You have insulted the wrong guy.
Judge Boasberg, in a NYT photo– he looks pretty stern to me.
(This essay was typed a week ago. On review, I had to enlarge the tale considerably and it is still not up to date. The bottom line is that Trump is a psychopath who is running amok with millions of followers in the United States. He has inspired deep alarm and revulsion in many parts of the world, recently provoking election losses by candidates sympathetic to him in Canada and Australia. On the other hand, Hungary is fully fascist and Germany is plagued by a neo-Nazi party that is extremely popular (and supported by our vice president). It reminds me of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”)
Judge Boasberg has been trying to stop the Trump administration from deporting alleged Tren de Aragua members to a prison in El Salvador. This has been going on since Saturday, March 15. Five of the deportees managed to get ACLU representation and contested their removal in Judge Boasberg’s court. Unfortunately, by the time he issued his order to stop the removals temporarily until he could consider the arguments in the case, the deportees were apparently in the air headed for El Salvador.
So Judge Boasberg ordered the government to turn the planes around. This they did not do. Eventually, it was revealed that a detainee on the flight overheard the officers discussing an order they had received telling them to turn around during the flight. This detainee was only able to report this because she and several other females were refused in El Salvador and had to be returned to the US (apparently only males were eligible for imprisonment in El Salvador). It is not known what the El Salvadoran officials would have thought had they been informed that the entire flight(s) had been ordered to turn around by a US judge.
Trump’s reaction to this was to call the judge a number of childish names and to press for the judge’s impeachment. Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Roberts reacted by issuing a rare press release informing all and sundry that impeachment is not an appropriate response to rulings that one disagrees with. No, appealing to a higher court is the appropriate response. Justice Roberts pitched his press release as if he was speaking to a child.
Trump, of course, is the president who publicly thanked Justice Roberts for all he had done for him– he paused in the reception line after his first address to a joint session of Congress, and audibly thanked him “for all you have done for me.” He was referring to the decision rendered less than a year ago that conferred legal immunity on him for official acts. Trump has clearly misconstrued this decision as giving him carte blanche to do whatever he wants.
He hasn’t reckoned with the fact that the people he directs to do things can still be prosecuted for violating the law (although he can just pardon them). He also has mistakenly assumed that anything he proclaims is the law– not so, at all. The courts have retained the authority to tell him that his proclamations don’t have any effect if they are struck down, even if he’s not legally liable.
So Trump’s insults and the government’s stonewalling over the time the flight left and how many passengers there were, etc. have left a bad taste in Boasberg’s mouth. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 is unlikely to stand in any case because there has been no declaration of war nor invasion of enemy soldiers to trigger its deportation provisions. Also, the last time the law was invoked (and supported by the court) the deportees were first given hearings and 30 days to contest the allegations that they were Nazis.
Judge Boasberg is a highly regarded individual in the court system. He is considered fair and impartial. He also has a hand in the top-secret Foreign Intelligence court that sits to approve warrants for wire taps and the like, so he’s comfortable with secret material. This is what makes the government’s invocation of the State Secrets gambit so laughable.
Another issue with this invocation is that most of the allegedly secret and sensitive facts that Judge Boasberg ordered the government to reveal are already public. We already know what time the planes left, how many people were under Alien Enemy authority (about 240), what time they arrived, and so on. We even know that they stopped to refuel several hours after the judge entered his written order.
The Appeals Court already met on Monday, March 24, and they issued a 2-1 ruling upholding Judge Boasberg. The judge that Trump appointed sided with him, but the Obama judge and the W. Bush judge shot him down. I don’t know how Trump’s judge justified his dissent in this case, but I’m sure it would make amusing reading.
Most importantly, the government hasn’t released a list of the people sent to El Salvador. People who viewed a video put out by El Salvador of the arrival of the deportees were able to recognize some of them, but not all– and of course they are completely incommunicado once in the Salvadoran gulag, I mean, terrorist confinement center.
The Supreme Court has weighed in on its shadow docket and ordered Trump to “facilitate” the return of a deportee the government admitted (at least at first) it had sent to a notorious terror prison in El Salvador despite a court’s saying he could not be deported there because of a risk to his life from a gang. Now members of the administration are badmouthing him and calling him a terrorist.
By sheer luck of the draw, Boasberg now has been assigned the Signalgate case, and is issuing orders for the government to preserve the entire text chain to which JG (Jeffrey Goldberg) was inadvertently added. Michael Waltz has taken responsibility to adding JG but denies he has ever spoken to or telephoned Jeffrey Goldberg. This is necessary because JG is the guy who outed Trump for calling soldiers losers and suckers.
