Belief in the Superior Man

 

Re reading "The Guarded Gate," by Daniel Okrent is a reawakening and an illumination.

Okrent traces the wellspring of American thinking about defining a superior man, who, in the 19th and 20 centuries was thought to be the vehicle for national redemption and advancement.

There were a group of men, who are today relative unknowns, who developed and fostered the idea of a natural aristocracy, and then there is the group of willing buyers of the concept among the famous, who were invariably rich and "well bred."

Of course, the idea of a naturally gifted man who possessed superior powers endowed by God, who was meant to rule over other men, much as man is meant to have dominion over animals, dates back to the sword and the stone and the Arthurian legends. But that was embellished and developed by the Englishman, who heads the list of "unknowns," Francis Galton.

Galton

Galton focused on the idea that you could measure intelligence, as if it were a single trait, like height or weight and then rank people by the number, the IQ. Like most on this list, he grew up wealthy and believed he was wealthy because he was more intelligent, talented and ambitious than the common man and thus deserved his wealth, almost as a God given thing. Reading Darwin, he found the concept of heredity and the idea that IQ could be passed on, as could the lack of it. "Let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best suited to invent and and conform to a high and generous civilization." Thus emerged the idea of genetics, selective breeding extended from the farm to the home. He came up with the word, "eugenics."

Then there was Charles Davenport, an American.

Davenport, also rich, chased after the huge money offered by Carnegie to set up a "laboratory" at Cold Spring Harbor, just down the road from Theodore Roosevelt's place, and he used it to launch the Eugenics Records Office and "Better Baby Breeding" programs, long before the idea of meritocracy based on IQ testing, it was Davenport's hope to get merit through meticulous breeding of human beings. Qualities like "morality" and high character were breedable.

Henry Adams

Then there was another of the Boston Brahmin class, Henry Adams, who mingled in this crowd. His influence was less direct, but a passage from his book, "The Education" is so ripe, it is important to include to describe the thinking in which all these men were marinated. Adams describes walking across Boston Common and seeing a man  in his twenties or thirties, long black frock coat of cheap gabardine, untamed beard down to his chest, flakes of dandruff and crumbs intermingled, pockmarked face, framed by side curls to his collar, unbathed, a walking stench, Adams wrote, "A Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow...a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish."  

What is so striking is this same revulsion to the Jew described by Adams appears, nearly word for word in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," written 18 years later. Same sentiment, same effect, different continent.

Then there was Prescott Hall. Another rich guy.

Prescott Hall

Hall said that immigration was a racial issue at its core, and that immigrants were "toiler, beggar, thief and scum." He wrote to the Boston Herald in 1894, "Shall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood?" He enlisted esteemed folks into his Immigration Restriction League, like Francis Walker who wrote of "the vast masses of filth [who came from] every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe."  An antecedent to "shithole countries." Like Mr. Trump, who wonders why more Norwegians don't want to immigrate to America, the IRL argued for a large entry fee which would keep out the scum but not prevent "thrifty Swedes, Norwegians, Germans." Keep out those who live like swine, in "systematic beggary at the doors of the rich...picking over the garbage barrels in our alleys...beaten men from beaten races."

Then there was Madison Grant, who was, in his time semi famous.

Madison Grant wrote the basic textbook of this Harvard/Brahmin attitude for race mixing which formed the fundamental resistance immigration, "The Passing of the Great Race," and said Eastern Europeans were "half-Asiatic mongrels" and "the Catholic Church under Jewish leadership," was directing the end to the great WASP civilization. 

Then there was H. Fairfield Osborn.

Osborne, who headed the American Museum of Natural history, which gave a scientific patina to the idea of survival of the fittest and evolution from subhumans (Eastern and Southern Europeans) to the superior Nordic and Anglo Saxon human specimens.

Then there was Albert Johnson, of the House Immigration Committee. He decried the "approaching extinction of the Mayflower Descendants" and crafted legislation in the House Committee on Immigration to stop all immigration for two years, to meet the "Emergency!" He did bend to the Brahmin set by allowing them their house servants, who were allowed to immigrate to work in the vast homes of the rich, as an exception to immigration barriers. And he ran into problems excluding all non white immigrants over the definition of who is White--people from India were rejected, but then a 1922 Supreme Court case settled the matter, by saying that for non native born people, citizenship was open only to Whites or African Americans born here (acknowledging the 14th amendment). Thus the Indian plaintiff, who was neither Black nor White, was out.

