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Although I took piano lessons for about eight years from elementary school through high school, and I learned a few Bach pieces, I never attempted even the aria from The Goldberg Variations. The first time I can recall paying attention to the work was seeing a Youtube of Glenn Gould performing them. I bought a CD of Keith Jarrett performing the Variations on harpsichord. Then, I found Gould’s 1955 piano recording among several hundred LPs owned by the mother of a colleague. Recently, I watched a couple of Youtubes on the life of Gould that emphasized the transformative and controversial nature of his recordings. In the past few days, I binge-watched the 15 episodes of the 30 Bach Goldberg Variations podcast directed and narrated by Lowry Yankwich. He interviews nearly 30 people, mostly musicians, about what the Variations mean to them. At the end of each episode is a performance of 1-4 of the variations, with images of the scores. The episodes are chock full of stories about Bach and t...

  We sold the University City house one year ago today. We lived there for 35 years. We raised a daughter in it. I built my faculty career while living in it. That house was built in 1928, and treated us pretty well. We made lots of improvements over the years. I do miss the screened in back porch that we had for about the last 15 years. We also miss the many friends we had in St. Louis. Some we can see on FB, although it's not the same. We're well into our second year here in Rumford RI. The major home repairs have been made and it's starting to feel more like a home and less like an Airbnb. We still need Siri to tell us how to get to most places, so we need to work on the navigation project. Linda's into her second year of retirement and I'll retire next summer, so our lifestyles will be different, too. As long as we have our health, I look forward to the new experiences here in New England.

Vaccination is one of the great triumphs of humanity over infectious disease. Smallpox was such a plague that George Washington mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers in 1777. Prior to the polio vaccine, most Americans knew a friend or relative who contracted polio; today, it’s virtually unheard of, just like mumps and whooping cough. The COVID vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer, are a triumph of genetic engineering. If you’ve been vaccinated, it will almost certainly keep you out of the ED and the morgue. Sadly, there are some politicians and media personalities who lie about vaccines. RFK, Jr has made his brand as an anti-vaxxer. Tens of millions have been vaccinated against COVID—where are the tens of millions of vaccine deaths? Does anyone seriously believe that deaths on such a scale could be covered up by Fauci and Biden? Get a grip! The success of HPV vaccines hasn’t been attacked by the American right-wing extremists, perhaps because it’s ...

Not to put too fine a point on it, the recent chaos in the GOP-controlled House isn't a bug, it's a feature for the modern GOP. There isn't any daylight between Gym Jordan and Mike Johnson politically, but policy no longer matters to the GOP. It's just optics, and Johnson has (so far) mastered the avuncular optics necessary to win the speakership. But since the point is chaos, Johnson will preside over chaos, with the hope that voters will decide to elect an autocrat (Trump) who promises to make the trains run on time. Look, nobody elected the Bolsheviks when the Czar abdicated. The Kerensky government was weak and Lenin et al. exploited this to replace some semblance of democracy with dictatorship. Trump and his supporters (Steve Bannon et al.) are the modern American Bolsheviks. Yes, Russia in 2017 was a peasant agrarian society and America in the 21st century is an industrialized society, but there's nothing Democratic about the presidential elections, what with ...

There is absolutely zero reason for civilians to own these weapons. If you are not in the active military or law enforcement, get yourself a shotgun if you feel like you need a gun. And keep it in your house. "Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) says he is reversing his opposition to banning assault rifles from civilian ownership." https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/10/26/rep-jared-golden-assault-rifles-maine-mass-shooting-tsr-vpx.cnn

Stephen Schwarzman is CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone and is worth $32 billion. Here's what he thinks motivates people to work from home: “It was actually more profitable for them to stay home because one, they didn’t work as hard, regardless of what they told you. Second, they don’t spend money to commute. They can make their lunch at home. They don’t have to buy expensive clothes, so their incomes are higher.” How much to you suppose Schwarzman spends on commuting, lunch and clothes? If his employees are motivated by those savings, he's probably not paying them enough. Offer them a 10% raise and see what happens. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/26/business/remote-work-covid-efficiency/index.html

As train wrecks stop to gawk at the House GOP caucus, Josh Marshall has a sobering reminder: "Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism. "Chaos and strongmanism aren’t opposites but two sides of the same coin. One needs and breeds the other. As big a comedy as the House GOP Speaker debacle is, it illustrates the same basic challenges and choices we face as a society and perhaps more broadly abroad: distributed power, agreed upon rules on the one hand or chaos and domination on the other. That’s the civic democracy and authoritarianism question and it’s playing out before us in the House GOP cauc...

