Trump is a danger to the nation

Note: I have been writing and rewriting this piece over the past few hours. Originally, I just planned to talk about the oh-so-spontaneous protests that oh-so-mysteriously sprung up in several states attacking the shelter-in-place orders. This is what I wrote:

I read recently about the groups of people who suddenly appeared to protest the stay-at-home orders in their states. Michigan, Kentucky, North Caroline, etc., all yadnsuch gatherings.

What interests me about them is not the rightness or wrongness of their cause but rather that they have several odd characteristics. First, they all came out of nowhere. Second, the protestors were often surprisingly furious. News pictures show faces absolutely contorted with rage. Third, at least some came armed, with some rather fearsome weaponry. Fourth, all of the protests were marked by people wearing MAGA hats,  flying Trump signs, and otherwise stating their loyalty to the Trumpian branch of the GOP. Fifth, and lastly, at least some of the protestors demonstrated links to far right-wing organizations.

All of which makes me suspect that the real intent of the gatherings was not to protest shelter-in-place orders, but rather to say “fuck you, libtard,” to the whole wide world, and to support Trump in the process.

Which brings up a question. Exactly how spontaneous were these protests? How local? And might they really have been organized elsewhere, under the command of other men and women...

Say in the White House itself?

Okay, so far so good. But then this morning, I discovered that, yes, indeed, there was evidence linking none other than Betsy DeVos to the protests. So, I added this:
So there have been developments in the case of the mysteriously “spontaneous” demonstrations in several states against stay-at-home orders. It seems that, at least in the case of Michigan, there were, indeed, other hands involved. A group affiliated with Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education (who has devoted her life to shutting down public schools) was heavily involved with the demonstrations, and may have helped create them in the first place.

In other words, once again...

Evil reaches out from the Trump’s White House to infect the world.

You’d think I’d be at an end here, wouldn’t you? But, no, by this afternoon, I learned that Trump himself had been tweeting encouragement to the demonstrators, sending them tweets like “LIBERATE Kentucky” and “LIBERATE Michigan.” Meaning that Trump was involved in the affair up this beady little eye-balls. So, I added this:


Now we’ve learned that Trump was, in fact, behind the the protests. In fact, he was tweeting the protestors things that sound a bit like inducements to violence. And given that some of those people were heavily armed...

Well...

Doesn’t this all sound a bit like treason?

sources:

‘You Have to Disobey’: Protesters Gather to Defy Stay-at-Home Orders, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/coronavirus-rules-protests.html

Armed protesters demand an end to Michigan's coronavirus lockdown orders, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/global/video/2020/apr/16/armed-protesters-demand-an-end-to-michigans-coronavirus-lockdown-orders-video

Trump Supporters Protest Shutdowns And People Say It Looks Like A Zombie Movie, Huffpost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shutdown-protest-zombie-movie_n_5e97c9f6c5b6ead14007841e


“Conservative group linked to DeVos family organizes protest of coronavirus restrictions in Michigan,” Salon, https://www.salon.com/2020/04/16/conservative-grouplinked-to-devos-familyorganizes-protest-of-coronavirus-restrictions-in-michigan/


“The Usual Suspects, Including Betsy DeVos, Behind Michigan ProtestsWe saw right-wing groups fund the Tea Party protests, and now we're seeing it again.” Crooks & Liars, https://crooksandliars.com/2020/04/usual-suspects-are-behind-michigan


In Trump's 'LIBERATE' tweets, extremists see a call to arms, NBCNews, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/trump-s-liberate-tweets-extremists-see-call-arms-n1186561

He is destroying us.

~

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Convid Conway

So I read the other day that Trump spokes-creature Kellyanne Conway defended her master and attacked the medical authorities and doctors who dared to disagree with the Orange One by saying that Covid-19 was a late-comer. If there was a Covid-19 then there must also have been a Covid-18, and -17, and -16, and finally all the way back to Covid-1.

Which meant, she implied, that the medical and scientific establishment must have been asleep when those other diseases came along, and now it was up to our brave and heroic (albeit pumpkin colored) Father & Teacher, from whom God takes instruction once a day, to step up and save us all.

The problem? There was no Covid-18, -17 -16, etc. The 19 in Covid-19 stands for 2019, which is when the disease was discovered. Meaning, either she is dumb as a brick or she was casting about for a lie to tell the public in the service of Dear Leader tRump. And, you know, I doubt that she is an idiot.

Of course, falsehoods are something we’ve come to expect from anyone in the Trump Administration. But, I’d submit that this is of a different order than what we’ve heard from Ms. Conway before. This is genuinely dangerous. This is the kind of statement that could get people killed.  Once you begin to cast on doubt science, and medical science at that, then you begin to encourage people to not take the kind of measures that will protect them.