Then there was Eugen Fischer.

Fischer: going where his creed led him

Perhaps my favorite among the non famous mopes is Eugen Fischer who said, "What Darwin was not able to do, genetics has achieved. It has destroyed the equality of Man." He was much loved by the Nazis.

So through launching a think tank, The Cold Spring Harbor enterprise, the publication of a widely read book, "The Passing of a Great Race," these men and their disciplines were able to gain access to men with power to place ideas into action.

It is the famous men who came under the spell of these obscurities who pushed their ideas into the public space and eventually, public policy.

Most of these  folks are remembered today for the positive things they did, but they each went to the dark side and that side has been neglected or some would say concealed from the history books.

Maxwell Perkins.

Perkins is remembered as the brilliant editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and literary prizes for editing are named after him, but he was at the same time publishing "The Passing of the Great Race" and other tracts vilifying all that is not WASP, and extolling the virtues of what Hitler called the "Aryans." He was in that polite, deeply antisemitic, racist caste.

Margaret Sanger.

Sanger is remembered and celebrated as an early feminist, who fought for contraception and abortion as a right women ought to enjoy, but she was happy to sell abortion as a means of controlling the reproduction of Blacks, mentally impaired and other impure elements in America.

And, of course, Henry Ford.

Ford, wrote "The International Jew" and was obsessed with Jews as forming a world wide conspiracy, and was informed by the previously mentioned mob. His greatest fan was Hitler, who showered awards upon him, had his framed portrait on his wall and Hitler noted, with great satisfaction, the denial of entry of the ship St. Louis loaded with Jews fleeing the Gestapo and their subsequent return to the concentration camps. Hitler said, "Well, the United States won't have them. Why should we? We'll dispose of them as we see fit."

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was well embedded with the entire mob. He called unfettered immigration to America, "Racial suicide." He invited a black man to have dinner at the White House, which almost cost him the whole former Confederacy in the next election, but he was of that rich class of folks who did not see themselves as racist, antisemitic or anything other than simply the elect.

And then there was Adolph Hitler, who was the ultimate expression of the thinking these men promulgated.

So, the "Crisis on the Border," the interminable clips on FOXNEWS of dark skinned South Americans headed up the Panama isthmus, and Central American gang members, and Mexican rapists headed toward Texas and the talk of American blood being poisoned, and of vermin streaming across the border is nothing new. 

It makes all those suckered White guys in the sports bars, who never wanted to get into Harvard, feel like they are members of an elite, the White American elite. And they can sing along with Lee Greenwood,

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'd gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.

And listening to them, Mr. Trump will recall John McCain, the sucker who got captured, and he'll know what Trump chumps do not, that he is in the long line of rich guys who have convinced the little guy he loves them.

Zaretsky and the Cynics

 

Cynicism is the operating mode in my office. Every day people visit with their problems and their hopelessness, asking for help from a system they fully expect will disappoint them.

When I tell them there's a drug prescription I can write which would likely help a lot, but the computer software tells me their insurance won't cover it, they smile bitterly and say, "Yeah, what a surprise."

Zaretsky

Not long ago a man who had type 1 diabetes from age 6 visited. He had over the prior three years achieved not just excellent blood sugar control using a new version of an insulin pump. His HbA1c, the measure of his average blood sugar had not just got to an excellent range, but to a normal range. Of course, we were both delighted. He was healthier than he'd been in years. 

Then his insurance company notified him it would no longer pay for his insulin pump supplies, effectively cutting off this therapy. Why? Well, his HbA1c's had been normal for 3 years so they were not going to pay for normal. As far as the 20 year old clerk in front of his computer in Minnetonka, MN was concerned, this patient was normal, and no amount of appeal helped. We spent 3 hours that day in the office, with my medical assistant progressing on her computer and by phone up the ladders of appeal to no effect. 

"So, my blood cholesterol and my blood thyroid levels and my blood pressure are now normal owing to my cholesterol and thyroid medication and my blood pressure medication. Are they going to stop those medications, too?" he asked me.

"What a surprise that would be," I said.

But that is not that sort of cynicism I worry about.

That sort of cynicism is what Robert Zaretsky describes in the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section of December 15.  Zaretsky begins with the arresting observation that cynicism afflicts us all, "like an odorless toxic gas."

