Another weekend, another chamber of news horrors. The sister-in-law of a woman I work with received one of Elon’s justify-your-job emails. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired, and replaced by a retiree who once told Trump he could whip ISIS in a week. fElon gets his stupid mug in the news more often than the boss, who every day looks more tired and orange.

Meanwhile, the town-hall pushback has begun.

I have very little news to report, other than this: Kate got outbid on a house she wanted, but! She won a spelling bee at a party on Sunday. I’m so proud. I texted her congratulations, and she said it was no biggie, that she’d won in the third round when she was the only one who could spell “preposterous.” I told her that was the advantage of being a reader in a generation raised with autocorrect and texting. I mean, I’m enough of a tightass on this subject that I winced when Prince did all that “2 U” and “4 U” shit in his song titles. I’m glad some of it got passed down to my offspring.

It reminded me of the time a News-Sentinel copy editor in Fort Wayne entered a spelling bee at Grabill Days or one of those olde tyme country fairs out in the region. Everyone was given an olde tyme slate and a piece of chalk, and the bee commenced. The pronouncer said, “diphtheria,” and every single person spelled it without the first H, except the editor. They bounced him. He protested. I can’t remember how it ended, whether anyone had thought to toss a dictionary into the judge’s kit or what, but I gather the organizers wanted Scott to vamoose and for the alternative-spelling olde tyme fun to continue. Chaos at Grabill Days! BURN DOWN THE SPELLING BEE.

Next we’ll do ophthalmologist and jodhpurs.

I used to have a great memory for phone numbers; I could recall numbers that friends had in 1969. No more. I can’t even remember area codes. I hope I retain my spelling prowess, however. Almost all of my spelling errors nowadays are due to autocorrect.

The last week of February is here, and I feel like a person climbing a mountain with spikes in my hands. We have a mini-break coming up at the end of the week, and it cannot get here soon enough.

My old neighbor in Fort Wayne — a saint, and Kate’s second mother — has a business cleaning offices and sometimes houses. Houses were more of a sideline, but once when we lived here she told me a terrible story about one. It was a nice house, in a good suburban subdivision, maybe set back a bit from its neighbors. On her way out, she complimented the owner on how nice it was.

“Yes,” the owner said. “I’m glad we were able to save it.”

The story unfolded like this: For three years or so, it had been occupied by two teenagers, who’d been abandoned by their parents. The mother left first, perhaps due to some sort of mental crisis, and then the father was offered a job in another state. The teens objected to being uprooted, so the father said, fine, you guys can stay here on your own. He said he’d send them money, and they were told to behave themselves.

In perhaps the least surprising news possible, they did not do this.

Soon the house became known as a teen party venue, and over the course of the next couple of years, the place was trashed. One detail I remember was about the night some kid brought over several gallon cans of paint, which were enthusiastically flung out the windows, lids off. Paint streamed down the sides of the house, and onto the roof and driveway. By the time the teens finished high school, the house was nearly unsalvageable.

I wondered at the time what it would be like to have both your parents abandon you, and at such a time of your life. I wondered what happened to those young people, how they grew up. I wonder where they are now. I wonder what the cops knew.

This week a far worse case of child abandonment was revealed here in Detroit. Three children — a boy, 15, and two girls, 12 and 13 — were found living on their own in a condo where garbage, mold and feces had piled up over the course of four years. This is in Pontiac. The neighbors were stunned. Everyone else was stunned, too, stunned and amazed that this could go on so long. The kids said food was left on the front porch, usually by delivery services. The mother lived nearby, with another child. That child’s father said he had no idea about the other three.

And how was this discovered? The landlord hadn’t been paid rent for a few months, and requested a welfare check.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Today the county prosecutor filed first-degree child abuse charges. But it’s pretty clear that when we say sometimes children “fall through the cracks,” those aren’t cracks, they’re chasms.

More will be revealed.

How can anyone do this to children. I just don’t understand.

