Draining U.S. Greatness at Warp Speed

We’re watching government accentuate the decline of a once pretty great country.

Take health, for example.

Measles and polio were problems in my childhood. Vaccines allowed us to eliminate measles by 2000.

After months of Robert F Kennedy heading Health and Human Services, amplifying his voice fostering doubt about vaccines, we have more measles cases than we’ve seen since the early 1990s. Misinformation fosters vaccine hesitancy and decreases coverage, facilitating the spread.

When the COVID-19 pandemic came out of nowhere and changed all our lives, initial response was hampered by the first Trump Administration having jettisoned the little department that used to look for such things. Trump denied the seriousness, blamed China, and recommended absurd or dangerous remedies.

We developed effective vaccines that used messenger RNA technology, telling one’s system to create a “spike” cell that’s harmless but triggers the immune system to fight COVID-19. This sped development and facilitate alterations to fight virus adaptations. Vaccines minimized urgent care visits and hospitalizations, reduced transmission, saved lives, and were generally quite safe. Trump called this “one of the greatest scientific accomplishments in history.”

It worked.

Recently the Government ceased funding further research projects and announced that those vaccines just didn’t work.

Usually such an announcement would follow expert staff reaching the conclusion based on facts, evidence, and science.

This announcement surprised everyone. It appeared absurd. It contradicted experience. But it was announced. Pathetic efforts to explain it followed.

That’s how upside-down this administration is. We are all Alices in Wonderland. But it’s not wonderful, in its impact on human health.

It’s also disastrous for our country’s future.

Climate craziness, which the rest of the world has united to mitigate, “is a hoax.” So we won’t deal with it, or develop viable alternative energy sources and products that are green. That means that when we eventually have to buy those, we’ll buy from China, or Norway.

The mRNA vaccines, the incredible drug innovations that muted the pandemic and were hailed by Donald Trump as “a medical miracle,” “don’t work. So we’ll stop work on those. That means that whatever the next pandemic arrives, or some enemy attacks using biological warfare, we’ll be buying vaccines from someone else – if possible.

Our Education Department kind of tried to stick to historical facts and scientific conclusions, which is inconvenient when you want to say slavery wasn’t so bad, there’s not much pollution and the universe started when the bible says it did, so we’ll abolish that department, and let folks teach whatever feels good to them, or whatever their god, mullah or preacher wants ‘em to teach.

That’ll hasten our already serious decline in science skills and learning.

What’s been helping us survive that decline is lots of foreigners, some not entirely white, want to study and live here. So we’ll scare the [excrement] out of folks seeking to visit this country, particularly if they talk funny or don’t kneel to Our Leader’s image.

That’ll help.

A country can be great lots of ways: culturally, as high-quality education, an uncensored Kennedy Center, an uncensored Smithsonian, and thriving public broadcasting helped us toward; scientifically, if you believe in science; economically – though we’re rapidly falling behind other nations; or militarily, having replaced experienced experts with a clownish defense secretary who is using insecure on-line rooms for classified conferences and bankrupting the department with unprecedented numbers of friends and family needing federal security.

               – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 24 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper’s website ("From a Great Nation to a Great Scare" ) and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[ Space didn’t permit further details. Kennedy canceled $500 million in 22 mRNA vaccine research contracts. Although his social media announcement claimed vaccine ineffectiveness, he provided no support (and there has been none) for his view. Further, HHS staff got no advance notice, no explanation, no communication plan, nor even a simple fact sheet to prepare staffmembers to respond to questions. Even if the decision were arguably correct, that’s extremely poor management.

Meanwhile, the moment I sent in the column to the newspaper, there was breaking news about further Kennedy idiocy. Kennedy has long held, without support, that the vaccines cause autism. He wants it that way. Recently he announced a huge project to identify the causes of autism. In particular, HHS would check with numerous available sources. That shocked the federal scientist who had been doing exactly that for years. She’s been tracking whether or not, and to what extent, workers’ exposure to chemicals can cause autism in the workers’ children. Kennedy canceled that and laid off the scientist. That interrupts a valid, ongoing scientific study to determine what he says he wants to determine. Either that’s idiotic, and a terrible waste, or it’s worse than idiotic, and was done to whitewash companies from any kind of responsibilities. At best, it says, “We’ll spend a lot of money to study causes of autism – if we can get the study to implicate vaccines.”