Being the editor of the Atlantic, Goldberg is one of the journalists Trump hates the most. Now Waltz is out as National Security advisor and is slated to get the UN Ambassador spot.
Michael Waltz spent most of his time after admitting he was on the chain talking about what a liar Jeffrey Goldberg is, even blaming him for signing on to the “Russia hoax.” If you’ll recall, that’s the “hoax” in which Trump knowingly and willingly accepted Russia’s help in the 2016 election. An important point to remember is that several Trump aides (who were convicted of various crimes, like lying to Congress) stonewalled the FBI on their communications with Russian figures, so Mueller was never able to expose the smoking gun.
In Michael Waltz’s dictionary, a “lie” is any fact that makes Trump look bad. Mr. Goldberg has been instrumental in exposing or spreading the news about a number of Trump’s faults, so he’s bottom scum if you believe Mr. Waltz. It’s impressive how many of Mr. Goldberg’s “lies” that Mr. Waltz can remember off the top of his head:
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys, and gone to Russia, hoax, gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president [of the] United States, and he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then get sucked into this group…”
The simplest explanation of the error would be that there is a “JG” on Mr. Waltz’s contact list pointing to Mr. Goldberg’s phone number, suggesting that Mr. Goldberg was one of Mr. Waltz’s contacts. That’s impossible, since speaking to a member of the press is one of the lowest forms of treachery if you’re a Trump appointee. So Mr. Waltz was forced to deny ever speaking to or meeting Mr. Goldberg. That’s odd, considering how well Mr. Waltz knows Mr. Goldberg’s suite of “lies.”
These fulminations obscure the fact that there’s no excuse for revealing the time bombing planes are due to take of from their aircraft carrier to attack Houthis in Yemen on Signal. Sure, it’s encrypted, but Russian or Chinese state hackers could have compromised the phone on which the chat was going out. State hackers greatly prize the opportunity to take over the phone of a high level government official.
There’s more, much, much more. Trump has issued executive orders blacklisting law firms that have represented any of his enemies or employed anyone who worked for one of the special prosecutors who were on his case. Even Mueller associates are on the hook. These orders have been and will be struck down because they violate the First and Sixth Amendments (freedom of speech and effective representation by a lawyer when in court). Despite this, nine law firms have already surrendered to this extortion. If the others don’t band together to fight back immediately, they will soon all be under Trump’s thumb.
I suspect that the $900 million in pro bono law work that the submissive law firms have pledged will evaporate once it becomes apparent that the courts will not abide this naked abuse of power. Already, injunctions are enjoining these extortionate demands clearly made on the basis of personal animus, not policy, besides being impermissible retaliation for First and Sixth Amendment-protected behavior.
Likewise, Columbia University has surrendered for fear that it will lose a billion dollars in yearly federal revenue (mostly for research). An article about the background of this case recently revealed that Trump is still angry because many years ago, Columbia refused to buy a plot of land in New York City from him. By some amazing coincidence, the asking price was 400 million dollars, which is the exact amount of money that Trump with-held from Columbia in his extortion demand– nowhere near the full billion that Columbia actually gets each year. Apparently, Columbia balked at buying Trump’s land because it was not contiguous with its campus and the price was too high. The land was sold to someone else a couple of years later.
The story of Harvard University is so broad as to defy depiction as it has careened from one outrage to the next, each worse than the last. The latest diktat from Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education is described as “deranged” and “barely literate.”
The story of the decimation of federal government and the elimination of entire departments by the unpopular Elon Musk has climaxed with the revelation that the Centers for Disease Control’s infection control committee has been shut down. The implications for infection control are staggering, at a time when the rate of whooping cough has doubled in a year and measles is breaking out again– all due to declining vaccination rates. The CDC, not to mention Health and Human Services, now run by worm in the brain RFK Jr, will do nothing to encourage vaccination– they’re too busy developing a database of autism patients.
So what is currently happening, if you’ve been keeping track, is that Trump is plunging at full tilt into the pages of the Project 2025 playbook (and adding his own revenge tour). This 900 page compendium or radical conservative wish list is looking more and more like a road map for much of Trump’s general policy. About half of his executive orders so far are ripped from its pages. In addition, in his revenge tour he has added extortion of his enemies in academia and the legal world to his radical deconstruction of the federal government.
