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.

Lauren Boebert and the Politics of Humility

 "The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent toward them: That's the essence of inhumanity."

--George Bernard Shaw

"What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. And if you can humble yourself before them, they will do anything you ask."

--Frank Underwood, "House of Cards"

Reading the article by Peter Hessler in this week's New Yorker (Jan 13,2025) about the resurrection and triumph of Lauren Boebert, who touted her personal history--a high school drop out, pregnant at 17, arrested, down and out, "I'm straight out of Rifle, running a restaurant with my four little boys and with my G.E.D," she told her constituents.

All this put me in mind, somehow, of doing rounds at the New York Hospital, in the early 1970's, as a a medical student, the lowest of the low in hospital hierarchy, a part of what one patient called, "the thundering herd," a group of men in white uniforms, nurses, and a phalanx of professors of medicine, entering a patient's room with the chief of service, in his spotless, long white lab coat, his pinstriped vest, Brooks Brother's tie, and everything but angels hovering above blowing horns, heralding the arrival of the great man at the bedside. 

And, what really stopped me in my tracks was seeing the patient, who might be a Bowery Bum, now scrubbed by the nurses for the arrival of the great man, sit up and look around him, suddenly the center of attention, rapt attention, I might add, everyone hanging on his every word, as the great man in white asked him, with utter politeness, about his symptoms. Had he become short of breath walking up a hill, or was he short of breath all the time? Had he noticed the swelling in his ankles was gone in the morning only to return later in the afternoon?

And what was really striking, when the great man was really a good clinician, is that he conveyed to the patient and to every member of the ward party, that this man in the bed was among the most important people  on earth, because he was a patient. Didn't matter what he was outside the hospital, once in that bed he was not Dirty Joe, or whatever his friends called him on the outside, he was Mr. Smith and he was treated with the utmost respect.

And the great man was truly interested in his answers, listening carefully, asking questions to clarify the information. Did he find he could tolerate some foods, but not, for example fatty foods? 

After the thundering herd moved on, as the medical student, I often had to visit the patient later, to draw his blood or to do some other task, and the patient often asked who the great man was, even though he'd been told before. "Well," the patient would often say. "I hope I did okay."

"What do you mean?" I would ask.

"Well, you know, I hope I gave the right answers. He seemed pretty concerned."

After all the build up, the patient had been told by the nurses about the coming of the great man, prepared by the interns, rehearsed by the residents, and after all that unaccustomed attention, he didn't want to disappoint anyone. 

Sometimes I found myself saying, "You know you are just as important as he is." 

Don't know why I said that.

But it seemed like the lesson I had learned.

This was a medical school where we were constantly told that we had been selected out of the multitudes, and we had to prove we were worthy of our spot in the class constantly, and even if we were lucky enough to be selected to be interns, there was a merit pyramid, so there were half of each class eliminated each year with only 10 senior residents left from a class of 30 interns. But, no matter how select we were, it was basic gospel truth, the patient in the bed was the most important person in the room.

And that's maybe where Lauren Boebert's appeal, and maybe Trump's appeal, is. 

Doesn't matter if people call you white trash or disrespect you or ignore you, you are important, and just as important as all those folks with Harvard degrees. 

As we say in New Hampshire, "Just saying."

Remarks at the Deliberative Session

There are three points I'm going to make with respect to this warrant article which grants public, taxpayer money to the Sacred Heart School of the Church of the Miraculous Medal:

I'll call them:

1. Nullification

2. Money

3. Separation

1. With respect to nullification:  

I have often visited New York City, Manhattan, and I have come to a crosswalk and see that sign flashing in red letters: DON'T WALK. I looked down the grid in both directions and seeing no car approaching, and I cross the street. Often, I have been accompanied by a policeman or a dozen other citizens. What we have done, of course, is to violate the law, but if we do not obey the law, and if there is no enforcement, we have nullified that law. 

There are other examples: The governor of Alabama, George Wallace, stood in a schoolhouse door and said no Negro child would ever cross that threshold into a public, all White school. He did not care what the Constitution or the Supreme Court said. Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.  Nullification.  