OK! Let’s move on. My friends whose house I’m staying in this week have the same coffeemaker we do. We have a different configuration — thermal carafe with no burner FTW — but we both have Moccamasters. These are pricey machines, but make excellent coffee. Alan has us on a strict maintenance schedule for ours. My friends do not. However, I am here and this is one of the week’s services I provide: Cleaning the Moccamaster. I just finished it, and I’ll explain the process to you, if you too have a teensy bit of OCD about getting stuff sparkling.

Here are the miracle solutions, purchased from Amazon. The gray box is for the innards, the blue for the pot itself:

They’re just powders, and speaking of OCD, I’d like to have a word with Urnex about why one box contains three packets of powder and the other four, because you use them together and that is annoying to always have to be ordering one or the other. But whatever. The gray descaler goes first. You dissolve it in water and let it run through. Here’s the Before picture:

Yuck, I know. I usually let the descaler run halfway through, turn the pot off and let it sit and do its work. Turn it back on after 10 minutes or so and run it all through. Then three water run-throughs, and you’re ready for the pot cleaner. This is where it gets sexy.

The pot cleaner is the same process — dissolve it in water and pour it through. You would not believe how much oil and gunk it takes off. This is the first pass through:

That looks like coffee, but it’s just gunk. Dump it out, and send three pots of plain water through, maybe tidy up with a paper towel here and there, and here is the After:

This may be one reason a skills assessment and interest inventory I took in high school said I should maybe run a commercial fishery. There’s just something about a project like this that is so much more satisfying than, say, writing.

The weekend is appearing on the horizon, and I’ll be going home to Wendy. You all have a good one, and if you like good coffee, enjoy a cup. I think I’ll have two.

Hi. Yesterday I interspersed work with parachute visits to right-wing media, where everyone was very happy that finally, finally, Americans would be given correct information about nutrition and how to live healthier lives.

Because everyone from your doctor to the FDA to Michelle Obama has been lying to you for all these years. What you need is to be gobbling steroids and 10,000 other dodgy supplements, and deep-frying your Thanksgiving turkey in beef tallow.

Which, p.s., costs $200 for enough to deep-fry a turkey. What the hell, Thanksgiving comes but once a year.

P.S. Tallow isn’t good for you.

I have mentioned before my bestie, and her brilliant son (and now daughter-in-law), both medical researchers. Her son has a grant application pending with the National Institutes of Health that will fund his work for the next few years. This news doesn’t bode well for him:

At the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the “disease detectives” who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.

President Trump’s plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts.

Both my friend’s son and his wife are the kind of BigBrains who can go anywhere, and maybe they will, soon enough. Remember when the U.S. benefited from brain drain from other countries? Now it’ll go the other way, unless your research is about What Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know About Beef Tallow.

Meanwhile, here’s Michigan’s freshman senator, to whom I just wrote yet another letter:

Four hundred twenty-four comments. I didn’t read them all. But all the ones I read spoke for me, i.e. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT.

I had to go on Twitter for something Tuesday morning, and saw a post with the video of people evacuating the crashed plane in Toronto on Monday. Most of the comments expressed indignation that the flight attendant was telling people to put their phones away while they were being hustled out the emergency door. Unreal, how stupid we’ve become.

Finally, I am ashamed — ashamed — to be an American, reading this:

When President Trump took office in January, his plan for sweeping deportations faced a major challenge: what to do with migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China where the United States cannot easily send deportees, because the other nations will not accept migrants or for other reasons.

Last week, the new administration found a solution: Export them to a country willing to take them in.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials began flying hundreds of people, including people from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries, to Panama, which is under intense pressure to appease Mr. Trump, who has threatened to take over the Panama Canal.

… Lawyers in Panama say it is illegal to detain people without a court order for more than 24 hours. Yet roughly 350 migrants deported by the United States on three military planes have been locked in a soaring, glass-paneled hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama in Panama City, for nearly a week, while officials ready a camp near the jungle.

