Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

My Struggles with RFK

I hate to get sick, which means I’m a big fan of vaccinations: I estimate I’ve gotten 21 since I moved here nine years ago, but I bet I undercounted. In order to protect people who actually can’t get vaccinations, we need a pretty high level of compliance. For those two reasons, I’m distressed that RFK is insinuating that vaccinations aren’t important, and not encouraging them. One of our goals for moving to Spain is to get out of here before flu season hits.

On the other hand…

…I do agree with other things RFK talks about. Those of us who have observed the crash in public health in the United States over the last 60 years find is a little hard to be very impressed by the usual experts. One of my friends told me she was so comfortable with the research over the past 20 years. The past 20 years! The US medical establishment has pretty much been getting an F-minus on public health over the past 20 years.

So the biggest problem with the establishment position RFK = wrong, mainstream doctors = right, is that it’s observably untrue. Instead of bolstering their influence on the public, this pronouncement just reminds everyone of the other untruths we have been told, such as that either party cares about working class jobs, or would take any action that discomfits major donors.

This came to my attention today because of an article about Vani Hari, aka the Food Babe, in the New York Times. Vani has a family and personal background as a prominent Democrat, but she’s working for RFK now because, like so many of us, she was able to turn her health around by changing her diet, and not in the way the doctors recommend, yet she never got establishment Democrats to support that message any more than Republicans would. Specifically, she worked closely with the Obamas in the 2012 presidential campaign, then Barack reneged on a promise to support GMO labeling and Michelle touted Subway as an example of a healthy food source.

Vani became famous in part by forcing industrial food purveyors to remove toxic ingredients using public pressure, and she’s had some big wins, including getting Kraft to remove that nasty yellow dye from macaroni and cheese. All the other first world countries already required Kraft to use paprika for coloration before Vani took them on, and now our kids get that advantage too.

Now that she has changed political sides, the left is going after Vani in a big way. One person quoted in the NYT article said: The desire to oversimplify and demonize what seems scary dovetails really well with a right-wing worldview. But Vani is not oversimplifying or demonizing, she’s sharing solutions that work. The chemicals in ultraprocessed foods combined with their base of highly industrialized, i.e. nutrient-free, farm products are demonstrably deleterious to public health.

The NYT also had this to say about Vani’s change of teams: [I]t has bewildered many on the progressive left who felt they owned what food historians call the good-food movement. So people who have come up with a group of things they think we should eat that has resulted in epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and dozens of autoimmune diseases, think because they branded that advice the “good-food movement” we should embrace it?

Results are more convincing that marketeering.

NYT also mentions that Trump supporters who once dismissed dietary interventions as part of the “nanny state” school of government are championing organic produce and trying to rid schools of ultraprocessed foods. That’s great news, right? In the context of the article, it sounds like the authors think it’s a negative.

I let a lot of the nonsense NYT and The Guardian write about nutrition rest unchallenged, but today I took the bait, and here I am, defending worm brain and his piece of the Trump destruction juggernaut. What a world.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 3 Comments

Why We Might Move

My husband and I are in the process of considering a permanent move to Spain. It is complicated and somewhat expensive, and we have not committed to doing it, but we are seriously investigating our options. We’ve already worked with an immigration lawyer to determine that there is a visa for which we would qualify and received quotes for medical insurance. We have a couple of tax consultations scheduled.

We like the lives we led here during the last nine years, but we don’t think there is a possibility of those lives continuing. Some people are startled that we would consider this, perhaps because they think United States is the best country. We realize it is somewhat craven to abandon our country, but we’re not sure it still exists.

No one can predict the future, but we have some ideas about what may happen. I decided to list them in a blog post because I get the Why? question a lot, and I would like to be able to answer it thoroughly. Here are some of our expectations based on our observations of the current situation, not in any particular order.

