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Politics

A Light exists in Spring.

A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay –

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.

by Emily Dickinson (Complete Poems)

My apple tree – lucky if we get three apples after the birds and squirrels have at it.

I figured I spare those of you not interested in politics today, by putting the poem out in front, accompanied by photographs of what is currently in bloom in my garden and the local parks, a celebration of spring. Enjoy her beautiful words that capture the essence of the season: light over darkness, rebirth, an ephemeral presence of something Holy, even if you’re not attached to Sacraments.

If you’re curious why this poem came to mind and how it is connected to thoughts about what is happening around us, on the other hand, read on. I’ll try to be concise and let the various links do the talking.

Neighborhood rhododendron

The poet warns us that there are spiritual things that science cannot “overtake” or measure, but that are rather felt by humans. I have no problem with that – I am perfectly willing to consider that not all can be explained by science. Before you allow those distrusting science in general to appropriate this poet, though, let me remind you that she also wrote in Fascicle Ten: “Faith is a fine invention / For Gentlemen who see — / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency!”

Science matters. We in the scientific community, but also most everyone I talk to who is not a scientist, are horrified by the current administration’s assault on all things scientific. What affects the largest number of people, the planet, really, is, of course, anything climate related. Policies weakened, rolled back, eliminated. Data collection abandoned, particularly where they’d demonstrate negative impact of climate change or industrial pollution on vulnerable populations (air quality, lead exposure), but also weather and dangerous conditions in general. Grants for research programs canceled, thousands of scientists fired for good. Research meetings prohibited, advisory committees dissolved, scientists no longer allowed to talk to “foreigners” (e.g. the research community that collaborates or the WHO.) Fire fighting and disaster mitigation curbed or canceled. Green initiatives kneecapped. Fossil fuel extraction resumed and encouraged, even in previously protected natural areas like our National Parks, and despite their impact on increased environmental pollution. Dickinson is likely spinning in her grave.

Daisies cover our meadow

Let’s look at health next. Again, thousands of employees terminated, including high ranking scientists and advisory boards. That includes the entire Board of Scientific Advisors for the National Cancer Institute. Brain drain, with many of those now courted by universities abroad leaving for sure. Acts instituted by an institution headed by cabinet secretary RFK Jr., who claims that ADD, ADHD, Tourette’s, Narcolepsy and Autism was unfamiliar when he was a child. ADD/ADHD was named in 1980, Tourette’s Syndrome was named in 1885, Narcolepsy was named in 1880, Autism was named in 1912…. The same person who believes a new “origins of autism” research study can be completed by September of this year.

Earlier this month, the administration formally rescinded the National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientific integrity policy, which had been created to protect federal scientists from political interference and retaliation. (In a timely fashion, then, note the letter sent by he acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia this week to the editor of a scientific journal, implying that the journal was partisan and asking a series of questions about how the publication protects the public from misinformation, whether it included competing viewpoints and whether it was influenced by funders or advertisers. Suppression of scientific freedom, if you don’t like the results they publish? And do we now need to add crackpot studies that spew misinformation for “fair and balanced” reporting ?)

How many blueberries will there be – taking bets.

Grants terminated (and not just that, but completely, irretrievably deleted from data bases), all references to certain vaccines prohibited. And speaking of vaccines: not only are they no longer officially recommended (causing measles and other avoidable childhood diseases to soar), or are accused of causing autism (long disproven,) they are now actively undermined in their development. Instead of approving the tweaking of existing vaccines for new variants of Covid, for example, just like the CDC did every year for flu vaccines, the pharmacological industry is now asked to run full new trials. Not only would that cost millions of dollars but also would not be possible to do for the next season when shots are most urgently needed, in fall. So the administration can claim there is no “prohibition” of vaccination, but in reality vaccination delayed is health (survival!) denied….

If you neglect research into cancer, infectious and heart diseases, as well as Alzheimers (all of whom have been defunded) how much do you actually care about public health? If you ignore the numbers on Covid infections, maternal deaths, or sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, or prevent treatment of acute drug addiction (Narcan program is canceled), many wonder if they are interested in getting rid of disease, or rather getting rid of sick people.

The magnolia is an ancient tree and on its last leg….

I forgot: food safety inspections – gone. And following $1 billion in food aid cuts by Trump, anti-hunger programs across the U.S. are struggling to feed vulnerable communities, with charities forced to replace nutritious meals with crackers, dried cranberries, and thin soup. The cutting of vital food assistance threatens the health and dignity of millions of low-income Americans.

If you prohibit mask wearing despite the scientifically demonstrate protection they provide against infectious diseases, what is your justification, particularly for vulnerable populations like the elderly and immune-compromised? When is the line crossed to applied eugenics?

The bans limiting exposure to toxic chemicals touch most facets of daily life, prohibiting everything from bisphenol in children’s products to mercury in personal care products to PFAS in food packagingand clothing. The administration is moving to kill the bans on PFAS. The location of thousands of high-risk chemical plant now shielded from public view. Car safety rules? Loosened.

Medicaid? House Republicans are considering slashing the federal government’s 90% funding match for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act — a move that could strip millions of low-income Americans of their health insurance, shifting massive costs onto states, dismantling a pillar of Obamacare.

Frontyard lilac.

Here is a site where you can find most actions taken by the administration regarding our health, sorted by month since the inauguration.

And here is a nifty general tracker that is constantly updated, where you can look at what is changing in many aspects of our daily and legal universe for yourself. In case you aren’t depressed enough yet. Every single claim made above, by the way, can also be found in the news, newspapers, journals and radio and TV programs alike. There is nothing hidden about it. I just don’t have the patience to add all the links.

