Life, Not More Important than Inconvenience

 

“Remember when 240,000 dead was a shocking estimate?” 

Asked by Nicholas Goldberg in an LA Times Aril 18th OpEd.

The United States, even with more than ample supply of vaccines and masks, is facing a virtual certainty of achieving a million direct-from-COVID deaths in the immediate future. This reality does not cover the uncounted horde of deceased people who either did not go to hospitals or could not be timely saved because hospitals were overwhelmed by COVID patients. That we are experiencing a new BA-2 COVID Omicron surge, much more contagious although less virulent than past strains, still does not stop diehard Trumpers who insist that they have right to mix in public, even in highly confined spaces, without wearing a mask. Even those with symptomless COVID.

Unless there is a stay pending appeal, the mask mandate in public transportation may have just ended by order of a lower court ruling.  U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle of Florida, a Trump appointee, said the mandate exceeds the statutory authority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Federal officials last week had extended the mask mandate for flying commercially and in other transportation settings, including on buses, ferries and subways, until at least May 3rd. Kimball Mizelle said a remedy limited to the plaintiffs would be meaningless, so this Tampa-based federal judge decided on a summary judgment (i.e., no trial) to vacate that CDC mandate across the entire country.

Regardless of your immune status or other medical vulnerabilities, you could be sardined on a flight, even on the bus on the way to the airport, to alleviate the “anxiety level” of a fellow traveler inconvenienced by having to wear a mask while traveling. That greater anxiety might be imposed on fellow travelers is irrelevant? And while those who have been vaccinated and boosted are unlikely to perish from a COVID infection, there is no guarantee of a symptomless recovery with no risk of long COVID. How quickly, we forget. Bleach or horse de-wormer, anyone? That drove Los Angeles Times correspondent, Nicholas Goldberg, to wax nostalgic about the bad old days, in his OpEd noted above:

“At the start of the pandemic, in late March 2020, President Trump held a White House briefing at which his top advisors presented their official COVID-19 death projections. In somber tones, they forecasted that between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die from the disease if we followed reasonable social-distancing and other mitigation guidelines.

“Two hundred and forty thousand! That was an inconceivable amount of death. Four times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. Eighty times the number who died in the 9/11 attacks.

“‘As sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,’ said Dr. Anthony Fauci [at the time], the nation’s leading infectious disease expert. Trump added that there was ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ if we behaved as we should, but that ‘we’re going to go through a very tough two weeks.’

“Today, two years later, we all know how that worked out. We didn’t behave as we should. We didn’t see the light after two weeks. And we didn’t have 100,000 deaths, or 240,000 deaths either.

“Instead, we’re now closing in on 1 million deaths. As of Sunday [4/17], total U.S. COVID deaths were at 986,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 400 more Americans dying each day… Our cumulative national death rate of more than 200 per 100,000 people is higher than that of any other large, wealthy, industrialized nation…

“Admittedly, this is a confusing moment. The danger has lessened. And by now, even liberal Democrats who hate Trump, revere Fauci and uncomplainingly followed all the mitigation rules are very sick of hiding out from this disease. We all want our lives back.

“So we tell ourselves there’s a level of ongoing death we can live with. That COVID is like the flu — endemic, not pandemic. That we’re vaxxed, and better yet boosted, and therefore we’re kind of, sort of, invulnerable.

“But eager as we may be for this to be over, now is a time to move slowly and avoid complacency. For one thing, only 66% of the country is fully vaccinated; only 45% has received even one booster. (In L.A. County alone, there are some 1.7 million people over age 5 who haven’t received even a single shot.) For another, as long as the virus is raging anywhere, the possibility of new, more dangerous mutations remains real… If we’re careful, perhaps we can slow the process and keep 1 million from becoming 2 million.”

Funny how that exceptionally selfish vision of individual rights, enshrined nowhere in religious text or constitutional law, seems to permeate a widely populist, modern and dangerous vision of America. From gun ownership, even to military assault weapons, all the way to mingling in public without concern for spreading an infectious disease. Inconsiderate? Rude? Or subject to reasonable rules and regulations?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the “say anything, do anything that I want” American constituency says more about the survivability of the nation than it does about individual liberties.