  • If the government takes $2 trillion-or-so out of the US economy, it will collapse, leading to a depression here or even worldwide.
  • Now that the US is not tracking disease factors either at home or abroad, and both vaccine development and vaccine usage are at historic lows, the next contagious epidemic disease will be much worse than the last one. Local outbreaks have already begun.
  • Mass firing of working scientist as well as elimination of grant programs has already virtually stopped medical research by the government, so we may lose ground quickly in medical science.
  • Reversal of environmental protections will lead to disruptive extractive industry activities and reduced air and water quality.
  • Reversal of gun control laws will increase–is it even possible?–our level of everyday, anywhere gun violence.
  • Gutting of agencies that maintain safety in areas like food supply and air traffic will result in more foodborne diseases and airplane crashes.
  • Gutting of agencies involved in emergency response will increase loss of life and property for future hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and wildfires.
  • Gutting of agencies that gather data on natural phenomena such as weather will reduce our ability to predict extreme events as well as the efficacy of our weather-based industries such as agriculture.
  • Deporting all of our “illegal” immigrants, which seems to include many non-criminals with paperwork in progress, will drastically reduce both the amount of crops we can get from farm to table and the amount of construction we can complete anywhere, exacerbating the food and housing problems we already have.
  • The states that removed women’s reproductive rights already have increased numbers of babies with birth defects as well as increased infant and maternal death rates. This will expand throughout the country should these laws become federal.
  • As far as we can tell, rule of law has been replaced by fealty as the basis of our justice and legislative systems, meaning that even routine services such as passport issuance could be decided based on envelopes of cash or how deeply one’s head is bowed.
  • With unqualified, unvetted personnel leading our security services and even our military, we will lose access to global security intel, making us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
  • The rise of the white male patriarchy systematically dismantling equal rights for people of all religions, ethnicities, and genders threatens most of the population–all women, for example–and is disturbing to us specifically.
  • The elevation of the concept of transferring the country’s wealth from poor and middle-class people to extremely wealthy people is virtually codified already, and seems to be accepted by most. We believe this will degrade the lives of ordinary Americans.
  • We find some of our country’s current policies morally wrong, including abandoning Ukraine, abandoning NATO, eliminating all of our health- and nutrition-based charitable efforts worldwide (USAID), aligning with Russia, seizing assets of other sovereign countries, and trying to force the European Union to be as mean-spirited and anti-citizen as our leadership is.

Any parent reading this will realize that the worst aspect of moving would be being even farther from our adult children, although being far from our friends will be a very close second. I have been trying to encourage the kids to move to another country for several years now, because at their ages they have many more options than we do.

So far they do not agree with me, and perhaps you do not either. Maybe you understand it a little better now, or maybe you just think we’re crazy. Maybe we will move, and maybe it won’t work out. Life was always a bit like a roulette wheel, but it seems to be spinning faster now.

Posted on by Jo Gent

One-Half Nation, Demoralized

Roughly half of our nation, namely the Maga supporters, are super psyched, for a variety of reasons. The anti-DEIs are happy about getting white heterosexual males back in charge of everyone else. The anti-abortion side plus some incels are excited about moving toward a Handmaid’s Tale-style society. The Dominionists are ready to re-create an Amerika that follows the teachings of the Vengeful Christ, whoever that is. A group recently released from (and a subset already returned to) incarceration are busily exercising their right to carry guns, chant, and intimidate average citizens on the nation’s average streets. A small but prominent minority, the Gazillionaires, are thrilled to find that for a few million dollars and utter abandonment of all moral principles plus everything they were taught as children, they may soon become gazillion-illionaires.

Then there’s President Musk, a man of action, who is continuing to live the values he learned as a child in South Africa, as he always has. He isn’t messing around; he’s taking over every government system of the United States and systematically destroying it from inside. He currently has complete control of federal spending and has gutted USAID, a pretty impressive effort for two weeks. He is being helped by executive orders and non-meritocrat Cabinet nominations by shadow president Trump. Did I get those backward?

Whatever. The other half are astounded by how easy it is for a small number of persons to bring our country to a near total halt just because they want to. It turns out that for the past 249 years the reason systems kept working is only because people didn’t try to break them. That is demoralizing.

I wouldn’t say there’s no resistance, but it’s feeble. A lot of this stuff is illegal, but if the enforcement branch is the one breaking the laws, the “normal” way to stop them is through the judicial system, which works pretty slowly, and is riddled with sycophants and capped by a nine-person bench of which six are cultists/corrupts.

There are some protests, and various interest groups trying to get attention, and lots of people and groups asking for money to help, but no person or group has a plan of action that appears to me will be in the slightest bit effective against the combination of power and norm-flouting currently practiced by the scofflaw co-presidents.

The Democrats and their supporting media organizations spend a lot of time being aghast or shrieking about the latest travesty, seemingly feeling that if they show Trump is “bad” we will all immediately conclude Democrats are what we need. Isn’t that the strategy that just lost them the election?

That’s bad, but even worse are the ones who are trying to find a way to compromise with our new administration. As we saw during the campaign when they couldn’t stop consulting their billionaire doners, denounce genocide in Gaza, stem government corruption, break up predatory conglomerates, or take one concrete step to reduce grocery prices, many Democrats are so enamored by hanging out with the cool kids that they’re going to drink the Kool-Aid.