It appears that Trump has blundered into a fascist dictator’s dream scenario. He has taken over the courts (he thinks), pushed the Legislature to the side, and has hired thousands of loyal apparatchiks to do his bidding. The nightmare for Trump is that Judge Boasberg does not look like a guy you want to mess with.
If the courts do not stop the weaponization of government, or if Trump ignores their strictures, we will be fully into a fascist state (fascism is essentially the takeover of government by a group of businesses that take direction from and support a charismatic leader whose whims dictate policy). The businesses in this case are easy to spot– the largest corporations in the world. They have remained entirely in the background, in part because they know large companies are resented by the typical Trump supporter.
We fought and over 400,000 Americans died to stop fascism in World War II. Sadly, we did not have the strength to take on communism then, but the capitalist world was able to outcompete the communist system by the end of the twentieth century.
Now, in the twenty-first century, we are confronted with the resurgence of fascism at a time of existential peril from climate change. Trump has proclaimed climate change to be a hoax, so in addition to destroying American civil society, he will be contributing to the destruction of world civilization. This is why I vacillate between thinking he’s a Russian asset and saying he’s just the AntiChrist. He is certainly a psychopath.
RIP Billy 2016-2025
Billy was a good dog.
Billy first came to us in July 2016 as a stray. He was big, but not full grown; I guessed he was six months old. He weighed 86 pounds when he was full grown.
On August 5, I had to go to San Francisco to have major surgery on my spine: laminectomy and fusion with internal fixation (rods) from L5 to T10.
At the beginning of September I came back and we started walking every day. At first he was on a leash, but that didn’t last long.
A few months later, a dog who lived on Leonard Avenue about a half mile from our house joined us and refused to leave. He was a black dog about 50 or 60 pounds. I found out later that he had been a stray as well and had been adopted at that house. I don’t know whether it was love for Billy or unhappiness with his “owner”, but Boris came to live with us too, for the rest of his life (he died about a year ago). After Boris died, Billy came inside to sleep at the foot of our bed every night.
Boris and Billy were inseparable and slept in the same dog house. They walked with me every day and I was fully rehabilitated after a couple of years. This grueling surgery and a $250,000 titanium rod were my reward for 27 years of being a doctor.
Billy was my reward for trying to be a good person. I know he loved me. Billy was a good dog.
It’s Monday again.
small rodent in the grass, our yard in Sanger, California
The cats trapped this rodent in the yard– it was trying to defend itself and escape simultaneously.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
now is the dark night of liberals. every knock on the door makes you fearful and you watch what you say to strangers. RFK Jr. will come for you and force you to drink bleach.
Over 1500 people were pardoned or had their sentences commuted on Trump’s first day as president. They now resent being called to account for their crimes on January 6, 2021. They felt justified in committing trespass, smashing windows, and attacking policemen because they believed the lies that Trump told them. Most of them still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
These miscreants are sure to seek revenge for being hauled into court, for being thrown in jail or put on probation, for being called criminals when they thought they were the law. They are talking about investigating the investigators, and the FBI agents who brought in the Jan. 6 lawbreakers are being thrown out of the Bureau.
What will happen next to those who investigated the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 insurrection? Their futures will to some extent depend on their behavior towards policemen who do not know them. They cannot expect to be recognized and feted everywhere they go.
The defenders of the Capitol have been haunted by intrusive, repetitive traumatic dreams and a few have committed suicide. Others have retired early.
A few of the attackers have come to grief during attempts at apprehension for fresh crimes and a few have had open warrants that involved deadly force in their service. The rest, however, are pardoned and can go free. Some may have changes to their federal personnel files. They can, however, return to their jobs.
The rest of us must submit to leopards licking our faces.
Be Here Now– photo by Harald Lepisk– courtesy of pixabay.com
It’s already too late to hide from retribution by the winning side. The winners have an active agenda of seeking out and punishing those who have opposed the new regime. The enemies list goes way, way back, to Hillary Clinton days and before.
Then there is the notional “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party”, whose motto is, “I didn’t think they’d eat my face!” The idea is that a “limousine liberal” is all in for this party until the leopards come for her face.
Anyway, I was sixteen in 1970 when a pro-government South Vietnamese “intellectual” group visited Harvard College. They met, about four of them, on a stage in front of an audience of over a thousand young students who booed continuously, so loudly that no-one could be heard. Time magazine did a big story on it, with a photograph of the student audience. My room-mate was shown with his middle finger raised. I was sitting next to him, but I was just out of the frame. So they almost came for my face, or would have, if right-wing doxing had existed then. Surely facial recognition applied to the photo would have identified all the students and allowed them to be expelled.
