From Pasteur to Bobby JR

 

During the dreadful year of 1918 influenza killed more people than the bombs and bullets.

The Black Plague killed somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all people in Europe. No war ever killed half of all the people in Europe.

COVID killed millions.

Now they're saying shiny things with hooks are bad for you.

So, if you are really concerned with Defense or Homeland Security, you would focus not so much on huge things, like rockets and bombs, but on tiny things you cannot see with the naked eye: microbes, viruses and all like that. You would make public health your first priority.

It's no accident then, and really not much of a secret, that the United States government has a secret facility at Ft. Dietrich Maryland to house, study and possibly weaponize infectious agents rather than nuclear bombs. 

Now vs Then (or RFKJR Now)

One thing which requires government, or at the very least a functioning health care system, is protection of the population from epidemic illnesses.

As dreadful as malignant disease is, as widespread as diabetes and coronary artery disease are, nothing quite threatens any organized society--which functions only when people can congregate and engage in commerce, education and group efforts like construction, transportation and government--nothing threatens all that like infectious disease.

One thing government has done for religion, even in a country which once valued the separation of church and state, is it has battled epidemic infectious diseases so people could congregate to worship together.

But now, we have the anti-science mob, who say, "I do my own research," and who now prevent the population from getting direction and advice from those folks who really do actual scientific research.

A few years ago, up here in New England, a fearsome outbreak of Respiratory Syncytial Virus tore through communities and hardly a soul did not know some family who had an infant, toddler or preschooler who wound up on a respirator and the hospitals were overwhelmed.

Remarkably, the American scientific establishment has now come up with a combination of vaccine and therapy which has, in a very significant trial proven to be quite effective at preventing the virus from hospitalizing kids and saving them when they get really sick with RSV. 

This vaccine triumph has happened at the end of a long, arduous, fraught, frustrating road, with many failures and sometimes harm to patients, but it is a remarkable achievement.  Bet you haven't heard. No surprise there. Your ignorance is by design.

The vaccine is actually given to pregnant mothers, who develop antibodies and pass them on to their incubating offspring. This is necessary because RSV kills kids less than a month old, and very often before age 1, so there's no window in their short lives to vaccinate in these neonates.

Parents are and should be understandably cautious about vaccinating a pregnant woman, so the study and its safety assessment and its efficacy should be widely discussed and examined, and you know women will be going online to educate themselves. It's a big decision, but there is good information, if only it were available.

Typically, the Center for Disease Control, puts out a lot of information about stuff like this, and it had a whole press package ready, until RFK JR nixed it. Nobody is going to get any "propaganda" from the CDC, the NIH or any federal department of public health as long as RFK JR is Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here's Paul Offit says of RFK JR:

He has restricted CDC attendance at scientific conferences, eliminated presentations to large audiences, and limited updates on CDC websites. In other words, he [RFK JR] has muzzled the CDC.

And Offit should know, as Offit is on the FDA advisory committee about vaccines. What we have here in RFK JR is really just one bizarre actor in the freak show that is the Trump Administration.  

RFK JR  is a man who was selected because he is the ultimate in oppositional/defiant personality Mr. Trump so loves. 

But, in this case he is positioned to do a world of harm.

It's not like Kristi Noem, the Tammy Faye of the cabinet, with her artificial eyelashes, super blush cheek highlights, who delights in dressing up like a "bad-ass" she-warrior and prancing around borders and prisons, when she is not executing her own pets--the harm she does, while cringe worthy, is nevertheless limited to a few thousand unfortunates--the harm RFK JR and his godfather, Trump, will do can run into the millions.

RFK JR does not believe in germ theory. When he tries to read the scientific literature he reads with a conspiracy theory mindset--finding malevolent intent in every lab, in every paper.  Doing his Own Research RFK JR read Tony Fauci's article on the superinfections seen in fatal cases of measles, and--Aha!--memo to world: RFK JR discovered people do not actually die of measles pneumonia, but of a bacterial (staph aureus) "super infection" pneumonia. So why vaccinate against measles when it's the bacterial that's killing people?  

Of course, this is like saying the man who hemorrhages to death in the emergency room after an auto accident died of bleeding, exsanguination, rather than from the auto accident.  

