Despicably Yours, Donald

 

The morning after a Blackhawk helicopter smashed into an American Airlines passenger jet,  killing everyone in both aircraft, Donald Trump announced the fault was in "Diversity."

Nobody had any idea what he was talking about. Well, that's not exactly true: Everybody knew what he was talking about.

Trying to get into his mind, one can get easily lost.

 All we know thus far is there was one White female soldier pilot, Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, who had 6 years experience flying Blackhawks on the helicopter, and there were two other soldiers. Did Mr. Trump mean the presence of the woman must have been the reason for the crash? He said this before the black boxes were even recovered, so we have no idea if Cpt. Lobach was at any of the controls, or even said anything during the doomed flight. The other pilots on the airplane were White males, so presumably Mr. Trump has no intention of blaming either of them.

Did he mean some "Diversity hire" in the control tower failed to do his/her job?

"Diversity" was responsible? 

What on earth was he even talking about?

Early reports suggest the helicopter pilot was supposed to look both ways before crossing the street, and he saw an airplane in his flight path, an airplane rising from the runway, and he avoided that one, but he did not see the other one coming, the American Airlines jet descending to land. All this is happening because there are multiple airplanes landing at National airport, one right after another, at night, with very little room or time in between, like a marching band executing elaborate patterns on the football field at halftime.

One expert interviewed on PBS, a woman Blackhawk pilot as it happens, noted there were only 3 soldiers on that helicopter, and that the usual crew would be 4, and that would allow one to look out the left, one for the right side and two to scan forward, each covering half of the visual field.  Whatever happened, it's pretty clear the crew missed seeing the airplane it hit.

A system with very little room for error. 

The wonder is it took so long to have this disaster.

The other wonder is why the military feels it should be flying helicopters around that hornets' nest known as National Airport.

Of course, Trump blamed everyone but himself: Peter Buttigige, Biden. Or possibly he was blaming Cpt. Lobach, who was also killed and female, ergo, she must be the culprit. Blaming the woman before any cockpit voice recorder had been recovered from the Potomac? The only thing he could know about her is that she was female.

I kept waiting to hear Mr. Trump blame the transgender movement, space lasers, the Governor of Virginia, the water spickets in Arlington, VA, the fake news, the Chinese, the failing New York Times, that fake climate change thing which is nothing more than a Chinese plot, vaccines, Gavin Newsome, Elizabeth Warren and/or the FBI, but he confined himself to Diversity, at least at that moment.

As Stephen Colbert noted, Mr. Trump is just not normal.

In fact, it goes beyond that. He is simply strange, or, as Tim Walz might say, Trump is truly weird. Or deranged. Or all of the above. 

What kind of man would blame this disaster on the one woman involved even before any evidence? Was he blaming an officer who had flown for 6 years? 

Of course, Mr. Trump denigrated John McCain for having been shot down in the skies of Vietnam. Why would he feel constrained from blaming Cpt. Lobach for having died over the Potomac?

And Mr. Trump has never even served because, you know, heel spurs. 

Tough Guy. Heel Spurs.

Mr. Trump, asked directly how he could connect the disaster to "Diversity" replied, "Common sense." 

Of all the explanations available, that "common sense" was perhaps the only explanation which we can eliminate ipso facto.

This disaster occurred on Mr. Trump's watch. 

Which is not to say the President can know about every training mission taking place around Washington, D.C. But that didn't stop him from claiming to know enough about this collision to announce the fault was Captain Diversity.  

He couldn't blame the passenger jet because it was piloted by White males, no Diversity there.

Does This Man Look Normal?

Looking at the menagerie Mr. Trump has paraded out: Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you know they are as bizarre a lot as ever headed a Western government, going back to the dwarf Goebbels, the bloated Goering, the wild eyed Hess. 

Look at the folks Trump surrounds himself with.

They look like they were selected by the folks who brought us "Dr. Strangelove." (One of them even rails against fluoridated water. That's a movie worth re-watching now.)

Would you want any of them piloting a Blackhawk?

