How Dr. Mom Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Plague

 Just in case the inconsistent and contradictory guidelines on masking from Anthony Fauci, liberal America's favorite brusque old grandpa, aren't enough to convince you that Learning To Live With Covid is not a euphemism for Accepting Death Graciously, the New York Times is here to set your minds at rest. 

They've reached out to a select group of lesser epidemiologists and physicians for advice on just how to chill the hell out. These medical professionals are young, they're hip, they're healthy, they're rich, and they know their germs a lot better than mere mortals like you and I do. If they can cope with pursuing their careers and having fun while raising their families, then so can you! 

However, the fine art of ignoring the pandemic does entail a tricky learning curve. Threading the needle on Following the Science® on the one hand and wallowing in rank magical thinking on the other is not a skill that you can learn overnight. Sangfroid in the time of Covid can only be mastered with lot of time and patience. Of course, if you are an actual Covid patient (short, long, or in-between), time might not exactly be on your side. But never mind all that, because the Times article is not directed at you anyway.

It's directed at the hip, the healthy and the hedonistic. Not to mention the financially whole. For example:

 "My (my bold) family has moved away from restricting our activities as the Omicron surge has receded," said Kate Eisenberg, an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester. "We do not have anyone with high risk health conditions in the household, and we're all vaccinated and boosted."

Eisenberg is currently planning some family trips, including air travel, and she is allowing her 12- and 15-year-old children to participate in most family activities. She has been avoiding indoor dining and crowded indoor settings, but as cases continue to come down, she plans to go out more.

This weekend, she is taking her younger daughter to a sold-out Billie Eilish concert at Madison Square Garden - apparently operating under the delusion that a rock concert in February in New York is not a crowded unventilated indoor setting, and that thousands of gallons of spittle emanating from the orifices of hordes of cheering fans will be magically diverted away from her and her child.

The reporter of this advice column of an article, Jonathan Wolfe, was apparently so heartened and so emboldened by this Dr. Mom and the other hip professionals he interviewed that he even made himself an editorialized part of the story, inserting the following paragraph, right out of the blue:

After we’ve spent two years of living in fear of the virus, being asked to “live with” it now may seem daunting. But in many ways, we’ve been preparing for this moment since the outbreak and it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come.

Dr. Mom Eisenberg is then allowed to chime in again herself, noting that not one of her friends or patients even bothers asking her any more whether it's safe to do this or that. "Most people have settled on their own conclusions about what works for them," she schmoozed to the Times.

Her friends, of course, are not the same kind of people as those Canadian truckers who have reached their own selfish, road-blocking, supply chain-thwarting conclusions about what works for them.  People like Eisenberg and her immediate circle would never dream of blocking traffic as they pursue their exotic getaways and rock concerts. At the very first sign of a sniffle, they have their stash of antiviral pills, and walk-in closets full of test kits. And if there is not a doctor in their actual house, then at the very least they probably have a concierge medic on perpetual call.

As long as we can follow the science® we'll be just fine. It helps immensely, of course, that Doctor Mom and her cohort are not facing eviction or foreclosure and have enough disposable income to take airplane vacation trips and dine out and ignore the plight of the Great Underclass, whose own paltry gains in income have more than been wiped out by inflation, not least by increasing rents and high grocery prices and skyrocketing fuel costs.

All you have to do in Timeswonderland is admit that unlike smallpox, Covid can never be eradicated, not that they even want it to be at this point. As the Times quotes another smugly sanguine epidemiologist as saying, we can continue on our merry ways with "an arsenal of tools" consisting of vaccines, pills and all that wonderful "paid sick leave" that she and her PMC cohort enjoy. Never mind that mandatory paid sick leave is, thanks to the oligarchy-captured US Congress and executive branch and statehouses, not something that the vast majority of US citizens enjoy.

The only arsenal that the ruling class believes in, in fact, is a trillion dollars' worth of lethal war hardware, allocated for the cause of torture and misery and death all over the world, every single year.

And the Democrats and their professional-managerial class base still have the chutzpah to wonder right out loud why the Republicans are winning over the working classes, even as they persist in working with a party that is openly fascist. The two factions each need the other to maintain the oligarchic system.

 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi never seems to tire of saying so herself. How else can she maintain her own maternally therapeutic grip on power?  Like any Doctor Mom, she can't perform her quack-cure without having a preventable disease right there in front of her. And thanks to a long history of political malpractice, the US was sick unto death long before Covid appeared. It's a convenient crisis way too good for either Democrats or Republicans to waste.

The Fault In Our Political Deathstars

 Had enough of the pornographic soap opera masquerading as the presidential election yet?  

 Replace the fat-shamed Miss Universe saga with the real Universe. Instead of wallowing in Donald Trump's mean-spirited stupidity, soar to the tragic glorious heights of two star-crossed lovers. Ditch the soap opera and revel in some space opera.

