Draw pistol, aim at foot.

I grew up in a police-friendly household. My father was a lawyer, an assistant attorney general, and then a judge. He was the only judge in the area who would sign search warrants after hours, so we would have state and local cops in our house in the middle of the night. My dad knew them all. Cops were just part of the landscape. I write this to give you perspective on where my attitude towards law enforcement started out. 

I’ve been watching the police my entire life. I have experienced a slow evolution from support to suspicion. Over the past couple of decades I have come to the conclusion that they aren’t paying attention to their own best interests. 

It’s counterintuitive. They seem like the most self-interested profession in the country. They have powerful unions and the blue wall of silence. They pressure politicians for more funding and less oversight. It’s gotten to the point where they can outright murder people on camera and walk away free. 

Lately it has gotten bolder, if that’s possible. People of color, religious minorities, and LGBT folks have always known that they are vulnerable, but police are taking it to the privileged. Recently a riot cop in LA, knowing he was on camera, casually shot an Australian journalist in the back with a non-lethal round as she was speaking to the camera. ICE agents, without provocation, manhandled and handcuffed a New York City mayoral candidate, again, on camera. Members of Congress aren’t safe from pointless arrest. 

The problem for police concerns their sources of power. They have one tiny power and one giant power. Their tiny power is on their belt. The gun, the nightstick, the taser, the pepper spray, may seem like their big power  because their effect is immediate and dramatic. Likewise their power of arrest and legal monopoly on violence. Not so. 

Their giant power is the idea in the minds of the people that they are a source of justice and safety. That they are the good guys. That they are definitely a better option than their absence. With that power they walk among people who support them, who will obey their orders without reluctance, and who will warn them of danger and assist them. Also a population that will pay their salaries and maintain their numbers. Without that power they are just another bunch of guys with guns. In America that doesn’t make them special. 

The police have been hacking away at the base of that giant power forever, but lately with more fervor. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, confidence in the police is around 51%. It hasn’t gone over 64% in the past 30 years. Broken down by demographics, the police are only above 50% with people over 55, white adults, and Republicans. Even Republicans only go as high as 62% approval. That’s a miserable rating for an institution that is supposedly the instrument of the law and order that Republicans tout. My guess is that even conservatives don’t really trust the police as a force of justice. They just believe that the police are brutal and lawless towards the types of people they fear and hate. 

In this disapproving environment it makes no sense in terms of self interest for ICE agents to show up everywhere in face masks with their badges covered. Wearing street clothes and driving unmarked vans, for that matter. It broadcasts a message of “We are doing something illegal and shameful.” Which, or course, they are. They are openly violating federal immigration laws and the Constitution every day. There is some evidence that ICE is hiring professional bounty hunters at $1,000 per arrest and deputizing unemployed prison guards. It’s red meat for a racist voting base, but not for the majority of Americans. 

That’s bad enough, but videos are now surfacing of random groups of white men in eBay tactical gear impersonating ICE and harassing Hispanic people. Every self-interested law enforcement officer in the U.S. should be alarmed and outraged by this. It’s a direct threat to their safety. In mid-June a man dressed as a police officer murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and shot another lawmaker and his wife, critically injuring them. This was a political assassination and an act of terrorism. It was also a blow to the legitimacy of law enforcement. The Minnesota police had to tell people that they would be searching for the suspect in pairs, and not to open their doors to a single police officer. 

There is rising resistance to the unidentified gangs snatching people, ICE or not. Unarmed groups of people are facing down the masked pseudo-cops. There is an ongoing resistance to police brutality and overreach. Every week there is another video online of some out of control cop either shooting, beating, intimidating, or humiliating somebody. For every cop that does this there are ten cops knowing that it happened and at best doing nothing, at worst obstructing justice. If police keep acting like criminals and can’t be visually distinguished from criminals, then what? 

At some point a sufficient mass of people will decide to act. The question is what form that action will take. With luck this will be a reform movement. ICE will be disbanded. After all, we made it from 1776 to 2003 without it, and it has become completely lawless. Police departments will get citizen oversight with real teeth. Qualified immunity will be weakened. Federal, state, and local  law enforcement will raise recruitment standards and improve training. And so on. Police will hate this and fight it. They will cling to their obvious, yet feeble version of power. 

