12 August—On this day in 1827, William Blake died at 69, Ian Fleming died at 56 in 1964, Henry Fonda died at 77 in 1982, and Merv Griffin died at 82 in 2007. And Nancy Wyman, Dan Malloy’s lieutenant governor, died just today at 80.
And IBM introduced its 5150 Personal Computer in 1981. It ran an 8-bit Intel 8088 processor at 4.77 MHz (compared to average 64-bit 4.7 GHz+ processors today), offered 16 to 64 KB of RAM (expandable to 256 KB . . .
Jesus Christ, my electric bra just went off. Sounded like an elevator reaching a floor. Or an old-fashioned department store. Evidently one of the allegedly life-saving electrodes lost contact with my thick skin. Life stopped while I fiddled with the bra. Couldn’t find anything wrong, but the gongs gave up and the screen stopped flashing anyway. Talk about a foot in the grave!
. . . compared to a realistic minimum of 8 GB of RAM today, easily expandable [on decent motherboards, anyway] to 128 GB), and came with a cassette tape recorder port for data storage, with a 160 KB 5.25 floppy-disk drive as an option (compared to low-end 256 GB USB flash drives today. Remember floppies?).
The first PC operating system was PC DOS 1.0, licensed from Microsoft (which had bought it from Seattle Computer Products for $75,000) and the standard 5151 12.5-inch cathode-ray tube monitor had a green monochrome display, although a 5153 color monitor was available. Mice didn’t come out of the woodwork until Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 DOS-based graphical user interface came along in the 1990s.
Given 5150, 5151, and 5153, if you’re wondering, IBM’s 5152 was a dot-matrix printer, actually a rebranded Epson MX-80, and 5154 was 13-inch upgraded color monitor. 5155 was IBM’s 30-pound Personal Portable Computer, a so-called “luggable” suitcase job, precursor of the laptop. The components of the 5150 totaled about 45 pounds.
The base IBM 5150 PC cost $1,565 and went up to about $6,000 with all the enhancements, decent bucks in the day, the base working out to about $5,750 today and the whole schmear $22,000. Imagine what kind of computing—or anything—that would buy today . . .
11 August—The first civilian prisoners arrived at Alcatraz, which had been converted from a military slammer, 92 years ago today. It closed only 29 years later, in 1963, at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (father of Donald Trump’s creepy HHS unstable asshole charlatan boss) because it cost too much to operate compared to mainland slammers.
Alcatraz is currently a popular tourist attraction. Of course Trump wants to reopen it as a prison for immigrants, honest politicians, political dissidents, journalists, critics, and other people he doesn’t like, but Congress hasn’t given him the scratch he wants for it. Yet.
That naturally raises the delightful prospect of Trump being sent up for all or even a small fraction of his countless crimes. We’ll dream on. I hope I live to at least see him out of office.
Meanwhile, Death kindly stopped for me last Monday. Well, he invited me to join him, anyway. Because, as anybody not asleep on the gurney should have known, I was suffering from pulmonary edema, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs. Classic symptoms, schmuck! The weight anomaly along with the breathing problem should have given it away months ago. But I was invincible.
So what caused my pulmonary edema? That’s the part that matters, after all. The etiology is cardiogenic, literally originating from the heart. Good, old-fashioned heart failure. Rather surprising, since I never thought I had a heart.
In heart failure, the heart, which physiologically is just a muscle, can’t pump blood as it should, causing plasma and water to back up in the lungs. So what caused my heart to fail? Same old, same old. Simply put, credit or blame blockage and aneurysm of a coronary artery as well as a stiff and narrowed heart valve.
Could my dissolute, profligate lifestyle, along with an unhealthy diet and excessive alcohol, nicotine, and tar consumption have caused my heart and blood vessels to fail? Could be. Except it can’t be for reasons too numerous—and obvious—to go into. So who knows? When the roll is called up yonder. And Death is taking a pee break.
So that takes us—finally—to my new electric bra. That’s really a Zoll Wearable Cardioverter Defibrillator Model 4000 LifeVest that’s supposed to keep me alive should my aching heart ever skip or add a beat or three. For a few months, anyway, until the experts decide what to do with me using miracle drugs, miracle surgery, miracle prosthesis, and miracle electronics.
And, of course, Medicare Advantage . . .
10 August—Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Epstein’s body was discovered in his cell in NYC’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. It’s doubtful it was a DIY job.