I first became a history autodidact in my 20s, trying to understand the difference between my worldview and those of my parents and in-laws. >100 histories and biographies later, I have a great appreciation of just how awful the 20th century was. In my lifetime, I remember political assassinations, race riots, the Vietnam war, recessions, 9/11, the anthrax scare and the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq. Not to mention COVID-19, which is still with us and mutating. It’s easy to be swept up in the present polycrisis and to believe things have never been worse. But over at jabberwocking.com, Kevin Drum provides a valuable antidote to recency bias: “The Great Recession peaked at 10% unemployment and stayed above 5% for seven years—compared to 11% and 27 years between 1970 and 1997. Wages for blue-collar workers went up during the Great Recession compared to a 7% decline during the Volcker Recession and a 40% decline during the Great Depression. The combination of 9/11 and bot...

Neither Linda nor I have ever had diabetes, but we gave up nearly all red meat consumption over ten years ago. Occasionally, we'll have some ground bison or ground lamb in spaghetti sauce, or some pieces of beef on pizza. If you eat more than one serving of red meat a day, you might want to cut back, even if you don't yet have T2D. "Intakes of total, processed, and unprocessed red meat were positively and approximately linearly associated with higher risks of T2D. Comparing the highest to the lowest quintiles, hazard ratios (HR) were 1.62 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.53, 1.71) for total red meat, 1.51 (95% CI: 1.44, 1.58) for processed red meat, and 1.40 (95% CI: 1.33, 1.47) for unprocessed red meat. The percentage lower risk of T2D associated with substituting 1 serving/d of nuts and legumes for total red meat was 30% (HR = 0.70, 95% CI: 0.66, 0.74), for processed red meat was 41% (HR = 0.59, 95% CI: 0.55, 0.64), and for unprocessed red meat was 29% (HR = 0.71, 95% CI...

Looks like the House will hold a third round of votes on Jordan’s speakership at 10 a.m. today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I7R8-g_G0Y

"But Chutkan made clear that she wouldn’t tolerate such rhetoric in her courtroom. “Politics stops at this courtroom door,” she said." I'll believe it when they toss him in jail for his obvious and egregious violations. Until then, it's just judicial puffery, and Trump knows it. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/politics/trump-gag-order-chutkan-hearing/index.html

Over at angrybearblog.com, Robert Waldmann points out that there is no endgame in Gaza. He concisely walks us through various scenarios and why they can't work. The Hamas attack was pure terrorism, and their goal is to elicit from Israel a disproportionate response that will bring international opprobrium upon the state of Israel. So far, Israel seems to be taking the bait: " . . . an offensive which will necessarily impose huge losses on civilians and will achieve nothing useful and lasting is not morally right. Even those who disagree should be convinced by the first three arguments. "The logic is the Sir Humphrey syllogism: We must do something. This is something. So we must do this. There is the added corollary: we tried to deter them by killing a lot of people with bombs. That approach failed completely, so we must kill many more people this time." https://angrybearblog.com/2023/10/i-think-the-upcoming-israeli-invasion-of-gaza-is-a-mistake-let-me-count-the-ways#...

Looks like opposition leader Donald Tusk will likely form the next government in Poland. Although the right-wing nationalist party got the most votes, there appears no way forward for them to form a majority coalition, but Tusk claims to have such a coalition for his moderate party. This will reverse the retreat of Poland from the EU, end the Polish boycott of Ukranian wheat, and probably end the attack on the Polish judicial system. https://www.ft.com/content/a4447b80-da74-408b-8cdd-7bbec90613e6

"By the end of the month, two Alabama hospitals will stop delivering babies. A third will follow suit a few weeks later. "That will leave two counties — Shelby and Monroe — without any birthing hospitals, and strip a predominantly Black neighborhood in Birmingham of a sought-after maternity unit. "After that, pregnant women in Shelby County will have to travel at least 17 miles farther to reach a hospital with an OB-GYN. And because the county, one of Alabama’s largest, is bordered by another whose hospital also lacks an obstetrics unit, some of those residents are also losing the closest place they could go to deliver their babies. “There’s a sense of dread knowing that there’s going to be families who are now not only driving to the county over, but driving through three counties,” said Honour McDaniel, director of maternal and infant health initiatives for the March of Dimes in Alabama. "People in Monroe County, meanwhile, could face drives between 35 to 100 mile...

