The Life in My Years

March 29, 2025.
Walnut Creek, California

Another Tesla Takedown protest and a much larger crowd. The previous week’s crowd was estimated at 1000. This week’s estimation is 2000. Larger and louder. Never large enough, never loud enough. From grandparents to grandchildren to family dogs, but it’s still not enough. It’s a race against autocracy and autocracy is winning.

I come away from these protests feeling energized and euphoric, and those feelings last for …

… less than 48 hours.

But there’s life besides Trump. There has to be, or all that remains is bottomless despair. It’s not like there’s no solace at all. I’m buoyed by the annual optimism of spring baseball. In March, every baseball fan in America feels the same surge of hope. Our own local nine, the Giants, has started the season off on a positive note. But we’re only three games into 162 – a marathon not a sprint. I need the team to keep the hope alive into August. I don’t need a World Series Championship. Just give me competitive, compelling, well played baseball; something to focus on besides Trump. 

March 31, 2025.
I try to insulate myself from the news on Sundays. I don’t bother with the Sunday interview shows; politicians harrumphing or lying – or both. Theoretically the weekends are supposed to be slow news periods, and in normal times, with the exception of some natural disaster, one could count on that theory holding true.

But in Trump’s America, bad news, like rust, as Neil Young suggested, never sleeps.

And so by the time my Monday morning coffee has grown tepid, so too has my enthusiasm. 

What did we wake up to today? 

King of America
The President of the United States said he’s not joking about running for a third term, a thing that would run afoul of the 22nd Amendment. And, if he tries the J.D. Vance for president and Trump for Veep with Vance stepping down gambit, he would run afoul of the 12th Amendment. But it isn’t like the Constitution has been a problem for this lawless president. He imagines himself as king of America. Not the America as it’s currently shown on the globe, but a vast America that stretches into the far arctic north of Canada and the sparsely populated island Greenland (a congressman from Georgia named Earl L. “Buddy” Carter was kind of spitballing when he suggested that once we take Greenland it should be called, Red, White and Blue Land). Trump juts out his chin, a caricature of Mussolini and rattles a menacing verbal saber. That he makes a wary world nervous must give him some gratification that borders on the sexual.

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The charlatan will see you now, or, the wolves are guarding the hen house
Frustrated by what he called, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s ‘misinformation and lies’, Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator has resigned. He was given the choice to walk of his own volition or be shown the door. To his credit, he chose the former.

In his letter of resignation to Sara Brenner, the Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs, Marks wrote, in part, ‘Efforts currently being advanced by some on the adverse health effects of vaccination are concerning. The history of the potential individual and societal benefits of vaccination is as old as our great nation.’

Not content with running out a scientist, Kennedy recently hired an anti-vax coconspirator to seemingly validate Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine lunacy. David Geier has been tapped to be a senior data analyst with the Department of Health and Human Services. His mission is to review the long ago debunked theory that vaccines cause autism, most likely to come up with a preconceived result of turning fiction into reality. But that’s the stock in trade of the entire Trump Administration. If truth and history are inconvenient simply make up your own, repeat it enough and soon the wide-eyed and trusting will seize the lie and reject the truth.

Why not Geier? If the administration can hire a news anchor to run Defense, and a talk show host with anger management issues to help run the FBI, why not bring in an anti-vax kook with no medical degree, who was disciplined by the Maryland State Board of Physicians for practicing medicine without a license? Why not? In a world turned topsy-turvy it makes perfect sense.

Kennedy’s quackery is being felt – hard – in Texas and New Mexico. Not only is measles gaining a strong foothold in those states, the science denier in chief has pushed cod liver oil, with its high Vitamin A content, as a miracle measles cure/preventative. In response, parents have been overdosing their children with cod liver oil and other Vitamin A supplements.

Doctors in a West Texas hospital who have been treating children for measles (which in a normal world they wouldn’t be doing) have discovered, through routine lab tests, signs of liver damage that include yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes. Why liver damage? Because in too high doses, Vitamin A can damage the liver, and in some cases lead to coma and death. But for those who believe Donald J. Trump is never wrong, RFK Jr is a pioneering oracle.

In my previous post, I stressed the need for America to feel, in as short a time as possible, the inevitable pain resulting from the administration’s policies. Serious illness and death are about as painful as it can get and the loon who is in charge of Health and Human Services seems to be hell bent on hastening that pain. That’s perfectly fine with me. If you’re prone to listening to quacks, liars and con artists then maybe you should reap your unfortunate rewards. Just allow the rest of us a return to normalcy.

Leading up to Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician who believes in the efficacy of vaccines, had voiced concern about Kennedy’s thinking (a word I use liberally here). In the end Cassidy was swayed, either by lies from Kennedy himself or by pressure from Trump, and he voted in favor of confirmation. Before becoming a senator, Cassidy had run a large scale immunization program.

Now?

Now, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Cassidy will have to explain the butcher’s bill that looms. Kennedy, who was literally and personally responsible for measles deaths in Samoa will deflect and blather his pseudo-science bunk. But what of Dr. Cassidy?

Do no harm, doctor. Do – no – harm. That’s the oath Cassidy took, before he took the one to defend the Constitution. He took two oaths and managed to break both of them.

It’s likely that there’s no statute that can hold Kennedy, and by extension, Trump, Cassidy and every other feckless senator who voted to confirm, criminally liable for this monstrosity. There should be, but even if there was such a statute, the bootlicker AG Pamela Jo Bondi would never prosecute.

Cora and I are already wondering whether or not there will be flu vaccines available in the fall. Maybe we should start stocking up on masks.

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The human cost of a tax cut
After Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, slashed USAID, the agency that provided (operative word “provided”) for the poor, the malnourished, and the sick, Musk infamously insisted that all was well, posting, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” It should come as no surprise that Musk lied. In an administration that takes incompetence and stupidity to new levels the one thing that the administration has mastered is the art of prevarication

.n his heartbreaking opinion piece for The New York Times, titled Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True, Nicholas Kristof documents the casualties wrought by Musk and the further casualties that loom on a dark, deadly horizon.

Kristof tells the story of ten year old Peter Donde, who contracted AIDS at birth. Under the PEPFAR program started during the George W. Bush Administration, 26 million lives, including young Peter’s, were saved. When PEPFAR was shut down, Peter was unable to receive his medication. He died from an opportunistic pneumonia infection when his immune system, like the program that kept Peter alive, shut down.

Thirty-five year old Jennifer Inyaa and her five year old son Evan Anzoo were HIV positive but kept alive by American aid. When the aid stopped Jennifer and Evan became sick and then died within a week of each other.

Over the coming year it’s estimated that the the stopping of American aid will take the lives of 1,650,000 people from HIV/AIDS related illness.

With the cutting off of other aid it’s estimated that 500,000 people will die without U.S provided vaccines and another 550,000 will starve to death.

Kristof’s piece is a long read. Not because he’s verbose but because he requires the space to document so much projected death and tragedy. Kristof documents numbers, but every number represents a living person who is expected to perish.

But Musk and his billionaire friends don’t think in terms of lives. They’re focused on dollars. The cutting off of American humanitarian aid means a future of sickness and starvation for the poor and the hungry, while for Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others in the billionaire’s club, shuttering USAID represents money saved in order to fund a tax cut.

What is the life of a hungry Black child in Africa to Elon Musk, the oligarchs, the tech bros and the MAGA cronies? For that matter, what is the life of a Black kid in Mississippi to this gang heartless pillagers? What are lives when there’s more money to be had, because why settle for billions when there’s a race to be the first trillionaire?

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MAHA
That’s the acronym that RFK Jr. came up with. It means Make America Healthy Again. Not a bad idea. So it seems counterintuitive that ten thousand federal health workers will be joining their colleagues from other federal agencies in the unemployment lines. The cuts are to agencies that regulate food and drugs, and research treatments and cures for various diseases.

Why?

Because these cuts, along with the unconscionable slashing of USAID and all of the other cuts are being made in order to fund the aforementioned tax cuts for the wealthy.

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There was some good news but it didn’t come out of Trump’s White House. It came from the French who know something about serving justice. A court in Paris found Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally Party, guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds. She’s been barred from seeking office for five years. It’s what should have happened in the United States. Republicans had countless off ramps from Trump’s highway to hell but they chose to drive on.

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It’s tiring and it’s dispiriting. Cora and I are planning a spring trip to New York City. A Mets game, a Yankees game, Broadway, jazz at Birdland, a mountainous corned beef sandwich at Katz, and steak at Peter Luger. My heart is only partially into the idea. Not just because of the doldrums of life in Trumpistan but because I have doubts about the wisdom of spending thousand of dollars during this time of upheaval.

Maybe part of the malaise is due to the constant rainy weather. Maybe all we need is a stretch of sunny weather. Maybe what we needed was less apathy and more commonsense last November.