Archives for January 2025

Friday, January 31, 2025

Where I grew up, we had a pond. In the wintertime we’d go skating on it. When it snowed we had big curved black metal scoops to clear the snow. Somehow, this time we didn’t get to clearing it. The snow had melted and refroze. There was a smooth gray patch between two humps of snow. My brother Rob and I were out skating. Dad was up in the living room. He could see us out the big picture window. Our next door neighbors The Rosenbergs had asked if they could come skate. Dad had said yes, of course.

This was an unusual request. For all the years we had known The Rosenbergs they had never asked to come skate. Jack and Debbie were casting agents in New York. This was their weekend getaway house.

As I remember they came over with another fellow, probably in his early thirties. I’m guessing this was the late 50s or early 60s. I remember Deb sitting on the edge of the pond putting on her figure skates. The other fellow whom we didn’t know had put on his skates and in the little space between the two plateaus of remelted frozen snow did a move and all of a sudden he was spinning. I mean twirling. He came out of the spin and commented, “that’s no good.” We had no idea why. It was fabulous. We were only a few feet away.

I remember Rob and I going over to look at the impression in the ice. It was a corkscrew like carving. Maybe more like “the golden ratio” or a snail’s shell seen in crossection.

Soon Dad was down wih a black scoop, trying to clear more ice. He had seen this fellow twirling about and wanted to give him more room.

Who was the man?

I’m sure many of you have guessed. It was Dick Button. Two time gold medalist (1948 & ’52). So when he was on our pond it was seven or maybe ten years after his last Olympics. 

We were always Button fans after that. 

Day 30 – Destroy America

Thursday, January 30, 2024

There are three things going on that could radically change the United States that we live in:

1. The movement of right wing billionaires and right wing podcasters to destroy the government of the United States. This includes, as we have seen this week, an offer for every government employee to retire, and the stopping of funding of everything the government does. The end game is to then appoint as they like to say a CEO or dictator to run things.

2. The harassing of anyone who does not agree with them. We have seen this in the removal of security details for people Trump does not like.

3. The putting in positions of responsibility people who have no experience in the position they would hold and who have radical ideas on what should be done.

Ancillary issues are:

A. The release and empowering of thugs and criminals of right wing sympathizers. Most notably the Jan 6th rioters. One of which was shot and killed in the midwest during a routine traffic stop.  Others have vowed revenge and some have been caught trying to buy weapons.

B. AI – Elon Musk and Sam Altman are feuding over AI. Meanwhile, China has come in and cleaned everyone’s clock with a much cheaper version. Whatever AI is or will become it is prophesied that it will change most of what we do, in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Do not be fooled. Trump and his allies want to destroy this country, and replace it with a dictatorship.

I was heartened to see that the White House, after sending up the trial balloon of cutting all funding had to rescind that order because people were outraged. I mean who knew that they wanted Medicaid and housing for homeless veterans. Robert Kennedy Jr. wants to reduce the premiums on Medicaid. Nice. There are no premiums you idiot.

Speaking of RK Jr. I didn’t know he kept birds of prey and ground up live chicks in a blender to feed them. Nor did I know he dealt cocaine out of his dorm room at Harvard. I didn’t know that until his cousin Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the President in a “video letter” to Congress She calls him a predator. 

Here’s the AP report:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/28/politics/caroline-kennedy-cousin-rfk-jr-letter-senators/index.html

(Caroline must have hit the mark Lara Trump calls it “disgusting.”)

In the BBC report: “He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience,” Caroline Kennedy said. “His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed.”

While he goes around saying vaccines are bad he made sure all his kids were vaccinated. The Senator from Hawaii Brian Schatz pointed out that Kennedy flew to Samoa to discourage people from getting the measles vaccine. The result? 5,000 people got measles and 83 died.

Sanjay Gupta has pointed out that to get herd immunity (a favorite term the vax deniers use) you need 95% of the population vaccinated. A few years ago people in this country fed lies by the right wing and people like Kennedy the percentage of people who trusted vaccines was at 90%. Now? It’s at 82%. We are ripe for a pandemic. And is one coming? Oh yeah. Bird flu. It’s not just for birds anymore. It’s migrated into other animals and it’s coming. Imagine having a vaccine denying critic with no experience medically managerially, running Health and Human Services.

One thing the early retirement threat has done is piss off people. They are now more determined than ever to stay and fight. Oh the memo said they’d be given a nice retirement package. By law the most they can get is 25 grand. Man, that’s like a lifetime membership at Costco. How say you Paul Ryan? Would you after working for decades to protect people by say making water safe to drink or meat safe to eat would you throw it all away for $25,000.00?

