Charlottesville and the White Supremacists

Recently, statues of Jefferson Davis and other Confederates have been removed from their places around the South.

Robert E. Lee, of course, is the Zeus among the gods of the Confederacy.  Some have argued he would have been a better, more successful general if he were less concerned about his dignity and more concerned about winning--thus his foolish and arrogant charge at Gettysburg, ordering Picket to charge up hill along a mile's open field, he repeat the mistake Ambrose Burnside had made at Fredericksburg, where Lee watched Union soldiers dying in heaps and remarked, "It is well war is so terrible or we would grow to love it."

Don't we look like Robert E. Lee? I feel like a hero.

It's not worth wasting much thought or breath about those little men with their big guns and their camouflage get ups, strutting in the streets of Charlottesville, as if they are fighting the Civil War again, fighting in the war against White people, resurrecting the Lost Cause.  Pretending to be heroes, like those football fans who show up at NFL stadiums wearing their team jerseys with the names of their heroes on the backs--Oh, your jersey says "Brady!" Are you Tom Brady? 

Now Lee is remembered as a saint among saints, a sort of martyr to "The Cause."
But as Grant remarked, as he looked at Lee at Appomattox, as Lee arrived to hand over his sword and surrender:

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

I am very sincere about my Cause

We can take some sage advice from Unconditional Surrender Grant when it comes to our current state of affairs and our current President to seems to occupy every liberal's mind, to preoccupy every person on every TV news show.  As Grant approached Richmond with his army, his generals kept arriving at his tent, with news of what Lee was doing, or was said to be doing or planning: 

Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. ..Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.

I feel the same way today: Stop worrying about what Donnie Dubious has said or will say. Think about your own plans; talk about what you intend to do for the country, for the 99%

Choose Your Apocalypse

As disappointing as the PBS News Hour has been on political reporting, their series with Paul Solman and Miles O'Brien reporting on the financial and scientific aspects of the agricultural uses of antibiotics has been nothing short of wonderful. This long neglected subject is well explored, complete with the interview with the owners of an industrial chicken operation who said they had their scientists look at the question of whether their use of industrial doses of antibiotics could possibly cause any problems in the world of drug resistant microbes.
The owners looked earnestly into the camera and assured the viewing public that their very own company veterinarians and assorted scientists looked into the matter and determined none of the antibiotics the company was pumping into their chickens was causing any problems at all for the chickens, the consumers or the world of microbial resistance. In fact, the antibiotics were being used for the "health of our chickens" the company owners said. And we are all for healthy chickens.

Upton Sinclair observed:  "It is difficult to bring a man to understanding, if his salary depends on not understanding." Thus it is with the company's veterinarians. 

All of these chicken producers, the owners, the scientists were on TV and so visibly, willfully blind to the harm they do. 

It is a wondrous thing to behold, actually, watching people talk themselves into obvious lies. Oh, we have been looking into Obama's birth certificate and you just wouldn't believe the things we're finding. Oh, those slaves were happy to be slaves. They were clothed, fed, housed, just happy, happy, happy.

Ditto for the pig and cow farmers who shove all their livestock into pens, snout to tail and keep them there, standing in their own excrement, developing open sores and infections which they try to prevent with large doses of antibiotics.

The English and most of Europe refuse to import American pork, beef or chickens, pointing to the horrid conditions in which these animals are kept. Of course, the Europeans have financial reasons of their own for not wanting to compete with the American mass production machine, but the Brits have said they don't want to emulate the efficiency of the Americans because it is a ruthless efficiency and cruel. The Germans, after all, were very efficient at Auschwitz, moving the cattle, branding them, disposing of those who could not be worked. 

Americans have turned living, sentient beings into industrial production centers, packed tight, unable to move, fed, slaughtered and packaged. And with all that crowding, infection control demands industrial doses of antibiotics, and with that, drug resistant, pathogenic E. coli and a variety of super bugs.

And meanwhile, your local doctor is spending hours on the phone with patients who are demanding antibiotics for their viral sinus infections, which the antibiotics will not help but the patients want them and the doctor is determined to fight the good fight and prevent the overuse of antibiotics, so he fights on, patient by patient,  saving a 500 mg dose of antibiotics while the cow and pig and chicken farmers are pouring tons of antibiotics over the land every day.

