Thoughts of a retired physician

  Time for my last blog post of 2021, a year that started badly and hasn’t much improved IMHO. There are multiple stories for this year that will be recounted in history but in my view, the two major ones remain an attempted coup by Trump and Trumpists in January and the continued ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic with new variants (Delta and Omicron) making their appearances.  The conspiracy by Donald Trump and his confederates continues to emerge from the dark shadows where it has been concealed by ongoing lies and propaganda. There is no Great Steal; that is a lie. The election of 2021 was won by President Joe Biden. Trump and his criminal cronies can lie all they want but the January 6 Committee is bringing to light a conspiracy to overturn the election and install Trump as a dictator. The idea was that the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January would result in a bloody confrontation with leftists and that would allow Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 . The military wou

  Two things today. First, read the latest post from Heather Cox Richardson . As usual, her summary and analysis of what is happening with the January 6 Committee is spot on. As more and more records come to the fore, the scope of the coup conspiracy is increasingly clear. There was a coordinated effort by Donald John Trump and numerous people in his thrall to overthrow the government and our Constitution on January 6th. This is a criminal conspiracy and needs to be dealt with as such. No “let’s forget this and move on” and no whataboutisms and no convoluted excuses soaked with right-wing propaganda. If you honestly believe that this was not a full-scale attempt to overturn an election and install a sociopathic grifter as dictator, I have no words for you that are printable. Over the next few weeks, I am certain the pieces will fit together.  The second problem is the Omicron variant of Covid 19. The data remain fuzzy but there are some harder edges appearing. In today’s CDC/IDSA webin

  Short post this week. Working on our Current Events for Tuesday next, decided we needed to really talk about the danger to American democracy. There are three really good articles in The Atlantic by Barton Gellman that are worth the read. The first one was published online in September 2020 - what will happen when Trump fails to concede. Highly prescient. The second one is from 17 January 2021 – how close were we to a coup?  Scary. Then the third one from 6 December 2021 – which makes the case that the danger is increasing to red-alert levels. I am also rereading Timothy Snyder’s superb book On Tyranny . Plan to use that as a framework to illustrate that Trumpism is no different from the other right-wing authoritarians today or in the past. More to follow – I urge you to keep up with developments on this. The threat is real.

  This has been one hell of a week for events and news. Almost overwhelming and the news is either RB (real bad) or at least disheartening. The Omicron variant has produced a lot of chaos and that is heightened by what we don’t know about it and therefore really fear as well as the stage it steps onto of a pandemic closing in on two years' duration. The Supreme Court showed it has become only a space for partisan political hacks with the Mississippi abortion case. There was yet another school shooting in Michigan with a troubled and possibly schizophrenic 15-year-old who was aided and abetted by irresponsible and morally bankrupt parents who not only bought the gun for him as a Christmas present but ignored the signs he was mentally disturbed and then fled the law when they were indicted for involuntary manslaughter for their role. The school district also failed here. We also saw Putin building up military force on Ukraine’s border with a possibility of invading that country (hope

And now Omicron. Skipping over nu and chi for reasons of clarity, we now have Omicron (Ο) as the latest variant of concern in the covid pandemic. Scientists, public health officials, and epidemiologists are working overtime to understand this new variant. The best to say at the moment is that we are gathering the data and have precious few real answers to the myriad of questions. Multiple nations, including the United States, closed travel from the southern countries of Africa where O likely emerged. This is of doubtful real efficacy as cases have been reported from multiple nations in Europe, as well as Asia and Australia. Locking the barn door after the horse has fled seems to be a common occurrence with this pandemic but simply shows that in an interconnected world, walls and barriers are meaningless political statements rather than real public health policy. South Africa needs support and praise, not shunning.  The origin of O is also of interest. The current thought is that an in

  The human brain is the organ that literally makes us human. A product of long evolution, it has produced all of the art, music, culture, and science that we see today. From birth, we witness the miracles of its development -- awareness, language skills, motor skills, sociability. When adolescence occurs, parents and others are often frustrated at behaviors that seem completely irrational. What is increasingly evident in studies of adolescents and their brains is that they are really immature. It is apparent now that the maturation of the brain continues through adolescence and is only completed in our mid-20s. It is clear that the limbic system and the centers for rewards are mature years before the frontal cortex; this helps explain why adolescents often engage in risky behavior which often leads to morbidity and mortality. In the United States, 71% of deaths between the ages of 10 and 24 are from four causes : motor-vehicle accidents, other unintentional trauma, homicide, and sui