Armed guards prevent any of the deportees from leaving the hotel. Several of them are children.

…In one window visible from a sidewalk below the hotel, a woman clawed at a latchless glass pane in an attempt to escape. When she noticed journalists below, she held up a piece of paper that read “Afghan.”

She made hand motions that indicated an airplane, then her head falling off. The message seemed to be clear: A flight home meant death.

Sorry for the longer-than-usual cut/paste, but that’s a gift article and no one else appears to be covering this. Children. CHILDREN, being relocated to a jungle migrant camp. Honestly, I want to puke. But mostly I want to beg forgiveness. If you voted for this, you’re a terrible person. That’s all there is to it.

I was looking back over the archives and realized that two years ago I was doing the same thing I’m doing now, i.e. dog- and house-sitting for some friends who live nearby. They’re in the Caribbean; we had about seven inches of snow in the last 24 hours. So they’re tanning, and I’m shoveling.

I am promised a very nice bottle of rum upon their return.

As often happens in an unfamiliar house, something comes up. So I text: Please tell me why I can’t run the kitchen faucet. It’s not cold enough to be frozen.

Reply: Ok. I have to order you some double A batteries bc they need to be replaced soon

“You can’t run the kitchen-sink faucet because the batteries are dead” is some real HAL 9000 shit, but this is why I’ve lived this long, I guess. Apparently the faucet has some sort of battery-supported touch mechanism that allows you to turn it on without the archaic 20th-century gesture of “reaching for the faucet,” I gather. I was wondering how I’d make coffee until I remembered I could use the pot-filler faucet over the stove. How well I remember our shared contractor, Sergei, saying mournfully as he installed it: “People want, but they do not use.” Well here I am, using it, Sergei! Take that!

Otherwise, I’m working, eating my way through an insanely large quantity of pasta e fagiole (pasta fazool to you non-Italians) and trying to keep the new dog from climbing onto my head at night. The diabetic schnauzer crossed the bridge a few weeks back, but now I’ve got Penny to deal with:

She likes to be close. It’s going to be very very cold in about 48 hours, so maybe I’ll need a dog on my head. I’ll certainly need a faucet that can drip all night to stave off freezing, so good thing I got those batteries.

In other news at this hour, too much has happened in the last 72 or so to even keep up. I see our new HHS secretary wants to get people off of SSRIs. Says they’re harder to kick than heroin. As someone who’s taken them a time or two, I disagree. Anyway, let’s say “you first” and make Croaky kick his fondness for anabolic steroids and other muscle-juicing drugs. Maybe Cheryl Hines can also swear off injecting botulism into her face, too.

Now I’m getting personal. Time to sign off and turn to the to-do list for the week ahead. Maybe make sure I have extra batteries.

I’ve mentioned one of my “retirement” gigs here. I am on the social-media team for a local nonprofit, which I won’t name because they didn’t ask to have an online loudmouth in the group. I respect that. It’s enjoyable work and pays enough to make it worth my time. It won’t last forever, anyway, and that’s fine.

But as such, I am more or less required to have a Facebook account. I can use the nonprofit’s login for every other major platform — Xitter, Threads, Instagram — but because the Facebook presence is a “business” page, I can only access it from my own personal account. And Facebook is the 900-pound gorilla, still, of social media, where the vast majority of users who pay attention to us dwell.

Many of the people I used to follow with pleasure are leaving Facebook these days. Who can blame them? Of all the tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg’s grovel to Trump has been the most cringey. And the platform has deteriorated, sharply, in recent years. Not as bad as Xitter’s Nazification, true, but it’s just hot garbage now, for the most part. I think I might have mentioned a month or so, I was served a post about Secretariat, the mid-’70s Triple Crown winner, probably because I once clicked on a video of him winning the 1973 Belmont. The post included an AI picture, ostensibly of that very horse, only the markings were wrong, the jockey’s silks were wrong and — this part was hilarious — he was running the wrong way on the track. Then yesterday I was served another one, an AI rewrite of a famous anecdote about the first time Ron Turcotte (his jockey) saw Secretariat as a two-year-old. The illustration, also AI, was a horse with palomino paint markings, as different from Secretariat as George Clooney is from Donald Trump; the prompt was probably something like “beautiful horse.”