People whose lungs have not be ravaged by measles or influenza or leukemia or lymphoma do not get staph pneumonia. 

RFK JR does not want you getting your information from the CDC, or the National Institutes of Health. He wants you getting your information only from him. He doesn't have to burn books or medical journals: He can keep you from ever holding one in your hand. He doesn't want NIH doctors going to medical conventions to share their study results with other doctors, because that is like some sort of ritual in a secret society and all the rest of us are left out. Of course, FOXNEWS and RFK JR himself could attend these meetings, but then they'd have to sit through hours and days of presentations, looking at slides, listening to questions from the audience challenging or supporting the findings of research scientists and that is just such hard work and boring!

Better to do your OWN RESEARCH and just know things without bothering to do all that hard work!

And learning stuff means you might have to be faced with stuff you've never heard of before and that can be so unnerving: Ask your school age child, or your college student offspring if they have ever heard of Alexandre Yersin.

Mad Dog will bet you dollars to doughnuts not a single kid will know.

These kids may know about Caesar or Napoleon or Hitler or any of a variety of merchants of death, but ask them if their schools ever taught them about Yersin, or, for that matter Jonas Salk.

Yersin

You can Google these guys, but just briefly: Yersin worked in Pasteur's lab but he had wanderlust badly and wound up in French Indochina just in time for a major outbreak of the black plague in British held Hong Kong. He managed to not only identify the bacillus which causes plague but he raised an antiserum to it so when it made it's way to Vietnam he was able to save his the people all around his village clinic,  and even though he is French, from the country which subjugated their country, there are monuments to Uncle Yersin in Vietnam today. They do not think of their erstwhile Tony Fauci as an authoritarian to be denounced: they know what he did and they understand how his science saved them.

Polio Ward

As for Jonas Salk, Dave Garroway summarized his achievement best. He had to introduce Salk at a banquet and as he was getting dressed in his tux, his seven year old son asked him what the big occasion was, and Garroway said he was going to introduce Jonas Salk, the man who invented the cure for polio. 

And the kid asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" 

And Garroway turns to the audience and says, "Can you imagine any kid of our generation who never heard of polio? That's the best introduction I can possibly give."

I suspect that was the best introduction Salk had ever heard.

These men, Salk, Yersin, along with Banting and Best, who discovered insulin, and saved the lives of countless children and they are the real heroes in history, although that history is not taught in public or even in private schools. 

Best & Banting

The history of the world is a pretty uninspiring thing, when you look at what men have done: hitting each other over the heads with clubs, and then escalating to arrows, then guns then nuclear bombs. But there is another history, that of science which changes for the better the lives of every citizen, in his own village, in his own family.

That is the history RFK JR does not know, or if he knows anything about it, he responds to it in some lunatic way, defying it, denying it, condemning it. I can only imagine where his pathology arose. 

If those who are horrified by Trump would only keep the spotlight on RFK JR, eventually, even the most obtuse will see the truth. The camera has only to show the man and his disease often enough.

And sunlight, ultimately, may prove to be the best disinfectant.

The Strange Principle of Class Guilt

 

The idea that because one member of a group, or "class" of people is guilty of a crime means that all people of that class ought to be punished is a prickly pear of an idea.

This is slightly different from the idea of punishing a group because within it, a criminal class is "hiding behind the skirts" of some members of the group, but the two are really one in the same in practice, as what is really being said is that those people providing the skirts ought to resist the criminal element and offer them up for punishment and if they do not, well then you kill every one.

It also says, of course, that you see all the people in a group as being indistinguishable: Don't you know, all (fill in the blank) Negroes, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jews look alike to you. Their individual facial features do not register with you; they are simply Negro, Asian, Jews to you.

This is the idea which operated behind lynching a randomly caught Negro as a warning to others, after a white woman reported she was raped by a Black man.

What of "class guilt"?

During the American Civil War, Lincoln's favorite general, Ulysses S. Grant, was outraged by reports of Jewish merchants who were selling captured bales of cotton on a black market and illegally profiting. He then issued this order, Field Order #11:

“The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.”