Or, to put it all the another way, when you begin to behave like Trump, who has repeatedly attacked science in tweet after tweet, press conference after press conference...

You become guilty of great and deadly sins.

So let me repeat...

For God’s sake, for all our sakes, vote in 2020.

And vote blue, whatever you do.

Trump And Covid-29

~~~

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

Death, Disease, and "Like a business"...

There is an excellent letter in the LA Times this week from John McGlynn, who identifies himself as a business professional in Southern California. Mr. McGlynn offers a very important observation, to wit, that government is not “like a business,” in spite of what all too many Libertarians and Deplorables would have us believe, and if you try to run a government along the lines of a corporation you’re asking for a disaster.

Which is, of course, exactly what we got when Trump et al utterly failed to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. But, then, how could Trump and the Trumpsters do otherwise? Their ideology is government-like-a-business par excellence. And a business does not concern itself with public health. If people die, well, so be it. It is not the job of a profit-making entity to worry about such things.

So, thank you very much, Mr. McGlynn, for wisely pointing out what Americans should have known all along, but which, somehow, they managed not to. And, if there is any (however thin) silver lining to this dreadful affair, it will be that people will start hearing you and others like you, and realize that “government like a business” is a direct route to mass death and endless horror.

Even if that apocalypse is profitable and improves shareholder value.

"Like A Business"

~~~

p.s., We can’t survive four more years of this. For heaven’s sakes, vote in 2020, and vote blue!

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I don’t like Biden Either...VOTE for him ANYWAY

I am troubled by the number of people I’ve encountered of who late tell me that they cannot vote for Biden. They point to this less than stellar performance in the debates, to the (as yet completely unproven) accusations of sexual impropriety, and to his connections with the wealthy and the powerful. And they say that voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for an evil.
But here’s the thing. The alternative to voting for Biden, is to passively support Donald Trump. 

To skip voting, or to throw away your vote on a hopeless Third Party, or to write in Bernie Sanders’ name on the ballot...none of those is helpful. They just give that much more power to the Deplorables who will line up obediently and vote for their orange glazed Führer no matter how obviously it is not in their own best interests to do so.

Oh, and have you noticed? The Right is actively attempting to suppress voter turnout...particularly of the young, of liberals, and of minorities. For Heaven’s sake, don’t do the Right any favors by suppressing your own vote...that is, by staying home on election day.

So, yeah, I would really rather be voting for Sanders or Warren. But Biden is what we’ve got.
If you must, think of him as a broken leg. Not great. But that is a hell of a lot better than having a broken neck.

Lesser of two evils, indeed.

Please?

***


About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Save Yourselves...VOTE!

Just in case you missed it, today Trump halted U.S. funding for the World Health Organization. Why? Mostly (as near as I can tell) because it gives him a way to (yet again) somehow blame someone else for his own appalling response to the Covid-19 crisis...and because it plays well to his base, who have always regarded American involvement with multinational organizations as somehow unpatriotic ... and because the pseudo-Libertarian elites who support his administration see money going anywhere except into their own pockets as blasphemy.

So, in other words, a whole lot more people are going to die and American prestige will continue to plunge, because the bloated, orange-headed moron in the White House decided to play politics and be petulant.

I have only one suggestion. Vote. If you possibly can, vote in November. Vote Blue. You may not like Biden, you may detest him...but the alternative is four more years of that horrible, disgusting, repellent creature in power.

And neither we, nor America, may be able to survive such a thing.

Trump And The Virus

***


About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Blood and Dragons (and antibodies)

This is less a political essay than a diary entry. But, here goes.

I may...repeat may...have had Covid-19 already. May not have. But may.

Way back in early February, I and everyone in my family came down with what seemed to be a very bad flu or cold. I had fever, a wracking cough, and, most of all, extreme fatigue. And I mean extreme. I spent something like two weeks doing very little more than laying on the sofa and trying hard just to keep my eyes open. (Didn’t need to self-isolate because I basically...er, ah...didn’t move.)

I and everyone in my family sought professional medical help. But, as I say, this was in February. Covid-19 was just starting to become a problem in the USA. We hadn’t recently traveled anywhere overseas at that time. We hadn’t been in the company of anyone who had. So, not even our very competent medical advisors thought of coronavirus. And even if they had, there were no test kits available.

Anyway, after a month of feeling pretty awful, we were all up and running again. By that time, of course, Covid-19 was everywhere and I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we had had the virus and didn’t know it.

If so, then I would have the antibodies to the virus already in my blood stream. And, if that were true, then I could donate blood for use in what’s called “convalescent plasma therapy.” I hadn’t run across the term before, but as I understand it, you take blood from someone who has already recovered from a disease and inject it into someone who is still sick. The antibodies in the donor blood then go zap the bad guy viroids. (If you’re interested, here is an article on the topic.)