Who needs this shit? Not me.

But. There are still pockets of the platform, nearly all local, that I need to access to keep up with things happening around here. This, too, is increasingly like watching a sluice of bullshit fly by, with an occasional well-wrapped sandwich coming through. My community’s newspaper is terrible and used as a cudgel by its wealthy owner, so I don’t subscribe. The bullshit posts — Did I just hear gunshots? (18 hours ago) Does anyone know if a particular store is open? (12 hours ago) I’m mad the garbage collectors left my can tipped over!!! (3 days ago) — sometimes have a worthwhile Marketplace item tucked in there, or, even more rarely, news of interest.

And also, Facebook is probably the only place where a fair number of people who read what I have to say disagree with me. In other words, it’s still a target-rich environment for needling assholes.

Lately I’ve been reading about how we can resist the current catastrophe. I’ve been through my back-turning phase, and it’s over; my new resolution is simply to stop 2 a.m. doomscrolling. But not paying attention is a sucker’s game, in the end. We must pay attention. We just have to. And my skill is that I’m a writer, and a fairly good one. While I know that the aforementioned assholes may not even follow me — I certainly unfollowed many of them years ago — I also know we have to feel less alone these days, that we have fellow travelers out in the ether.

I stepped away from Facebook around New Year’s Day. I still comment here and there, but I haven’t made a new post, in writing, since then. I have changed my “cover” photo twice, to images that make clear how I feel about All This Shit, and the reaction to it makes me wonder if dropping the platform entirely (which, again, I can’t do with this job) isn’t the wrong strategy. Meet people where they are, in other words, and for now they’re still on Facebook.

If you’ve read this far, I’d be interested in opinions.

Jesus, what a week, which is to say, another fucking week. Here’s a treat, though, speaking of keeping up the good fight: A hilarious piece by Roy Edroso on the new, Trumpified Kennedy Center. It made me laugh and I hope it does the same for you. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Elon “You can’t spell ‘felon’ without Elon” Musk is often seen with a little boy, who sometimes rides on his shoulders (when cameras are about) and otherwise just pops up here and there; his life seems to be one big take-your-child-to-work-day. The kid has some stupid alphanumeric name (X Æ A-Xii) that’s usually shortened to X, ha ha, but for the sake of discussing him here let’s call him Bobby. Bobby Musk is maybe his 10th or 11th child of 12, born to his ex-girlfriend, an eccentric pop artist named Grimes.

This puts me in mind of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, which went by the name the Repository for Germinal Choice. Founded in 1979, it was supposed to give women who wanted a baby on their own the option of choosing from a selection of chronic masturbators who happened to have traveled to Oslo at least once in their career. It didn’t work out that way; the few laureates who seemed interested backed out when early publicity made it clear that racism was the foundation for the whole idea.

Slate had a deep dive on it a while back, but I’ve limited out on free articles, so here’s a pretty good aggregation of it, in Smithsonian magazine:

The Repository was opened in 1979 in Escondido, California, according to Lawrence Van Gelder for The New York Times. Among Graham’s donors were three Nobel laureates. In fact, “Nobel Prize sperm bank” was the nickname that the initiative quickly gained in the press, according to David Plotz, writing in Slate. Ironic, considering that Graham himself walked away with a 1991 Ig Nobel for the repository.

After Graham tried to sell the press on his idea in 1980, Plotz writes, two of the laureates quickly backed out. Many said—with reason—that Graham’s theories about to create “ideal” children seemed a lot like the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century that eventually shaped Nazism. All his donors were white and had to be married heterosexuals, among other criteria, and the bank would only supply sperm to women who were the same. In theory, Graham said, the bank would produce children that were all white, intelligent, neurotypical and physically conforming to one ideal aesthetic.

William B. Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, was the only one to publically admit to being in the Repository, although Plotz writes that he never donated again. Shockley’s longstanding reputation for racism and espousing evolutionary pseudo-theories that strayed far outside his area of expertise helped to discredit the bank.

Musk appears to believe he, too, has super sperm, and is very generous in offering it up to willing wombs. He has children with his ex-wife, with Grimes, and this latest batch from a Neuralink employee. Page Six — of course, Page Six — has a comprehensive list.

My point here isn’t to gossip about children who, after all, had no say in how or where they entered the world, nor to speculate on whether these women actually enjoyed laying with a doughy South African, but the truly repellent idea that some sperm — always emitting from a white man, funnily enough — is better than others. One of the greatest things about human beings is how we aren’t show dogs or race horses, and happy accidents of intelligence and talent happen all over.

My colleague Ron did a story years ago in Fort Wayne, about a boy who was getting a little squirrelly in his…I think it was fourth-grade classroom, maybe? Still in grade school, anyway. He was the son of two tattooed, working-class Hoosiers who didn’t play Baby Mozart tapes when he was in utero, probably didn’t care all that much about organic food, educational television, “enrichment” classes or any of that. But the kid’s teacher had him tested for something other than ADHD, and he turned out to have an IQ of something like 165, well into genius range. IQ tests are deeply suspect, true, but it was a startling result, and the story was about how his parents and school were trying to see that he lived up to the potential his brainpower offered.

I love stories like that. I hope that kid is doing great in life, and has his mom and dad to thank for it.

In other children news this week, we had a tragedy in Detroit. A family of six — mom and five children — were sleeping in their van in various casino parking garages, and two of the children froze to death a couple nights ago. It’s heartbreaking, because the mother had reached out for help three times in recent weeks, but had never been placed in a shelter, and there were even empty beds the very night the kids died.

When I heard the headline — children found dead in casino parking garage — I first thought it was a story about child neglect and compulsive gambling. But no. Casinos are open all night, and are good places to sneak into a washroom. No guard checks vehicles coming and going at odd hours. They say she was running the heater, but the van ran out of gas.

This is so discouraging. Exactly what shelters are supposed to prevent.

So we’re in the first month of Trump sitting on his fat ass behind the Resolute Desk, a pile of Sharpie Magnums at the ready, and he’s been…signing things. Not meeting with Congressional leaders, not holding policy meetings. He gave Elon and his broccoli heads the keys to the treasury and he’s retired to the Oval to sign stuff. It started with serious stuff, and three weeks later, he’s down to straws.

I’m beginning to think this isn’t serious, although it is very dangerous. There should be a strategy to fight this. The American system wasn’t meant to run on executive orders by a mad king, even one with many stupid followers and some unsmiling henchman. Seventy-four million voters said hell no to this bullshit, and millions more stayed home because they either couldn’t be bothered or simply despised both candidates. But one candidate isn’t in the picture anymore, so maybe we could redirect that sentiment? I dunno. Then there’s this:

Gillibrand on WNYC today said one reason they're all falling in line is that they get death threats.

[image or embed]

— Regina Schrambling (@gastropoda.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 3:31 PM

As more than one person pointed out in the replies, lots of people get death threats these days, but they don’t let a bunch of cowards change the way they live their lives or do their jobs. So nut up, Kristin Gillibrand. There’s work to do.

Now it’s time for the Super Bowl. It’s still more than an hour to kickoff, I just turned the game on, but I’m confident President Sharpie hasn’t showed up yet. The warmups are ongoing, and there’s a lot of helmet-knocking and close-up yelling player-to-player, which I gather is a bonding / amp-up ritual. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but part of me wants the Chiefs to lose, so Taylor and Travis break up and she writes a song about it.

This is the overwhelming Detroit vibe today:

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Let’s watch.

I watched “Emilia Pérez” this week. It’s, shall we say, a rather experimental film. One critic described it as “Mrs. Doubtfire” meets “Sicario,” plus a musical. Written and directed by a Frenchman (and filmed almost entirely in Paris), it has received a buttload of cultural criticism; one critic noticed none of the characters in this Mexico-set story spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. To this I can only shrug; it was so weird and imaginative it seemed to take place in a world where accents were the least of anyone’s worries. The plot, in a nutshell:

Rita, a female lawyer (Zoe Saldana) frustrated with her work, is plucked off the street, literally, by a Mexican drug lord, Manitas, who wants her to do an unusual service: To relocate him and his family, separately, to a place where his enemies will never find him or them. His motivation: He intends to complete his gender transition and become a woman. For this service Rita will be rewarded with riches beyond her wildest dreams. She does so; this is the first act. Manitas, now Emilia, is in London, his wife and children in Switzerland. After some years, Emilia misses her children and wants to live with them again, and Rita is again enlisted to reunite them, this time with the cover story that Emilia is a long-lost aunt, and this is where the Mrs. Doubtfire stuff comes in. The story gets even more spirited from there, and I won’t tell you more, other than to say: I liked it short of loving it. The performances were excellent, and I even identified with Emilia in the sense that we have similar high-school-linebacker-size bodies; every time I saw her in the frame with the Hollywood-tiny Saldana, or Selena Gomez, who plays her wife, I was startled by the contrast.

As a rule, the Oscar-bait films come out at the end of the year and I haven’t seen many this year. I get dispirited by 10 months of superheroes, toy-based crap, animated garbage and so forth in the local multiplexes, and can’t always find a dozen free weekends between Labor Day and the King holiday to cram all the good stuff in. I think the last thing we saw in theaters was “Megalopolis.” But we’ve set aside tonight for “A Complete Unknown,” so there.

Anyway, I’ve come to admire art that really swings for the fences, and while “Emilia Perez” has many many flaws, it does indeed do that.

It’s been a weird week. Every time I look at a news site, I see further evidence we’re doomed. I don’t want to look away, as many have; it’s our responsibility to stay woke, as we once said. But there are days I have to think about the movies for a while. So I leave you with some bloggage, OK?

A smart piece on Pamela Paul, departing NYT columnist.

Finally, a photo I’ve vividly remembered from my college years, and could never find, until the name the photographer gave it when it made the contest rounds came to me all at once, burped up by my memory. A quick Google, and there it was. Not wanting to violate whatever copyright might still pertain, here’s a link. The backstory: The Ohio KKK held a rally on the Statehouse steps and some anti-racists showed up to fuck up their shit, so to speak. One made it all the way to where the Grand Wizard, or whatever those douchebags call themselves, was standing and delivered a fine blow, caught at the exact instant of impact by a UPI photographer. Title: “The Wizard Gets Walloped,” an image that regrettably will probably be duplicated in our own time. This may mark me as old-school, but I love, purely love, black-and-white news photography, and no video will ever change that.

Have a good weekend, all. Welcome to new readers. Thanks for stopping by.

I wrote the below Tuesday afternoon, before the world learned the United States government would be assisting in developing beachfront property in Gaza. Clearly we’ll have something to discuss today, but I don’t have words for it at the moment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, which means he goes on to a full Senate confirmation vote, which means he’ll probably be confirmed. The one possible GOP holdout, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor if you can believe that shit, folded like a cheap tent and so there’s the fourth Republican who might have saved the country from this quackery advocate.

Which reminds me, I need my second shingles shot, and should probably get it PDQ. The RSV jab as well. Then it’s just wait for bird flu to roll through.

I wrote to both my senators yesterday. They were sharply worded, but contained no R-rated language and didn’t get personal. I’m trying to do my part. God knows it isn’t easy.

