Seems I’ve been neglecting this venue in recent days. Sorry about that. Life and work has piled up, but the pile is manageable now, and so: Back to it.

Like most of you, I’ve been watching the unfolding of the Signal scandal — and it is a scandal, and not one I’ll affix “-gate” to — with a growing sense of horror. The initial horror of the deed, followed by the exasperated horror of the spin: Seriously this is not the big deal you think it is, nothing classified was shared, anyway Signal is secure, anyway that guy should have revealed himself anyway HILLARY DID IT FIRST, etc. As a friend said, wait until Hegseth leaves his phone in a bar somewhere. Because you know that’ll happen. But at this point I don’t have anything special to say about it that hasn’t already been said, so let’s just continue that conversation.

I do have a number of photos to share.

Got my car washed yesterday, because it was shamefully dirty. I don’t know about your car wash, but mine is like an explosion of small-market capitalism, the long hallway from the drop-off to the pickup bays lined with windows — so you can watch the wash, of course — and under that, stacks of stuff for sale because you never know what you might be missing. Peanut-butter pretzels are big this week; a while back it was barrels of cheese puffs. Office supplies of the sort sold near the checkout lines at Staples — tissue, Post-its, legal pads. Lots of car-related stuff like air fresheners or steering-wheel covers (a product I’ve never used, nor felt the need for). Shop towels, microfiber and cotton, in bulk. Lately they’ve been selling generic versions of those Scrub Daddy sponges. There’s a mechanical horse for children to ride while they wait. Self-published books by local authors, and the traditional bulletin board of business cards. But lately I’ve been taken by the family-business displays, like this:

The car wash is called Mr. C’s. That is the original Mr. C, although I’m sure he perished long before it opened. That is one impressive mustache. Sicilian, of course, because northern Italians weren’t the main immigrants from the boot, but rather, the impoverished southern ones. A framed obit near this photo tells more of the story. Sorry the picture is so crappy, but I can read it:

The subject being remembered is the second Mr. C, son of the mustache man. After the original Mr. C came here and earned enough money, he came back to Sicily, married, and left his pregnant wife behind while he crossed the water again and started his grocery business, “pushing a vegetable cart on Detroit’s east side.” At some point he sent for his family; his little boy was 6. The cart became a store, then another store, and by the time that little boy retired in 1969, he went to work in his children’s businesses, which by then included another market, and then a line of delis. The car washes came in 1991, across the street from one of the delis. His son, Vito Jr., is now called Bill. (Or was — this obit is from 2000. Dunno if he’s still with us. The top-tier wash is called “Bill’s Best,” and that’s the one I got.) The Mack Bewick Market is now deep in the hood; it was owned by a friend of a friend’s father for a time, and was notable for not having any bulletproof plexi between the customer and the clerk, “however, the clerks were never more than an arm’s length from a gun,” friend reports. I found a social-media post by someone who said “you could get ANYthing there,” and she wasn’t talking about drugs, but rather, the things that make hood life possible, like low-cost infant formula, counterfeit license stickers for your plates, etc.

An inspiring family story. I wonder how they feel about current U.S. immigration policy.

It’s been chilly this week, but it won’t last, and yesterday Alan raked up all the plant detritus, mulched it with the mower, ran out the gas in the snow blower and set the stage for the first green shoots, expected soon:

We’ll check back in a few weeks, see how it shapes up.

Finally, I followed a link on an old blog a few days back and lo, it still works, and isn’t this story more interesting now:

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.

This was in 2022, and Boeing was already $660 million in the hole, and responsible for all cost overruns, under a contract signed during the first Trump administration. Meanwhile, I read this story last month:

President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes.

What could possibly go wrong! Keep an eye on this. It could get good — or funny!! — really fast. I want someone to only finger-tighten the bolts holding down the POTUS-only toilet. If regular civilians have to fly on planes with the doors blowing off, it’s the least they can do for us.

Thursday already! Have a great one.

I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing at this:

President Trump is demanding that Colorado take down its “purposefully distorted” painting of him hanging in the State Capitol.

“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump said in a post Sunday on Truth Social. “The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one [of] me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older.”

…“I am speaking …to the Radical Left Governor, Jared Polis, who is extremely weak on Crime, in particular with respect to Tren de Aragua, which practically took over Aurora (Don’t worry, we saved it!), to take it down,” Trump said. “Jared should be ashamed of himself.”

