A Weekend Potpourri Of Things You Might Have Missed

May 28th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

Life expectancy from another angle

Earlier in the week I wrote about life expectancy in the U.S. and how our woeful public health system negatively impacts it.

Another under-the-radar issue affecting how long we live is where we live. That is, living in a blue or red state can either add years to your life, or deprive you of a few. Significant research is bearing this out.

A report from the Population Reference Bureau, with funding support from the National Institute on Aging, concludes that life expectancy is influenced by policymaker decisions at the state level. According to the report:

Life expectancy differences among states have widened in recent years, as state policies have become more polarized. In general, states where policies have become more liberal have added years to their residents’ lives more quickly, while states where policies have veered conservative have seen slower gains in life expectancy.

This study builds on research published by Jennifer Karas Montez, et al., in the Millbank Quarterly in August 2020. Their paper, US State Policies, Politics, and Life Expectancy, found that states with more conservative marijuana policies and more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labor rights, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes were related to lower mortality in working-age Americans between 1999 and 2019. In particular, gun safety laws were associated with a lower suicide risk among men; labor protections like minimum wage and paid leave were tied to a lower risk of alcohol-related death; and tobacco taxes and economic taxes were linked to a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

The authors estimate if all states enacted the most liberal policies, 171,030 lives might have been saved in 2019. On the other hand, enacting the most conservative policies might have cost 217,635 lives. Looking at it from another perspective, they concluded that US life expectancy would be 2.8 years longer among women and 2.1 years longer among men if all states enjoyed the health advantages of states with more liberal policies.

It would be nice if research like this persuaded politicians in red states to consider liberalizing some of their policies with an eye to making life better for their constituents. At the very least, they could read the studies (I did) and invite the researchers to discuss their findings.

Meanwhile, deep in the heart of Texas

You probably don’t know this if you don’t live there, but for months, top Republicans in the Lone Star State have coalesced into two warring camps. On one side are State Attorney General Ken Paxton and his followers. Facing off against them are Speaker of the House Dade Phelan and the House Committee on General Investigating. The Texas House has long been seen as far less far rightish than the Senate and Paxton’s base. The result is that though they have total control over the Legislature and every statewide office, Republicans have not always agreed on what to do with their power.

For some time it has been apparent the two sides don’t like each other very much.

A bit of history is in order.

There has been a cloud of scandal hovering over Attorney General Paxton for years. The ever-darkening cloud includes an extramarital affair and actions taken to benefit an Austin real estate developer who donated to Paxton’s campaign and renovated his home. Despite the scandal, and an indictment in state court for securities fraud dating back to 2015 (he has repeatedly succeeded in delaying his trial), he won re-election to a third term last year, largely by closely aligning himself with Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters.

The barely concealed disdain of the two factions for each other, brewing for months, burst into public view this past week when the Attorney General accused Speaker Phelan of performing his duties while drunk and called for the speaker’s resignation.¹

That accusation last Tuesday sent a shock wave through Austin. Then, less than an hour later, word came that Paxton might have had a personal motive for attacking the speaker: The aforementioned House Committee on General Investigating had subpoenaed records from his office, as part of an inquiry into the Attorney General’s request for $3.3 million in state money to settle corruption allegations brought against him by his own former high-ranking aides.

The House Committee met the next day, Wednesday, for several hours to discuss accusations against Paxton brought by those former aides in 2020, as well as allegations of retaliation from the same former aides.

The four top aides — turned whistleblowers — had taken their concerns about his activities to the F.B.I. and the Texas Rangers. Paxton then fired all four.

The aides — Ryan Vassar, Mark Penley, James Blake Brickman and David Maxwell — are all former Deputy Attorneys General, and Maxwell is a former director of the office’s law enforcement division. They told investigators that the Texas AG may have committed crimes including bribery and abuse of office. They have also sued Paxton.

This is where the $3.3 million comes in. Paxton wanted the state to pay that amount to settle the lawsuit brought by the former aides. Speaker Phelan has said that he did not believe there were the votes in the House needed to approve the payment; he also has said that he did not himself support doing so. If the state paid the aides the $3.3 million settlement it would be like giving Paxton a very expensive Get Out Of Jail Free card.

After hours of testimony on Wednesday from five House investigators who outlined the evidence they had collected against Paxton, the attorney general suggested on Twitter that he believed the Texas House was preparing a case to impeach him.

“It is not surprising that a committee appointed by liberal Speaker Dade Phelan would seek to disenfranchise Texas voters and sabotage my work as attorney general,” Paxton said in a statement aimed at his base of supporters, many of whom view the Speaker as aligned with Democrats.

Thursday evening, the Committee on General Investigating unanimously filed 20 articles of impeachment against the Texas AG. The Committee is composed of two Democrats and three Republicans.

And last night, despite a last minute appeal by Donald Trump, the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Attorney General Paxton, temporarily removing him from office while he undergoes trial in the Senate. The vote was 121-23. He is the first statewide office holder to be impeached in Texas since 1917.

Regardless of the lopsided impeachment vote, one can be forgiven for thinking a conviction in the Texas Senate will be about as difficult to achieve as a conviction in the US Senate was, twice, for Donald Trump.

_____________________

¹ After a 12 hour day of pushing through bills as the House’s term was approaching year-end, 57-year-old Speaker Phelan appeared to slur a few words in one sentence. This was recorded on video. It went unnoticed by most. But apparently not by Paxton.

Medicaid work requirements — raw meat to the Republican base

Late yesterday, President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House leader, announced yesterday that they had reached a deal to increase the amount of money the government can borrow. The deal includes additional work requirements for food stamps and welfare.

Getting tougher with Medicaid work requirements was one of the sticking points in resolving the ridiculous debt ceiling crisis. It is something the more conservative, that would be most, elements of the Republican Party have demanded for at least the last two decades.

But what would that achieve in terms of reducing the national debt and helping people get healthier so they can escape poverty?

I have written before about the resource-rich Econofact.org, a product of the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Econofact, created by eminent economist Michael Klein, is a network of economists and public policy specialists from all over the country who contribute to the non-partisan publication designed to bring key facts and incisive analysis to the national debate on economic and social policies. Unlike most things on the internet these days, Econofact is free to readers. It is well worth subscribing.

Regarding the work requirements continuing dispute, I would like to show you three charts produced by Econofact thought leaders² to put the issue in perhaps a better perspective. Basically, the data show adding to work requirements already in place won’t reduce US spending and, besides being not worth the administrative and bureaucratic effort, would negatively impact many children currently living in poverty and make it more difficult for them to rise out of it.

First, what is the size of the population we’re actually talking about?

It’s the bottom four bars, totaling 11.57 percent of the population, we’re talking about.

Now, how is that 11.57 percent spending its time?

Less than six percent are unemployed, but looking for work.

Finally, to what extent does expanding access to Medicaid increase the probability of rising out of poverty?

This Letter began with research showing that states more liberal in their constituent services experience greater life expectancy. Medicaid is one of those services. The Econofact charts show  most people on Medicaid who can work, already are. They also show, in addition to greater life expectancy, enhancing Medicaid benefits is the best way to achieve what should be the desired goal of Medicaid in the first place: getting people healthy, so they can raise themselves out of poverty into productive lives.