So yesterday’s disquisition elicited a number of comments, questions, and suggestions. Comments ranged from “Great column today” to “why dont you get a life and leave President Trump alone.” A few questions wondered what had happened to me and several asked what the hell is an electric bra? And two readers suggested replacing the national days panel with something like the Heil Mein Führer! one.
It was gratifying that no one regretted my not having died. No one who wrote in, anyway. Suffice to say for now that it’s not all that easy to find ready, willing, and able butts like Todd Blanche to have fun with every day. But it’s something to consider.
It happened that age and its concomitants surprised me—although they shouldn’t have. Back in the day I’d think nothing of carrying 100-pound bags of horse feed and was—and am—critical of busybodies like OSHA for banning them. A fortnight ago, a 50-pound bag of dog food was a challenge.
Of late, I’d had to climb stairs slowly, I’d often found it hard—even impossible at times—to take deep breaths, and I’d gained weight in spite of 1,500 daily calories at the most. Last weekend, however, after mowing the meadow with the Hustler, I split some wood with a sledge and wedge with no problem. (I’ve never used an hydraulic splitter.)
Monday morning, a week ago, I felt so weak, I asked my son to take me to the walk-in clinic in the former CBT building in downtown Torrington. I had to be wheeled in. Breathing got harder. Ambulance called to take me to the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital. Breathing even harder. I began to panic. Wheeled into Charlotte ER. More panicky panic.
Next thing I remember, I woke up with a tube down my throat, my arms tied down, and no way to communicate, since my voice was disabled by the ventilator tube. Talk about panic and despair. I don’t know how long I panicked and despaired before a team came in to ease the tube out of my throat, unbind my arms, and welcome me to the intensive care unit of St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport.
It was Tuesday morning. I had been in an induced coma for a day. My son later told me that the emergency room physician at the Charlotte had told him I was an hour away from death (give or take, of course) when I was knocked out and put on life support.
Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me. Yeah, right, Emily . . .
9 August—As I Lay Dying. That’s a novel by William Faulkner, so I shouldn’t use it as a hook. How about With Nothing Better to Do than Contemplate Mortality or maybe Killing Time as Time Kills Me? More about that some other time. Writes the optimist.
So on to Tuesday’s Connecticut party primaries, the Democrats will certainly be choosing incumbent governor Ned Lamont, who may not be great for the state but is much, much better, more reasonable, more stable than state rep Josh Elliot who besides having sponsored or co-sponsored most of the stupid legislation the Democrats have inflicted or tried to inflict on the state since he’s been polluting the state House of Representatives is an arrogant, narcissistic flaming asshole.
Former Hartford mayor Luke Bronin is perhaps a shade more stable than Elliot, but he’s just as unreasonable and also an arrogant, narcissistic flaming asshole. So one would hope that First District Democrats who bother to turn out on Tuesday have the sense to choose incumbent congressman John Larson for a 50th term or whatever.
Speaking of flaming assholes, we come to the Fifth Congressional District Republican primary, in which two posterior cheeks are fighting very nastily for the opportunity to lose to Democrat incumbent Jahana Hayes in November. One GOP MAGA cheek spent 19 years up the river for what—for convenience—we’ll call killing and for which he was pardoned even though he’d pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Jonathan De Barros has quite a chip on his shoulder—and it’s not entirely unjustified. He’s also the better candidate.
But the other GOP MAGA cheek—the one endorsed by the Fifth District GOP convention—doesn’t let GOP voters forget about “De Barros’ past, crazy comments, and erratic behavior.” One of Chris Shea’s problems, though, is that he makes a point of gluing himself to Donald Trump, since that’s certain to get him the support of the idiot faction—evidently the majority—of Connecticut Republicans even though it’s sure to lose him the support of intelligent people in November.
Just for the record, Donald Trump is guilty of murder, not manslaughter.
In the 62 years I’ve been eligible to vote (you had to be 21 when I registered in 1963), I have never missed any kind of vote—general election, party primary, referendum. But I’m going to skip the GOP farce on Tuesday. Because, among other things, De Barros has been endorsed by the whore of whores Dick Morris and Shea is boastfully dependent on Donald Trump. We simply do not want people like that in Congress. And you wonder why De Barros sought Morris’s endorsement.
I’ve never received nor found any mailings from De Barros, but here’s the latest one from Shea. Send Trump a fighter indeed! And anyone who stands with Trump doesn’t stand with me. And now to change the battery of my new electric bra . . .
