May 28

 Good morning. Sunny right now after a night with pulses of heavy rain. I haven't had to water the gardens more than once or twice in the last two weeks.

Stray thought--Trump has promised to deport the pro-Palestinian demonstrators if he wins the election. I have a couple questions. First, deport to where? Not all of the demonstrators, perhaps not even a majority, are foreign students. Many are Jewish protestors who oppose what Israel is doing but aren't Israelis. From what I have read you can't deport natural born citizens and can only deport naturalized citizens after legal proceedings showing cause for rescinding the naturalization of that citizen.  I do remember such rare deportations but those cases involved  people who lied on their applications and had been suspected of being Nazi war criminals. Second, do we really want to go down the road of quasi-criminalizing speech we don't agree with? I can agree that certain kinds of actions should not be characterized as speech, such as blocking highways or blocking access on college campuses to people who aren't protesting. But Trump's promise is just that--a criminalization of speech. Third, Trump white washes or totally ignores the violence perpetrated by people he can assume supports him: the white supremacists on Jan 6 and the "pro-Israel" counter protestors. The harassment of Jewish students that made them too afraid to walk their campuses should have been investigated and dealt with by various administrations who failed in their duty. Abusive harassment has become the norm.

Another stray thought--the news focuses on the "collateral damage" of Israel's attacks in Gaza especially the numbers of women and children who die. The news about the latest attack notes that Israel claims to have killed two Hamas fighters (often described as Hamas leaders) while the fires and shrapnel killed nearly 50 others. Not a good outcome unless you decided that any number of civilian deaths are justified so long as some Hamas combatants also die. (Note: if we question the accuracy of the Hamas run health agency figures on civilian deaths, we should also question the Israeli figures on Hamas casualties.) I saw ONE report about a response one Hamas leader gave to the question a reporter asked: how many Palestinian deaths are justifiable/acceptable. He said 100,000 isn't too many. We see two enemies locked in a death match. I put that phrase in quotes because damage is only collateral if it is the "unintended" result of your actions--even if the consequences are entirely predictable. The damage is real. I hate that phrase.

Naked Capitalism has a post from IM Doc that should be truly scary. IM Doc has been chronicling his experiences with patients who had less than optimal outcomes from the COVID vaccines. He has also noted new studies which back up his growing skepticism. We got the vaccines for Flu for the two years when the pandemic spiked and for COVID for about the same time. However, since the pandemic has waned and COVID has become a cyclical, and as new information has become available we have stopped. We don't like crowds and avoid them. We don't wear our masks now unless the place we are going requests it because complying is polite.

I have been a medical skeptic (minimalist) for several decades now. Some of it is a hard headed evaluation of what might happen and how much the medical care (which only might help) would cost. Mom was in the hospital for about four days with a viral    and the cost to us was a bit more than $2000. If Medicare paid 80% that makes the total cost more than $10,000. That doesn't include the ambulance and EMT charges which weren't covered. Thankfully, we were able to cover that cost. A lot of people can't. IM Doc's description of the quality of new doctors makes me even more skeptical.