“Are young people annoying? Yes of course. They don’t know jack shit and they act like they know everything and they mock our outfits, which we are certain are cool. More to the point, what chafes older people so much is, I think, the fact that younger people seem eager to pass judgment on the world without ever having had to navigate its many challenges themselves. We see their certainty as unearned, their arrogance as off-putting, and their smooth, glowing skin as an insult to our own mortality. “What I want to say at this very fraught political moment, however, is this: The wisdom that older people claim grants them the legitimacy to control the world also demands the grace and humility to be able to admit that young people bring important qualities to the political mix that we lack. To high-handedly dismiss the demands of the young that knotty moral outrages be fixed, just because those demands feel simplistic or tinged with self-righteousness, is to reveal that we are not as wise ...

T he Middle East has always generated more history than it can consume locally. But if you want to understand the current crisis in Gaza, you have to understand 20th century history. An excellent place to start is David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace." https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/fromkin-peace.html

Rote memorization was a major strategy for success in my STEM curriculum. I did it, and I graduated UT-K with honors, once I figured out the gig. Yes, there were critical thinking skills to be had, but memorization was huge. When I became a medical school professor, I introduced problem-based learning in the course I directed to encourage critical thinking. What do I need to know to help this patient? When do I know enough? That kind of teaching is hard, but most student appreciate when you respect their intelligence. The problem is that faculty are assessed based on how much teaching they do, not how much learning happens. Measuring teaching is easy. Measuring learning is hard.

Collective punishment has been the tool of dictators and barbarians throughout history. It was the tool of American troops in Vietnam. It was the tool of Hitler. It was the tool of Stalin. It was the tool of Genghis Kahn. It was the tool of Yahweh in the Old Testament. Behold the most recent manifestation. "As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” Feh. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-gaza-isaac-herzog_n_65295ee8e4b03...

When we moved to New England, I looked forward to eating more seafood, locally sourced. The first clue I had that my expectations were not grounded in reality was when I discovered that the cod in grocery stores was Alaskan/Pacific cod. Turns out, a lot of the seafood on your plate was likely sourced through Chinese fishing fleets whose crews are suffering from problematic labor practices. "Fishermen, in particular, are falling sick with and dying from beriberi because they’re being compelled to spend longer and longer periods of time — often years — at sea in illegal and intolerable conditions. “There is absolutely no reason people should be getting, much less dying from, this disease,” says Nicola Pocock, who teaches at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Beriberi fatality at sea is a red flag for severe neglect or captivity.” "Much of this story concerns China and the labor practices of its distant-water fishing fleet, which are deeply problematic. But j...

Before we moved to Rhode Island last year, I was familiar with Newport as the home of the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals. Indeed, we attended one afternoon of performances at the Newport Jazz Festival this summer. Newport is only an hour from our home in Rumford RI. Recently, I read in The New York Review of Books that Newport RI was once the epicenter of the North American African slave trade. This surprising (to me) news provoked me to read “American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644–1865” by Sean M. Kelley. Indeed, during colonial times, Newport became the major North American port through which British slavers disembarked their captives. Eventually, ships going out to Africa from Newport added to the trade and created a large cadre of experienced sailors and captains to exploit the African captive market. Lacking much in the way of goods to exchange, eventually Rhode Island slavers settled on rum, which eventually displaced French brand...

