B-Day

I recently posted my video short on bees living in my spa. Yesterday was B-Day when I invaded the tranquility of my unwanted guests. My reconnaissance was rather limited. I knew my enemy was armed and dangerous. Since bees are normally beneficial to farmers, I wanted to evict my “guests” without causing great collateral damage.

My research said that I was on solid ground with eviction, especially under our current administration. I found out that honeybees are not native to North America, but they are essentially Europeans without green cards.  Yes, honeybees came with white settlers in 1622.  Mormon honeybees moved later to Utah in 1848.  Since none of my spa bees were carrying pamphlets, I assumed these were not of the Mormon persuasion.

I originally estimated my bee infestation at around 300 bees. To get a more accurate reading I sent a picture of my swarming bees to the White House and told them that these were all Trump fans and I wanted an accurate count for publication purposes. They got back to me with an estimate of “at least 3 million.” I will compromise those figures and say that I was dealing with 3,000-armed adversaries.

You have to wear the right gear when battling the multitudes.

I had planned to pitch the story of my battle with Apis mellifera to be made into a blockbuster movie, but I knew that a comparable film already had been named “300.” That original work involved a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae during the Persian Wars where 300 Spartans battled 300,000 Persians in order to steal their rugs. At least I think it was all about rugs, I may have my Persian history confused.  Twisted history is popular these days so I will stand by, or on, my carpet theory. My personal battle with these illegal alien invaders had all the earmarks to be an event of similarly epic proportions.  The numbers were right, one against 3,000.  A battle of wits was about to start and I was going in as the underdog.

Never fear, Underdog is here

While the rest of the world dealt with Covid-19, I was forced to deal with a more formidable enemy, Beevid-20. In the week before B-Day I had unsuccessfully tried to use peppermint oil that I heard they didn’t like. No joy. I would also later try to dust them with garlic powder that they supposedly couldn’t stand, only to find that my European bees were probably from Italy. I say this because when I doused them with the garlic powder I swear I heard them say, “mangia, mangia.” If my honeybees were truly Italian, they would be Apis mellifera ligustica. I looked closely at the hive to see if I could spot a red and white checkered tablecloth but found only a very small bottle of Chianti.

The garlic powder might work on some bees, but not on the Italian ones.

I worked out my battle gear, which would be fine for anyone fighting Covid-19 or Beevid-20. I had long pants, socks and sneakers, gloves, a tee shirt and a long sleeve shirt, a hat with a towel for back neck protection, a wrap-around eye shield, and a ventilator mask. I would be an intimidating spectacle for any European bee, even an Italian one with a switchblade. Cue the music from West Side Story. I know that WSS was about Puerto Rican gangs but the music would be cooler than anything comparable from The Godfather or The Sopranos. Who knows, there could have been some Puerto Rican bees living in one of the many hive neighborhoods.

West Side Story bees in flight.

Well, much like the original D-Day, things didn’t go as planned. I had to remove the large panel from the side of the spa and my electric screwdriver gave out after about four screw removals. I had two more screws and eight long bolts to go so I called for Lieutenant Sue to retrieve another electric screwdriver. She arrived with reinforcements and the battle was on. The panel came off and I saw the hive covered in worker bees protecting their bee vomit, aka honey.

Queen for just one day longer.

As the peppermint and garlic hadn’t worked, I had to find a different solution. I tried my mosquito fogger but that didn’t faze them other than to cause them to get a bit agitated. I wanted docile bees not a bunch of pissed-off females. This may sound sexist but you should know that, as in humans, only the females have stingers. Whoops, I guess that sounded sexist after all.

I tried the fogger and they just took up smoking.  They haven't heard about the Surgeon General's report.

I finally came up with a solution and I broke out my large shop-vac. I was able to literally suck up the hive, bees, and all, into the large vacuum storage container. I then marched the vacuum to an area near my back fence and dumped the contents.  Now, obviously, a few bees met their maker. You don’t get sucked at high velocity down a long black corrugated tube and slammed into a deflector shield without some injuries and yes, a few lost souls. There are still plenty of bees left to rebuild.

Note the bees clinging to the wax hive at the end of the vacuum tube.

Bee survivors trying to figure out what just happened.  What a rush.

As for the blockbuster movie of this monumental triumph of the human spirit over a natural challenger, I have suffered a major setback. I had picked Ron Howard to direct this epic piece of a sure-fire classic film. He had expressed an interest in my project and had promised financial backing but he reconsidered once he heard that Aunt Bee was among the missing. As my cousin-in-law Herb used to say, “Some days chicken, and some days feathers.” In this instance, it might just suffice to say, some days it’s honey and other days it’s just bee vomit.