I do, however, recommend reading a longer piece that made quite a bit of sense to me in explaining where the anti-science attitude originated. Hint, the claim is that it was born from an anti-governmental ideology long anchored in conservative thinking. An interesting analysis from 3 years ago by a Harvard Historian of Science and a NASA historian at CalTech.

However, what we are seeing now is going beyond that. If you undermine public health, disaster response, and climate crisis mitigation, you harm the nation you are supposed to protect. The amassing of power when you dismantle independent agencies and academic scientific research, and surround yourself with sycophants rather than experts who know what they are doing, might be the goal, but it will not lead to an advancement of the common good, the health, safety and perhaps prosperity of all of us. The few who benefit might have the illusion that they can retreat to their private islands, their luxury bunkers or another planet – but reality will catch up even with them, if only after many of us have been harmed by the denial of science and the tools it offers for our survival.

Music today is meant to cheer us all, with one of the most incredible drummers of our time – Yussef Dayes. There is light in that greenhouse – and that music – the would be familiar to Dickinson…..

Rhodies in the park.

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Hereness.

There is a woman in my neighborhood who spreads beauty. She lays out blossoms and greenery into flower mandalas at a local park, refreshing or changing them ever so often, usually early in the morning, before anybody sees her. I don’t know who she is, or her motivations, but I know this: the joy of walking by these little works of art and discovering new patterns and/or colors (never mind learning about what is currently in bloom) is immense. It feels like we have our very own local flower fairy. Or, for differently inclined people, a hint at the powers of Gaia, the earth Goddess, who appreciates, by all reports, these kinds of offerings…

What I appreciate is living HERE, amongst people who are kind and offer gestures of comfort or encouragement. Or remind us of beauty. People who give to 2-can Tuesdays, leaving food items for the local hungry, dependent on Neighborhood House food pantries, under their mailbox every Tuesday, to be picked up by volunteers. People who will soon start to exchange the overflow produce of their gardens, people who don’t know your name but that of your dog, from friendly chit-chat on the daily dog rounds. Or people who are handing out ACLU cards with printed instructions in different languages about what to do when stopped by police, ICE or the FBI. People who offer rides to the doctor, or free translation services.

There is a term in Yiddish, doikayt or doikejt (in english-speaking or german-speaking countries respectively) that refers to Hereness – the idea that you should live and fight for what is right, what you believe in, right where you live and not in some distant place or in nationally defined borders. It was a guiding concept to the Eastern-European Jewish Labor Bund, a secular, socialist, Jewish party dedicated to fighting for a better world and against anti-Semitism, founded in Vilna in 1897. Rather than following Zionist ideas (officially founded in the very same year) or emigrating to the U.S., they favored integration at the local level. The Bund believed that culture, not a place or state, would be the glue that held our people together, within the context of a world of multicultural and multi-ethnic countries. Here is an interview about the history with artist and writer Molly Crabapple, who is working on a book about Doikayt. It gives some background and is generally wonderfully snarky and informative.

I think the concept, hereness, should really be held in a more universal way, constructively appropriated from the original ideas of the Bund, then relevant to the Jewish Diaspora. We all should focus on the “here” in making our communities places where we can live in dignity, provide mutual support, protect the planet, and take that ideology with us whenever and wherever we are forced to move, by circumstance outside of our control. Moves that these days might very well be forced on many of us, by geographic, economic, catastrophic or political circumstances, integrating into ever new communities.

Returning to the flower lady, local support can be as simple as small gestures of spreading joy in times when it is increasingly more difficult to come by that commodity… joy reinvigorates, strengthens. But small gestures that you yourself are capable of, can also add up to inoculating you against larger dangers, making it less likely to sink into indifference because so much is overwhelming. Psychologist Robert Cialdini‘s principles of commitment and consistency apply here (even though developed for marketing strategies.) Once you have committed with a small step, you are likely to engage in larger ones later, feeling bound to the principle of consistency.

Why would this matter? I am reminded here of a quote by Gordon Hirabayshi, a Seattle-born Japanese American who fought legally against the internment policies of the government in 1942.

“We had the Constitution behind us in 1942. It didn’t because the will of the people (wasn’t) behind it.”

(We might take note, given current events, of the legal issues surrounding internment of American citizens.

“Hirabayshi’s case before the Supreme Court, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), was the first challenge to the government’s wartime curfew and expulsion of Japanese Americans. The Court ruled against him 9-0. In the 1980s, 40 years after his wartime convictions, Hirabayashi challenged the decisions with a little used legal recourse called coram nobis, which allowed for judicial review of a judgment based on factual error not known to the court at the time the judgment was delivered. Researchers and legal scholars Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga had uncovered irrefutable evidence that the government had withheld information from the Office of Naval Intelligence, contradicting the United States Army’s claim of widespread disloyalty among Japanese Americans. This was the so-called “military necessity” rationale for the evacuation. In fact, not one Japanese American was ever convicted of sabotage or espionage during the entire war. Hirabayashi’s exclusion and curfew convictions were overturned in 1986 and 1987 respectively.” 

***

The will of the people – it will be influenced by our perceptions of ourselves guided by moral principles, rather than governed by fear. No one is asking you (yet) of hiding someone in the attic. But, of course, there are other ways of strengthening the struggle for justice and equality at the local level, and sometimes the means are provided from farther away. I am thinking here of two national data bases that affect the local level.

One is this one. There are over 700 Oregon businesses that have chosen to be listed as PRO-MAGA businesses. You can check them out and then decide what to do with that information…..