5 August—The Litchfield Monitor broke out just over five years ago—on 20 July 2021, to be exact (when Donald Trump was a never-to-be-again)—and hadn’t missed a day until Monday, when—you don’t want to know, but it was no fun. We hope to resume disquisiting and sending daily links when we’re able to get back to the editorial office and the computer with all the necessary crap on it. In the meantime, we apologize for the lacuna.
So why not read some of the old stuff by clicking on Genesis in the header. It’s pretty good and not all of it is untimely . . .
2 August—It’s hard to believe that Jeanine Pirro, Donald Trump’s hitherto devoted U.S. Attorney-lackey for the District of Columbia, didn’t ask her lord and master’s permission before dropping felony destruction of property charges against a fall guy who clearly was innocent from the get-go and in the bargain attributing the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to lousy work done by a contractor personally known to and hired by Trump, bypassing the competitive-bidding process.
(As the shit surfaced in the pool, though, true to form, Trump denied he had hired the contractor and typically claimed the Interior Department had chosen a contractor he didn’t even know. What a guy!)
Yesterday, Trump didn’t “know what [Pirro] was thinking.” The point, of course, is that she embarrassed the grifter-in-chief. So will he fire her when considers the time is right?
In all events, everybody knows that Donald Trump is infallible, always right, without exception. So if he says “it was a pure case of vandalism,” it obviously was. Even if it wasn’t.
With that out of the way, let’s hark back to yesterday’s disquisition on der Führer. It’s well known that starting on 2 August 1934 and persisting through Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, all German government employees, including the military, as well as members of Nazi organizations, and other groups like Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth, precursor of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA), rather than taking an oath to support and defend the fatherland and obey the constitution and laws, took a personal oath of loyalty and unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler. It was known as the Führereid, or Führer Oath:
“Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid, daß ich dem Führer des Deutschen Reiches und Volkes Adolf Hitler.”
“I swear by God this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler.”
Strong stuff. Especially when you consider that virtually all members of the military and civil service took the Führer Oath very seriously, to the extent that they reckoned it justified complicity in war crimes, among other abominations.
Moving forward and homeward, then, it’s not at all well known that starting on 20 January 2017 and persisting during Donald Trump’s first reign of terror and error, through the blissful interregnum, into the second reign of terror and error, all upper-level federal government appointees have been required to take a personal oath of loyalty and unconditional obedience to Donald Trump.
Surprised? Maybe not.
The so-called Trumpotus Oath is administered in secret by Trump himself or his Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller in one of the multitude of bathrooms of the White House’s private apartment, with the oath taker kissing Trump’s ass after selling his or her (but never their) soul. Since the Trumpotus Oath must be sworn before Trump announces an appointment or nomination, the oath taker is bound by it even if he or she (but never they) fail to get whatever upper-level job it may be.
This is the simple and direct Trumpotus Oath, which hasn’t changed in ten years and supersedes any other oaths, (ir)regardless of when sworn:
“I swear by Donald J. Trump this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to Donald J. Trump. Period.”
Judging by the refusal of all Trump appointees and nominees to admit that he lost the 2020 election (and their obviously scripted pussyfooting around it) as well as their unstinting subversion and weaponization of the Constitution and laws on behalf of their lord and master, it’s evident they take the Trumpotus Oath as seriously as Nazis took the Führer Oath . . .
1 August—92 years ago today, Der Führer was created. Here’s how it happened:
In March 1933, shortly after President Paul von Hinderburg had reluctantly appointed him chancellor, Adolf Hitler forced the Reichstag—the German parliament at the time—to effectively dump the legitimate Weimar Constitution in order to enable him to succeed the deeply beloved 85-year-old military hero and political leader, whom he likely was prepared to murder if age and cancer didn’t get him (although there’s no proof of that).
Hitler was able to subvert the Reichstag and the parliamentary process by extrajudicially (of course) having his Nazi goons arrest 107 Communist Party and Social Democrat members so they couldn’t attend and stationing other Nazi goons outside the voting venue (not the Reichstag, because that had been heavily damaged by probably-Nazi arson) to intimidate members who could and did attend. Hitler thus got his notorious Enabling Act with a 441 to 94 vote. One may wonder about the fate of the 94 parliamentarians who voted the wrong way.