He then launches into a visit to the original Cynics of ancient Greece.

Diogenes

Now, I have to admit up front, anytime I hear someone jump back to ancient Greece my antennae sizzle and start to combust: Oh, here we go, trying to act all scholarly by referring to Socrates or someone who lived so long ago, surely we have no real idea of what he said, thought or lived, but every Oxford don loves to go there, because it makes them sound, well, you know, scholarly. Hey, this guy can read Greek on tablets--he must know something I don't.

But in Zaretsky's case, he actually makes this all relevant, alive and engaging. 

Diogenes, the original Cynic it turns out, is a guy I recognize. "In their eyes, civility equaled hypocrisy and conventions corrupted our nature."

Oh, that I know from way back. 

My father was like that. 

We lived in Washington, D.C., the ultimate place for parsed speech, for hypocrisy hiding behind every euphemism. Washington, D.C. was then a distinctly un-cosmopolitan, Southern town, where people always began with a "Bless your heart," and lots of Southern blather. "Why, Bless your heart, I understand why you might be upset about my insistence that no Negroes be able to use a Whites Only bathroom, but you know it's only about hygiene and it's best for everyone, the Negroes as much as us."

My father got to the point where he hated the mindless rituals, like saying, "Nice to meet you," or "Thanks for coming by." He just launched into people.

Polite Company

I saw the same thing in European immigrants who flooded suburban Washington after the second world war--they had no time for civility. The former fighter pilot up the street was like that. He had heard the colonel sending him out on another mission say stuff like, "We are all so proud of you," once to often. I can only imagine how he would react to that "Thank you for your service," thing.

But modern cynics, who orbit Mr. Trump do not insist on shoving aside the hypocritical to speak the truth.

"Unlike the modern cynic, the ancient Cynic insisted upon truth-telling. Not to be cruel for the sake of cruelty but to be blunt for the sake of our common humanity," Zaretsky notes. 

My father was a huge embarrassment to my brother and me because whenever we had to go somewhere social with him, he stood out, much as Diogenes, as uncultured, hostile and unsophisticated.

In a social world where people from South Carolina and Georgia, where lynching happened daily and the Whites just smiled politely, there were plenty of hot button issues everyone stayed away from, the third rails prevailed, even at a cocktail party of my mother's friends who taught at the high school where she taught. My curmudgeonly father could start a fight if we weren't minding him, and bottles and furniture might start flying.

Modern Day Cynic at his Lynching Trial

But now, that's what Trumplings want to happen. As if the fight, the provocation were all that mattered. Truth is irrelevant. The 2020 election was stolen; vaccines cause autism; COVID was a Chinese plot; climate change is a Chinese plot; wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers; separation of church and state is not constitutional--the First Amendment is unconstitutional. Doesn't matter. Truth to power is no longer a thing--it's now the middle finger to power. Truth is irrelevant.

The story of Diogenes sunbathing and Alexander the Great walks up to talk to him and commands, "Make a request!" And Diogenes says, "Move out of my sun," is a splendid parable. "In effect, he reminded the hegemon-to-be that he was nothing more than a man."

I really don't care if this parable reports a real event any more than it matters whether Biblical parables are true. The point is, it is a relevant story for today.  This is why Musk is so topical: He's telling everyone to move out of his sun. He may be a weird reactionary but he's not wrong about everything. As Musk has pointed to a multibillion dollar fighter plane saying that sending up a man in an airplane, when a drone could serve the purpose better, has more to do with getting the pilot laid when he goes to the Tail Hook party later, than with national defense. 

Truth there, even coming from a nasty self serving source.

Zaretsky's article is worth a read. I was a science major in college but I did get to take the occasional non science course, even one in philosophy, but as soon as the professor started talking about how some word or concept actually goes back to the ancients, and all the other dons started smiling because they wanted to believe their mastery of ancient Greek mattered, my mind shut down. Zaretsky makes this stuff modern, makes it live.

My cynical patients,  care nothing for the truth; they just want to burn everything down, and they are as happy to embrace untruth as truth. 

Discovering truth is often a lot of work. 

Vaccines? Oh, horrible, more harm than good, better to have polio and measles abound than to risk a vaccine. 

Yikes. 

I presume Diogenes would not be amused. 