This resulted in thirty Jewish families living in the Department of Tennessee being forcibly ejected from their homes and expelled. To Grant, all Jews were the same; all were guilty, because, you know, the Merchant of Venice.

Lincoln, being a lawyer, and understanding justice, and having read Shakespeare,  promptly slapped Grant down on this and told him, "You cannot punish a class of people for the transgressions of a few."

After the assassination of Hitler's beloved lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich, near the village of Lidice, in what is now Czechoslovakia,  the Germans simply killed everyone--men, women and children-- in the village as a warning, a punishment and an instrument of terror. An Aryan fair haired boy had been murdered; a  class of human beings (non German members of a nearby village) was exterminated.

Heydrich, the Aryan

Memorial to the Lost Children of Lidice

Later, during the Vietnam War, American soldiers, being mostly non Asian, came to see all Vietnamese villagers as untrustworthy. They established "free fire zones" and killed anyone living in them to "destroy that village to free it." The village of My Lai paid the price of this attitude, and infants, mothers, fathers were laid to waste. The Viet Cong were operating in the vicinity and the Americans couldn't tell Viet Cong from garden variety Vietnamese villagers, so just shoot them all. Notice the mothers cradling their babies.

My Lai: Paying the Price of Living While Vietnamese

Now, the same thing is being promulgated in Gaza by Netanyahu:  Because there are Hamas living among the Palestinians in the department of Gazza, that geographic area must be cleansed of all Palestinians, and the presence of these miscreants among a class of human being, namely the Palestinians, justifies the killing of all those human beings; the whole class has to be eliminated from a territory.

Somehow, people still defend this.

Where is Lincoln, when we need him?

Oh Happy Day! Blonde Immigrants!

Never let it be said that wishes don't come true in Trumpland.

 The Guardian: 4/8/24

"Donald Trump bemoaned a lack of immigrants to the US from 'nice' countries 'like Denmark [or] Switzerland,' offering millionaire donors at a Florida fundraiser a reprise of infamous racist Oval Office remarks about people coming to America from 'shithole countries'."

And now, finally, South Africa has offered more than just Elon Musk, but some verifiably blonde immigrants who are coming from what may or may not satisfy Mr. Trump as a "nice country," but they sure are pale.

So the U.S. government foots the bill for the transport, presumably funded by DOGE, and now we have some immigrants we can all embrace, fleeing oppression, the wretched refuge on the teeming shore! And they will not be illegal because, well, they are White, after all.

And we need more of those.

And they can tell stories which will resonate with all those ICE interviewers, about how badly they were treated in their native land because they were--wait for it--WHITE!

So, once again, Mr. Trump has come to the rescue of the white underclass, that group whose fetters he seeks to break, who need our support.

Church pantries will open; resettlement in sanctuary cities will be a breeze.

And all is white in White Nationalist land. There are no doubt homes being readied for them in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Alabama and Mississippi, where new sanctuary counties will be hastily constructed. 

Promises made. Promises kept!

Suspend Habeas Corpus! Invasion from South Africa

 President Trump has long said he could not understand why the only immigrants who seem to want to crash the gate are from "shithole countries." He wondered why we don't get more blue eyed blondes from Norway.

Well, finally! Now we got some blue eyed blondes, of Dutch ancestry, being flown under US government auspices to the US of A, because they have been persecuted for being white in South Africa, according to Karoline Leavitt. Whites, of course, have a long history of being persecuted in South Africa: Just look a Elon Musk!

Now we have finally got some immigrants Mr. Trump can love! And the white nationalists will be delirious. The Proud Boys will meet them at the airport with flowers and maybe some gift guns and if there are any willing women, marriage proposals.

And, an added benefit, owing to the immigrant invasion (which Mr. Trump & Co have contributed to with their South African caper) Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump's personal Gollum, now says Trump will suspend Habeas Corpus, which the Constitution allows in the case of foreign invasion. Last time this happened was when General Robert E. Lee invaded Antietam, Maryland with the Army of Northern Virginia.  

But, of course, of course, it's not an invasion if the refuges are white; only when they are dark skinned does it become an invasion, an infestation. 

Is this a great country, or what?