Another one is a data based established by Georgetown Law students (2Ls no less) recording law firms’ responses to the EO singling out law firms for political retribution. They titled document “Legal Industry Responses to Fascist Attacks Tracker” and included by now more than 800 firms, assigning them to one of five stark categories: “Caved to Administration,” “Complying in Advance,” “Other Negative Action,” “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks,” or “No Response.”

This will help people looking for internships, or future employers, or hiring a lawyer, to make informed decisions; wherever you are locally, you can check the data base about the status of that particular firm. (It works so well that apparently some firms are now asking to have changes or updates to assignment.)

As today’s reestablished Bund demands: “We must strengthen our communities, workplaces, and economies by making them more democratic, exemplary, moral, and marked by respect for all, striving for both justice and peace.” On any given day, I might just include creating beauty.

We just need enough people. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 : “When a people agree to form themselves into a republic … it is understood that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them … (and) they renounce as detestable, the power of exercising, at any future time any species of despotism over each other, or of doing a thing not right in itself, because a majority of them may have the strength of numbers sufficient to accomplish it.” (Ref.)

Music today by a Viennese musician who has pursued the concept of doikayt. This album contains old Yiddish songs from the Bund and also compositions integrating the works of Yiddish poets.

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Your very own Town Crier.

Walk with me. That way we can talk and I don’t have to yell “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” like the town criers of yore, to get your attention for today’s public announcements. Oyez means “hear me,” (still used in French, originally Anglo-Norman.) I have always wondered if the German expression Oh Je – oh no! – is a derivative, since the news were mostly bad and the expression is one of concern, regret, or surprise….but I digress.

Let’s walk the just re-opened Oak Island Loop, at its most glorious colors this time of year, on a sunny and warm day, too warm for April, really. Trudge across the large meadows and turn a corner into the oak woods – unclear who was more startled, the calves hanging out in the shade or this hiker. But guess who ran!

Vultures hovering close, ever hopeful. Not this day, my friends, not yet!

Golden sheen wherever you look. The unfurling oak leaves green-gold, the poplar leaves not yet covered with dust reflecting sunlight like golden dots, the buttercups not far behind.

Colors in general more on the pastel side, soft pink hawthorne, nettles, the blues of the camassia everywhere, and white, tinged occasionally with pink in the fruit blossoms and emerging white hawthorne.

I had been thinking about colors, having wasted 90 minutes of my precious life time on an inane movie with nothing to show for but admiration for the colorist who designed costumes and backgrounds to sheer perfection. The Room Next Door was on my list for the mere fact that I am a sucker for Tilda Swinton and director Pedro Almodóvar‘s work. I don’t know what they were thinking here. Stilted dialogue, a plot too hard to believe, a display of photogenic suicide with nary a bit of pain in sight.

Narcissistic woman who has managed to drive everyone from her life, is now facing cancer death in loneliness. Neither estranged daughter nor distant friends answer her request not to die alone when taking her own life. Forgotten friend from long ago, who makes a living writing about her fear of death, inexplicably yields to the request for companionship even though both know it endangers her for criminal aiding and abetting. Rent a mansion in upstate NY (costing enough to cover the price of a first class flight to Switzerland, where assisted suicide for any reason is legal, is my bet.) Patient takes her own life, friend barely escapes legal trouble, daughter (also played by Swinton in a ridiculous wig) reappears to find no real answers.

In any case, the ethics of suicide are never discussed, the pragmatics not based in reality, and the question of succumbing to requests that are entirely selfish, not once tackled. Political questions are reduced to the plight of personal trainers not allowed to touch clients any longer, or whiney ex-lovers hinting at their disgust for climate change. Almodóvar, what has got into you? In any case, not recommended, but for the colors which rule in setting up space and personalities.

***

Back to the public proclamations of your personal town crier. On Wednesday, the members of Portland City Council Community and Public Safety committees voted on passing a resolution about the fate of Portland Street Response‘s future to the full City Council. Part of Portland’s Public Safety area, the program is a successful tool in assisting people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises, rather than calling the police on the frequently unhoused people in distress. The new resolution seeks to strengthen this program, among other things, by fully realizing Portland Street Response as a 24-7 co-equal branch of the first responder system. Here is the resolution in full.

Water is ominously low already. St. Helens in the background.

Two of the committee’s members, Loretta Smith (District 1) and Eric Zimmerman (my istrict 4) voted against bringing the resolution to the full council – really trying to throw a wrench into the gears of progress in dealing with our homelessness crisis. They ignore the positive example of many other cities (Seattle, Albuquerque, and Durham, NC, among them) that have shown that independence – not reporting to either police or fire department, in other words being co-equal – has improved service capabilities. Luckily, Steve Novick cast the decisive vote to bring the resolution forwards.

Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood in full view.

The meeting for the full council is in early May. If you cannot attend – a lot of presence always helps – I encourage everyone here in Portland to consider writing to their respective council members what you think should be voted for (or against.) Seven ayes will be needed to pass the resolution. (I have already written to Mitch Green, who is the District 4 member to vote next. And to Zimmerman to protest.) Here is the link where you can choose to write to your counselor. There is a spot where you can pick the name of your representative to be alerted.

Back to private proclamations: the woods were full of birdsong, the warblers picking up the golden dot theme,

For obvious reasons called butter butt…

the mourning doves, the red-winged blackbirds, the robins, song sparrows and swallows joining the chorus. Baldies shrieking, Heuer happy.