When you find yourself, as Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have, trying to explain why it is wrong for Trump to say the crash was caused by "Diversity," before the bodies were retrieved from the icy waters of the river,   you know you're in trouble.

This is the strength of the Big Lie:

If you say something so wild it leaves everyone gob smacked, you have already achieved a sort of trump card, or a Trump card, as it were. 

Orthodoxy, Intolerance and Transgender Wars

 

We've all seen articles about controversies involving the topic of transgender youth.

Here is an article from a New Hampshire newspaper about an incident on a school bus carrying students home from Exeter High School, the same town where Philips Exeter Academy is located, but this is the public high school for a liberal community.

“The student then turned a copy of this text conversation over to Vice Principal Dovholuk, who confronted M. P. with printed copies of the text messages. M. P. was then subject to an athletic suspension,” according to the complaint.

Dovholuk suspended M.P. from athletics because of this conversation, which happened outside the school building, Cornerstone said.

Exeter adopted a Gender Nonconforming Students policy in 2016 that states in part, “[a] student has the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun that corresponds to the student’s gender identity,” it also includes a broader rule: “the intentional… refusal to respect a student’s gender identity… is a violation of this policy.” 

The principal of the school suspended the offending student from participation in inter scholastic sports, because he expressed an opinion that there are only two genders. 

The confrontation on the school bus occurred when a boy said he thought there are only two genders, and a girl replied gender is fluid and called him a bigot.

The connection between the student's thoughts on gender and his being forbidden to play in a basketball game against a rival school escaped me. He violated a policy on pronouns?

Male Puberty; Women's Swm Meet

I attended a conference where "Androgen Abuse Syndrome" was discussed in a session. Men with bodies like Arnold Schwarzenegger show up at Endocrine Clinics asking for testosterone injections because they think they do not look big enough. They are treated much like women with anorexia nervosa, which is to say, they are told have have a single wrong idea. They are looking in a mirror and seeing a 98 pound weakling when in fact, they are massively muscled. They eventually are brought to the realization there is something wrong with their perceptual processes, and they enter into contracts agreeing not to seek testosterone at other clinics and to attend only the one clinic and then they embark on a program to lower their doses of testosterone and they are treated with tapering doses of testosterone, visits to insure compliance with this regimen,  they are weaned off the testosterone. It's similar to how women with anorexia nervosa are treated, and there are often set backs, patients falling off the program, and then re-entering unto completion. 

I walked from that session to one on Transgender Medicine.

In that session, the Transgender Clinic people talked about the doses they used to bring a patient born female to male. The doses they were using were nigh on astronomical, four times the highest doses I've ever used to replace a male who was deficient. I texted the doctor who led the Androgen Abuse session, saying here is a clinic where they practice androgen abuse, and he quickly responded saying these are doses used for "gender affirming therapy," and so that was perfectly fine.

I tried asking about the doses at the Transgender session, but was quickly shut down and the scowls and murmurs around the room told me I was quickly becoming a pariah.

Dr. Paul McHugh

The cases presented at the session left me reeling: a couple, a transgender male to female (who has not been castrated, and still has penis and testicles), with his lesbian partner who want to have a baby and are directed into IVF. A female to male transgender who continues menstruating through the testosterone therapy, so the doses of testosterone are escalated to levels I would be afraid to give any human being, but the menses are said to be so disheartening to the patient, undermining the new male identity, it's worth the risk of the high testosterone doses.

Paul McHugh, as a newly appointed Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was asked to provide psychiatry liaison to the Transgender Clinic there. He reviewed the records and found a 40% suicide rate among patients in that clinic, and he declined to participate until he could understand why this program had such a high mortality rate. (Even today, this is the figure most often quoted for Transgender Clinics--somewhere between 25% and 40% suicide rates.)  Eventually, he concluded that patients with "gender dysphoria" might be a lot like patients with anorexia nervosa: in his mind these patients had "a single wrong idea." In the case of anorexia, the idea was the patient believed herself to be too fat. In the case of gender dysphoria, people who said they felt as if they were in the wrong body, that even though declared a girl at birth, they felt more like  boys. 