Pretend Democracy on the Cheap

 

Last night about 50 members of the Hampton Democrats Club, sometimes ironically referred to as the "Young Democrats Club" (median age 72) held its monthly meeting.

This was something different: it was not devoted to the usual business about picnics, fund raising and complaints about Donald Trump,  but to a panel discussion.

On the panel was a member of the Planning Board, the chairwoman of the Budget Committee, the chairwoman of the Zoning Board and a member of the Board of Selectman. The only Board not represented was the School Board.

These constitute the town government as most citizens of Hampton understand town government. 

There is also a town manager, who most people in the room (and in the town at large) could not only not name, but could not pick out of a line up. What his role is is anyone's guess. There is also a town moderator of elections and a town moderator for the Deliberative Session on schools.

Although the majority of those present last night had lived in the town for over 40 years, many having grown up here and graduated from Winnacunnet High School, few could have actually described how the town government works. More Young Democrats could tell you what the three branches of the federal government do--or used to do before Trump--than  could describe the functions and jurisdictions of these town organs.

The Zoning Board chairwoman enlightened us by saying that the Zoning Board does not set up zoning rules--that's done by the Selectmen. All the Zoning Board does is hear appeals from citizens who find they cannot possibly comply with a zoning ordinance for their given property: as in the case of a person who owns a property which extends only  30 feet back from the road but who is required to establish a 40 foot set back. If the Board finds the code cannot be reasonably applied, the Board grants an exemption. 

The Budget Committee chair told us that committee simply executes the will of the voters, who vote on the warrant articles every March. If the voters vote down money for a new garbage truck, the Budget Committee does not spend money on a new truck, but scrounges around for money to buy parts for the old trucks. If the town voters vote down money to put a new roof on the high school, then the high school does not get a new roof.

The Planning Commission comes up with recommendations for what ought to happen for the town longterm: Should overhead power lines be buried? Should a study of what to do as rising tides and sea levels overflow the seawall and flood the main road along the coast, and flood the homes and businesses? They send these recommendations to the Select Board who may or may not put them on the warrant articles for the March vote.

What was clear was that  these committees do not talk to one another much.

And something else was clear:

The town has roughly 20,000 year round residents. In the summer it has 150,000 residents, for whom garbage collection, water, electricity, sewage treatment, police, fire and emergency services have to be provided. 

The town's budget is difficult to nail down: Not counting the school budgets for the four town schools, the town budget is around $45 to 50 million. There's another $40 million in trust funds of obscure origin which may or may not be at the disposal of the town and its schools. The school budgets, perhaps as many as three different school budgets, run around $25 million each--which would be $75 million total. 

So, overall, you're looking at a town of 20,000 which has a government controlling somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000,000.

As someone observed, if Hampton were a college or a business, the ladies on these boards, but especially the chairwoman of the Board of Selectman would be making $2 million a year for that job. 

She gets $3,000 and the other chairman get zero.

In fact, the representatives to the Concord House of Representatives and to the state senate get $100 a year.

Decisions about how to spend  these millions are often left up to the annual March "warrant article" votes, which draw on a big year, 2,000 to 3,000 voters. Then, if the new roof for the school is voted down, well, it is said, the citizens of the town have spoken.

This was the inevitable refrain when the slush fund for the Catholic school in town was voted through every year: The voters have spoken. But the fact is, the voters had no idea what that warrant article meant--they simply read "Recommended by the Budget Committee" and moved on to the next twenty pages of warrant articles, about which they knew next to nothing.

This is why democracies, in their purest form, cannot function for a group of people exceeding a hundred souls. There is just too much minutiae to wade through. You need a civil service for that. 

So, we go through an annual charade called "Deliberative Sessions" where townsfolk get up and speak on issues important to them, but only a hundred citizens attend these. To be a really good, informed citizen would be a second job. And after the deliberative sessions, warrant articles are printed up and about a third to half the eligible voters in town vote on the two articles they actually know something about and then just rubber stamp the others.

For most people in town, they want to get home at night after work and just be able to flush their toilets, put out their trash and not find the Atlantic Ocean in their living rooms. 

The fact is, our local government was constructed when the town was a dinghy, but now it's a battleship. 

