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A time of reckoning

I recently read a history and a biography that are both centered on the American Revolution. It reminded me that for the founding fathers, the ineluctable reality was that they were risking their lives for their beliefs.   Josh Marshall has a piece up at TPM about Trump’s effort to extort control over the 2026 elections, notwithstanding that the Constitution explicitly gives control of elections to state. He argues that state officials may face existential pressure from Trump to cede that control to him. “It is incumbent on those state officials not simply to “resist” but to refuse, to lean into the full power of their state sovereignty under the federal constitution. States have just as much authority to defend the integrity of the federal constitution and obedience to it as the White House or, for that matter, the Supreme Court. Not every question of what the U.S. Constitution means is up for genuine debate. This one, for example, is not. States are not only entitled to insist on...
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High intelligence doesn’t predict good judgement

I taught medical students for over 30 years. The bar to admission at Saint Louis University Medical School was pretty high for metrics like GPA and MCAT scores. But as a professor, I realized that crossing those bars was no guarantee of sound judgement.   Erica Schwartz, Trump’s CDC director nominee, wasn’t a SLUSOM grad*, but she is a case study supporting my contention that, in humans, the traits of high intelligence and good judgement are unlinked. “As the hearing proceeded, I began to hear rumblings in my public health group chats. The hearing was not going well. Schwartz was failing to give straightforward answers to lay-ups. Clips began appearing on my social media feeds.  It was not good . Before long, it looked like a complete implosion.    “Schwartz would not give clear statements debunking links between vaccines and autism.  Ouch.   “She did not know that the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health is, for all practical purposes,  closed . (This i...
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Quote of the day

It’s another example of how we are in this weird and uncanny political moment in which Trump’s politics have broken free of the constraints of public opinion. (It’s reminiscent of a mob bust-out where you rapidly strip a business of its value with no concern for the future because you’re just going to burn it down and collect the insurance pay out.) Presidents often pursue some policies in which they are on the wrong side of public opinion. That’s in the nature of politics. What we’re seeing today is in a different category, a president acting as though there are no limits on his power even as those limits gather round him. While people really do use AI, AI data centers rate in popularity terms down with child molesters. And yes, perhaps that’s an indicator when it comes to Trump. What we’re seeing here and elsewhere is a presidency in YOLO mode, freed even from medium-term strategies and warnings and focused on cashing in, both politically and financially, in the short term.   ~Jo...
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Yes, Virginia, there’s arsenic in your rice

Whenever you read the conspiracy theories about fluoridated water, it’s a good idea to remember that much of the world’s water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, the correlation between natural fluoridation and lower incidence of dental caries is what lead to artificial water fluoridation.   There are plenty of other things to fret about if that’s how you want to spend the years that remain to you. One is dietary arsenic.  “All over the world, people eat rice, and lots of it. From congee and risotto to arroz con frijoles and biryani, it’s an essential ingredient in dishes integral to a variety of cuisines. But while this universal crop plays a foundational role in many diets, eating too much rice comes with a downside: It’s a significant source of the heavy metal arsenic.   “CR  first tested rice  for arsenic in 2012, and released  follow-up testing  in 2014. We recently conducted new tests to see if levels of inorganic arsenic, the more dangerous ...
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Two books for the sestercentennial

By now, we all know the Cliff Notes version of American’s founding: Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the colonists defeated the British at Yorktown and Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin wrote the Constitution, which the 13 colonies/states ratified enthusiastically. As an antidote to those cliché histories, I read a couple of good books on the period, a history and a biography.   The history book was “ Freedom around the globe: A world history of the American Revolution” by Sarah M.S Pearsall. The through-line of this book is that the “American Revolution” was one theater of a global war that also involved British colonies in Canadian North America, the Caribbean, South America Gibraltar and South Asia. And the combatants also included France and Spain. As Pearsall makes clear, Britain lost the American Revolution for reasons familiar to historians of empire—they simply exhausted their resources. By the battle of Yorktown, Cornwallis was fielding a wea...
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Quote of the day

Had he passed away in 2016, the mourning for him would have been universal. Someone might have named an airport, or a building, for him.   But the last decade  did  happen. And we can’t look past that. We can’t pretend that the “real” Lindsey Graham was the guy before 2016 and everything that’s happened since is just an unfortunate unpleasantness from which polite people should avert their eyes.   The Trump-era Lindsey Graham was the real Lindsey Graham, too. And that matters.   ~Jonathan V. Last
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Advances in solar power

For the last eight years we lived in St. Louis, we had rooftop solar. Ameren paid half the cost, and we got a 30% tax write-off on the rest. The 22 panels only exceeded consumption for a couple months a year. The total savings didn’t pay off the investment. No matter, we did our part to combat global warming in a state where >70% of electricity was generated from coal. Solar options have proliferated since we got involved: “ Plug-in solar , also called balcony or DIY solar, has taken off in Europe, especially in Germany, where perhaps   4 million households  have installed systems that can be   purchased from places like Ikea . Customers buy small panels, typically about the size of half a ping-pong table, then plug them into an electrical outlet. Energy flows from the panels into the home to power up appliances.   Set up   can be measured in minutes. “The units, which come with an inverter, range in capacity, typically between 200 and 1,200 watts, supplying ...
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