The Enabling Act of 1933 overrode and violated the Weimar Constitution by, among other things, canceling basic civil rights and banning rival political factions as well as bypassing both the president and the parliament—and checks and balances—in the legislative process by empowering the cabinet under the iron hand of Chancellor Hitler to issue laws. At the time, Hitler hadn’t handpicked the cabinet, but he wasn’t worried. (Don’t even think about executive orders.)
So on 1 August 1934, with 86-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg on his death bed, totally dissing the Weimar Constitution, Chancellor Adolf Hitler had the compliant German cabinet enact a succession law that combined the powers of president and chancellor into one absolute dictator. Das heißt, der Führer wurde geboren.
After Hindenburg died on 2 August (of lung cancer and old age—probably), rather than assuming the title of President (out of respect for Hindenburg, he claimed), Hitler became the Führer und Reichskanzler (Leader and Chancellor) and absolute dictator of Germany, combining the powers of president and chancellor into one unquestionably omnipotent office—and making himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the bargain.
Two weeks later, Hitler held a plebiscite, a fake referendum (i.e., non-secret voting, Nazi goon surveillance, rigged counts, all the usual stuff), to get the official approval of the public. No surprise that he got 90 percent approval out of some 46 million votes cast.
No surprise, either, that populist demagogue Hitler was quite popular with much of the benighted public—just as he was feared by the enlightened much. It’s hard to gauge his popularity based on a plebiscite, but he certainly was more popular than Donald Trump is now.
Not that there’s any comparison, to be sure . . .
31 July—So Donald Trump is boasting that thanks to his magnificent Board of Peace the wonderful folks in Hamas have agreed to disarm as the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire. Wow! As of this writing, though, Israel hasn’t agreed to bupkes. Because the Israelis aren’t so dumb as to trust Hamas with anything, let alone peace. (And many if not most Israelis don’t trust Trump either.) Doubtless, Trump is bullying his pal of convenience Bibi Netanyahu to agree to the ceasefire, mostly to make Trump look good. So we’ll see what happens. But let’s not count on anything.
Donald Trump often calls himself the President of Peace and his faithful flunkies compound the con by referring to their lord and master as the Peacemaker in Chief. We won’t linger on what principled people and institutions call him.
The Peacemaker in Chief’s signal accomplishment is of course his self-vaunted scam called the Board of Peace, which surprisingly isn’t called the Donald J. Trump Board of Peace. It’s commonly known as the BOP, an initialism in which the letters are pronounced individually, rather than an acronym in which BOP is a word—which in this case would not be inappropriate.
In all events, true to form, Trump has made himself the chairman and absolute dictator of BOP, including but not limited to control over membership—which costs member states a billion dollars for a three-year term—and strategy of the BOP travesty. Trump first proposed his BOP last September as a plan to end the Gaza war and (of course) win the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s since expanded his BOP’s remit beyond Gaza, thus serving only to further undermine the already undermined United Nations.
Here are the nations that Trump invited to join his BOP which have accepted and pledged but not necessarily paid their billion-dollar dues. Note the dictatorships:
Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States (really!?), Uzbekistan, Vietnam.
Evidently Trump invited Belarus, an ally of Russia, to sign up. And it did. But Trump’s weaponized State Department refused visas for the Belarus delegation. Go figure.
Here are states that, along with the European Union, have sent observers to Trump’s BOP but have yet to accept or have declined membership:
Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom (even though former Labour PM Tony Blair is on Trump’s BOP executive board).
Here are states that have been invited to sign up and pay for Trump’s BOP but have neither responded nor attended as observers:
Australia, Brazil, Red China (because Nationalist China doesn’t officially exist), Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore.
Here are the states that have declined Trump’s self-serving invitation to join his BOP: France, Ireland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Vatican City (not surprising), Ukraine (rather surprising, all things considered).
And here’s the extra-special state that Trump invited to subscribe to his ludicrous BOP but subsequently uninvited in one of his hissy fits:
Canada (what’s there to say?) . . .
30 July—On this day in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson enthusiastically signed Public Law 89-97, An Act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes, commonly known as the Health Insurance for the Aged Act.
If you haven’t guessed, that’s what created Medicare and Medicaid.
The landmark legislation had been passed with comfortable majorities by both the House of Representatives and Senate, although Republicans weren’t anywhere near as enthusiastic as Democrats. In the House, Democrats voted 237 in favor, 48 against; Republicans voted 70 in favor, 68 against. In the Senate, Democrats voted 57 in favor, 7 against; Republicans voted 13 in favor, 17 against.