The False Choice of Luigi Mangione

The problem with the reaction to Luigi Mangione is most of it is based on the assumption that the only choice open to Mr. Mangione was to point a gun and shoot a man in the back.

Jia Tolentina has noted that there are different forms of violence, one which was noted by Friedrich Engels in the 19th century: the violence perpetrated on the starving masses by predatory capitalists, and the implication is that shooting capitalists is, in a sense, answering violence with violence.  

She also remarked there are other forms of resistance beyond violence, organized street protests, like  Occupy Wall Street. She could have mentioned the Million Woman March with the pink knit hats with ears or, for that matter the marches against the Vietnamese war, all of which shared the common characteristic of having close to no effect to change anything at all.

That United Health Care is said to reject 30% of claims, if true, should speak for itself. That people have lost homes, gone bankrupt, got more ill, suffered strokes and some died as a result of insurance companies legally breaking contracts to prevent all that is beyond dispute because the experience in America has been so widespread: virtually everyone in America has had this happen to them, a vital drug denied, a procedure denied, a hospitalization not paid for with ruinous financial results, or if not to them, to a relative or someone they know.

Torentino notes with astonishment that the supposedly liberal media has reacted by publishing articles on the problem of protecting corporate executives, and by publishing op eds by corporate head of United saying we still care about the American public and public health, while it is patently obvious they care more about shareholder dividends.

But does any of this justify shooting a bad man in the back? 

Like the Penny killer who strangled a deranged homeless man on a subway, did Mangione have no other choice in his effort to protect the public from a dangerous man?

Well, duh, yes.

If he were a little more imaginative, he might have broken into Mr. Thompson's home and evacuated it of all living creatures, wife, kids, dog, goldfish, and then burned it to the ground. That at least would have not cost a life and would have been symbolic of the lives burned to the ground by the financial ruin brought upon them by health insurance companies.

There are dozens of creative ways of bringing home to the billionaire class the protest against their culture of vulture capitalism. 

Shooting in the back is one of the least imaginative, least effective ways.

Is Diversity A Virtue?

 

Growing up in Arlington, Virginia, I attended segregated schools until we moved across the Potomac to Maryland, where racial segregation was not the local law, but I still saw no Negroes (as they were called then) in my elementary school classes. 

In Junior High School (grades 7-9) there were perhaps nine Negroes in a school of 1500 students. This was not because the governor of Maryland stood in the school house door blocking Negroes but because there were so few Negroes living in the redlined, White suburban neighborhoods which fed these schools. 

At a school dance, in the ninth grade there was a long line of girls along one wall and boys along the other and for some reason, I was at the microphone and was supposed to announce the next dance, which was a recording of somebody, Buddy Holly, I think, "That'll Be The Day," but I got no more than a few words out before I caught in my peripheral vision the teacher, James McFall, flying across the floor to wrest the microphone from my hand. 

When he arrived he pulled me aside, looking hugely relieved, "Oh, I thought you were going to tell the two lines to walk across the floor and dance with the boy across from them."

"No," I said, "But what why would that have mattered?"

"Because," Mr. McFall told me, "Then you might have some white girl having to dance with a Nigger."

Later that year, the name of the new high school opening up which we would all be attending, got announced, and we heard about it in Mr. McFall's science classroom. 

"You hear who they named it after?" he asked me, under his breath.

"Yes, Walt Whitman."

Mr. McFall looked around, under his eyebrows and over his shoulder, "You know about him, right?"
"Not much, actually. He was a poet, right?"

"Queer as a three dollar bill," Mr. McFall informed me. "Can you believe it? Named that school after a faggot."

I was 14 years old and I was not at all clear what a queer as a three dollar bill or a faggot might be. They did not teach that in science class. 

Mr. McFall taught "star science" to the star students. I was not one of those. Maybe if I'd been, I'd have known about queers.

Anyway, those were the times. Diversity in our nearly all white, nearly all Christian, nearly all WASP or Catholic school of the descendants of families from alpine, British or Scandinavian places was nearly non existent.  

Our high school had 20 or so Black students out of 1500.

I don't know, but I may have been a better or wiser person if I had gone to school with more Negroes, or even Asians for that matter.  

My college had a little more diversity. One day a student interrupted the professor and asked if we could talk about the "Twelve percent thing," and the professor said yes.