McHugh found that Johns Hopkins medical students refused to speak to him. Students refused to hear what he had to say. At one of the most "elite" medical schools in the country. Free inquiry enjoined.

Writing in an NBC News posting, a reporter named Dawn Ennis said, "The 'research' Paul McHugh has been peddling and marketing are a weapon in the arsenal of anti-transgender politicians and extremists."  This under the headline, "Human Rights Campaign Sets on Johns Hopkins After Controversial Trans Report."

So, clearly there were and still are "anti-transgender politicians," who might fairly be called, "extremists" but is it not also true there are pro-transgender extremists?

McHugh was vilified as a Catholic who was simply pushing his religious beliefs as science.

What McHugh was doing, for whatever reason, was questioning orthodoxy.

Dave Chappelle has been attacked for his ruminations on transgenders, as he openly questions what rights and deference society should allow to accommodate these folks. 

But one of his most affecting stories is about a trans woman who he befriended, after she approached him for help with her nascent comedy career. Like so many Chappelle monologues, it is a long and winding road, filled with sly take downs, but it ends with the news which devasted him-- that this transgender person threw herself off a roof to her death--one of those 40%. 

No sentient person could or should hear him tell that story and think anything but Chappelle was desolated by her fate, and yet his clear empathy has been ignored in the maelstrom of hate pouring down on him for his criticisms of the orthodoxy of pronouns and things we are not allowed to say.

Even the New Yorker writes in correct pronouns, constructing such sentences as "Even during periods of grief and exhaustion, they said, they were 'still able to write some of my best gags,' and they took this as a hopeful sign that 'they'll still be fun to have around.'"

Academia has been particularly inept at dealing with the demands for correctness, not just at Exeter High School but at Harvard. 

And the whole BLGT thing is misleading, as if a gay person is simply one of the same group as a trans person. Both may face societal hostility and stress, but gay people do not need doctors or medications. They are more different than alike transgenders.

Most of the academic deans and professors I speak with actually have no idea what a transgender is, what sorts of therapies they request, what is known about sexual differentiation, and how that may relate to gender dysphoria, but they are very certain about policies on pronouns.

The very institutions which are supposed to foster open discussion--universities, medical schools, medical societies-- at all of these, free inquiry has been all but shut down.

This is one of the reasons we have President Trump in the White House today. 

What I Like About Donald Trump: A Liberal's Lament

 

The title to this post may surprise long time readers of this blog, but as repugnant as Donald Trump is, in his coy pitch to White Supremacists, asserting that dark skinned people from "shit hole countries" are invading across the Southern border, infesting, and infecting the pure blood of our nation, and despite his habit of stating as fact things he's "heard people say," like the wild fires in California are the fault of the liberal Democrats, and despite his willfulness in appointing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, whose worm infected brain drives him to condemn vaccines, there are some things Trump stumbles toward which I find something of a relief.

One is the demolition of "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" thing. Reading the testimony of a professor of engineering who applied for a job at UCLA and was asked to write an essay about how he would support the ideal of diversity, equity and inclusion in his engineering class, I thought. Oh, this has gone way too far.

I like the idea of a diversity of opinions and experience in a classroom or at work, but being Black or American Indian is not a merit, and if we care about putting people into medical school on the basis of merit, then it shouldn't matter if we wind up with a class of 100% Asian Americans.  

The problem, of course, is "merit" is such a slippery thing. It turns out you don't need to be a genius to be a physician or a surgeon--you need to be obsessive compulsive and hard working, but you don't have to be able to solve differential equations, be an ace at calculus or physics. There are way more people with enough intelligence to become good physicians than there are spots in medical school, so the real differentiation by merit comes down to how much you want it and how hard you are willing to work in your late teens and twenties to win a spot.  

But having a Black or a White face is no more relevant than having blue eyes or straight hair. 

Meritocracy is a wonderful idea, but, in practice, it's a thorny knot, because first you have to know what "good" is and that is almost always a problem.

Tom Brady was not recognized as having merit.

People who audition behind a screen to be selected for the orchestra make the cut on merit, but there are precious few lines of work with that pure a meritocracy. 

