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:

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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.

Idaho’s state legislature wants to ask SCOTUS to overturn Obergefell, i.e. the same-sex marriage decision. They’re doing this in the form of a petition, which is unusual and unlikely to succeed, but I’m thinking this is the velociraptors testing the electric fence. They’ll be brushed back, and then try again. Or another state will get the idea. And I expect we’ll see the corrupt SCOTUS roll back this protection. Places like Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York will retain the right, but red-state shitholes like Alabama, Louisiana, even Indiana? I doubt it. And so a lesbian couple that travels from their home in Grand Rapids to, say, the bluegrass festival in Brown County, Indiana should take care not to get into a traffic accident, because they wouldn’t be each other’s next of kin if something bad happened.

This situation is why we have federalism, of course. It’s preposterous to think you can be married in one state and single in another, but that’s the way MAGAts want it, and I guess that’s how they’ll get it.

Also, the president casually suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza over the weekend. I hope the Arab Americans in Dearborn and Hamtramck who simply couldn’t vote for the party of Genocide Joe will enjoy this outcome. We’re also tariff-beefing with…checks notes…Colombia?

In other news at this hour, all the Great Lakes freighters are heading to their winter layup ports, about a week late. One had to be broken out of the ice in Lake Erie near Buffalo. It’s not exactly Shackleton’s Endurance, but good lord, we knew this weather was coming at least a week ahead of its arrival.

And that’s all I have energy for today.

There are two Catholic high schools in Fort Wayne. Bishop Dwenger, in the north end of town, is considered the academic powerhouse of the pair. Bishop Luers, on the south end? A football academy. In my time as a Hoosier, I remember the football academy being in the news when it was discovered that some of the players had something they called “The GTA Club,” with GTA standing for “grab that ass,” and we’re not talking about on the football field. In that more innocent time — it was before the Boston priest scandal — it was seen as a one-off, problematic but boys will be boys, etc.

My friend Nathan reports in an extended Xitter post that this is, it would seem, part of a pattern. In 2012, the athletic director was dismissed after he was found to be surreptitiously taking “inappropriate” photos and videos of students. In 2023, a teacher was arrested for having sex with students, and when it turned out he was having a competition with another teacher to see who could bang the most students, that guy was arrested, too. (One is in prison, the other is not.)

But it gets worse.

This week, a lawsuit was filed over, again, a scandal with sexual overtones. Overtones — what am I saying? It’s a sex scandal, but a particularly cruel one. The ledes of both stories don’t really explain fully what happened, so I’ll try:

Male students would go to porn sites and find clips where the female performer had similar hair, skin tone and body type as one of their classmates, then add her name to the clip and trade with or sell it to their friends and others, advertising it as being that student. This constitutes child pornography under state law.

The suit claims the school knew and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — did nothing. The diocese did nothing. The principal, and dean of students/athletic director not only did nothing, they stonewalled the parents of the girls. Relevant quote:

According to the lawsuit, (the dean of students/AD) admitted to the parents that the school had been “dealing with” the pornographic videos for “some time.” He also admitted the videos had not been reported to the authorities, the suit said.

“During this confrontation at the school on September 25, (the principal) repeatedly proclaimed: ‘We don’t want to falsely accuse the boys!’” the lawsuit reads.

When I first read the story, I assumed the clips were so-called deepfakes, where AI is used to actually put a person’s face on another’s body. They don’t appear to be, but I’m sure that’s next, and I’m sure the next principal will stonewall those young women, too.

My trainer coaches at a local public high school, and says the parents of students at the Catholic football academy in these parts are fond of screaming obscenities at the officials.

I smell bullshit in this story, too:

The Trump administration has instructed federal health agencies to pause all external communications, such as health advisories, weekly scientific reports, updates to websites and social media posts, according to nearly a dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the matter.

The instructions were delivered Tuesday to staff at agencies inside the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, one day after the new administration took office, according to the people with knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Some of them acknowledged that they expected some review during a presidential transition but said they were confused by the pause’s scope and indeterminate length.

…Two others suggested the move is aimed at helping the newly installed Trump health officials understand the vast flow of information coming out of the agencies. The pause, according to one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal agency conversations, “seemed more about letting them catch their breath and know what is going on with regard to” communications.

Catch their breath, my ass. The MMWR — Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, to you civilians, and one of the “paused” communications — is how doctors and researchers keep up with what’s killing and sickening Americans. Journalists rely on it, too. But I’m sure this is OK; it’s not like bird flu is going around or anything.

This, along with the deep freeze we’ve been stuck in all week, is not elevating my mood. At least Kate’s house hunt is a diversion. She got her pre-approval, and starts going through houses on Friday. So it begins.

Well, I kept some of my vow. I didn’t watch any of the inauguration ceremonies, but some of it got in around the edges. Melania’s hat. Ivanka’s hat. Both of their chins, Ivanka’s unquestionably new. The next Mrs. Bezos-elect’s neckline. Saved by God, golden age, Elon’s Nazi salute, blah blah blah. All those executive orders. I guess this is how we govern now? Send a bunch of idiot clowns to Congress, then get shit done via EO. The wingnuts will holler OBAMA DID THIS while ignoring that the reason Obama did so much via EO was because Mitch McConnell, et al, vowed to do absolutely nothing to work with him, i.e. their jobs, and were as good as their word. Now there’s a whole generation of young people who think this is governing. It is not. It’s stupid king-signaling, but this is the country we are now. Regrettably.

Vivek Ramaswamy is out at the new commission which is basically just an office and has no power other than to prompt more EOs. The human mosquito now intends to run for governor of my native state. I haven’t kept up on how the Democrats are doing in Ohio, but I have no doubt that Buckeyes will buy what he’s selling, whatever that is. I wonder if he sends his kids to the excellent public schools in the suburb where he lives now, the same one I grew up in. My guess is…no. But they’re still very young, so we’ll see.

A headline along the way spoke of Trump’s “showmanship.” I guess that’s what you’d call it, but I prefer to think of it as the greasiest pro-wrestling promoter baying to a crowd of toothless morons, desecrating the traditions and buildings of our allegedly cherished republic. In other words, I’m even less inclined to be nice to Trump voters, if I ever was.

Yes, I am glum today. How about you?