Without luck, well, I don’t want to think about what will happen without luck. 

Law enforcement officers of every kind need to stop and think about their relationship with the people they supposedly serve. All of the people; not just the wealthy and the white and the likeminded. It’s on them to change that relationship from adversarial to cooperative. They need to think about their tiny power and their giant power. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it’s the self-interested thing to do.

Disney and the DOD

I heard a thing recently about when the Walt Disney corporation hired the McKinsey group to advise them on cost cutting. It’s important to note that among amusement parks Disney had a stellar reputation for safety. The McKinsey people visited the parks, talked with employees, and did the math. They advised Disney to cut back on maintenance and safety inspections. It was overkill, they said. There was plenty of room to make adjustments without endangering anyone. 

There was an exchange between a Disney safety inspector and a McKinsey employee that is telling. The McKinsey boffin said, “Why do you check the lap bars every day? You haven’t had a malfunction in 20 years.” (The lap bars are those padded bars that fold down over ride passengers to keep them from catapulting into space.) The safety employee replied, “We haven’t had an accident in 20 years *because* we inspect them every day.” 

The result was entirely predictable. Disney visitors started to be injured, disabled, and even killed on the rides. Pieces flew off and hit people. Lives were ruined. The Disney reputation for safety was gone. 

Just yesterday, I read about the latest DOGE cut in the federal government. The Department of Defense just ordered a 50% cut to what is called The Office of the Director, Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E). The office acts as a kind of Consumer Reports for things that go boom. Also things that fly, float, drive, communicate, encrypt, clothe, heal, and feed. They hire private companies to test various types of hardware and software and report back on how it performs. Engineers of all kinds test to make sure that the flying things stay in the air, the driving things stay on the ground, the booming things go boom when, how, and where they are supposed to, and the software resists the attacks of Russian and Chinese hackers. 

A relevant news report. 

We can have a discussion about how much we spend on the military and how we use the military, but I think we all can agree that whatever it is that we are spending money on should actually work and be safe for the personnel using it. Of course, to the barely post-pubescent hackers of DOGE, budgets were made for arbitrarily cutting in half. Quality assurance isn’t a requirement for consumer software, so why should it be for an aircraft navigation system? An image comes to mind of a cartoon character sawing off the branch that it is sitting on. 

Alcoholic sex offender, failed nonprofit director, and Fox news host turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, intends to save $300 million a year by halving the DOT&E staff and cutting contracts. He has not presented any estimate of how much money the Pentagon will lose per year due to nonfunctional hardware, or more importantly, how many military personnel will be injured or die due to equipment failure. Or, for that matter, whether we will lose a military conflict because the enemy hacked our control systems. 

Perhaps the cost cutters could focus on the 145 golf courses owned and operated at a loss by the DOD?

The DOD hasn’t done a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round since 2005, even though the DOD estimates that it has upwards of 20% excess base capacity. Closing and combining bases could save $2.7 billion annually.

There is a crowd of journalists and think tanks pointing out ways that the Pentagon is wasting money. Much of that waste has to do with private contractors overcharging the DOD, often for underperforming products. There is also a bad habit among members of Congress; horse trading for billion dollar contracts for ships and planes the DOD doesn’t even want, but that inject money into the congressmember’s home state.

The Pentagon could save a lot of money by buying and having fewer things and paying less for them. It’s the worst false economy to cut the program that ensures that they work.

Barbies and Pencils

 People who are paying attention are worried about the effects on the U.S. of the Trump tariffs on China. Just today the White House floated the idea of reducing them from the present 145% to 80%. That level would still be crippling to trade. Administration officials have made public statements about children not needing so many dolls or pencils, but that’s beside the point.

If you want, you can see the effect for yourself. Here’s a link to an international ship tracking site, with the focus on the Port of Los Angeles.   Each arrow is a ship. This port should be swarmed with container ships from China, but it is a maritime ghost town. Compare to the Port of Shanghai. 