The opponents—mostly Republicans, predictably—rationalized that Medicare and Medicaid interfered with the traditional doctor-patient relationship and—more important to them, of course—amounted to socialized medicine and federal overreach, as well as the unfair expansion of taxation. Republicans generally favored private insurance subsidies and means-tested welfare programs for only the most needy.
Medicare Advantage, originally called Medicare+Choice, was created in 1997 to contain costs through subsidizing competition (of course), improve efficiency (of course), and offer more choices to beneficiaries (of course)—but, most of all, to provide a highly profitable revenue stream to the private sector.
While federal Medicare Advantage subsidies to private-sector insurers vary depending on actuarial calculation and manipulation, they average about $15,000 per year per beneficiary. And the insurers are said to realize profits from $1,600 to $2,000 from those subsidies, considerably higher than they claim to realize from non-Medicare markets.
Means-tested Medicaid also subsidizes private-sector insurers through managed-care contracts, but it’s a different animal from Medicare, and it’s even stingier in paying providers for their services. Not that providers and insurers don’t milk the system to the best of their respective abilities to be sure. The bottom line is profit, after all . . .
29 July—Why do people keep diaries? Easy: Ego. Self-importance. Narcissism. Because posterity will be grateful. Obviously. And that’s precisely why Tony Fauci kept his detailed private diary. Unfortunately, though, it evidently gives the lie to Dr. Fauci’s public persona and many of his pronouncements.
You wonder how the deranged charlatan Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s typically unqualified, incompetent, and malignant Health and Human Services Secretary, got his filthy hands on Fauci’s private diary. It’s digital rather than analog, of course. But you’d think a clever guy like Tony Fauci would have super-encrypted it and known better than to put it on a government server.
So now Sen. Dr. Rand Paul, who has had differences with Fauci—with more than a little justification—from the get-go, having been given the juicy journal by crazy Kennedy, has published it and intends to rake Fauci over the coals about—shall we say?—the discrepancies between public and private.
These are the pregnant links:
https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026.07.27_Diary-Prequel-.pdf
https://www.paul.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Reading-Room-FINAL.pdf
Today, Dr. Fauci copped the fifth, presumably to avoid incriminating himself in his trial by senate. But you’ll recall that among the preemptive pardons Joe Biden issued as one of his last acts as POTUS—with more than a little justification—was one for Dr. Anthony Fauci, covering any federal offenses related to his service from 1 January 2014 onward, including his time leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and acting as Chief Medical Advisor.
So was copping the fifth necessary? But the Fauci diary goes back to 2001, well before the COVID panic. And testifying in Congress opens a whole nother can of worms in all events.
* * * * * * *
We can’t let 29 July pass without mentioning that 105 years ago today (that’s 1921) Adolf Hitler bullied or wormed his way to leadership of the rabidly anti-communist, far-right- extremist Nazi Party by threatening to resign unless he was given complete and absolute dictatorial power over the party.
What do you think would happen if Donald Trump threatened to resign as de facto leader of the rabidly anti-communist, far-right-extremist Republican Party over which he has complete and absolute dictatorial power? Rather have him resign as POTUS . . .
28 July—The Litchfield Monitor isn’t in the news-gathering or scooping business, but since the local news media have for over two months ignored this undeniably important news, here’s the scoop:
Michael Peloquin and his backers (to whom he sold the land he wants to develop) lost their suit against the Litchfield Planning and Zoning Commission in a decision entered back on 7 May. The suit was an appeal against P&Z’s denial of a zone change application which would have allowed considerably more intensive development of the land parcel at issue than is currently permitted.
To save you the trouble of reading the whole closely reasoned ruling in Docket No. LND-CV-24-61806420-S, here’s the conclusion of Judge Trial Referee Barbara M. Quinn’s memorandum of decision:
“In sum, the plaintiffs have failed to prove that the Commission’s denial of their zone change application was illegal, arbitrary or an abuse of the discretion. The Commission’s decision to deny the application for a zone change was an appropriate exercise of the broad discretion and power vested in it. The decision was based on reasonable and credible evidence in the record and the public interests for carefully planned development within the community. The denial is not confiscatory in nature as the plaintiffs have development rights to their property in accordance with the present zones in which their land is variously located. Therefore, the court dismisses this appeal.”
Great! you’re thinking. But expect an appeal. And there’s always the prospect of Peloquin’s threatened skyscraper affordable housing complex for hundreds of families from Waterbury . . .