A Contrast in Leadership

Germany is being led by a physicist (Angela Merkel) with a doctorate in quantum chemistry and America is being led by a spoiled rich brat who played the role of an entrepreneur on a reality TV show and who believes he knows more than anyone in the scientific community.  During a March 3rd visit to the CDC in Atlanta Trump was quoted as saying, “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this? ' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."  He prefaced these remarks by saying that he is so scientifically clever because his uncle, Dr. John Trump, used to be a professor at MIT.  Perhaps he is channeling his late uncle with clairvoyance or his psychic abilities.  Physicist or psychic, what a choice.

Trump channeling his late uncle

Ms. Merkel went on national television for the first time in her 15-year political career to calmly address her nation with facts and the clear thinking typified by someone with a background in the sciences.  Her handling of the pandemic crisis was ranked in a recent poll with an 89% approval.  Germany’s health care system has been in good enough shape to be taking in patients from overwhelmed Italy and France, with intensive care beds still available.  Germany’s success is partially attributed to widespread and early testing for the virus, among other measures.  When Trump finally declared a national emergency in mid-March but took no further action beyond the declaration, Ms. Merkel closed all public spaces and banned religious gatherings.

Our polymathic Donald Trump went on national television for the one gazillionth time March 12th and announced that the United States was suspending all travel to Europe.  He did this reading from a teleprompter.  It caught everyone off-guard and had to be retracted almost immediately.  Instead of steadying a rattled nation, he sowed the seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  In this address, he also announced that insurance companies would be waiving copayments for all Coronavirus treatments.  This too was blatantly wrong and had to be later corrected by White House staff.  It would seem that there is a good bit of a difference between all “treatments” and mere testing which is what he was supposed to say.  Those missteps coupled with his attempts to sugar-coat reality with distorted information that is tactfully “restated and clarified” by Anthony Fauci, don’t instill confidence in a nation that is desperate for leadership.

It's Official

Finally, on March 13th, Trump declared a national emergency but failed to use his position as president to coordinate the national relief efforts.  Instead, he has left it to be a free-for-all at the state level to compete with FEMA for scarce resources.  It didn’t occur to him to use the military to act as an emergency quartermaster to properly inventory things like ventilators, PPE gear, testing reagents, and supplies, and to either commandeer those critical emergency items or at least restrict their sale and distribution.  A military quartermaster could use the national inventory that would include all equipment regardless of ownership and could be responsible for moving such equipment where it was most critical.  Under our current guidelines, we will probably find out that people were left to die because of shortages while supplies were available elsewhere.  To paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke, “What we got here, is a failure in leadership.”

Strother Martin quote from Cool Hand Luke, paraphrased.

Today, Dr. Trump went on national television and recommend that people take the drug hydroxychloroquine.  Dr. Trump is not a real doctor but he plays one on TV.  Among the side effects listed, “taking hydroxychloroquine long-term or at high doses may cause irreversible damage to the retina of your eye.”  Trump sparked confusion Saturday by claiming a study suggested that people with the autoimmune disease lupus were not as affected by coronavirus—presumably because they commonly use the drug hydroxychloroquine—but then immediately backtracked, saying “maybe that's correct, maybe it’s false, you’re going to have to check it out,” and his own medical advisor downplayed any connection.

The Doctor is In

Anthony Fauci stepped in to tell the audience that there was as yet no proof that the drug was effective.  Then Trump stepped back in to say he “hopes” hydroxychloroquine will be used because it’s been “used for a long time” and that people are “in bad shape” and “what do [they] have to lose?” he asked.  Now that's what we all want our doctors to say, "what do you have to lose?"

Trump has now on several occasions touted the antimalaria drug as a possible game-changer.  The CDC has warned against taking non-pharmaceutical chloroquine phosphate without a prescription and the supervision of a healthcare provider because it “can cause serious health consequences, including death.”  One person has already died after listening to Trump’s recommendations and taking a similar chemical.  Such conflicting advice and rhetoric are not helpful.  This is not leadership, this is a confused man grasping at straws on national television.