Instead of music today we’ll have the splendid sound scape of a day’s recording – dawn to dusk – of nature sounds on the Knepp Estates, one of Englands pioneers in rewilding. The album was released 4 days ago and is revelatory. From the producers:

The recordings were made by Alice Eldridge of the University of Sussex, who explained the idea behind the wilding.radio project that inspired this release:
“I have come to believe that nature sounds are not only ‘calming’, but offer a powerful, visceral means to remind us that we are a part of the wider tapestry of life. This simple listening experience has been received with extraordinary enthusiasm and gratitude. Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. This reduction in biodiversity has serious consequences for the future of life on this planet. It also radically depletes our sensory connection to wider nature. And if we don’t feel our connection to the rest of life on this planet, we are less likely to care for and take positive environmental action in the future.”

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The Repair of a Torn Civic Fabric.

Today I want us to think through the connection between hobbies and Pope Francis. “What on earth,” you mutter, wondering if I have lost my marbles, or at least the relevant respect for the recently deceased. Neither, I assure you, just give me a minute.

The number of obituaries for the Pope matched those of articles contemplating what will come next, just as the differing political leanings were obvious in both kinds of publications: reverence for what he represented and had accomplished, or hopes for a return to less progressive eras.

“Some popes perfectly complement the age in which they live. A few were reformers—agents of positive change. Others railed against modernity and the diminishing power of the Roman Catholic Church. Some accomplished great things, some horrific.”

“It was a pope who, parleying with Attila the Hun, persuaded the great conqueror not to invade Italy; a pope who, in what remains the greatest psy-op of all time, riled up disgruntled Normans and sent them to Jerusalem to repulse the Seljuk Turks; a pope whose legate, after indiscriminately slaughtering the entire population of Béziers because a gnostic sect was based there, replied, when asked how to tell the heretics from the faithful, “Kill them all and let God sort them out”; a pope who divvied up lands in the New World between Portugal and Spain; a pope whose Papal Bull was used to justify slavery in the Americas; a pope who excommunicated Henry VIII, indirectly establishing the Church of England; a pope whose corrupt and venal policies prompted Martin Luther to nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, jumpstarting the Reformation; and so on.”

This from the most insightful – and funny – essay on the power of the papacy in general that I read yesterday.

What stuck we me, however, regarding Pope Francis, was a paragraph in the NYT obituary about his personal focus:

“Francis …called for “Synodality”, the word given to the ancient church habit of assembling, discussing, discerning and deciding. Francis adapted the ancient practice of synods and councils in a radically inclusive way that invites all the faithful to be involved. The cardinals may conclude that right now, this is the greatest sign of hope the church can offer the world.

This “culture of encounter,” as Francis called it, may seem a puny thing to the powers that be. But it starts from the idea that those in thrall to the will to power cannot understand: the innate dignity of all, the need to listen to everyone, including those on the margins, and the importance of patiently waiting for consensus. These things are all crucial to the repair of a torn civic fabric.“

And here, of course, we have our bridge to hobbies: the culture of encounter.

New reports on the effects of the devastating consequences of this administration’s economic kamikaze include the fact that many people are priced out of their hobbies, with cost increases put on consumers’ backs. Now, for usually more solitary passions like mine, knitting, the horrendous prices for wool might register in decreased sanity – after all, it is my form of therapy, and absent those hours spent with my needles, neuroticism might visibly increase – beware, dear reader. Might lose my marbles after all.

Can you guys what my current project is?

But many hobbies are activities where you meet other people, or engage with them, often providing exposure to very different types from different walks of life, who would usually not be encountered. You meet people fishing, bowling, hunting, or in bike clubs – you get the idea. Usually, the Meso-world, as sociologists call it, the tiny publics you find in groups that come together to act on the local level, consist of people who already have much in common. Your unions, your prayer circle, your book club or who you go to demonstrations with are all comprised of somewhat like-minded compatriots.

Hobbies, on the other hand, really draw participants from different worlds. And if they now exclude the segments that simply can no longer afford them, you have lost an opportunity for civic encounter in small collectives. That means losing the dialogues that can lead to cooperation, or to conflict – both drive civic commitment that can provide a metaphorical hinge between individuals and societies. (Informative reading here: Gary Alan Fine The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments.)

One way to counteract the price surges and foster local engagement at the same time, are lending libraries – not for books, but for tools or other items needed for activities once easily shared. These are, of course, not new inventions. I remember driving my teenager, who had a new expensive hobby every 5 minutes, to a tool shop where you could rent space and time with existing wood working tools that would have cost a fortune, even then, to acquire. He met quite a few people who would mentor or share his interests. These days, these shops take on a different kind of urgency.

These non-profits have, of course, their challenges. Who does the tool maintenance? How do you recoup the tools that wander off… who pays for liability insurance and how do you raise funds, if you don’t charge membership dues or other fees? But on net, they are a marvelous way to create community, connecting people around them and supporting other communal efforts of small collectives. After all, community-based volunteer programs around the country, from tree plantings to building renovations, from picking up trash to community garden projects, all depend on borrowing massive numbers of tools when they call for action.

Here is a way to find your local tool lending library or other ways to share tools.

As for crafts? There are certainly ways to find or found local craft groups, or, if your health or transportation issues preclude in-person meetings, there are zoom encounters with like-minded knitters. For folks in Portland, there is a wonderful offer by the Multnomah Library system, to be taught and to meet with others in their A good yarn project for knitting and crocheting, all levels of experience welcome. And of course there is always the BUY NOTHING possibility for scoring some tools and wool that generous people donate.

The civic fabric might be torn, but we still have ways to mend it. Don’t let inertia be the enemy.

And since we are talking politics and craft/ tools, it has to be Hans Sachs today, singing about the madness of the world… Wagner’s Meistersänger is endless (4:29 hours, although in Herman Prey’s company it might fly by…), but I figured we could stomach this short aria.





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On this Passover.