This debt ceiling deal, while possibly ending the crisis (if it can actually pass in the Congress), will not help to achieve that goal.

______________________

² The first chart was produced by Econofact contributors  and , of
the University of Maryland, Aspen Economic Strategy Group, and Gusto; the second, by , of UC Davis and the Center for Poverty Research; and the third by , of Georgetown University.

Posted in 6 January Select Committee, Misc.

Will Our Debt Ceiling Crisis Put A Knife Through The Heart of America’s Public Health System?

May 23rd, 2023 by Tom Lynch

As I have written before, despite the cost of health care in America being nearly twice the average of the other 37 countries within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we achieve poorer health care outcomes than the average and our life expectancy of 76.1 years¹ is 4.9 years below the OECD average of 81.

If we reach the age of 65 when Medicare becomes available, life expectancy improves to 84.5 years, but that puts us still below the OECD average of 84.9 and 13th from the bottom of the pack. By way of further comparison, the Brits, whose National Health System we so cavalierly denigrate, outlive us by 3.9 years; Canadiens, by 5.3 years. They must be doing something right, and they do it for significantly less money.

One often overlooked and, for the most part, unexamined reason for our high health care costs and sub-par outcomes can be found in our woebegone Public Health System. Of all the gaping holes COVID-19 exposed in the nation’s approach to health care and emergency preparedness, our Public Health System, fragmented, uncoordinated, underfunded, but critically important, is the deepest.

COVID turned the health care world upside down, especially with regard to health care funding. Although CMS reported U.S. health care spending grew 10.3 percent in 2020, it slowed to 2.7 percent in 2021, reaching $4.3 trillion or $12,914 per person.  As a share of GDP, health spending accounted for 18.3 percent, down from 19.4 percent in 2020.

Less than 4% of that $4.3 trillion went to our Public Health System. Moreover, Trust for America’s Health, a non-partisan organization that tracks health issues, reports public health spending as a proportion of total health spending has been decreasing since 2000 and falling in inflation-adjusted terms since the Great Recession. Health departments across the country are battling 21st-century health care wars with mid-20th-century weapons.

Our Public Health System is supposed to address everything having to do with health, from diseases like COVID-19 to tornados, hurricanes, wild fires, floods, rat infestations, and the like. It lives at the local level, from states, to counties, to cities and towns. My little Berkshire town of Becket, Massachusetts, population of 1,931, has a functioning Health Department.

The CDC, through grants to the states and large cities is the primary funder of federal public health. The system and funding for it worked pretty well until, in 2001, terrorists brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11, killing 2,996 of our fellow citizens. Suddenly, money that had been earmarked for public health was syphoned off for the War on Terror. In attempting to right the ship, Section 4002 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) established the Prevention and Public Health Fund. Also known as the Prevention Fund or PPHF, it is the nation’s first mandatory funding stream dedicated to improving our nation’s public health system. By law, the Prevention Fund must be used “to provide for expanded and sustained national investment in prevention and public health programs to improve health and help restrain the rate of growth in private and public health care costs.” The law mandated funding: $18.75 billion between fiscal years 2010 and 2022 and then $2 billion annually thereafter.

The Fund’s intentional mandatory design was meant to ensure consistent, predictable, and expanded resources for prevention and public health that are not always politically viable in the annual appropriations process, where public health and prevention programs compete against other priorities.

The Fund’s statute is broad and authorizes use of funds for a number of activities and grant programs:

The Secretary shall transfer amounts in the Fund to accounts within the Department of Health and Human Services to increase funding, over the fiscal year 2008 level, for programs authorized by the Public Health Service Act [42 U.S.C. 201 et seq.], for prevention, wellness, and public health activities including prevention research, health screenings, and initiatives, such as the Community Transformation grant program, the Education and Outreach Campaign Regarding Preventive Benefits, and immunization programs.

But nowhere in the statute does it say that the President or Congress cannot redirect the Fund’s money for some other purpose. And that is what has happened.

Redirecting the Fund’s cash for some other purpose would not be, per se, a bad thing as long as the new purpose advanced public health. However, political expediency, partisan grandstanding, the republican-led 63 attempts to repeal the ACA, the law that established and governs the Fund, have done damage. For example, in February 2012, Congress passed and President Obama signed legislation to cut the Fund by $6.25 billion over 9 years (FY2013 to FY2021) to correct the Medicare sustainable growth rate and prevent cuts to physician services in the Medicare program (known as the “doc fix”). To believe these measures actually advanced our Public Health System is to believe pigs really can fly.

A less controversial move that still violated the Fund’s legislative intent happened in FY2013, when Republicans, who controlled the House of Representatives, refused to appropriate funding for ACA enrollment activities. In response, the Obama administration used the Fund’s money to do that.

As congressional partisanship deepened in the following years, Republicans began to question the Fund as government overreach, calling it the “Obama slush fund.” In 2017, the Republican-led House passed the American Health Care Act of 2017, which would have cut the Fund by $1 billion. It was defeated in the Senate, but it exemplifies the rancor in the Halls of Congress.

Our current it-would-be-farce-if-it-weren’t-so-serious debt ceiling crisis is not helping. As Devon Page wrote for the Association of State and Territorial Officials discussing the impact of the recently passed  House bill to raise the debt ceiling—H.R. 2811, or the “Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023,” that would reduce discretionary spending by 22 percent:

If enacted, the proposed discretionary spending cuts alone would have a near-ubiquitous impact, from public school funding to public safety programs. State health agencies could see core federal funding lines—some of which are already underfunded—threatened.

At stake is nearly $17 billion in unobligated funding at the Department of Health and Human Services, with about $4 billion at CDC and $2.5 billion for the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). This includes dollars designated for the infectious disease rapid response fund, research and development of vaccines and therapeutics, payments to hospitals and nursing homes, and genomic sequencing of COVID-19 samples to identify variants.

A government’s first duty is to protect the safety of its citizens. The arrival of COVID-19, laying bare our still woeful Public Health System, showed us we were unprepared to address that sacred duty, and, as of one week ago, 1,128,903 of us have died to prove the point.

We could have learned from that. We could have, but we didn’t.

We could have done so much better.

_______________________________

¹ This figure is from the National Vital Statistics Report, August 2022, and is for 2021. Preliminary indications are that life expectancy rebounded in 2022 by 1.07 years to 77.45.

 

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in Public Health Policy

Does Ron DeSantis Actually Believe In What He Says And Does?

May 19th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

When Hitler’s Nazis took complete power on 5 March 1933 the first groups they and the Brownshirts went after hammer and tong were Communists, other political parties (within three months they were all gone), intellectuals and the Jews. Among the intellectuals, they focused on university professors, who they judged not sufficiently “reliable” to parrot the Nationalist Socialist ideology, and the music directors of large orchestras, who were mostly Jews.

During the first few months of the 3rd Reich, the Nazis eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

They easily had already coopted university students. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” (a euphemism for non-Nazi ideology) in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight.

I mention this history, because I’ve been thinking about what is happening in Florida, as well as in a number of other red states. But it’s Florida that interests me most, because of its Governor, Ron DeSantis, who little by little unveils his nakedly ambitious and relentless drive to become our president.

