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No, it’s not the Internet’s fault. It’s not the YAF’s fault. It’s not even entirely the Republican party’s fault. It’s the fault of modern American political conservatism, which encouraged vandalism and savagery and now finds itself a road company of   Lord of the Flies.   My sympathy is really quite limited. ~Charles P. Pierce

Blogger Duncan Black coined the “Freidman Unit” to refer to NYT columnist Tom   Friedman's frequent predictions during the Iraq War that "the next six months" would be the decisive turning point, a phrase he used repeatedly over several years without the decisive moment ever arriving.  Now, Sen. Kennedy reaches into the prophecy vault to revive the F.U. “ U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told a crowd of Iowa conservatives Saturday he believes current high inflation is being caused by the U.S.-Iran war — but said he sees an end to the conflict within six months.”   https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2026/09/19/us-sen-john-kennedy-in-iowa-predicts-end-of-iran-war-in-6-months/

From a pediatrician and fellow emeritus professor: “You want to know about vaccines? Okay. Here you go. “In 42 years, in about 150,000 patient encounters, I have only seen one child who had a bad reaction: localized severe angioedema of the arm, I.e., severe redness and swelling, where he got a DTaP. Even so, he responded well to oral antihistamines and did not need to be hospitalized.   “That’s it: one kid who did well with outpatient treatment. In 42 years. In about 150,000 patient encounters.   “Now, how many kids did the jabs I prescribed save from illness, hospitalization, even death? I’ll never know, but I know it’s tens of thousands.   “Vaccines are a miracle. Yet they are so much more. They are a pinnacle of human intellect, achievement, and compassion. They are essential to human life on this planet, and I will continue to urge everyone I know - and thousands I don’t - to get themselves and their children every vaccine that’s appropriate for them.   “Because...

It wasn’t Hitler or Himmler who deported me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who were given a uniform and then believed they were the master race. ~Karl Strojka, Auschwitz

“T he Pentagon has rolled out formal guidance for mandatory testosterone testing for male service members 30 and older, a policy that leaves out women for now and faces questions from medical experts about the need and efficacy of such a program.   “ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in July   that a new program to screen troops for “testosterone deficiency” was necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best.” The new clinical guidance, released late Thursday, outlines how the program would work.   “The Pentagon’s efforts to test for low testosterone coincide with growing interest in the hormone that has been driven by men’s health influencers and podcasters, many of whom recommend the drug as a way to boost energy, muscle and feel younger.” There is *zero* evidence that circulating testosterone levels in American troops have *anything* to do with national security. So why is Whisky Pete spending your tax money on this project?   Two obvious reason...

Most of our retirement and savings portfolios are in equities. While we have been investors for over 40 years, we don’t gamble with stocks or tried to time the market. We’ve never borrowed to buy stocks. If you’re a stock market gambler, now might be a good time to fold ‘em. “Margin debt went from $850.6 billion in April 2025 to $1.502 trillion in June 2026. That is 77% in 14 months. In the 30-year history of this data, that kind of move has happened three other times. All three were immediately followed by significant stock market declines. April 2025 is worth noting as a starting point. Stocks sold off sharply that month during the tariff uncertainty. Investors pulled back on borrowing. Then markets recovered. The AI rally picked back up. Investors started borrowing again, and kept borrowing all the way through June 2026 without stopping. “Retail investors borrowing through brokerage accounts are one piece of the leverage picture. Hedge fund gross borrowing hit $7.2 trillion in July ...

It wasn’t Hitler or Himmler who deported me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who were given a uniform and then believed they were the master race. ~Karl Strojka, Auschwitz

1989 was supposed to be the end of all that: fascism had been defeated, and now communism had fallen, first that year in eastern Europe, and then two years later in the Soviet Union. But history did not end; and the belief that it had accelerated some of the more dangerous trends. Communism continued in North Korea and China, where party leaders managed to combine one-party rule with capitalism. That economic system proved compatible with essentially any form of politics. Post-communist Russia became a pioneer of extreme inequality of wealth, bringing with it oligarchy and ultimately fascism and a war of aggression in Ukraine. That inequality was characteristic of the United States as well, making social mobility difficult and opening political possibilities for those able to choose enemies and punish them. Fascism, defeated in war, now returned, first quietly, and then openly. The internet, far from spreading knowledge and reason, favored conspiracy thinking and habits of mind inconsi...