Let Them Eat Nothing… Red States Rejecting Federal Food Aid for the Poor

 

It would be one thing if Christian charity were to fill the void, but that would encourage sloth rejected by right-wing menu evangelicals led by their pastor hypocrites who foster intolerance, are quick to cast the first stone and chastise the kindness and charity of the New Testament as being unacceptably “woke.” That a deeply religious text is interpreted by false prelates as a menu from which the faithful can pick and choose should be disturbing to faithful Christians. False idols, false witness and not killing are the most “opt-out” commandments. Wonder if anyone ever put an AR-15 in the collection plate?

Scott McFetridge, writing for the April 17th (Easter Sunday, ironically) Associated Press, points out the irony in red states turning on their food impaired citizens: “Month by month, more of the roughly 40 million Americans who get help buying groceries through the federal food stamp program are seeing their benefits plunge, even as the nation struggles with the biggest increase in food costs in decades.

“The payments to low- income individuals and families are dropping as governors end COVID-19 disaster declarations and opt out of an ongoing federal program that made their states eligible for dramatic increases in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, also known as food stamps.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture began offering the increased benefit in April 2020 in response to surging unemployment after the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the country.

“The result is that, depending on the politics of a state, people in need find themselves eligible for significantly different levels of help buying food.

“Nebraska took the most aggressive action, ending the emergency benefits four months into the pandemic, in July 2020 — a move Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts said would ‘show the rest of the country how to get back to normal.’

“Since then, nearly a dozen GOP-led states have taken similar action. This month, Iowa become the most recent place to slash the benefits; they will be cut in Wyoming and Kentucky in the next month. Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee have also scaled them back.

“Republican leaders say the extra benefits were intended to temporarily help people who were forced out of work by the pandemic. Now that the health crisis has eased, they say, there is no need to offer the higher payments when businesses in most states are struggling to find enough workers.

“But the extra benefits also help families in need at a time of skyrocketing food prices… Recipients receive at least $95 per month under the program, but some individuals and families typically eligible only for small benefits can get hundreds of dollars in extra payments each month… The entire program will come to a halt if the federal government decides to end its public health emergency, though the Biden administration has yet to signal that it intends to do so.” Of course, Republicans in Congress and in state capitals are pushing hard for an end to the public health emergency. Should Biden eliminate Title 42 (used to close our borders during the pandemic) to enable asylum seekers to cross the border to press their cases, as currently planned, those benefits would cease anyway.

Kindness, tolerance, support for those who need our help has become both un-American and violative of the teachings of a majority of white evangelical preachers and the sheep who blindly follow them. If you believe in the true teachings of the Bible, New and Old Testaments, you are unacceptably “woke.” What would Jesus do? Probably something exceptionally “woke.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and I believe that “wokeness” is the best any human being can be… like the Jesus Christ whose teachings so many evangelicals reject.

Insane with Methane

 

There’s lots of angst being generated from Germany’s heavy reliance on natural gas supplied through Russian pipelines. The United States is one of the world’s leading producers of natural gas. Getting our gas to Germany… well, we are way short of the number of tankers it would take to make that feasible. 

Those of us who have gas heaters or use gas-fired cooktops and ovens or dryers are mostly using natural gas. It’s normally odorless, but they add a distinct odor to consumers who use it to detect leaks. The largest component of natural gas is methane, a compound with one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms (CH 4). And methane is one of those lovely fossil fuels, which are the mostly the product of millennia of compressed organic matter, decomposing plants and animals, found deep within the earth. Or in frozen tundra (permafrost), until something melts that ground cover, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Or in the digestive tracts and manure of animals, particularly large lumbering cows.

Even though we sell it, harvest it, pull it out of the ground, methane is a very big and bad component of greenhouse gas if it is released in its purely gaseous form. While the carbon dioxide component of atmospherically trapped greenhouse gas is by far the largest component, methane has, over the years, increased more disproportionately. Methane does break down faster than carbon dioxide – that takes about a decade – but it is also 24 times heavier than carbon dioxide. The good news, however, is that if you manage to capture methane and use it as fuel, it burns far cleaner than either coal or petroleum products. Thus, natural gas has become what many believe is a transitional fuel until we can shift entirely off carbon-based products.

So, cow gas is big business these days. We politely include this effluent into our generic category of “biofuel.” Mostly, it’s methane. Except for the smell part. And oil rich California likes cow excrement. A lot. They collect it. And sell it. In “California, this collection of animal excrement is a climate success… The state has enabled farmers and their business partners in California and far beyond to make millions diverting such methane into a web of futuristic machinery that processes and pumps it into natural gas pipelines.

“‘With a good natural gas car, one cow could get you across the country,’ said Neil Black, president of California Bioenergy, which installs the digesters that trap and repurpose the gas. ‘In addition to producing milk and cheese and yogurt and ice cream … each cow produces about 125 diesel gallon equivalents of methane a year.’” Evan Halper writing for the March 29th Los Angeles Times. But like many of these “oh, wow” stories, there’s a catch, a very unpleasant downside, particularly if you happen to be a valuable, gas emitting animal. 

“The methane incentives are so generous that one UC Davis professor warns that the state is nearing a point where it is rewarding production of manure, pushing livestock industries to crowd more of their animals into confinement, and potentially creating more manure — and thus, methane — than otherwise necessary.” Harper. Farmers are also likely to shift from growing lower-profit-making crops, decreasing those supplies (hence raising their prices), to move into more lucrative biofuel harvesting. 

“Separate from the methane push, California’s bullishness on biofuels is also moving some of the country’s large refineries to retrofit their operations to no longer process crude oil. They are shifting to the business of making ‘renewable’ diesel and jet fuel from plants and animal fats… The projected demand California is driving for these ingredients could outpace the supply, which threatens to touch off a range of consequences from increased food costs to a sharp uptick in palm oil production from plantations that are one of the world’s most potent accelerators of global warming.

“‘We don’t have all the right solutions yet,’ said Gene Gebolys, chief executive of World Energy, which has converted a refinery in Paramount into one of the world’s first operations that make jet fuel without using a drop of crude oil. “But the stuff we are working on right now will lead to the right solutions, because it has to. We have no choice but to figure this out. The status quo is not going to work…Regulators are trying to limit ancillary damage to food companies unnerved by its potential to boost the price of cooking oils, fence-line communities warning it creates new pollution threats, and small ag businesses accusing the state of helping factory farms squeeze them out.” Harper. Can you just see this process spiraling completely out of control? 

I’m Peter Dekom, and the laws of unintended consequences seem to be looming large over American cows, pigs… and, well, all kinds of farming and ranching.

Accountability, Responsibility and the End of the Robert’s Supreme Court

 

The United States has changed significantly in the last few years. Mythology and conspiracy theories, embraced by some of those in the highest elected offices in the land, have replaced fact and, to a fairly large segment of the electorate, led to the denigration and marginalization of trained and educated professionals. Individuals have claimed exemption from mandates aimed at saving lives, believing that somehow, their right to carry on even at the risk of death to their fellow Americans, is somehow (and incorrectly) their God-given or constitutional right. 

We are quick to lambast and deny so many trying to flee their gun-driven, cartel oppression home nations, even though their terror is a direct and immediate result of America’s inability to stem its own demand-generating addiction rates… simply looking the other way as gunmakers unabashedly market and tailor their best small arms to cartel buyers. And as such weapons, easily purchased in the US, find no difficulty being smuggled to cartel criminals across the border. Inane arguments about “Second Amendment Rights,” and how guns are needed to protect our families, conveniently ignore reality: even though only one in 35 civilian gun homicides is deemed “justifiable” and mass shootings continue to skyrocket. 

Culture wars, the marginalization of racial, ethnic and gender minorities and their human rights, and the overriding fact that 73% of Americans with school-age children are not anxious to impose rigid but ambiguous anti-CRT rules on their children’s teachers. Yet these unnecessary and restrictive anti-CRT laws are still passed by evangelically inspired politicians… and we wonder why teachers are quitting in droves with few qualified applicants ready to live in that restrictive world.

Right-wing middle-aged and elder white male legislators pass anti-abortion statutes, hoping that a Supreme Court with two probable rapists (noting the FBI purposely did an expedited and knowingly incomplete vetting) will sustain their efforts to reverse Roe v Wade, enjoying a wave of gerrymandered and white-voter-biased anti-minority, anti-women legislation that defies the overwhelming majority will based on every credible poll taken on the subject. The Supreme Court has become a quasi-legislative body with no checks or balances, that has affirmed or will affirm these deepest and most anti-democratic desires.

Bottom line: squeaky-wheel right wing minorities, successfully marginalizing opposing voters in their states, have dictated an entirely new set of underlying basic rights that deeply offend the majority of Americans, without a shred of remorse… or accountability for the obvious consequences. We do not think like a nation, and with rare exception act like a nation. To see how far the United States as a “democracy” has fallen in the eyes of the rest of the world, please see my April 4th A Nation Sits in Intolerant Judgment blog. We passionately support Ukraine’s democracy, just as we erode and unravel our own.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has presided over a court that has reverted to a level of obfuscation – deciding cases on a purported interim basis without any reasoning, but effectively making a ruling that lower courts are bound to follow – that we have never seen before: a significant increase in so-called shadow docket rulings. In an April 13th OpEd to the New York Times, University of Texas constitutional law professor, Stephen Vladeck examines this accelerating abuse of Supreme Court discretion.

“The term ‘shadow docket’ was introduced by the University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015 to describe the more obscure part of the Supreme Court’s work — the thousands of unsigned and usually unexplained orders that the justices issue each year to manage their docket. Those orders are in contrast to the merits docket, the 60 to 70 cases each year that go through rounds of briefing and oral argument before being resolved in long, signed opinions for the court…

“[An early April 5-4 shadow ruling upholding a Trump-era limitation of the Clean War Act] cannot be ignored, especially because of the brief but blistering dissenting opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. It’s not the first time that liberal justices have called out most of the court’s conservative justices for their increasingly frequent use of the so-called shadow docket — unsigned, unexplained orders like the one last week. But it was significant for being the first time that Chief Justice John Roberts joined her (and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor) in doing so. 

“[In a September shadow docket ruling that refuse to stop a Texas abortion law,] Justice Kagan noted in a dissent:] ‘The majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.’… Owing to its inscrutability, the shadow docket has historically received much less public attention or scrutiny. Most shadow docket orders are anodyne — matters as routine as refusing to take up an appeal or giving a party more time to file a brief.

“But far more than ever before, the court is using procedural orders on applications for emergency relief while appeals work their way through the courts to resolve disputes affecting the lives of millions of Americans — whether in blocking a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on a vaccination mandate for large employers, refusing to block Texas’ ban on most abortions after six weeks or putting back into effect congressional district maps that two Alabama lower courts struck down as violating the Voting Rights Act.

“Time and again, the justices are ordering lower courts to treat these decisions as precedents — even when, as in last week’s ruling, the order includes no analysis to apply to other cases, which often makes the precedent difficult for lower courts to apply…

“The justices have long insisted — as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter put it in 1992 — that ‘the court’s legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the nation.’ The proliferation of principle-free decisions affecting more and more Americans — and with a clear, troubling tendency of favoring Republicans over Democrats — calls that legitimacy into increasingly serious question.

“It’s understandable, then, why Chief Justice Roberts would finally speak out. No one better understands the stakes for the court’s credibility — and institutional viability. If even his objections can’t persuade the other conservatives to stop abusing the shadow docket, then that may signal the willingness of the court’s conservative majority to go even further in the future and to use the shadow docket to resolve even more significant and contentious constitutional questions.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who generally backs conservative results, has finally sensed the growing abuse of this shadow docket process. It is a slam to the credibility of the court, particularly when the result is the reversal of major statutes or long-held Supreme Court precedents, made even more egregious when the resulting reversal flies in the face of the will of a clear majority of Americans. But despite his title, the Chief Justice has lost control of his bench. It's a right-wing tribunal without any requirements. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is indeed unfortunate that most Americans do not recognize the appointment of Supreme Court justices as the most important long term impact any president can make.

In Thine Severe Mistrust

 

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as Florida rejected a 41% of math textbooks submitted by publishers in part because they “contained prohibited subjects,” including critical race theory.

We sit on the precipice of thermonuclear war. Ultraviolence in a major food/fossil fuel producing region (Ukraine and Russia) and the pent-up demand, which exploded as the lingering effects of the pandemic subsided, combined to create the highest rate of inflation in over forty years. The monthly cost of carrying a normal mortgage doubled literally overnight. Radical right-wing policies – from restricting established voting and abortion rights to baseless culture wars and censorship, accelerated by a growing support for armed insurrection – have moved us one giant step toward autocracy. And the Supreme Court has become an ultra-conservative legislature with no appellate checks and balances, hell-bent on repealing decades of expanding individual rights.