Like your doctor saying, I’ll do a test and proved that your condition is what I think it should be. Not, “this test will determine the facts, whatever they are.” But Kennedy is not your doctor. He’s everyone’s doctor. Or would be, if he were any kind of doctor, rather than a somewhat addled lawyer. At least then he’d have taken the Hippocratic Oath, and sworn to do no harm. ]

Walking a Few Inches in a Cop's Shoes

How can I be writing this, given that when I tried to talk sense into someone yesterday, he shot me dead? I hadn’t even drawn my gun.

Fortunately both our guns lacked bullets, and just made a big noise. We (“media” folks, city councilors, city employees, and a few state legislators), and we were in the Las Cruces Public Safety Building,, attempting police training scenarios, wearing protective equipment and under close supervision.

Police must know dozens of specific legal cases and state or federal laws. They must know ‘em better than prosecutors or defense attorneys. Lawyers can research a law’s details before citing it in a brief or going to court. Police officers must decide on the spot, sometimes in nanoseconds, under pressure, whether or not to put a foot in the door to prevent a man who may or may not be abusing his spouse from closing that door, or how to handle a shirtless trespasser who is acting in bizarre and threatening ways outside Costco.

Our state courts have (mostly correctly, I think, but challengingly for law enforcement) interpreted our search and seizure and other constitutional provisions and laws as more protective of individual rights than analogous federal provisions.

The landmark 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case of Graham v. Connor (as interpreted by later cases) governs police use-of-force cases. The Court unanimously held that all excessive-force claims should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard, not a generalized “substantive due process” standard. Were the officer’s actions objectively reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them? Courts judge reasonableness from the viewpoint of a reasonable officer in the moment, not using hindsight. Relevant factors include the severity of the suspected crime, the immediacy of any threat to anyone’s safety, and whether the suspect is actively resisting (or trying to evade) arrest. (More specifics in today’s blog post.)

One could note that we didn’t see the other side of the coin, when police officers step over lines and harm people unnecessarily. While officers spoke of the basic rules, I thought about situations from just a few years ago in which failure to follow those rules led to deaths.

I also saw again the chest video Officer Jonah Hernandez was wearing when a man to whom he’d spoken politely just rushed him, without warning or provocation, and knifed him to death. It’s hard to watch. It’s hard not to reflect on, afterward. It must have been incredibly painful for Chief Story and others who knew him well.

For me, the proper response to the session (which wasn’t my first) is NOT to express unqualified support for whatever police officers do in whatever circumstances; but I do view their actions with greatly enhanced sympathy and understanding. We owe them optimum training, equipment, support, and oversight.

We should recognize that we make them deal with all the hardest problems we are too weak, lazy, or blasé to fix: that modern society seems to drive more people mad, that a capitalist society involves a lot of poverty for those the system can’t use; and that most people are wonderful, by nature, others are somewhat vicious. Whether that’s caused by God or the devil or getting beaten too badly by Papa, trying to talk such a person into acting benignly, without violating his or her rights, or seeing anyone injured, is a tough problem you and I rarely have to face.

                                             – 30 –

[The above column appeared Sunday, 17 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper’s website (sub nom, "Understanding the Tough Choices Law Enforcement Officers Have to Make" ) and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[I mention Graham v. Connor (1989), the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that set the constitutional standard for evaluating claims of excessive force by law enforcement during arrests, investigatory stops, or other seizures. The Court ruled that 4^th Amendment “reasonable search and seizures” standard applied, not the 8^th Amendment, which would have turned on whether the officers had malicious intent or acted with excessive cruelty. (Initially, the Charlotte trial court had tossed the case at the pleading stage, based on the 8^th Amendment standard, and the U.S. Court of Appeal had affirmed.

The facts perfectly illustrate the two worlds different people can inhabit in the same parking lot.

Outside a crowded 7-11 gas station / convenience store, a cop noticed a car pull up, and the passenger jump out, acting a little oddly, and tell the driver he’d be out in a moment. He ran back out soon afterward and jumped in the car, which took off rapidly. The officer followed them, stopped them, and ordered them to wait while he investigated, then released them after a while, once he found out that there had been no crime.

A diabetic patient beginning to experience an insulin reaction asked a friend to drive him to a convenience store to buy orange juice. The store was so crowded that he concluded he wouldn’t be able to buy the juice quickly enough, and asked his friend to drive him to another friend’s house. An officer stopped them almost immediately, and other officers soon arrived and handcuffed the patient, who was injured in the process.