And now I find myself looking at a to-do list for the week that’s mostly checked off. Having lunch with friends on Wednesday. Contact with other humans is important, lest we go even nuttier than we already are. It doesn’t help that so many people I know are having a terrible winter, even outside of current events. Jeff Borden has shared his here. The other day I met a friend for coffee, and his current situation sounds like something out of a 19th century novel.

I want spring to come and everybody to be happy and healthy, but increasingly that’s not looking too possible.

Back to writing to representatives. And waiting for RFK to take the reins.

Sorry this is short and bummer-ish, but I’m committed to three a week this year, and at the rate we’re going, we’ll need a fresh thread sometime on Wednesday. Because IT NEVER ENDS.

There was a tragedy hereabouts last week: A 5-year-old child was killed, and his mother injured, when the hyperbaric oxygen chamber he was in exploded. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers push nearly 100 percent oxygen, which is highly flammable. Obviously, something went very wrong.

I didn’t think much of it at first. My friend Mark the Shark went through a course of HBO therapy a few years ago, after hand surgery post-op went awry and the bandage was removed, revealing a gangrenous pinky finger. He and his doctors managed to save the finger, which gradually returned to its normal pink hue over the course of 35 treatments. This was in a hospital setting, and wound care of this sort is one of the conditions for which HBO is indicated.

But I started reading further, and the world of, shall we say, suspect HBO treatments was revealed. This boy was not in a hospital but a treatment center, founded and run by a doctor whose degree is a PhD in education, not medicine. The list of conditions HBO is said to treat would set off alarm bells in any reasonable person. It runs from A (ADHD, autism) to T (traumatic brain injury), perhaps because no one’s thought to tie it to Zika virus. This child was being treated for sleep apnea, which is rare in kids but is treatable with, shall we say, different strategies than HBO, at least according to Yale Medicine. And the Mayo Clinic. And Cedars-Sinai. You get the idea.

Anyway. The area’s fiercest PI law firm has taken the case, and time will tell. But it’s always interesting to see how health care can make people desperate for Cures That Modern Medicine Is Keeping From Us, Because Big Pharma. The Atlantic reports that if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as HHS secretary, expect to see what flimsy restraints are put on dietary supplements obliterated entirely:

If the little regulation that the FDA is responsible for now—surveilling supplements after they’re on the market—lapses, more adulterated and mislabeled supplements could line store shelves. And Americans might well pour even more of our money into the industry, egged on by the wellness influencer charged with protecting our health and loudly warning that most of our food and drug supply is harmful. Kennedy might even try to get in on the supplement rush himself. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that, according to documents filed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Kennedy applied to trademark MAHA last year, which would allow him to sell, among other things, MAHA-branded supplements and vitamins. (He transferred ownership of the application to an LLC in December. Kennedy’s team did not respond to the Post.)

A truly unleashed supplement industry would have plenty of tools at its disposal with which to seduce customers. Austin studies dietary supplements that make claims related to weight loss, muscle building, “cleansing,” and detoxing, many of which are marketed to not just adults, but teenagers too. “Those types of products, in particular, play on people’s insecurities,” she told me. They also purport to ease common forms of bodily or mental distress that can’t be quickly addressed by traditional medical care. Reducing stress is hard, but ordering the latest cortisol-reducing gummy on TikTok Shop is easy. Your doctor can’t force vegetables into your diet, but a monthly subscription of powdered greens can.

We talked about this a few weeks back. I’ll repeat now what I said then: There is very little FDA oversight of supplements now, and grifters and sleazebags take full advantage of it. Not-Dr. Kash Patel has pimped “vaccine reversal” supplements, for god’s sake.

Oh, well. In other mad-king news, perhaps in an effort to prove that yes there is SO a giant valve that one can turn to send water to Southern California, the president ordered two dams there to release water. It won’t do any good, but it could harm farmers when the growing season starts, because that’s what the water is being impounded for.

Finally, Neil Steinberg speaks for me.

Gird your loins. The week ahead awaits.