Protests like that could never succeed at today’s Harvard. The pro-Palestinian encampments that did take place were roundly condemned and the protesters were involuntarily separated from the College. At another college, police withdrew and allowed pro-Israeli vigilantes to attack the encampment.
Watch out, the leopards will come for your face next.
Since I posted that last uninformed screed, I looked up the bullets recovered at the scene, and travelled to the Warren Commission Report. This tome lists a nearly intact bullet (weighing 158+ grains vs a factory bullet weighing 160-161 grains); two large fragments:
One fragment, found on the seat beside the driver, weighed 44.6 grains and consisted of the nose portion of a bullet. … The other fragment, found along the right side of the front seat, weighed 21.0 grains and consisted of the base portion of a bullet.
Three small fragments less than a grain apiece were found under the seat occupied by Mrs. Connally.
In addition, the front windshield was struck from the inside, but not penetrated, by a bullet fragment which may or may not have been recovered.
Finally, a bullet fragment struck the south curb of Main Street and grazed the cheek of a bystander. The curb site was spectrographically examined later and found to contain lead with a small amount of antimony but no copper– the core of a bullet but no jacket. This is not likely to have been from the shot that entirely missed, since that would have been intact.
So the bullets were not at all accounted for.
The nearly intact bullet, said by the Warren Report to have been found when it fell out of Mr. Connally’s stretcher, could not have been the one that struck him as the nose wasn’t dented by impact with his ribs and it lost only a few grains from its factory weight. I suggest that it was planted. The mere possibility opens up a hornet’s nest of issues as the planter had have been someone close like a Secret Service agent.
Multiple lines of evidence point to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole shooter in the assassination. His motivations as outlined in the Warren Report are also clear. To oversimplify, he wanted to make his mark on history. The only thing that is unclear is whether he had any help or direction.
Another avenue is the Warren Commission’s exploration of Lee Harvey Oswald’s history. Most critical is its mention of his employment at the Texas Book Depository. There is no indication of any help that he had getting the job, although Oswald was using Texas state employment agency help and may have gotten it through them. Nonetheless, it is a bizarre and probably inexplicable coincidence that he took a job at a location that offered him a prime shooting view for a motorcade which hadn’t planned on coming that way when he got the job.
You were warned– it’s another rabbit hole.
We revisit the JFK assassination story today because the last secret files from the government are due to be released very soon. Articles in Vanity Fair explore the story of revelations that have occurred in the last couple of years and what could be released soon from still-secret CIA archives.
The first article, published yesterday, discusses the releases and interviews the “reigning expert” on the story. Jefferson Morley covers the possible documents to be un-redacted and the current state of controversy over the whole affair. Naturally, no-one is completely satisfied with the story so far.
The second article, published in September 2023, covers a book recently written by Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent who was protecting Jackie Kennedy at the time. He was in the car behind Kennedy’s, and Landis witnessed the impact of the bullet that hit Kennedy in the skull and made his brain explode.
He was forced to retire from the Service a few months later, after only four years of service. He suffered from severe PTSD, which was not recognized as a diagnosis at that time. For 50 years, he worked quietly as a security guard and kept secret a tiny detail with enormous significance.
Landis finds the magic bullet
In his book, he finally reveals that he found a spent bullet in the Kennedy limousine. It was lying loose on the back of the rear seat where the vehicle’s removable top attached. It appeared to be nearly pristine. He picked it up, wrapped it in his handkerchief, and shortly afterward placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher next to his body.
This bullet is the one that later was mistakenly said to have been found on Connally’s stretcher. It had a secure chain of custody to the FBI lab, where it was observed to have rifling marks consistent with having been fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
Given that the damage to CE-399 consists of a slight longitudinal twist and compression at its base, that bullet encountered something along its flight path. Whether the intervening objects were Kennedy and Connally as opposed a barrel of water, or a bale of cotton, is the question.https://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/Breakability/Breakability.htm
This basic fact goes with certain other facts: the wounds to Kennedy’s back and neck, and the wounds to Connally’s chest and knee, were in fact aligned and likely occurred from the same bullet. The photograph above of the tiny model limousine shows Kennedy and Connally in the correct position and, knowing that the fatal bullets came from a little above and slightly to the left of them, indicates how plausible that trajectory is.
Clearly, the bullet recovered by Agent Landis was not the bullet that wounded both Kennedy and Connally. The fact that the bullet was not near where it would be expected after becoming an expended round from Oswald’s shooting, and that there was no blood or tissue associated with it less than half an hour after the shooting, both suggest that the bullet was placed there by a person unknown.