I started down the Ron DeSantis rabbit hole more than a year ago when he revoked the Walt Disney Company’s Special Taxing District designation, which had been in effect for 55 years, because Disney CEO Bob Chapek had the temerity to criticize the Governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Take that, Goofy!

Then, in an act of cavalier cruelty, he sent two planes full of undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to stick it in the eye of northern liberals.

Next, once again flexing his imagined Popeye muscles, he had his Commissioner of Education ban 54 math textbooks because of their potential to indoctrinate Florida’s children with Woke ideology (I never knew math could be so divisive).

And, speaking of book banning, acolytes of DeSantis have had a field day doing just that all over Florida, most notably in Escambia County where more than 100 books have become restricted, or just plain banned altogether, taken off the shelves of school libraries and put in permanent storage.¹

Moving right along, DeSantis fired a prosecutor, elected by the citizens of Hillsborough County (yup, a governor can do that in Florida), because he said the prosecutor, Andrew Warren, had been “soft on crime.”

He bullied a group of high school students for wearing masks at an event at the University of South Florida. “You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. This is ridiculous,” he told the teens just before slamming his folder on a lectern. He all but said, “Don’t you know Covid-19 won’t hurt you?”

He’s Florida’s grand puppeteer who wants to be America’s grand puppeteer. For whatever reason and by whatever means the Governor seems to have every Republican legislator in Florida dangling from his many-fingered hands. Whatever he demands, they do. Last week they passed a law that changes what was Florida law and allows him to remain Governor as he runs for President (Is that a sign of a lack of confidence on his part, or just careful planning?).

On Monday of this week, after spending months beating the Woke out of what was once an excellent state educational system, the Governor signed a law prohibiting state colleges from offering courses in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). I can’t think of any other colleges that explicitly prohibit a specific course from being taught because of ideology. Can you?

“If you look at the way this has actually been implemented across the country, DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination,” DeSantis said during a news conference at New College of Florida in Sarasota. “And that has no place in our public institutions.”

You tell ’em, Ronnie.

As if all that weren’t enough, yesterday the Governor-wanna-be president signed five newly-passed bills (at his instigation and encouragement) that will govern student pronouns in public schools (they’re out), limit access to gender-affirming care (that’s out, too), and allow group prayer before sporting events (that’s in, thank God).

To add to the theme, he signed the bills on a stage at Cambridge Christian School in Tampa.

From banning books, to muzzling teachers, to eviscerating DEI, to criminalizing any teaching that racism is endemic, to slapping down any discussion of gender identity, to picking a huge fight over a small issue with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse, Machiavellian DeSantis continues to find new and improved ways to wage the full scale culture war he thinks will lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And just now, the Tampa Bay Times has reported DeSantis will formally announce his candidacy at Miami’s Four Seasons Hotel next Thursday, 25 May. Should be quite the show.

But here is a question for you: Do you think Ron DeSantis, Yale undergrad, Harvard Law, actually believes what he’s spewing all over the Sunshine State (and now in Iowa and New Hampshire, too)? Or, is he the consummate hypocrite trying to see what really resonates with the MAGA crowd and beyond by throwing the worst of the worst up against the wall to see how much sticks?

It’s got to be one or the other. Both are bad. Really bad.

And now for a house selling update

I cannot allow Ron DeSantis to have this entire page, and I know you’re curious. It seems that realtors Kurt and Tom were right. We have many people who want to see the place. Maybe one of them will want to buy it. Maybe more than one of them. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m beginning (barely) to forget the six weeks of drudgery lugging all those boxes and plastic bins. It seemed there’d never be an end to them. But now, here in the Berkshires, even Lancelot the wonder dog seems happy for us.

Open House isn’t until Saturday, but we already are loaded with what Kurt and Tom call “showing  appointments.”

Friends, this is beginning to turn into a fun project.

________________________________

¹ For a deeper dive into Escambia County’s book banning shenanigans, see Judd Legum’s continuing and relentless coverage of this miscarriage of educational justice in Popular Information.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Politics, Public policy

Fifty-one Years Of Stuff

May 17th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

The story of the stuff.

Friends, I’m exhausted.

I’ve been away from this beloved keyboard for six weeks, and, because I’m addicted to Mr. QUERTY, the withdrawal has been painful. But have I been slacking off, ignoring my responsibility to do my best to afflict the comfortable? Not a bit. Why? Let me tell you a story about the stuff, the dumpsters, a painful ending, and a bright beginning.

Fifty one years ago, after spending a few years in the U.S. Army, two of which on an all-expenses-paid trip to Southeast Asia, property of the 101st Airborne Division, my late wife Marilyn and the two-year-old daughter I was just beginning to know left the red clay of Fort Benning Georgia, returned to Massachusetts and, after some time getting reacquainted with parents and friends, bought a house in Central Massachusetts.

Thus began the Great Accumulation.

A few years later we enlarged the house to accommodate Marilyn’s parents who had sold their spacious  home and were entering the period in life my wife Karen calls the “smallening down phase.” A few years after that, having achieved some professional success, we enlarged the house further—a lot.

We now had 13 rooms, a great big attic, an even bigger basement, and a large garage with storage area above.

I’m sure you will recall the old adage, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” I’m living proof.

Over the succeeding years, the family managed to accumulate an immense amount of what George Carlin famously called “stuff.”¹

The trouble is, we never knew we were bringing so much stuff into the house, because, after using it, we always packed it away in the cavernous attic, basement or garage. Oh, and don’t let me forget the closets—they can hold more than you think, and we had a lot of them, big ones, too.

And then, of course, there was the storage unit.

Why didn’t we have the occasional purge of stuff? My excuse is it seemed like a big job (I was right), and we were busy all the time, and, besides, we couldn’t see it; it was all hidden away. So the stuff kept growing, sort of like the carnivorous monster alien from outer space in the 1958 horror movie, The Blob, that kept growing by eating everything in its path.²

Since the pandemic began, we’ve been living at our place in the Berkshires, the place where I write these Letters. About six months ago we concluded it didn’t make a lot of sense anymore to have two big homes, so we decided one of them had to go, and Central Mass drew the short straw.

Thus began the Great Disaccumulation.

Little did we know what we were in for. But this will sum it up. One 17 Yard dumpster and three (yup, three) 1-800-Got-Junk full dumpster trucks later (with one more still to go when we get rid of the last humongous pile in the garage), we have emptied the house of 51 years of stuff, and the Central Mass beauty went on the market today. If you’re interested in a house in Central Massachusetts with a great big basement, attic, garage, and closets, the place can be yours.

After six weeks of travail, I cannot tell you how good it feels to sit at this keyboard and not be lugging boxes.

By the way, about that place in the Berkshires? It doesn’t have an attic, the basement is fully furnished (it’s where the pool table is), and the closets are normal. Not much chance of another Great Accumulation. Moreover, although I find it hard to believe, odds are we won’t be here for 51 years.

___________________________

¹ Watch the video—it’s hilarious.

² Trivia moment—The Blob was Steve McQueen’s movie debut. He played the teenage hero.

 

 

 

 

Tags: ,
Posted in Misc.

A Pause In Israel’s Judicial Changes, But At What Price?

