One of the detriments to the internet is how much we assume facts not in evidence. You probably heard a child died of measles in Texas today. (Fact.) This child was unvaccinated. (Fact.) Beyond that, we don’t know much, and it will likely stay that way. We can speculate that the child’s parents were anti-vax nuts, but we can’t know that. But I predict that soon someone will sing out that the poor dead kid had a crazy mother who prayed to RFK Jr. every night, and that will become the story that gets passed around. It’s entirely possible the child’s family was poor, or ignorant, and maybe didn’t know there was a vaccination event taking place at the local health department. It’s useful to remember Sherri’s comment some days back, that the people who will suffer most under the new regime are the most powerless.

Our new HHS secretary is a liar and an exaggerator; he sticks to the 72-doses bullshit, which is simply untrue, among many other outright lies about vaccine safety. At the first cabinet meeting today, he downplayed the Texas outbreak as no biggie, just one of many that happen every year, ignoring the fact as recently as 2000, we considered measles on the brink of extinction.

It’s pretty clear now: We’re all going to be on our own for at least the next four years. Birds are dropping out of the sky from bird flu. There’s a new bleeding-from-the-eyeballs disease in Africa. Influenza A is ripping through my community, as is norovirus. I look forward to Croaky telling us to double up on the Vitamin D.

God, what a pig.

Speaking of pigs, I can’t even talk about Jeff Bezos right now.

I mentioned we have a mini-break coming, and as usual, I have a bunch of work to do before that. So I’m afraid this will be the last entry of the week, but! We’ll have some fun pix starting over the weekend, as the Derringers decamp for…New Orleans. And Mardi Gras.

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.

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:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by outer limits lounge (@theouterlimitslounge)

Let’s watch.

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.

Edited to add: Friends, I wrote this yesterday before news of the plane crash broke. Obviously, we’ll all be watching those developments today. Feel free to thread hijack all you want.

I’ve probably talked about this before here, but if there are any newbies in the readership, here it is again: I’ve always felt a certain not-too-serious sisterhood with Caroline Kennedy. We’re so close in age — she is two days younger than me — that it’s the sort of thing your mom tells you when you’re both little, and her dad is president. What’s more, her younger brother’s birthday is on the same date as mine, three years later. So it’s:

Me: November 25, 1957
Caroline: November 27, 1957
John Kennedy Jr.: November 25, 1960

Mostly this was taken as a joke in my family: “I see Caroline Kennedy is interning for the New York Daily News this summer,” my mom might say, by way of noting that I was spending my break working the cash register in a Mexican restaurant. Caroline went to law school. Caroline has published many books. Caroline has served as ambassador to two countries (Japan, Australia). Needless to say, Caroline lives a cooler life than I do, but that’s to be expected.

This week Caroline made news for a devastating letter she sent to senators considering her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the president’s nominee to run the Department of Health & Human Services. You can see her read it here. The letter itself was very brave; she described her cousin as a “predator” and a malign influence on others. She scolded him for appropriating her father’s image and family’s reputation for his ridiculous presidential run, before “groveling to Trump for a job.” We’ll see if it has an effect.

But, shallow doppelgänger than I am, I couldn’t help but notice her face. I don’t want to snip copyright photos, so let’s look at the public-domain Wikipedia shot:

That is a 67-year-old, well-lived-in face. (Albeit one with Irish DNA and likely our generation’s casual relationship with sunblock.) And I think we’ve forgotten what that looks like.

We’re so inured to today’s fillered, Botoxed, surgically altered, Instagram-filtered face, we think that’s what older women should do, whether they want to or not. JLo is 55, and has not only no lines, but a 25-year-old’s body. The old ad line for hair color — “Does she or doesn’t she?” has moved from hair to our entire body. And speaking of 55-year-olds (in April), let’s take a look at another older woman:

It’s the new First Sex Worker’s official portrait. In the name of Photoshop, have you ever seen more filters deployed in your life? Not to mention the heavily plasticized body, with the breast implants, the slanty eyes, and god knows what else. Also 55 (although this photo is a few years old:

This photo was singled out for derision when she published it on her Instagram. It says a lot about her, if you ask me.

You can go online and find photos of both these women before they entered the Mar-a-Lago fembot factory. Others, too. Kristi Noem, age 53:

I can hear some of you men, or at least your horny ids, saying so what if Kristi and Kim got a glow-up? That high-necked pink blouse was doing her no favors, and her new hair is sexy. My reply would be: Why did she change her look so drastically? To catch the eye of a known sexual assailant, that’s why.

Speaking of Mar-a-lago:

(Shudder.)

Anyway. I’m watching the RFK Jr. hearing now. I can’t figure out whether Bobby has perma-dyed his skin the color of a walnut, whether he supplements with Bronx Colors makeup like his would-be boss, or if he simply spends so much time outside, maybe flexing his guns on the beach shirtless in a pair of jeans, or what.

Are we doomed? I feel like we probably are.