Those at the top have never made so much money. Those at the bottom have not fared this badly since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We live in an era of blame and polarization, where logical legislation is stymied if sponsored by the “opposition” party. There are red Americans. There are blue Americans. There is no “loyal opposition.” And there are very few truly neutral Americans. So few, just Americans. We mistrust. We fear. But mostly, we hate. Even Putin’s war has failed to unite us. Are we irretrievably and permanently a divided land?

Within this toxic combination, we watch mass shootings, follow-home violent robberies, flash mob invasions of retail markets, absurd levels of gun violence, now including military grade assault weapons (easily converted to fully automatic) and more guns than this nation has ever had before, passing through the permeable walls between our international boundaries (guns going south) and open borders between states… between states that want to control gun ownership and those that wish to expand it. The new normal. Ghost guns, AR-15s, large-clip automatic pistols. Murder rates in almost every major city hit new peaks… with hope for a maybe?

The April17th New York Times newsletter (by German Lopez) summarized what their editors believe are the underlying vectors of rising animosity, criminality, gun violence that clearly illustrates how a Supreme Court misinterpretation of the Second Amendment (Heller vs District of Columbia, 2008) opened the flood gates to an explosion of gun homicides:

“Three explanations help explain the increase in violence. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns disrupted all aspects of life, including the social services that can tame crime and violence. The high-profile police killings of 2020 and the protests that followed strained police-community relations. And Americans bought a record number of guns in recent years.

“Another explanation… ties these issues together: a growing sense of social discord and distrust. As Americans lose faith in their institutions and each other, they are more likely to lash out — sometimes in violent ways, Randolph Roth, a crime historian at Ohio State University, told me.

“Besides Covid and police brutality, the country’s increasingly polarized politics and poor economic conditions have also fueled this discord. That helps explain the murder spike, as well as recent increases in drug addiction and overdoses, mental health problems, car crashes and even confrontations over masks on airplanes.

“But given the shootings of the past two weeks, I want to step back and focus on violent crime trends in particular… Experts pointed to several reasons for concern: not only the headline-making tragedies, but also continued murder rate increases in some cities and the persistence of problems that contributed to more violent crime in the first place. But experts also see some potentially hopeful signs: recent decreases in murder rates in other cities, the easing of Covid-related disruptions and growing distance from the more chaotic police-community relations of 2020.” Exactly what is the stake that the bottom of our economic ladder have in “America”? What do they have left to lose? A hot, very very hot, summer looms. As midterms approach, politicians in red states are digging in their heels, and very Putin-like, doubling down on mythology to sustain a severe shift to white evangelical minority rule. Will the violence subsize… or is this just the beginning? Can polarization get any worse?            I’m Peter Dekom, and as we supply Ukraine with arms to protect their democracy, we clearly watching our own most fragile democracy cracking, perhaps permanently, at the seams.

When Entire Political Movements Are Based on Big Lies

 

“How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” But some lies are bigger than others.

It is with intense sadness that I watched the labeled Russian “retaliation” – amped-up bombing and shelling of major Ukrainian cities, particularly the teetering Mariupol – for Ukraine’s sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship guided missile cruiser. Except Russia told us that the sinking was not due to the obvious success of a double missile strike from Ukrainian designed and built Neptune missiles. Russia swore the damage was from a fire that broke out on board. So, what are they retaliating against? So, they used the nebulous words, “terrorist activities” instead. Putin continues his diatribe, his crusade, to de-Nazify Ukraine – a clear nerve in a nation that suffered 70% of all the casualties in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) – and crush dissent with brutality and a 15-year prison sentence for those prosecuted.

Russia finally sent its expected but ominous threatening diplomatic communique to the leaders of all NATO nations, including Joe Biden. The letter said: “We call on the United States and its allies to stop the irresponsible militarization of Ukraine, which implies unpredictable consequences for regional and international security,” warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict there and could bring “unpredictable consequences.” 