There’s roughly a 30 day transit time between the Chinese coast and the U.S. west coast, so given the timing of the tariffs, this makes sense. For a standard container ship it’s another two weeks to the Port of Houston and another ten days beyond that to New York City. The final run of normal shipments from China should end around the beginning of June.

As the title says, it’s not just Barbies and pencils. China produces a large percentage of the world’s Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API). Those are the chemical compounds that do the actual work in a prescription or over the counter drug; the ibuprofen or hydrocortisone or penicillin itself. From Drug Patent Watch:

“For the United States, China supplies approximately 17% of API imports but only around 6% of overall pharmaceutical imports15. However, these aggregate statistics mask important variations across product categories. For certain essential medications, particularly older generics with thin profit margins, dependency on Chinese APIs may approach near-totality.”

For some OTC drugs, China has essentially a monopoly.

 

(Credit: Apollo Academy )

Even a 17% drop in API supply would create critical shortages. China also is a major source of medical instruments and supplies such as syringes and sterile coverings for diagnostic instruments. They sold us about $15 billion of that equipment annually as of 2024. They sell us the majority of our supply of nitrile gloves.

There is the issue of circuit boards. These are sheets of insulating material with patterns of electrically conductive material printed on them and various electronic components soldered to them. They are in everything from your coffee maker to your car, as well as agricultural equipment, industrial controls, and consumer electronics. China has 43% of the world market. I am thinking about the complex nature of modern ag equipment such as combines for harvesting wheat and corn. What happens to a farmer in the Midwest when a circuit board in a combine fails during harvesting and there are no replacements? It’s hard to analyze what devices have Chinese circuit boards and which of these is an annoyance versus a crisis. Even industries with a robust presence in the U.S. have digital controls running on Chinese made circuit boards.

While I’m on the subject of agricultural equipment, John Deere has a lot of production facilities in China.

And then there is manganese, a mineral absolutely necessary to steel production. It is also an element of modern battery chemistries. There is no domestic production of manganese in North America. The U.S. and Canada mined out all the good ore by 1970. 70% of our supply comes from China. That will be hard to replace. Likewise the obscure mineral scandium, used in high strength aluminum alloys for aerospace. We get 68% of our imported scandium from China, with no domestic production. I will stop here on the rare earth minerals, but they are coming mostly from China and they are essential to a number of industries.

I don’t have any precise conclusions about which portions of our economy are the most vulnerable to a cutoff of trade with China. It seems as if vital bits of almost every sector are reliant on Chinese imports. For example, we get about 7% of our fasteners (nuts and bolts, rivets, screws, etc.) from China. Not a majority of our supply by a long shot, but a sudden 7% deficit will disrupt the market.

As I noted above, the flow will stop in the beginning of June. Modern economics is about financial efficiency rather than resilience, so there is generally the least possible inventory of finished goods, parts and materials. We’ll feel the effects within the month. I’ll bet there will be sudden backtracking on tariffs. Even so, the travel time across the Pacific is still there. Even if the Trump administration reverses itself by the end of June, and the Chinese decide to play nice, *and* the Chinese manufacturers jump right on the shipping again, it will be early August before a container ship reaches the Port of Los Angeles. And that would be with a one or two month backlog to be made up. It would be September before ships started arriving on the east coast. That’s an absolute best case scenario.

I don’t know what to tell you to do because I don’t know exactly what will be affected and by how much. Some of everything. Do what you can to prepare for a recession. Prepare for shortages of pharmaceuticals, especially over-the-counter and generic. Expect high prices for a lot of ordinary consumer goods. Expect a lot of Trump voters to say “I didn’t vote for this!” Prepare to say, “Yes. yes, you did. You absolutely did.”

American Roulette

(I figure I'm going to lose some friends with this one)

We are all familiar with the concept of Russian Roulette, a form of life or death gambling with one bullet in a six shot revolver. In an attempt to let you know how I am feeling these days, as well as other members of my social minority, I’d like to present the parable of American Roulette.

Imagine that we accidentally meet at the grocery store. As we start talking, I casually pull out a weird looking revolver.

When I say weird looking, I specifically mean a revolver with a huge cylinder that has 100 chambers in it. A 100 shooter instead of a six shooter.