Malaria was eliminated from the US by a concerted effort to eliminate Anopheles mosquito habitats and the application of DDT. Now, tick-borne diseases are replacing malaria as a public health menace. “ Whereas malaria progressed from disease understanding to elimination within 50 years, Lyme disease has expanded dramatically in  incidence  and  geographic reach  over a similar period. Moreover,  other tick-borne diseases  have emerged and expanded alongside Lyme: babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, and a growing number of other pathogens.   “The public health burden of the tick-borne disease epidemic has become substantial, with  incidence rates  exceeding 100 per 100,000 population in some endemic areas in the U.S. Allergic reactions to tick bites, specifically alpha-gal syndrome ("red meat" allergy), have also emerged as a major public health concern, with  tens of thousands of suspected cases  identified in the U.S. in recent...

Diesel prices are skyrocketing as we head into the midterms. Trump’s elective war in the Middle East has slowed oil production and refining. While Trump tries to shift blame to Ukraine’s bombing of Russian diesel refineries, that is dwarfed by the consequences of blocking the Strait of Hormuz and the recent bombing of a Saudi pipeline that had been used to bypass the strait. “ Priyanka Shankar   at Al Jazeera reminds us that there is yet another driver of inflation in all this. Refineries produce gasoline, diesel and distillates, and sell the heavy fuel oil (HFO) left over, “bunker fuel,” to shipping companies. But there is a shortage of bunker fuel. Not only has the Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran taken several million barrels of crude oil off the market daily, but the high price of diesel means that refineries are now making another pass at the HFO and turning it into diesel rather than selling it at a lower price for ships. Less supply and stable demand equals higher prices, and the...

I think these ‘culture war’ kind of issues are necessary to keep their base in marching formation with a party that has always primarily sought to enrich the wealthiest Americans. You’ve always kind of needed the bigotry to keep these camps together. ~Kate Riga

I graduated from a state university with a BA and from a different state university with a PhD. After that, I did a postdoc at an elite private university and served as faculty for 37 years at a different private university. My daughter got her BA from a public university and her JD from an elite private university. So I’ve seen both public and private higher ed from the inside. My impression, both from personal experience and from reading the data is that the tuition premium charged by private colleges and universities is not repaid in post-graduation earnings. Today, the reputational branding of elite colleges and universities is being questioned. “ Regardless of whether one sees these developments as an overdue correction or as a scramble to minimize the damage being wrought by the Trump administration, this much is clearly true: The proclamations of a handful of wealthy, hyperselective universities tell us almost nothing about the state of American higher education writ large. ...

  It needs to be understood that--as Reich points out--Fascism is not a 20th Century invention. With the institution of slavery, the glorification of conquest and the subjugation of women, the Fascist or Dominator State already appears in history. All the early agricultural/monarchist systems contained the full body of Fascist theory and practice; Hitler and Mussolini merely revived this system after it had appeared to be in eclipse due to industrialism and democracy.   ~Robert Anton Wilson

The point of terrorism isn’t military victory or conquest. It’s fear. And bin Laden certainly achieved his goal on 9/11. The US invasion and military occupation of Iraq and the current US war against Iran are the direct consequences of 9/11, as are DHS, ICE and the mass deportations. Indeed, the Trump GOP has embraced bin Laden objective and uses fear as its primary tool. A true patriot would reject al Qaida terrorism and seek to unite Americans around the things that have historically strengthened our country—democracy, diversity and tolerance. Otherwise, bin Laden continues to win.

So the choice we face in the next generation is not capitalism versus communism, or the end of history versus the return of history, but the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes versus the erosion of society by the politics of fear.   ~Tony Judt  

"In offices across the military and in the intelligence community, there have been recent quiet discussions about cutting the number of people and facilities typically stationed in the Middle East if the Trump administration succeeds in ending the Iran conflict, six sources say.     "If those cuts happen, it would mark another shift in how the US national security apparatus treats a region that successive presidents have sought to leave behind." "If" is doing all the work in that sentence. I'll bet on a TACO. <a href=" h  https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/us-military-intelligence-bases-troops-middle-east " >US to pull troops out of the ME? </a>

Much has been made of the fact that being vaccinated does prevent you from catching COVID. Of course, that was never the claim; the claim was that vaccination would keep you out of the ED and the morgue, a claim that enjoys abundant support. Less well appreciated is that vaccination also protects from Long COVID. “. . . long COVID  may be underdiagnosed . Millions of Americans  are thought to be suffering  but not receiving  appropriate clinical care . Furthermore, even now, well after the acute phase of the COVID pandemic has passed, an estimated  30,000 Americans  are newly diagnosed with long COVID each year. But this is far fewer than expected,  based on 2023 data . Thus, long COVID appears to have become a hidden cause of disease and disability. “When research suggests that as many as  one in six patients  with COVID-19 may develop post-acute sequelae but those statistics are inconsistent with what doctors are reporting, many start to de...