Trump grasping at straws

Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath of the Renaissance and Donald Trump is a polymath of our New Age of Enlightened Ignorance.  This enlightened ignorance, or EI, is typified by a profound feeling of superior intellect within an individual while acting in a manner that would otherwise question that person’s sanity. In his position as the leader of the Enlightened Ignorance movement, he is able to display such a high level of confidence in his own powers of reason and deduction that he is able to convince others of like or lesser intellect that he is invincible and worthy of his position of leadership.  Nothing is more dangerous than an ignorant human in a position of power over others who are convinced, beyond all evidence to the contrary, that he is infallible.

America: Are We Great Yet?

Before we get started let me say I love this country and I can’t think of another country in which I would rather live. I’ve thought about England, Ireland, and Canada but the language barrier is almost insurmountable. Don’t even get me started on Scotland. So, let’s get “down to brass tacks,” to use a hackneyed expression that probably is meaningless in those other so-called English-speaking countries. This pandemic has given us all more time to ponder important matters like, where does navel lint come from and which plant leaves are safe substitutes for toilet paper.

Like most politicians before him, our new president promised a better life through his guidance and further indicated that he alone could Make America Great Again. This latter promise presupposes we were great before, we were not great when he took the reins of our democracy, and that he could make meaningful improvements in our quality of life. Well, it’s been three years since he positioned his keister behind the Resolute Desk and I can now say that the light at the end of the tunnel is visible and it is the headlight of another train.

I see the light.

I can’t blame President Trump for this viral pandemic because I know he is not smart enough to have conjured up something this diabolical. He abhors science much as he does three-syllable words. What COVID-19 has shown us is the weaknesses of our form of government; at least in what it has become.

Healthcare

We see that our healthcare system is inadequate to perform in the circumstance of such a national crisis. While 9/11 was a national crisis, its devastation was localized to but a few states. The impact of 9/11 was felt around the world but the event did not unduly burden our healthcare system. This pandemic, however, has taxed our for-profit system of healthcare to the breaking point. We found out that we really don’t have much invested in our public health system either. It too was found wanting. Our healthcare workers are among the best in the world but the system mostly sucks, to use the technical term. We (our government) were so prioritizing capital gains and economic health, that we ignored the very foundation upon which the financial system was based, its people. We couldn’t test enough people fast enough to get a handle on the burgeoning situation. We (our government) dragged our collective feet and failed to take decisive action before the virus spread out of control.

Our stockpiles of crucial equipment like ventilators and PPE’s (we all now know that acronym) were woefully inadequate. Our just-in-time supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Farming out the manufacturing of critical medical supplies and equipment to foreign countries made financial sense but lacked the common sense that comes with proper planning and foresight.  We now see that American manufacturers were allowed to ship critical ventilators and PPEs to foreign customers into the month of March when much of Europe and Asia had banned such exports from their countries.  Our government officials were still downplaying the crisis.  When it comes to healthcare, failure is not an option.  I’m sure the top 1% will be fine and will get all the testing, drugs and respirators they need, but what of the rest of us?

Economy

Our economy had been touted as the best it had ever been. James Carville’s famous 1992 quote, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was put forward as a selling point for Bill Clinton’s bid for the presidency. When all else failed, our current president also stresses his perception of a great economy. He uses, like others before him, the stock market with its ever-rising Dow Jones and S&P 500 averages as shining examples of our great economy. Our low unemployment rate is also rolled out as part of a robust financial picture.

Hidden among those rosy numbers were the facts that 44% of people say that their expenses exceeded their income. Another 42% have no retirement savings. About half of all Americans would have trouble finding $400 for a financial emergency. Many wage earners are forced to work more than one job to make ends meet and the financially successful single wage-earning family is a rarity.  The forced shut-down of our normal daily commerce has shined its glaring light on the true frailty of the “World’s Greatest Economy.”  It is but a house of cards waiting on that first strong breeze.  A great economy cannot be measured solely at the top.

Leadership

In times of crisis, the true mettle of our leaders is tested. Great leaders lead almost effortlessly.  Those in a position of authority who do not possess leadership skills are easy to spot. Picture a man at a podium. He opens his mouth and tells you that he is taking care of things and those things will be getting back to normal soon.  He uses simple words strung together in platitudes and meandering blather.  He blames others for the current situation, tells you that nobody could have foreseen such a calamity, and gives himself a “Perfect 10” for his leadership.  This same individual, just a couple of weeks previous, told you that this was a minor malady, “this is the flu,” and that it would soon be gone. He now tells you that, “It’s not the flu,” and “It’s vicious.” He now states we will be lucky if only 100,000 to 200,000 Americans die of this “flu.” He told you, “anyone who wants a (COVID-19) test can get one,” even though you just heard from doctors, governors, and people with symptoms, that testing was unavailable or denied. He then responds to a pointed question from a reporter and he attacks that reporter as being stupid and refuses to answer the question. Now look back at that podium. Is the man in that picture tall, overweight, sporting a long red tie, reddish-blonde hair, and an orange spray-tan? Who could have guessed that one?