One interesting fact is that I haven’t been able to discover how the case ultimately came out between the diabetic and the city police. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded. That’s a common move when the Court determines that lower courts applied the wrong legal standard, or misunderstood the law. You clarify the rules and play the game over. Lower courts take more evidence and ultimately decide. However, records from lower courts are sometimes spotty. It appears that the parties settled the case out of court after the Court clarified the governing law.

Therefore it seems that the diabetic got compensated. That sounds fair. Even if the first police officer’s stop was reasonable – hold these guys a moment while we have another officer ask the store if it had just been robbed – the cop who handcuffed Graham and rolled him over on the sidewalk, so rudely that a foot got broken and a shoulder injured, ignoring the man’s explanation about the insulin (while another officer said, “I’ve seen insulin shock. There’s nothing wrong with this motherfucker except he’s drunk.”) may not have been so reasonable. (If the plaintiff was physically resisting the stop, such that subduing and handcuffing him was necessary, maybe it’s a different story.)

I also understand that the diabetic was Black. In Charlotte in 1989. I’m pretty sure a couple of middle-class white businessmen in the same situation would have been heard a little better by the officers, or at least treated more respectfully.

At any rate, as I say, last week’s event was a good session. Well-run, and pretty fair. Certainly something more civilians should see or experience. ]

Bad News? Shoot the Messenger!

Economic chickens do come home to roost. August 1’s disappointing July job statistics and downward correction of the two previous months were serious bad news. They fit with the uncertainty Donald J Trump’s tariff madness and dithering has caused everyone. If you’re importing cars or making widgets that use foreign-made components you’d be wise to wait to see what costs and possible prices might be.

Dozens of presidents have seen good and bad numbers and tried to explain them, probably not always honestly.

They haven’t shot the messenger. DJT’s response is to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics head. Joseph Stalin also punished statisticians when data didn’t match his hopes. Salting economic data sank Argentina and Greece. Given the years of trust that led many folks around the world to rely on the apolitical and objective standard Trump just tossed in the fire, we may never know the full depth of the harm.

Is this the start of the slowdown, or ”stagflation,” (weakening economy yet also inflation) economists have predicted? How much worse will it get? Will Trump respond with more reasonable tariffs? Will the Fed now have to lower interest rates to help repair the damage? As voters have trouble paying higher prices with unraised salaries or lost jobs blame Mr. Trump, or the hated Democrats? Accurate information would help folks answer fair questions.

But DJT is carefully killing all the messengers.

He dislikes the science on climate craziness, and therefore fires scientists, asks the Supreme Court to forget its decision on the subject, and removes solid information from the EPA’s website.

He resents that he was impeached (though not quite convicted). Therefore the Smithsonian’s exhibit on presidential impeachments removes reference to Trump’s two, which are that historical fact.

He started by firing seventeen inspectors-general Congress carefully legislated into existence to keep presidents and departments from breaking laws. Previously strong Republican Senate supporters of the inspectors-general, like Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, wimped out.

He dislikes the independent Federal Reserve Bank’s sensible reluctance to lower interest rates in the present financial context, and so he wants to fire the Fed chief.

His Department of Justice lawyers lie so frequently and baldly that judges, grand juries, and defense lawyers no longer trust the DOJ. All lawyers try to present the best case for their clients; but most competent lawyers try to make their exaggerations reasonable. Our court system depends on some minimum ethical standards, which these folks refuse to meet.

We are supposedly a democratic republic. A democratic republic requires informed voters. I think 90% of our population would agree: let’s look honestly at the facts, then make decisions, on which, of course, we might disagree; but let’s be in the same zip code as the facts.

Mr. Trump is systematically removing all independent sources of those facts.

That’s a quantum leap from just explaining stuff in a way that makes you not look so bad. Like the difference between claiming the wind and a photographer and bad luck caused you to shoot a 12-over-par 84 – versus crossing out scores and saying you shot 70. The difference between making excuses for a senseless war in Viet Nam that killed 58,000 U.S. soldiers – and erasing the casualty figures to claim that only a couple of dozen died. Or, better, getting so tired of making excuses for losing to the Yankees that you hire new umpires paid by your team, not the American League.

                            – 30 – 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 10 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[Trump added another level of idiocy – or dementia – by criticizing Joe Biden for appointing the Federal Reserve Bank’s President, whom Trump appointed.]

[Inspired by our president, I knew just what to do when I received an exorbitant electric bill this week. I shot the postman, though we liked him. Then I blew up that damned Smart Meter. We couldn’t have used THAT MUCH juice last month!]

You bring me a bill that high again, you're toast!

