And Alabama In Between

Writing in response to a NYT article by Timothy Eagen, a correspondent said:




Sorry Tim, but you're wrong. Truth won't ever win out when half the population refuses to acknowledge it. I just spent Thanksgiving with my Alabama-living, hyper conservative Christian in-laws, and was absolutely amazed by their version of reality. Roy Moore? Those child-dating allegations have been debunked. The Clinton economic expansion? That was because of Reagan. W's recession? Clinton's fault. The Obama recovery? That was because of the GOP house. The ACA? More people have lost insurance than gained it, but the liberal media won't tell you that. Climate change? It's just cyclical; scientists are lying and/or it's God's will. Did I mention Christians are oppressed because they can't lead a mass prayer at football games? What about the uptick in violence against minorities? Well, you know Muslims throw gay people off buildings so the US isn't so bad.

There is literally no reasoning with these people. Down is up, and up is always by the grace of the GOP. Democrats are evil; the media can't be trusted* and should be investigated for perpetuating "Fake News!"; Donald Trump is extremely smart because he didn't lose the money he inherited (despite the fact that we don't know anything about his finances because he won't release his tax returns, which to them, is not suspicious).

Don't have faith that reason will win the day, because to these people, their worldview is reasonable.

*Certain exemptions apply: media that reenforces your preconceptions is fair and balanced.

We have joked in New Hampshire that our state is Portsmouth, Manchester, Durham and Alabama in between. (There are versions of this for many states from Pennsylvania to North Carolina) but we had no idea.


The detail of what these folks in Alabama are like is stunning.

And to think, we fought to keep these guys in the Union.


We have Union dead buried in cemeteries from Hampton to Holderness. And this is what they died for? To keep these people as our countrymen?

Yale Psychiatrist Diagnoses Trump As Certifiable: Poor, Wimpy Yale

If ever we needed a clue about why Donald Trump has succeeded in capturing and enrapturing his base, we need look no further than the letter to the editor in the New York Times from somebody, Dr. Bandy X.  Lee, who is supposed to be a "forensic psychiatrist" at the Yale School of Medicine. (Yale, highly ranked by U.S. News and World Reports--the definition of fake news if there ever was one. But that's another story.)

"We urge the public and the lawmakers of this country to push for an urgent evaluation of the president, for which we are in the process of developing a separate but independent expert panel, capable of meeting and carrying out all medical standards of care.

BANDY X. LEE, NEW HAVEN

The writer is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine."

So now, we have Dr. Lee and Yale suggesting a solution to our problem with President Dotard: simply put him in the care of "expert panel" of august psychiatrists who can judge his sanity and his worthiness to command.
Oh, Rush Limbaugh will love this one.

If anyone is detached from reality, who do you think is the more likely candidate: Dr. Lee or President Donald Trump?


P.S. I doubled checked: This is not from The Onion. It's from the NY Times

On Dying Unnoticed: Kodokushi

There is some saying that God notices every sparrow who drops dead to earth.

Yesterday, in the NYT an article about elderly Japanese dying unnoticed in their apartments drew over 200 anguished replies within hours.


Apparently, owing to basic changes in Japanese society, thousands of Japanese men and women now in their 70's and 80's and 90's are living in vast tracks of bleak government buildings and when one dies in one of those apartments, the only way anyone knows is a stink from the decaying body calls attention to the fact.
A new industry of body removal and apartment decontamination has sprung up.

Kodokushi

One man was not discovered for an estimated 3 years, and the cockroaches and mice had picked his skeleton clean.


The reasons for this phenomenon include changes in the economy so that multigenerational family homes have disappeared and Japanese have few children, so if you are a widow and your one offspring dies before you do, there is nobody on earth to notice when you die.


A woman in the story arranged with her neighbor to call for the body removers if she has not raised her window shades in the morning.

Death was Noted

Talk about living in isolation. It's not really the idea of dying unnoticed so much as living unnoticed which got to me.


As we age in America, our kids grown and moved away, we become less and less relevant, less important, and we accept this. We retire. More than retire, we withdraw. One of the things about continuing to work is if you don't show up, somebody may notice.

They did not die alone; small comfort

We express our opinions and nobody listens. As Bill Clinton noted, leaving office was liberating because he no longer had to be so careful about everything he said; he could say anything he wanted to say, no filters. Trouble was, he added, "Nobody cares what I say now."
Of course some elderly folks still command attention--Warren Buffet, the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump.
But the day they retire, well they'd have to pay somebody to go find their bodies.