I would love to be able to do this. It would be so terribly cool. Sort of like being a reverse vampire. You give blood, and maybe life, rather than take it.

So, I set out to find out how I could sign up to be a convalescent plasma donor. Turns out that’s easier said than done, just yet. Several organizations are gearing up to start taking serum donations. Among the places I’ve found doing so are the Red Cross and, in my own locality, We Are Blood.

The kicker is that you need to be able to prove that you have the antibodies in your blood stream. At the moment, the sort of test required...an coronavirus antibody titer test (I’m not making that up)... is available in only a few places. And one of those places is not (alas) Texas. So, looks like I’m out of the game for a while. Though I’m hoping to get off the bench just as soon as tests show up here in the Austin-area.

Give A Gift Of Life

But if you’re interested in being a serum donor, check and see if the Covid-19 titer test is available in your neck of the woods. It would be very, very cool if we could organize a platoon of donors to be of serum service!

So when you get a moment, hop on over to Google or DuckDuckGo or where-ever and do a search for “Coronavirus titer test near me.” If you’re lucky, test kits will be available, and you’ll soon be able to start helping save lives.

In the meantime, I’ve set up an appointment to give blood in the near future -- or, more specifically, to donate platelets, which have to do with things like healing.  I’m AB+, a fairly rare group, and it turns out that us AB-babies are in demand for both platelet and plasma donations.

So, that’s pretty cool, too. And if you can’t get a Covid-19 titer test, consider just giving blood, or platelets or “double red” or whatever. 

It’s a way of being on the side of the angels, and of pissing off the Grim Reaper, at a time when so many angels and their supporters are needed...and there is way too much Death to deal with.

Onward and upward.

mjt 

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Masks Are Marvelous

So I thought I would post a link to this story, “Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public” by Jeremy Howard, which recently appeared in the Washington Post. It is important, because there have been some snotty articles appearing in the press lately about how Do It Yourself face masks are worse than useless and you ought to just stop trying to make or use them.

Except...that isn’t exactly true. Yes, it is accurate to say that a DIY mask can’t take the place of a hospital grade N95 mask. But, medical professionals can wear a cloth mask over an N95 and thus extend its useful life span.

Also, just because a DIY mask isn’t hospital-grade, that doesn’t mean it’s useless. As Howard notes, outside a medical facility, in public, DIY masks can do a great deal to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and other diseases. “Studies have documented definitively that in controlled environments like airplanes, people with masks rarely infect others and rarely become infected themselves,” he says, “while those without masks more easily infect others or become infected themselves.”

So, if you’re making cloth masks for others, or if you’re wearing one to go to the store or wherever, don’t stop. You could actually be saving lives...including, maybe, your own. 

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Please Don’t WIC It Away

Okay, this one is quick but urgent. Martha just pointed out to me this piece by Marissa Higgins on DailyKos, “The real reason to leave WIC-eligible grocery items on the shelf as you stock up amid coronavirus.”

WIC, of course, is the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Ms. Higgins further defines it as, “a federal program for low-income women with children under 5 years old. WIC generally covers eggs, milk, fortified foods, peanut butter, beans, tofu, fruits, vegetables, canned fish, and more. Women who don’t breastfeed are able to receive iron-fortified infant formula. People can also use WIC assistance at participating farmers’ markets to buy fresh produce.”

Which is all to say that it very, very important. For a lot of people, particularly children, it determines whether they have anything to eat...of not.

The kicker? WIC approved products are disappearing from grocery stores, along with everything else that people can scoop up in an age of panic buying. That means that those WIC approved items may not be available for people who really, really need them.

So, suggests Higgins, if you see the WIC symbol on a product, or see that it is “WIC approved,” and you aren’t yourself in the WIC program, consider putting it back. Someone else may very well need it more than you.

And that someone could be a baby...

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Just A Link To My Man Milton

Like it says, this is just a link to the blog of one of my favorite writers, Milton Brasher-Cunningham. Check out this recent posting on "Don't Eat Alone."

lenten journal: help somebody

 

***   Please check out my new book, Padre, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father. https://www.amazon.com/Padre-Island-Michael-Jay-Tucker/dp/1792646909

Government Isn’t Like A Business (you idiot!)

Fascinating piece on the Brookings Institute site this week, “Trump’s failed presidency” by Elaine Kamarck. In it, the talented Dr. Kamarck looks at the Trump administration and asks why it is coming apart so spectacularly.

Her answer? Well, you know how high-powered business executives and corporate CEOs and Hedge Fund managers will so often say that government would work “if only you ran it like a business?” Trump and his enablers believe that dictum as an article of faith. They want a government that would be efficient, profitable, and most of all, small enough “to drown in a bathtub.”

