Occupy those Democrat Cities!

 

Street Crime, law and order has been a sure fire way to whip up the middle class dating back way before George H.W. Bush invoked Willie Horton 37 years ago, as the symbol of how Democrats coddle dangerous criminals while Republicans are strong, macho men who keep them in check.  

Willie Horton was released from jail only to promptly murder someone and that, Bush said, was all the fault of his Democratic opponent who was soft on crime and wanted to free dangerous Black males to prey on vulnerable White women because all the Democrats care about was not violating Mr. Horton's civil rights.

Randy Newman's "Rednecks" slyly punctured the idea that tough, white guys could prevent violence in the cities of Roxbury (Boston), Chicago, Cleveland, East St. Louis and San Francisco by simply unleashing rednecks to go about "keeping the Niggers down."

Because there is always a racial element to this theme, Democrats have been leery of joining in the cry to punish and suppress the criminal element for fear of being seen as just another force of "keeping the Niggers down." So the Republicans have made this issue their own, not being afraid as being seen as being anti Black.

But, of course, there is another dimension to all this when you go beyond talking about increased police activities, or police tactics like "stop and frisk" which targeted young Black males, who, after all, statistically were more likely than other groups to be carrying weapons and committing crimes with those guns in the inner cities where they lived and you go to the option of simply stationing armies with powerful war weapons and tanks on street corners or patrolling neighborhoods.

Armies in neighborhoods have been tried and failed in other settings, most notably Ireland, where, during "The Troubles" British troops were deployed to violent streets of Belfast and ordinary street crime, robberies, non politically inspired murders did not decrease. In fact, Professor Google tells us conventional crime actually increased during the time regular police, who at least knew the neighborhoods and the people living in them were replaced by military patrols. And getting cooperation from local community folks identifying who done it and when and where and maybe why was forfeit once the troops arrived. 

There has been the feeble defense that this deployment of troops to the Black inner city is not actually about "keeping the Niggers down," but it is an enlightened, compassionate and welcomed effort to protect minority folk from the depredations of criminals in those neighborhoods, because, actually, the majority of victims are minority folks, law abiding, innocent people caught in the cross fire and preyed upon by criminals who could be contained if only we'd send in the troops. No, we're not playing the RACE CARD, we are protecting the minorities! This is all for their own good! This sounds to Mad Dog like the lame excuse that we are only sending our troops into the Sudetenland because those nasty locals are harassing and murdering and raping German speaking local citizens who need the German army to protect them.  Despots always need a victimized group to protect. 

There are actual ways of studying what drives violence, gun deaths in certain parts of cities. The most famous study was "The Boston Miracle" where professors, criminologists actually tried to understand what drove killings in Boston, and they discovered the vast majority were driven by small "crews" who sold and distributed crack cocaine. These were young men, less than 1% of the city's population committing more than 60% of homicides.

The researchers were surprised it was not poverty, per se, but macho stuff, being disrespected, drug marketing territory violations and insults which drove murders. Interventions from government guided by this understanding with buy ins from police dropped the murder rate precipitately in Boston and the tactics were embraced and used in other cities with similar results.

Of course, for many cities government by Democrats, street crime has been drastically reduced, most often confined to certain neighborhoods.

Exceptionally, criminals stalk affluent people in rich neighborhoods, car jacking, murdering or raping, but if you are talking about policy, that is a rule by which resources are guided, you would not deploy your anti crime units be they police or army to patrol rich White neighborhoods. You put them where the crime is. As Willie Sutton said, when asked why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is." Yet another Willie instructing.

Then you get the exceptional case, like the horrific murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a bus by a deranged Black man, who was caught on video stabbing her in the neck fatally, for no apparent reason--there was no reason beyond his schizophrenia. And now Trump has his new Willie Horton. This happened in Charlotte, North Carolina, a blue city in a Red State. The mayor is a Democrat, which is reason enough to send troops with bayonets, tanks and cruise missiles to Charlotte. 

Send in the National Guard!

 

Insurrection from the White House

The definition of insurrection is a violent attempt to overthrow existing authority, so an insurrection from the existing authority contains a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. Then again, we are talking about Donald Trump.

J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois just said, "The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is no joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won't be intimidated by a wannabe dictator."

To this Trump replied: "Chicago is about to find out why we call it 'The Department of War.'"

So, now, this could get interesting.

Mad Dog thinks of the conflict between Lincoln and the state of South Carolina. When he sent provisions to Fort Sumter, the locals fired on the fort and laid waste to the defenders. 