The portrait:

Now this is Monday content I can get behind. The president, who considers himself a next-level handsome specimen of mature masculinity, with a year-round tan due to his many masculine outdoor pursuits, and he leans forward like he does because he’s making a masculine point, dammit, not because he wears lifts in his shoes — doesn’t like his portrait, which makes him look like a chubby-cheeked demon. And Barack Obama looks wonderful! HOW DARE THEY?

A few more fat portraits, a few more Tesla demonstrations, and we might have the beginnings of a foothold. As Democrats, with very few exceptions, are proving themselves worthless in this struggle, then we’ll just have to keep on strugglin’ on our own.

A busy weekend. The Derringers took a proactive stance toward dealing with our anger by? Taking a gun class, the one Michigan requires before you can get your CPL, or concealed pistol license. I have no intention of packing, I hasten to add. But it was interesting to see the law detailed (such as it was, kinda — more on that in a couple sentences). And the course included an hour of range time, so I got to see what all the excitement is about, and honestly, I don’t get it. The vibe on pistol ranges is so unpleasant to me, the bro-y bullshit of it all. The guy shooting next to me was wearing earmuffs emblazoned FJB, and in case you were too stupid to get it, LET’S GO BRANDON as well. For a rank novice, I shot pretty well.

The teacher was a piece of work. He chuckled through the entire 8-hour class, and swore like the Marine he once was. Having worked in newsrooms, nothing about the language offended me, and maybe when you’re teaching in a super-macho gun store, you think no one will be bothered by the ass-rape jokes you make after every! Single! Mention! of Jail! But I know a few gay people who are arming themselves for the unpleasantness they have every reason to believe is coming, and some of them certainly would be. But we graduated, and got our certificates, and now I have to consider whether it’s worth $100 to be legal, so to speak. I just don’t see the point. I don’t live in the world gun-toters do, with their constant vigilance against the violence they are sure is stalking them, personally, every minute of the day.

I used to work with a man — Leo Morris, for those of you who remember him — whose brother, a Texas resident, was radicalized by the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre of 1991. He started packing, and swiftly got to the point he “felt naked” without his holster and sidearm. He was always trying to get Leo to do the same, taking him shooting when they got together, etc. I lost touch with Leo in his later years, but a few things he wrote made me think that maybe his brother’s paranoia had taken hold in Leo. (He began using the phrase “constitutional carry,” for instance.) But one thing gun school did for me is make me realize: There is virtually nothing I could shoot someone over. A physical attack with serious intent to kill or maim me or my family is the only thing I can think of, and that would require so much advance planning — I’d have to have the gun, the gun would have to be loaded, I’d have to be able to get to it, etc. — that it strikes me as intensely impractical. So I guess I’ll just have to trust that a lifetime of prudent behavior will save me from losing my life to gun violence, as it does millions and millions of Americans.

The guy teaching the class, the chuckling Leatherneck, sketched out so many scenarios where violence is right there waiting to strike you down that I had to think: What a way to live. He was carrying, I am not kidding, THREE weapons — two on each hip and one down the back of his pants. Talk about paranoia. And he was responsible, if you take him at his word. He doesn’t carry when he’s going to be drinking, he said. He practices often. And so on. But if you’re armed, then it almost requires you to be hyper-vigilant at all times, and that? Is exhausting. I have enough shit to worry about.

I keep thinking about the FJB-earmuffs guy. Alan, who shoots skeet, reported that there was a chronic ammunition shortage during the Obama administration, due to persistent rumors that the president was coming for the guns AND the ammo. He did neither, but we’re not talking about the smartest, savviest, best-informed people, either. And neither did Biden, but oh my those Macomb County Republicans aren’t going to let that stop them from putting him on their stupid gun earmuffs. The way people talk on social media when, for instance, someone’s TV gets stolen or car is broken into, makes me think they…don’t think. You can’t shoot someone over a TV, or your car stereo, or any other property crime. People imagine they’d be able to drop to the floor, find a cover position, calmly draw their weapon and return fire with deadly accuracy? In a movie theater. In a grocery store. In any mass-panic situation. You are not John Wick, and John Wick doesn’t exist. And even if you did act within the law — the guy was coming through your window, knife in his teeth, etc. — imagine the aftermath. The cops. The cleanup. Having to walk past the spot where you shot and killed a man, every day. You’d have to move! I would, anyway. Totally not worth it to me. I’d just run out the back door.

OK, I’ve gone on enough, and it’s time to finish editing this video. The week ahead promises temperatures in the 40s, ugh. Might as well do some spring cleaning and file the taxes. Later.