The kicker? Government isn’t like a business.  In particular, says Kamarck, a government has to be ready to deal with the unexpected. A government, she says, “...is in the business of preparing for low-probability events.” Things, that is, like wars, natural disasters, and, now, pandemics.

And in preparing for those-low probability but high-risk events, the Trump Administration has, she notes, “been especially inept ... from the beginning.” As a result, we have a modern plague that could have been prevented, or at least mitigated, but which wasn’t, because Trump et al never suspected it would actually happen.

The long-term take-away, I think, from Dr. Kamarck’s article, and from the Trump Administration in general, is that the run-the-government-like-a-business crowd is dangerous...every bit as dangerous as coronavirus itself.

For those who believe in such maxims, and who would put them into practice, suffer from too deep a faith in their own omni-competence.

Or to put it another way...from hubris.

Which goes before a fall, and makes the tragedy all too Greek.

~~~

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Covid-19 & The Triumph Of Trump

So I had an interesting experience today, and it involved coronavirus. No, I haven’t got it, and I don’t think I’ve been exposed to it. But I have seen the power of the fear it commands.

We had gone to a local Walmart to get a few things. We found what we needed, fortunately, but then we drifted into the aisle that was supposed to contain cleaning goods. You know of course, what we found. The shelves were utterly empty. Bleach, disinfecting wipes, antibacterial sprays...all gone. All purchased and carried away in great piles by people who will never be able to use all of it, but who fought for its possession as though their lives depended on it.

It is frightening to see such fear. To see panic in all its horrid glory.

Don’t get me wrong.   Covid-19 is dangerous, and potentially deadly -- certainly, it is a threat to those of us who are over sixty. As you know, the virus seems to be sparing the young and targeting the old. (Yes, my dear Millennials, the Universe works in mysterious ways. Your vengeance on Boomers seems to be at hand.) And certainly, it is much, much more dangerous than Trump is saying.

Yet, fear, too, is like an infection. It, too, can spread and do dreadful things in the process. Thus the panic buying...and who knows what else?...in my local store.

And, strangely enough, it is Trump who is partly responsible for the great and dangerous Fear. He is making an effort to discount the threat of coronavirus. He is saying that it is no worse than the flu, and that reports otherwise are (dreadful term) fake news.

The Triumph Of Death

But there’s the rub. Even his most ardent supporters know he is lying. In a wonderful of Orwellian doublethink, they believe and disbelieve him. They mock liberals for their fear of the virus, and yet prepare themselves for the triumph of death. Recall that many of them have been eagerly expecting the end of the world for years, and have been prepping for it all this time. How heartening it must be to feel the day is here at last.

And thus Trump does the worst that he can do. He directs his deplorables to simultaneously ignore medical advice, and to over-react.  So it is that you must stand in awe of the man. He is a quadruple threat. In one fell swoop, he establishes four distinct evils...

Fever and fear. Ignorance and arrogance.

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

To Senator Warren, With Admiration

I saw today that Elizabeth Warren has ended her bid for the presidency. This saddens me. I did not vote for her in the primary, but I greatly respect her, and I think she would have made a terrific president.

Also, on a somewhat more primitive level, I would have loved to have seen her debate Trump. Her performance in taking down Michael Bloomberg was wonderful enough, but her utter evisceration of 45 would have been glorious to behold.

But, I suppose, she made the right choice given her performance on Super Tuesday. (Where were her voters?  Why did they not cast their ballots for her? It is a mystery to me -- just as I am bewildered by some of the young people who were so energetic in their support for Bernie Sanders on the web, but who somehow declined to actually appear at the polls.)

Still, she remains a Senator, and an intense pain to Wall Street and many rabid defenders of the status quo. We’ve not seen the last of her, I’m sure. As my wife put it to me this afternoon, she will have her place in our national history...and in our future. 

So, brava, Senator Warren! You have fought the good fight, and you will continue to do so.

I very much look forward to recounting your victories.

***

About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)


Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.


  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Hero Li Wenliang

Note: This originally appeared on 25 Feb, 2020, on LiberalResistance.net. I reproduce it here with the kind permission of the editors. 



I continue to be fascinated (albeit with a chill fascination) the spread of coronavirus in China, and from there to the rest of the world. I shudder to think what’s coming, and hope that, somehow, the virus gets stopped before it goes any further.

So far, the only thing that I find remotely positive about the disease is that it seems to be sparing children.(1) Unlike, say, the great “Spanish” Influenza of 1918, which apparently targeted younger people, the coronavirus seems to leave the young alone, while hitting those of us who are older harder. As a grandfather, that reassures me a wee bit. At least I know that I may fall, but my granddaughter may be safe. Or at least safer.

Okay, but the other thing which interests me is China’s response to the problem. Like most authoritarian regimes, it has both advantages and disadvantages in this situation. The advantage is that it can impose strict measures (like fairly brutal quarantines) that simply wouldn’t fly in a more democratic society.

The disadvantage is that it is morbidly concerned about its image, both at home and abroad. So, it tends to shut down the flow of information about the disease, even when that censorship puts lives at risk.

Maybe the most telling example of this is in the treatment of Li Wenliang, the rather heroic doctor who tried to warn his country (and the world) about the danger, and for his efforts was arrested for spreading “alarmist” rumors — which only goes to prove just how well, alas, Henrik Ibsen knew human character, particularly at its worst.

Dr. Li died of the pandemic he tried so hard to prevent. But he did get, in a sense, his revenge. According to at least some reports, his story has spread wide and far in China, in spite of the best efforts of the authorities to control it. (Seems that disease and information are equally difficult to control.)

In fact, according to one article I saw on CNN, Dr. Li’s case has very, very seriously damaged the government’s reputation with its people. (2) Thus, by trying to control its image, the government managed to injured its image, perhaps beyond any hope of recovery.  Who knows? It might even result in a genuine crisis of legitimacy. It probably won’t bring down the government all by itself, but, in combination with other problems…

Maybe there’s a lesson there, for governments, and, indeed, for us all. One of the central premises of the Enlightenment, and science, is that the free flow of information is a good thing, and that attempts to prevent that freedom — however tempting it might be — become in the end destructive…even fatal.

The Enlightenment, and science, have not been popular of late. For both Right, and yes (let’s confess), the Left, it has seem so more much satisfying to rely instead on faith, received wisdom, “alternative facts,” and sophist mumblings about “postmodernism.”

Yet, here’s the lesson of the day, as provided by the coronavirus and the martyrdom of Dr. Li:  facts may be disruptive. They may be economically inconvenient.  They may clash with your faith. They may be politically incorrect. But …they are inescapable and immutable. And when you ignore them, they bite you.

Hard.



1) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/11/the-coronavirus-appears-to-be-sparing-one-group-of-people-kids.html
2) https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/asia/china-doctor-death-censorship-intl-hnk/index.html