March 31st, 2023 by Tom Lynch

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the U.S. and it have created a bilateral relationship based on tangible, steadily increasing security and economic interests, not just shared values. Israel has become a lynchpin in our efforts to achieve stability in the middle east (Our success in that regard has been dubious, at best). In fact, at the final presidential debate of the 2012 campaign season, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney mentioned Israel some 30 times, more than any other country except Iran. Both candidates called the Jewish state “a true friend,” pledging to stand with it through thick and thin. And we’ve done that. Since the end of World War II, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, assistance totaling more than $158 billion (non-inflation adjusted).

Unlike most democracies, Israel lacks a written Constitution, functioning, rather, under what are called “Basic Laws.”

The Basic Laws, enacted at various times between 1958 and 2018, number thirteen and are mostly rather vague. The 8th Basic Law, The Judiciary, enacted in 1984, lays out common sensible judicial requirements about honesty, transparency, judicial probity and process, and the like.

The Basic Laws place a heavy burden on the country’s judiciary and its Supreme Court, the High Court of Justice, making it the final arbiter. By nature, the Court is always involved in a tense relationship with its sister institution, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. In this regard, both are critical pillars in Israel’s foundational house of democracy.

Four months ago, a coalition comprised of the conservative Likud Party and five other far right and ultra-orthodox Parties won a national election and returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power as Prime Minister for the sixth time, despite his standing trial in three current corruption cases for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The coalition has a one vote majority with 61 seats out of 120 Knesset members.

Immediately upon taking control, the Coalition introduced a number of judicial law changes aimed at weakening the Supreme Court, chief among them one that would enable the Knesset to overrule Supreme Court decisions by a simple majority, which is currently what Netanyahu’s coalition enjoys. The reason for this seems to be that the Prime Minister’s coalition partners, without whom he cannot survive, blame the Court for stifling the establishment of new settlements in the West Bank and for being lackeys of the left. Their anger about this has been growing for years, but until now they have been unable to do anything about it. Entering a coalition with the weakened Netanyahu provides the opportunity they have long sought. If they are successful and this particular change were to become law, Israel’s Supreme Court would no longer be the “final arbiter.” Rather, it would serve at the pleasure of the Knesset.

This is a monumental change in the 8th Basic Law, in which Section 17 says,

“A verdict of a court in the first instance, may be appealed by right, save a verdict of the Supreme Court.” (emphasis added)

Further, Section 22, entitled, Stability of the law, reads,

“Emergency regulations do not have the power to change this law, to temporarily suspend its validity, or to subject it to conditions.”

Clearly, the authors of Basic Law 8 intended for the judiciary’s Supreme Court to be independent and unfettered.

The proposed judicial changes, like an oncoming train wreck, could be catastrophic for Israeli democracy.

Last week, the Knesset passed a portion of the proposed changes — a measure making it harder to remove Netanyahu, after which the prime minister announced his intention to take a more hands-on role in pushing the reforms, something he had guaranteed he would not do given the cited corruption charges and his ongoing Trials.¹

Hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets every weekend in protest. The Army, heavily dependent on highly-trained reservists, who have threatened not to obey orders if the judicial changes actually pass into law, has warned that national security is in serious jeopardy. All of Israel’s western allies have told Netanyahu he is making a terrible mistake by continuing to push for Knesset approval of the judicial changes.

Last Saturday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has become increasingly concerned that a growing number of reservists — including cyber warfare teams, pilots, and intelligence officers — have been skipping training duty in recent weeks because of the proposed changes, publicly urged Netanyahu to at least wait on the reforms until the Knesset returns from recess in a month, arguing pushing forward would make Israel vulnerable to attack. “This is a clear, immediate and tangible danger to the security of the state,” he said. “For the sake of our security, for the sake of our unity, it is our duty to return to the arena of dialogue.”

For this candid advice, Netanyahu promptly fired him.

The most vociferously far-right of his coalition partners, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, vowed to resign from the government if Netanyahu halts the judicial change plan. If Ben-Gvir resigned, the coalition would collapse, which would leave Netanyahu less protected with respect to his corruption charges.

That may have been the one-too-many straws that broke the enervated camel’s back. On Monday, in an address to the nation, Netanyahu announced a pause in the judicial change agenda. Not a stop; a pause, and only until the Knesset returns from its April recess. In his speech, Netanyahu blasted protesters for urging Reservists to avoid reporting for duty and Reservists for heeding that advice, saying, “The State of Israel can’t exist without the Israel Defense Forces, and the IDF cannot exist if there’s refusal to serve. Such refusal will be the end of our country.”

It would appear that Netanyahu’s coalition partners have him right where they want him. Before Mondays “pause” speech Ben-Gvir announced he would not resign and that he had agreed to back Netanyahu’s call for a pause in exchange for the Prime Minister’s promise to create an Israeli “National Guard” under Ben-Givr’s control.

This was confirmed when Ben Gvir circulated a letter to media outlets, signed by Netanyahu, in which the prime minister promised to raise the issue of forming such a body within the National Security Ministry in the cabinet meeting two days from now. Achieved through nothing but extortion, what would a new National Guard mean when placed under the control of Israel’s most far-right cabinet extremist? It seems a terrible price Netanyahu is willing to pay to stay in power.

Left out of any of these discussions are the 1.6 million Arab citizens of Israel who make up 17.2% of the population. Whatever rules, compromises, or judicial changes come out of this mess will affect them in a tangible and meaningful way, which could be far more impactful than the current political hijinks.

My modest proposal is that Israel immediately get to work on writing a constitution, as most modern democracies have done. They could dust off the one John Adams wrote for Massachusetts in 1780. It’s the oldest in the world and the model for America’s. It has stood the test of time. If Netanyahu were to announce such a move, saying the judicial changes are on a longer pause pending completion of the draft constitution, the warring factions may see the benefit of open dialogue rather than polemical threats.

Call me Pollyanna.

__________________

¹ Israel’s attorney general issued a sharp rebuke on Friday, warning that Netanyahu had broken the law by announcing his direct involvement in the overhaul while facing criminal charges — a stern statement that raised the specter of a constitutional crisis.

Tags: ,
Posted in International relations, Israel, Law

A Sad Update And One Sweet Diversion

March 29th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

Once again, into the darkness

So, here we are again.

In Nashville two days ago, the U.S. suffered its 131st Mass Shooting of 2023. That’s 131 in 86 days, for a rate of 1.52 a day — thus far.

This was also another Mass Murder, the 13th of the year. What’s the difference?

The Gun Violence Archive, which began documenting gun violence in the U.S. in 2013, defines a mass shooting as a gun violence incident in which four or more people are killed or injured, excluding the suspect or perpetrator.¹

The FBI does not have a definition for mass shootings; rather, it tracks mass murders, which it defines as an incident in which four or more people are killed.  It includes gun violence, bombings or any other incident where four or more are killed. Mass Murder would statistically be a subset of Mass Shooting.

Consequently, in the first 86 days of 2023, there have been 131 mass shootings and 13 mass murders. The event in Nashville added to both categories.

Regardless of definitions, what really matters is that in the first 86 days of 2023, 10,009 people who were alive to welcome in 2023 on New Year’s Eve are now dead by gun violence, 4,267 by homicide; 5,742 by suicide.