Here’s Brian Schatz whole press release:

01.22.2025

Schatz: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Whose Dangerous Lies Fueled Measles Outbreak in Samoa & Caused Preventable Deaths, Unqualified To Lead HHS

Schatz: You Wouldn’t Put Him In Charge Of A Local Clinic, Let Alone Our Country’s Entire Health System

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) took to the Senate floor today to detail how President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spread dangerous lies about vaccines which directly led to disease outbreaks and caused preventable deaths. Schatz recounted the story of how Kennedy traveled to Samoa in 2019 to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine which ultimately led to an outbreak in which thousands of people were infected and 83, mostly children, died.

“In 2019, he flew to Samoa to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine, deepening hesitancy that was already building. And it worked,” said Senator Schatz. “Vaccination rates for eligible 1-year-olds fell to lower than 33%. And just 5 months later, Samoa found itself in the middle of a measles outbreak. Over 5,000 people got the measles. 83 people died.”

Senator Schatz added, “Yes, this is a question of character and competence. But it is also a question of life or death. And who we want in charge, making decisions, when lives are on the line. And it’s our job, here in the Senate, to make damn sure that person isn’t RFK Jr.”

The full text of Senator Schatz’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, is below. Video is available here.

You’d think the person nominated to lead our nation’s top health department – an agency with a budget of over 2 trillion dollars and responsible for running everything from Medicare to vaccine trials. You’d think that person would at least be interested, if not experienced, in curing diseases and promoting public health. That they’d follow science and work to build the public’s trust in it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is none of those things.

For the first time ever, we might have a health secretary who’s actively fueled disease outbreaks. He’s literally made a career out of lying about the safety of basic vaccines. And it is not an exaggeration to say: lives will be lost if this man gets confirmed. He has cost lives pretending to be a public health expert before. And he will do it again if he becomes the next health secretary.

This is not some random dude with his buddies kicking around wacky ideas for the hell of it. He’s a Kennedy, with an enormous fortune, parachuting into countries to tell flat out lies and stop people from taking life-saving vaccines.

In 2019, he flew to Samoa to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine, deepening hesitancy that was already building. And it worked. Vaccination rates for eligible 1-year-olds fell to lower than 33%. And just 5 months later, Samoa found itself in the middle of a measles outbreak. Over 5,000 people got the measles. 83 people died.

Aside from spreading baseless lies about vaccines, RFK Jr. has regularly spouted all kinds of deranged conspiracy theories, including that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He’s also claimed – without any evidence – that antidepressants are to blame for mass shootings and that chemicals in our water are turning kids gay.

His plans to remake the Department of Health and Human Services are equally terrifying. He wants to revoke approvals for the polio and Hepatitis B vaccines for children and roll back guidance on other vital vaccines. There’s a reason we haven’t had to think about these awful, painful diseases in a long, long time. It’s because we’ve successfully vaccinated our way out of outbreaks.

He’s also vowed to fire hundreds of federal health researchers and scientists and stop all research into infectious diseases and vaccine development. Because “we’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” We’re going to give diseases a break.

This man, in his views and his actions, is as dangerous as they come. You wouldn’t put him in charge of a local clinic – let alone our country’s entire health system.

And look, I get it. Some people hear his critiques of our food system and agree with him. Our food system is broken. And people are getting sick because of it. We’ve subsidized the wrong things for so long that you can find an unhealthy meal faster and for cheaper than a healthy one. Ultra-processed foods are everywhere. Healthy, hearty meals are harder to come by. And that has to change. But we don’t fix that problem by inviting a measles or mumps outbreak. We don’t have to voluntarily conjure up the horrors of polio in the name of cleansing our diet. That’s a false choice I refuse to make.

There are many people – including my friend, Senator Cory Booker – who are working to solve this problem with the seriousness and the thoughtfulness it demands. To reign in factory farms, empower family farmers, and make healthy food more readily available and affordable. We can and must do all of that. But RFK Jr. is not the man to do it.

The medical profession, at it’s best, is about helping people. I think about doctors like my dad, Dr. Irv Schatz, aboard a hospital ship – the SS Hope – providing free medical care to people in Latin America. So many like him put their lives and careers on hold to travel far and wide and care for the less fortunate. Helping kids with cleft palates…distributing mosquito nets…delivering babies…treating and preventing diseases. It’s hard and unglamorous and unselfish work.