Lincoln, of course, did not want to precipitate a civil war. He had no need to demonstrate his manliness. He was a rail splitter and muscled and sinewy, and he had briefly served in a local war. But in our current President we have a man with heel spurs and the Big Truck/Small Penis syndrome clearly manifest, so anything is possible.

Of course, mention always gets made about Eisenhower sending in the 101st Airborne to escort Negro girls into White schools, past the jeering mob in Little Rock, and Kennedy shoving George Wallace aside in Alabama, with the National guard, but the only thing those histories share is the use of federal troops to over ride local resistance--but this was local resistance which was behavior which violated federal law, namely the Constitution, which is not in play in Chicago or California or DC. Trump never justified the use of federal troops to uphold a particular federal law or the Constitution--he just said there was (imaginary) carnage in the Blue cities and he says he does not like Democratic mayors and governors in states that did not vote for him, and he has said he likes National Guard units from states which voted for him by 47 points. So he is using people he likes to hold guns against people who don't like him and who he does not like. So the comparisons are pure sophistry.

Ideally, Governor Pritzker has been talking with Governor Newsom and with the governors of Washington state, Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and Maryland. But that's ideally. And this is not an ideal world. 

Actual, Real Hero

                                     

What can these governors do? 

Mad Dog does not really know the options, but conceivably, if the state National guard units are under the power of the governors, all of them could deploy their troops to be ready for the Department of War to deploy the federal troops and then we will really see just how tough Trump is. 

Is he TACO Trump or Trump of his own dreams?

Push could actually come to shove.

Nobody has yet shown that sort of nerve, on either side. 

Trump Play Actor Hero

But we live in interesting times. 

Dr. Strangelove Lives! Jack D. Ripper is Surgeon General!

"Your body is a gift from God," Dr. Ladapo tells us. 

Vaccine mandates, which is to say vaccines (which cannot work unless nearly 100% are vaccinated) are evil. "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery."

So, there we have it. The surgeon general of the state of Florida has staked his claim to make Florida patient zero for the entire country. 

Texas was giving them a run for the most medieval stance on public health, but Florida will not be undone.

 Lunatic Fringe: Jack D. Ripper & Gov Strangelove

It will take some years, but we will surely see rising influenza and COVID 19 deaths in infants and young children and measles killing kids, gestational rubella presenting with deaf and deformed babies--rubella is part of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, the MMR, so no measles vaccine and you get the other two as a bonus.

 

Here's the best story in public health, though. It has nothing to do with vaccines, but it's all about sacrificing an individual's rights for the public health, the common good.

2025: Mad Cow  2040: Jacob Creutzfeld 

A farmer in Oregon has a cow who tested positive for Mad Cow disease. He owns 300 head of cattle and it is unclear how his cow got Mad Cow Disease, but likely it was feed contaminated with the causative agent, which is something called a prion, which is not a virus, not a bacteria. 

You cannot do a blood test for Mad Cow Disease--only see it on autopsy of the brain. So there's no way of selecting which cows of the herd of 300 have it; you have to sacrifice all 300. 

If one cow ate the wrong feed, they may all have done that. So all 300 have to be killed. 

If the cows are not sacrificed, there might be 1.5 million hamburgers made from their infected meat*. If their infectious agent is transmitted to human beings, the result is something called Jacob-Creutzfeld disease. But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years. It will definitely happen, just not immediately

This is the farmer's livelihood. You are violating his property rights. You are telling him to do something he does not want to do for the sake of the community, for the sake of all those 1.5 million Americans out there who will eat hamburgers made from his mad cows. Not every single hamburger eater will get Mad Cow/Jacob Creutzfield disease, but nobody can say how many. 

Prion disease causes Mad Cow disease in cattle, but when human beings eat hamburgers or other stuff from infected cattle, 15-20 years later they get  Jacob-Creutzfeld  disease which presents as a person who develops rapid onset of dementia and spasmodic muscle movements and quickly become bedridden and dies, drooling and twitching in bed. A horrific death. Caused by an infectious agent. Undetectable by blood tests. Potentially thousands of unsuspecting victims.

But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years.

All our current politicians will be dead or gone by then. (Including Dr. Ladapo and Gov. Desantis.)

But if public health officials insist on culling that herd, is that "slavery" as Dr. Ladapo calls it? Is this a violation of civil rights as Governor Desantis calls it? 

We are clearly insisting this individual, this farmer do something he does not want to do--kill all his cows. We call that acting for the common good, but we are trampling all over individual rights to do it.

Or is it protection for the nation?

That thing we call "public health?"

*Assuming 5,000 hamburgers from each cow. Google says one cow can make 5,000-10,000 quarter pounders; so I took the low number, just to sound reasonable.