Now, picture a man sitting at a table who tells you that there are severe shortages of PPE’s, and there will be a shortage of critical care beds and necessary ventilators. He explains what he is doing to address the problem and what he thinks needs to happen at the federal level to ameliorate the upcoming crisis. He talks in clear and concise terms without much emotion. He handles questions from the press without attacking the reporter, no matter how difficult the question. Does that man look like Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York? Actually, it could have been Cuomo, or Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, or Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, or Gavin Newsom of California, or any of a number of leaders from both sides of the political aisle. Fine leadership is available in this country, it just doesn’t currently reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

The US didn’t declare a national emergency until March 13th.  The sluggish response to this crisis by this administration will cost American lives that could have been saved.  Fear of damaging an economy which was the key to the president’s reelection bid created a hesitance to move more decisively.  To have taken on the mantle of leadership was not something a former reality TV star and real estate entrepreneur found in his comfort zone.  He can’t just fire someone or declare bankruptcy to get out of this one.  He can blame his current problems on previous administrations, his worries over the impeachment, his never-ending search for Hillary Clinton’s email server, Comey, the Deep State, or the Easter Bunny; just know that he says, “I accept no responsibility.”  On February 28th of this year, a St. Louis firm shipped 1.5 tons of N-95 masks to Hamburg Germany.  DeVilbiss, a Pennsylvania company, shipped 55 tons of respirator equipment to Belgium between February and mid-March.  Other nations had banned such sales out of their countries weeks prior.  We sail on a rudderless ship of fools, the Walloping Window Blind.  The lyrics from the first stanza come to mind now....,

A capital ship for an ocean trip
Was "The Walloping Window Blind, "
No gale that blew dismayed her crew
Or troubled the captain's mind.
The man at the wheel was taught to feel
Contempt for the wildest blow,
And it often appeared, when the weather had cleared,
That he'd been in his bunk below.

This song was on a children's folk song album I had years ago.

I asked the lead question that is the title of this article and wrote on the same topic back in 2017.  In that early diatribe, I evaluated Trump’s performance just seven months into his reign as King of the United States of America. My previous summary will suffice here as I quote myself, “I postulate that America was always great.  It continues to be great.  It is certainly greater than most of the alternatives.  Like any family this large, we have room for improvement.  We need to continually revisit what we are doing to see how we can make things better.  Not only for the privileged few at the pinnacle of our pyramid of wealth but also for the citizen base that provides the foundation of our democracy.”

Postscript:  The James Carville quote about the “economy stupid” was but one of three points he pushed home to campaign workers in 1992.  The lesser-known focus messages were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.”

National Security: A New Perspective

When Americans think of national security, they think with pride of our military.  We have the biggest and best Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine military force money can buy.  Hell, we even have a Space Force.  Who else has one of those?  This military force is overseen and given guidance by the finest group of politicians a boatload of special interest money can buy.  We, as a nation, are ready to face any threat to our security, or so we thought.

Declare War on Virus

We now face a daunting enemy, one who is very adept at stealth technology and camouflage.  This new enemy can’t be stopped by a border wall.  It can’t be shot down by a drone.  You can’t “send in the Marines.”  Even our elite Army Rangers, Green Berets, and Seal Teams are no match for this elite fighting force.  This newly identified terrorist group is called, COVID-19, aka SARS-CoV-2, aka Coronavirus.

Yes, a microscopic pathogen has brought our nation and the rest of the world to its knees.  In a matter of weeks, it has shut down commerce, grounded our passenger airlines, filled our hospitals to the breaking point, strained our supply chain, and sent Wall Street into a panic.

Wall Street Panic

You can’t blame this virus on President Trump.  You should never blame our president for something until you have walked a mile in his clown-shoes.  He didn’t invent this system of security priorities where we spend more of our GDP on our military than the next seven nations combined.  He perpetuated it but it was already in place from previous administrations.  We may, however, blame him for mismanagement of the current crisis and for placing his reelection goals ahead of the nation’s health; but he is not alone in this.  President Trump, members of Congress, and others before him, minimized the threat of what we now face.  We have collectively prioritized military might over our nation’s health.