And DEI is an abnegation of meritocracy.  And Trump, in his rambling, chaotic and vapid way mumbles about wanting to go back to meritocracy and rejecting DEI and he's not wrong there. 

And then there is the famous Trumpian cant about sending your son off to school and having him come home a girl. And he rasps on about how this has happened, or maybe just could happen, but to Trump it's all the same, because you know, on some level, he doesn't really believe anything he is saying. It's all just something he's heard that caught his short attention. 

But he has absorbed enough from the goons around him to know he can sell, "There's only two genders" to the crowd, and he knows he won the election, at least partly, because he pushed that button. And it was a button which was so misunderstood by "the woke crowd." Whatever that may be.

Let me make clear, I think every patient who has gender dysphoria should be treated kindly, with respect and sympathy, but I have grave misgivings about "Transgender Clinics," as they are currently constituted, and I'm with Dave Chappelle when he says, "I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?"

The whole transgender issue has been an area where free and open discussion has been shut down even at scientific meetings and in some medical schools, where "gender confirming therapy" has become a matter of faith and any objections to the approach has been shouted down. Democrats, who once were the champions of free and open discussion, who were diligent about allowing for contrary but unpopular views to be fully examined and expressed, jettisoned those values and became guardians of orthodoxy, and intolerant of dissent.

Competing as a Woman after a Male Puberty

Trump has often been compared to Hitler, and I can see why, but having read Mein Kampf and watched enough History Channel, I think it's not really an apt comparison. Trump is simply not an ideologue. He could never have written Mein Kampf, or any book, actually, on his own. He is simply a business guy who doesn't really get abstraction. 

His knowledge of almost anything is simply superficial and he really has no deeply held convictions--he's entirely given over to the pursuit of his own pleasure, which entails feeling he has power and is potent.

He is happy to surround himself with Blacks and Hispanics, as long as they kiss his ring.  So he dog whistles racists, and he's happy to have them on his side, and he pardons White Supremacists, like the Proud Boys, but you never get the feeling he actually cares much about race, beyond how he can use it to his own benefit.

He has been compared to Don Corleone, the Godfather, but the Godfather had a code, a sense of where to draw the line and of morality: He insisted on Johnny Fontane's spending time with his family, and he would not get into the drug market, thinking prostitution and gambling were victimless crimes, less morally fraught. Trump would never make those calculations; he is quite open about what matters to him: how to make more money for himself.

In that, he is like  Shaw's Undershaft of "Major Barbara," the man who has become fabulously wealthy making dynamite. bombs and armaments--he doesn't care about what harm his business does; he is indifferent to the fact his bombs kill babies--He says the first and only thing for a human being to care about is to not be poor. That is his creed.

Trump is not religious. He doesn't quote scripture. He doesn't read the Bible, but he'll sell you one. And that's funny, too. He'll sell you steaks or bit coins or a college diploma, really, anything. 

He's not really a President, he's a marketing machine.

He doesn't know much, if anything about the Constitution and thinks all he has to do to overturn the 14th amendment and it's rule that if you are born on American soil, you are automatically a citizen is to say he doesn't like that.  The man who would be king. It's such fun. He heard some people say birthright citizenship is BAD and he's going to void that. Dred Scott, the 14th amendment, he's never hear of either. He just knows what sounds right to him.

But people love that. They buy his golden tennis shoes. They know World Wrestling is not real, but they love the antics, and the personalities, and he comes right out of that world of make believe, where everyone knows the game is rigged but they love the show.

Watch World Wrestling sometimes and you'll get a true appreciation of the world Trump lives in and creates for his fans.  Sheer escapism. Doesn't work so well when you have real problem to solve, like a virus which is ripping through a susceptible population on it's way to killing 3 million Americans. Then you need people who deal in the real world, in science and technology and engineering. But until that happens, Trump is your man.

Trump called John McCain a loser for having been captured. Doesn't matter McCain got shot out of the sky, endured years of abuse, major injuries "in the service of his country."  He got shot down and captured. He's a loser, as far as Trump is concerned. 

