dangerous, stupid and many other despicable things. But it is also true that the bear said what he did only because he was poked and that the Democratic Six (a different group than the Democratic Eight who voted to reopen the government last week) knew they were poking. And they weren’t poking by making quiet, side comments, but by creating a flashy TV spot, addressing members of the U.S. military and others subject to an official command structure that they are not to follow orders if the orders are not legal.

Their saying this does not break new ground. There is probably no one (or there should not be anyone) subject to this instruction who does not always know that this is the rule that they have sworn to follow.

It is very difficult to determine if an order is legal. Take, for example, either the strikes against Venezuelan fishing boats in the Caribbean, or certain orders which can be given to National Guard members patrolling American cities. These orders might be very controversial, some experts arguing one way, some arguing the other. You can’t have each individual deciding for himself, and you can’t have a soldier respond to any order with “Let’s see first what the Supreme Court says”.

The video gave no advice as to how one is to determine what is an illegal order. So what is a 19 year old recruit to do?

The video also has led to threats against the lives of the Six, something that puts them in danger, but to which they have no clear next move, other than to say “Don’t “.

Yes, the video restated the obvious, but it did so in a manner designed to poke the bear. It sure seems to me an unnecessary poke, one which inevitably will stir up more trouble for everyone. And that should have been obvious from the start.

My views may be in the minority, but I think them correct. In voting to reopen the government, the  Democratic Eight were right. In poking the bear without a clear sense of what next notes to play, the Democratic Six were wrong.