“A dispiriting thing I have learned over time is that a great deal of "success" comes not from what we normally consider to be "talent" (very broadly defined)," "luck," or "hard work," but rather a relentless shamelessness, an ability to be dishonest and ruthless at such a level that is actually unfathomable to normal people. It is a superpower. “A system which greatly rewards sociopathy is not such a great system, especially as that success grants those sociopaths even more power. “We've long celebrated the "ruthless" businessman without giving much thought to what that ruthlessness means in practice. “The top is filled with these guys, convinced of their superiority in all things. ”   https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/10/success.html  

Reading about Woodrow Wilson’s famous speech in which he justified America’s entry into The Great War (WWI) on the grounds that “The world must be made same for democracy.” “Wilson, however, did not share with his audience information that would have revealed less righteous-sounding motives for going to war. Only a month earlier, his ambassador to London had telegraphed Washington a warning that if the country did not enter the conflict, not only might the Allies collapse, but with them any chance that Americans who had bought British and French war bonds would ever get their money back.” ~American Midnight, p. 31

"Fred Birnbaum, legislative affairs director of Idaho Freedom Foundation, said studying the causes of Idaho’s roughly 10 to 15 preventable maternal deaths each year risked inviting a push for more government support to help keep people from dying. And government support was anathema to his group. “You know the old saying, ‘All roads lead to Rome,’” said Birnbaum, who testified against the committee’s creation on similar grounds in 2019. “Well, all government-created committees lead to the call for more government spending.” Feh. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/idaho-banned-abortion-then-it-turned-down-supports-for-pregnancies-and-births

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!” Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” ~ Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts

I saw an article online yesterday that claimed that over 1% of Americans are using semaglutides for weight loss. Since these drugs suppress appetite, the article was about the possible impact on food retail. Since global warming promises to destroy a lot of arable land on the planet, as well as ocean fisheries, reducing food consumption by overweight people strikes me as an unalloyed good. Since obesity is a risk factor for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and joint damage, maybe semaglutides will also reduce healthcare costs in America. This is starting to shape up like statins, anti-hypertensives and antibiotics for peptic ulcers--relatively risk-free pharmacology with transformative health outcomes.

In order to get married in the Roman Catholic Church, Linda and I went through "pre-Caana conferences" under the direction of Fr. Hofstedder, who was the parish priest at St. Mary Catholic Church in 1977. He gave us a copy of the RCC-approved "Holy Bible." I got a copy of "The New Testament" for my First Communion, and I have a copy of the Old Testament that was owned by my dad and that I picked up somewhere along the way. Back when I was in 1st grade, the teacher had each student bring in a bible reading. It was around then that I first realized that the Douay version of The Bible that was approved by the RCC was not the same Bible that my Protestant classmates used. Flash forward to the present. Now I understand that God was created in man's image, and that there are several bibles among which we can choose (and many others that have been suppressed). And of course, there are plenty of folks who only read the parts of their bible that suit them and i...

I see where Donald Trump has given a full-throated endorsement of Gym Jordan as the next House speaker. Figures. Here's Josh Marshall with a little history: "To refresh your memory: Before Jordan got into politics he was an assistant wrestling coach (1987-1995) at Ohio State. He claims he didn’t know the team doctor was sexually molesting team members. But apparently it was an open secret and a number of team members from the time claim Jordan knew. They go on TV and say it. "The initial version of the scandal was put to rest when Jordan’s House colleagues just decided it didn’t matter. But Jordan’s explanation never really passed the laugh test. For someone outside the party leadership, what counts and what doesn’t is mostly up to the member’s constituents and the GOP caucus. Different story if you’re Speaker of the House. There’s little question that that whole pretty ugly saga would come in for a full review were Jordan to become Speaker." https://talkingpointsmem...

“That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government . . .” There’s the problem: thanks to the Senate, the electoral college, and gerrymandering, the US government long ago ceased to derive its powers from the consent of the governed—at least from the majority of the governed. Add to that, the GOP (which is advantaged by our non-representative system) has vilified government ever since Reagan. Today’s failed GOP leadership in the House is merely the sad apotheosis of a process begun over 40 years ago. Once the GOP succeeds in making the state ungovernable, they set the stage for authoritarians.

You know that Hungarian woman who shared this year's Nobel in Physiology or Medicine? She struggled to get and keep an academic career. Eventually, she was pushed out of her lab at Penn. "That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.” https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021

"What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France. "A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country f...

There's has been a ‘stealth’ third party in American politics since the late 19th century. They came to be known as Dixiecrats, and actually were an overt third party in 1948, when their candidate, Strom Thurmond, won four Southern states. Since then, as the national Democratic Party has taken stronger positions on civil rights, the Dixiecrats became the Southern-strategy success story for the Republican Party. And today, some of the Dixiecrats political/creedal descendants are a part of the Freedom Caucus. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose