by Judy Handley | Mar 11, 2025 | 2024 Life Logs |
2025 Life Logs, Day 70: Book Club, Protest, Indivisible Meeting, and Claude Malhuret
Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Weather: Sunny and Warm; High Temp 53, Low 37 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
It was another crazy, busy day. I hosted my book group this morning, spent time getting ready for my Encore Board meeting tomorrow, attended another protest, my fourth in the past few weeks, and ended the day at an Upper Cape Indivisible meeting.
On the national scene, Trump and company were busy continuing to dismantle our federal government today. Yesterday I saw a post on Facebook with the full text of a speech made last week by French senator, Claude Malhuret. It very clearly lays out all that is wrong with what the Trump regime is doing. This morning, a friend sent me a video of the speech. Then when I opened by daily post from Robert Reich, that speech was there in its entirety once again. It is an important read. So, if you have not yet read it, here it is again.
Trump is a traitor, and Europe is now alone: A view from France
Robert Reich, March 11, 2025
From time to time, I bring you views from outside the United States on what we are enduring here. The following is an English translation of a speech made last week by by Claude Malhuret, a French senator who is largely unknown outside France. Malhuret’s words are chillingly relevant to what is now happening in the United States.
Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is slipping, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.
Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
The ‘king of the deal’ is showing what the art of the deal is on his stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, seeing such a submissiveness, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.
Never in history has a US President capitulated to the enemy. Never has any one of them supported an aggressor against an ally, trampled on the US Constitution, issued so many illegal executive orders, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military senior staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.
This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.
I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to bend or resign.
Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: confront it.
And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.
What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with as its first principle the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the core of the United Nations, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.
“Give me Greenland, Panama, and Canada. You can get Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe. He can get Taiwan and the China Sea.”
In the dinners of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, they call this “diplomatic realism.”
So, we are now standing alone. But the idea that Putin cannot be confronted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.
Interest rates at 25 percent, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, the demographic collapse, all show that [Russia] is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.
The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
This will be costly. It will be necessary to end the taboo of using frozen Russian assets [and] circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, which includes, of course, the United Kingdom.
Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally—and this is the most urgent because it is what will take the most time—we must build a European defense, too-long neglected to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a way to recognize that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.
It remains to build it.
It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate the entry into the [European] Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, relaunch the anti-missile defense and satellite programs.
The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.
Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.
But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion against war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the far right and the far left.
They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of “de Gaulle Zelensky” by a “Ukrainian Pétain” at Putin’s beck and call. The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.
Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great.
But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken during the past month have finally made the Americans react.
Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social networks.
But in American history, the defenders of freedom have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the US who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, find the means for their common defense, and make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost.
The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.
Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
by Judy Handley | Dec 31, 2024 | 2024 Life Logs |
2024 Life Logs, Day 366: Garden Clean Up on New Year’s Eve
Date: Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Weather: Mostly Sunny; Temp 49, Low 41 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
On New Year’s Day, sometime between 1986 and 1988, Mark and I went to pick Justin up from an overnight at his friend Warren Decker’s house. Warren’s mother, Patsy, was out in her garden planting garlic. This was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where winters are mild, but we had moved there from West Virginia, and gardening at that time of year seemed strange to me. But these days here on the Cape, planting garlic and doing a little garden clean up on New Years Eve no longer seems strange. We haven’t had a really cold New Year’s Eve since 2017. But the year before and after 2017, the temps were back to mild. I’m listing my Falmouth weather recordings since 2016 here in case you are curious.