I spin the cylinder, point it at you, and pull the trigger.

At this juncture you undoubtedly have a couple of questions to ask me. Questions such as “WHAT the FUCK?” and “Have you gone comPLETELY inSANE?”

My bland answer is, “Hey, what’s the big deal? I don’t even know if it’s loaded. It might have one bullet in it, or none, or five, or ten. No idea. And even if it did go off, I wasn’t aiming carefully. Sure, I might have killed you, but I might have just wounded you. I suppose if I wounded you, you might die of a secondary infection or whatever later, or be permanently disabled, but it’s not guaranteed.”

I am sure that this would not satisfy you. You would be reassessing my sanity and maybe our friendship.

Now, imagine walking into your local grocery store and watching almost everyone else in the place carrying weirdly large revolvers and engaging in a constant, mindless game of mutual American Roulette. It would be maddening.

Yes, I’m writing about Covid.

It’s hard to make an exact estimate of the odds of Covid causing hospitalization, disability, or death for any individual. There are many factors involved, including age, gender, disability, vaccination status, obesity, comorbidities, and the particular strain of Covid involved. Overall, the death rate goes up with age and existing health problems. For your average adult it’s somewhere from a 200-shooter to a 100-shooter. For someone in their 80s, more of a 20-shooter. But that’s just for acute Covid.

An individual’s chances of multiple types of disease go up after a Covid infection. Bacterial and viral infections. Three times the chance of heart attack and stroke. Seven times the chance of a pulmonary embolism and five times the chance of deep vein thrombosis. Marked increase in breathlessness after exertion and reduction in lung capacity. Increased incidence of diabetes, early onset Alzheimer’s, and Parkinsons. Virtually guaranteed brain damage. (See my Cat and Mouse post) It’s early days because of the time lag involved, but there are indications that Covid increases susceptibility to cancer. There’s also a study showing that having Covid increases your chance of a car crash by 1.5 times. It robs you of a few I.Q. points with each infection. Basically, anything that has to do with brain damage, immune system damage, and spreading microscopic blood clots through the vascular system. A measurable increase in morbidity and mortality. For those on chemotherapy or immunosuppressant drugs, or those with immune system disorders, it’s close to a death sentence.

Somewhere between one in six and one in ten infected people suffer long Covid. People get months or years knocked out of their lives, lose their ability to work, and experience financial ruin. Some people simply never completely recover.

That’s important to know in terms of individual risk assessment and risk tolerance, but also in the moral calculation of what we are willing to inflict upon others.

Covid is asymptomatic for days when carriers are infectious. Some people have entirely asymptomatic cases, yet are still infectious. About 60% of infections are from people with no symptoms. Just such a case happened to a friend of mine not long ago, after he had a meal with a seemingly healthy friend of his. Absent a professional grade test, none of us can be sure.

An axiom of firearm safety is “Always treat every gun as if it was loaded.” Hard experience is that the number one thing people say after accidentally shooting someone is “I didn’t realize that it was loaded.” It’s too late at that point; someone is dead or hospitalized.

A firearm is a tangible, visible object and a virus can only be seen with an electron microscope. A firearm makes a loud noise and the effect is dramatic and immediate, while a virus is silent and the effect delayed. Still, a virus is just as real and can kill or disable just like a bullet.

If that seems hyperbolic to you, just ask the opinion of one of the hundreds of people who died from Covid last week. Oh, right, you can’t. They’re dead. They’re dead because someone thoughtlessly breathed virus laden aerosol in their vicinity. Or, you could ask the millions of people with compromised immune systems who live with microbial crosshairs on them. They are hard to find, because they have to stay out of public spaces because our ableist society has decided that brunch is more important than other people’s lives. You undoubtedly know people who have had months or years knocked out of their lives by long Covid. People who are not the same as they were before.

And yet, as I walk through the world, I see few masks and little effort to prevent Covid transmission. I wear a mask in indoor public spaces, but that’s like wearing a ballistic vest to a mass gunfight. It does some good, but nothing is perfect. An N95 mask is 95% effective, not 100%. But that’s for a lone masker. If two people wear N95 masks, their combined effectiveness is 99.75%. The chance of a viral aerosol particle getting through drops from one in twenty to one in four hundred. Almost nobody is willing to put in that minor effort.