Apparently, the university's board of trustees was considering mandating that 12% of the next class admitted to this Ivy League institution be Black. 

I was genuinely perplexed. "Why would they do that?" I asked.

"Because 12% of our country is Black and only 3% of students at Brown are Black."

"But we all killed ourselves competing for grades and SAT scores to get in here. I thought admissions were supposed to be based on merit."

"But Black kids don't have a fair chance in that game."

"But why make it 12% for Black kids? Why not for Asian kids or 1% for American Samoans? Or how about 60% for the kids of blue collar workers?"

I was making myself very unpopular in that class. But it was really a novel idea to me. I hadn't heard anything about this. 

The main argument seemed to be that our college ought to look like America and that having diverse racial groups would bring new and important perspectives to campus.  I didn't know about that, never having been exposed to new and different perspectives from Black people having never been exposed to Black people at all.

My brother at another college later told me some Black students on his campus had formed essentially a Black fraternity because they felt they needed a place to connect and feel welcomed, which sounded like resegregation to me, but then again, when they attended classes or played on teams they might share a different perspective with their White classmates.

Later, I learned many corporations wanted a workforce which "looks more like America" by which they meant physical appearance, as in race. To me, looking like America might look like someone with piercings and tattoos and green hair and jeans with big holes around the thighs. 

On youtube I saw an interview with Warren Buffett and Charles Munger of Berkshire, Hathaway and they were asked about a photo of the board of directors which was, apparently, bereft of Black faces. Buffett said they chose board members for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with their capacity to think innovatively, be motivated by things other than simply making money, essentially saying he did not consider race a merit. 

Munger was more explicit: He told a story about one of their law firms which handled business for the archdiocese of Los Angeles. Munger's lawyer told the archbishop they were happy for the business but there were surely a fair number of Catholic lawyers in LA who could handle the affairs of the archdiocese. The archbishop replied:  "Last year I was facing some serious surgery. I did not look around for the best Catholic surgeon."

Living in New Hampshire after living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and having jobs in the city both my wife and I have noticed how odd to seems to see so few Blacks in our every day lives.

"I miss seeing them," my wife said, simply.

"I hadn't noticed, but now that you mention it, it does get a little dull dealing with just New England Yankees day in and day out."

When I go to my office near Lawrence, Massachusetts, I see Hispanic folks from all over the Caribbean and South America. I don't know that experience enriches my life or changes my perspective, but it does require me to make adjustments in how I communicate.  There are some Blacks, mostly from Africa, rather than from the American South, and they are more foreign than Black, if you know what I mean. I might forget a name and ask my secretary, "Do you remember that name of the lady yesterday from Nigeria?" I wouldn't say, "That Black lady."

We see people from South Asia (the subcontinent) and from all over the Middle East in the office.  

Many of these people are different not because of their race but because of their educations or lack of it.  Hispanics, in our office at least, are from a certain socioeconomic group and they miss more appointments are often very early or very late and engage in magical thinking, as when one lady told me she rubs iodine over her mothers neck because she heard it was good for the thyroid. That is not a Hispanic perspective, but it may represent a type of thinking from a specific subculture, uneducated, poor, unscientific.

Would I have been broadened by exposure to her children when I was in college?

Some have argued that globalization has meant Americans have to compete in world wide markets, and for that we need a work force comfortable with diversity, comfortable with people who look different and who make think differently from us. But I buy most of my stuff on Amazon and it's made, mostly in China, South Asia or Vietnam or Japan and I've had next to no exposure to their different perspective. You may say we can import stuff and remain parochial, but we need to be more open to others to sell to them, to export. But how many American farmers speak Japanese to whom they export beef or soy beans?

England voted to withdraw from the EU, mostly because the British did not like the new multiracial/multicultural society and wanted to clamp down on immigration and they wanted to be "more like us." Or something like that. Donald Trump reacted to Brexit saying, "They wanted borders."  For once, he may have got something right.

I always liked the look of Starship Enterprise which had Black, Asian, White all sorts of crew members working together apparently harmoniously.

My father in law, a White Mormon from Utah, whose Church forbids Blacks in the clergy, had a long career in the Army and in all the years I knew him and saw him interacting with Black people I never detected a whiff of him seeing or treating a Black person differently than a White person. In fact, he was in uniform coming through a hotel door and a Black man held the door open for him, as he was loaded down with a long russet bag and he thanked the man and shook his hand, and after he passed on into the lobby the Black man grinned at me and said, "I spent twenty five years in the Army and no general ever shook my hand. I hold a door open for that one and he does."