It took some courage, or some would say "gall" to go down that line, but he did and it worked for him. 

What Trump was saying was clear enough to his fans: "Serving your country" is a scam; it's what you say when you are trying to dress up your desire to have a career, to play war and to sound noble. But that is not a thing with Trump. He's saying all that is garbage.  No politician I can remember would ever go after "war heroes" for fear of bringing righteous sanctimony down upon his campaign. But it worked wonderfully well for him. Made him look tough, and bold and honest and different.

He's more like the mafia boss: You don't serve your country. You fight for yourself, and possibly for your family, to get richer. Everyone else is just losers.

 He thinks soldiers are losers, too, because the best they can be is hired mercenaries, and he says it's fine for Presidents to kill people, that Presidents have done this all the time. 

Tom Clancy, the author of "Hunt for Red October" dissed Congressman because they only made a six figure salary and he was making millions with his novels, so he had no respect for those bottom feeding Congressmen. The measure of a man is his dollar worth.

Hearing that cynicism applied by Trump to the Presidency is refreshing. Presidents kill people, like mafia dons. They issue a kill order and a drone kills the target and maybe some innocent civilians. It's what we do as Presidents. We are tough guys. You don't have to love us, but you have to respect us.

Woodrow Wilson posed as a saint, and every American high school student learns about his courageous but doomed campaign to unite the world in a League of Nations, when in fact, he expunged all colored folks from the federal government, found the notion of women voting abhorrent, presided over a nation where people were thrown into prison for the simple act of speaking out against the draft for WWI, and not even speaking, but simply pamphlet-erring.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

That famous phrase from Oliver Wendel Holmes that freedom of speech is not absolute, that falsely crying "Fire!" in a crowded theater presents a "clear and present danger" was in a case where some poor schmuck named Schenck had printed up leaflets--in Yiddish!-- opposing the WWI draft and the Court sent him to prison for 10 years. That was the country Woodrow Wilson gave us. 

People are dismayed because the American electorate gave us Trump, but the American electorate has a long history of being nasty, intolerant and spiteful and giving us real terrible people for President.

Emma Goldman was imprisoned and deported for opposing conscription. Her great crime was to speak freely for sexual freedom, women's rights, workers' rights, and against violent authoritarianism and against the First World War, a war where a bayonet was weapon with a worker on either end.  That was punished by the American voter who put in office authoritarians and who loved to talk about glory and serving one's country. 

Teddy Roosevelt said that allowing non whites to immigrate to the US was "racial suicide" and although he was out of power, he tried with all his might to get America into World War I, and he wanted to be commissioned to lead another regiment into the fight, so he could recreate his famous charge up San Juan Hill. And when he was told this war was going to be fought with tanks and nerve gas and he was too old, he pushed his son into volunteering for glorious combat, and his son was promptly killed. He endorsed the Spanish American War and the acquisition of an American Empire. Law did not matter. Power mattered. And the American public loved him for that. 

Teddy, you must always remember, a woman who knew him well once said, is always going to be six years old.

And that is what Trump is, really. He's a child. A case study of arrested development. At best he's twelve years old.

He's a goof who expostulates at a press conference that he's got this great idea about injecting bleach in your veins to cure COVID, when he's got Tony Fauci on stage; Fauci who'd been working with serious folks to launch a vaccine that actually works and will not harm people. 

He thinks he can make a hurricane change course with a magic marker, or maybe an atom bomb. Funny, right?

He loves the idea of tariffs but he doesn't know why. 

Clearly, the reason he wants to slap Canada has nothing to do with the legions of immigrants flooding across the Canadian border, or with Fentanyl.  

The Canadians are mystified why he would want to alienate them. They are America's biggest trading partner. How would slapping a 25% tariff on Canadian goods help America? 

And why would you want to hurt your biggest trading partner? 

Because of Fentanyl? Not likely.

Because we have a trade deficit with Canada? 

What's wrong with that? 

And besides the deficit is only because of all the oil we buy from Canada; otherwise we have a surplus. And we wanted that Canadian oil so we wouldn't have to depend on Iranian and Saudi oil, but now Canada is the bad guy?