Good things are happening in the world right now. Decent people are having babies, the ultimate act of optimism about the future. The days are getting longer (in our hemisphere, anyway), and spring will arrive one of these days. Who knows, maybe right at this very instant karma is coming for Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rest of the democracy wrecking crew. You never know. Cancer could be metastasizing, a blood vessel wearing thin, a lethal dose of fentanyl making it way to someone’s coke or ketamine stash. We’re all going to die someday, and maybe one of those assholes will die first, hopefully in front of cameras.

But it’s hard to be optimistic. This I grant you. One of Michigan’s Democratic senators announced his retirement Tuesday. This isn’t good.

Today I opened the newspaper and learned it’s sponsoring a serious event in a few days:

Sponsored by The Detroit News, the program, “Lessons from History, Hope for Tomorrow: A Courageous Conversation,” is scheduled to be moderated by Gary Miles, editor and publisher of The News. Panelists are center CEO Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld; Nolan Finley, editorial page editor of The News; and his partner in the Great Lakes Civility Project, Stephen Henderson of Bridge Detroit.

The center referenced is the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills. The center, and the above-mentioned individuals, want to “divert America from that dangerous path,” because “incivility can quickly lead to hatred, and hatred to dehumanization.” Jews know this well. And yet, as I texted friends after reading this…well, it was something uncivil. Take my word for it.

Civility. Are you fucking kidding me.

The two partners in the Great Lakes Civility Project are, or used to be, the editors of their respective newspaper’s editorial pages. Finley still has his job, but Henderson left his a while back, and now works for my old employer. Both are lavishly paid and both still do this increasingly anachronistic work afforded only a lucky few anymore — having opinions, and sitting on panels to discuss these opinions in front of audiences. They’re friends, of course, because they have more in common than the fact one is a conservative and the other a liberal. As someone whose name I forget coined a phrase in a piece I also forget, they are fellow People of the Green Room. Game recognize game.

Not to beat up on those two. If someone offers you an honorarium, you take it. God knows where we’ll be in another year or two. Or six months. But I guffawed when I clicked through to the ticket site and learned it’s restricted to members of the Holocaust Center and Detroit News subscribers. I can imagine what the crowd will look like.

Here’s the question I’d ask, if I somehow were immobilized with a tranquilizer dart and forced to sit in the audience at this event: Why is it always us who extend the hand of brotherhood across the chasm of division? Have you ever seen a right-wing outfit – a church, a policy shop, anything – fretting about our uncivil world? And don’t tell me Nolan Finley constitutes “the other side.” Like I said, besides his fat ‘n’ happy career perch, he’s enough of a never-Trumper to be despised by many MAGA types. Which means this earnest event will have zero effect other than to fill the gray heads filing out afterward with endorphins.

It’s times like this I remember another quote whose source I forget, about an infamous Jewish gangster: “If more Jews were like Meyer Lansky, there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust.” Maybe we need a new hashtag: #BeLikeMeyer. No, that would be wrong. That would be uncivil. Meanwhile, here’s the winning team, as featured in the current issue of New York magazine:

This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity. A joke about Puerto Ricans or eugenics or sleeping with Nick Fuentes could throw a pack of smokers outside Butterworth’s into a gigglefest. Recounting her time at one of the balls, a woman tells me she jumped the velvet rope into a VIP section “like a little Mexican.” Then she lets out a cackle. This is the posture that has attracted newcomers to the cause. “Six months into Biden being president, I was like, I can’t fucking do this anymore,” says a 19-year-old New Yorker who once quite literally had blue hair and attends Marymount Manhattan, which he describes as “75 percent women and 23 percent trannies.” He had supported Biden, but “I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time.” Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say “faggot” and “retarded.”

They want to say faggot and retarded. And once they get comfortable, you know the other slur with double-Gs in the middle will come back from its long stretch in the wilderness. And maybe then the “19-year-old New Yorker” will feel brave enough to use his real name. (This I doubt.)

Of course, all those people can use those words now. I certainly hear them plenty. They just don’t want to get their ass kicked for saying them. Which makes them cowards, as well as uncivil.

Here’s one more thing, a glimpse from a subculture, or a sub-sub-subculture, I have no real knowledge of. The setup: There’s a local club in town, deep in the black east side of Detroit, that mostly hosts rock acts. It always seems to be teetering on the edge of some sort of collapse and its glory days are well behind it, but it stays open, somehow. Apparently over the past weekend, they were hosting a seven-band metal show, put on by an independent promoter, which means the venue was just there to be the roof and bar. The promoter handled everything else. The first band went on, and surprise! They’re Nazis! The house manager did the right thing, and shut down the show during the second band’s set. Here’s a newspaper story about it, based on social-media postings.

The Reddit thread is more instructive. A snippet:

I know who the dudes are who put this show on. They are in fact Nazis. Half the crowd was probably Latino and this is common in the NSBM(nationalist socialist black metal) scene and yes I know that makes no sense but it’s a thing.

The promoter is himself Latino! MAKE THIS MAKE SENSE. Because I can’t.