The army my father in law knew was totally integrated, especially in the Medical Corps, where all that mattered was competence.

I think he benefited from that perspective, but I'm not sure that applies to what happens in college. 

Assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO United Healthcare: Predictable? Predictive?

 

As details of the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare, the megalith health insurance conglomerate have emerged, Mad Dog has found himself saying, oh, maybe this makes sense. 

Which is not to say Mad Dog thinks murder is a good idea, but this was no random urban shooting. 

For some reason, it made Mad Dog think about the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick in the middle of the steelworkers' strike in 1892. Frick had refused to negotiate with the steelworkers' union and the commonfolk around Pittsburgh were hurting badly and a man named Alexander Berkman, a so called "anarchist" and the lover of Emma Goldman, the most famous anarchist, tried to shoot Frick in his office, but only wounded him. His level of planning for the attack was amateurish compared with the assassin of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

Berkman shoots Frick

But the meaning of the attempt on Frick was not lost on the suffering steel workers, and as the shell casings with the words, "Deny" and "Delay" suggested, there may have been a meaning to this assassination attempt.

It is wise to remember this murder may have been a personal attack masquerading as a political statement. The Washington, DC sniper was trying to murder his ex-wife, but he killed random citizens to make it look like the shooting of his wife was just one of those, because he knew shooting his wife would make him the prime, if not only, suspect.

Thompson

But assuming this killing is a statement of sorts, we have an interesting event.

The New Yorker, of course, carries a piece about it, by Jia Tolentino, which points to the reaction to the event in a broader context:

On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions.--Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

There is no dearth of resentment toward health insurance companies.

Mad Dog knows a patient with type 1 diabetes whose blood sugar control has been brought into dazzling control by an insulin pump. For three years his HbA1c, the measure which assesses his blood sugar control over a  three month interval, has been normal--not just good or excellent but actually within the normal range. His insulin pump has allowed him to achieve normality, which is rare in the management of type 1 diabetes by any method, even using insulin pumps. What a success! 

But then his insurance company refused to pay for his insulin pump supplies, his insulin or anything related to his diabetes. He is normal now, the company argued. Why should we pay for someone who is normal? As if his type 1 diabetes had been cured, rather than managed!  

He asked, "My blood pressure, my thyroid levels and cholesterol are now normal on medication, are they going to stop paying for those pills as well?"

Mad Dog been thrilled with the advent of a new class of medications for type 2 diabetes (DM)--the type of diabetes where the patient makes plenty of insulin but it simply cannot keep the blood sugar under control--unlike type 1 diabetes, where the patient simply cannot make adequate insulin.  For the first time in 50 years he has drugs which actually work, which can normalize blood sugars and patients stop the long list of inadequate medications which only barely managed to lower the blood sugars modestly.

Trouble is, the drug companies which make these medications--Mounjaro and Ozempic (Lilly and Novo Nordisk)--charge $1800 a month for the medications. 

Who can afford that? 

If you have the right health insurance, if you are a Teamster, for example, your cost might be $20 a month, but if your health insurance is not the right one, you're out of luck.

Mad Dog has seen some analyses of what the monthly cost of these drugs could be if the drug companies which make them would be satisfied with a $1 billion profit annually. We are not talking about net income, but profit above expenses. (Of course, expenses include the multimillion dollar advertising campaigns.) The price per customer would be $40 a month. 

Apparently, a billion dollar a year profit from a single drug is not good enough for the drug companies. And remember, the patents last 17 years--so that's $17 billion.

So, it's not just the health insurance fat cats who are reaming out the bank accounts of American citizens. The drug companies are doing their share of vulture capitalism. 

But back to the insurance companies: 

A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient. --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

It is understandable that the American public might regard the American health insurance industry as fraudulent, promising one thing and then refusing to deliver, robbing from the poor to deliver to the rich. At least the drug companies are actually creating something new; the insurance companies are just accountants shifting numbers in columns. 