Maybe you missed this with all the dredging-up of the sex scandals of some pretty loathsome characters: A spacecraft named Rosetta finally consummated her long-distance relationship with her comet paramour. As so eloquently described by the New York Times's Kenneth Chang, it almost makes us forget the tawdry bathos supplanting American democracy.

 It's a story of truly Wagnerian proportions: (cue optional soundtrack.)

Rosetta, the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, is dead, setting down in a final embrace with its companion of the past two years.

Radio signals from Rosetta flatlined at 7:19 a.m. Eastern after it did a soft belly-flop onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at a speed of two miles per hour, slower than the average walk.

For the last few minutes, people at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, watched their computer screens mostly in silence, but with some nervous chatter. When the radio signals ceased, they applauded and hugged in a celebration that was part joyous, part somber.

It took Rosetta 12 years, but she finally got her guy. And she died right in the act. But it was so worth it:

 Of course she was European. It mattered not a whit that Comet 67P himself is a bit on the misshapen side, resembling a rubber duck with a painful skin condition. This apparent anomaly was likely caused by two comets colliding a long time ago, and getting stuck together forever. So the consummation was sort of a threesome. Like I said, totally European and avant-garde. Squeamish conservatives in the United States never would have tolerated or funded this particular scientific expedition, what with their defunding of NASA in between their prayer breakfasts and righteous visits to porn websites and legalized buckfests. The media-political complex has enough on its plate at the moment, thank you very much, what with pornography now the main topic on The Trail.

Furthermore, the anti-NASA/science crowd might be afraid of being compared to Rubber Duckman. On his surface, he is as hard as a rock. But inside, there's nothing but fluff and dust. And what's even worse, he's as doomed as Rosetta. He's headed straight for the sun. Take that, climate change denialists!

  The story of Rosetta and her Comet Duck Prince is a fairy tale come true, straight from the land of the Brothers Grimm, and thus cannot be tolerated in a country founded by fire and brimstone Puritans. In the exceptional USA, Congress has defunded our own government space program, even as it's being outsourced to private industry at a steady clip. This year alone, $40 million has been removed from several NASA initiatives, including development of the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD)

So those billionaires jockeying for position on the first manned flight to Mars had better beware. Although the idiots and anti-science zealots in Congress might think they've  outlawed LSD, the program they're so gleefully scrapping would actually allow a Mars rocket to slow down enough to land safely on the surface of the Red Planet. Without this safeguard, the plutocratic space tourists will never know what hit them. It won't be anything close to the balletic pas-de-deux on display last week from a space rock far, far away.

It will more resemble last week's horrific New Jersey train wreck, caused at least in part by a corrupt, reactionary governor's reduction of funding for maintenance and repairs to the transportation infrastructure. Chris Christie is even blackmailing his state's most vulnerable citizens for what little improvement he is offering. There's more than one way to go off the rails, as explained by the Daily News's Jason Silverstein:

New Jersey’s Trump-loving Republican governor has frozen $100 million in aid — by executive order — until the state’s public employees agree to his demand of cutting $250 million in their health benefits.
The governor’s office said he was forced into the heavy halt by “the Legislature’s inability to responsibly identify realistic revenues and health care cost savings.”

Christie would rather get rid of the estate tax than fund pensions and safely maintain the public transportation system. How else will filthy rich heirs and heiresses come up with the money to privately travel to Mars and build their own exclusive space colony, once they've helped finish off Planet Earth with their polluting wage-slave factories, exploding oil trains and pipelines, and private jets?

And once the rich people are on Mars, guess who gets to feed, clothe, and keep them alive for the duration? That's right: it's the same old socialized risk and privatized gain racket that's been keeping them healthy, wealthy and selfish for countless generations through their off-shored tax havens and the countless tax loopholes provided for them by the groveling likes of Chris Christie.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Futuristic (credit, MarsOne)

So on second thought, forget about restoring funding for that Low Density Supersonic Decelerator. First, we have to figure out a way to decelerate the greed of the pathocrats and close the most extreme wealth gap in modern history.

The philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno had the whole rotten system pegged half a century ago: "The fact that the extended arm of mankind can reach out to remote, empty planets, but is unable to establish eternal peace on its own planet, is a striking proof the absurd direction in which the social dialectic is moving."

Cordially Yours, Jeb Bush

Flailing presidential candidate Jeb Bush has apologized for his odious suggestion that only Christian refugees be allowed sanctuary in his America.

"This was a horribly insensitive gaffe on my part," the scion of one of the country's premier crime families was heard to sheepishly admit on Tuesday. "What I meant to say was, only conservative folks with money, dynastic connections, elite degrees and professions or trust funds have an absolute guarantee of asylum in these, my United States. It's just a plus if they're High Church Christians, is all I'm saying. I didn't mean all Christians, fer chrissake. Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists, especially, might be sadly out of luck when it comes to the political vetting process. Do you hear me, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson? And forget about the secular humanists. I'm handing those atheist folks a one-way ticket to the hell that my born-again brother created to keep y'all safe."

