SUNDAY 27 SEPTEMER 2026

Well, it’s a mercifully cool morning. The measles death count is increasing. Pennsylvania is asking for assistance from the CDC and largely getting obstruction.

The cats are already outside. Aside from napping, their absolute favorite thing to do is to explore their yard. We’ve never really had a problem with one of them straying off the property before Sam. Everything is before Sam. We don’t even know where Sam goes. He’s like another cat when he’s outside, in another world. He’s a wild cat out there. Yesterday he ate, or at least caught a blue tail skenk, which scared his mother to death.

Blue tails can make them very sick. Eddie ate one once. When the vet, the wonderful Dr. Brooks walked in the door he stopped dead in his tracks: “He feels horrible doesn’t he?” Very few people notice what cats feel like if they don’t live with them. Cats are specialists at hiding pain – they are afraid somebody will try to get one up on them if they perceive any weakness.

So, I suppose the wonderful, ingenious skink, dropped the blue tail and escaped because Sam is not sick this morning. Yesterday, I had to pick him up and drag him into the house.

NEWS NOTES

QUOTE: Russian saying: “There is no rock bottom, there is knocking from below the bottom.” Things can and will get worse (Kuznetsova and Storyev)

ARTICLE: Pisani, Joseph (9/25/26) “Trump angers lawmakers with $810 million in cuts.” The Wall Street Journal.

LIFE AND NEWS NOTES

· Trump is clawing back $810 already approved by Congress, again trying to challenge Congress’ authority over government spending.

· The cuts are known as “pocket rescissions” were for programs that “provide health and education services and support for immigrants, refugees and minority-owned businesses.”

· This move tests the Impoundment Control Act under which the White House can pause spending for 45 days while it asks Congress to pass a measure rescinding the money. If Congress doesn’t act, the money must be released.

· (Collins is trying to behave as if she gives a shit by calling it an “unlawful cancellation of appropriations…approved on a bipartisan basis…”)

ARTICLE: Kuznetsova, Maria and Dan Storyev (9/25/26) “6 Russian words…” Foreign Policy.

· Book: “How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America.”

· The authors grew up in Russia and watched as Putin centralized power. “Russians…have generations of experience with the sense of unreality that characterizes life under an oppressive state.”

· (Note: Andrei Tarkovsky 1979 film Stalker)

ARTICLE: Grossman, Nicolas (9/24/26) “Saudi Arabia bribed the wrong people.” Foreign Policy.

· “Saudi Arabia is in serious trouble. Its global influence primarily comes from its leading position as an oil producer and the money resulting from that role…. Today, Saudi tankers are blocked in the Persian Gulf and under threat in the Red Sea, and the country’s biggest oil pipeline has shut down after a drone attacked. Yet Saudi Arabia’s biggest long term problem may be that it’s long time security guarantor the United States is unable to put out the fire and doesn’t seem especially interested in trying.”

BOOKS:

DEN OF SPIES BY CRAIG UNGER.

The Iran Hostage crisis did not come at a good time for the CIA. In 1974. The New York Times exposed that the CIA had been conducting massive illegal domestic intelligence operations against the anti-war movement and other activists during the Vietnam War. Soon after that investigations by the Church Committee exposed the full range of the CIA’s dirty little secrets for all to see. “Among them were 1/4 century of overseas assassination attempts, illegal wiretaps, human experimentation, spying for Richard Nixon and Watergate, and more. They had staged coup d’etats in Syria in 1949, in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954, in the Congo in 1960, in the Dominican Republic in 1963, in South Vietnam in 1963, in Brazil in 1964 and in Chile in 1973. There were CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam and more” (17)