How many bullets were found?
Further, the three rounds known to have been fired have been accounted for: one in Kennedy’s skull, of which fragments were recoverded; one through the windshield into the curb and probably shattered; one into Connally’s knee, massively damaged. If this pristine round is included, that makes four when only three were fired.
So if the bullet was undeniably from Oswald’s gun by the rifling and it was not recovered anywhere near expected, and it was nearly pristine, then some “supernatural” or at least “extraordinary” event/s occurred to put it there. Was it recovered from when Oswald was shooting at the firing range– when he made sure that he made eyewitnesses know he was there? That would account for the deformation present–possibly made by a tool extracting it from the target.
The presence of minimal deformation is not surprising in a bullet expended on a target at a range but it is surprising in a bullet that has encountered tissue and bone. Usually a round that wounds and is recovered shows significant deformation. A round that penetrates the skull and explodes the brain is likely to be fragmented, exactly as occurred in this case. There were large fragments found on the back seat mixed with blood, bone, and brains.
From these facts it is possibly to hypothesize that the first shot hit Kennedy low in the neck while he was slouched over (limited by his back brace) and exited his throat at tracheostomy level nearly in the midline. It is probable that this shot hit Connally too. Their positions line up for such a shot in recreations of their exact locations. It is unclear where that bullet wound up, although X-rays suggest that parts of it remained in Connally’s tissues. That bullet’s trajectory indicates that it suffered little damage going through Kennedy’s soft tissues, but encountered major obstacles in Connally.
The second shot may have gone through the windshield and hit a curb in front of the limousine. A fragment from this round hit a pedestrian on the cheek. The third shot hit Kennedy in the occipital bone, fragmented, and blew his brain apart, spraying it all over a state trooper on a motorcycle behind him. His scalp and hair, mostly intact, fell back over the wound and obscured it while he was being transported and treated at the hospital. That is why there was no brain in the materials recovered at autopsy and preserved– no actual mystery there.
There is thus little reason to question the thesis that Oswald fired all three of the shots fired that day, and that he had no direct accomplices. There is reason to suspect that he felt he was acting in the interests or at the direction of some organization, but what that entity would be is unknown. Again, it is unclear what organization would like to feel that they were deliberately engaging the services of an assassin, trained by the Marines, who had already taken a shot a a retired general recently and gotten away with it.
The presence of this “magic bullet” suggests that Oswald was supported by a group who knew he was going to shoot and furthermore had the opportunity to physically place the bullet in the limousine within minutes after the shooting (if not before). This person would almost have to be an insider like another Secret Service agent assigned to the same detail. This narrow window to place the bullet makes the whole theory a little less plausible.
Why kill Kennedy?
There is no shortage of parties who had a motivation to do away with President Kennedy. It could be the CIA, pro-Castro Cubans (in retaliation for failed plots against Castro), the American military, the Russians ( or Soviets, as they were known), or any of a number of other lesser known groups with low ethical standards.
It is clear that the CIA had Oswald under surveillance for months before he shot Kennedy. He was picked up by CIA surveillance of the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City and relayed to headquarters, who as it turned out, already had a file on him. The CIA was watching Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. It is alleged that his pro-Castro pamphlet distribution on the street and appearances on local talk television were publicized to call attention to him.
Whether the CIA surveilled Oswald closely enough to know anything about his steps seems unlikely. He went to mail-order a rifle, tried to shoot a retired general and missed, then went to a rifle range to sight it in. He obtained a job site overlooking the motorcade route at a spot where it was forced to slow down by a sharp turn. The motorcade route had not been finalized until a week before the assassination, so it is likely that simple opportunity placed a decisive role.
It seems unlikely that they watched him that closely. He did proudly display his new rifle and a newspaper for a photograph taken in his yard. How did he get a job at the Texas Book Depository a few weeks beforehand? Was it a fateful coincidence or did he have help? Maybe he thought it up himself and researched the routes that motorcades take.
There’s a lot here that provokes massive scrutiny and speculation. The subject certainly tried to pull me down a rabbit hole. Feel free to write a movie script based on the “magic bullet.”
The End of the World As We Know It
A recent article in The Independent with the same title as the above says that we are close to a tipping point between extinction and evolution to a greater plane. It draws together a number of recent insights on the issues of climate extinction and human evolution which are of interest to the casual reader.