The West Bank, Gaza, the G-word, and Us

Months ago, we saw the film No Other Land at the Fountain Theater. Last Monday an English teacher who’d shot some of its footage was shot to death.

We liked the unique story of the film’s making, by two Palestinian and two Jewish directors, about the forced displacement of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in southwest occupied West Bank. The Israelis declared that a huge swath of Palestinian farms and village was part of an Israeli military base, so that the residents were trespassers. Yeah, it reminded me of the U.S. South decades ago. The authorities weren’t marching Negroes to concentration camps, but stood by while white citizens did as they liked.

The film is deeply personal, especially in scenes where the two key directors talk about their situations. The Palestinian was born in Masafer Yatta.

It moved us. It helped humanize what’s going on there.

A similar cooperative spirit ran through our recent radio visit with Amalia Zeitlin, Las Cruces resident and symphony violinist, discussing her efforts to bring Jewish and Palestinian youth together through music in Jerusalem.

Dead is Awdaw Hataleen, father of three. The settler who shot him had been under U.S. sanction for violence against Palestinians – until Mr. Trump took office.

If I focus here on the West Bank, it’s because the slow, inexorable, illegal eviction of Palestinians from their farms and villages there has angered me longer, since well before October 7, and has been so clearly wrong. Nothing could justify the October 7 massacre and kidnappings; but earlier events can help explain.

The film won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature, yet couldn’t find distribution because of prejudice among the powerful.

I have Israeli friends whom I love. I do not judge them for their country’s misdeeds, as I was grateful that folks from other countries never judged me for my country’s terrible crimes. Fellow budget travelers who liked someone from the U.S. would say, “Oh, you must be Canadian.”

In December I wrote that Israel’s leading genocide scholar classed Israel’s treatment of Gazans as genocide. That bus is filling up. Just this week two Israeli human rights organizations and Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped on. Include prominent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, who initially called Israeli actions “just war crimes.”

No one wants to say a country founded partly in response to the Holocaust is committing genocide But there are 60,000 dead, 90% of the population displaced, and 80% of medical facilities destroyed or only partially functional. Amputations have replaced limb-saving surgery. Sixty per cent of housing units are gone. Huge numbers are starving, with innumerable kids suffering malnutrition in what the U.N. calls a “worst-case famine scenario.” More than half of aid shipments have been denied, delayed, or impeded.

West Bank facts help establish motive or intent. They show on a smaller scale, over time, that Israel does not regard Palestinians and their human rights, or lives, even outside Israel proper, as worth protecting. And they predated October 7. Netanyahu has more understandable motives than Hitler did; but he’s doing the crime. So did Hutu. Reasons, but not justification. As an Israeli human rights group points out, all instances of genocide have had justifications, at least in the minds of those who committed them.

As Edmund Burke and Albert Einstein said, the world will not be destroyed by evil-doers but by regular folks standing by silently.

Ain’t that us?

                                        – 30 --

[The above column appeared Sunday, 2 August, 2025, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, and on the newspaper's website and the KRWG website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). That website also contains station show archives.]

[By using the G-word, I do not mean to equate Israel’s destruction of Gazans with the Nazi obliteration of Jews. Hitler, unlike Netanyahu, had not killed in battle, and had not had family killed by, the people he tried to destroy. Further, while I cannot agree with Netanhayu’s final solution, and believe his conduct influenced also by his desire to avoid legal consequences for his own alleged bad conduct, any reasonable person would have to agree that “How can we end the violence between Jews and Muslims and live in peace?” is an incredibly difficult question I can’t answer. No such question made sense as to the German non-Jewish people and German Jews. Without regard to apportioning blame, everyone in the nation has lost someone to hostile violence, and/or been injured, and/or killed, and many on all sides have been displaced, or lived longing for the home from which they or parents or grandparents were rudely evicted. If one said, “I want all of us to make a fresh start,” it’s not clear what that would look like or how it would be maintained as some few on each side bore grudges too deep to transcend. The Germans had no such problems with the Jews. But the effect on me is the same if I’m a starving orphan in or Jabalia or Khan Younis: I’m in shock, fear, and pain – and grieving, though I’ve harmed no one. Whether it’s because Hitler insanely blames the Jews for Germany’s defeat and depression, or Tutsis horribly took out their anger and resentment against Hutus based on years of discrimination, if you’re a suffering kid you’re a suffering kid. And it doesn’t help to know that the Belgians should or could bear some ultimate responsibility, or the British, or the allied negotiators at Versailles.