~~~

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Medical Malpractice Of Rush Limbaugh

So I heard the other day that Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, has said that coronavirus is just the “common cold,” and liberals are vastly exaggerating its deadliness is a deliberate attempt to attack Donald Trump. Yet, somewhat contradictorily, he then said the virus was a thoroughly diabolical bio-weapon engineered by the Chinese. (1)

Houston, we have a problem. The disease is, or isn’t a mortal danger. Pick one.

Limbaugh’s claims are, of course, non-sense. The coronavirus isn’t the common cold. It probably isn’t a weapon. It is a real danger. It does kill people. And if the media does exaggerate its threat, then it is because scary headlines sell, not because anyone is after Trump. (Though, frankly, the media probably isn’t exaggerating the problem a whole lot. Any disease which has a mortality rate of about 2% needs to be taken very carefully.)

Oh, and special kudos, by the way, to Chelsea Clinton, who took time out of her busy schedule to call out Limbaugh. It was well done. And, unfortunately, that took courage in an age when simple truth telling is to invite abuse on a grand scale.(2)

But, anyway, this isn’t the first time that Limbaugh has spread medical misinformation. You’ll recall that he denied the dangers of smoking for years. Right up to the moment he was diagnosed with a late stage version of the disease, he was saying that there was no provable link between smoking and lung cancer. (3)

We have no way of knowing how many people continued to smoke, or took up the practice, because they heard Limbaugh say it wasn’t a problem. But we can guess that many did. And of those, many, many have suffered because of it, or will suffer in future.

Now, he has said that coronavirus is no danger.  That is a case where he may not have negatively impacted individual behavior -- no one is going and deliberately expose themselves to coronavirus because he told them to -- but it could be problematic to us all, anyway. If his audience believes him, then its members could work against the policies and individuals who could mitigate the spread and danger of the disease. Does the CDC say we have a problem and must take countermeasures? Nonsense. Fake news. The alarmist lies of libtard Eastern Elites...

And recall, already, Limbugh’s hero, Donald Trump, has done much to defund the very organizations -- like the CDC -- which could have helped stop or at least slowed coronavirus while there was still time. Trump and his administration should receive no support in continuing that policy.

My point? I have always, always been a proponent of unlimited free speech. I have always thought that people should be able to say whatever they damn well pleased. If what they said was false, well, eventually that would proven by public debate and experimentation.

This is different. This is telling millions upon millions of listeners that they may ...indeed, should! ...endanger their lives, and ours. This rates up there with Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook conspiracy theories (and, in the process, encouraging gun rights lunatics, to stalk and threaten the parents of slain children). It rates up there as well with anti-Vaxxers proselytizing dubious theories of autism, and encouraging parents to endanger their children by not having them vaccinated. 