Gun violence incidents rocketed to another level in America in 2020 as the Coronavirus gripped the country, and since then they have not slackened at all.

I have periodically been writing about gun violence since 2005, and most recently just two months ago in January of this year.

I’m not going to rehash what I’ve written previously. I urge you to read the column from this past January. It says it all — except for one thing. It doesn’t discuss the children. In yesterday’s obscene brutality, the obviously deranged shooter killed three nine-year-old children. They were Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney, and Hallie Scruggs. Also killed were Mike Hill, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Cynthia Peak, 61.

This is how bad things have become: guns kill more children than any other cause.

As I reported in May of 2022, the US dwarfs the 28 most economically developed countries in the 38-member OECD in deaths by firearms. Not only is our firearm death rate nearly 25 times higher than our OECD companions, our total homicide rate is eight times higher. In America, 98 people die by firearms every single day. In those other 28 OECD countries, with a combined population more than twice that of ours (712 million vs. 331 million), that number is 19.

I have found people to be mostly the same the world over. Many are smart; some are not. Many are wealthy; most are not. But we in America have two things other countries do not have: more guns than people and sky-high homicide rates.  The first leads to the second. Why? Because guns can kill fast and from a distance. It’s hard to outrun a bullet. Other methods often take some time during which a victim has a chance to run away. Countries with far fewer guns have far fewer homicides. Simple as that.

Rather than doing something about the root problem — 393.3 million guns — we’ll continue to nibble around the edges mistaking movement for progress. And more nine-year-old children will die.

What kind of allegedly enlightened society allows this to happen?

Only ours.

And now for a sweet diversion

Do you know what rheology is?

To save you the trouble of looking up the answer, I’ll tell you.

Rheology is the branch of physics that deals with the deformation and flow of matter, especially the non-Newtonian flow of liquids and the plastic flow of solids.

There. Now you know.

This is a story of rheology, an Oreo cookie, and how a couple of MIT kids may have too much time on their hands.

Graduate student Crystal Owens and undergraduate Max Fan set out to solve a cookie conundrum that I’m sure has baffled you forever: whether there is a way to twist apart an Oreo and have the filling stick to both wafers. For Owens, the research “was a fun, easy way to make my regular physics and engineering work more accessible to the general public.”

According to Fan, “There’s a fascinating problem of trying to get the cream to distribute evenly between the two wafers, which turns out to be really hard.”

In fact, they couldn’t do it. PhD candidate Owens, who studies the properties of complex fluids, said, “Videos of the manufacturing process show that they put the first wafer down, then dispense a ball of cream onto that wafer before putting the second wafer on top. Apparently that little time delay may make the cream stick better to the first wafer.”

In the lab, the research team subjected Oreo cookies to standard rheology tests (whatever they are) and found that no matter the flavor or amount of stuffing, the cream at the center of an Oreo almost always sticks to one wafer when twisted open. I have no idea how many of the failures were eventually consumed, but I think it would have been a shame to waste any of them. Maybe they had after work Oreo and Gator Aid² parties.

And to show you how MIT students go to lengths you’ve probably never dreamed of to solve a problem, Owens and Fan designed a 3D-printable “Oreometer” — a simple device that firmly grasps an Oreo cookie and uses pennies and rubber bands to control the twisting force that progressively twists the cookie open. Instructions for the tabletop device can be found here. They are marvelous, and I include them, because, you never know, you might want to try this at home.

So, what do you do after you’ve done a research study on Oreo cookies and built a 3D-printable Oreometer, to boot? Why, you publish a paper detailing your research.  On Oreology, the fracture and flow of ‘milk’s favorite cookie appears today in Kitchen Flows, a special issue of the journal Physics of Fluids.

Get your copy now.

_________________________

¹ Two other reputable non-profit organizations track gun violence in the U.S.: Everytown Research & Policy and the Giffords Law Center.

² Gator Aid is another wonderful creation invented in a University lab, in this case the University of Florida’s.

 

 

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Education, Gun Violence, Israel, Misc.

Has The Past Become Prologue Again?

March 24th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

On 30 January 1933, the 85-year-old German hero of World War 1, President Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Nazi leader Adolph Hitler as Reich Chancellor, which was akin to being named Prime Minister. Hindenburg and his German Cabinet, many of whom shared Hitler’s Nationalist positions, thought they could control the loose-cannon Hitler better if he were in Government rather than out of it. Sort of like bringing the camel into the tent, where you hope he’ll spit out, rather than leaving him outside, where you know he’ll spit in.

Thirty-five days later, on 5 March 1933, a coalition of political parties led by the Nazis won the national parliamentary election.

Just as Hindenburg and his Cabinet thought they could control Hitler, so did his coalition party partners. They were all wrong. And, just like that, the 14-year Weimar Republic was dead.

Despite winning only 45% of the vote — 55% of the country having voted against them — the Nazis were now in charge, and within three months the coalition was a thing of the past, with every other political party in Germany having gone the way of the Wooly Mammoth. The Nazis, using what they called “coordination,” had banned them all.

Immediately, Hitler’s Storm Troopers, whose numbers had grown from 400,000 in 1932 to nearly 2 million in January of 1933 (they outnumbered the Jewish population by close to 4 top 1¹) amped up their brutal intimidation and persecution of Jews, Communists and homosexuals. According to the World Committee’s Brown Book, by the end of June they had murdered 43 Jews and severely beaten hundreds more, but the chroniclers point out these estimates are likely quite low.

The Prussian police force was the largest in Germany, and Hitler put Hermann Göring in charge of it. He immediately  populated it with unhinged Storm Troopers wearing police uniforms. They arrested anyone thought to be an “unreliable” German. This included Jews, members of the non-Nazi German press, intellectual elites, homosexuals, and more Jews. In fact, so many were arrested that the country’s prisons could not contain them all. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, solved that problem. On 20 March, just two weeks after the Nazis’ election victory, he announced to the press that “a concentration camp for political prisoners” would be opened at Dachau, just outside Munich. It was to be Germany’s first concentration camp and set an ominous precedent. Two days later, four police trucks ferried 200 of the Nazis’ newly ordained “criminals” to their swell new digs. The citizens of Dachau watched them go by.

Three weeks later, to show they meant business, Himmler’s guards took four Jews out of their cells, brought them outside, stood them against a wall, and shot all four dead.

Dachau, however, was not an improvised solution to an overcrowding problem. As far back as 1921, Hitler had declared that when they came to power, the Nazis would imprison German Jews in concentration camps along the lines of those used by the British in the Boer war.

But the Nazis did much more in the first three months of the Third Reich than round up their version of the usual suspects. They also eviscerated higher education. On 7 April 1933, the Reichstag, the German parliament now controlled by Hitler, passed the Enabling Act, which contained a civil service provision that provided for the dismissal of “politically unreliable” state employees. This was a catch-all phrase for Jews, Communists, non-Aryans, as well as  anyone who had had the temerity to criticize the Nazis. And since, unlike other countries, all colleges and universities were state-owned, that meant many of Germany’s best and brightest were now out of work and facing physical danger. This included 20 past or future Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein was one of them — Germany’s loss; Princeton’s gain. But the Nazis never cared.