I learned an expression recently: skeptical hedonism. That’s the human tendency to discount the worth and truth of things that interfere with our pleasure. Masks are unattractive, inconvenient, and annoying. Testing is expensive and inconvenient. Spontaneous socializing in crowds is fun. So we get bullshit statements such as “It’s only a cold” or “Covid is over” or “You have to live your life.” A month of widespread masking would end the pandemic, but that would be a full thirty days of minor self-discipline, slight inconvenience, and concern for the vulnerable and disabled, so it won’t happen.

What might actually happen is society starting to treat air the way we started treating water in the early 20^th century. Covid aside, millions of Americans are sickened each year by the pollutant laden microbial soup we breathe indoors. It’s been firmly established that high indoor levels of carbon dioxide and volatile chemicals wreck our ability to think. Employers and schools would see significant improvements in employee and student performance if they implemented modern ventilation and filtration. The side benefit would be far fewer people dying of Covid or having their lives ruined by its aftermath.

Over the past five years I have watched tribalism, delusion, and selfishness triumph over solidarity, reason, and generosity. I have felt despair, disgust, anger, and incredulity. I have watched people I regard as the most socially conscious blithely ignore the facts in front of them in favor of self-indulgence. The conservative tribalists with their “I will not comply” slogan didn’t bother me. I never expected much from them. What gets to me is the utter moral and intellectual failure of the portion of the population that is supposed to give a damn.

I keep thinking about Field Marshal Douglas Haig. He was the commander of British forces during World War 1. By all accounts, he was an intelligent man. He was well educated, and an experienced soldier. However, he sent hundreds of thousands of his men to pointless deaths. He did this because he couldn’t accept the reality in front of him. He thought he knew the right way to fight a war; the way he had fought it before. He looked at reports from the front that told him he was misreading the situation, that his tactics were failing, that men’s lives were being wasted. He couldn’t absorb the facts because he couldn’t give up his prior assumptions. It was a normalcy bias that led to mass death.

That’s where we are. 99% of people are being normal, ignoring those among them getting picked off. It’s like one of those horror movies where, as the monster stalks them, the main characters always do the dumbest possible thing. It’s a movie I’m tired of watching.

Those of you out there still masking, testing, filtering, and otherwise protecting the lives and health of your fellow human beings, I thank you. I admire your perseverance in the face of indifference, peer pressure, scorn, and harassment. When the H5N1 pandemic hits and the hospitals run out of refrigerated morgue trucks, it will be your job to patiently explain to your fellow citizens the absurdly simple ways to avoid dying.

To the other 99% of you who have given up on protecting yourselves and others, I have no idea what to say. If witnessing millions of deaths and ruined lives, to this day, can’t convince you to take an interest in self-preservation, or the lives of your loved ones, then what will my words do? I feel like Dr. Semmelweis in 1850, trying to convince his colleagues to wash their hands in between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies. Perhaps in thirty years reality will sink in.

Really, I’m not writing this with the expectation of convincing anyone. I’m writing this to get it out of my head. I hope it gives some gratification to my fellow Covid realists. I hope it gives everyone else some insight into the contained rage of those people you see wearing masks.

The Ardennes Counter-Offensive

Watching what is playing out in American politics right now, I am thinking about the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. Stay with me here.

I’ll give you the briefest overview possible. Stacks of books have been written on it, so hit the library if you like. It started on December 16, 1944. The Allies were slowly pushing eastwards through France and Belgium towards the Rhine. The Nazis were losing ground in the east and the west. Even Hitler realized that the best he could do was a negotiated settlement. His strategy was to secretly mass troops opposite a thinly held section in the Ardennes forest and break through with a lightning strike to the coast, taking the deep water port of Antwerp. That would split the allied forces and deprive them of supplies. The plan was to get from the existing lines to the coast in four days.