Makes no sense. Doesn't have to. But it's FUN, isn't it?

Doesn't have to make sense. He just growls about wanting to make Canada an American state. 

It's funny, right?

And he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico and to acquire Greenland. 

Of course, it's not Trump, as we all hear. It's the people who voted for Trump. But, you know, the more history you read--try Emma Goldman's "Living My Life," or Daniel Okrent's, "The Guarded Gate,"--the more you realize: "This America, man." 

We've always been like this. 

The real aberration was Obama, not Trump.

Trump's just so looney, it's impossible to take him seriously.

It's not just a matter of taking him literally. You can't take him seriously or literally. 

He's just too much of a flake.

He's a sixties hippie aged in a blue suit and a long red tie. He's all about what's happening and where's the best stuff? He's a World Wrestling Association hero. 

Trump World

If he didn't have the nuclear codes, it would be fun to watch.

 

Look Ma! I'm a Hero (Again)!

 

Look, Ma!

Remember January 6, 2021? 

I was a loving tourist, but then they threw me in jail.

But, now, I got to be a hero again!

(And, oh, BTW, Canada and Mexico aren't friends our anymore.)

They let bad guys cross the border with their Fentanyl.)

Isn't it wonderful how things can change?

An Act of God?

 

If God takes a hand in shaping events on earth for mortal man, then one might think that President Trump's assertion that God turned aside that bullet so it did not strike his head, but only his ear, may well be true.

Certainly, fans of Adolf Hitler thought God played an obvious role when an assassin placed a bomb in a briefcase case next to Hitler, and the explosion shredded the room, killed four people, but Hitler walked away with nothing more than a perforated eardrum and shredded trousers. 

Hitler's Shredded Trousers

At the time, it is easy to understand how people could have seen this extraordinary occurrence as a clear sign of divine intervention. And the next step was also understandable: If God wanted Hitler to survive, then whatever Hitler is trying to do, he is doing it with God's blessing. After all, God is protecting Hitler.

But, as President Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, "The Almighty has his own purposes." He was pondering why God would have allowed or willed the Civil war to ravage the nation, to kill so many and to destroy so much.

In the case of Hitler, drawing the conclusion God wanted Hitler to survive must mean that God blessed Hitler, might seem jumping to conclusions. After all, if Hitler had died in July, 1944, the generals who killed him would likely have tried to negotiate an end to the war, and the German Reich might have continued, the  concentration camps might never have been liberated and exposed and that final, complete destruction of the Reich might not have occurred. And how much better to see Hitler putting the gun to his own head than being dead before he ever knew what hit him?

Lincoln speculated that God might have wanted the Civil War to be so prolonged and destructive that every drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's lash (the slave driver) be paid for by a drop of blood paid for by that drawn by the sword; it may seem a harsh retribution from a vengeful God, but "The judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

So, President Trump may be correct: God may be on his side. "Gott Mit Uns," read the belt buckles of the German soldiers in the great wars. 

But it may be a bit to soon to know what God really has in store for us.

The Wrecking Cabinet: Team of Breakers

 

--Ignorantia est betitudo

The Boston Globe today ran an editorial: "Unconventional Trump Cabinet Picks Represent a Clear and Present Danger."

Government Employee

Pointing to Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Russell Vought for Office of Management and Budget, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, the Globe outlined the harm they could do. Vought could prevent aid for Ukraine; RFK JR could gum up vaccine use and approval and Gabbard may be a Manchurian candidate--with known and unknown ties to Putin and who knows who.

Of course, these appointments are all making Trump's most important point: You don't have to know squat to run a big organization. The guys at the top have the easy jobs; all they have to do is to give the general order: "We will sail West," and leave all the details to the executive officer and crew.

This comports well with the sense well entrenched among the common man that the guys at the top, who are making 4000 times what their factory workers make, actually have the easiest jobs. They really don't even have to show up for work.

Some years ago, I found myself at a cocktail party, in some sumptuous setting, speaking with a lawyer for a famous Washington, DC law firm, who looked right out of central casting, white collar and cuffs with a cobalt blue shirt, Armani suit, Farragamo silk tie, star quality hair, and he spoke of his alma mater, Harvard (then Yale Law) and he  mentioned that Larry Summers had recently been deposed/fired as the President at Harvard for being so politically incorrect as to suggest women did not have the head for math and science. 

"It's too bad," he said, "Because Larry had that particular blend of  skill sets which would have made him a really great Harvard President and there aren't that many individuals who have what it takes."

And I could not contain myself, "You've got to be kidding!" I expostulated, "All a President of Harvard has to do is sit back and receive the billionaires who want to donate some millions to Harvard, and to make a commencement address every Spring. It's got to be one of the easiest jobs in the world."

Maybe I just don't know much about the job of college president.

During his first term Trump appointed Wilbur Ross to head the Department of Commerce, and Ross did not attend any of the programs the civil servants had prepared for him to inform him of how the department works, its responsibilities; nor did he read the thick notebooks they prepared. Once on the job, he was shocked to learn the Department of Commerce is really the Department of Data and Information or maybe the Department of Science and Technololgy. Had he gone to the briefings prepared for him, he would have learned he had sway over the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to mention just a few. Ross complained he thought he was taking over the Department of Business--he wasn't interested in all that other stuff.

Perhaps Trump's epitome of appointments was Rick Perry, former governor of Texas who during the primaries said he would eliminate three entire departments to make the federal government smaller: Commerce, Education and then he blanked on the third one. Later he added in Department of Energy. 

So Trump appointed him head of that. 

To his great surprise, it turns out the Department of Energy does stuff like cleaning up sites and sometimes whole towns  contaminated by radioactive accidents, radioactive waste from nuclear plants, and it runs labs like Brookhaven and Oak Ridge. 

It also has to maintain the nuclear silos containing all those missiles. When an Air Force plane accidentally drops a nuclear bomb flying over, say, North Carolina, guess who gets the call? 

Fracking came not from the private sector but came from DOE research. 

Hanford, Washington, a small impoverished town was chosen to make plutonium for atom bombs in the 1940's, and today 10% of the budget of the DOE goes to cleaning up the soil and water table which is washing plutonium toward the Columbia River. If the federal government ever stopped its efforts, Hanford would glow green. Trump won the county Hanford resides in by 25 points. 

To his credit, Perry eventually marveled at all the stuff the DOE does and said Golly Gee, if he'd only known, he would have fought to enhance it, rather than destroy it.

Maybe some of this will happen with Trump's new appointees.

Maybe not.

And it's worth noting that the woman Trump appointed to be the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, tried to intervene in the star chamber organizations at colleges which heard evidence of date rape without the accused boy ever being able to confront his accuser or, in some cases, even having access to the testimony against him. Accusation became tantamount to conviction, and young men who had worked hard to gain admission, were expelled from their colleges. 

Sometimes having someone who is not willing to bend to a politically correct wave is a good thing.

But, overall, the plan is to paralyze government.

If you don't know about all the good, necessary and vital things government does to keep the nation alive and well, then maybe destroying it sounds like a terrific idea.

We'll see how that works.  

Oh, Those Space Lasers!

 

Sometimes, someone gets it so right, there is just nothing to add.

So, from Jon Stewart...this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2LFwMKbr5c

Nobody does it better.

--Mad Dog 

Paul Offit and RFK JR: The Truth v The Big Lie

 

Reading Mein Kampf is not easy reading. It is repetitious, self absorbed, petty and something of a slog, but along the way you realize a few things about Hitler: he is a man who has thought about his life and his experiences and how they shaped him, and he has some genuine insights buried among all the obvious pathology. 

One insight is that it is easier to sell The Big Lie than little ones. 

He notes that all of us tell little lies every day, from idle comments like, "You look lovely today," to other innocent white lies. But most people faced with a big lie, like we lost the war because the Jews stabbed us in the back, is believable because most people think you would not dare to lie so infamously, so it must be true. And it is often hard to marshal counter arguments to big things.