Before we anoint the murderer as a latter day Robin Hood, however, we need to know more. The murderer had inside information according to one police analyst: He knew exactly when Mr. Thompson was going to be walking out of his hotel and arriving at the Hilton. The assassin had to wait only 5 minutes. He knew his victim's schedule. And once he had fired his shots, he walked up to the victim lying on the sidewalk, and he did not deliver a final shot to the head, but simply looked at him and walked on, and escaped. This suggested to the police analyst, the killing was "nothing personal." 

Of course, it may have not been personal to the shooter. It could not have been more personal to Mr. Thompson.

Mad Dog watched "Prime Minister's Questions" for many years. These are the televised sessions in the British Parliament, where Members of Parliament can ask the Prime Minister about issues dear to the hearts of their constituents. We have nothing like this in America. We have rare press conferences where media starlets get to ask the President questions, but we do not have members of Congress asking questions on behalf of their constituents. Fully 40% of the questions had to do with the National Health system, by Mad Dog's count.

Banting & Best: Discovers of Insulin

It is small wonder that Congress and the President have wanted no part in running American healthcare. That is a thankless job. That is a job for big boys, all grown up. 

If you are failing in healthcare, there is no way to fantasize your way past it. You can claim there are millions of dark skinned rapists flooding across the border infesting America; you can say the economy is in tatters no matter what the unemployment rates and inflation indices say; you can say that manufacturing jobs have left America because of China; you can say there is no such thing as climate change; you can say vaccinations cause autism and the fluoridation of water causes dementia; you can say wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers. But you cannot say American health care is doing just fine, when all the  people out there are all customers and they know better.

So, if Mr. Thompson's assassination was a political/social statement and not just a murder of a rich guy with enemies, then the choice of the victim was telling.

Nullification: Don't Tell Me About the Law; Tell Me About the Judge

 

STATEMENT TO THE HAMPTON SCHOOL BOARD

(Considering the Warrant Article giving a taxpayer money, an annual stipend, to a local church, the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Catholic Church.)

One of the most cynical, and yet truest pieces of advice ever given a President was this: "Do not tell me about the law. Tell me about the judge." (Roy Cohn to Donald Trump.)

Law, of course is abstract. People are flesh and blood. Unless people follow the law, unless it is enforced, there is no law.

When I visit New York City, Manhattan, I often cross the street despite the electric "Don't Walk" sign. But I walk anyway. I can look down the grid in both directions and see no car, and I walk. And I'm often accompanied by a policeman walking next to me, or a dozen citizens, all of us violating a law. We ignore the law, and in doing so we nullify it. George Wallace stood in the school house door in Alabama to nullify a law to desegrated schools, and he was voted in--the will of local folks over the Constitution.

The Supreme Law of the Land, in New Hampshire as in Alabama, is the Constitution of the United States, and the very first words of the First Amendment to the Constitution say government shall not establish a church or any religion. And what can that mean? Well, as far as I know, there are only two ways to establish: simply stating a church is the official state church--the Church of England is the state church of England, or, Miraculous Medal is the official church of Hampton. That's one way to establish a church or religion. 

The other is simply to give government/taxpayer money to a church, just as you might establish a college by giving money.

Now, Justice Alito and Justice Thomas have ruled from their office in Washington, D.C., that separation of church and state is unconstitutional. Curious finding: The Constitution itself is unconstitutional! 

This is not my observation: Justice Sotomayor said this after the Court ruled that the State of Maine could not deny taxpayer dollars to a religious school simply because it is a religious school, teaching religion. Doesn't matter what the First Amendment says--the justices say different. Nullification. An instance of nullification of the Constitution from the Court.

Don't tell me about the law; tell me about the judge.

Well, here in Hampton, New Hampshire, we cannot change the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, D.C.

But as a member of the Hampton School Board, you can say "No." You can say, "the law matters." It may be abstract, but embodied in the First Amendment is something we care about, something we think is a good thing: separation of church and state. We know the sorry, sordid, bloody history of states which mixed religion and state. Wives literally lost their heads when church/state mixed.

But tonight, right here in New Hampshire, you can, as elected members of the School Board, vote to embrace rather than nullify, you can choose to resist those who blithely violate the Constitution.  You can say, "NO!" Enough!

You can say nullification of the law can in some instances be benign, but in other instances it is not benign; it can be a willful act from the dark ages, an insurrection against the enlightened principles we have held dear, and which have served us well over the course of our nation's history--the temporary tenures of Supreme Court justices notwithstanding. 

You have, at least, that much power. 