Yesterday, Robert Reich’s Sunday Thoughts landed in my inbox. He describes the most recent evidence of the “Trump regime’s abject cruelty, viciousness, heartlessness, brutality,” and asks, “How does a moral person live with this? How do we not become complicit?”

We have been asking ourselves these very questions during this year’s Passover, a Jewish holiday focussed on the experience of abject cruelty, viciousness, heartlessness, brutality, (against ALL, by the way) and on teaching our children and grandchildren how you should forestall a repetition of oppression or how you can overcome it. Except that in this very year 2025 the “Never again!” rings hollow.

I had absconded to the Northern California Redwoods to get away from the news, and get together with family. The beauty of those woods is unique, but even there you are reminded of human interference for profit, the harvesting and subsequent charring of century old trees. (The big stumps are the ones logged about 100 years ago, the surrounding forest is secondary growth.)

The secondary growth is still awe inspiring, as is the light that pushes its way through the dense tree crowns, forming intensely contrasting scenery.

The meadows adjacent to the forests are filled with wildflowers at this time of year, and the emerging elk look as if a fairy tale world existed that they freely move in and out of, safe from predators.

Safe from predators: no longer a given in a nation that decides it can disappear people without due process, with no redress once removed from American soil, and put into gulags extracting slave labor until the day you die. It can happen to anyone, Jews no exception, particularly with this administration’s anti-Semitism in plain sight. “What?” you ask? Are they not devoted to fight anti-Semitism?

Is leaving copies of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in the military libraries the Naval Academy, while removing books teaching the history of the Holocaust, fighting anti-Semitism? When the superintendent of a school district in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas agrees within minutes to a conservative group’s demands to remove seminal texts about the Holocaust and antisemitism, including Maus and Anne Frank’s Diary? Florida’s state Education Department rejected two new Holocaust-focused textbooks for high school classroom use. “Modern Genocides,” and a course titled “History of the Holocaust.” Is that fighting anti-Semitism? Is using the Hitler salute by an administration “advisor” fighting anti-Semitism?

Is Trump’s election campaign use of featuring ads of Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and a Star of David, and another promising protection against global special interests and featuring the portraits of three Jewish financiers, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein fighting anti-Semitism? Both ads are typical renditions of the classic antisemitic smear of Jewish money and Jewish financiers as the sources of power behind an opponent.

Is calling demonstrators marching with swastika and Confederate flags in a Nazi-style torchlit parade, chanting the Nazi slogans “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” at a rally in 2017, ““fine people” on “both sides” fighting anti-Semitism?

Trump declared the protesters wearing sweatshirts that said “CAMP AUSCHWITZ,” or those seen elsewhere wearing what seems to be the Proud Boy version, “6MWE” (6 Million Weren’t Enough) during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, “political hostages” and “patriots.” He regularly dines with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers like Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. And in the run-up to the 2024 election, he proclaimed that if he lost, it would be because too many American Jews had failed to vote for him—once again a classic antisemitic tactic: if things go wrong, blame the Jews. Is this fighting anti-Semitism?

Is not calling out the arson of a Jewish governor’s home with his family sleeping inside on the first night of Passover fighting anti-Semitism? There was, of course, no official response whatsoever from our President.

In the spirit of Passover, let me recite what I see in the context of our history. So far, the concept of anti-Semitism has been used to stifle dissent, targeting pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiments. It has been abused to stifle freedom of expression at our Institutions of Higher Learning in general. (For detailed and smart discussions of this listen to Timothy Snyder here, or read Elad Nehorai here.)

Polls already taken in 2021 reported that more than a quarter of all American Jews believe that Israel is an apartheid state, while 45% assert the Palestinians suffer from systematic racisms. These numbers are likely to be much higher now. Definitionally, according to the Antidefamation League, these American Jews are anti-Semitic. If the current administration would deport them for their beliefs, and Israel ensures not to allow them to live there (see the new conditions touted by BEHAR), the two countries will render fellow Jews stateless. Again.

Can’t be deported for your beliefs? May I introduce you to Mahmoud Khalil. Can’t be deported (and tortured or left to rot) as a U.S citizen? May I encourage you to listen to your President’s suggestion that he can and will do so? Here is the game plan. Can’t be deported as a declared enemy of the state for criticism of the President? Here is a legal analysis that suggests former Trump cyber security officer, Christopher Krebs, now investigated for treason for asserting that Trump lost the 2020 election, might get ready to leave the country before he ends up unretrievable in El Salvador.

Can’t be retrieved, after admittedly erroneous deportation, even if the Supreme Court demands it (or pretends to do so…)? Indeed, says the administration, oops. When the single proposed safety mechanism against wrongful deportation, Habeas Corpus, is made moot by trickery and lawlessness, we are all endangered. From purported criminals they HAVE rights to due process) to dissidents to personal retribution targets to religious classes – none will be spared.

As we recount the history around the seder table – all of this is not new. But apparently more than 60 million voters in this country were willing to install exactly that kind of ideology. It was not hidden. 6 million dead Jews made no difference. Nor does the attempted erasure of an entire other people, the Palestinians, apparently.

How do we not become complicit? Educate yourself on the issues and speak out! Understand that the core freedoms of our constitution are under attack, regardless of who you are or what you believe. Protect those who are less privileged than we still are. Defy apathy or wishful thinking that it will all work out. This is not just chaos, or economic turmoil, or a multi-pronged attack against science and humanities. This is about sending people to their death in prison camps, ordered by those with immoral inclinations and through lawless means.

To brighten the day after some dark musings (Yes, I’m back, true to form… ) here is a remarkable collaboration between a French and a British musician.

and this from my inbox: Reversible Barnes & Noble display in Georgetown this weekend. (Courtesy of Chris Geidner.)