Bacteria do love to mutate around whatever antibiotic we bring out to hammer them with. The agribusiness giants are out there looking at their ledgers and their private bank accounts. They don't care if humankind dies off with infectious diseases, just as long as there are enough customers left to fatten the wallets of the corporate owners.

The great American business creed.

The big question is which will get us first:  superbugs resistant to all antibiotics or global warming with the North Pole melting and all Santa's elves drowning.

Democrats Wimp Out in the Game of Thrones

Pray tell, who were those guys with Chuck Schumer talking about a "Better Deal?"
Teddy Roosevelt had the "Square Deal."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had the "New Deal."
And now, the best we can do is a "Better Deal?"

Oh, well, it's not Trump's deal. It's better. It's not good. It's not inspiring. It won't bring you health care or a job or a chicken in every pot, but then again, do we really want to wring the necks of a million chickens?
It's maybe an okay deal. Or a pretty fair deal. Or a better than nothing deal. Or a sort of pretty good deal. Or, how about a better than the crummy deal you had got.


Sad to say, this is no surprise.
You know how when you got to know your kids' friends, and there was this wimpy little guy with arms like pencils who would make Woody Allen look like Arnold Schwarzenegger by comparison, and when you met his parents at the PTA you knew the kid never had a chance.  HIs parents begat what you would expect them to begat.


Well, that's what it's like when you go to meetings of local Democrats, with some happy exceptions. But, for the most part, the Dems are just such jellyfish.

They ooze displeasure with Trump. They do not explode with it.


We have some forceful, energetic, warrior types, but most of them are older and tired.


Listening to a former United States Senator, now retired, I wondered--in what electoral cycle did this guy ever manage to get elected?  He still thinks of himself as a dreamy guitar playing folk singer whose idea of force is getting teary eyed as he works himself up into a passion about being for the little guy and the common man.


We have meetings where sharp contrasts and incendiary conflicts emerge:  A group of Free State Project people arrive for a presentation by a professional Democrat who makes her career giving presentations about the Free State Project. The presiding officer makes sure there is no real confrontation between her and the FSP people.

A bookclub is organized to read and discuss books like "Dark Money"  which contain enough incendiary material to light any room afire, but a professional "facilitator" is hired to "guide" the discussion with talking points and pre formulated "questions" like the questions at the back of the grade school  textbooks: Compare and contrast the Republicans and the Democrats;  what were the author's themes? How well did the author substantiate her points?
Look around the room and take the pulse of the attendees--if you can find a pulse in any of them.

Where is a Rough Rider when you need him? Where is a leader who can rally the troops in the heat of battle? Where is Phil Sheridan or Richard Winters or Teddy Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Gloria Steinem or anyone with at least a patina of charisma?

Why is it so difficult to find someone?

I love Bernie, but fact is, he's too old.

We need to pass the torch, but to whom?

Failure of the Profit Motive in Driving Good Medical Care (Part 1)

An article of faith among every Republican is the profit motive is the best possible driver of human behavior. From Ayn Rand to Paul Ryan to Mitch McConnell, every deep red Tea Party Republican believes what Ronald Reagan preached, the "9 most scary words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

It's a catchy and absolute simple minded concept, but it's dead wrong when it comes to medical care.


As Alexandre Yersin once observed, when asked why he did not practice medicine--and he was a fabulous physician who discovered the cause and first treatment for bubonic plague--he said, "I simply could never bring myself to say to a patient, 'your money or your life.'"


Examples of this come up daily in every doctor's office, but I'll start with a first installment which occurred at a bar.