And they did not stop with professors and scientists. On 10 May 1933, at the instigation of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, German university students organized an “act against unGerman spirit” in nineteen university towns across the country. They compiled a list of “unGerman” books, seized them from all the libraries they could find, piled them up in public squares, and set them all alight. Goebbels joined the students at the Berlin burning, the biggest, telling them they were “doing the right thing in committing the evil spirit of the past to the flames.” One after another, books were thrown onto the funeral pyre of intellect.

We’re not burning books in America — yet, but we sure are banning them.

That is how it started in that most momentous of years, 1933, a year scholars have likened to the Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 France.

But in reality, the Nazis’ rise to power began with a quickly-put-down revolution in Munich immediately following the end of World War 1. Right up to the very end, the German military and the Kaiser had convinced the German people the country was winning the war. The Armistice signed on 11 November 1918 came as a huge shock, and the people felt they had been betrayed or, as one man put it, “Knifed in the back by the ruling class.” Then came the Treaty of Versailles with its draconian terms of surrender.

Out of the shock and humiliation of that defeat, a small group of radical, fanatical zealots began to slowly poison the soul of what, at that time, was the largest and most advanced country in Europe. In the 14 years of the Weimar Republic between the end of the war and 5 March 1933, the Nazis gradually unleashed a cultural revolution that eventually became an unstoppable national revolution — which ended 12 years later, deep in the ground of a Berlin bunker.

The Nazis did not come to power overnight, but the circumstances of the 1920s and early 1930s sowed fertile ground for their eventual ascendancy. People wrote them off at the beginning. But an economic depression, tremendous bitterness over the perceived betrayal at the end of the war along with the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty, and one man of messianic and evil determination was all it took. And millions upon millions paid the price.

Americans knew what was happening in 1933 Germany. Our journalists covered it in detail, and our newspapers published what they wrote: the beatings, the discovery of Jews lying in gutters covered in blood, the book burnings. All of it. But we had our own problems back then, so nobody did a thing to help. Right here, it’s fair to ask, could anything have been done, by anyone, to reverse the unfolding terror. The behavior of the Nazis had been horrific, but the regime had been in power for only a few months. At the same time, the entire world was still in the midst of a global depression, and most countries looked upon what was happening in Germany as a German problem that Germans would fix. At that point, no one cared. Germans had done it to themselves and had walked into that biggest of bear traps with their eyes wide shut.

In America right now we are undergoing our own cultural revolution, and it has some of the same chaotic characteristics of the early 1920s in Germany. Of course it’s different, and we’ve built systems that we hope will withstand the current partisan fanaticism. But January 6th really happened, and it could have been catastrophically worse, just as Adolph Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch really happened in November 1923, ten years prior to his coming to power. We might want to note that, while 335 of the January 6th insurrectionists have been sentenced to prison thus far, Hitler and his putsch cohorts also went to prison.

It’s what happened afterwards that made all the difference.

____________________

¹ According to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were approximately 523,000 Jews living in Germany in January, 1933.

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in History, Politics, Racism

Time And Time Again, It’s Hubris That Does Us In

March 22nd, 2023 by Tom Lynch

Trying to follow, much less get your head around, America’s ongoing culture wars, ridiculous partisanship, and all the bile spouted repeatedly by hypocritical politicians is like being at a Rappers Convention. It’s constant chaos.

In the middle of that rancid daily lunacy, we might be forgiven for missing a significant milestone: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Make that the second invasion.

In January 1991, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the U.S. went to war with Iraq to free the country of Kuwait (and all its oil), which Iraq had invaded and taken over in August, five months earlier. America had 33 allies in the venture including most Arab states. Iraq had no allies. Not one.

After American and British airpower destroyed more than 30% of the Iraqi military’s capability, the ground operation, Operation Desert Sabre, brilliantly planned and executed under the leadership of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, lasted all of 100 hours before Saddam Hussein was forced to accept a cease fire.

And that’s where it stopped. President Bush, General Schwarzkopf, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell decided not to continue on to Baghdad, which frustrated a lot of hawkish politicians.

It was the right decision. The war had been won, Kuwait freed, and Hussein humbled and forced to agree to international inspections to root out any weapons of mass destruction he might have stockpiled. Moving on to Baghdad would have mired the U.S. down in a protracted slog, and the Arab allies would never have agreed, anyway. For that matter, it’s likely none of our allies would have agreed.

The 1991 invasion showed American leadership at its finest. The 2003 invasion, the second invasion, showed it at its worst, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.

President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion demonstrated in vivid colors what hubris can do to otherwise rational people. After 9/11, our job was to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy al Queda. Nearly every country in the world was on our side. Then came the stupidity of Iraq.

Claiming without a shred of verified evidence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, — it didn’t — the Administration invaded. Soon, we had taken over the country. We were the dog who caught the bus.

Tragically, Bush did not have his father’s wisdom (remember “Mission Accomplished?”), and he and his neocon associates believed they could conquer and rebuild Iraq in the image of America, just as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had believed the same about Vietnam. All of these five presidents were catastrophically wrong.

Nearly three million U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2001. Twenty-five hundred are still in Iraq today. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, more than 7,000 of our troops had died there by the end of 2019. Thousands more were wounded, many of those maimed for life.

Just as so many Americans now have experience fighting, dying and being wounded in the Middle East, I have experience in Southeast Asia, where more than 50,000 of my brothers in arms died in a hostile place.

Thirty-five years after I landed in Saigon and got to participate in one of America’s worst mistakes — until then, — President Bush and his Neocons  dropped us into another awful, no-win position. He and men with names like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Kristol, et al, were blinded by the bright lights of “American exceptionalism.” Few, if any of them, had ever known a day of military service. They knew the right people and either had deferments, lots of them, or, like George Bush, were weekenders. Although it appears to have been fine for weekenders of Mr. Bush’s social and political status to skip those tiresome drills if they proved inconvenient.

A lifetime spent walking war’s sanitized sidelines, never hearing that unforgettable and very special sound a bullet makes as it whizzes past your ear,  may prevent one from appreciating the chaotic hell of war and from grasping how terrifying it really ought to be to rip men and women from the fabric of their families to face the horrifying prospect of fighting and dying in a strange land for a counterfeit cause.

The Iraq war has been a national nightmare, but what I always found most horrifying about it was that once we were in it nobody, especially the egotists who tossed us into that deepest of pits, ever had any idea of how to get us out of it, which is exactly the same thing that happened to us in Vietnam. Vietnam, where lessons should have been learned, but weren’t. Instead, they were swept under the nation’s political rug for posterity to trip over. And it did.

In the pantheon of man-made catastrophes, our wars in Vietnam and Iraq have been monumental achievements.

Happy anniversary.

 

Tags: ,
Posted in History, Leadership

The Calendar, The Nuts, And A Long-Ago Time In A Faraway Place

March 20th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

No political punching today. This year’s terrific NCAA tournament (my bracket was busted in about a minute and a half) has put me in a good frame of mind.

So, let me tell you a story.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a 23-year-old, newly minted, Infantry 2nd Lieutenant Airborne Ranger with my name spent a fair amount of time in a little woebegone country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam.

In Vietnam, I took command of a platoon of about 30 draftee soldiers, none of whom wanted to be there and all of whom never understood why they were. There were no college graduates among that lot, and a few never finished high school. They were America’s flotsam and jetsam, and they all knew it. I would grow to love every one of them.