President Makes War Against Blue States

 

So now President Trump has declared war on the state of Colorado.

He is moving the Space Command, with all its jobs to Alabama.

Could it be because Colorado is where South Park is?

No, the President says it's because Colorado voted against him 3 times, which was very unfair and corrupt.

And Alabama, where he is moving the Space Command voted for him by 47 points.

So, that's only fair. If your state votes for Trump, you get whatever he can think to throw your way. If you vote against him, you are on his bad list and are a pariah state.

Personally, Mad Dog thinks he just did not like Steve Carell in "Space Force" that Netflix TV series which was set in a Colorado mountain and made the whole idea of a Space Command look like something of a joke. And if there's one thing Mr. Trump cannot abide is being a joke. Because, you know, everyone takes him if not literally, at least seriously.

New Hampshire, it should be noted, voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. 

We can only imagine what Trump will do to us.

Maybe he'll move the Portsmouth Navy yard to Mississippi. (The joke would be on Maine, of course, as the Portsmouth, NH Navy yard is actually, across the river from Portsmouth, NH,  in Maine.) And one of Maine's senators is Susan Collins who has pretended to be independent but has never voted against Trump on anything.

Of course, it goes without saying that Trump will drop a bomb on New York, where he was convicted of 39 felonies and Maryland, oh Maryland, are you ever in for it. Trump thinks "The Wire" was a documentary, and he is not far wrong there, but he is definitely going to send in the Marines to Baltimore and Montgomery County.

We are in for so much fun now. 

Imagine if King George III had decided to send in troops to towns which annoyed him, like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. And Yorktown, Virginia.

Oh, wait. 

Smarter Than Anyone

Paul Offit, MD, the University of Pennsylvania pediatrician and vaccinologist, reminds us about RFK JR:

Secy Jack D. Ripper

1/ RFKJR does not believe in germ theory, i.e. that viruses and bacteria cause specific diseases.

2/ He believes (along with certain African dictators) that HIV does not cause AIDS. What exactly does cause AIDS in his mind is not entirely clear, but Mad Dog cannot imagine whatever RFKJR thinks does cause AIDS is something anyone ought to worry about.

3/ RFKJR believes vaccines are at best, not beneficial and, at worst, vaccines are harmful. Fortunately, for Americans since Sam Adams had his family inoculated against small pox around the time of the American revolution, to the mid twentieth century when the polio vaccine finally freed America of the specter of polio, RFKJR was not in charge.

 Luckily for Pasteur's patients in 1895, there was no RFKJR in France, where Pasteur successfully treated people bitten by rabid dogs saved them from certain death from the rabies virus. And luckily, at least for the time being, we still have rabies vaccines.  One can only imagine what combination of diet and clean living RFKJR would prescribe for your kid if she were bitten by a rabid animal.

4/ RFKJR does not like Pasteurization of milk or other liquids which might spoil, and extolls the health benefits of unpasteurized milk, and would not just make America Healthy Again, but would take us back to the 19th century in American public health. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 19th century, because Pasteur was already saving lives in the 19th century. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 18th century, as small pox vaccines were successfully used even then.

5/ RFKJR  thinks swimming in bacterial ladened fresh water is good for your immune system, which is good news for certain microorganism:  leptospirosis, crytospiridium, cholera bacilli,  polio virus, hepatitis A and B viruses, giardia parasites and  COVID virus all of which are removed by water treatment plants in large cities and small towns. 

Alexandre Yersin

6/ RFKJR also likes the measles virus, which he says wards off malignant disease somehow prevents heart disease and autoimmune disease. 

Maybe, if measles kills people young, they never live old enough to develop heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disease. 

More children have died of measles since RFKJR took office and got himself a pulpit since the turn of the century.

It used to be you had to be a child living in an ultra Orthodox Hasidic community, where they don't believe in vaccines,  to die from measles. Now, you can be a typical WASPy kid from Texas and meet that fate because your parents don't believe in experts but they have faith in Trump and RFKJR.

 Measles vaccine is usually combined with rubella vaccine. Rubella contracted by pregnant women results in deafness and other fetal malformations, so we are not yet even close to being able to tally up the damage RFKJR will do to the next generation, not to mention current citizens.

7/ Another RFKJR target: fluoridated water, which prevents childhood and adult dental cavities. If you are old enough, you remember Colonel Jack D. Ripper of "Dr. Strangelove" who launched a nuclear war while complaining about  how fluoride was "poisoning our precious bodily fluids." 

We all laughed at Jack D. Ripper because he was just so absurd. 

Now, Jack D. Ripper has come to life, no longer a fictional super villain, like the Joker, but a real life Joker.