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This aged well…

In 1995, Umberto Eco (author of The Name of the Rose, among others) published an essay in the New York Review of Books called: Ur-Fascism with a sub-title Freedom and Liberation are an unending task. He had grown up under Mussolini’s regime and he was trying to assess in this essay when or under what circumstances it is legitimate to call something fascism.

He insisted “There was only one Nazism,” but “The fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” He then went on to outline 14 “typical” features that make up the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism.”

“These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

I am copying them here (Ref.) and add some annotations posted by German analyst Marc Raschke on IG, put into my own words.

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.” Let’s go back to a (presumed) golden past : Make America Great again!

2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” Climate change? What climate change? Science? Vaccinations? Infectious or chronic disease research?

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” Tariffs yes! Tariffs no! Let’s break organizations before we re-build them (if we rebuild them…)

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.” Media? Critics? Scientists? Universities? Enemies of the People! More executive orders like “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” 

5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Diversity? Let’s get rid of or demote anyone not fitting the norms set by white men… deport! deport! deport!

6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” Frustrated? Status challenged? – It’s the fault of minorities, migrants, the elites or trans people! Remember the Great Replacement idea.

7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” Obsessed with conspiracies? Too many to count here….

8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” The Deep State is all powerful! The Deep state is ineffective and corrupt!

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.” Let’s have a war against the invading foreigners or the Deep State or the Law firms or whoever comes to mind this moment. What about Greenland? Canada? Panama Canal?

10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.” The weak need to be eliminated! Only the strong should rule! Let’s get rid of meals-on-wheels! Let cancer patients die, who needs research. FEMA is a waste. Scratch the financial support for heating and cooling.

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.” We are a heroic mass movement with the biggest popular support (ignore the election statistics…) and our martyrs shall be heroes – like Ashli Babbit on January 6th…

12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” Men rule, women serve – they will be protected (and fertilized… ) whether they like it or not. Let’s have a household vote only from male head of household. Let’s eliminate choice and control of one’s own body. Let’s do away with marriage equality. Project 2025 spells it out in detail.

13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” PBS be gone! Billionaire-owned media rule.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Newspeak? Fake News, Woke Mind Virus, Deep State anyone?

1995 – 2025. You can draw your own conclusions.

Music today by Luciano Berio who was a close friend of Eco’s, and at times collaborating on projects that combined semiotics and music. (I chose one of his more traditional compositions.)

Graffiti with tongue-in-cheek suggestions for an antidote to fascism, from Vienna, during my last visit. The Italian one I photographed in Trieste, in 2018.

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The Ruckus Clause

Remember the Ruckus Clause in the Constitution – the one that says if you create a ruckus in this country while legally visiting from another country, your permit will be revoked and you will be sent back? Ruckus, mind you, defined as voicing an opinion that is opposed to administration think, not a crime, a riot, a participation in illegal activities – simply making use of free speech? Free speech guaranties that apparently no longer apply to green card holders or other legal foreign residents?

Well, I don’t remember it either, but here is Marco Rubio on the specifics of PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk:

“We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”

This is, of course, was the Tufts woman who was snatched by plain clothed, masked goons pushing her into a car and abducting her to an unknown site, unable to speak to her lawyer for 24+ hours and not until after she was in Louisiana — despite a court order that she not be moved from MA. For having voiced an opinion in a student news paper as one of four co-authors, a year ago no less, about Israeli attacks on Gaza and university divestment from funding warfare in the Middle East, with no evidence produced that she did anything unlawful. Rubio claims that they are doing it every day, having revoked around 300 visas so far on the basis of disliked speech, not criminal action.

Then there is the Russian dissident, a scientist from Harvard medical School, who was arrested yesterday upon re-entry at our borders, returning from a research trip to France and having some undeclared items due to messed up papers in her luggage. If she is deported to Russia she will likely not survive as a known, outspoken critic of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. some claim we are now helping to squash dissent as demanded by our newest ally.

Never mind all the tourists who have been detained, some under torture-like conditions, eventually needing medical attention.

I am trying to get the point across that many people shrug when “Venezuelan gang members” are shipped off to a gulag abroad without due process. That some people are more concerned when they are coming for foreign academics or simple tourists from western countries. That WE ALL should be frightened, however, for one and all, once the normalization of abduction, neglect of Habeus Corpus, and absence of any recourse that due process would allow, has taken place. Every single person can be snatched and disappeared, just as 1930s Germany or contemporary Russia model, with claims that the officials know what they are doing and punishing criminals – how can you prove that you are not, when sitting in a cell with 80 other women, unable to speak the language (some tourists) and no access to lawyers in Louisiana, if you are lucky, or El Salvador, if you are not?

Is it surprising that many countries in the world have now posted official travel warnings against visiting the United States? Or, more nightmarish to me, that prominent scholars of fascism have chosen to leave this country and teach abroad (historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale among them?)Not counting the brain drain of our best scientists leaving for countries where their work is revered and can continue in contrast to here with all the department closures?

I was thinking about all this while watching how various wildlife traverse our garden, how freely they move, with no borders to stop them and certainly no ICE or Customs personal snatching them into custody, moving them to unknown locations or sending them back to places where there is existential threat waiting for them.

The deer come and go.

The coyotes come and go, blissfully ignoring my wildly barking dog.

The squirrel has claimed the owl house.

The owl has claimed the redwood where the crows nest. (That is a crow behind the owl, unsuccessfully yelling at the owl.)

The finches and sparrows and various other birds freely come and go, ready to snatch nesting materials.