The article notes that the Earth has reached a population of 8.2 billion humans, close to or beyond its carrying capacity. Researchers forecast cessation of population growth over the next 50 years, at about 10 billion people, followed by a gradual decline. Population decline has already begun in China and several other countries– South Korea is the worst. The decline is correlated with increased living standards. It is related especially to education for women and the development of universal birth control.
The article reminds us that if we continue current practices we will continue to rapidly degrade the environment and cause intolerable heating of the entire globe. The article describes the possibilities as evolution away from the internal combustion energy paradigm and survival, versus submission to an authoritarian government that chains us to the old paradigm and extinction.
We have seen that denial has successfully delayed action to combat climate change for 50 years. For a few years we were permitted to hope that action would finally begin, but denial has reared its ugly head again in the US. We have elected a president who calls climate change a hoax. As close as we are to a tipping point (although how close is unknown) we will only be closer after four more years.
If we don’t act, temperatures will continue to rise with the sea levels and all life on Earth will suffer the agonies of the damned. Extinction would naturally follow if this process is allowed to continue.
The article quotes a well-known expert:
“Industrial civilisation is facing ‘inevitable’ decline as it is replaced by what could turn out to be a far more advanced ‘postmaterialist’ civilisation based on distributed superabundant clean energy. The main challenge is that industrial civilisation is facing such rapid decline that this could derail the emergence of a new and superior ‘life-cycle’ for the human species”, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, the bestselling author and journalist who is a distinguished fellow at the UK-based Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, said in a statement.
Dr Ahmed has written a paper, published in the journal Foresight, hypothesizing that we are close to a tipping point based on an analysis of multiple global crises that are currently befalling us.
His analysis says that civilizations evolve through a four-stage life-cycle: growth, stability, decline, and eventual transformation. These stages are not necessarily consecutive; decline may be followed by regrowth if the civilization is dynamic enough. Or a polity could transition directly from growth to transformation directly if a truly destabilizing event occurs. Transformation may mean extinction or it may involve evolution into a species more suited to its environment.
At the moment, our industrial, internal combustion civilization is going through a decline. Growth has continued year on year up to now. Industrial activities, specifically the burning of coal, oil, or gas, and the manufacture of cement have raised the concentration of carbon dioxide (among many other pollutants) higher every year. Even the rate of increase is increasing. This has caused climate change with predictable (and predicted) results: a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming of the globe so far, as of 2023.
Multiple simultaneous global crises signal that we are walking off a cliff. For example, the back to back hurricanes in the Southeast US, the floods, droughts, and wildfires in Europe, the latest fires in Los Angeles. These are natural disasters that may have occurred at any time in the past– but 50 years ago they would have been much less severe. Climate change has already caused a 20-25% increase in storm and fire severity.
Our survival is dependent on our adopting, rapidly and on a massive scale, non-carbon dioxide producing energy sources. We could do this beginning today; little new technology is needed. Right now, China is producing mass quantities of photovoltaic cells and batteries at very low prices. If we bought these items and installed them in every home, we could produce enough energy to abandon polluting facilities in a few years. Instead, we are barring Chinese EVs, solar cells, and batteries with obstructive tariffs.
The point is that if we don’t evolve soon, we will become extinct. We will all die, our children will die, and pretty soon there won’t be any people left. By the time that happens, the Earth will be a pretty unpleasant place.
Followers of political news will by now know of Donald J. Trump’s announcement of his intention to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Kennedy has no medical degree nor any other scientific training, a fact which makes him completely unqualified to be in charge of a large number of scientists.
Kennedy is also well known for his claim that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been thoroughly debunked. The original article alleging autism from vaccines, in 1998, has been retracted and the doctor who wrote it lost his license in the UK– but that didn’t change Mr. Kennedy’s mind. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association with 95,000 subjects, published in 2015, definitively ruled out vaccines as a cause of autism. That didn’t change his mind either.
Among other changes that Mr. Kennedy has announced is a plan to substantially reduce the National Institutes of Health’s emphasis on infectious diseases, switching to an emphasis on chronic disease, lifestyle diseases, nutritional issues, and especially alternative and complementary medicine. This prompted my belated tribute to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss, in anticipation of the overthrow of his scientific observations on germs.
Mr. Kennedy is apparently unaware of the numerous divisions within NIH that specifically address such issues as degenerative and autoimmune diseases, aging, toxic substances, nutrition, and so on. There is even a branch for alternative and complementary medicine. It’s not well funded and is ostracized by actual alternative practitioners, but it does focus on non-mainstream medicine.