The world is concerned with weapons of mass destruction (better: those inflicting uncontrollable destruction in the general area of the target) and the possible onset of a full-on WWIII. Biden has tiptoed on the brink, but Putin is a master of testing resolve. What if Putin did not immediately escalate to strategic or even tactical nuclear weapons? Or even biological and chemical warfare? What if Putin just fired a single missile into Poland, a shot across the bow if you will, focused on those supply lines? Do NATO treaty obligations force an immediate escalation? A single responsive missile into Russia or Belarus aimed at their supply lines? A no-fly zone over Ukraine? And if NATO did nothing?

Given several NATO members’ leanings toward disengagement – Hungary and perhaps Greece and Turkey… even France if Putin ally Marie Le Pen defeats Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election now pending – could such a move implement Putin’s belief and desire to facture the NATO alliance? He’s made the same saber-rattling threats against the pending addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO. It’s a risky choice, but Putin has a history of never deescalating, a “double down” tactic embraced by his autocrat wannabe protégé, Donald Trump.  Experts warn that even if Putin offers of one or more ceasefires, these entreaties are nothing more than an enabling a respite for his troops to reconfigure and resupply until they are ready to resume and continue to try and negate Ukraine’s existence.

But lest we believe that autocratic destructive social policies predicated on massive fabrications are the stuff of “others,” let’s look at the lies that threaten our own democracy, promulgated by a neo-populist Republican Party: Biden stole the 2020 election by massive voter fraud, the radical left (heavily populated with supporters of child pornography) are attempting to poison the minds of public school children and must be stopped, the January 6th attempted coup showed “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” endemic racism died in the 1950s/60s with civil rights legislation and judicial rulings, most Americans abhor allowing abortion rights that must be stopped, individual “rights” trump even most reasonable efforts to stop the spread of a pandemic-level killing infections and “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Not one single statement above is remotely true, but repetition of these fabrications justifies a thoroughly antidemocratic GOP platform. Tolerance of people with gender difference has left the building. 

The response to that purported “voter fraud,” still a core GOP belief despite a continued and dramatic lack of proof, is massive new gerrymandering and out and out voter suppression that, lo and behold, coincidentally seems to reduce Democratic votes while amplifying GOP supporters. The rising number of criminal convictions of Capitol insurrectionists decimates the notion of “legitimate political discourse.” That COVID remains a killer (2021 was the deadliest year and we now face a new B2 strain of a more infectious COVID virus), beginning to surge again, makes us question the rights of individuals to engage in activities that spread the disease to others. That mass shootings with assault weapons are soaring, noting that only one in thirty-five civilian gun homicides are justified, blows away the press for increasingly lax gun laws in red states… which continues unabated. The new transparency evidencing racism – thank you ubiquitous smartphone footage – conclusively proves racism is anything but gone in this country. Finally, virtually all credible polls show that a majority of Americans do not want Roe vs Wade to be reversed; only under a third of Americans want it gone.

I suspect the “it’s the economy stupid” maxim is what augurs badly for the Dems, since the party in power during any economic decline (regardless of the real cause) gets blame, and mid-terms generally go against the incumbent majority. It would be a big mistake to believe that this expected vote against that Democratic majority is a vote for Republican values. And yes, aging political leaders have that strike against them as well.

Personally, I do not believe that Donald Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Even if he is able to delay or evade the many felonies he faces, his obsession with a lost election, his admiration for a war criminal in Russia and his proclivity to engage in vitriol and blame are slowly cutting him away from political viability. Further, a risk which may be exacerbated if Trump-endorsed candidates do not defeat their rivals in the mid-terms, Trump would further face probable another catastrophic loss – perhaps engaging in another extended battle to reverse an election – that would signal his impending political irrelevancy. A massive public humiliation that I believe he cannot tolerate.

The rising star in right-wing populism is clearly Ron DeSantis, extreme in every way but one: his lack of polarizing personal attacks. He does not engage in meaningless political ad hominem vitriol or responsibility-shirking blame; he does not openly admired Vladimir Putin, but he does represent every radical right policy and belief down to the decimal point. He does favor white traditional rule above all else, and he is driven to support a minority evangelical platform that does not reflect who America really is. Stand back and stand by!

I’m Peter Dekom, and when you see how many autocrats began as elected leaders campaigning on a bed of lies, you really have to be concerned with the anti-democratic direction too many Americans seem to be willing to accept going forward.