It is, in other words, a genuine public health care risk, and should be treated as such. There should be--and it pains me to say this--some sort of consequence for people who willingly spread health care falsehoods which could all too easily threaten the entire society.

Or, at the very least, we should have legions of fact checkers -- like Ms. Clinton -- who are willing and able to oppose lies and outright ignorance, and who would be protected afterwards.

Otherwise we are left at the mercy of plagues...

Whether those spread by insects, or foul water, or contact...

Or by men and women with access to microphones, and no restraint of conscience.


***

Two updates.

First, since I wrote this, I learned that Donald Trump has, indeed, begun to say things that sound very much as if they were taken from the Limbaugh play book (4)

Second, somehow I missed the fact that Rush Limbaugh lost his hearing a while back. I didn’t know it until I saw photos of him with cochlear implants.

The other thing I didn’t realize is why he became deaf. It hasn’t been proven, but there is some well-informed speculation that it was caused by his overuse of prescription pain killers.(5) In other words, he may have deafened himself, just as his constant recourse to cigars may have caused his lung cancer.

There is something terribly metaphoric in that.




Sources

1. https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-trump-023911730.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=1_04
2. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/484603-chelsea-clinton-rips-limbaugh-for-peddling-fake-news
3. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rush-limbaugh-nicotine-addictive/
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/25/white-house-struggles-contain-public-alarm-over-coronavirus-despite-panic/
5.https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=128270&page=1

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Mad Mike, Rest In Peace

I was saddened to learn today of the death of Mike “Mad Mike” Hughes, who was among many other things a daredevil and a prominent flat earth proponent. He was killed in the line of duty when his homemade rocket crash landed with him at the controls. He had hoped to reach an altitude of 5000 feet (1524 meters), from whence he thought he could take pictures of the earth and show that it did not curve.

As I say, I am saddened. He was a colorful and eccentric figure, and the world needs more of those.

Still, there is something amazingly metaphoric here. His mission was to prove that the scientific conception of the world, and the laws of physics behind it, were at least flawed and maybe deliberate lies. In our present age, that is accepted and even encouraged—after all “everyone has the right to an opinion” and “reality is socially created.”

The problem is that the real world (which really is round) and the laws of physics are not so accepting of eccentricity as we might be, and in that real world reality steadfastly refuses to be socially created, no matter how certain are our professors of postmodernism and professional decriers of “Fake News” may be that it is.

And therein lies the great danger of dismissing reality as an illusion, for it may not agree, and its whims are truly deadly.

 

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



 Tucker’s most recent book is Padre: To The Island, a meditation on life and death based on the passing of his own parents



.       This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Santa Fe: The Movie!

Okay, I’ve made another video…

As you know, a while back I wrote a short book (or is it a booklet?) entitled With Luther, God, and Tourists in Santa Fe. It’s part travel log, part essay on progressive Christianity, and part personal recollection of a trip Martha and I took to Santa Fe to attend something called “The Lutheran Advocacy Ministry Bishop’s Luncheon and Issues Briefing.” We’re not Lutherans ourselves, but our church sent us as representatives to see what our co-religionists were up to—which was a lot. They were involved in several social programs that impressed us no end.

Anyway, I wrote the book (which I’m giving away as a pdf. Instructions of where to get it are below), and then…

I got the urge to make it into a video. Or, more precisely, a slide animation with one my long-winded voice overs.

 

And, after much reading aloud and other fiddling around, I got the video done. It is on my Vimeo site and you can see it here: https://vimeo.com/390884002

Now, if you get tempted to watch it, great! But a word of warning. It is a long one — just about thirty minutes, making it one of the longest videos I’ve ever done.

Still, I think you might enjoy it, particularly if you have an interest in Progressive Christianity, a.k.a., The Christian Left.

Also, it is a chance for me to show off my sterling reading voice, which (I’m told) isn’t that bad.

So, give it a listen, and if you have the urge to have me read your audio book, drop me a line.

Cheers
mjt


Want the book (for free?) Go here: https://gumroad.com/l/TouristsAndGodInSantaFeFe

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!


And, again, you can see the video here: https://vimeo.com/390884002

The Last Ulysses

So not exactly political, but you can’t do politics all the time: I read in The Guardian the other day that Stephen Joyce, the “last direct descendant of James Joyce” had passed on at 87.

He was James Joyce’s grandson, and was known -- says the article -- “for his fierce guardianship of his grandfather’s works...” That is, if anything, an understatement. Stephen was the terror of academia and many a scholar suffered from his legal attentions for unauthorized quotations from James Joyce’s material.

As a former academic myself (well, sort of), it is hard for me to fully understand or sympathize with Stephen Joyce’s position. Still, you have to admire his energy and tenacity. He was definitely the sort of defender every family needs.

