The Night and Day of the Living Dead: Trump World's Assault on Social Security

 Hampton's very own Karoline Leavitt, President Trump's press secretary, explained why foreign citizens living in the US, paying into the Social Security system through workplace taxes, were placed on a list of dead people by saying they are all terrorists and horrible, no good very bad people who deserve to be declared dead, even if they aren't yet quite dead, but they are dead, as in the expression, "He's dead to me."

Ms. Leavitt, Press Secretary in Dead Fur

The head of the Social Security Administration has been fired for refusing to agree to say that living people are, in fact, dead people, which struck him, somehow--don't ask me why--as wrong.

Apparently, Social Security offended  Elon Musk, for whom the distinction between a dead person and a living person is incomprehensible. 

Interviews with the newly declared dead people are being conducted at the Social Security Administration offices, where people are being asked whether or not they are, in fact, dead.

Ukranian Woman With Real Job

Wouldn't you love to be there for those interviews?

Social Security Administration Not Dead Living Empolyee (SANDLE): This interview may be recorded for training purposes. Is that OK with you?

Officially Dead And Actually Confused Person (ODAACP):

Well, I can't see why it would matter to me, if I am dead.

SANDLE: Well, this is why you are here today, to determine that.

ODAACP: I'm here to determine if I am dead?

SANDLE: Yes.

ODAACP: And what have you decided?

SANDLE: Well, there's a process for that.

ODAACP: I see.

SANDLE: So you have been contributing to the Social Security fund with each pay check, when you were alive and working?

ODAACP: Yes, as long as I was working, I was alive and contributing. But  I'm not sure if I can contribute once I am dead.

SANDLE: That's to be determined.

ODAACP: So I might be able to contribute, even after I'm determined to be dead?

SANDE: Well, unless you are found to be a terrorist or a terrible, horrible, no good very bad person.

ODAACP: You don't want any contributions from very bad people?

SANDLE: No. We accept money only from good Americans, who are alive.

ODAACP: Well, I wish you had told me that when I was alive. I could have saved a lot of money.

SANDLE: But you're dead now, so that's no longer a problem.

ODAACP: Oh? I thought you were going to determine if I am dead. So you've already decided I'm dead?

SANDLE: Well, why else would we have called you here today, if we thought you were alive?

ODACCP: So you're only interviewing people who you know are already dead?

SANDLE: You're being argumentative.

ODACCP: I'm just asking...

SANDLE: You understand you could lose your Green card if you continue to obstruct justice.

ODACCP: Well, I guess I won't have much use for a Green card, inasmuch as I'm already dead.

SANDLE: Well, if you feel that way...

ODACCP: You know, dead people don't really feel much of anything. I was thinking about my relatives. Isn't there some sort of death benefit for relatives?

SANDLE: You could apply for that, if you were alive. But dead people cannot fill out the forms, obviously.

ODACCP: Oh, well, that really is government efficiency. 

SANDLE: I've been instructed to tell you the new policy of this government is: "The only good immigrant is a dead immigrant." 

ODACCP: Well, that is a relief! I thought you said I was a horrible, terrible no good very bad immigrant.

SANDE: Now that you're dead, you're good. So there's that.

They Will Always Disappoint You

 "They will always disappoint you."

--Norm--Carcetti's campaign manager in "The Wire," on what happens after your candidate gets elected

McHugh

For many blog posts, I have used Paul McHugh as a classic example of a man who has been vilified, shouted down by people you might describe as "liberal" as they defend transgender medical practices which he has opposed. McHugh looked like the man who insisted on the truth, no matter what the personal costs.

August Macke

And, it is true that he was excoriated and ostracized at Johns Hopkins when he suggested that gender dysphoria--the primary disorder of someone who says he or she feels like they are in the wrong body, feeling like a woman in a man's body--may be a problem of  suffering from "a single wrong idea," like people with anorexia nervosa, who feel they are too fat when, in fact, they are emaciated.  Saying this was apostasy, heresy, and it violated the whole premise for transgender clinics, where the assumption has been that patient is always correct. But what if the patient with transgender dysphroria is as deluded as the patient with anorexia nervosa?