I was telling a guy who worked for a major health insurance company about this patient whose father, brother, sister and paternal aunt had all died of colon cancer before the age of 50.  I advised him to have a colonscopy but the insurance company rejected this because he was only 46 years old.  The company official explained the company does not approve or pay for colonoscopy before the age of 50. When I asked why they said the rate of colon cancer deaths does not skyrocket until age 50. The curve of deaths rises abruptly only after that age.
"But this guy does not want to be on the DEATH curve," I pointed out. He wants to get to that polyp with the cancer in the tip of the polyp before the cancer has worked its way down to the wall of the bowel, invaded the lymphatic vessels and blood vessels there and metastasized."
"I don't know of any company which would approve that," my beer drinking insurance guy told me.
"But, tell me," I persisted. "The colonoscopy costs, I don't know, say $2000--overpriced but that's another story--but even at that price it's a lot cheaper than the partial colectomy and the chemotherapy and the radiation therapy you'll be paying for when the disease is finally discovered 5 years from now."
"Ah, that's the rub," my beer guzzler pointed out. "The average customer stays with us 3 years. Then his employer buys his coverage from some other company. By the time that guy arrives with his widely metastatic disease on the doorstep, he'll be some other insurance company's problem."

Insurance Companies Have to Pay Rent, Too

Now this insurance guy is not really a monster. He is doing his job, which is not to save this patient but to protect the profit of the share holders of the insurance company. And if he can spare the cost of the colonoscopy this year, his books look good. That's his mission.


That's the profit motive, pure and simple.

Swat Team on Wild Pasture Road

Eager to get out on my bicycle, upon my return from New York City, I took off along one of my favorite paths, which takes me down Towle Farm Road to Nason Lane to Drinkwater. I actually pass through borders of three townships, Hampton, Hampton Falls and Kensington, on this route.  Just after entering Kensington, I start to ascend Wild Pasture road, which is canopied by tall sycamores and other sorts of trees.

Today, as I huffed and puffed up the hill I saw something I'd never seen before, never expected to see. I could see it half a mile off, a long black sedan with blue lights flashing fore and aft, T boned across the road, blocking it. 

Slowing as I approached, I tried to guess what this might be about.  Police sometimes stop their cars to slow traffic for work crews, tree trimming, but this was a Sunday when no work crews are out, and in any case, they usually just slow everyone down and there was nobody with one of those slow/stop signs, no workers in hard hats, in fact, no police visible.

Suddenly, I remembered where I was:  New Hampshire! That drug infested den!  I have it on the highest authority, that's what this state is now. And this might be some sort of drug bust. 

About fifty yards from the police car I could just dimly perceive someone sitting behind the wheel. He was tough to see because he was dressed in all black and wearing a black baseball cap and as I approached, he leaned from the driver's side so he could shout through the open right door window,

"Hey, the rules apply to bikers, you know!"

I started to ask him to which particular rule he was referring, but I thought better of it, and simply turned around and headed back in the direction from which I came and another biker, who I hadn't noticed, just behind me, wheeled about and passed me saying, "Well, he was a little over the top, wasn't he?"


As we headed back I noticed  utility truck pulling up near the police car and a drooping over head power line.

I looked  to see if there might have been a power line 0n the road, but if it was a wire the cop was worried about, why was he not standing outside his car in the road to stop traffic?

Meanwhile, a steady stream of cars, half a dozen at least, headed past me toward the cop, and I presumed he would remind them the rules applied to cars as well and they would be turning around and following me back down the road.

I thought of the cop. He was one hostile cop. Maybe he had seen bicycle riders just swerve around roadblocks and continue through. Bicyclists do sometimes do things which motorists would not do.  Coming up a blind curve to my house, I cut across the road and ride facing traffic as if I were walking because if I stayed in the lane I would force trucks and cars into the oncoming traffic. I also cross a closed covered Bridge which has a sign, "No vehicular traffic" and I rationalize a bicycle is not really what they mean by vehicle. Clearly, the intent is to prevent the weight of cars and trucks on the bridge.


Some of the cop's reaction may have been based on prior anger at what he'd seen other bikers do which had offended him.  More likely he was just a cop, like most cops I know: Basically volatile to the point of explosion, high strung. I suspect if President Obama had invited the two of us to the White House for a beer, I might have seen his point of view. But I don't think either of us will be invited to the White House any time soon. I would not be interested at the present time, even to get to know the cop better.