How Swede It Wasn’t

  

  Sweden early in the coronavirus breakout… then later

“The Swedish response to this pandemic was unique and characterized by 

a morally, ethically, and scientifically questionable laissez-faire approach.” 

March 22nd Scientific Study of Sweden’s Failed Approach to COVID-19

Way before there was a vaccine, Swedish authorities were hell-bent on pursuing “life without restrictions” under a misguided belief that COVID-19 would soon find stasis and herd immunity would take it from there. At first, the disease did not explode. This led many around the world, most notably in Trump’s America, to believe that it was more harmful to lockdown, impose masks and social distancing, thus decimating the economy, than to mandate serious impositions on lifestyle choices with those restrictions. That initial impression of “Swedish success” persists to this very day. But soon after this initial and very brief seeming success, Sweden became the poster-nation for explosive COVID infection rates and major rises in mortality rates. Simply, the Swedish approach was horrifically wrong.

The above-noted study – “Evaluation of science advice during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden” by a litany of experts under the aegis of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, was published in Nature News, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 9, Article number: 91 (2022) – paints an ugly picture. Here is their abstract, a crushing post-mortem, supported by reams of statistical and medical facts:

Sweden was well equipped to prevent the pandemic of COVID-19 from becoming serious. Over 280 years of collaboration between political bodies, authorities, and the scientific community had yielded many successes in preventive medicine. Sweden’s population is literate and has a high level of trust in authorities and those in power. During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway. In this report, we try to understand why, using a narrative approach to evaluate the Swedish COVID-19 policy and the role of scientific evidence and integrity. We argue that that scientific methodology was not followed by the major figures in the acting authorities—or the responsible politicians—with alternative narratives being considered as valid, resulting in arbitrary policy decisions. In 2014, the Public Health Agency merged with the Institute for Infectious Disease Control; the first decision by its new head (Johan Carlson) was to dismiss and move the authority’s six professors to Karolinska Institute. With this setup, the authority lacked expertise and could disregard scientific facts. The Swedish pandemic strategy seemed targeted towards “natural” herd-immunity and avoiding a societal shutdown. The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead. The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 [the formal name for COVID-19] transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm. Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives. If Sweden wants to do better in future pandemics, the scientific method must be re-established, not least within the Public Health Agency. It would likely make a large difference if a separate, independent Institute for Infectious Disease Control is recreated. We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process about its political culture and the lack of accountability of decision-makers to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Writing for the March 31st Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik notes additional aspects of this report that stunned him, as “experts” hid facts from Swedish citizens and purposely tried to force an impossible “herd immunity”: “The Swedish government, they report, deliberately tried to use children to spread COVID-19 and denied care to seniors and those suffering from other conditions.

“The government’s goal appeared geared to produce herd immunity — a level of infection that would create a natural barrier to the pandemic’s spread without inconveniencing middle- and upper-class citizens; the government never set forth that goal publicly, but internal government emails unearthed by the Swedish press revealed that herd immunity was the strategy behind closed doors.

“Explicit or not, the effort failed. ‘Projected ‘natural herd-immunity’ levels are still nowhere in sight,’ the researchers wrote, adding that herd immunity ‘does not seem within reach without widespread vaccinations’ and ‘may be unlikely’ under any circumstances… That’s a reproach to the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely criticized white paper endorsing the quest for herd immunity and co-written by Martin Kulldorf, a Sweden-born Harvard professor who has explicitly defended his native country’s policies.” 

To all the anti-vaxxers, those who believe masks to be frivolous impositions, this is a huge lesson which they are unlikely to learn. And while we may have to learn to live with COVID, now tamed with vaccines and treatments, there are a vast array of new viral infections brewing “out there,” perhaps more like the infamous Spanish Flu from the WWI era, waiting to feast on hordes of human beings, particularly in close-quartered large cities. It is indeed time for the United States to embrace scientific and medical facts and for people to know: 1. not only is there no constitutional prohibition against severe restrictions during a severe pandemic, 2. there also is no right cavalierly to reject containment and insist on having a right to infect others accordingly.

I’m Peter Dekom, and fact-averse nations almost never do well militarily, economically, politically or, of course, medically.