And so it takes a special kind of person to do the exact opposite. To do what RFK Jr. did, which is to fly halfway around the world, and cause pain. Cause disease. Cause death. So yes, this is a question of character and competence. But it is also a question of life or death. And who we want in charge, making decisions, when lives are on the line. And it’s our job, here in the Senate, to make damn sure that person isn’t RFK Jr.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Do you know Greg Palast? 

He does investigative journalism. Every once in a while I get an email from him. The title of this screed is the headline from his latest missive. And here is his data:

Here are key numbers:

• 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
  
  
• By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
  
  
• No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
  
  
• At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
  
  
• 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
  
  
• 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

Here’s an example of voter suppression from Greg:

Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.

In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.

But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the COVID epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.

Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” in Texas. Texas!

Almost all the Republican held state legislatures have passed some form of voter suppression and a few Dem states as well.

Palast points out that there are other ways Republicans have titled elections in their favor. Take for instance  Brian Kemp’s bill in Georgia to get rid of 75% of the drop boxes in black communities. It seems to me that they also hired the same people who reject your health insurance claims to reject your voter application and or you mail in ballot.

So, did Harris lose? Or did Trump? Well, it depends on whether you let all the voters vote and whether you count all the ballots.

Moving on. Pete Hegsworth. We were watching last night’s Daily Show and there was Pete on a clip from Fox. He was in a dunk tank. His white shirt was soaking wet and I could see he had a large tattoo on his right chest. It’s an Iron Cross. Made famous in WWI on German soldiers and throughout WWII as an identifier on tanks and airplanes. Yikes! What is this guy into? This symbol was adopted by the Nazis and later bikers and also white supremacists. I looked up his tattoos and found out that his particular brand of Iron Cross is associated with The First Crusade and Christian Nationalists. Don’t I feel better? And he’s got a bunch of other tattoos with various religious meaning both Jewish and Christian. Also, he’s got some Founding Father stuff and some Roman stuff and an AK-47 a part of an American flag.

Here’s more on his tattoos:

https://www.aol.com/tattooed-secretary-defense-pete-hegseth-225007843.html

So to put it bluntly, this guy is hiding the fact that he’s part of a racist Christian nationalist cult. Combine that with the fact that he knows nothing about running a large organization and nothing about the Defense Department and – well – that’s what we’ve got.

Monday, January 27, 2025

My dad used to tell me this story. When he was a kid the Indiana state legislature passed a law declaring the value of pi to be 3.0. Apparently, they were tired of all the squabbling and decided to clear up the mess.

I am reminded of that story in our time and what we are facing. Yes, you can have different opinions and views but as Ms. Conway said – they have alternate facts. That’s might work if you are asking what happened. As in “Did John hit Sam first, or the other way around? “But the ratio of a circumference to its diameter is the same regardless of its size and how you measure it or what units you use. You may not be able to express it exactly using a number system but it is universally the same. 

My dad also talked about Gallileo. When Gallileo got in trouble with the Roman Catholic Church for saying that the Earth went around the Sun. It was said that at his trial he recanted, but as he walked out of the court room whispered, “It still moves.” 

I’ve read accounts that say that is not true. Maybe it is maybe it isn’t, but he was right and the Church was not. Four hundred years later the Church admitted so. These things take time – you got to understand. It was also said that Gallileo asked a cardinal to look through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter (another sinful statement). The cardinal refused. I mean, what would have happened if he looked and saw the moons? Would he tell the truth of what he saw and go against his employer? Not a good carear move. Better to not look.

That sort of thing is similar to the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome.  I remember when I was working at Western Electric we were creating some of the most sophisticated injection molds in the world to make wire splice connectors. One of the engineers told me about a Bell Labs engineer claiming some sort of plastic couldn’t be made. Well, someone made it. They had a big conference. The triumphant conclusion of which was the holding up of that plastic in front of the face of the Bell Labs engineer and proudly asking, “What do you see?” The answer was, “I don’t see anything.”

Yes, truth sometimes has a hard time getting out. Eventually, it usually does. It took the British Navy seventy years to adopt the practice of sailors eating citrus to prevent scurvy. Even though they knew it to be true. Why? I don’t know. Put it under Ain’t to proud to beg. Yes I am!