We've got a command structure built for a dinghy.

Lynching immigrants: The Display of Cruelty is the Point

 

Adam Serwer, back in 2018 wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Cruelty is the Point," in which he noted that the Trump mob celebrates thuggery. This is the glue which binds them.

There's a line in "Avenue Q" about the word "Schadenfreude" (joy at the misfortune of others)--"Oh, that IS German!" 

Well, that is American, too. 

Right back to the lynchings in the American South, which persisted into the 1960's. The kindred of photos of the grinning mobs jeering at Jews in Austria, who were forced to scrub the sidewalks with their toothbrushes juxtaposed with the grinning mobs at American lynching is striking.

It is the same character trait which drives the boy who puts a kitten into a microwave and delights in watching it fry alive. 

There are certain behaviors which denote deep psychopathology--microwaving the kitten, placing fresh, defecated stool in a dresser drawer of folded laundry.  At a medical school dorm at Yale, I once stepped into a toilet stall in a bathroom, and right next to the toilet was a steaming pile of stool in a wordless display of a deeply diseased mind.

Delighting the MAGATS

That is what you've seen at Trump rallies dating back to his first run for office, as he points to some dissenter in the crowd and tells the crowd to beat him up and carry him out. It's not just the gesture from the stage; it's the delight in the mob. 

Date Night In the Deep South

The fact it's so open is important. All that it is is hiding in plain site. We are the champions. We are the irresistible horde, the orcs, the Wehrmacht, the Army of Northern Virginia, marching toward Antietam, the Roman legions, the Force. 

Oddly, or perhaps significantly, the leaders are often deformed: the bald, corpulent Mussolini, the whole Nazi crew: Fair as Hitler, tall as Goebbels, lean as Goering the joke went. Hitler with that comically elephantine nose and the brush mustache attempting to distract the gaze, the dwarf Goebbels with his club foot, Goering who grew so fat he could not fit any uniform--like Homer Simpson who had to be fitted with a smock. 

When Hillary Clinton, in a rare unguarded moment observed Trump and his fans were a "basket of deplorables" she touched a nerve and the reaction was so electric she followed her advisers' advice and retreated rather than doubling down on it. She had stuck the bull with the picadors' stakes and rather than rising to match Trump's rantings, she retreated.

But now, we can see she spoke the truth, too mildly and without enough conviction. 

We can see the monsters. The Trump rallies are nothing short of the crowds along the route to the guillotine. 

This is what marching those shaven men, shoving them down from behind the neck is all about. It is the old Sheriff Joe Arpiao marching men outfitted in pink underwear who had been arrested but not even arraigned, through the Arizona streets, while he stood atop his tank painted with flames along its flanks, the ultimate tough guy.

Sheriff Arpaio's Delight

Lynching and Spectacle: Trump's Model

 

Amy Louise Wood published a book in 2011 called, "Lynching and Spectacle," about the Jim Crow South during the 1950's--that halcyon time in America to which Mr. Trump would like to return us.

She makes a number of surprising observations, based on the data she managed to collect about who was doing the lynching, where it happened most often and why.

But, the central insight is that lynching was about spectacle. It was a "warning to the others."

And that is really what Mr. Trump is all about, with the call to re open Alcatraz, with his urgings to the dictator of El Salvador to build new torture chambers to receive all the bad guys Mr. Trump intends to send him, not just illegal immigrants, but "home grown" nasties.

What Mr. Trump really is doing is simply a neo-lynching, the new wrinkle is it is not done by the local hooded vigilantes. It is the government who is the vigilantes--no trials, just string 'em up quick as we can.

We are living the Ox Bow Incident every day now.

Doesn't matter if we make a mistake now and then, stringing up the wrong guy, because they are all guilty of being Black or from shit-hole countries and we need to send a message.

When you look at the post cards made of the lynchings, there are often children grinning into the camera with a Negro hanging by his neck in the back ground.

It was just a fun Sunday diversion--go hang the Negro.

Sometimes done before church, a ceremony of dominance, fire and brimstone.

Now it's send the immigrant to the gulag.

That's the point of Mr. Trump's current mob: a  spectacle of cruelty.