And then there is judicial nullification, in which judges nullify a law. The state of Maine refused to use public funds to pay tuition for students to a religious school. It was the only school within a hundred miles of where the students lived, and Justices Thomas and Alito ruled the state had to pay. They said to discriminate against a religious school simply because it was religious was unfair.  Justice Sotomayor noted that this ruling, at its heart, held that separation of church and state is unconstitutional.

This is a peculiar opinion, of course, to say that the First Amendment, a part of the Constitution, is itself unconstitutional. 

Some say separation of church and state is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, and that is true. But that phrase was unnecessary because folk in those days knew what it meant that  government shall not establish a state religion. And the Constitution was not written for lawyers; it was written for the common man, and when it was written every common man knew what state establishment of a church meant, because they already had an established church: The Church of England.

In fact some of those colonists came to the New World to escape establishment of religion. 

And they knew there were only two ways to establish a religion:  if you state this is the state church, or if you used taxpayer money to support a church, that was state establishment of a church. Apparently, Justices Alito and Thomas have forgotten all that. So they have ruled in this peculiar way to say that the Constitution is itself unconstitutional. 

But they won't serve forever.

The question we have before us today is whether the nullification of the United States Constitution, the First Amendment, as we do it every year through this warrant article is more like crossing against the light, or more like the more pernicious forms of nullification of the Governor of Alabama or the US Supreme Court. 

Here in our small New Hampshire town, we cannot change the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., but we can make a stand for the Constitution. 

2.Then there is the money argument: 

For years, it was argued that it was simply cheaper to pay for Hampton kids to go to Sacred Heart, which was less expensive than the posh public schools. That may have been true once, but now there have been empty seats in Hampton schools for years; we have already paid for those Sacred Heart students once, and now we pay again.

The corollary to this is "I am a Hampton taxpayer, and my taxes should go to pay for my kid's education and I want my kid going to Sacred Heart." But the fact is only 25% of the kids at Sacred Heart live in Hampton. Only 25% come from households who pay property taxes in Hampton. 75% of the student body is from out of town, so what we are really paying for is  a Catholic school education for anyone who wants one, no matter where they live. 

There is simply no money argument for spending Hampton taxpayer money on Sacred Heart--for paying for computers for Sacred Heart, especially when it has always been promised that the funds were spent for only "non religious" things like computers, but when pressed  on the subject, officials admitted they have no idea whether those computers are used to stream religious services.

3. Separation of Church and State: Good for Catholics or an Insult?

You will say to me, "You have no right to tell Catholics what is good for them as Catholics. You are not even Catholic."

This is true: I am not a Catholic.

But I am old.

And I remember, before most of the people in this room were even born, a man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who said, "Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, it is apparently necessary for me to state that I believe in the absolute separation of church and state, that no public funds should ever be granted to any church, or to any church school." 

Then he went on to explain why he felt he had to discuss this, but even at age 13, I already knew why: My neighbors said, "Oh, you can't vote for Kennedy, he is a Catholic. That would be like putting the Pope into the White House. He would be a puppet on a string."

Of course, Kennedy did keep that promise, and it was not always easy, but because he kept that promise that finger of suspicion was never pointed at a Catholic candidate again and Catholics have been elected at every level of government, including the Presidency, since Kennedy.

So separation of church and state is good for Catholics, I would submit.

I'll close with my favorite story about separation of church and state, and it involves a past governor of Texas, Ann Richards. 

One day, Governor Richards looked up from her desk and found herself confronted by four very distraught looking staffers who told her they had some bad news.

"What's wrong?" she asked, rising from her desk.

"Well, you see that nativity scene out there on the lawn outside your office, just a few feet from the entrance to the Capitol? The Supreme Court has ruled we have to take that down, because it violates separation of church and state!"

Governor Richards looked out her window at the manger scene, and said, "Damn! That's a crying shame. I really hate to do it! This is the one and only time, every year, when in Austin, at the Capitol, when we are ever able to gather three wise men together here in one place!"

It's not always easy to maintain separation of church and state.

You may say, we are only a small town in New England; we cannot change the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., and the forces arrayed against us are large and well organized; have been for years. They have unleashed a well funded torrent to accomplish the goal of eliminating separation in the form of government funded vouchers for religious schools

But I would argue that here, of all places in the entire country this may be the one place it might be possible to make a stand, because we are in New England.

Right here, we have a small band of embattled citizens; We have come to a moment at a rude bridge to the future and it spans a raging flood.  

But it would not be for the first time, when a small group in New England, banded together on principle, embattled, resolutely, standing at that bridge,  and fired a shot  heard round the world.

A Shot To Save the World

 

As Mad Dog has gotten older, he finds he needs to return to books and articles to really appreciate them. The first time through, no matter how carefully he reads them, it just doesn't stick, but upon the return things come into focus.

Penn Ad in the New Yorker: Stealing the Glory

Re-reading Gregory Zuckerman's "A Shot to Save the World," about the scores of scientists who over a thirty year slog coalesced around the science that produced a remarkably effective vaccine against COVID 19 in just a year, Mad Dog is once again smitten by the story.

Some of this is simply delicious because of the story of one of the central figures who played a key role in providing the essential platform for the vaccine, mRNA, Katalin Kariko, and how she was ostracized at the University of Pennsylvania, ultimately given the choice of being fired or taking a demotion to a new university rank devised just for her as a "senior researcher" not even a faculty member, how when she finally managed to convince another faculty member of the potential value of mRNA, and once the two of them started a company to pursue it, Penn refused to invest in it, but ultimately made $1.2 billion from the patent it provided which was used to make the vaccine.

And then, in the ultimate in chutzpah, in an act which must win the grand prize for hypocrisy, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work, Penn took out a full page ad in the New Yorker claiming credit for nurturing her great work.

Penn outdid Cinderella's wicked step mother, claiming it didn't just nurture the princess, but delivered her glass slipper and the prince to go with it.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Luckily, in the 21st century there is Google, and it takes precious little time on Google to see how nasty Penn was to Kariko--not an unusual story in medical research--but it's the claim that we knew all along how she was destined for greatness that sets off the rockets.

There will be, likely already are many other books about the way in which the COVID 19 mRNA vaccines were developed, but a good place to start is with Zuckerman's tale. He is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and his interests are unavoidably connected to the financial aspects of vaccine development, but he's clearly talked to enough scientists-- and the right scientists--who schooled him on how to ask the right questions, and once you get past the inevitable grab-you-by-the-lapel style, the determination to describe the personalities of the scientists for "human interest," the story is a page turner.

Banting & Best Discoverers of Insulin

So many people were involved, so many people taking risks, so many falling flat on their faces, so many people in positions of power who simply were too dim witted to pull the right levers, but enough smart, determined people simply dodged around the nincompoops, the deed got done.

Most vaccines take 10 years to bring successfully to market, the shortest big one before the COVID vaccine took 4 years, and they did COVID in one year.

Dr. Offit

When Paul Offit gave credit to President Trump for getting the vaccine done, he laughed. He said bringing that vaccine to fruition was the greatest scientific achievement of his lifetime and that was on Trump's watch. The reason he laughed is evident in Zuckerman's tale. The way science and the way this vaccine happens cannot ever be one man's credit--a decades long, tedious, ants on the march scenario is required. The guys at the top of political and academic institutions just hold the news conferences and take the credit.

Any fan of "The Wire" knows what I'm talking about: It's the "drugs on the table" charade. 

We see people working on HIV, like Henry Masur and later Tony Fauci, and we see people working on using genes to fight cancer, and we see people working on stem cell technologies and all these people weaving a thick mat upon which the next line of performers can jump and then the next.

It's an inspiring story, and an instructive one.

It also suggests that while government must occasionally play an essential role, government alone cannot do this kind of thing.  The Manhattan Project was a children's tea party compared to this one.

It reveals the centrality of universities, but it also shows how obtuse and arrogant faculties in academia can be and often are.

Child with Type 1 Diabetes

But mostly, it suggests that the Napoleon's, the Stalin's, the Ghengis Khan's of history are not much more than people who hit other people over the head with bigger and bigger clubs, while the folks like Jonas Salk and Katalin Kariko are the people who change life on earth for every little guy just trying to survive.