Thoughts of a retired physician

  As a child, I was taught that books are wonderful things that could take you to different places and expose you to many ideas – thanks, Mom and Dad. I was taken to the public library in Reading by my Dad who wanted me to take out books and find pleasure and education in them as he did. When I saw movies of Nazis burning books I couldn’t understand why anyone would do that.  We are in the midst of a frenzy to ban books these days. As the article notes, this has been politicized as everything is now to divide our nation further. The ostensible reasons are not to harm children by exposing them to ideas that parents believe they should not be exposed to –  sexuality, curse words, gender issues, race. I still have to ask Why?  I think that I see some answers but they are excuses to me rather than answers. I believe first that a main driver is fear. As Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, “ Book banning doesn’t fit neatly into the rubrics of left and right politics. ” While this is true, the overwhel

  The deluge is finally coming. In an excellent piece this morning, Jennifer Rubin notes that “ Defeated former president Donald Trump just had a really bad week .” In New York, the state attorney general, Letitia James, has compiled evidence that Trump and his adult children conspired to revalue his assets to meet the needs of who was asking for the valuation – always in Trump’s favor, of course. This is not a criminal case but the financial liability for Trump could be enormous. At the same time the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has kept two attorneys who are working a criminal case against Trump and his organization. In Georgia, the Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis has requested a special grand jury in her investigation of criminal misconduct by Trump in the 2020 Georgia election, and Brian Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State has indicated he will cooperate with such a grand jury. This is also a criminal investigation with the possibility of prison time for Trum

  A short post this week because I am working on a presentation for our residents on covid (Margan and I had no idea when we moved to MonteCedro that this would become our ongoing thing) as well as some other stuff in the to-do pile. This was a bad week with SCOTUS deciding that vaccine mandates under OSHA were not to be for large employers but were fine for HCW in places receiving federal funds (poor application of the law as well as ridiculous as the covid pandemic rages on IMHO); Manchin and Sinema declared their fealty to the filibuster instead of voting rights and the Constitution (no interest in democracy from these two); Putin, Trump’s puppet master, threatens a new Cuban missile crisis ; and a volcano in Tonga erupted with violent fury with tsunami waves across the Pacific and the fate of Tongans still unclear. But there was some good news too. We are at last seeing real movement by the Department of Justice on the January 6th coup attempt with a group of the Oath Keepers (a

    U.S. Covid cases to 8 January 2022, New York Times 7-day average   Also 7-day averages from the NYT   The omicron variant of covid has walloped the world, including the United States. The graph at the top shows U.S. cases from the start of the pandemic. The foothill to the left of the spike is of course the delta variant. The spike is omicron. In thinking through all the epidemics in American history, this one can only be compared to the 1918 flu pandemic and the more localized epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox in the 18th and 19th centuries. This despite effective countermeasures – testing, masks, vaccines, improved ventilation. Why? The phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated” has become a point of contention between public health professionals and hard-core libertarians. Is it? Well, yes and maybe. The case spike seen on the graph represents what virologists, immunologists, and vaccinologists have long feared. Omicron more easily evades the neutralizing antibodies raised by ou

  First, the good news: 2021 is in the rear view mirror! A year of pandemic and a year of danger to democracy, it’s not going to be lost in the history books. Two news items in today’s Washington Post of note to start. A full third of people polled by the Post and the University of Maryland say they think there is justification for violent action against the U.S. government while 62% said violence against the government is never justified. The proportion of Republicans saying this is clearly higher than Democrats but equals the proportion of independents. How much of this is driven by the lies of Donald Trump, echoed by Republicans, that the election was “stolen” from him in 2020? My guess is that most of it is. Despite the facts (those stubborn things per John Adams) showing no genuine widespread fraud in voting or counting votes in 2020, more people than ever feel that violence is a justifiable means to change governments. When can we use our guns is a question increasingly heard

  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