Leaders of our nations universities are very much in this last category. Their organizations are reeling under new DEI strictures, but every single one is carefully tempering comments on the topic, fearful of retaliation.

In other words, it turns out that those of us who should be leading the resistance are either craven or ineffectual. Bernie Sanders would be the exception; he does not appear afraid of retaliation in the slightest. However, he is still focusing on using our nation’s process, spending his considerable energy and influence on finding truly progressive and perhaps bold leaders to run for office in 2026.

I think it is perhaps optimistic to think we will have an election in 2026. Even we do, we need to do something before then. This last election was at least in part decided by gerrymandered precincts and reduced voter rolls, and those sorts of activities will only increase between now and then.

My husband and I are thinking we should leave. That also seems craven, but as two retired people, we are in no position to turn any aircraft carriers around, especially without a strong organization spearheading a viable plan. As people depending on Social Security as part of our retirement plan, we are very vulnerable to impoverishment. We are angry; we’ve spent nine years building a new life in California, and we will have to start over again at this older age. However, that is something we at least can figure out how to do.

Honestly, it’s not clear that we will be able to get out in time. The US has now officially stopped tracking/reporting bird flu, and if it transitions to human-human transmission, which seems inevitable, we may not even find out until it has spread halfway across the country.

Season 2 of Trump v Pandemic could be more of a killer than Season 1.

Posted on by Jo Gent

Fascism v Liberalism

The ideas in this blog are derived from the “Naples” essay written by Walter Benjamin of the Frankfort school with help from proletariat Asja Lacis. As you may know, the Frankfurt School refers to a group of thinkers dissatisfied with all then-current forms of government who coalesced during the interwar period in Europe. What struck me about the essay was the comparison of fascism and liberalism, which I found it very enlightening and still useful.

Fascism divides the world into “the vital and the decadent, the essential and the discardable, the us and the them.” All the dichotomies are false of course, similar to the old joke, There are two types of people: Those who love cats and those who love dogs. Extreme simplification works in a joke, but were it to be applied in reality, it would exclude people who hate both, who love both, who eat both, and who prefer fish.

The other problem with two types thinking is that it usually concludes one of the types is wrong.

Fascism encourages follower to “worship a concocted, false social whole,” like the three decades in America during which Caucasian white- and blue-collar workers were able to support a non-working wife and kids with a single job, usually while owning a late-model car and a TV, and maybe even a dwelling.

These conditions never existed either before or after that time period in the US, but they do survive in the living memory of many Americans today, even though that memory maybe misremembered, remembered from someone else’s life, or gleaned from watching or reading fiction.

Obviously those conditions don’t seem ideal to many today, though I can only speak for women like me, who are much happier wielding a soldering iron and getting paid than wielding a mop and getting ignored.

Liberalism “emphasizes the individual at the expense of the network of relations in which they are embedded.” This definition speaks to me, but seems vaguely worded. One example might be assuming a gay person would politically prioritize gay issues over issues relating to that person being a daughter, aunt, employer, PTO member, football fan, dancer, diabetic, or whale lover. This might be referred to as one type thinking, as in, people have one characteristic that matters, at least in terms of politics, to which all their other webs are subordinate.

That obviously doesn’t work. I can’t even choose between Scottish dancing and line dancing.

Liberalism “encourages followers to banish the idea of any social whole in favor of abstractions like the economy as if they were entities existing independently of human life.” Two things about this. Firstly, it reminds one painfully of all the election exhortations by liberals about the US economy being the envy of the world, when citizens just weren’t experiencing it that way. When you are reduced to living on disability insurance and your kid has to join the service because all the well-paying jobs with benefits have been shipped overseas to create more billionaires, you really don’t care what the numbers say.

Secondly, the economy is most assuredly an abstraction, something created out of the imaginations of people, for which there are no natural laws. There are plenty of historical societies and even some modern ones that maintain their members’ health and happiness throughout all the stages of their lives, without impoverishing–or over-enriching–anyone. The ideal that “making any challenge to [capitalism is] as pointless as challenging the laws of motion” is also fiction, a way of forcing all people to identify with “the power which beats them.”

In modern America, both fascism and liberalism encourage us to embrace capitalism in a simplistic, unthinking sort of way. We don’t have to, though.

Faced with the incursions of industrialization in the 1920s, “Nealpolitans stubbornly resisted modernization, and refused to be overwhelmed and remade by industrial commodities that flooded their city.” They preferred to fix their own cars, even if they had to stop every mile to do so, and often re-purposed modern inventions to be actually useful. Everyone not only had hands-on knowledge but also believed it was important in order to avoid reliance on outsiders or elites.

It still is. How deftly capitalism conceals its dark side! We all can purchase an industrial good without thinking of “the late-night labor, the unattended children, the workplace injuries,” or the laborers who are slaves, prisoners, or children. How empowered could we be with the ability to get our goals accomplished without kowtowing to a system designed to endlessly syphon more wealth to the wealthy?

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Is Murder Always Bad?

Mainstream media and government elites are “shocked” by a massive outpouring of haha emojis after the assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. Shooting people is not a great way to solve things, and it’s probably not going to work out well for the accused assassin, unless he can pull an OJ Simpson with the jury. But chronic pain, permanent impairment, financial ruin, and, yes, even murder avoidable death, are being dealt every day to ordinary Americans by ordinary American health insurance companies.

I have to admit that when I first heard the headline my immediate response was, Well, no surprise there.

The insurance company Anthem had recently announced a plan to limit anesthesia coverage to the predicted duration of an operation, as opposed to its actual duration. This announcement was met with equanimity by the major press and politicians, among whom there are apparently no persons who can imagine what it would be like to be dropped off anesthesia before you’re stitched up. Anthem reversed that decision immediately after the assassination, a tangible positive result.

I feel like I should stop the blog right here, because everyone knows this already, right? Our singular for-profit healthcare system makes people sicker, and America’s health has plummeted in my lifetime while its healthcare costs have burgeoned.

The observable failure of our healthcare system has fed into the cynicism created by decades of being blanketed with false messages about government waste and trickle-down economics combined with stories of why three is the right number for yachts as well as bears. The only people doing well in America are moguls, and non-mogul 21st-century Americans are ready for a piece of the action, including our doctors. Getting more money is a good thing, however you go about it. If we’re rich we’re trying to get richer. If we’re not we’re trying to get there.

I heard today that Detroit was having an “upturn” after a decline lasting over 50 years. I hope they’ll have an upturn lasting 50 years. If this neglect of Detroit is exemplary of other regions of the country, no wonder citizen-victims of all ages are fed up with waiting for their turn to prosper.

The depth of the cynicism is truly fathomless, especially for us those of us who grew up when it was pretty simple to identify an asshole. Like Pete Hegseth, a jerk, an alcoholic, a misogynist, and a perpetrator of sexual assault. Even so, zero Republican male Senators are going to vote against him while the Republican women Senators are “trying” to find a way to vote Yes.

I guess Republicans just want the Cabinet to behave more like the Supreme Court.

The Democrats are cynical as well, responsible for moving most blue-collar jobs overseas, destroying limits on monopolies and income inequality, failing to devise reasonable immigration policy for decades, and making policies that led to us imprisoning more people than any other nation.

We’re number one!

So I really am sympathetic to those who felt neither voting choice was good. Soon I fear I will need to be empathetic with them as well. When the macroeconomically-challenged Elon and Vivek take the $1.5 trillion of Social Security payments out of circulation, my own personal economy is going to collapse along with the nation’s.

Pretty sure I won’t be around for 50 years of decline though.

Posted on by Jo Gent

RFK might be OK

I’m almost as depressed by the dialogue around this election as I am about the results. I really feel the blue angst-fest is missing the obvious. Case in point was an interview on Politico about RFK becoming secretary of HHS. The guest had a lot of credentials from Georgetown university, including a program he devised that is supported by WHO. In other words, he was another elite of the sort who have been running the country since the 1990s.

While he briefly acknowledged that eating fewer processed foods could be healthy, the guest, as well as the journalist interviewing him, were making the point that having RFK in charge of health would be a really bad idea, ie, piling on with collapse-of-the-country predictions, and by-the-way simply can’t imagine what Trump voters were thinking.

Castigating voters is not getting us anywhere. Millions of people are not stupid or crazy, they’re voting their own interest based on their own narrative. While some of these are clearly concerned with America becoming a “minority majority” nation, a lot of them have noticed that decades of political control by graduates of elite universities has led to declining living conditions here.

The healthcare expert on Politico, for example, did not even mention–and was not asked about–the fact that health in the United States had cratered during this century. We are one of the most unhealthy populations in the world, rife with chronic diseases and mental illnesses, often starting in childhood, for which we are offered expensive, corporation-enriching patented pharmaceuticals that allay some symptoms while introducing others, rather than treatments that might effect a cure.

Someone, as in at least one Democrat of prominence, should *apologize* for selling us all out. Because that is what has happened here. Instead, they are daily asking for more money! The beneficiaries of the inaccurately-named meritocracy have taken their subsidized Ivy League credentials right to the bank. Most are wallowing in the ill-gotten gains of a financial industry optimized to extract value from everywhere and stuff it into the pockets of those seeking a baby yacht for their momma yacht.

