The Confabulation Candidate

 

As a medical student, I was confronted with patients who had a form of dementia which deceived the unsuspecting--you could ask a man what he ate for breakfast this morning, and he would confidently tell you, "Ham and eggs, two slices of toast with blueberry marmalade, orange juice and coffee, black, two sugars."

Meanwhile, his daughter, standing behind him with her arms crossed, was rolling her eyes, shaking her head and she would pull you aside and say, "He had oatmeal. Nothing else."

That was called, "confabulation." People who cannot recall, who have big lacunae (holes) in their memory and brain will often just run out a convincing sounding string of details which have nothing to do with real memory, or with reality at all.

There are a variety of ways dementia may reveal itself, but details, the inability to recall details, connects many of them.  Dementia may hide behind cliche` and common expressions, "Well, he's someone you can trust. He's a man of principle."

This morning, making our rounds in Hampton, N.H., my stalwart partner, Ms. McM, and I walked up a driveway looking for a Marie O'B, who was on our computer list as a Democrat who had voted in the last primary, and who we were trying to remind to vote in the election less than 3 weeks from now. There was a sign for a Democratic candidate on the  front lawn, so we thought we were at the right address, but in the window above the garage door was a large Trump sign.

Obadiah Youngblood

Standing over a lawn mower below the sign, in his driveway, a white bearded man wearing a beat up black leather cowboy hat and overalls looked up from abusing the starter cord of his machine, and watched us approach, fingering the starter cord as if he wished it was a trigger on a shotgun. He did not know who we were, or what we wanted. Ms. McM was wearing a KAMALA 2024 baseball hat. It was not clear if he noticed the hat, or if he would be able to read it, if he had.

"We're looking for Marie," Ms. McM told him. 

"Yeah, well, she's in the house," he said, eyeing us warily.

"I'm confused," I told the man, trying to sound friendly. "You've got a Democratic lawn sign, Mike Edgar for state legislature, but you've got a Trump sign, too."

"Oh, well, that's Mike," he said. "Mike and me go way back. His wife did my physical therapy, back in the day."

"So, we can't count on you to vote for any other Democrat?"

"Naw. I'm for Trump. All the rest is liars and lies."

"So, when Trump was President, did you like what he did?"

"Yeah."

"What, in particular, did you like?"
"Oh, well, just all of it. He was just so much better. No bullshit. Just did what he said he'd do. I didn't like the other guys, going way back, even before that. You know them. Just liars."

"But Trump did what you wanted?"

"Yeah."

"Which was what?"

"All of it."

We walked over to the front door, leaving the old man who knew his own mind, but who could not actually come up with any details,  to work on his lawnmower.

"Oh, that's my father," Marie told us. "An obstreperous bastard."

We asked her what the issues she cared most about might be. "Childcare," she said. "And getting Trump out."

Hampton Academy

She is a pretty woman, still in full bloom, dark hair, peachy skin and dark lashes, and she told us she had gone to Hampton schools, from pre school through high school, now a single mother with two kids below school age, and she had to live with her father because there is no affordable housing in town and she said she makes a solid six figure salary. But daycare alone makes owning a home unfeasible. Her parents do not want to do day care for little kids. She has a daughter and she is incensed Trump has made abortion illegal. "He's taken away freedom."

My partner said, "You ought to come to our Democratic Party Committee meetings, first Tuesday of every month, 6 PM. Lot of kindred spirits there for you."

"Oh, well, if you could make it kid friendly, I'd come. But no way I can do anything after work, except tend to the kids."

We walked off down her driveway. Her father was now limping along behind his lawnmower, carving wobbly lines in the lawn, still trying, no doubt, to remember exactly what it was President Trump had done for him.

Navalny, Putin, Trump: Connected Dots

 

The New Yorker put Alexis Navalny's image on its cover this week and I thought: Donald Trump is about to take over the government in three weeks--there's an election going on: Why would you be thinking about a Russian dissident, even if he was murdered by Vladimir Putin?

This man who died 8 months ago, in Russia. He's not of the current moment.

Right now, we've got our own problems, right here in the U.S. of A.

I resisted reading it. 

But after I got done with Adam Gopnik's typically trenchant analysis of the Trump problem--"No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune."--I slid by the article on whether birds can talk to each other, and another on Kamala Harris's chances, and there was "Prison Diaries," and I said, "Okay, I'll read just the first entry, and then move on to the Cartoon Caption Contest."

But, after the first entry, I was hooked.

Nalvany's voice, even in English, is clear and beguiling--it's like reading Dostoevsky  as read by Andrei  Codrescu, droll, chatty, absurdist, intoxicating.

"The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it's a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it's not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves."

Nalvany is in prison, and not one of those white collar prisons for rich aristocrats who fudged their book keeping and wound up scamming banks for a few tens of millions of dollars, a Russian prison where you sit on a wood bench under a portrait of Putin for hours so you can engage in "disciplinary activity."

But he is not one to feel sorry for himself. He says he made his choices and accepts the consequences, unlike the Ukrainian parents who were "Just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighboring country, announces that you are all 'Nazis' and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin." So, "Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs."

As he sits in prison, more and more charges are brought against him, as the opaque Russian state moves against him, which is to say, Putin moves against him. 

"Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials."

Finally, Navalny realizes how much Putin and his cadre really fear him: they move him to a gulag in the far north, the Artic Circle. It's not enough to have him deep inside a stone prison 300 miles from Moscow; he has to be really far away for Putin to feel safe, where the temperatures outside are -26 degrees F.

"Today I went for a walk, got frozen and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character's dead horse trick  in 'The Revenant.' I don't think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes."

I have never seen that movie, but I am sure I know exactly what that trick was.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot roasted elephant in Yamal?"

Navalny died almost exactly 3 years after he returned to Russia and was arrested as soon as he landed. 

His fate was sealed the moment he stepped off that plane.

Vladimir Putin was never going to allow him to live, much less to speak to the Russian people. 

One wonders why Putin bothered to prolong the agony, but as you read Navalny, you understand. Drawing out the process plays into the narrative.

Putin is not a ruthless king, nor a Stalin who simply shoots people in the head. In Putin's Russia, they pretend there are laws and processes and they even have lawyers. But all that is just for show. 

I know what you are going to say--how different are we here in the USA? After all, Jeffrey Epstein died in prison and nobody asked any questions. Donald Trump was President.

Someone asked Donald Trump about what he was willing to do as President: Was he willing to order to have people killed?  "Oh?" Trump said, "You don't think American Presidents kill people?"

Of course, President Obama had ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden and celebratory crowds gathered outside the White House to congratulate him.

Donald Trump does not ask about the law. He asks about the judge. 

Putin, of course, is the law. But Trump can, in fact, exert his will through others now. He has a Supreme Court which no longer even pretends to care about the law, about precedent, which has made separation of church and state unconstitutional, which declared billions spent to support candidates as simply free speech, which embraces the idea we have the best government money can buy, which, in his second term, has said it will reverse gay marriage and is open to considering allowing state laws to forbid inter racial marriage. (The last oddity is especially odd since it was floated by a Black justice who is married to a White woman who seemed to embrace this idea; odd, of course, unless he is looking for a way out of his marriage short of divorce. Having your marriage set aside without the cost of divorce lawyers may have some appeal. Or maybe this was simply a sly appeal to Black men who Trump has been courting.)

                                          

When Hitler invaded Poland, he claimed he was defending Germans living within its borders, and the same for Czechoslovakia.  Autocrats are always rescuing some down trodden group, sometimes on horseback, riding shirtless. Putin is rescuing Ukraine from Nazis, although nobody has yet claimed he has crossed the border on horseback, shirtless. Trump is the father of in vitro fertilization and the protector of women. And like most strong man wannabes, he is, well, strong, or at least he talks as if he were strong, and, well, a man.

But there will always be Trumps, Putin's, Hitler's, Orban's, Mussolini's, and, for that matter, Jim Jones's around. 

Tough Guy

                                 

                                 

Not Such a Tough Guy: Sic Semper Tyranis

The only real question is whether there are enough true believers to drink their Kool Aide.

 

The Roaring Crowd, The Quiet Assassins

 

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

--Abraham Lincoln

Ne timeas populares auditum; timent rugitum!

--Fear not the demagogue; fear his roaring crowd

Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor...[He] nonetheless [has] considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following...To grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers--the sinister truth asserts itself...One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted and have to work hard to even remember the outrages of a few weeks past...No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune...Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives."

--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Oct. 21,2024

We are slouching toward Bethlehem now, the election just a few weeks away.  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as William Butler Yeats observed.

We will find out if there are more of them or more of us.

They, of course, do not care about that question; they are determined to prevail whether they are the majority or not because, as Mr. Trump has asserted, in his world losing the election is simply not possible, no matter how the votes are counted. He has already declared himself the winner no matter what anyone or what millions may say. He cannot possibly lose because he writes his own reality and his masses have drunk that Kool Aide. 

In my office, day after day, I daily interview the vampires, the body/mind snatched, who are indistinguishable from normal, ordinary citizens. It's not the MAGA hatted man who chills your soul; it's the guy who looks normal, until he opens his mouth and answers your question about the most important issue to him with, "Oh, the border."

Stockholm Syndrome

 

And this guy lives in New Hampshire! So what border is he worried about? There's the border to the north, only about 3 hours drive, and then there's that border down in Texas, 2400 miles and 36 hours drive away.

There's the woman who may laugh about Haitians eating cats in Ohio--but that was just a joke. We take him seriously, not literally. 

As the bard has noted, the executioner's face is always well hidden.

It's Them or Us

 

There are many possible scenarios which may play out on or about November 5th. 

Several of them would put Donald Trump back in the White House.

Fewer would put  Kamala Harris there.

Gods Taking Sides

There have been times in history when concerted dark forces amalgamated to sweep everything before them. Once, Germany chose to follow a man who found a simple solution to the bewildering array of problems with unemployment, currency collapse, hyperinflation by discovering the Jews were behind it all, along with the Communists, who were mostly Jewish anyway, and he was able to ally himself with Italy to protect his Southern front, a pastiche of neighbors--parts of Czechoslovakia, and Romania and Hungary and if he had only been able to seduce more Americans, his plan would never have failed.

To be sure, there were many reasons to believe the Americans would favor Germany over Britain and its allies: Americans were every bit as racist as Germany--they just chose a different group to vilify. But Henry Ford, Father Coughlin and a host of others including the American Bund, who held huge rallies at Madison Square Garden were all Hitler fans.

As it turned out, though, more Americans drifted toward democracy than dictatorship/monarchy and ultimately the forces of darkness succumbed to the forces of light and progress, which is to say, science and the all men are created equal thing. 

Now, we have the guy who cunningly chose a less definable scapegoat, a "they" who he sees sweeping across our Southern border from "shithole countries," rapists, insane asylum escapees, drug cartel gang members, Haitians who will eat your pet, dark skinned men who want to rape your wife and daughter, if your wife and daughter are White. 

And his party is also against people who insist on telling you their pronouns, who want to not just choose a different sex for themselves, but who want to seize your children at school and change their sex, or make them gay--you decide which is worse--and they control the weather, and start fires with space lasers, and none of that seems at all outlandish, because, you know, you heard it on TV.

And so, if there are more people who want to believe all that than there are who do not want to go back to the days when women could not have credit  cards unless their husbands allowed it, to the days when restaurants, hotels and swimming pools were racially segregated, to the good ol' days, when anti lynching laws could not be passed in Congress, well then, we'll go where the American people, in their wisdom want to go.

Oh, We'll Be Back

Those Pet Eating Democrats! (Phantom Loaner)

 

Everybody's saying it. And I saw it on TV, so it must be true.

All those ketchup ladened French Fries thrown against the wall, were part of a special "Cat and Dog" dish he likes.

And there are miles of caravans, thousands of criminals and insane asylum escapees headed your way, especially if you live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia or Arizona all because they want to go to his massive rallies, which are bigger than any rallies in the history of the world and definitely not boring. 

Those are the best places for out-of-staters to feast. Ohio was just the beginning.

South Carolinians are crossing the border into North Carolina and not the best ones--they don't send their best; they send the pet eaters.

And don't get me started on Maryland, which is where, you know, the Wire happened, and all those bodies wound up in the vacant houses and Hannibal Lecter had a field day. Jodie Foster was lucky to escape with her life. Oh, lovely Jodie. Poor Jodie, you know she was a child hooker before she became an FBI agent? Very sad. And Maryland shares a border with Pennsylvania: Marylanders are just pouring across that Southern border into Pennsylvania by the thousands, looking for pets, and women, White women. They eat the pets and rape the women in Pennsylvania. 

Is Hillary out of jail yet? You know we didn't lock her up long enough. I bet she's headed to Springfield right now. She has a taste for a certain type of cat, I don't know which type, but she's a very nasty woman with a big cat appetite.

Did you know he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and nobody would blink an eye and his fans would still vote for him? Everyone says so.

 He's done worse, really. Raping that woman, who was definitely not his type, in the back of that store and we won't even talk about Jeffrey Epstein, but you'd be surprised what we are finding out about him! That was the Clintons who did Jeffrey, who was a very nice guy. A good friend of Alan Dershowitz, you know.

And Alan just changed parties: He's no longer a Democrat. He couldn't stand being forced to eat dogs, which is what all Democrats do. But Republicans don't stop at the cats and dogs--they go after the children, or at least White children. White Christian children.

But the best part is, if you vote right, you'll never have to vote again, ever. Which is such a pain. Having to wait in line with all those foul, stinky immigrants the Democrats imported to vote for them but are now voting for Republicans, which is just so perfect. Really.

Really, I don't know why I bother. 

You can take a bullet for Democracy and all you get is complaints.

Lenacapavir: Not a Vaccine But a Solution for HIV/AIDS?

For forty years Tony Fauci labored away at the NIH trying to develop a vaccine to prevent HIV/AIDS, and failed. He consistently said that because of the peculiar nature of HIV, it's ability to attack and disable T cells, to destroy the very immune system which protects against infection, a Vaccine against HIV was probably never going to happen.

Many private companies have failed to develop a vaccine or a preventative molecule.

But now a drug company, Gilead, has developed a molecule, lenacapavir, which binds to the viral mechanism required for viral replication, a classic anti viral drug. Taken twice a year, it apparently prevents HIV infection safely and effectively. Who needs a vaccine if you've got a drug to prevent the disease?

So, where are the headlines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post? 

HIV DEFEATED! 

AN END TO THE SCOURGE OF HIV!

Apparently, not so fast.

While the drug can be produced inexpensively and used to great effect, as it has been during large trials in Africa, the company which makes it, Gilead wants to repeat the rewards of its discovery. That means charging $40,000 a year in the United States, whereas in the 3rd world, it can be profitable at $40 a year.

As of 2024 the drug, produced by Gilead, costs US$42,250 for the first year. A study presented in July 2024^[22] found that mass production of a generic version would allow a profit margin of 30% on an annual price of $40 if used by 10 million people. The authors said that lowering HIV levels significantly would probably require 60 million people to take the drug preventative.

--Wikipedia

According to Endocrine lore, when Banting and Best discovered insulin in 1922, they sold the patent rights for $1. They wanted to get insulin produced in industrial quantities because they had wards full of dying kids with Type 1 diabetes. Money did not matter to them. It was all about the kids. Every month's delay meant more kids literally dying before their eyes in Toronto.

Mother holds Child with Diabetes 1922

Now, there is a difference between a vaccine and an antiviral: a vaccine might be used once and provide years of protection, but there are vaccines, like the flu vaccine, which require annual injections and if this drug requires twice yearly injections, would it not be almost as good? Currently COVID vaccines are  twice yearly vaccines.

But here, with HIV and this new drug, we have a financial structure and an ethos working against public health and individual fates.

1$ for the patent to Insulin

CAN THE GOOD GUYS WIN THIS ONE? STRATEGY & TACTICS

 

If Strategy is the grand plan and tactics are the steps you actually take to execute that grand plan, then what is the strategy to beat Mr. Trump and his MAGA hordes? And what does that imply for tactics?

Mad Dog believes the strategy is to take the offense and that means committing to humiliating the Donald and his masses of Orcs. Only by calling them out for what they are, shattering the fantasies they peddle, push past the amnesia of what he did and how that played out last time.

The alternative is singing kumbaya and sitting quietly with our hands folded, as if politics were a tea party which requires not raisings one's voice. 

As today's NYT editorial noted Donald Trump and his minions spin their own version of memory and history: Senator Katie Britt of Alabama exhorted the Republican National Convention with the stirring words that Donald Trump gave us the "greatest economy in history."

Of course, inflation was low during part of his tenure, when gas prices dipped below $3 a gallon--but selective amnesia, when gas prices were that low, there was no place to drive to--stores, restaurants were closed and the economy careened toward a second Great Depression because President Trump refused to believe we had a pandemic, despite the box cars outside hospitals being used as temporary morgues to store the bodies, and when he finally came around, he had his own creative ideas about finding a cure for COVID--intravenous injections of bleach.

We would be well served if Governor Walz and Vice President reminded everyone face to face with Trump, Vance and the other Magats out there.

Don't Eat Me, Donald!

But we cannot depend on that happening. We have to act ourselves, in our own small towns, along the highways and byways, to express our opinions, which is our most fundamental right, upon which all other rights depend. 

One Weird, Creepy, Senile

One thing Mad Dog would like to see is the placement in public places of signs expressing unhappiness with Trump and his MAGA cause. 

Objections have been raised this may violate some local laws, signs needing names and addresses of sponsors.

But there are two things to note:

1. The other side already does this: Examples from my bike ride around Hampton below.

No Attribution

Political Statement

2. Local towns and states cannot defy the United States Constitution in violating the First Amendment which protects freedom of expression, particularly of political thought.

That is found in McIntyre v Ohio Board of elections:

Held: Section 3599.09(A)'s prohibition of the distribution of anonymous campaign literature abridges the freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment. Pp.341-357.

(a) The freedom to publish anonymously is protected by the First Amendment, and, as Talley indicates, extends beyond the literary realm to the advocacy of political causes. Pp.341-343.

(b) This Court's precedents make abundantly clear that the Ohio Supreme Court's reasonableness standard is significantly more lenient than is appropriate in a case of this kind. Although Talley concerned a different limitation than § 3599.09(A) and thus does not necessarily control here, the First Amendment's protection of anonymity nevertheless applies. Section 3599.09(A) is not simply an election code provision subject to the "ordinary litigation" test set forth in Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, and similar cases. Rather, it is a regulation of core political speech. Moreover, the category of documents it covers is defined by their content-only those publications containing speech designed to influence the voters in an election need bear the required information. See, e. g., First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U. S. 765,776-777. When a law burdens such speech, the Court applies "exacting scrutiny,"

---

335

upholding the restriction only if it is narrowly tailored to serve an overriding state interest. See, e. g., id., at 786. Pp.343-347.

(c) Section 3599.09(A)'s anonymous speech ban is not justified by Ohio's asserted interests in preventing fraudulent and libelous statements and in providing the electorate with relevant information. The claimed informational interest is plainly insufficient to support the statute's disclosure requirement, since the speaker's identity is no different from other components of a document's contents that the author is free to include or exclude, and the author's name and address add little to the reader's ability to evaluate the document in the case of a handbill written by a private citizen unknown to the reader. Moreover, the state interest in preventing fraud and libel (which Ohio vindicates by means of other, more direct prohibitions) does not justify § 3599.09(A)'s extremely broad prohibition of anonymous leaflets. The statute encompasses all documents, regardless of whether they are arguably false or misleading. Although a State might somehow demonstrate that its enforcement interests justify a more limited identification requirement, Ohio has not met that burden here. Pp. 348-353.

It is weird to claim immigrants are eating pets; weird to say police could bring law and order if only they were allowed to get violent enough just briefly; weird to call Hannibal Lecter "the late great," weird to ponder, at a rally which is worse electrocution or being eaten by a shark; weird to claim the cure for COVID could be intravenous bleach; Weird to say Kim Jung Un of North Korea writes such beautiful letters Trump is now best buddies with him;  creepy/weird to speculate about dating your daughter because she is just so hot.

So, we ought to get out there and say our piece and not allow the other side to intimidate or dominate us.