2024 Mostly Sunny; Temp 49, Low 41 degrees F
2023 Weather: Partly Sunny; High 39, Low 31 F
2022 Overcast and Rainy: High 56, Low 46 degrees F
2021 Mostly Cloudy, Some Sunshine in PM; High Temp 45, Low Temp 43 degrees F
2020 Rainy Morning, Then Overcast; High 50, Low 29 Degrees
2019 Dreary and Misty; High 38, Low 28 degrees F
2018 RAIN, High 53, Low 38 degrees F
2017 Sunny and Cold; High 22, Low 7 degrees F
2016 Partly Sunny; High 50, Low 30 degrees F
I ran some errands and stopped at Heather and Jed’s around lunch time. Jed was at the boat trying to get it covered before winter truly sets in, but everyone else was at home and inside. When I mentioned that I had been working outside doing a little gardening, the “Oh, I haven’t planted my garlic yet” light bulb went off in Heather’s head, so she grabbed some garlic and went out to the planting boxes on the deck. I then realized that I hadn’t planted garlic either. November is the time most people plant it here, but this was a busy November with a lot of traveling and no time for garlic. So, I went home and planted my garlic as well. And as I did, I thought of Patsy Decker all those years ago planting garlic on New Year’s Day.
Other than the little bit of garden work I did today, I spent a lot of time thinking about the many things I want to accomplish in 2025. Before I go to bed tonight, I’ll pare down that list and write my to do list of big 2025 projects before I go to bed. But this is different from making a resolution. I don’t make resolutions any longer because I have one that I will need to work on every day of my life. On New Year’s Eve in 2016, I was in New Hampshire with my friends Detta and Tom Porat. Detta and I stayed up until midnight trying to solve the world’s problems. Then, just after midnight, I turned on my computer to write my log. I opened an email from Heather, Jed, and the boys sharing a wish for the new year: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” (Mahatma Gandhi) That is a lifelong resolution and I’m sticking with it.
by Judy Handley | Dec 30, 2024 | 2024 Life Logs |
2024 Life Logs, Day 365: Day Trip to New Hampshire
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024
Weather: Pouring Rain Early, Then Drizzle; Temp 53, Low 39 degrees F in Falmouth
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Today I drove to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area, to have a nice, long, relaxed lunch with friend Peppe Christianson. She will fly home to the West Coast on New Year’s Day and our get together on my way home from Maine last Friday was just not long enough. Today we had planned to have lunch and then go for a seaside walk, but somehow we managed to spent four hours talking and having lunch, leaving no time for a walk. We met at the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel on New Castle Island near Portsmouth. The Wentworth was a Gilded Age grand hotel that survived until 1982 before its doors were finally shut. Then in the mid 1990’s it was listed as one of America’s most endangered old hotels. The notoriety around that listing saved it, or at least the part of it that was left, and it was totally restored. It is a lovely place to meet, eat, and talk away the afternoon. Peppe treated me to lunch, which was delicious. Thank you, Peppe. I look forward to our next meeting.
Tonight, I talked to my son Justin. I knew Coco was sick on Christmas Day, but tonight I found out that everyone in the family now has whatever Coco has. She still has a bit of a fever but is feeling a bit better. Hopefully by New Year’s Day the whole gang will be better. And after I had a late dinner, I talked to another close friend, Lynne Kirwin, in New Zealand. We managed to talk away the rest of the evening. It is New Year’s Eve there, so we finally had to hang up so she could join a few friends to celebrate. Happy New Year to Lynne.
by Judy Handley | Dec 29, 2024 | 2024 Life Logs |
2024 Life Logs, Day 364: Dinner with HJSO minus Jonah
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024
Weather: Overcast with Mist; Temp 53, Low 50 degrees F in Falmouth
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
This morning I visited with my 91 year old friend Olga Mitchell. Olga, Shadow, and I are walking partners, but Olga fell on Christmas Eve and is out of walking commission until she sees a doctor. But we enjoyed a “sitting” morning, eating some of her Czech Christmas bread and drinking coffee. I sure hope she is back in “walking” mode soon.
After coming home and playing ball outside with Shadow, I did a little garden clean up. The weather was so warm that it felt like spring. Of course, that is not the case, but the reprieve from colder weather gave me a chance to do some things that did not get done this fall. Then tonight, Heather, Jed, Sam, and Ollie came over for dinner. Jonah is spending the night with his friend Kaiden, so he was missing in action. We had beef stew and salad with chocolate pudding pie for dessert. The boys bought Shadow a stuffed lobster for Christmas in Boothbay and they brought it over for him tonight. He loved it.