Re-focusing on healthcare, others have gotten very wealthy trying to “cure” cancer with bank-account emptying, damaging procedures–because how would we make money if we prevent cancer?–or re-purposing their research to serving big pharma in the race for patentable pharmaceuticals people can pay for for the rest of our lives, instead of saving for retirement .

if RFK says that raw milk is good for us, or that highly processed foods are not good for us, why can’t we test and find out whether this is true?

Don’t answer, I know the answer, I’m just playing with you!

It’s really hard to get major funding to figure out whether a lifestyle solution such as a change in diet would improve health, because that doesn’t lead to any big paydays for the funders. The US healthcare system is the rare for-profit healthcare system, and the sicker we are, the richer the top 10% will be.

If blue journalists and Democratic politicians want to have any credibility going forward, after apologizing, they might try to find out why so many people, smart people, rejected them. Both red and blue are hobnobbing with billionaires, and both sides have prominent members who are willing to use their positions to maximize their own wealth and prestige, one of whom I would posit is the president-elect. But the blue siders keep saying, We care about working families, and then using their power in ways that promote income and job inequality.

Three caveats:

  • Shoutout to Biden, who did pass several major bills with long-range improvements for jobs and infrastructure that will mostly take effect in time for Republicans to take credit, but points off for waiting so long to do anything then not selling it.
  • I’m thinking and reading a lot about this, but ultimately I’m guessing about motivations, because, as most of you know, I still think the blue side has more of a chance of actually improving conditions for We the Folk.
  • I drink a therapeutic 8 ounces of raw milk most days.
Posted on by Jo Gent

Brace Yourself

Have you had a chance to rate anything lately? JK! I know you have because I have. Every visit to a retailer, every online purchase, every interaction with customer service results in an email requesting feedback, and often several if I don’t reply. I rarely do. It’s sort of like reading those legal agreements associated with every software upgrade, which is to say, it could take up your entire life if you actually did it.

Just check I Accept! They already have all your data anyway.

However, there are some things I would LOVE to rate yet I can’t. A lot of those are news programs I hear on the radio or watch on TV, which don’t even offer the thumbs up/down you get with streaming shows. NPR is usually the main offender. I have a habit of listening to it from years past, when it didn’t have commercials and employed actual journalists who interviewed principals on air live.

Now of course, NPR has regular commercials by sponsors, celebrity hosts with neither radio nor content skills (eg Ira Flatow or Meghna Chakrabarti), and a stable of young radio announcers who “interview” each other using scripts.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a journalist-journalist interview that was informative or interesting, but I am positive I haven’t heard a scripted one that was. Those kids may have journalism training, but they aren’t actors or writers, and you can practically hear the paper rustling. JK! Of course they are reading from their tablets.

The gang I really want to rate is MSNBC. While NPR is still trying for the neutral voice in a foolishly rigorous way–every climate change feature includes someone from the opposition, probably because these kids do all their research online where Mother Earth and World 2 have roughly equal coverage–MSNBC has always been unapologetically partisan, politically blue and very woke. I think NPR correspondents are overpaid, but I know MSNBC anchors are, since some MSNBC salaries are public. They’re mostly 7-figure amounts, though rumor has it that Rachel Maddow’s is now into 8-figures.

I stopped watching MSNBC during the pandemic, when the bubble enclosing their anchors started choking their brains. Every night they were ranting about people who wouldn’t stay home from work to keep others “safe.” Later we found out that over 90 % of workers were unable to work from home. I was one of those, working in a provider’s office for a while, then for Cal-Fire, then in a grocery store. All essential jobs! During the pandemic and after, there was nary a word of thanks or even acknowledgement to all of us who enabled those bubble babies to work from home.

After the recent presidential debate MSNBC doubled down. Big Biden backers until then, its anchors lined up to throw Biden under the bus. Partly it was the need to let everyone know how many Dem decision makers each had on speed-dial, since like all modern journalists they compete on follower counts and insider access.

However, they weren’t alone. NYT has jumped on board, as has the entire continent of Europe. This must be an extraordinary moment for the MAGA movement, as the Blue press competes to cancel Biden. It’s a classic shoot-yourself-in-the-foot move, since no Red state is going to put a non-primary-winning Dem on the ballot. Continuing with the self-inflicted wound theme, this wasn’t even necessary: Is it really impossible to make the case that a reality TV star glibly spouting a fictional script is a worse choice than a seasoned politician with a record of accomplishment who had a badly-timed cold?

Blue Media could learn something about loyalty from Trump supporters.