Back to Semmelweiss (1818-1865). He was a Hungarian doctor who practiced in Vienna, Austria, at a maternity hospital (details of his life are available on Wikipedia). The germ theory of disease was not fully accepted until the 1880’s and doctors were not advised that germs could contaminate any surface. Doctors in his time did not wear gloves, gowns, or masks, and they used no disinfectants. Neither did they wash their hands.
Semmelweiss was impressed by the high incidence of childbed fever at his hospital. About one in ten of the women who delivered babies at the hospital died of the fever. More patients came down with the fever in the doctor’s wards than in the midwife’s wards (roughly 8-12% for the doctors and 3-4% for the midwives). The disease also killed a few of the staff. This happened to Semmelweiss’ colleague after he was inadvertently poked with an instrument during an autopsy. The doctor’s hand became swollen and red, and he soon died with a high fever and signs of sepsis.
Semmelweiss himself did the autopsy on his colleague, and he was struck by the similarity of the disease between the women at his hospital and the young doctor who succumbed after being poked. He immediately theorized that some maleficent particle had been transferred from the deceased autopsy patient to the doctor’s hands, to his blood, and to the next female victim. The doctors did autopsies in the morning and worked on women in the afternoon, without washing their hands or changing their coats (the midwives did no autopsies, which accounted for their lower death rates).
Faced with a threefold difference in mortality rates between midwife’s wards and doctor’s wards, Semmelweiss knew there was something wrong. That something was the autopsies on victims of childbed fever, now known to be usually caused by a virulent Streptococcus bacterium.
Semmelweiss knew that a solution of chlorinated lime was already used at the hospital to remove the stench of death, so in 1847 he ordered the doctors to start washing their hands with this stuff after doing autopsies and before touching patients. The death rate in the doctor’s wards fell to below the rate in the midwife’s wards.
Semmelweiss was rewarded for pushing this innovation by being fired from the hospital and blacklisted in Vienna. He had to return to Hungary and his work was attacked in medical journals. He didn’t publish his results in a journal until 1861. The underlying identity of the “maleficent particle” on the doctor’s hands was not identified until Pasteur established in the mid-1860’s that germs caused many, if not most, fatal diseases in that era (now the fatal diseases are mostly cancer and blood vessel blockages from atherosclerosis).
After he returned to Hungary, Semmelweiss continued his revolutionary practices and saved many women from the fever. However, he continued to face opposition and lashed out at his detractors. His mental health deteriorated after 1861, until he was committed to an insane asylum in 1865. He was beaten by the guards, treated very harshly (as was normal in those days), and suffered a wound on his right hand which quickly became gangrenous (infected). Two weeks after he was admitted, he died of the infection– something that could have been prevented if his theory had been accepted.
Joseph Lister was the first to successfully use antiseptics in surgery, first with phenol, then carbolic acid. He used carbolic acid on wounds in 1865 with great success. Ironically, Semmelweiss went mad and died in an asylum the same year.
An extensive reference to this sad tale is found in an article in Forbes published eight years ago that you may or may not find interesting:https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/02/09/a-history-lesson-on-the-dangers-of-letting-data-speak-for-itself/ The author, Brent Dykes, has a blog on how to tell effective stories with data. He organizes the storytelling into data, narrative, and visuals.
The article is a speculation about why Semmelweiss failed to convince his colleagues that his theory was correct. He had eighteen months of data showing the drop in death rates after introducing chloride of lime, and its resurgence when handwashing stopped. At first, the doctors lost 12.2% from infections in the wards. After they started handwashing, the rate dropped to 2.2%. Death rates in the midwive’s wards remained at roughly 3-4%. You would think that such numbers would be instantly convincing. But no. He was ridiculed and demeaned in the press.
The attitudes of many contemporary doctors are summed up by a quote: “Doctors are gentlemen and gentlemen have clean hands.” While Semmelweiss had many followers among his close associates, others dismissed the idea of invisible, impalpable particles on people’s hands and clothes. They were unable to understand new concepts like germ theory– on which his results did not depend but which explained how his results worked.
The post by Mr. Dykes is supplemented with basic graphs that instantly show the obvious reductions in death rates. 150 years ago, such graphs were as scarce as hen’s teeth, and were not used in Semmelweiss’ article. The first such illustrations are landmarks like the cholera maps drawn by physician John Snow in London in 1854. These showed the dynamic locations of cholera cases in relation to local water pumps used by every member of the community. Florence Nightingale used charts in 1858 to show how unsanitary conditions were contributing to the spread of wound infections among soldiers in Crimea.