The Goldstones are not going to Vermont for New Year’s as planned. The weather is way too warm for skiing, so the group of Heather’s friends from high school days at St. Paul’s have decided not to gather this year. Tomorrow, I am headed back to New Hampshire to spend some more time with my friend Peppe tomorrow, but I will be back tomorrow evening to spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day here at home.
by Judy Handley | Dec 27, 2024 | 2024 Life Logs |
2024 Life Logs, Day 361: From Maine to New Hampshire to Home on Cape Cod
Date: Friday, December 27, 2024
Weather: Sunny; Temp 30, Low 33 degrees F in Falmouth
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Today I drove from Boothbay, Maine, to Exeter, New Hampshire, to visit with Peppe Christianson. Peppe, who lives on an island near Seattle, Washington, is visiting with her sister who is undergoing cancer treatment. Peppe just lost her husband Bob in November, so I really wanted to visit with her to give her hug, even though we knew the visit would be too short. We met for lunch and then I traveled on. I got home at 4:30 pm, just in time to play outside with Shadow in the light of the setting sun. As always, it feels great to be home, but I did have a wonderful holiday in Maine. I have spent my evening writing a Facebook post covering Thanksgiving to Christmas. I’m copying that here as my holiday summary.
Happy Holidays to all! My holiday began at Thanksgiving, so this is going to be a long post. I flew to Puerto Rico to spend Thanksgiving with my son Justin and his family and after Thanksgiving, we went to get a Christmas tree and decorate it so I could be a part of their Christmas festivities. When I returned from Puerto Rico, I decorated my tree and watched as Heather and family decorated theirs. Then there was the Falmouth Christmas Parade.
Fast forward to today. I just returned from a Christmas and Chanukah holiday that began last Sunday in Cambridge. Along with my daughter Heather, her family, and members of Jed’s family, we celebrated Solstice and welcomed the Yule at the Midwinter Revels at Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre. After the matinee performance, we did last minute Christmas shopping in Harvard Square and had a wonderful Indian dinner at The Maharaja. On Monday, it was off to Boothbay, Maine, for Christmas at the Goldstone/Welch family farm. The next day, Christmas Eve, we awoke to a world of white with snow still coming down as we listened to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols service from King’s College in Cambridge, England, a long-time family tradition. There was a late afternoon walk down to the water which was just spectacular and then the traditional Goldstone oyster stew for dinner. On Christmas morning, it was fitting that the youngest member of the family, Ollie, was the first upstairs on Christmas morning. And as we checked out our stockings, we listened to John Stegeman’s reading of The Night Before Christmas on WCAI in Woods Hole. John was Heather’s advisor when she first came to Woods Hole in the late 1990’s as part of the Woods Hole/MIT Joint Program and now Jed works in John’s lab at WHOI. Over the many years, John has become a close family friend and on children’s stories on the radio. What a special Christmas morning treat.
We opened presents for hours, enjoyed Heather’s traditional monkey bread, went caroling down at the farmhouse, and ended our Christmas Day with the lighting of the first menorah candle of Chanukah before dinner. Four of five times in the last century, Christmas Day and the first night of Chanukah have happened on the same day.
On Boxing Day evening, Heather, Toby’s (Jed’s brother) significant other, Stephanie, and I went to see the light display at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. There was an “enchanting” forest with bigger than life wooden trolls that live there year-round. And for the holiday display, there were mushrooms, wild animals, and shooting stars, fields of flowers, marine and freshwater animals, birds, and more … all made of thousands of Christmas lights. And now I am back at home in Falmouth. What a wonderful month-long holiday I have enjoyed. However you celebrate, I hope your holiday was as wonderful as mine.