Of course, it didn’t go to plan. The Germans pushed a westward bulge in the line, but fierce resistance at key points slowed them down enough for the Allies to send in reinforcements and drive them back. There were striking moments of heroism. An 18 man reconnaissance team held off 500 elite German paratroopers for 16 hours until they ran out of ammunition and had to surrender. It was a vital 16 hour delay. The 101^st Airborne and the 969^th Artillery Battalion held the vital road junction village of Bastogne from the 19^th through the 26^th, although surrounded. Eventually the German attack ran out of soldiers, fuel, supplies, and vehicles, and had to turn back. The Allies finally pushed the Germans back to the pre-offensive lines at the end of January.

The key point of this whole ordeal was timing. The Nazis did not have the reserves or supplies for an extended attritional battle. It had to be a sudden victory. Even though the battle lasted a month and a half, a number of German generals later said that they realized they were defeated when the planned four days became eight, and then sixteen. They had known they were losing the war so they rolled the dice on a final blitzkrieg. Delay defeated them.

And here we are. Anti-democratic forces in the U.S. know that they are losing the demographic war. Their base is aging. Young people overwhelmingly reject their worldview. The base of straight, white, Christian conservatives has witnessed their social superiority eroded by a cascade of rights revolutions. People understand that big business has broken the social contract. The opportunity for them to regain former power is slipping away. So, a roll of the dice. A flurry of executive orders. A plan to wreck the functions and credibility of government. An attack on political dissent, starting with the least popular demographics. An attack on voting rights.

But it has to happen quickly to succeed. In my previous essay about Covid I wrote about how people respond in a disaster: Denial, Deliberation, Decision. The anti-democratic plan is to rush through the changes while the country is still in denial and deliberation mode. They also have to get the job done before the economic destruction hits their base of voters.

We are aided in our resistance by the whim, grudge, and bribe solicitation based economic policy of Trump. He is derailing the economy faster than expected. We still need some political heroics, though. That’s why my heart was gladdened by Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) using a Senate procedure to put a hold on 300 Trump nominees, as well as a handful of bills in the foreign relations committee. It would have been better to start on January 21^st, but I’ll take it.

That’s how you do it. Make the Republicans spend time, effort, political capital, and attention on our actions and our priorities rather than their own plans. The Republicans spent years obstructing the efforts of Democratic presidents and majorities. They became the party of no. Since the Republicans have become a racist personality cult serving a rich donor class, it is the responsibility of the Democrats to turn the tables.

Every Democratic senator should put holds on every nominee and bill the Republicans propose. They should filibuster like Cory Booker. They should use every parliamentary rule possible to slow down the process. No unanimous consent. All roll call votes.

They should bill troll, like Bernie Sanders with his $17 minimum wage bill. It has no chance of passing, but it forces the GOP to publicly oppose it and try to explain why. The Democrats should look at polling, select the most popular progressive policies, and start introducing bills. Then publicize it when the GOP leadership won’t let the bills  get anywhere. “We wanted to eliminate credit card late fees, but the Republicans serve the credit card companies, not you.”

Policies themselves are less important than using policies as a wedge to separate the identity of a voter from the identity of the Republican political establishment. People make political judgements based on identity, and we need to make the Trump cult an alien minority in American culture. Bigots and billionaires.

What should you do? Email and telephone your members of Congress. Tell them to gum up the works; obstruct, delay, confuse, distract. Tell them to bill troll the Republicans. Tell them to focus on identity; the GOP as the party of the corporate overlords and  the rich, with racist pawns doing the dirty work. Be polite but insistent. Tell them that time is the most important factor. Most members of Congress are careerist cowards. They will only do something if doing nothing is more unpleasant and risky.

Show up at rallies. It’s just a show, but it builds emotional energy and lets people know they aren’t alone. Humanity is all about belonging, and demonstrating that our group is invigorated, numerous, driven, and even fun, is incentive to belong. Find your local political groups.

Support organizations like Public Citizen that are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration over its multitude of legal and constitutional crimes. Fighting crime is the right thing to do, and it imposes a burden on the criminals.

Timing is key. Today, search for the websites of your members of Congress. Find the contact pages and bookmark them. Put their office numbers on your phone. Contact them today. Make it a weekly or biweekly habit to send them a reminder of their responsibilities.

If we can keep the fascists away from Antwerp for a bit longer we will win.