Month after month, my guys and I patrolled the mountains in the north of South Vietnam, occasionally encountering North Vietnamese Regulars who were doing the same thing. Those were interesting meetings. We didn’t talk much when we met, but we did frequently have a somewhat frank exchange of views.

Our Platoon had some memorable moments in Vietnam, such as The March to the Sea, The Rescue, The Whistling Mortar Round, The Search for the Body That Turned Out to Be a Piece of Wood, and The Flying Flywheel. But those are stories for another day. For right now, for today, we’re telling the story of The Calendar and the Nuts.

Four months before the end of my first Vietnam tour, the Army promoted me to 1st Lieutenant, made me say “goodbye” to my guys, sent a Huey chopper to fly me out of the jungle, and gave me a staff job on Firebase Vegel in northern South Vietnam. A firebase was a temporary army camp built by the Corps of Engineers on top of a mountain. It supplied the troops in its area both logistically and militarily. And by “militarily” I mean weapons, ammunition, and helicopter gunship support and transportation. Firebases were cushier than the jungle, but often more dangerous, because they were stationery targets. That was made apparent to me a number of times in vivid ways.

My job on Vegel was to dream up crazy search and destroy operations for the “grunts” in the jungle, the crazier the better. I did my best to make them crazy enough to satisfy the Commanders, but not crazy enough to get our folks killed. It was not easy.

The Army of North Vietnam and their comrades in the south, the Viet Cong, were a determined foe. They were fighting with biblical devotion for a purpose they believed in — their country. They weren’t going anywhere until the war was over and they had won. We, on the other hand, were the political pawns, the shmucks who were there because we had to be, and none of us liked it all that much. Wasn’t our country. And all of us knew, with a fair degree of certainty, the date we were scheduled to go home — if we could stay alive long enough.

With two months to go in the country with the biggest mosquitos on earth, I began to get a bit anxious. I knew guys who had come to untimely ends with only a few days left, one, a good friend, within three hours of leaving. So, realizing I needed a diversion to take my mind off things, I decided to create one — my very own 60 day, Short-Timer’s Calendar.

I confess while deep in the jungle in the 1960s my admiration for and envy of Hugh Heffner knew no bounds. Consequently, my Short-Timer’s Calendar was the centerfold of the June 1970 Playboy magazine. To build the Calendar, I enlisted the aid of my Battalion Commander Bulldog Carter (that’s right, Bulldog), and Buck Kernan, my partner who went on to become a Lieutenant General, like his father before him. The three of us divided the luscious photo into 60 puzzle-like areas counting down from 60 to one. The trajectory of the progression became increasingly lascivious.

Thereafter, we held a nightly, candle-lit ceremony in the bunker occupied by Buck and me.

⏺⏺⏺

But before I describe the ceremony, I have to tell you about the Macadamia nuts.

During Vietnam, soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in that hellhole were allowed a ten-day R&R (Rest and Relaxation) vacation, usually a little after the mid-point of their tour. Unmarried soldiers usually went either to Bangkok, Thailand, or Australia.

Most of the time the married folks went to Hawaii to meet their wives. So, when my turn came, I hopped a plane at Da Nang airbase halfway up the coast of the South China Sea and flew off to meet my wife, Marilyn, in Honolulu.

When we first checked into our hotel and got to our room, we discovered the hotel had left a small jar of macadamia nuts for us. Up until then I had never tasted a macadamia nut in my life, but once I tossed the first one down the gullet, I was hooked. I subsequently learned Hawaii is noted for its macadamia nuts. There’s even a Macadamia Nut Visitor Center somewhere on Oahu.

You may forgive me for saying with the exception of the inside of our hotel room and the balcony outside it on Waikiki Beach, the one with a beautiful view of Diamond Head up the coast, we never did see much of Hawaii for the first four or five days.

But toward the end of the R&R, after we’d come up for air, seen the sights, sampled the beach, and done the obligatory Don Ho nightclub show, we went to the PX (Post Exchange) at Scofield Army Barracks and bought a large jar of Macadamia nuts for me to take back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, little things became luxurious delicacies.

The next day, Marilyn and I boarded our separate planes, she to return to the civilized world of Massachusetts, and me to head back to something completely different.

⏺⏺⏺

Back to the ceremony.

The bunker assigned to Buck and me had a single bunk bed. There was only one bed, because Buck and I took 12-hour shifts in the Operations Center, where we prevented the dominos from falling and kept the world safe for democracy. One of us would end his shift, head to the bunker, wave as he passed the other guy, and crash into the bed.

Every night, at 2000 hours — 8 p.m. to you — the three of us, Bulldog, Buck and I, would gather in the bunker. I had scrounged a small table which I had placed against the wall to the side of the bed. I had lovingly pinned Miss June to the wall above the table. At the appointed hour, I would light the two candles I had placed on each side of the table under the pin-up. I would open the jar of Macadamia nuts, which occupied a special spot in the center of the table, and hand each of my comrades one nut, taking one for myself. We would then spend a moment in quiet reflection, meditating on the bounty before us, after which I would, with a red marker purloined from the Ops Center, X-out that day’s descending number on Miss June’s tantalizing body.

We would then eat the nuts.

We did that for 59 consecutive nights. Fifty-nine red Xs covered Miss June. We were down to ONE! On the final night, we held a special ceremony, inviting the Battalion XO, the other six staff officers, the Battalion Sgt. Major, and the Chaplain, Father McBride, into the bunker, which became almost as crowded as the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera.” We gave everyone a Macadamia nut that night, and, to great applause, I placed the last red X on Miss June’. Even Father McBride smiled.

Then, in a service worthy of priestly ordination, I passed the jar of Macadamia nuts to Buck — who, because he still had six weeks to go, later on would replace my centerfold with his centerfold and continue the tradition. We retired my centerfold to a place of prominence on the side wall of the Ops Center, where it looked down on all the guys, and where Bulldog could see it every day, its 60 red Xs pointing the way to his bit of heaven back in the U.S. Six weeks later, Buck’s would hang his beside it.

The next day, I choppered south, boarded a chartered Pan Am plane with about three hundred other happy survivors, and flew home to what we called “the world.”

Since then, Macadamia nuts have occupied a special place in my heart.

Tags:
Posted in History, Misc.

Updates On Recent Stories I Covered

March 3rd, 2023 by Tom Lynch

Israel’s judicial crisis continues as far right bills advance in Knesset

In mid-February I wrote about Israel’s descent into judicial chaos.

Israel had gone through three elections in late 2022 to elect a new government. To regain power, the historically conservative Likud Party, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, joined in a coalition with five right-wing and religiously conservative parties, some of which are hugely influenced, perhaps dominated, by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, known as the Haredim. The coalition won the third election, and Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the sixth time. Six days after the election the government filed bills in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to severely limit the power of the country’s Supreme Court in that:

  1. A simple majority in the Knesset, 61 votes out of 120, would have the power to annul Supreme Court rulings. This would enable the government of the day to pass legislation without fear of it being struck down. It is called the “override” provision, in that the Knesset could override a Supreme Court ruling;
  2. The Supreme Court’s ability to revoke administrative decisions by the government on the grounds of “reasonability” (what would a reasonable person say about this?), would end, significantly decreasing judicial oversight; and,
  3. For the Supreme Court to strike down a Knesset-passed law would require 80% of the court’s 15 judges voting for such a ruling. But even if that were to happen, a simple Knesset majority could “override” the ruling.