RFKJR promised Donald Trump he would be a wrecker of establishment norms in healthcare, and he has kept that promise as a one man train wreck.

Of course, we only have RFKJR because he fits Donald Trump's most important sales pitch: Experts are wrong and that includes scientists. The only people you can believe are Donald Trump and his mob.

On the bright side, eventually as thousands die from these preventable diseases, germ theory may make a come back.

But, of course, it's also possible that whatever damages RFKJR  and Mr. Trump cause, they will simply blame on Democrats and Woke ideology, and the average American will never actually know what hit him.

It will be the Trump/Roy Cohn thing: Whatever you are guilty of, accuse your opponent of that. Me, Caused epidemics to erupt? No, you!

RFKJR likes to think of a himself as a contrarian, who is standing up to entrenched scientific belief and speaking the truth to all those ossified "experts" who belief things like viruses cause disease.

Of course, the history of medicine is the history of men who were contrarians. 

That's what science is, you know?  Make an observation and then try to prove it, even if it contradicts current dogma.

Doctors have made observations, often before they had a theoretical basis to explain why those things observed happened. Ignaz Semmelweiss, in Hungary, observed that women who gave birth on the midwifery ward never got post delivery infections whereas those delivered by physicians, who delivered their babies after having visited the autopsy rooms and other wards without washing their hands, often got "childbirth fever" and died.  He was working before Pasteur's germ theory.  He insisted all doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution but he did not know what the hand washing actually did to prevent these deaths. He insulted a lot of respected physicians and they did not like it. He was drummed out of the medical profession for his efforts. He was a contrarian, but he had some numbers to prove his point. He didn't just make a claim; he tried to do a study to prove it.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Lister was insisting on surgeons washing their hands in carbolic acid, but he had some knowledge of Pasteur's germ theory and he fared better and while his approach ruffled feathers, he was eventually embraced as results got tabulated and science, which is all about proving what you say is true, not simply announcing your faith in some idea.

RFKJR is, of course, an anti-scientist. He operates on faith. He just says something is true and because he believes it, he insists it is true, no matter what studies, experiments, scientific observations tabulated in double blind studies say. He often alludes to "all the studies" or "there are enough studies," but he never actually gives the actual study, the actual reference in the scientific literature. Or, one should say, when he does giver a reference it is always to some joker who has been so thoroughly discredited his name is a joke--like the guy who said vaccines cause autism.

Science depends on results: So when polio infections nearly disappeared after widespread polio vaccines, it was scientific to connect those two things.

When Alexandre Yersin discovered a bacillus in the buboes of patients dying of the Black Plague and raised antibodies to it and treated patients with his vaccine and stopped an outbreak of Plague in Vietnam, results spoke for themselves.

All those centuries of belief about the Black Death evaporated: The Plague was not caused by bad diet, by the moral turpitude of European villagers, and it was not God's wrath against sinners in European nations. It turned out it was a micro organism you could not see with the naked eye.

Imagine that.

And a scientist figured that out. He was trained by Pasteur and he believed in germ theory and he proved germ theory was right.

But now we don't have Yersin or Pasteur or Lister.

We have Donald Trump, who wants us to feel we are better than all those scientists. We have RFKJR who wants to protect our precious bodily fluids and forget about germs and viruses.  Alexandre Yersin, actual scientist.

And we are all just as smart as anyone from some laboratory, or from some snooty university.  

We just know stuff. 

Don't that just make you feel smart and strong? 

 

New Truths

 

So now Trump is saying windmills cause cancer, (not to mention a bird Holocaust), solar energy is bad and coal is clean and oil and gas are the way to the future. 

Also, vaccines cause more death and disease than the diseases they are designed to prevent (beginning with polio, which, don't you know, is merely a sign of bad diet and sedentary lifestyle.)

COVID was a Chinese plot. It was hatched to scare the world into depression in that Wuhan lab, but then the mRNA COVID vaccine contained it because Trump was up on that research, but COVID vaccine now is bad, so forget that Operation Warp Speed triumph, and let's not do any more harm with vaccines.

Ebola is and always will be confined to "shithole countries."

Confederate generals were fighting for a genteel way of life and slavery was actually good for those backward slaves from shithole countries. 

January 6 rioters who were pardoned by Trump are victims of the deep swamp, and they were actually heroes, trying to save the country, disguised as ordinary tourists but they  simply could not find any bathrooms in the Capitol building, so they, you know, just defecated on the walls and they should be compensated for all the embarrassment, which was in large part because Congress was too cheap to fund public bathrooms. 