OK, so I made that quote up. Despite his attempted dehumanization of refugees as pesky "challenges of the world," Jeb Bush did not verbally condemn them to hell based solely upon religion or lack thereof. All he said is that Syrians and Iraqis should present some sort of Christian I.D. prior to crossing the border into Exceptional USA. 

 Discrimination, which they grotesquely call "compassionate conservatism," has always has been an integral part of the Bush Family's ideological DNA. Simply read his bogus trickle-down platform and listen to his speeches, and you will discover that Jeb has devised a hell on earth for all poor atheists, all poor agnostics, all poor Catholics, all poor Jews, all poor Protestants, all poor Muslims, all poor Hindus, all poor Sikhs, all poor Jains and all poor Buddhists, regardless of where they come from, no matter whom they love.  He is an equal opportunity plutocratic class warrior. Muslims and immigrants are among the more recent convenient scapegoats for the rabid right wing, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks in France.

Jeb and his cohort simply feel a little freer to spew the fear and the hatred and the sanctimony these days. All he has to do is open his mouth and cable news is there in a flash to give him endless campaign air time at no cost to Jeb and much cost to the refugees.

And not to be outdone on the domestic front, even by himself, Jeb also just managed to mangle the fable that illustrates precisely why most poor, doomed, white, angry voters still get fooled most of the time by the likes of him, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

Responding to a question at a campaign event about Bernie Sanders' call for free college tuition, Jeb lit right up. "This is a great question, I’m glad you brought it up! Because this notion that earned success in life, that the government can just take care of us, if we keep taking steps down that path, we’re in danger. And it’s insidious, because you don’t see it until it’s over. That’s the problem with this. It’s like the crabs in the, you know, whatever —the crabs in the boiling water."

(To be fair to Jeb, he was probably suffering from the congenital Bush family trait of not being able to maintain more than one picture-bubble in his head at a time. He was probably seeing the corporate media's cartoon caricature of "Crabby Bernie" as he struggled in vain to answer yet another unfair liberal "gotcha!" question.)

Luckily, a sympathetic audience member heard his silent cry for help, and yelled out: "Frogs!" 

(To be fair to Jeb, he probably didn't want to bring up frogs in his mangled metaphor, lest it dredge up memories about how W. used to stick firecrackers up frogs' butts just to watch them explode, a juvenile prelude to his blowing-up of the entire Middle East.)

But to further outdo even himself, Jeb gamely lumbered on with his gruesome tale:

“The frogs. You think it’s warm, and it feels pretty good and then it feels like you’re in a whirlpool—you know, a Jacuzzi or something. And then you’re dead. That’s how this works.”

Translation: Subsidized higher education for the masses is a clear and present danger to the Republican Party. Beware the functioning brain and the independent thought. Look at the Bushes, for whom congenital intellectual and moral deficits are worn like badges of honor and they got filthy rich anyway. If they can do it, you can do it. And if you still insist on college, debt peonage till the day you die will be your lot and your loss, and their gain.

Jeb might not be the Smartest Bush. But when it comes to disclosing the Right's true fascist agenda, he is at least an inadvertently Honest Bush. They make you feel all warm and wet and turgid, and then zap. They do you.

That's how it works, crabby frog-people. The oligarchy is tossing you into an epic maelstrom right out of Edgar Allan Poe. Life sucks, and then you die. That's exactly how it works. That's the Republican plan for America. 

GOP Jacuzzi for the Poor

The Culling of the American Herd (Update)

The only thing more surprising than a new study showing that middle-aged white people are dying in a virtual epidemic of suicide and substance abuse is that the experts are so shocked by this news. After all, the USA is the richest, most technologically advanced, most exceptional country in the history of history. Aren't minimum wage earners taking advantage of the Obamacare shopping network and champing at the bit to fork over $5,000 in deductibles every year before predatory insurance kicks in to treat their ingrown toenail? What gives?

The discovery by a pair of Princeton economists of the awful truth that tens of thousands of people in their forties and fifties are dying prematurely and unnecessarily was made purely by accident. Co-author Anne Case, herself suffering from a painful and inoperable back condition, was curious about the possible relationships among happiness, pain and suicide rankings in the various states. She and her husband, recent Nobel economics prize-winner Angus Deaton, were stunned to learn that the death rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. The causes of these deaths are not diabetes, heart disease or hypertension: they are suicide, and the liver-damaging, life-shortening effects of alcohol, and accidental overdose from heroin and prescription opioids. 

They write:

 This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population.

