Thoughts of a retired physician

  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

  I have been writing postcards and letters to voters in Pennsylvania and Virginia and have a lot more to go so this week’s blog post is short and devoted to photography. Margan and I got into digital photography 20 years ago and have had a blast with it since. I post to Flickr , Redbubble , and 500px . My work is available for sale on Redbubble and 500px. Here are a few photos for you to enjoy. Study in Chlorophyll I hear the train a’coming I See You (as mouse pad) Blue Abstract #1 More of substance next week. In the interim, I hope you enjoy the photos.

  Just finished slides for our Current Events session on Tuesday, topic Antivaccination and Covid. The opposition to vaccination is longstanding, beginning even before vaccines when there was opposition to the practice of inoculation for smallpox. After Jenner described protection from smallpox by introducing cowpox to an 8-year old boy named James Phipps and then exposing him to smallpox two months later (no Institutional Review Boards then), humankind had its first real vaccine. The opposition to vaccination came quickly.  George Gibbs, an opponent of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain in the mid-19th century, wrote a book that sounds like it could have been written by the anti-vaxxers of today. Gibbs opposed mandatory vaccination for smallpox. He felt the law was an intrusion of personal rights; it was written to benefit the medical trade; the law treated people as too stupid to make their own health decisions; it mandated a practice that was not universally accepted by phys