So here we are with a guy who is going to be heading up the Defense Department who knows nothing about defense or running a large organization. Who has been a blowhard on Fox News. Who has ideas that have already been pointed out are in direct contradiction to the department. At his hearing he admitted he didn’t know much, if anything, about the details of running the Defense Department. He said he would have people working for him that knew. But here’s the thing. This administration is claiming they will wipe out all the experts. Will they suceed? Anyone who has been hired by the U.S. government in the last one or two years can be fired without cause. So they might start there. So many are imagining a government whose President speaks in random words – not sentences, appointing underlings who know nothing, who fire the people below them who know how to actually run their agencies. How will the agencies function? Well, we got a taste of that last time. How will those agencies function? They won’t.

We have a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. We have a threatening bird flu pandemic, and we have a person nominated to head up Health and Human Services that doesn’t believe in vaccines. Fortunately, during the last pandemic we developed MRNA methods for creating vaccines. Now the question will be can that be developed and deployed without someone getting in the way? Probably not.

Meanwhile, eggs are at an all time high and the headlines say those prices may stay high forever. Gas is up. Do you think Mr Art of The Deal can beat Joe Biden’s gas trading? I don’t think so. And to compllete the tri-fecta of economic pain for the average person the Republican Congress has a tax bill that will punish those folks. I mean there isn’t even a fig leaf on it. At least when Paul Ryan screwed us over he pointed out that a few crumsb fell off the table. Now? Well, many of the tax exemptions for average folks expire this year. And there are plans to tax other normal things regular people depend on. Ah well, too bad.

The underling President, Elon Musk, is busy telling far right Nazi groups in Germany that it’s okay to give the Nazi salute and that others need to get over it.

The President is still saying he’ll impose tariffs on other countries as punshment. Punishment to whom? It’s his hammer and boy does he want to use it. So what if it hits him in the forehead? He’s threatened Russia with sanctions. Great. Do you know how much business the Russians do with us? LIke nothing. Sounds good, if you buy the argument the tariffs hurt the country being tariffed. It doesn’t btw.

What is going to implode first? It’s hard to say.

Ayn Rand wrote in – was it The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? – ( I can’t remember they kind of run together in my mind ) … Well she wrote about the train signalling system in New York completely breaking down and the workers asked, “What should we do?” The answer was to use the old way – walking with lanterns to signal. 

I just read that the war in Sudan has left a large part of the country in desperate straights. Aid workers and supplies can’t come in because the aid workers get attacked, shot, and killed. The food and supplies are stolen. So the locals have banded together in small groups to help each other. Forming food kitchens, medical facillities, etc. 

Are we on about to take to the lanterns? To form our own ways of helping our neighbors? Without the government. I once read that is doesn’t matter how a system is supposed to work; it matters how it works in its failure mode. The Dems tried and succeeded. The Republicans don’t even try, and they don’t suceed, but boy do they have a great PR machine.

What I have read about the Democrats failure to win the Presidency blames several things: an insulated group of high priced consultants and a failure to connect to local groups. I have read what Bernie, AOC, and the young man who survived the shooting in Florida (which one? I know) that is now involved in politics are advocating more honest straight forward ways of dealing with problems and these will take bigger steps. They are called out as liberals, and that is tagged as a bad thing. The Republicans on the other hand yell, “Tax and Spend” about the Dems, but  now at the rallies it is completely disconnected from any basis in fact or reality. This has become their base’s new reality – it’s a fantasy.

It seems both parties are entrenched in their own ways of holding onto power. AOC asked for money the other day (well, every day it seems). One of the comments was, “What are you going to use it for?” and another asked, “Don’t we pay you to do that already?”

What she and David Hogg (that’s the kid’s name!) are advocating is to work outside the normal groups, to form new groups, to set new priorities to strengthen and transform the Democratic Party. Will that work? Can it succeed? I don’t know, but I don’t see anything else.

MSNBC has had a huge falling off of viewership after the election. People are exhausted and hearing the same stuff repeated show after show – turned folks off. They’ve had enough.

I heard a guy being interviewed on NPR. He was talking about transformative change. Not just advocating for a cause but figuring out how to actually ask your elected officials to do something for your cause. His contention was that we don’t ask enough of the people who agree to help. I’m not sure I agree with that. However, I think that if you are going to try and change things you must be very specific and focused on how you are going to do it, and how you are going to direct your fellow volunteers. I am not going to sign a petition and  then give $25 to “send a message” to whomever, because they ain’t listening. 

I would like to hear more about how someone spent the last $5, $10, or $25 and what it accomplished.

No more bitchin’ – action! (NMB-A!)

Yeah. time for a nap.