In American Concentration Camp

Watch those dottering preachers on TV, all those prosperity church men and women.  They will get on TV and exhort their congregations as long as they can because as long as they can get on screen, they matter. They matter because the money keeps flowing in--just send your cash and God will Bless YOU!

Somebody noticed

This has got to be the ultimate alienation:  I do not matter. I'm just road kill.
At least the crows, ravens and vultures pay attention.
The circle of life.

The Alienated Liberal

Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers?
--Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Mad Dog was liberal once. Now he's alienated. You know, you grow.

Pia Guerra

Mad Dog actually enjoys the Dotard's tweets every morning. After his morning ablutions, Mad Dog  checks in with the Pink Puffer.  Dotard tweets sharpen his senses. They make him feel superior and alive.
It's his own tribe drives him crazy.

Alienated Left

It all starts with NPR in the morning, on the drive to work.
Mad Dog starts screaming at the radio.
And he likes NPR. He sends them checks every year.

A sampler:

1. A story about transgender patients who just want to be accepted for who they are.

2. A story about the opioid crisis which suggests if only the uncaring Trumpian hordes would allow Democrats to fund drug rehab programs overdoses and addiction would end by New Year's Day.

3. A story about a woman who out-ed Al Frankin as a misogynist, groper, sexual harasser who should resign his Senate seat.

 4.  A story on global warming causing "invasive species" to proliferate in the Mediterranean and other places.

+The transgender story:  Mad Dog wholeheartedly agrees people should not be attacked, belittled or scorned because of their sexual preference, identity etc. There is no excuse for trying to hurt someone who has not hurt you.  And Mad Dog believes homosexuals do not "choose" to be different (although they may embrace it.) They simply are. Gay is not a disease. But transgender folks are different, qualitatively, from gays and if you sit in a room with enough transgender folks for long enough, you see that difference very plainly. There is a reason they had to stop the transgender program at Johns Hopkins because of a suicide rate which exceeded 30%.

+The Opioid Story: People dying of overdoses, young people addicted to heroin, meth, cocaine, squandering their youth, getting heart infections, hep C, AIDs is alarming and sad.  But to suggest all we need to do is to change government policies is not just naïve and wishful thinking, it's bound to reap a back lash once people figure out this has been a wasteful, unsuccessful approach. 
Watched a meeting chaired by Steny Hoyer, during which someone mentioned "compassion fatigue" very common among EMT's, ER doctors, nurses who see the same guy over dosing dozens of times,  readmitted for heart valve surgery for infected valves from the use of dirty needles.
 The collapse of the "war on poverty" programs of the Great Society, disillusioned the Joe Sixpack, lunch pail crowd who became cynical and hostile when they saw mindless embrace of programs which are bound to fail. We may well see the same for our war against the opioid epidemic.
You want to really go at this problem: study Portugal. Go all in: legalize every drug and treat this like a public health problem with tough love.

+The Accuser Du Jour.:   Mad Dog is sorry to admit it, and he knows he is inviting vituperative response, but he has the feeling some of the women lining up to be "Me Too" are just enjoying their moment too much. He knows, he knows, it is so difficult to come forward, but really?

Yes, get your revenge. Unload on the jerks who made your life miserable, but remember, there are phony accusers out there as the NY Times op ed said today. 
Not every woman always speaks the truth. The Duke Lacrosse story, the UVA Rolling Stone story demonstrate that much, surely. "Believe the women" can be taken too far.

And playing into the hands of the Roy Moore crowd by stabbing Al Franken is putting your own satisfaction over the needs of the nation. This may sound Machiavellian. Should we excuse Franken to protect the Senate?

 But there's another reason to give Franken a pass: the evidence, such as we have it is very different in his case and Moore's case. The news accounts provide enough data to conclude, given the detail of the stories about Moore, there is a pattern there,  attested to by enough different women to conclude his was a pattern of malicious behavior sustained for decades. 
About Franken, not so much. He might be as slimy as Moore, but he might also be simply boorish, puerile and unfunny. I'm sorry but a photo WHICH FRANKEN KNEW WAS BEING TAKEN AS HE WAS MUGGING FOR THE CAMERA may be stupid and tasteless and gross,  but it is a far different thing from a 40 year old man, secretly, in an automobile, running his hand up the skirt of a 14 year old. Can you not see that?


Of course, it has been said we believe the accusers if the accused is a conservative Republican but not if the accused is a liberal Democrat. 
You believe what you want to believe. 


But the stories and the public testimony and evidence looks vastly different in these two cases--only the Rush Limbaugh crowd can see it the other way.

+ Invasive Species:  As anyone who has read about evolution knows: evolution does not anoint favored species because it has favorites, nor does it designate "invasive species." 
Environments change; species take advantage of these changes to claim a niche and they thrive. Just because there's a fish or a tree which you lovefor some reason, does not mean we are seeing tragedy writ large on the planet if that fish or tree is replaced by a new species which is more successful in the new environment, which has spelled the end of your favorite. "Native species" once replaced other species. There is no plant or animal which belongs in a given place, which has a right to that space.

Okay, Mad Dog's  done it now. He's said it. 
Hate him. 
Spew your bile. 
But there it is.

Guns in America

Tonight, at a party,  I chatted up the chairman of the Maine House of Representatives committee on Health and Human Services. 

I asked her what she thought we ought to do about guns and she started talking about mass shootings. 

Then she talked about the level of gun violence in our country.

Then she mentioned we are #1 in the number of guns per capita in the world.

Then I asked her again what we ought to do about guns.  
She said she didn't know. 
A refreshingly honest answer.

The "gun problem" is actually at least four different problems:

1. Mass shootings with guns by homicidal maniacs.

2. Street shootings with guns unrelated to robberies or other crimes, where men get into arguments at dance clubs, or one kid insults another kid's sneakers. 

3. The number of deaths by gun, which includes suicides and accidents at home, where some kids shoots his brother while playing with a gun, or household disputes.

4. The use of guns in commission of crimes. 

Trying to stop the mass shooter may have you looking at identifying psychos by various means, but trying to stop street shootings might mean you can't allow handguns to be sold to just any kid with $50 at the local Walmart.  Accidental shootings of kids by kids might require some sort of fingerprint recognition system on triggers. The use of guns in crimes is likely insoluble. Read "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" and you know that there is a whole underground industry, generations old, devoted to providing working tools to America's street criminals.

Whatever legislatures do, I doubt America would be successful in a gun usurpation/confiscation program.  You can bury guns in your back yard and dig it up a year later and go shoot your wife, no matter what the local police do.

I do not have the answers. 
But neither do those who reflexively cry out for "gun control" after every mass shooting. 

More on Dogs for Wounded Vets

Currently re reading Bruce Catton's fabulous "Grant Takes Command" and am struck by the organization and attention to detail which were the prime virtues Grant required to be successful.

Most people understand it was his pugnacity and perseverance which set him apart from the unsuccessful generals who preceded him--the timid and the halt--but what made his campaigns successful was a capacity to organize millions of food rations, railroad tracks, locomotives, pontoon boats, soldiers and their commanders, and, of course, horses and mules. 

Without healthy horses and mules you could not pull up heavy artillery pieces, canons and howitzers to win battles and that meant you had to arrange for feed for the horses, care and maintenance of the horses' health.  In fact, horses were so depleted before the crucial Tennessee campaign headed toward Lookout Mountain, the attacks planned had to be halted, because for want of a nail the shoe was lost for want of a shoe the horse was lost...so the army depended on animals in the mid nineteen century.

Rick Yount, Sub contractor, making $ from puppies

All this made me return to the kerfuffle surrounding the discontinuation of the Dogs for Wounded Warriors program at Walter Reed and Ft. Belvoir, announced on Veterans Day and attributed to Donald Trump and his heartlessness, President Heel Spurs.


“I’m never going to say we do everything 100 percent, but this is my baby and you’re going to potentially bid it out to some other organization without telling me why.” 
--Rick Yount, CEO Warrior Canine Connection

The actual name of the program is Warrior Canine Connection, which is run as a private company, I gather, which subcontracts with another company called MD Consultants and the WCC apparently had fewer than twenty employees who raised puppies and who helped train them to be "service dogs." Almost nothing about this company has been reported, total number of employees, budget, number of other enterprises, whether or not it is a puppy mill or a big hearted ASPCA type organization. Questions about the health of the dogs had been raised and answered but there has been virtually no reporting on:
1/ How much money was Rick Yount paid to run this program? 
2/ Did the funds come from the VA, the Defense Department, the taxpayers, or the soldiers who got the dogs?
3/ Were there other companies which looked better to the officials who cancelled this contract and decided to "bid it out?" Did other companies offer better service for a better price?
4/ How do you assess the value of such a program, warm and fuzzy as it may be, to the wounded warriors?
5/ What has happened to the dogs and the patients who received these dogs over time?  Have the patients and dogs lived happily ever after or have the dogs been starved or abandoned by their wounded warriors?
The Walter Reed spokeswoman suggested the wound warriors would continue to get their dogs but a new program to supply these dogs would have better metrics and better supervision. In other words, as in any health care intervention, you want to know how successful it is and at what cost and whether or not there might be a better way to render the services.