One of the people detained upon entry to the US last week was composer Andrew Balfour, on his way to perform with the Amabile Choirs at Carnegie Hall, conducting selections from his work Tapwe: Songs of Truth. There was some mistake in his papers, and he was held for hours in isolation, phone and luggage taken from him, until he was given a choice: he could wait (for days) for an immigration judge to decide his detention, or he could take a flight back home to Toronto, to which he was then escorted by armed guards. He was lucky – some have been kept in detention for 2 weeks, completely clueless about what the accusations consisted of.

Anyhow, Balfour is a singular musician in the sense that he has two things that matter for his creative focus: his love for sacred music by Renaissance composers, particularly British ones, and his identity as a Cree, infusing indigenous spirituality into the music he creates. The music I am linking to today takes scores from Byrd and Tallis, and arranges them around Cree and Ojibway words. The project, called Nagamo , which means “sing” in Cree, is not a translation of the old texts, but an infusion of indigenous perspective. It’s quite something.

If you are interested in the whole composition, go here.

Below are some parts that I picked, demonstrating diversity of melodic and rhythmic approaches.

And at the very end you can watch a short video that introduces the composers and his biography.

Let the music fill you with a sense of resolve – people have overcome injustice and trauma for centuries.

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Stone Soup.

It looks like one of the organizations that help folks on the margins reenter social life equipped with new professional skills, is in the process of loosing employment services funding. I am turning to my Multnomah County/PDX friends and readers with an appeal for action today. The rest of you can enjoy my newest montages, or check out if similar cuts are on the docket in your own neighborhoods.

As you know, I care deeply for support of those less privileged than the rest of us, and Stone Soup is a local organization that has done a lot of work to help people back onto their feet with culinary education and job training. They are also first line defenders against hunger among the houseless in our city. I let them speak for themselves below, and am also attaching an easily modifiable template to write to your Multnomah County commissioner – which is the action I recommend today. Your email to your commissioner will perhaps produce momentum towards keeping these services in the FY26 budget for Multnomah County. At least we can try. (If you have forgotten your district number like I did – here is the easy way to find out!)

Stone Soup’s plight:

A Letter From Our Co-Founder March 18th, 2025
Urgent: Help Save Job Training Funding in Multnomah County’s Budget

If you’ve been following Multnomah County politics, you know budget challenges are on the horizon. Service providers across the county—us included—are being asked to tighten our belts yet again. It’s a familiar refrain in the nonprofit world: do more with less.
 At Stone Soup PDX, we currently receive funding for our culinary job training program through a contract with Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services. This support helps us provide Employment Services to our participants—equipping them with skills, experience, and a path to long-term stability. It’s not just the right thing to do—it’s also smart fiscal policy.
 Our Social Return on Investment Calculator estimates that for every $1 invested in our program, local governments save around $8 by reducing the need for public assistance for our participants. I don’t know about you, but if I could get an 8-to-1 return on investment in the market, I’d take that deal every time.
 And yet, the proposed FY26 budget completely eliminates the Employment Services funding line.
 That means no county support for transformational job training programs like ours. It means pulling public investment from participants like the one we highlighted in a recent blog post—someone who went from dishwasher to Kitchen Manager, now earning $64,000 a year plus benefits. These are real outcomes with real impact.
 The good news? The budget isn’t finalized yet. We have until June to advocate for restoring this funding. We understand that cuts are coming. But eliminating this support entirely is the wrong move for Multnomah County.
 That’s where you come in. Take a minute to call or email your county commissioner. Tell them you want to see Employment Services restored in the FY26 budget. Let them know that job training programs work—and that investing in our workforce strengthens our entire community.
 Here’s how to reach your commissioners:Multnomah County Commissioners:
📌 Chair: Jessica Vega Pederson
📌 District 1: Meghan Moyer (Powell Location)
📌 District 2: Shannon Singleton
📌 District 3: Julia Brim-Edwards (Glisan Landing Location)
📌 District 4: Vince Jones-Dixon
Your voice matters. Let’s make sure they hear it.
Craig Gerard
Co-Founder and Director of Community Contracts, Stone Soup PDX   To make it easier, we’ve put together a template email you can use—just copy, personalize, and send it to your commissioner.Click here!

And here is the Commissioner Outreach Template- Stone Soup PDX

Subject: Restore Employment Services Funding in the FY26 Budget

Dear Commissioner [Last Name],

I’m writing to urge you to reinstate funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. The current proposed budget eliminates this critical funding for service agencies, threatening the ability of organizations like Stone Soup PDX to continue providing essential job training programs.

Stone Soup PDX equips individuals facing employment barriers with the skills they need to secure stable jobs in the food service industry. Without this funding, many of our community’s most vulnerable residents will lose access to workforce development programs that help them build self-sufficiency.

Investing in employment services isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a smart financial decision. For every $1 invested in Stone Soup PDX, local governments save $8 by reducing reliance on public assistance programs. By supporting job training initiatives, you are strengthening our workforce and ensuring a more economically vibrant Multnomah County.

I strongly urge you and your fellow commissioners to restore funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

It’ll take ten minutes and is one of the things we can so easily do to fight budget cuts that hurt the most vulnerable among us. Give it a thought, please! And if you want to link to this appeal on your social media to spread the word, that would be cool as well.

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And another one in the interesting people department….

It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.

Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees.

Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.

And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.

March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens.)

Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man … war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.

No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.

Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.)

The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded the deployment of home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”

Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet, (ca. 1912)

During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens, soon recognized by the USDA.

Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.

Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women’s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “‘land girls’ central to the anti-fascist ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902)

By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack—in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”

The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.