How Trump will bring down the price of eggs:

(Hint: Didn’t he say he’d turn it around?)

Saturday, January 25, 2025

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has a photo exhibit that is closed this past weekend. I had been meaning to go and finally I did, on Friday. I tore myself away from whatever and got down there.

Wow. It’s actually two exhibits. One on Hungarian photographers. All of whom changed their names when they emigrated to the U.S. and the other exhibit entitled The Old South which has photos from before the Civil war through the Civil Rights marches in the 1960s and up to today. The newest photos are oftentimes color printed on canvas with what seems to be the equivalent of oil paint. It’s hard to know if it’s a photo or an oil painting.

There’s a lot to see and it’s exhausting, but wow. Many of the photos I easily recognized: Marilyn Monroe sitting on a beach, the dog attacking the Civil Rights marcher, the man at the moment he was shot in the Spanish Civil War … Iconic stuff, and the mundane, the odd, the supernatural.

There was a large photo print painting of a little girl standing on a dock. The dock was almost completely submerged. Only where the girl was standing was it above the dirty brown tan colored water. The rest was a forest of trees or a swamp. It was an overflowing stream. The water was this consistent dirty tan. It reminded me of much of the south.

There were many quotes about the South and how just below its surface lies something mean, sick, or evil. The hypocrisy, known, accepted and ignored. I know. At this point someone will want to defend it. It’s way of life, etc. The “Others do it too.” defense. Yeah, I get it. But the South has a special way of doing it. Let’s call it “We know it’s Bull, but it’s tradition.” 

I went back a second time on Saturday. This time with Shelby. One display had two frames of people. One frame had a young girl and an older woman. The other a young boy and an older man. The man looked familiar, but other than that I didn’t recognize them. I had passed the description by on the first visit. This time I didn’t. 

They were photos about the bombing of the church in Alabama that killed three children. The photos showed a young person at the age they were when they died, and what they would look like now, if they had lived.

Powerful stuff.

I had just turned thirteen when that bombing took place. It was the time of Selma. Our assistant minister Bob Hall went down there to be part of it. When he came back so did this new kid to the community, Prince Chamblis. I thought Rev Hall had brought him back. (Years later when I mentioned this to Prince he said no. He knew of Bob Hall, but he had nothing to do with it.) Prince was black. That, for Ridgefield Connecticut, where I grew up was very unusual. At that time, I knew of three black people: Joan and Janet Baker, and Booker. Booker was the sexton of our church. That a fancy way of saying he took care of the place. Joan and Janet were in my grade school classes. In the six years they were in school with me I never heard them say a word.

Pair this with the fact that Ridgefield had the strongest chapter of The John Birch Society and you’ll draw the conclusion (rightly) that black people weren’t entirely welcome. 

The first time I met Prince was at Great Pond, the local swimming  hole. At the time there were floats held up by 55 gallon drums. They stood three feet off the water and had a diving board on them. There were sturdy ladders to climb up onto the floats. This has now been replaced by low floating no ladder no diving board things – terrible.

The swimming test was to be able to swim out to the float. If you could do that, you were a swimmer, and no longer confined to the shallow water. Now you could go out to the float and then brave the diving board.

My brother and I had swum out to the float. Once you made it you could preen on the edge facing the shore and show off your muscles to the adoring fans. Okay, our mother and maybe Mrs. Thomas as the two of them would be gabbing.

Prince was already out at the float. I noticed three things about him. He was dark, darker than me. His butt stuck out, and he had the huge soft boiled egg eyes. You could see a blood vessel in the white of the eye. It was a darkish purple brown spidery line that ran almost vertically up one eyeball. (If you remember the actor Charles Laughton, that’s what Prince’s eyes reminded me of.)

We were quite the physical specimens, all three of us. Spindly armed, skinny standing in our little elastic suits. Prince stood between Rob and myself. I think we had said hello. Then we all turned to look at the shore. I was trying to think of something to say – anything. I remember reading the headline in The Danbury News Times (published four times a week) about a church bombing in Alabama and three or four girls being killed. 

It’s all I could think of in the solitude of the moment. “Hey,” I said, “Did you know those girls who died in that church bombing.”

I can still remember Prince turning his head slowly to look at me. (That’s probably when I saw the blood vessel.) Quietly, slowly, softly he said, “Yes.” He turned his head back to look at the shore.

What was there left to say?

I noticed our similarly spindly arms, his butt. I looked back to the shore.

This is when the civil rights movement came home for me.