But unless you use it, there is no law.  There is only local willfulness, indifference to principle, the cynical pursuit of mon-ey placed above what is true and right. It is a lesson, for better or for worse, for our schools and for our children right here in Hampton.

Transgender Orthodoxy As the Synecdoche for Blue Puddle Collapse

 There is no one reason which explains why voters turned against Democrats and returned Donald Trump to the White House, and swept Republicans into control in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

But there is one part of the explanation which contains most of the relevant elements, which can stand as a part for the whole: Transgender orthodoxy.

Male Puberty: Women's Swim Records

There was something, on a gut, if not on a  cerebral cortex level, so wrong with insisting that a person who had gone through male puberty, who still looked male, while wearing a female swimming suit, should be allowed to be seen as a woman, and compete as a woman in Ivy League swimming meets. When that person demolished all the women's swimming records, one had to ask: Why do we have women's sports (as distinguished from men's swimming) at all?

Well, we can see it in the numbers: There are something like 1500 men/boys who run the 800 meters faster than the women's world record. 

Testosterone makes a difference.

We have weight classes in boxing and wrestling for a reason. We want to see like competing with like.

Not in every instance: We don't have short people basketball or lightweight football--in some sports we accept unequal size and strength as part of the game.

But when Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said he did not like the idea of his girls being run over by a field hockey player who went through male puberty, he added that saying that cost him standing among Democrats.

It is the very intolerance to opposition, intolerance to an opposing opinion which characterized and still does characterize many if not most of those who support "transgender rights."

When Dr. Paul McHugh, chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, suggest that gender dysphoria, which lands most patients at Transgender Clinics, might be more like anorexia nervosa than it is like homosexuality, he was vilified and attacked voraciously--medical students refused to speak to him. There was no objective, disinterested exploration of ideas here: a gospel had been violated. Apostasy had to be crushed. 

Paul McHugh: Heretic 

The same thing happened to any endocrinologist who dared question Transgender medicine. When an endocrinologist attended a  session on "Androgen Abuse Syndrome" in which men who look like the incredible hulk demanding ever higher doses of testosterone from Endocrine Clinics, he heard about how these men could be "managed" like anorexia nervosa patients. But when he attended the next session, in the next room, on Transgender Medicine, where the doses of testosterone given transgender patients were three times that requested by the androgen abuse patients, and the endocrinologist asked, "But wait! Isn't this androgen abuse?" 

Absolutely No Gender Dysphoria 

He was admonished. "No, in the case of the transgender patient this testosterone is 'gender affirming' whereas in the case of the body builder it's 'androgen abuse.'"

It wasn't until a famous Scottish pediatrician reviewed practices and records at Transgender Clinics in the UK, and found that a substantial (25%?) number of girls with gender dysphoria, who had been treated with testosterone at at 10 or 11 where no longer taking it by age 17, that the tide began to turn just a little, and questioning Transgender Medicine got some cover.

Intolerance

And when even the most ardent Democrats began grumbling about pronouns, about having people begin their talks with the phrase, "I'm Sue Smith and my pronouns are she/her," the tide began to shift further. When loyal readers of the New York Times and the New Yorker found themselves reading about an individual and the paragraph proceeded to describe how they went to town to get a haircut, that grumblings became a groan.

And some said, after the election--if Trump and his reactionaries can expunge pronouns and the sort of orthodoxy which demands "equity/inclusiveness/diversity" then maybe the reactionary purge will have done some good.

Objectifiying Women

As Clemenza told Michael before the gangs went to the mattresses: "This sort of thing has to happen, every five, ten years. Clears out the bad blood."

I am happy to see my grandchildren have classmates of all races, but I do not think diversity should be a goal in the classroom. Diversity of opinion should be a goal, but not racial diversity. Race blind I like. Race quotas I do not like. In my son's hoity toity private school, twenty years ago, there were maybe 10 to 15% Black kids, but their parents were neurosurgeons, lawyers, business magnates, and if you closed your eyes and listened, you could not tell the Blacks from the Whites.

And I don't know what "equity" in college classes would mean. Inclusiveness sounds like a good thing, but then why at Cornell are Black students demanding a Black dorm where they can feel safe and comfortable? How is that accomplishing inclusiveness?

So, maybe we'll throw the baby out with the bathwater, but at least we may get some fresh bath water.