Particularly families that are literary.

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

War Without Mercy

I don’t know why, but I’ve gotten interested in Balkan history lately. Right now, I’m reading Misha Glenny’s book, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2011. Great read, by the way, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

Anyway, part of the book deals with the Balkans during World War I. Of course, the Great War started there when the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serbian ultra-nationalist. Gavrilo Princip. That led, obviously, to war…though, in retrospect, it’s not clear that Serbia’s conduct was entirely responsible for the outbreak of hostilities. Mostly, maybe, but not entirely. The Austro-Hungarians had been looking for a reason to go to war with the Serbia for quite some time. The death of their crown prince provided a handy excuse.

But, that’s a story for another day.

What I’m interested in right now, though, is what happened immediately after war was declared. Austria (well, Austro-Hungary, but let’s keep things short and simple) invaded Serbia. The very first shot fired in that invasion, and indeed, in the war itself, was from an Austrian gunboat on the Danube.(1) This was the Bodrog, which was a “monitor,” in the language of the time.

Monitors were boats meant to fight on rivers.  And, yes, they took the name from the original one that served with the United States Navy in the American Civil War. Most of the bigger nations of the time possessed them, and they were sometimes quite heavily armed.  The Bodrog, for instance, or so says Wikipedia, "was armed with two 120 mm (4.7 in)L/35[c] guns in single gun turrets, a single 120 mm (4.7 in)L/10 howitzer in a central pivot mount, and two 37 mm (1.5 in) guns.[1] The maximum range of her Škoda 120 mm guns was 10 kilometres (6.2 mi), and her howitzer could fire its 20 kg (44 lb) shells a maximum of 6.2 km (3.9 mi).”

The Bodrog

See below for source

It was, in other words, a pretty fearsome weapon, and when it and other Austrian monitors steamed into Serbian waters, there wasn’t much the defenders could do about them. This was particularly unfortunate for the Serbs because first target for the monitors was the city of Belgrade—and, particularly, its civilian population.

The whole business sounds pretty awful. Glenny writes about the civilians watching while their city was turned into a battlefield, “At night almost every street in Belgrade was lit up either by the huge network of floodlights constructed by the Austrian army or by the fires raging out of control at the cigarette factory, saw mill and oil depot. Early on, the waterworks was destroyed, leading to a rapid deterioration in sanitary conditions. Drinking water was soon in short supply, and swarms of mosquitoes tormented the flesh of the hundreds of homeless people who had been forced to abandon their homes to seek shelter in a huge cave in Topčider.”

I’ll spare you the rest of the history lecture. Suffice to say that Serbs did mount a counterattack which stunned the world by driving the Austro-Hungarians out of the country. But, then the Empire struck back, with much German aid, and eventually occupied the whole country. Oh, and in there too was a horrific retreat of the Serbian army across snow covered mountains—a brilliant maneuver, but one which left thousands of Serbian men (and Austrian POWs) dead along the way. If you want to know more, Wikipedia has an entry on The Serbian Campaign of World War I. (2)

But, I’m writing about all of this because I realized two things. First…and I’m embarrassed to admit this…but I was startled to learn that almost from the beginning, the Great War included urban warfare and attacks on non-combatants. Somehow I had gotten the naive idea that most of the Great War’s battles were out in the countryside — like Flanders Field — or in small towns or villages when those places were unfortunate enough to get caught in the action.

Which meant that I somehow had the idea the Great War was minutely less deadly to civilians than the wars that came before it and those many that came after it. I didn’t think that the combatant nations were particularly chivalrous, though that may have played a role, but simply that they conceived of war as something that was done outside the confines of urban areas.

Second, though, I realized that I had never heard of the shelling of Belgrade. Oh, I knew that there had been an Austrian invasion of Serbia, and I had some hazy memory of reading about the war in Balkans after that. But, monitors on the river, shelling women and children, that was new to me.

And I worry about my ignorance. I’m hoping that I simply hadn’t paid enough attention to my history books, and that Belgrade’s sufferings were recorded there for all to see.

But, what concerns me is the possibility that the battle of Belgrade is less well known to everyone, not just me, and that is it less well known because it simply isn’t covered as much in English-language texts…and maybe not in French, German, and Dutch ones either. And that the reason it is less well known is because that the city’s sufferings did not particularly and uniquely impact Western Europeans and Americans. And so, since the killings were somewhere out there…beyond the pale…among those Others…it didn’t really matter.

If that sort of willful blindness is at work, then you understand why the tale of Belgrade’s ruin sort of slipped below the horizon. And, if Belgrade, then other things might similarly be subject to directed amnesia—like, for instance, the relative indifference that the West seemed to have shown about many a slaughter—the Holocaust, the destruction of the Armenians, the Gulag, Nanjing, Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia (again the Balkans), and so many, many other places and times.