  I was in college when I discovered how interesting microbiology was. I majored in it and found the courses in medical school equally interesting. I did a senior year rotation in infectious diseases at Temple under Bennett Lorber, then a new assistant professor fresh from his infectious diseases fellowship. This was in January 1974 and I was hooked. The Navy offered me a fellowship in 1981 after a tour as a general internist at Naval Hospital Guantanamo Bay; I then spent two years at Naval Hospital San Diego which was tremendous fun as well as accelerated learning. The program at San Diego was also a shaping one. The problem of sexually transmitted diseases, especially gonorrhea, drove the research part of my fellowship. Little did I know how it would affect me for the remainder of my medical career. At Naval Medical Center Portsmouth Virginia, a full decade of running an HIV Evaluation Unit with Margan certainly cemented the importance of these diseases in my psyche. Upon retirement

  Spent last week with Margan in Santa Barbara. Nice to just get away for some “our” time and see a few new things. Santa Barbara is beautiful but we could tell the pandemic had hit the downtown pretty hard. Went to the Old Mission, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the SB Zoo, and the SB Botanical Gardens. I Will get back to more serious stuff next week but here are a few photos of our trip. Old Mission Santa Barbara Panoramic View, Old Mission Santa Barbara Bronze Bust, SB Museum of Art Santa Ynez Mountains from SB Botanical Gardens

  Happy Halloween to all. This has been another ultra-busy week and my one idea for the blog was about obliviousness. All of us will often be unaware of our actions and their impact on others. One of my pet peeves is people who do things that annoy me, e.g. change lanes abruptly without turn signals, seem in a fog about their surroundings and encroach on others, etc. My wife reminds me to apply Thad’s Maxim in such cases: never attribute to malignancy that which is explained by obliviousness (yes, in some cases stupidity but let’s just use obliviousness for now). In the end, it saves a lot of Donald Duck moments (as in encounters with witches, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnvygJHFX8k ).  Enjoy Halloween -- back from Santa Barbara next weekend, more then. Photo above taken 29 October at The Huntington Gardens and Library in San Marino, California.

  As I write this, I am listening to Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto #11 on KUSC , the Los Angeles classical music station. Today is the 75th birthday of KUSC and this made me think about how lucky I have been to have classical music available to me during my lifetime. I listened to WFLN in Philadelphia growing up but really got into them in my med school days at Temple, when I would have classical music playing while I studied. They ceased broadcasting classical music in 1997. The station’s classic recordings were donated to Temple’s music station WRTI 90.1 and in that sense, WFLN lives on. I accumulated classic music LP’s that sufficed for my music at home but there was a desert for classical through the airwaves from the mid-70s until 1983 for me. After entering the Navy in 1979, there was nothing on Armed Forces Radio and Television Service ( AFRTS , pronounced a-farts) in Guantanamo Bay that could be termed classical (Casey Kasem and AT40 and Wolfman Jack became favorites). Even

  Missed posting last weekend due to a lot of other stuff I had to do. Margan and I did a Current Events session here at MonteCedro last Tuesday on the topic of Dark Money in politics. That entailed reviewing a book I had already read but needed to review ( Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer) and a book I just read ( Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean) and making a short introduction for our group with slides. Lots of work but it really is the way to learn. I recommend both of these books. Both Mayer and MacLean detail the efforts of billionaires (the Koch brothers are front and center but there are many others) to influence our government behind the scenes. In my view, what they are doing is buying the best government for their own benefits, which are no business regulations and as little taxation of them and their corporations as possible. As I poin

  Margan and I took up the Current Events Group here at MonteCedro over a year ago. It was and is one of the most popular activities here. We meet every two weeks with a topic; Margan and I alternate preparing a short presentation to set the stage and then the group gets into the discussion. We routinely have 30 to 40 participants. My turn is next. The group wanted to discuss dark money in politics. When the topic was broached the first thing that came up was the Citizens United vs FEC  decision in 2010 in which the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision opened the floodgates for dark money coming into political campaigns. But the backstory is much darker and several books have been written regarding how billionaire plutocrats have been trying for years to subvert democracy. The two most notable are Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer and Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America b

  The news regarding covid vaccines continues to accumulate every day. The latest installment in the United States is whether or not boosters should be available based on data that shows declining levels of neutralizing antibodies after the initial vaccination effort early this year. The Biden administration announced that part of their plan to respond to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic will be to provide boosters because of this finding. Cue the controversy. We should first acknowledge that refusal of many Americans to get vaccinated contributed to the huge spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from Covid-19 this summer. The CDC Covid Tracker puts the vaccination rate for the United States yesterday at 55.9% . The real story is the patchwork map of vaccine penetration with many states dismally below that and feeling the full effect of rampant SARS-CoV-2 transmission as a consequence. Idaho’s vaccination rate is 41.3% and their hospitals are in desperate straits, rationing car