At the time I wrote about this there was a singular complication: Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, actually three trials, for corruption. If he is convicted of anything and appeals, the coalition government could override any Supreme Court ruling. Some might say this places Netanyahu at the mercy of his coalition partners.

Update

In order for these measure to become law requires passing three readings in Knesset committees. Last week, in a long and tense plenary session, the combined bill passed its first reading in the Knesset. Yesterday, the Knesset’s Constitution Committee advanced the bill for its second reading.

The judicial crisis was only made worse last Sunday when, in revenge for the killing of two Jewish Israeli brothers as they drove through the West Bank town of Hawara, near the city of Nablus, a mob of Jewish settlers attacked the town, torching 36 homes and 15 cars. The Palestinian Red Crescent reported one death and 98 Palestinians wounded in the attack. Three ambulances were also destroyed.

The attack was met with a public outpouring of support from settler leaders and Knesset members. Moreover, the Israeli coalition Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a firebrand of the first order, told the settlers, “Hawara must be destroyed.” It nearly was.

The U.S. condemned the violence in unusually strong terms. “Just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said.

It does not seem too much of a stretch to conclude the new coalition government, with its uber-nationalistic sway, has emboldened the highly nationalistic settlers who continue to gobble up land and force Palestinians into ever more woeful conditions.

Israel’s other western allies, for example the UK and France, have also condemned Sunday’s violence and, along with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have told Mr. Netanyahu—to his face—that the judicial reforms he is championing are a serious threat to the future of their relationship. So far, the Prime Minister and his coalition partners are calling their bluff.

At this point, it does not appear this situation will end well—for anyone.

Mississippi extends Medicaid postpartum coverage duration

In February, I wrote about maternal mortality in America. Bottom line: It’s the highest in the developed world. At that time, I wrote:

Federal law requires Medicaid to cover postpartum care for only 60 days following birth, which is one of the prime reasons for our lagging maternal mortality global performance. In the other OECD countries, mothers not only receive postpartum care for a year, they also average 51 weeks of paid maternity leave. (The U.S. is the only OECD country with no requirement for paid maternity leave.)

The  American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) created an option for states to extend postpartum coverage for Medicaid beneficiaries from 60 days to a full year. Under the Act, the option was scheduled to expire in 2027. Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, the 12-month extended Medicaid postpartum coverage option was made permanent. Now once states take up the option to extend the postpartum period from 60 days to 12 months, federal matching funds will continue to flow. Thus far, 35 states have already taken advantage of the option and the federal cash that goes with it.

Nine other states have legislation pending to follow the 35. Mississippi is one of them.

Update

I can’t tell you how happy I am to report that yesterday the Mississippi legislature passed the postpartum permanent extension, and Governor Tate Reeves signed it into law. Reeves had been opposed to the measure, but had a change of heart when he realized that a lot more babies were about to be born in Mississippi due to the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the state’s strict (to say the least) anti-abortion laws, which meant some mothers could die without the postpartum extension, and the politically astute Reeves did not want to be the one taking incoming fire for helping that to happen. To which I say: Whatever works.

Mississippi’s joining the postpartum extension club only happened because Division of Medicaid Executive Director Drew Snyder, whose department reports to the Governor and who for months has refused to take a stance on postpartum coverage extension (how medically courageous of him, eh?), wrote a letter on 27 February to House Speaker Philip Gunn voicing his newfound support for the legislation’s passage (notably, after his boss, Governor Reeves had his change of heart). Gunn had been vehemently opposed to the measure, believing it put the state in the awful position of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, something he has vowed would never happen. In his letter, Snyder assured Gunn that permanently extending Medicaid postpartum coverage would not equate to expanding Medicaid a la the Affordable Care Act, and he urged the Speaker to come on board for all the reasons that had swayed Governor Reeves. You know, all those babies about to be born in Mississippi. He also reminded Gunn the state has a $3.1 billion surplus, the annual cost of the extension is pegged at $7.1 million, and the feds will chip in more than $35 million. Reading Snyder’s letter is like reading George Orwell.

Whatever the reasons, Mississippi has done the right thing.

Ely Lilly to drop the cost of basic insulin to $35 per vial

I have written a number of times about what I consider the obscene price of insulin for Type 1 diabetics. See here and here for the history of the discovery and how we got to this point. Bottom line, as I wrote in 2018, the three discovers of insulin, led by Frederick Banting, who won the Nobel Prize for it:

sold the patent to the University of Toronto for the princely sum of $3.00. When asked why he didn’t cash in on his discovery, Banting said, “Insulin is my gift to mankind.” With Banting’s blessing, the University licensed insulin’s manufacturing to drug companies, royalty free. If drug companies didn’t have to pay royalties, Banting thought they would keep the price of insulin low.

And they did. For decades.

But patents expire, and capitalism being what it is, people get greedy, and greed is why we have no generic, low-cost insulin today and why, over the past 20 years, insulin prices have risen anywhere from 800% to 1,157%, depending on the variety and brand. It’s why, lacking health insurance, some Type 1 diabetics have recently been driven to ration their precious insulin. Some of them have died.

Update

Yesterday, the Ely Lilly company, the first company to license Banting’s discovery, announced price reductions of 70% for its most commonly prescribed insulins and an expansion of its Insulin Value Program that caps patient out-of-pocket costs at $35 or less per month. In its press release, the company said it is:

  • Cutting the list price of its non-branded insulin, Insulin Lispro Injection…to $25 a vial. Effective May 1, 2023, it will be the lowest list-priced mealtime insulin available, and less than the price of a Humalog® vial in 1999.
  • Cutting the list price of Humalog® …, Lilly’s most commonly prescribed insulin, and Humulin® (insulin human) injection … by 70%, effective in Q4 2023.
  • Launching RezvoglarTM …injection, a basal insulin that is biosimilar to, and interchangeable with, Lantus® (insulin glargine) injection, for $92 per five pack of KwikPens®, a 78% discount to Lantus, effective April 1, 2023.

Lilly also said:

  • Effective immediately, Lilly will automatically cap out-of-pocket costs at $35 at participating retail pharmacies for people with commercial insurance using Lilly insulin.
  • People who don’t have insurance can continue to go to InsulinAffordability.com and immediately download the Lilly Insulin Value Program savings card to receive Lilly insulins for $35 per month.

This, of course, is marvelous news for the 1.3 million Type 1 diabetics in the country not on Medicare, which already has a $35 cap thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

It is not an exaggeration to say insulin made Eli Lilly and Company and Novo Nordisk two of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. It also hasn’t hurt the bottom line of Sanofi, the company that rounds out the insulin producing triumvirate and is the world’s fifth largest pharma by sales. I think it is a good bet these last two will quickly follow Lilly’s lead.

The greed of these three companies over the last two or three decades has hurt a lot of people, both physically and economically. Let’s hope this move by Lilly is the first step in making amends.

 

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in health care, International relations, Medical Issues, Public policy

« Older Entries