The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women’s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew’s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by ‘female vandals’ are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order. (Ref.)

Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler, ca. 1908

Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.

She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.

Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. “She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) of 1928).

Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (1878)

Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act, people!)?

What do you think I am saying?

Anna Ancher Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890)

Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.

“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette’s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”

  • smashing windows on private property and governmental buildings
  • disrupting the postal service
  • burning public buildings
  • attacking Church of England buildings
  • holding illegal demonstrations
  • burning politicians’ unoccupied homes
  • disrupting the 1911 census
  • ruining golf courses and male-only clubs
  • chaining themselves to buildings
  • disrupting political meetings
  • planting bombs
  • handcuffing themselves to railings
  • going on hunger strikes

Historians still argue whether or not the militant campaigns helped to further the women’s suffrage movement or whether it harmed it. But presumably they’ll agree, crocheting won’t do the job. And we did get the right to vote. For the time being.

Mary Cassatt Lydia Crocheting in the Garden (1880)

I’ll tackle that debate another day. For now, let’s enjoy the spring bloom!

And listen to Elisabeth Knight.

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This, That, and the Other Thing.

I know, it’s Friday. Week was long and hard for many. You need some things to smile about, and I will comply with cartoons that landed in my inbox. Well, may be more grimace than smile. Also a reminder: today is the day of Economic Blackout that intends to make our voices heard. Raid the pantry, avoid the stores.

I will also list some of the facts, undisputed by Republicans, that came into view this week, facts relevant to science and healthcare, as we had agreed would be my focus. Well, maybe you didn’t agree, and wished for all art all the time. Not going to happen. We need documentation when we talk to our grandchildren about the speed at which things changed in ways that would endanger them all in the long run.

Healthcare issues directly related to us:

According to the Washington Post, the most upsetting news to the population in general, are the elimination of cancer research and treatment programs, both at the NIH and the VA. It makes no sense to even the most devoted Republicans. In other health news:

  • Measles epidemic amongst unvaccinated populations led to first deaths. Since the incubation time is about two weeks, we will see an explosion of cases overall in the coming weeks – our HHS Tsar JFK Jr. flicked it off with a comment that these epidemics are not out of the norm.
  • A) not true. B) Easily fixed if we had programs to encourage and normalize vaccinations.
  • The meeting to decide which flu vaccine to produce for the fall was called off by same anti-vaxxer health Tsar. Mid-March is the time when people discuss the recommendations for vaccine choice by the WHO (which we have left) and then pharma organizations start production which will need about 6 months to be ready for early flu season. Here are the pitfalls of his decision: if we don’t produce vaccines at all, for fear their approval might be killed by anti-vaccination sentiment from said Tsar (with investment in the production then a total loss), we will have a harrowing epidemic. If we go ahead and make a best guess as to which strains to target, given that official information channels are now foreclosed, we might have a vaccination campaign in the fall, but it might be useless, since vaccine ineffective. “See?”The Tsar can then claim, “Vaccinations don’t work.” – I, by the way, as many of my elderly friends, have a huge stake in this – the flu could simply kill me, given the state of my immune system. The CDC says, for the US in 2023-2024: “Flu vaccines prevent about 9.8 million illnesses, 4.8 million doctor visits, 120,000 hospital stays, and 7,900 deaths.”
  • According to WSJ, HHS weighs rescinding Moderna bird flu vaccine contract: The Trump administration confirmed it is reevaluating a $590 million human bird flu vaccine contract awarded to Moderna in the waning days of the Biden administration.

Rest of the world:

  • Musk and Trump terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts.
  • All malaria supplies protecting 53 million people, mostly children, including bed nets, diagnostics, preventive drugs, and treatments – terminated.
  • All tuberculosis programs, including the Global TB Drug Facility – terminated. – This will lead to treatment resistant strains that will hurt US citizens as well.
  • All supplies of US-manufactured emergency food packets for starving children on the brink of death – terminated. newrepublic.com
  • USAID’s contract for supplying essential medicines for maternal and child health in countries worldwide – terminated.
  • Services from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation – just one organization – reaching 350,000 people on HIV treatment, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women – terminated.
  • Every USAID program in the former Soviet countries in Central Asia, including health programs to combat tuberculosis, along with agricultural programs – terminated. www.voanews.com.
  • The Ebola programs were terminated, “a mistake” according to Musk, that he said was rectified. A bold lie, responded the director of the program. A few staff were given waivers to return to work, but the funds remain cut, and the office leases terminated, making the work impossible.

And regarding our health, if not lives, impacted by fire:

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has made steep cuts to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of the Interior. This reportedly impacts funding appropriated to fight wildfires across the country. The most significant budget cuts is setting the limit for BLM firefighters’ credit cards and travel credit cards to just $1, making it impossible for them to buy supplies or travel to wildfire sites. Additionally, the Trump administration froze the disbursement of approximately $3 billion in wildfire mitigation-related funds. This includes things like clearing dead branches and undergrowth that can help wildfires spread quickly if not removed ahead of time. (Ref.)

Over 1000 staff has been shrunk from NOOA, leaving us without weather warning and maritime predictions. The majority of staff at the only two Tsunami Warning Centers in the US have been fired.

Again, please explain to me what the goal of this is. The remaining people cannot do the work alone. The dire consequences will hurt the population in unimaginably deep ways- what is the possible justification for this?

Music today was written during (and about) the Influenza (Spanish Flu) epidemic in 1918. Darius Milhaud was greatly influenced by the horrors he witnessed. The Sonata’s final movement, “Douloureux,” is perhaps a funeral march. The deadliest flu epidemic, before vaccines, cost, in a range of estimates, between 25 and 50 million lives.

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