I had just spent the weekend in New York City, where you see cops who walk the sidewalks.  They go by in cars, too, but mostly you see them in pairs on the sidewalks, on street corners. These NYPD cops do not seem ready to explode. They look annoyed, amused, sometimes indifferent, but they are not the sort of people you cross the street to avoid. 

I was happy to get back to Hampton, where the dens are less drug infested. The worse infestations we have in Hampton are borer beetles who eat birch trees.


Up here in the Live Free or Die Drug infested Den, the police are cooped up in their cars and it seems to make them resentful and irritated.

Can't be fun having to deal with this drug infested population.

Refugees and the Democratic Party

We have not yet figured out where to stand on refugees.

It may be there is not one single immigration/refugee problem but many, but the question often seems to devolve down to how do you decide who you want to allow to cross your border and who you want to turn away.

We have dealt with people crossing borders since before American independence and the Europeans have had border laws for far longer.

So it is puzzling to see so many countries looking so confused and conflicted about what to do with the waves of refugees from all around the Mediterranean basin, and from Afghanistan.

You would think we would have had some modicum of agreement about what to do for and with these desperate people.

It's the old lifeboat question: Can we afford to bring everyone on board the lifeboat at the risk of sinking it and saving no one?

I really do not know how to even begin thinking about this.

I do know when I see a report about African refugees adrift in the Mediterranean and boats headed out to deny them entry and other boats headed out to haul them over to Sicily, I have the feeling both crews on both sides are wrong.  

Those who say simply we must head out to sea and load all the Africans we find in the boats and haul them off to Sicily seem so certain this is the only humane response. Well, we can't just let them drown at sea.

But I have to ask: Once you open that door, are you not encouraging even more to take that risk? You will say, these people are so desperate, it's foolish to talk about encouraging them. But one cannot look at them and not see they are throwing themselves on the mercy of others. They are appealing to the same streak of compassion the man lying on the street with his hand outstretched is tapping. Pity me. Do something for me in my suffering.

Which is not to say the refugees are wrong to do this, to appeal to our compassion. But can we hand out change to everyone?  
I once decided to simply give every street beggar something, just so I would not have to feel badly walking by them. I soon discovered my pockets were empty long before my path brought me to my destination.

After World War II there were more refugees moving in larger groups over a shorter time than what we are dealing with, but in the case of the European refugees, you could see the cause of their displacement was limited and discrete. Once all those Jews leaving Europe, those bombed out Italians and Poles got resettled, that would be it. 
In fact, there are at least two categories of immigrants, as far as I can see from Professor Google, the vast majority being people who were not displaced by war, crime, famine, but who simply lined up in a more or less orderly way and got in. And, surprisingly, although the biggest immigrant population in this country is (predictably) Mexican, i.e. people who now live here legally either as citizens or not, are Mexican, but if you look at the past few years, more people moved here from India than from Mexico or from any other nation and more from China than from Mexico. The numbers are around 140,000 from each country per year.

For Europe, when it comes to the Africans and the Syrians, there is no end in sight. There are simply too many desperately poor, failed states in Africa. For the United States it's  Central America from which the desperate and the equivalent of "boat people" emanate.

To some extent, it's a question of numbers. How many can we anticipate? How much will they cost to absorb, if we decided to absorb them, rather than turn them away?

Are there any good ways to estimate the numbers?
I once heard a story about a survey which reported that 1/4 of the entire nation of China would emigrate to the United States tomorrow if they were allowed to do so. That would be around 300 million Chinese moving to the US. We would have more Chinese speakers than English speakers.  India is about the same size as China, and what if 1/3 of the Indians decided they'd like to come, too? These reports may be absurd, but it raises the reductio ad absurdum argument: is there a point at which we would all agree there is a limit on what we can absorb? On the other hand, this "horror show" scenario has some basis in reality in the sense we are seeing the greatest number of immigrants seeking to leave their countries come from India and China.
We rarely hear Donald Trump or any of his frothing minions scream about the threat from the Trojan horses of India and China because people from these nations do not scare the White men without college degrees living in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The argument is that if we had 300 million Chinese speakers and 300 million Indians move into the USA overnight, it would change the nature of our country. People who might welcome the diversity afforded by some new people may well recoil if there are more of them than "us."