Journalism these days is so focused on anniversaries — it can be reported in advance, relies on “experts,” and allows editors to plan their news budgets — that it was natural the five-year anniversary of Covid’s first appearance in this country would be a big thing, although not that big. I sense the wound is still a little raw, so the observances have been…muted, shall we say.

We all have our memories. The overwhelming weirdness of it all is how it stands out for me. I was already doing a fair amount of work at home, so that wasn’t a shock, but for Alan, it was. The sound of the Microsoft Teams audio alert calling him to yet another online meeting is seared in my brainpan. He remembers working on the car that first weekend of shutdowns, outdoors on a typical late-winter afternoon, being struck by the near-constant sirens, presumably ambulances arriving at the hospital a half-mile away. Kate was on tour with her band, and it was like jumping from one melting ice floe to the next, each venue less sparsely populated than the next, culminating in a van breakdown in rural Utah. She settled into her own room, defeated.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “By Memorial Day this will all be past us.”

Well. Shows what I know.

I’ve probably shared the above previously, and we all have our own memories. I reread a one-year anniversary story I did for Deadline Detroit around this time every year, just to remind me how crazy it was. I particularly linger over the recollections of a black funeral director:

The real trouble started when government offices closed. We couldn’t get death certificates. You have to have an official cause and manner of death to bury, and especially for cremation. I rented a refrigerated truck. My holding room was overflowing. Hospital morgues were overflowing. It was late May to June before I could finally catch up.

Without death certificates, families can’t collect insurance. And because people were dying so young, nobody had a will or plan. Some people had their living wills, medical power of attorney, all those things in order, but that wasn’t the majority. Then you had households with multiple Covid cases, like a husband and wife in the ICU at the same time. If one died and the other was on a vent, no one could speak for them. So someone had to get emergency guardianship. It complicated all the situations. It hit my community so hard, and we were screaming and it’s like nobody heard us. I’d hear these people saying, “We have to open up. I can’t go to my restaurant anymore,” and I’m having trouble getting gloves because of the hoarding. Without gloves, I’m out of business.

Yes indeed. So it’s interesting to read one group’s memories and takeaways, i.e., conservative chatterboxes. To listen to them, it’s all about FREEDOM and VACCINE MANDATES and GOVERNMENT LYING and DYING WITH COVID, NOT OF COVID, and SHEEPLE. More than a million Americans didn’t die (except for grandma, who took her last breath alone while her tearful family watched on an iPad). And for what? A silly flu? Never again!!!

Well, OK. And when Croaky’s oversight allows bird flu to mutate and become the next pandemic, we all know what to do. But there won’t be stimulus checks, no special unemployment, no public-health measures.

I took some pictures. This is one of my favorites, from September 2020, some Grosse Pointe teens having a socially distanced hang in a middle-school parking lot:’

Of course some fashion rules must be upheld, no matter the situation. I mean, we’re not savages:

I’ve had eight Covid shots, and no Covid (to my knowledge; I know asymptomatic cases exist). I wonder if I’ll be able to even get one this fall.

How was your St. Patrick’s Day? I went out for the first time in years, to two spots: The Gaelic League and Nancy Whiskey, a great Detroit dive. I had fun, and confined my drinking to two Harps and a shot of Jameson’s. An old man kissed me on the lips. I came home and told Alan. “Did he try to slip you some tongue?” he asked. No, I’m happy to say.

Had to do a Costco run today. We were running low on paper towels, and needed trash bags, laundry detergent, that stuff I only want to buy twice a year. I had a little extra time, it was lunchtime, and I thought, by golly, I’m going to try one of those giant hot dogs this place is so famous for. I got the combo — hot dog plus drink — for $1.50 and sat down at a shared table to eat. The couple next to me had come in from Canada to shop, but were disappointed they couldn’t find Bugles. Yes, the horn-shaped snack food. Another couple sitting nearby suggested they try Aldi, just three miles away.

“But there’ll be a 25 percent tariff on those levied at the bridge, so I hope that doesn’t eat up the anticipated bulk savings,” I said, and we all shared a grim chuckle. This Costco is in red Macomb County, and the fact we could laugh about it struck me as a slim slice of dim sunshine in a dark time. Then I came home to learn the on-again, off-again tariffs are kinda off, then kinda on, and we’re supporting Ukraine militarily again? But the market is still down 600 points, just today. Capitalists these days must feel like a frat boy who brought a hot girl home from the bar at closing time, and learned too late that she was crazy as a shithouse rat, and also pregnant.

We tried to warn them! Now they’ve fucked around and are finding out. A friend was drinking on a bar patio last night — we’re deep in Fool’s Spring this week — and a Cybertruck pulled up to the stop sign at the corner. Everyone on the patio began yelling abuse at the driver. This is good news.

Oh well. Concentrate on the good! Kate’s house passed inspection with flying colors, and closing is set for the end of the month. Don’t tell her, but her father is giving her a [deleted] for a housewarming present. Me, I’m still thinking. The problem is complicated by her boyfriend’s two cats, so any decent furniture is probably not a good idea. I saw a few pieces of furniture at Costco, but the style now is this nubby upholstery that makes everything look like a giant scratching post. Think I’ll wait until she’s moved and see what gaps need to be filled.

Meanwhile, I tackled the taxes. What should have been a two-hour chore stretched out to the full day, because That Tax Program Everyone Uses was glitchy as hell. I laid down for a nap after four hours, and a potential solution came to me in a doze. Didn’t work, although now, even though I changed nothing, it claims our forms are error-free and ready to file. Then I wondered if the problem was Safari, the Mac browser I’ve been using forever. More and more sites are dropping subtle hints that they’re “optimized for Chrome,” and the thought of migrating all my bookmarks and passwords gives me a headache.

Finally, I assume you’ve been paying attention to the Mahmoud Khalil case. It makes me think of Larry Flynt, and why a bigshot Harvard lawyer like Alan Isaacman took his case to the Supreme Court. As Isaacman and Flynt both pointed out, when the government wants to crack down on free speech, they don’t go after the Girl Scouts first. They target the pornographers, people others are afraid to stand up for. And when they want to break all the laws around immigration, they go after a troublesome Palestinian activist. But they won’t stop there. And I think that’s evident.

Midweek is here. Hope no more glitches.

We didn’t see this in New Orleans, but I endorse it heartily:

Swastikar gets bombarded at Mardi Gras
byu/funksonme inPublicFreakout

I also find this account from inside one of the Swasticars amusing:

New Orleans is a blue city in a bloody-red state, but still: Resistance. And resistance that means more than wearing a pink suit and holding up a little paddle. I mean, we’ve seen what a piece of crap a Cybertruck is — one of those beads might have shattered the windshield.

And this, Reddit informs me, is now a regular event at the Easton Tesla dealership in Columbus:

I guess if we’re going to save what’s left of this country, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Surely we can’t rely on anyone in Washington to do it:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are shying away from criticizing Donald Trump’s policies over fears for their physical safety and that of their families, a Democratic member of Congress has said.

Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative from California, said his Republican colleagues were “terrified” of crossing Trump not only because of the negative impact on their political careers, but also from anxiety that it might provoke physical threats that could cause personal upheaval and require them to hire round-the-clock security as protection.

…“It’s their personal safety that they’re afraid of, and they have spouses and family members saying, ‘Do not do this, it’s not worth it, it will change our lives forever. We will have to hire around-the-clock security.’ Life can be very uncomfortable for your children.

“That is real, because when [Elon] Musk [Trump’s most powerful ally] tweets at somebody, or Trump tweets at somebody, or calls somebody out, their lives are turned upside down.

“When he tweets at you, people make threats, and you have to take people at their word. And so that is a real thing that my colleagues struggle with.”

Here’s my advice: Don’t take them at their word. Assume the people who make these threats are what they seem to be: Cowards. Live your life in the open. If someone yells at you in a restaurant, yell back, or spill your ice water on their shoes, or just look bored and snap your fingers for security to throw them out. Don’t hire around-the-clock security. Be brave. Public service isn’t all receptions at the French embassy. There are women all over the world who open their inboxes every day and find death threats, rape threats, threats most congress members haven’t even considered. Teach your children what bravery looks like.

(Noted: This didn’t work out for Salman Rushdie, true. But most of these people are indeed cowards. The odds are in your favor.)

But if you can’t find the strength to do this, please dispense with the pink and the paddles and the other empty gestures, which sound like something you’d hear discussed in the background chatter in a Woody Allen movie party scene. It just doesn’t pack the punch you think it does. Boycott the speech. A pink pantsuit is not bravery.

And now we’re back home. The shiner has progressed from Mardi Gras magenta to southwestern-sunset shades of muted purple and yellow. Most of the swelling is gone, but the browbone is still a little tender. I forget what I look like, and every time I pass a mirror I start a little, but oh well.

And Kate found a house! A cute, very nicely remodeled bungalow on the east side of Detroit. Still has to pass inspection, but I’m thinking it’ll work out.

The week begins, and already my to-do list is a mile long. First: Lunch. Then a workout. Hope your goes well.

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.