Of course, the reporting of this discontinuation made it sound like the ultimate in uncaring cruelty on the part of the Army, but that story came from the jilted Rick Yount, mainly. Was the real story simply the Army found a better product at a better price and Yount portrayed this as a heartless act of an uncaring bureaucracy?

Therapy Dogs for Vets: How Trump Plays the Soft Headed Left

You expect people who embrace Judge Roy Moore, who cannot be shaken from their adulation of the Dotard to be unappetizing, and they rarely disappoint. You know there are people in the world like that.

What is really dismaying is when people who you agree with disappoint you, when their passion becomes mere, unthinking stridency, and you see the soft, spongey, crumbling side of the liberal persuasion.

For Mad Dog, this has come to pass over the great Therapy Dog kerfluffle. The forces of Trumpland discovered the VA had a program which brought loving dogs to Vets who had suffered PTSD.  Suddenly, one day, the people at the VA offices which administered this program were told to cease and desist and they were out of a job.

Of course, these people, now out of a job, went viral on the internet and ardent anti Trumpies saw this as what it was, a gesture of rejection of compassion. For the liberal folks, this was simply one more example of cruelty coming from the Bannon disrupters.

But, of course, the Trump tough guys touted it as an example of bleeding heart liberals not considering the hard facts of reality and gushing over a boondoggle of a program. Here is a Dotard who proclaimed the NFL is going soft because it has rules designed to prevent head injuries and Traumatic Brain Disorder; this puppy love story is perfect for him to look tough, hard headed and no nonsense while making the cooing dog loving liberal folks soft headed rather than soft hearted.

If you need a dog to love, let your mother buy you one; don't expect the Army to find you one.

There was an old saw at the cancer hospital: "More people make a living off cancer than die from it," which was likely inaccurate but it did convey the cynicism of those who saw that from every misfortune was a fortune waiting to be made that some would cash in on--war profiteers, whether the war on cancer or the war against terrorism.

Twitter filled with indignant expressions of loathing for the cold hearted curs who had cut off this program.  The commercial for a therapy dog program in Europe was posted.  The Royal Dutch Guide Dog Foundation commissioned a commercial to sell its product which won a Gouden Loeki award in 2014--the Dutch version of our Clio awards which often go to American ad agencies for their Super Bowl ads.
The ad, linked below, is a tear jerker, but the very existence of the ad should tell us something. These folks are SELLING something and heart warming as puppies and wounded warrior stories may be, we have to step back and THINK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DnMzW1qJuU



The title of the ad is, "We provide help not only for those who cannot see, but for those who have seen too much."
And you see a horrible war scene and a soldier seeing things which will cause his PTSD and then the warm embrace of the dog licking his face, bringing him back to serenity and true mental health.

But think of this program, with its employees, its "trained therapy dog specialists" and their contracts, their new careers as "therapy dog trainers" and all this going on at a hospital like Walter Reed, where truly horrific injuries are treated by doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and into this atmosphere of highly trained, real professionals, you have introduced this "therapy dog" program.

Of course, Mad Dog sees people every day who have no more anxiety or real illness than your aunt Tillie but they have their little therapy dog with them, from whom they cannot be separated on airplane or doctor's office or subway, because the dog is their "therapy." It is the old lie of creating an illness out of mere anxiety, or in the case of the very real illness of PTSD, (which results in suicides and much misery,) it is the case of creating a treatment without scientific validation.

For those liberals who have been brought to tears, brought to rage over the cancellation of this program, Mad Dog can only say, "See how others see you. Get control. Move on. Focus on the real enemy."
Donald Trump has used things like this to make liberals look ridiculous time and again and he is doing it again and those gushing liberals are playing right into his hands.

Of course, Mad Dog has no way of knowing who initiated the cancellation of the Wound Warriors Dog Program, whether the Dotard even knew about it before it was done. But if the Pink Puffer Fish did sign off on it, you have to ask yourself: "Why?" Why would he cancel any program for our sacred Vets our Wounded Warriors? 
And you have to imagine him seeing before him those who would react to this. Possibly, there would be some veterans or families of veterans who might narrow their eyes and go, "Huh?" But surely there would be those moist eyed fools, who would play right into his hands.