The article by Dykes points out four ways in which Semmelweiss’s data failed to break through to the general public:
First, timeliness of publication: it was fourteen years before Semmelweiss’ data was published in book form, in 1861. Prior to publication, he transmitted the information by word of mouth and his auditors often misinterpreted, exaggerated, or minimized what he meant. The second or third-hand voices about his work muddied the impact of his story.
Second, Mr. Dykes blames the “curse of knowledge” and the ignorance of his audience. The curse was that he forgot what it was like to not know what he knew. He became impatient with those who wouldn’t accept his simple handwashing advice. He thought the worst of them and, instead of trying to persuade them, he insulted and demeaned them. This simply alienated them.
Third, Semmelweiss lacked a good story to weave into his results. He should have invoked the women who were saved by preventative hand-washing. Numbers of deaths alone are not emotionally charged. In addition to numbers, he should have invoked names and relationships, asking his audience, “What if this was your mother?”
Fourth, the data was not visualized in graphs, being presented mainly in data tables. This was due to the low level of graphics development generally at that time. Today, you could highlight a row of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and convert it to a graph in moments. In 1850, Semmelweiss had nothing to work with as an exemplar so it wouldn’t even come to mind. People have difficulty visualizing what a number means: 4 and 9 are just numbers until it’s pointed out that 9 is more than twice 4.
The bottom line is that people weren’t ready for the germ theory. A lot of people still aren’t. I feel bad when I think it, but the truth is that half of people are below average. This means that a significant number of people will not understand even the simplest logical argument.
Therefore, when you tell someone that Trump is a liar, they don’t make the connection to his promise to lower prices of consumer goods. He is lying, and he is not even going to try to lower the price of eggs and bacon. If he was successful in lowering grocery prices, it would be a sign of deflation, which is a disaster for the economy since it would mean that nobody has any money to buy groceries at the normal price. That’s too complicated of an argument.
So this is why Trump was re-elected: his propaganda was aimed at the lowest common denominator. Besides being all-pervasive, lying without shame, and loudly repeating the same lies over and over, his propaganda was the best lies available. There is no way to beat him or the forces he represents without engaging in a more effective propaganda campaign. Sadly, we must pander to the lowest intelligence and blanket the airways with repetitive stories and claims. The four factors in Mr. Dykes’ article are a good framework: early publication (post on social media first and frequently), persuasive communication instead of argument (don’t insult your audience), tell a story about identifiable people who are affected by your issue(what if this happened to your mother?), and finally, use the best visualization methods available, like videos, TikToks with music, and line graphs.
Remember, as Voltaire said, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” (thanks to Mr. Dykes for the quotations)
Women are being trolled with the taunt “Your body, my choice” and President-elect Trump has announced his nomination of Matt Gaetz, former congressman, for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz will be completely focused on revenge. In addition, Trump states that he intends to pursue recess appointments immediately and asks the Senate to go into recess for the minimum two weeks needed.
We should also note that Mr. Gaetz was supposed to receive a report this week on the House Ethics Committee’s long-running investigation of his participation in drug and under-age sex parties while he was in Congress. He resigned just a few hours before the report was to be delivered, putting himself out of the reach of the investigation.
Mr. Trump has successfully engaged in the same behavior, stalling the four criminal cases against him until the clock runs out. He has made full use of the Democratic administration’s almost two-year delay in delivering indictments for his incitement to insurrection and retention of classified documents (with obstruction).
It is clear that Biden’s main fault was that he was too nice. Biden should have allowed or prompted his Attorney General to proceed immediately with the case against Trump. Biden should have trumpeted his own accomplishments, loudly, far and wide. Where is his press conference announcing that the economy of the USA is the “envy of the world” (per the Economist magazine)?
One last question: why didn’t the Harris campaign know that there were ten million Democrats who planned to sit out the election– the ten million that Harris needed to win?
It is clear from the final voting numbers that Trump retained all but a couple of million of his die-hard followers– he received almost the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020. But Harris in 2024 received over ten million votes less than Biden in 2020, indicating that many Democratic voters sat out the election.
It was also clear from Trump’s campaigning style that he had no interest in courting voters beyond his hard base. He made it all about his grievances and revenge, and allowed the voters to pursue their prejudiced views on inflation and immigration. No-one who voted against him before would ever vote for him again.
It may have been a mistake to campaign with never-Trump Republicans. The time may have been better spent trying to find and motivate those Democrats who were not going to vote at all.
The less said about the new Health and Human Services chief, the better.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 