One thing Democrats should be doing right now is thinking about all these issues and not simply reacting reflexively: If Trump wants to keep them out, I want to let them all in. 

There is a real problem here. We have to get serious about solving it.

The War Against White America

I was wondering when Donnie Snowflake would get back to fighting the war against White America.

Look at that Black guy. He took some white kid's place!

He did go to that Carrier Air Conditioner factory in Indiana to rescue those 800 jobs, and he did get about 500 coal miners jobs in a mine. So his war against unemployment is going well. And he keeps going to places where lots of white men show up for rallies, but really, where has he been when it comes to college admissions?


Well, now we know. He's got his good friend Jeff Sessions sending in Justice Department G men to probe and intimidate colleges about their admissions of Black, Hispanic, undocumented terrorists instead of  good White, Christian Americans.




Kris Kobach, protecting you against ethnic cleansing of Whites

He's soul mate out there in the great insane state of Kansas, Kris Kobach, has observed there is a war against White America going on, launched from over our Southern Border by dark skinned Mexicans who aim to carry out ethnic cleansing of all the White Americans. Louie Gohmert and Joe Arpaio can't hold back all those invading hordes by themselves.
I have to ask: If you were a marauding darked skin Hispanic from Latin America, would you go try to cleanse in the state of Kansas? Have you ever seen the movie "Infamous" based on Truman Capote's novel, "In Cold Blood"?  That place is just empty spaces and open fields--it makes Wichita Falls in "The Last Picture Show" look like Gay Paree. Kansas is just bleak. Why would you want to maraud in Kansas?


But back to the point: Donnie Diva has to ride to the rescue to save the White people.

If they need any advice on where to start, I'd send them to the Cornell University Medical College, now known as Weill Cornell, after Sandy Weill, a Wall Street robber baron gave them $150 million (which for him was lunch money) to get Cornell to name their medical school after him.

Even the bricks are white at Cornell

Cornell for decades was the bastion of white upper class men.  There were 90 students in each class, 4 women and 86 men. Most of these were selected because they were the sons or nephews of alumni, and that place was just as WASPy as you could get.  Jews were expressly forbidden.

But when Sandy Weill got rich enough, he decided it would be a good joke for him, a man of Jewish ancestry, to buy himself a medical school which formerly excluded people like him.  Jews not good enough for you blue bloods? Well, I'll just take control and see how superior you are then.
But then, sometime in the late Twentieth century, somebody at the school decided if they were going to owned by a Jew, they ought to go full Monty and just admit all sorts of non Christian, even non White people. Shoot the moon.
They even opened a branch in Qatar, which is somewhere in the Muslim Middle East.  Donnie Diva's got no use for Qatar,  even though we have a big military base there. Seems Saudi Arabia's got some grudge against Qatar and that's good enough for Donnie Dubious after the wonderful time he had in Saudi Arabia, where they really know how to throw a  party and they gave him a nifty sword and they know how to treat women in that country. They have still harems there, in case you were wondering. Which just goes to show not all the good ideas in the world come from America.

Anyway, to get back to the war on White America:  all those dark skinned students have displaced all the blondes and real Americans who wanted to go to Cornell medical school. They've had to find other places. 
My own son, who happens to be White and male had to settle for Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.  As it turned out, he had a wonderful time there.  But he never even got an interview at Cornell, despite his astonishing MCAT score and his great grades and his wonderful recommendations. I called up some of my old friends at Cornell, who still fester in various departments, and was told, variously, "He's got into a way better school, across town," and "He's a bit too pale for current tastes at Cornell" and all like that.

Personally, I'd be okay with "blind" admissions to medical school, and to college. It might work like those auditions   at Lincoln Center, where they put up a curtain and you play your violin or cello behind the curtain and they chose you no matter what your color or your gender or your gender preference, based just on the sound you make.

But when you are talking about glittering prizes, like college and medical school admissions, they haven't yet figured out how to do the equivalent of the curtain thing.


"Qualified" in America hasn't meant "capable and good at the job you are seeking" but it means you have the right color, look, family background.


If that isn't a meritocracy, well then I don't know what is.