Our economy is going gangbusters but is in such a crisis that Mr. President needs emergency powers to seize control of the purse strings of government and impose tariffs.

A thriving economy, you see, is an emergency.

Also Jeffrey Epstein was actually rehabilitating all those fourteen years old girls who came from shithole homes, and the Donald was always a father figure to them, but he hardly knew Epstein and never visit any of his islands. And Donald never got the credit he deserved for what he did for those girls, some of whom got needed attention in his beauty pageants. 

FEMA and the CDC and the NIH and most universities are worse than useless. Ditto for medical research. Air traffic controllers should not be of the female persuasion, and certainly never pilots, because, you know, it was a female helicopter pilot that ran into that airplane at Washington National airport, which just proves the point, because, you know, a case like that says it all.

Also, the best way to stop street crime in blue cities is to send National Guard troops from Red states to stomp it out, because those boys from Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi, really know how to keep those gang members (whose families all come from shithole countries) down and under control, just like Randy Newman said in that song, "Rednecks."

In fact, the murder rates in those three states (Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi) make the murder rates in New York City look like minor league play, so those Guard units are very experienced in murder.

The further away you get from Washington, D.C., in fact the better Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller look.

And with our new Supreme Court, well, they can just retire, because, after all, they've said anything Trump does is just fine and he has the right to do it, so why should they bother hearing cases, unless it's to certify he's right about everything, which we already know, so we could save their salaries and close that vestigial branch down.

And Congress, well, once we get the Gerrymander done in Texas and Ohio and Pennsylvania we really won't need to ask much from Congress. That's 435 salaries we might just dump into the Potomac and go home. 

Why, just the other day there was a three hour cabinet meeting, which, if you watched it, you'll know, was just a lovefest for Mr. Trump, as one cabinet officer after another said how wonderful Trump had made everything from Commerce to Agriculture to Health to Homeland Security, which is really important since all those areas are scary bad in America right now and would be a lot worse if it weren't for that steady hand on the tiller in Washington, DC at the White House, which, by the way, is looking worlds better now that it's been turned into a ballroom with a concrete rose garden and gilt up with gold everywhere, but especially in the Oval Office, which really needed an upgrade, because, you know, all those losers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Obama and whoever had stunk the place up. 

And there's no more war in Ukraine--that's just fake news from the failing New York Times and NPR. That war is over. And if Donald Trump does not get the Nobel Peace prize for ending it, then the Nobel Peace prize is history, just like Twitter and there will be a new Peace Prize: The TRUTH PEACE PRIZE and it's first and ultimately only winner, year after year will be Donald J. Trump, as it should be. Because, that's the TRUTH.

So, that's the Truth. All said.

And done.

The swamp is drained.

The Man Who Would Be King

 

May 4, 1970, the day which still lives in infamy, when the National Guard arrived on campus at Kent State and inexplicably shot dead unarmed students.

Mary Ann Vecchio with dead Jeffrey Miller, Kent State

"We should not be afraid. THEY should be afraid," Trump has told his fans. 

And this is the way you do that. 

Send in the National Guard and shoot a few people as an example to the others.

Nixon called the Kent State students "Bums."

The folks in Kent, Ohio, as James Mitchener documented in his book, "Kent State," thought the university students were worse than that. They thought those students deserved it.

What was incomprehensible to us on that day, that those guard soldiers would hate students enough to shoot them in cold blood, became more comprehensible, as you read through Mitchener's pages: There was deep seeded resentment among the blue collar folk of that town, and their sons, who were in uniform with guns exercised that resentment toward the rich, privileged, pampered students. 

Those who would today be called leftist, elitist DEI advocates at universities Trump is trying to transform at best, and destroy at worst.

And so they shot them down.

It was very American, as My Lai attested.

Lyndon Johnson called out the Guard to DC after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, when city blocks were actually set on fire. 

Washington, DC 1968: Real Emergency

Then the Guard appeared with fixed bayonets in dangerous, burning parts of town, during an actual true serious emergency.

Guard in DC 1968: Actual Emergency

Not like now, when they are just strutting around the monuments and the Mall with nothing to do. There is no actual emergency in DC, at least not where the Guard is.

Guard in Trump's DC Now

The Guard is running away from the nasties. They are just there for show.

And now, Mr. Trump sends National Guard to blue cities with the same intent, maybe. 

Does he really want to provoke another Kent State?

Thus far, he has behaved only comically. 

Friends from DC tell me the Guard patrols only the safest parts of town. They are nowhere to be seen in the actual dangerous parts of DC. 

Georgie Porgie

Puddin and pie.

Kissed the girls.

And made them cry.

But when the boys came out to play.

Georgie Porgie ran away.