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.

The Fifth Risk Meets Project 2025

Those who voted for Donald Trump clearly wanted Mr. Trump to disrupt, to ignore precedent, which to their way of thinking is to reject "woke," and now they may (or may not) get that.

As Michael Lewis documented in his 2018 book, "The Fifth Risk," Trump was never able to do much more than lower taxes on billionaires and build a part of a wall on the Southern Border, which often fell over or was scaled or tunneled under, so it did not much stem the tide of cross border crossings.

His impotence in "draining the swamp" derived mostly from an ignorance of what the swamp is, does and what keeps it full.

To chose just one of dozens of examples, he sent a man named Thomas Pyle to disembowel the Department of Energy, as a part of a "Landing Team" to assault the department, but the man never actually attended all the briefings about the Department's operations, so the landing wound up being a bunch of commandos seeking out woke civil servants, who had attended meetings about the Social Cost of Carbon, but the many jobs of the Department of Energy remained untouched--as it turns out if you are trying to negotiate with Iran to prevent it from making nuclear weapons, you have to know which parts of their nuclear program they must stop to prevent them from making a nuclear weapon. And for that you needed the physicists at the Department of Energy.

Obadiah Youngblood

Trump's shock troops simply never discovered what places like the DOE actually do. The names of the various Departments are misleading. The Department of Commerce actually has little to do with business, directly. It is really the Department of Statistics. 

National labs like Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia simulate nuclear explosions so we don't have to do actual explosive tests to test our nuclear arsenal--all that is not in the Defense Department but in the Department of Energy.

It's confusing and Trump never got un-confused.

Rick Perry, who Trump sent to head DOE, who said the DOE didn't do anything worth doing, never bothered to get briefed on a single program run by the DOE. 

But the DOE did provide low interest loans to Tesla so it could build a factory to make electronic (environmentally friendly) cars.  But now, of course, Mr. Musk may find that inefficient. He doesn't want to talk about that.

A lot of the DOE budget went to maintaining the nuclear arsenals in their siloes scattered about the country, and another big share to cleaning up the mess generated in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The DOE still spends billions to clean up the radioactive mess it unleashed in Hanford, Washington between 1943 and 1987 making nuclear weapons. Trump wants to shut down that down, part of cleaning up the swamp, or more accurately, allowing the swamp to just sit there and glow. Hanford's county voted by 25 points for Trump.  

One might say, well then, if that's what they want, let 'em glow.

The DOE is not really a department of energy--it's a department of science, figuring out what to do with nuclear waste from nuclear plants. Also tracking down and finding people who have sarin gas canisters they plan to release in football stadiums or subways.

Fracking was a DOE invention. Now, of course it's all "drill baby drill" for the MAGA crowd, but it was conceived of and launched by the government, specifically, the DOE.

Another thing we were lucky the Trump men did not manage to understand is the role of the DOE in defending and developing the electric grid. In the red West, locals shot up electrical transformers and cut wires to Apple and Google centers. The government had to protect these icons of free enterprise from crazies.

As time allows, Mad Dog may work through other goals of 2025: turning the USA into a Christian nation, abolishing the Federal Reserve, replacing the income tax with sales taxes, abolishing the Consumer Protection Board, taxing things made in the European Union and China into oblivion, so we no longer have to worry about competition from cheaper foreign goods, which is to say, abolishing the global economy in the USA.

The project is over 400 pages and, to say the least ambitious in its transformative goals.

It will take some time to visit all of it.

Until then, Mad Dog may just wait and see.

They Just Don't Like Us

There will lots of post mortem exams for Democrats to explain the thumping they took in 2024--lost both House and Senate and the Presidency.

Toxic 

But, for Mad Dog, the simple truth is: They just don't like us. Voters may or may not like Trump, but they will vote for him so they can vote against Democrats.

Listening to Hispanic voters interviewed on NPR, who said they don't like boys playing in girls sports, don't like people who don't work, or who sneak into the country or those who defend them, Mad Dog thought: So the vitriol from FOX and the Right really did get absorbed.

Americans really do not like Democrats. We are not likeable because we throw our arms around people other Americans do not like. Drug addicts who litter the streets of Manchester with their syringes and needles. We don't feel sorry for them. We don't like them.

Republicans don't like a lot of people, and they don't care if people do not like them. And, in the end, the folks who care too much about not offending, wind up offending more people than those who don't care who they offend.

 The photo/video of the frozen Joe Biden standing next to a laughing Kamala, who was flanked by her husband and next to him a man with shoulder length hair, wearing a dress, a transvestite or something, was enough to send a chill to Mad Dog's marrow--beyond cringe worthy. What was that man doing in a photo opportunity during election season? What message was the Democratic party sending America?

What does that do to the Honduran immigrant, naturalized U.S. citizen, church going man, when he sees Joe Biden embrace all that? As the man said: the Democrats are the party of freaks and weaklings, the party of people who talk about being afraid, or who talk about many genders--they want his little girls playing soccer against girls who used to be boys.  This immigrant wants to assimilate into a culture with clear cultural and gender identities, not the Weimar Republic.