That is concerning because it suggests that we are only troubled (let alone moved to provide help) only by what we see…and what we see greatly depends on what we are allowed to see by greater powers than ourselves. And those powers may not be particularly interested in what is just and what is humane.

Which worries me because it suggests that perhaps there are terrible things happening right now… in places like Congo and Iraq and Xinjiang…but we are shamefully unaware of them, because it is not in the interests of the elite that we be otherwise.

That’s bad enough…but there is more…

You see, we are now Great and Powerful ourselves. America is the sole remaining superpower in the world. But, all greatness fades. All empires tumble. There may come a time…perhaps even in our lives…when we are not the focus of the world’s fascinated attention.

When that time comes, and should we also be the subject of massacre and horror…will we discover, too late, that we too are ignored, that we too are left the perish…

Because it is not expedient for the Great and the Powerful…

To save us?

*

Two quick asides: One, if I had bothered to research the issue even a little bit, I’d have known that urban areas (at least towns) were being attacked and civilians were being killed from the minute the Great War began in 1914. Indeed, a quick Google search on my part just now revealed that while soldiers seemed to have formed the bulk of those killed in the Great War, civilians made up a lot of the dead. In an article on the British Library site, “The ‘German Atrocities’ of 1914,” Sophie de Schaepdrijver notes that “the war started with massacres of civilians,” mostly Belgian and French who ran afoul of the invading German army. (3)

And, two, I talk about how we ignore genocides if they seem to be far away. Someone could quite legitimately point out that we have had our own genocides right here, and not that long ago—for example, the near extermination of Native Americans. That’s true, of course, but maybe you could argue that in the nineteenth century, massacres going on “way out west” were psychically distant, in that it required days or weeks of travel to actually reach the places where they were happening, newspapers were often more concerned with events in the cites of the East Coast, and there were few among the national elites who had anything to gain from protecting “the Vanishing American.”

Or, maybe my thesis is just fundamentally flawed. If so, I’m willing to (reluctantly) accept that judgment.

But, still, even so, I think I am right to be concerned about national destiny, and whether or not we might find ourselves without friends at some dreadful moment in our future.

Footnotes:

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_monitor_Sava
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_campaign_of_World_War_I
3) https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/civilian-atrocities-german-1914

Source on photo of Bodrog: By Foto Kilophot G.m.b.h. Vienna(Life time: N/A) - Original publication: Vienna, 1914 as a postcard. Immediate source: http://www.kuk-kriegsmarine.it/navi/monitor-fluviali/bodrog/bodrog.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44208609


~~~

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.


***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Glass Floor And Rich Idiots

Amusing article on Huffpost a while back, The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots At The Top by Michael Hobbes. In it, Hobbes looks at how family connections, special treatment, and pure money keeps the children of the wealthy outperforming the rest of us -- even if those wealthy young people are complete idiots.

Hobbes quotes Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution researcher, who says that today’s moneyed families and their heirs, benefit from a “glass floor,” that keeps them from experiencing downward social mobility, even if they’re talentless or incompetent. The same floor keeps talented but poorer young people from rising. This means, says Hobbes, “Rather than sending our most brilliant minds up the income ladder, America is ensuring that the wealthy, no matter their mediocrity, retain their grip on the highest rung.”

True? False?  I can’t say for certain. But you must confess, if there is such a glass floor, then it would explain many recent events. And that boss you had who seemed like a privileged moron and you always wondered if he could really be that stupid?

Well, guess what, he really was.

And maybe more.

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Taxes Or Pitchforks?

So check out this op-ed piece in The Guardian, Millionaires like me should pay more taxes. Giving to charity is a fig leaf, by Chuck Collins. Collins is a big money guy. The article identifies him as “the great-grandson of the US meatpacker Oscar Mayer.”

But he is also very concerned about growing economic inequality in the west. He thinks that it is, in fact, actually destroying us. He writes, “This process of pulling apart, both within countries and between nations, will all but guarantee that the global community will further polarize and fail to adequately respond to the looming climate catastrophe. This will be disastrous for everyone, including the planet’s billionaires and millionaires.”

So, in the op-ed, he encourages the wealthy among his readers to pay their fair share -- that is, pay more taxes, and stop fighting so hard for some kind of libertarian society where any regulation of the economy (i.e., of their own wants) is anathema.

Honestly, it is a very compelling piece, and if I were a billionaire, I’d take it very seriously, particularly as Colins notes, “The choice is stark: do we want pitchforks or a working tax system?”

But there’s the rub. I’m not a billionaire. And neither are most of his readers.

So, will they...the 1%...heed his warning? Or will they just keep on doing what they’re doing, increasing their profits at the cost of everyone else, until one day they meet...

That pitchfork? 

~~~

Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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***

Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.