The New York Times:

 The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

 (snip)

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.

Wow? More like duh. Another economist, from Harvard, is quoted as sniffing that he'd always just assumed that these drug deaths were just "blips on the radar," and  that "everyone's" health is improving, just as the "economy" is supposedly improving. Actually, the new study shows that by "everyone," the experts mean those of a higher educational and socioeconomic status, who can afford to see a doctor because they have actual jobs paying a living wage. The premature death effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent, while they actually fell for those with a college education. 

It's the class war, stupid. It's the wealth inequality, geniuses. It's the corporate media propaganda telling us that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is a "moderate" who will join with Democrats to soberly, responsibly and wonkishly cut what remains of the social safety net out from under millions of struggling, suffering Americans. It's Social Darwinism newly illustrated on a spreadsheet. It's the continued, deliberate culling of the American herd.

This silent epidemic of sadism within the political class has been going on for decades now. That the new findings of premature death are about white people probably accounts for much of the elite shock, since the death rates among blacks and Latinos are still higher than those of even the poorest whites. They simply have reached something of a plateau of pain, while whites are rapidly playing catch-up in their trek to the misery mountaintop.

It's telling that the Deaton-Case study didn't delve into the correlation between the higher death rates of poor whites with residence in states opting out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Liberal pundits are very fond of blaming higher mortality and morbidity among whites in red states on Republican governors and legislatures refusing to join in the expansion, even though it is initially being paid for by federal funds.

Therefore, a Harvard study last year showing that as many as 17,000 people will needlessly die every year in states opting out of Medicaid expansion was met by a group shrug by liberal experts, who pointed to GOP nihilism rather than the despair and hardship of the individuals affected by the lousy economy as the cause. If only more people could access the rare doctor willing to accept those paltry Medicaid fees, the conventional wisdom went, people would be alive and well and happy.

The new study turns that supposition right on its head. Poor people are dying way too young in all 50 states, Medicaid or no Medicaid, Obamacare or no Obamacare. While official Census Bureau figures show that one in six people exists below the official poverty threshold, the reality is much worse when you consider that more than half of us don't have enough savings to cover a $1,000 medical co-pay or a $500 car repair. 

And we are all supposed to be surprised that a person would rather self-medicate with cheap heroin or a six-pack than log on to the Healthcare.gov website and be faced with rate hikes as high as 40 percent a year. Pay up, or else the IRS will charge you a penalty. Your pain is their gain.

It is obvious is that more and more people have been forced to treat their pain with opioids and booze because they can't afford a surgeon or a dentist. The authors of the study are still unsure what came first: the pain, or the substance abuse.  And they do not purport to find a link between the death rate and the financial crisis.

But an earlier study on the increasing fatal use of painkillers by white women squarely blames the plutocracy-spawned financial meltdown for premature deaths of poor and working class females:

Increases in midlife mortality are paralleled by increases in self-reported midlife morbidity….The increase in reports of poor health among those in midlife was matched by increased reports of pain. Rows 4–7 of Table 2 present the fraction reporting neck pain, facial pain, chronic joint pain, and sciatica. One in three white non-Hispanics aged 45–54 reported chronic joint pain in the 2011–2013 period; one in five reported neck pain; and one in seven reported sciatica. Reports of all four types of pain increased significantly between 1997−1999 and 2011−2013….
The epidemic of pain which the opioids were designed to treat is real enough, although the data here cannot establish whether the increase in opioid use or the increase in pain came first. Both
increased rapidly after the mid-1990s. Pain prevalence might have been even higher without the drugs, although long-term opioid use may exacerbate pain for some (26), and consensus on the effectiveness and risks of long-term opioid use has been hampered by lack of research evidence (27). Pain is also a risk factor for suicide (28). Increased alcohol abuse and suicides are likely symptoms of the same underlying epidemic (18, 19, 29), and have increased alongside it, both temporally and spatially.
Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience (lanekenworthy.net/shared-prosperity and ref. 30). The United States has moved primarily to defined-contribution pension plans with associated stock market risk, whereas, in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Future financial insecurity may weigh more heavily on US workers, if they perceive stock market risk harder to manage than earnings risk, or if they have contributed inadequately to defined-contribution plans (31).

Between 2007 and 2013, median wealth dropped a shocking 40 percent, leaving the poorest half with negative wealth (because of debt), and about 100 plutocratic families owning as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent of Americans combined.  The wealth gap is now the highest ever recorded.

And the experts still have the chutzpah to call themselves "startled" that half a million desperate white people (a probably too-low figure, in my opinion) are killing themselves at rates comparable to those during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Methinks they had better rethink their definitions of the American Empire, and American Exceptionalism.

We'd also be wise to define Chronic Despair as a public health emergency. The pathology of the plutocrats is trickling down like a ton of Ebola and killing people right in their tracks.