The people who are seen to be creepy weirdos are not the guys who talk about immigrants eating pets, who bed porn stars, or say their daughters are so hot they would date them if they weren't their fathers. 

The creepy weirdos are now the Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTiZisXrkw&t=17s

I don't know how widely this clip was viewed, but who among the Blue Campaign could have seen this without cringing and seeing the doom of the Democrats?

Everyone Has An Answer

 

But Mad Dog has no answer.

Why did 20 million fewer voters turn out to vote for Kamala Harris than they had for Biden? Actually, that may not even be true, but whatever the number, she got fewer votes than Biden and that difference may or may not have beaten Trump who got about the same 72 million.

The numbers matter.

The breakdown and analysis of the numbers matter: More Hispanic males and Black males voting for Trump likely means something. More white suburban females voting for Trump likely means something. 

Clearly, however you slice and dice it, there were more Americans who voted for Trump in what appeared to be a free and fair election.

Bernie Sanders says this is because Democrats have abandoned the working class.

Seth Moulton says this is because the Democrats have tried to please every special interest group--transgenders for example--which alienates the great majority of working class White voters who see Democrats kissing up to Indians (Native Americans), transgenders, gays, People of Color, what have you but nothing addressed to whitebread, "ordinary" Americans, who are actually still in the majority. 

It's not Just This Guy

Arab Americans in Michigan say she lost because of Gazza and losing Michigan, but even if she had won Michigan she lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, so Michigan didn't matter.  In fact those last three no Democrat had any business winning in the first place, they are all Confederate states or Confederate diaspora states.

Re-elected by their adoring constituents 

And it's true, the Deep Blue states of New England and the West Coast stayed blue as did Colorado and New Mexico. 

So, if everyone has a reason for the demise of the Democratic Party, why should Mad Dog be left out?

For Mad Dog, the reason for the apocalypse is that Democrats do not have an entertainment/political propaganda juggernaut like the Republican FOX/Rogan/Breitbart/Storm Front/erstwhile Rush Limbaugh.

No matter where you go in America, you can hear workman, roofers, carpenters, garage mechanics, working men listening to radio right wing and loving it, laughing along and getting indoctrinated.

Of course, people choose to tune into FOX, for the most part. They know what they are going to hear.

And liberals tried putting Al Franken on the radio once to offer a liberal alternative, but, truth be told he wasn't very funny and he didn't last long.

There was a reason Joseph Goebbels was so important to Hitler and the Third Reich: he was the minister of propaganda and without a marketing wing, the National Socialist Workers party would have been just another crackpot cabal on the fringes.

Bad Optics: Not What We Should Be Selling

Mad Dog once tried to launch a rendition of "Spitting Image" the British puppet show which lampooned various politicos, but, despite lots of puppets and an effort to launch on youtube, he got all of about 15 clicks.

So, clearly, Mad Dog does not have the Rush Limbaugh karma. Or maybe it's the message. Or maybe just not funny enough, or not enough Koch brothers money behind it, or something.

But, from all Mad Dog can tell, door knocking and telephone banks cannot penetrate the minds of Americans. Something else has already done that and continues to do that, so you hear FOX phrases coming at you from a wide variety of citizens. 

Mad Dog may be wrong, but he thinks it's entirely possible it's not that the message conveyed is wrong or unattractive--it's the delivery of that message, the media which has destroyed Democrats. "It's the media, not the message," or perhaps, "The media IS the message."

Mad Dog suspects  until Democrats master the airwaves, the podcasts, the social media X sites, they will watch Trump and his progeny dominate political power.

We sure won't be beating him with blogs and the New York Times.

Delicious Defeat

 

How perverse is it that even seeing Donald Trump get 51% of the popular vote, and facing 4 more years of All Donald All the Time, there are a couple of things Mad Dog secretly relishes?

Every once in a while, at one of the monthly Democrats Club meetings a guest speaker would introduce herself and add, "My pronouns are she/her," and it took every fiber of his restraint to throw nothing at her.

Reading a New Yorker article about a gender fluid person whose pronouns were "they" and the New Yorker dutifully described "them" going to town to get a haircut and how "they" ate an ice cream cone and he would tear that issue into tiny pieces.

As Dave Chappelle said, "I completely support everyone being whoever they want to be but my question is to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?"

And he agrees with the Massachusetts Congressman, Seth Moulton, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that."

And he can now reiterate that when Ray Buckley opened the New Hampshire State Democratic convention with 15 minutes of Native Americans playing traditional tom toms to show how inclusive Democrats are, but there was no Lee Greenwood singing, "Proud to be An American,"  and he thought, "Oh, this ought to win over a lot of plaid shirt and suspender HVAC guys in Claremont and Salem," he was dismissed as intolerant.

The fact is, he forgave all that because the alternative--Trump--was worse. 

But 51% of his fellow Americans were offended enough to vote Republican.