So it is when Dr. Paul Offit exposes the Big Lies Robert Kennedy tells--that polio vaccine has killed more people than it has saved by causing soft tissue tumors or the Big Lie that germ theory saying specific bacteria or viruses cause specific diseases is wrong. 

Where do you even begin with that?

In his op ed in the New York Times,  Offit patiently marches through the specific things RFK JR has said which are simply put, dead wrong: the COVID vaccine is the "deadliest vaccine ever made"; that pasteurization of foods, milk is harmful rather than life saving, “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccination are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public policy;" that AIDS was not caused by HIV but by drug use  "was most likely caused by recreational drugs like poppers and the antiviral drug AZT." that the drug used to treat HIV, AZT was "mass murder."

A cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, Oscar Wilde observed, and RFK taps into the large and deep well of cynicism in the American public. RFK JR knows that by going after the strongest part of the "elite establishment," doctors and medical science, he has the best chance of defeating the establishment. 

Paul Offit, MD

Trump knows that, too.

If you allow any segment of American society to be trusted, respected by the general public that segment, should it turn on you, criticize you or correct you, poses the only threat to your power.

That is why when Tony Fauci heard Trump say you can cure COVID with intravenous bleach and Fauci hit his own forehead, and shook his head in silent disavowal, that was more damaging to Trump than a hundred CNN and MSNBC journalists singing in unison. Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, even Bernie Sanders were never a threat to Trump, but Dr. Fauci was. 

And that's why he and his family got death threats. 

People trusted Fauci, and they ultimately trusted him more than they trusted Trump, or at least Fauci gave them pause. 

Which is why he had to be attacked as the man who gave China the money to develop the SARS-COVID19 virus in that lab in Wuhan with all the talk of "furin cleavage sites" and "gain of function" stuff came from. 

But those were the little lies and could be easily debunked. The Big Lie is that China developed the virus to attack the West and bring Western economies to their knees. That particular lie was a little hard to sell when it was revealed that China suffered as much or more from the pandemic, although that could be dismissed as China bungling. There are still Congressmen who vow to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID 19. 

As Offit, and many others have said, "Good luck with that."

Not that it really matters if China did develop the virus as a weapon and it simply got out of hand. What would we do with that information?

In medicine there's an old adage: don't do a diagnostic test if there is no therapeutic implication. Even if China was the nefarious villain in COVID, what is the therapeutic implication? That we stop studying virus? That we stop trying to monitor viruses in the real world, that we stop trying to see where viruses are leaking from bats to pangolins and hogs? That we stop making vaccines? Or, if we believe in the Chinese lab, you can say it was US NIH money that funded it. 

Nonsense. 

The Chinese don't need our money. The piddling grant from the NIH did not support the Wuhan lab which is enormous and gets enormous support from the Chinese government. 

And, in fact, the Chinese scientist, Zhang Yongzhen, who released the genome of the COVID 19 virus early on, was the man with the best chance of allowing test kits to be made nearly instantaneously, and gave labs around the world a jump on developing a vaccine. 

True, in the finest bureaucratic version that scientist got his wrist slapped by the bureaucrats in the Chinese government, but he was a scientist first, and he behaved like one--and he's still working. And he collaborates with scientists around the world, including Dr. Barney Graham at the NIH who was part of the team which got the COVID vaccine done.

Dr. Zhang Yongzhen

One thing which happened in New Hampshire during the height of the pandemic is the National Guard, those twenty something kids in their camo uniforms, lined up at parking lots, and long streams of people in their cars drove by and got vaccinated. 

Government in action to protect you. 

That was the best argument against the Big Lie. You could pound back your beers in your basement and growl about the elites and the establishment and cleaning out the swamps, but were you really going to sit home and not get vaccinated? 

Some did, but the vast majority voted with their feet and their bare arms, saying, no, well, actually I'll take the vaccine.

When push came to shove most of those cynics who take such glee in giving the finger to those elites who want to control the little guy still know that you don't want a deadly virus, intubation on a respirator, withered limbs, dead children and they embrace germ theory.