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