The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members. Ukrainians are making a war in the Pacific much less likely by demonstrating to China that offensive operations are harder than they seem. They have made nuclear war less likely by demonstrating that nuclear blackmail need not work. Ukraine is also fighting to restore its grain exports to Africa and Asia, where millions of people have been put at risk by Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian economy. Last but not least, Ukrainians are demonstrating that a democracy can defend itself. ~Timothy Snyder

The Trump plans for USPS handling of mail-in ballots will leave millions of ballots in limbo for weeks or years after the elections. “Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.   “If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in   a declaration   as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.   “If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”   *snip* “ . . .  a single error — ...

I'm no expert on fascism or Ukraine, but based on everything I've read so far, the claim the Ukraine is a fascist state is pure Putin propaganda.   On the other hand, Prof. Timothy Snyder *is* an expert on fascism and Ukraine. And he is a big supporter of Ukraine in its defense against Russia.   https://snyder.substack.com/p/why-i-like-mark-hamill?r=2133ns&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Next Thursday is the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death. I don’t know that I ever encountered any Charlie Kirk videos. His reputation was so repugnant, I had no more curiosity to see him as I have to read Mein Kampf. “In   one 2023 tweet , Kirk managed to simultaneously defend South Africa’s apartheid regime, the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and even the internet code for “Heil Hitler.”    “Multiculturalism is un-American,” Kirk wrote in another screed, adding, “If you don’t assimilate you are disgracing this country and you can kindly leave.”   “Another lowlight was this bit of   anti-trans paranoia   that feels like a bigoted fever dream take on the “Ghost In The Shell” anime franchise.     “The Trans Agenda is being used to condition people to eventually merge with machine and abandon their humanity,” Kirk wrote.”   My reaction to Kirk’s death called to mind Clarance Darrow: “I have never killed any one, but I ...

In the 1990s, I traveled on three separate occasions to Halle Germany, which is in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in the former East Germany. My MD/PhD student at the time spent two months in a research lab in Halle. At that time, Halle was experiencing the flush of new money that flooded in after reunification. There were cranes all over the city, signifying new buildings. People were replacing their Trabants with BMWs (although I photographed over a dozen Trabbies around town during a three-week visit. But now the picture in Saxony-Anhalt looks different. “ The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.   “Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help real...

Is modern life really so complicated? What most Americans do is get themselves into lots of credit-card debt. Which if you understood what cumulative interest means, that is, if you had just the most elementary calculus or even just really understood your multiplication tables, maybe you would be able to avoid. The best defense of the working class in general is arithmetic. And that therefore social policy, just looking at it this way, has to include making sure that people can do their own math.   ~Timothy Snyder

It really is very, very unwise indeed, in the practical ethics of international relations for democracies to make war unprompted—on preemptive grounds—when alternative strategies are available to them. Because that is corrosive, not only of the exemplary quality of democracies—without which they cannot lecture dictatorships—but is also internally corrosive of what democracies are supposed to be about. ~Tony Judt  

My department is named for Edward A. Doisy, who shared the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of vitamin K. He was the founding chair of my department, which was 100 years old in 2024. Naturally, I have more than average appreciation for this discovery and its medical impact. “The rate of newborns not receiving the vitamin K shot within a day of birth in hospitals jumped more than 57% from January through June, a review of health records for more than 1 ​million births nationwide by health data and analytics company Truveta revealed. “While vitamin K refusals have been on the rise for years, the Truveta analysis shows that in the first half of 2026, the rate of non-receipt was 2.5 times higher than the average rate from 2019 to 2024. It was 1.4 times higher than in 2025.”   OK, but so what? “ Babies are born with very low levels of vitamin K, which helps blood to clot, and are unprotected up until about six months of age, according to the Centers for Dise...

“President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration previously called on conservatives to create new academic journals and to fund science that would explicitly back right-wing policy goals. “Heidi Overton made the comments in a December 2023 appearance on The Tank, a podcast by the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute. Overton, who has a medical degree and is now a White House aide, was previously chief policy officer at the think tank. There she led health care policy and was director of the institute’s Center for a Healthy America.   “In the 2023 interview, Overton called for new science journals that would be dedicated to “conservative-based” science and described a 20-year vision for changing the infrastructure of funding and research to make it more aligned with conservative policy. This vision included “alternate systems” for publishing research.”   I’m an actual, you know, scientist. Real science is evidence-based. What she's ad...

What happens when Claude talks to Claude? Peak AI. Click the link and find out! https://www.thisamericanlife.org/896/i-know-what-you-need/act-two-2?fbclid=IwY2xjawUCXcZwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5kLIBRB2pTfjTJRPk8HY6qA1Gn6GpC_5NJkD5AGYV9XTdHeaqCaDfxy49BuA_aem_uSCafsocyeOPBJe9Ud4iAQ