He might have had a real insight there, might even have been right, but it turns out, like so many things, when you have more information, there is often another side to the story.

McHugh has also said that homosexuality is a disorder of "erroneous desire" and he opposed same sex marriage.

When critics said he allowed his Catholicism to blind him to science, they may have referred to his testimony for the defense of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse, or his recommendation against using stem cells because this could be the killing of an unborn child, according to Wikipedia. If he harbors these ideas, how objective can he be about viewing other people, patients, who violate the norms of sexual behavior and preference?

Obadiah Youngblood

It is, of course, possible, to be correct about some things, but very wrong about other things.

McHugh tried to follow up on patients who had sex change operations, and found that while few patients expressed regrets about the change in their sex operations, as a rule, they were unable to find happiness or satisfying sexual lives.  How exactly he did this is not clear. Did he simply review journal articles or did he personally interview the patients? 

But his assertion comports well with the study by the British pediatrician, Hilary Cass, who, reviewing literature and data from British transgender clinics, concluded that there was something rotten in Denmark, or actually in the UK, and possibly, the Netherlands, where transgender medicine had been most clearly defined and which looked like the model to be pursued.

It is notable that in the Netherlands, you cannot get your gender changed on your driver's license until and unless you have transgender surgery, castration (and mastectomy in some cases)--apparently because they recognize that patients who have not gone to the ultimate step may be indicating they are not sure of their own choice.

The big question raised by Cass had to do with the observation that some number (in dispute what that number is) of patients who decided to go from female to male (FTM) later gravitated back to their gender assignment at birth, raising the question whether sex affirming surgery, (mastectomies, among other procedures) is a good idea. The Dutch have not found the levels of reversion (detransitioning) to be as  high as what the Brits had seen.

Cass was asked to do her review of the experience with transgender clinics in the UK because the number of patients presenting to clinics exploded from a few thousand to over 500,000,  raising the suspicion this may be another one of those "fad" diseases, which run through medicine now and then. There have been epidemics of hypoglycemia and chronic fatigue syndrome over the years and it's not entirely clear of many of the patients said to have these disorders actually have true organic disease.

The other big idea Cass proposed is that the approach of clinic doctors who unquestioningly embrace the patient's assertion they are in the wrong body, may not be the best approach. If transgender dysphoria is, in fact, more like anorexia nervosa, then embracing the patient's delusion might be harmful.  McHugh, in his wolfish way suggested embracing the patients' formulation uncritically is like offering liposuction to a patient with anorexia nervosa.

But McHugh's critics may have a point about the source of his opposition to transgender medicine, and about how dispassionately he has viewed the studies he cites in his review of the literature.

Paul McHugh, MD

The trouble is, it is hard finding the "truth." 

The "truth" coming out of the Trump/MAGA crowd is there are only two genders and none of these transgenders really has anything wrong with them other than they are weird; the truth coming out of LGBTQ crowd is that transgenders have a medical condition, an innate driven quality, like homosexuals, to simply have to be something other than what the world wants them to be.

One truth, at least one tentative truth, appears to be that whatever problem transgenders have, whatever is driving them to present to transgender clinics, is not the problem homosexuals have. Homosexuals simply want to be left alone; they do not seek out clinics for help.  They are lumped in that LGBT group because of social/political similarities, i.e. they are faced with a hostile world which tries to humiliate, discriminate and deny them basic rights and respect. 

But that's simply an affinity of being grouped together as undesirables. Like the victims in German concentration camps--Jews, gypsies (Roma), homosexuals and communists--they shared the stigma and disapproval of the ruling Reich, but they shared little else.

So, we wander in the darkness of the unknown, which is where science offers the only hope of light. 

Imagine Him In Any Other Job

So, if your doctor prescribed you a pill for your blood pressure and said, "Take these for a month, and we'll reassess,"-- but then he calls you three days later and says, "Oh, no! Not that one. Stop that one! Maybe we'll try something else. Let's pause that. Or maybe go back to that one, but a bigger dose. No, wait. Maybe we'll triple the dose. Or maybe we'll negotiate a better blood pressure."

Or if your plumber came by and said, "Well, this system you've got is just the worst system in the world and you've been cheated by the water company, and the plumbing supply companies and I'm going to fix it right now, day one." Which is funny, because your toilet was working just fine, until he arrived.

A Man of the People

Or your pilot comes on the speaker: "This is your captain speaking. I know it looks like beautiful weather out your windows, but we are flying into a horrible storm and we're going back to the airport to land until the weather stops treating us so horribly." And as he swoops in toward the runway, the plane lifts back up and swerves to the right in a steep bank, enough to make you reach for the vomit bag. And he comes back on the PA, "Well, that was close. That was just the worse runway ever! And those air traffic controllers are the worst. Actually, Elon fired them all, so that's what caused that near collision just now. Not my fault. Never my fault. We got rid of those diversity hires in the control tower, and now it's every man for himself.  But I saved you! Now we're headed back to Washington, D.C. again. Sit back, relax and don't worry about your seat belts: You've got the best captain ever up here and this will be the best ride you've ever had."

At what point would you lose faith?

Love In His Heart

If you are a person of faith, likely never, or until they lay you in your grave. 

Trump Tourists in the Capitol

Meanwhile, your friends and family might be looking around for a doctor who does not dance around with a bone through his nose, gyrating with a guy who thinks vitamin A cures measles, and maybe they'd try to book on a different airline.  Or maybe, they'd decide to drive instead. Maybe drive a Tesla. Because, you know. Tesla is made by a genius. 

Never Lose Faith!

The problem with our American system is we are stuck with the witch doctor for 4 more years. Congress we can change in 2 years, but what are the chances of that?

 

What Matters In Our Current State?

 

Ah, youtube!

Don't give me a million women in pink knit hats.

Don't talk to me about demonstrations across the country on April 5th. 

Remember all those marches on Washington during the Vietnam war?  Listen to the Nixon tapes or the Johnson tapes. Did you hear either president express concern about these public protests becoming a threat to their own power, or about the possibility these demonstrations may have changed minds?

I've listened. I have never heard that. What you heard from the Presidents was contempt, indifference but never any indication public assemblies to redress grievances ever made them think twice. They were ineffectual group hugs.

But, if you're looking for consensual validation which might, eventually, over time, change a few minds, look to youtube. 

Here's the Marsh family on Trump's tariffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DyNjjSxO8s

And, if you want more than entertainment and a warm and fuzzy feeling that there are other right thinking people out there, you can tune in to a youtube post which actually explains some arcana about tariffs, like, for example there is a Canadian tariff on American milk coming into the country which approaches 200% after a certain volume of milk has been shipped north across the border, but that volume is so high, it's never been reached. One wonders why it's on the books at all--but that's another question.

As usual, there is a sliver of some true thing which Trump fastens on before sailing off into space--like the man who hits you with an axe for inadvertently stepping on his toe.

This will have to play out--Trump is right about that. Because there is nobody who is in a position to thwart Trump--not the Supreme Court (even more right wing than he is), not Senate Republicans, and certainly not House Republicans.  There is simply no check in the balance.

The Warp and Woof: Everson

 

Even though you might see the right or wrong of a thing, that does not mean you cannot see how your opponent draws his own conclusion, opposite to your own.

Obadiah Youngblood

Yes, this is another blog post about separation of church and state, so you can move on if you have had your fill of that. But it's really not so much about this particular issue as how arguments are constructed and how lines get drawn.

During the Deliberative Session a supporter of the warrant articles granting taxpayer funds to a church school said, "We do not send the fire department to extinguish fires only at public schools." There is a principle of "Mutual Aid" which allows for this. You don't rescue people at the beach only after asking about their religion.

But, of course, the argument here is not about doing something we provide all citizens equally, but about doing something special for one school, a church school.

The Supreme Court struggled with this in its "Everson" decision, written by Justice Hugo Black. He addressed the two poles of arguments about funding, directly or indirectly, church institutions. The Court has oscillated between "neutrality" of government when faced with religious institutions and "strict separation" or "erecting a wall."

In the Everson case, a town in New Jersey decided to pay for school bus transportation for all students in the town to take them to their schools, but a citizen sued saying he did not want his taxes paying for transporting kids to church schools where they would be taught religion.

Writing the majority opinion, Black said, 

"Similarly, parents might be reluctant to permit their children to attend schools which the state had cut off from such general government services as ordinary police and fire protection, connections for sewage disposal, public highways and sidewalks. Of course, cutting off church schools from these services, so separate and so indisputably marked off from the religious function, would make it far more difficult for the schools to operate. But such is obviously not the purpose of the First Amendment. That Amendment requires the state to be a neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and non-believers; it does not require the state to be their adversary. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions, than it is to favor them.

This Court has said that parents may, in the discharge of their duty under state compulsory education laws, send their children to a religious rather than a public school if the school meets the secular educational requirements which the state has power to impose. . . . It appears that these parochial schools meet New Jersey’s requirements. The State contributes no money to the schools. It does not support them. Its legislation, as applied, does no more than provide a general program to help parents get their children, regardless of their religion, safely and expeditiously to and from accredited schools."

So Black was arguing the "neutrality" justification.  The town had not favored church schools, it simply offered to the church schools and their students what it had decided to offer all students living in the town. It was extending "mutual aid" to all citizens of the town, regardless of their religious beliefs. Paying for cross walk guards to get children safely across the street to the church school is not to embrace church doctrine, but to protect public safety.

Leclerc

In the Sacred Heart School case, the facts, the circumstances are different: the town set up an account which the church can draw upon to buy whatever it likes: computers, paper supplies, textbooks. There has been testimony over the years from the town official, the treasurer of the SAU school district, that she has never refused to pay for an invoice presented by the church.  It is not clear that invoices for crucifixes were never presented, but it is clear the computers could have used to stream religious services. It is also clear that the town treasurer, reputedly a graduate of Sacred Heart School, has over the decade or so she has been writing these checks never declined to pay for the invoices.  

Munch, "The Scream"

Even in Everson, the phrase "non religious purposes" was floated, as if you can separate out normal maintenance of the church school building a "non religious purpose." If the town decided to pay an invoice for a new roof for the school, would that be a non religious purpose and therefore not a problem?

In the "Carson" case from Maine, the Court ruled beyond "Everson," by saying if you were going to fund any private school, pay tuition for any private school, you had to do that for a school which teaches religion.  To deny a religious school taxpayer money while allowing a nonsectarian school public funds is to discriminate against religioun, and goes beyond neutrality to active opposition.  In "Carson," of course, we are no longer talking about "mutual aid," (putting out a fire, paving all playgrounds in town or providing transportation to all students) in "Carson" you are paying a school to teach religion to its students. 

The Roberts Court took up the cry of "discrimination against religion" in its "Carson" ruling.  The ghost of Black's admonition the First amendment "does not require the state to be the adversary" of religion; it requires only neutrality. 

But, of course, now we are talking about what a sacred script means, and when you start examining Constitutional scripture, you are going back to origin stories, and reading people like Madison and Jefferson, and they clearly were appalled by the nefarious things organized religion had done in the colonies, and they wanted to be sure taxpayers, non believers, free Americans were not required to support organized religion. So yes, we discriminate against religion, not a particular religion but we discriminate against all religions as a class of entity, in order to remain neutral.

Provensen

There were two dissents in Everson, one by Justice Robert O. Jackson, in which he argued that a church would rather give up almost anything than give up its school, because without the school, the church dies in a single generation.

Using that loaded word, "discrimination" in his "Carson" opinion Justice Alito sought to discredit the attempt of the state of Maine to protect the First Amendment.

Justice Rutledge, in his "Everson" dissent argued:

"Of course discrimination in the legal sense does not exist. The child attending the religious school has the same right as any other to attend the public school. But he foregoes exercising it because the same guaranty which assures this freedom forbids the public school or any agency of the state to give or aid him in securing the religious instruction he seeks.

Were he to accept the common school, he would be the first to protest the teaching there of any creed or faith not his own. And it is precisely for the reason that their atmosphere is wholly secular that children are not sent to public schools . . . . But that is a constitutional necessity, because we have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion. . . ."

In doing so Rutledge maintained that treating religious schools as just some other form of private education is absurd.

Most of this argument to can traced to a fundamental psychological proposition: Many Americans think religion, all (especially Christian) religion is a good thing, a benefit to society, a guardian of virtue and that all their fellow citizens should embrace this self evident truth. They oppose "godless communism." Their Senators and Congressmen have weekly Bible study groups, and prayer breakfasts. When I was a child, our teachers led us in the Lord's Prayer to start the school day. This was a practice I found downright bizarre as a child, never having heard the Lord's Prayer at home, and my mother told me, "Well, you go to school to learn new things. You may not believe all the things you are taught, but at least you have become acquainted with them." 

And the thing which really struck me, especially as I got older, and encountered coaches who knelt down in prayer before a game with their players, as if God wanted Walt Whitman High School to defeat Bethesda Chevy Chase High School, was that the religious folks assumed you agreed with them. They could not understand how anyone could not see God's truth in what they said. Of course God wants Whitman to beat B-CC!

I cannot forget the look on their faces of utter incomprehension at the idea that someone might say, "No, actually, I don't want to pray with you. That's your thing."

When asked for his opinion in public school class about whether dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was a good or bad thing, a classmate replied, "Well, I would ask what Jesus would do," and he smiled beneficently, as if he expected the teacher and all his classmates to join his grinning complacency and cry out, "Hallelujah!" 

And I looked around my classroom, at my friends, who I knew thought this guy and his response were ridiculous, and they would suppress smiles and giggles and shake their heads and warn me off from shouting: "Jesus would have no frigging idea what to do! They did not have nuclear weapons in Jerusalem! And if they did, he would have had to ask what the alternatives were, and what the costs were, and what the costs of not dropping the bombs would be."

It was then, in that classroom in Maryland, the ruling folkway that people who profess religious belief are good souls and not to be challenged and certainly not to be denigrated.

Provensen

I think, even in New Hampshire, in the 21st century, still much the same.

  

Blind To Our Own Vulnerabilities

 

Growing up playing baseball, one of the most important things to learn was my own vulnerabilities:  Every pitcher looks for "the hole" in your swing. 

On Deck, Obadiah Youngblood

I could never hit inside pitches all that well--and curve balls, forget it. The first thing my good friend, (who was a pitcher) who really knew baseball, did for me was to introduce me to a hitting coach, who taught me how to hit the curve. Once I got that down, it was much harder for the opposition to get me out. (I continued to see a lot of inside pitches, but even that could be finessed.) Knowing that vulnerability and fixing it allowed me to win a lot more confrontations. 

Lovely Diversity

Now, the Democratic Party is failing because it does not see its own vulnerabilities, and if Trump is good at anything, it is to identify vulnerabilities, and to pitch to them. "Little Marco. Sleepy Jeb."

So Trump has picked on transgender politics and liberal DEI orthodoxy as the most obvious vulnerabilities. 

Transgender politics is the perfect example of taking a Democratic position, which affects a tiny percentage of people, and making it stand for all that is extreme and absurd in people who value consistency of thought and principle. 

Taking the small and making it the big. 

Exploiting reductio ad absurdum. 

If you believe in transgender rights, well,  then you would be willing to allow some transgender male to female to run over your daughter on the field hockey field, or to demolish her in swimming meets. That's how unhinged you are!

Mediocre Male Swimmer, Now Champion Female Swimmer

I've addressed what is wrong with the Democrats' approach to transgender politics ad nauseam in other posts and it boils down to "I am all for treating everyone with respect and kindness and sympathy, but that doesn't mean I can embrace transgender athletes."  Nobody objects to a former girl playing on a boy's team; what upsets people is a former boy playing on a girl's team. Rare as that may be, it makes you look like an unrepentant extremist if you refuse to see the problem there. You look like you are on the side of the bullies.

And don't get me started on pronouns. As if the entire English speaking world should switch from "she went to town to get a haircut and facial" to "they went to town..."

Not going to happen.

As Dave Chappelle has said, "I support anyone's right to  be who they want to be. My question is: To extent do I have to participate in your self image."

And then there is DEI.  It sounded so good, initially. Sure, I'm all for Starship Enterprise, a nation where everyone has a fair shot and the outcome of that, we all thought, would be school photos of classes with kids of every race and girls and boys all smiling happily in one big family. Like those United Colors of Benetton ads.  But that is not the way it worked out. 

United Colors of Benneton

What happened was the outcome of those happy, diverse groups we had hoped for did not happen automatically. Diversity is a virtue in a group, but it is not an individual virtue. An individual cannot be diverse; at most an individual can have a different perspective and contribute to diversity as that group meets and discusses things. But choosing a Black face does not mean the individual that face belongs to actually is much different from people with white faces.  

Preference was given individuals because of their color or gender and that preference overwhelmed the stated rules which had previously defined meritocracy (test scores, grades.) 

Resentment grew and in response to that, DEI proponents started setting up loyalty tests: New faculty in engineering and science were asked, "What will you do, if you get this job, to advance diversity, inclusion and equity in your classroom?"  In an engineering classroom? In a physics classroom? In a mathematics classroom? You had to declare your allegiance to the idea, to the gospel of DEI to get hired. I pledge allegiance to the banner of DEI. 

The fact is, diversity is a joy and a value we can embrace as a feature of a group, but if diversity comes down to assigning a virtue value to your non White face, that is a different story. Diversity is a value in a group; diversity is not a personal merit.  

As George Carlin said, you can be proud of something you have personally accomplished, but being proud of being Black or Irish or Hispanic is absurd. That is an accident of birth, not an accomplishment. And that is also true of diversity, being a face of color--this is not a merit and should not be assigned points in a meritocracy.

Now, of course, it is also true that there are many jobs and college freshmen classes which could be filled by a lottery without appreciably affecting the quality of those work crews and classes. 

Most of our "qualifications" are arbitrary and absurd. There's a wonderful ad on TV with a man interviewing a woman for a job, and he tells her she could clearly do the job well, but "the job requires a college degree, any college degree" for her to be hired. 

And she says, "I need a college degree for this job I've done for the past 10 years without one?" 

"Yes," he tells her. 

"And what was your college degree in?" she asks.

"Dance," he replies. 

"Dance?" she says.

And there you have it, meritocracy in practice.

We can all see the absurdity of this idea of meritocracy in the ad, but are our cherished SAT and high school grades any less arbitrary or absurd? Can you tell me a single question from the last SAT exam?   How much do you know about the SAT exam? Last I saw, the SAT predicted the performance of students for the first semester in college but had no correlation to who made Phi Beta Kappa or went on to other scholastic honors in college. And yet, it's taken as an IQ test.  And it is very much a test which you can pay money to prep for and do better as a result.

And high school grades?  Look at who is doing the judging in high school. When you look at the high school teachers at Winnacunnet High, do you see folks you think should be choosing the freshman class at Harvard or Brown?

We could fill most positions by lottery, after a low hurdle is passed. The virtue of a lottery is at least we all know it is by definition, arbitrary. It's luck.

And now we have a meritocracy at colleges which looks to your embrace of the gospel of "Diversity" as a merit badge.

And the gospel does not affect just new hires. The president of Harvard, Larry Summers, a graduate of MIT, ruminated on the relative paucity of females at MIT and in Harvard's engineering and math and science classes and he, impolitically, thinking out loud, asked  if females might have less aptitude for math and science.  

He might have asked, "Does the Y chromosome give males some sort of advantage in these areas?" But he wasn't that smart, and the orthodox folks at Harvard, who accept as a matter of faith that women and men have equal capacities in all academic disciplines (which is likely true, but still) howled bloody murder,  and the liberal outrage deposed him and he was gone. 

Summers detractors on the Harvard faculty could have said, "Well, Larry, interesting question, but show us the numbers, the studies, which show that women have lower math/science aptitude than men. Surely, that is a testable hypothesis." 

That response was never even a consideration. He had uttered heresy and had to be removed as president. Can't have a president of the college questioning the basic dogma. 

This was intolerance of questioning; this was punishing anyone who had the temerity to challenge the gospel, intolerance of challenging orthodoxy, and it meant he would not be tolerated on campus.

After 50 years of affirmative action, there are now more women in medical schools and colleges than men.  And that was not mostly because of some special preference. It happened for a variety of reasons, but no special program or preference was needed. 

Somehow, however, once affirmative action preferences were removed for people of color, the percentages of Blacks and Hispanics at universities across the nation plunged.  Interestingly, the presence of Black males has been especially obvious. Black females continue to hold places in universities but Black males are becoming increasingly rare, for reasons I do not understand.

Liberal orthodoxy has meant that certain questions cannot be openly examined, that challenges to the way transgenders are treated are verboten. When Paul McHugh questioned whether the approach to transgenders might be wrong--given the 40% suicide rate at almost all transgender clinics nationwide--he was hounded out of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Now, Mr. Summers publishes an op ed  in the New York Times about the capitulation of universities to the inquisition from Trumpworld, which aims to dismantle elite universities, or at the very least, to replace the liberal orthodoxy with a reactionary orthodoxy:

"The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm they greet micromanagement when they approve the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized."

--Larry Summers, NYT op ed

Ironically, one of the most famous examples of liberal intolerance to questioning orthodoxy, now calls for liberals to stand up and resist.

Until and unless liberals (and I am one) face the weakness in their own arguments, face the absurd places their own dogma has carried them, Trump, Vance and all those creepy crawlies who have emerged from under the rocks they had been hiding, will rule the planet.  

The magnificent dinosaurs could not survive the extinction events. 

Hopefully, Democrats will prove capable of fixing the holes in their swings.

Base Hit At Frederick, Obadiah Youngblood

Getting Noticed: Fifty Thousand Voices, All Talking At Once

45 years ago, Mad Dog exulted in the news that his first book was accepted for publication. 

Gustave Wiegand, Blue Lake

It was an improbable story, taken off the "slush pile," after having been rejected at 20 New York publishing houses, but one reader, an oddball gig worker named Brendan Boyd, who read manuscripts for a publisher with offices in Boston and New York, read it on his breaks at a Boston bookstore, where he worked, and told the publisher to publish it, and Mad Dog thought his ship had finally come in.

"Publishing is not a dream fulfilled," Brendan told Mad Dog. "It's a nightmare."

Gustave Wiegand, Springtime, New Hampshire

Mad Dog was too delirious to listen, but then he got sent down to the annual Booksellers Convention, this one in Washington, D.C., and he rode up on the escalator to the 2nd floor, where all the publishers had their displays, and stepping off the escalator, he looked around and saw Brendan's point. That year, 1981, there were 50,000 books published. Mad Dog looked around, and it was like trying to find one penguin among those throngs on the beach in "Planet Earth." 

Then it hit him: his one book, although published, printed, was a single peep among a huge expanse of birds.

In 2024, there were roughly 2.2 million books published.

How do you ever get heard, even if your idea, your voice, your story is the most magnificent of the year?

In fact, Mad Dog's book was nowhere close to the most magnificent of that year, and it was never heard of again. It was ignored, hardly reviewed, unnoticed, likely deservedly.

Actually, that's an over simplification, for purposes of clarity: The book did get one single, glowing review in the Washington Post Book World, front page, but what the reviewer liked about the book was its verisimilitude, its dark depiction of a hospital and the doctors, a sort of Nordic Noir, but Medical Noir, and the droves of people who streamed to local bookstores discovered the book had a bodice ripper cover which belonged on a romance novel, and so they left without the book, and if it ever had an audience, it never found it. So there is a case of a voice heard as a chirp, but then lost in the vicissitudes of marketing. So many things have to go right for a rocket to be launched. 

Gustave Wiegand

This Spring the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will do an exhibit of Van Gogh's paintings from his time at Arles, when he lived with the Roulin family, and he painted its members and he painted a number of scenes around their home.  When you get off the boat along the Seine, at Arles, you walk past a church and outside the church is a one foot square display of a Van Gogh painting of that church, and the town is dotted with other such displays in front of places he painted and you look at the things he painted, and you look at how he saw them, and you realize he was seeing things you could not see. 

Pink House, Obadiah Youngblood

Van Gogh was virtually unknown in his own time.

But, somehow, years later, we can all see his brilliance.

Andy Warhol gave away his paintings, strategically. Mad Dog was part of a group of friends from New York City who rented a summer house in East Hampton and one day, a woman named Nancy,  lying on her back in a bed in one of the rooms focused on what looked like a child's painting, which was unframed, but mounted on a board on the wall next to her bed. At the bottom of the painting was an inscription: "For Linda, From Andy."

Nancy pulled on her bikini and wandered out to the dining room table, where Mad Dog was mangling a  bagel, and she asked, "What was the name of that family on the lease for this place?"

Van Gogh and His Brother at Arles

As it happened, Mad Dog had signed the lease, and he somehow remembered: "Eastman," Mad Dog told her. "I remember because it's East Hampton and the name was Eastman. East, Eastman. Get it?"

Warhol

 

"Come with me," Nancy instructed, and Mad Dog followed her down to the bedroom, his hopes and curiosity rising in tandem--Nancy was a good looking woman. "Look at that," Nancy said. 

Mad Dog looked at the painting and said, "So?"

"So!" Nancy said. 

"Some kid painted..." Mad Dog said.

"To Linda," Nancy said, "Linda Eastman."

"Paul McCartney's Linda Eastman?" Mad Dog said.

"Yes, of course! Who would likely own a place in East Hampton she didn't use in the summer? And what Andy would give her a little sketch?"

"Andy Warhol?"

"Absolutely," said Nancy. "Who else?"

And that is one strategy for getting noticed. Give your stuff to famous people, rich famous people, and hope they hang it in their homes and then other people will want your stuff. 

If only Van Gogh had thought of that.

Three Hawks, Obadiah Youngblood

Somehow, some people with talent do get noticed.

Bob Dylan pursued Woody Guthrie, and he got Pete Seeger to put him on the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and he played the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. 

Linda Ronstadt hung out with the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. 

Sometimes, groups of people can help each other get noticed.

But what if you want to start a political movement?

Hitler hung out at the beer hall in Munich.

Hamilton hung out with Aaron Burr and a bunch of friends in New York.

Locke 8, C&O Canal Obadiah Youngblood

But how many Van Goghs, Dylan's, Hamilton's never get noticed, never get heard? 

Gustave Wiegan, The Birches, Schroon Lake

In a Democracy, a government of, by and for the people means everyone has a voice, but if everyone is speaking and not enough people listening, what happens?