Military Spending by Country in Billions

Running a country, any country, requires vision.  You can’t be blinded by nationalism to a point where the very continued existence of that nation is threatened.  We can surely blame this president for his perpetuation of an isolationist attitude that places us at odds with those who would be our friends.  He seems to be looking at the operation of our country like another real estate venture, and that has proved disastrous.  If you make a bad decision in real estate, you can file for bankruptcy.  If you make bad decisions running a country, people die.  Having vision means having your head on a swivel and seeing things from many perspectives.  Myopic leadership is dangerous, expensive, and deadly.

We should have taken what we learned from PDM09 (H1N1) and had plans in place.  That 2009 virus, infected 60.8 million Americans, required 274,304 hospitalizations and resulted in 12,469 deaths.  Global statistics were obviously much higher.  During that pandemic, 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65 years of age.  President Obama’s transition team warned the incoming Trump team that it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs, and other medical essentials.  They were told that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount.”  Such warnings now seem eerily prescient given our current pandemic.  Those warnings were dire and the result of a mock run-through of a pandemic response using the experiences of the swine flu pandemic.  Those warnings garnered a cold reception and two-thirds of the people who were present, are no longer part of “Team-Trump.”  I guess there is an “I” in team.

We see now that President Trump should never have shut down the White House National Security Council's entire global health security unit in 2018.  This unit would have developed plans for a pandemic.  He saved a few dollars.  The bill for this pandemic was able to outstrip those meager savings in a nanosecond.  We will never know how well that unit would have performed or prepared us for this eventuality, but it certainly couldn’t have done much worse.  We are now flying blind without enough test kits to know where the virus is and how best to manage its spread.  When testing kits eventually become a reality, we will have squandered valuable time that would have minimized the exponential spread of the pathogen.

The Enemy

We don’t currently have enough respirators, hospital beds, or personal protective gear necessary to manage this crisis.  We will be forced to make life and death decisions as to who will get treatment and who will be allowed to fend for themselves for lack of equipment and personnel.  Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” promoted during her fight against the Affordable Care Act may become a reality if we don’t move quickly.

Now it is time to get beyond the blame game and start looking at where we go from here.  We will plod along without a true leader and we will rely on the likes of immunologist, Anthony Fauci and Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo to get us through this mess.  We will be led out of this crisis by a hodgepodge of leaders forced into service.  We will come through this, but not without cost and consequence.  We need to plan for our future.

Anthony Fauci and Andrew Cuomo filling the vacuum

We will need to adjust our national security priorities so that they include health.  Perhaps instead of setting up a Space Force, we should have created a National Health Force (NHF).  It could even be run out of the Pentagon budget so it could be properly funded.  What politician in their right mind (this is rhetorical) would think of under-funding our “military.”

A National Health Force could plan for the next pandemic with lessons learned from this and previous ones.  Perhaps the Trump administration could find some of those discarded planning documents provided by the Obama administration.  I say that in jest knowing that Donald Trump has spent the better part of his presidency trying to dismantle everything with Obama’s name attached.

Ventilators, mobile hospitals, a reserve unit of active and retired medical professionals, all could be part of a national response plan.  We could also properly fund our Veterans Administration and expand its hospital facilities to have a certain capacity for national emergencies.  This would improve the care for our veterans and provide a civilian safety net.

Emergency Hospital at Miami-Dade County Fairgrounds

We can only hope that the passage of this crisis will not be replaced with even more chaos of some other threat to our nation.  We have paid a high price for this lesson.  We didn’t take the information gained from the last event to plan for this one but let’s hope that we have someone in office that will.  We should not take the easy political path of thinking we have better things to do.  I would hope that some future president would be able to repair the relationships with other nations that were broken with this administration.  We should be able to come to some international agreement that promotes a free exchange of information and a sharing of research.  We will survive this.  Let’s hope we learn from this.

Human Arrogance

Perhaps it was always going to take another global pandemic to wake us up from our lethargy. As the presupposed apex predator for our planet, we humans have always been somewhat arrogant. We rape and pillage the resources of our earthly host while gleefully ignoring the damage we have wrought. Now, a microscopic challenger has managed a virtual shut-down of much of the so-called civilized world. Many of the ubiquitous governmental “they” and their follower/supporters have prioritized wealth, greed, and our economy over the health of the inhabitants and the environment of the only planet we have.

Hypothetical seasonal flu epidemic spread is depicted here with the colors indicating regions currently infected with seasonal flu (red), refractory and immune to pandemics (purple), and recovered and currently susceptible to a novel pandemic (blue). White lines depict the global flight network. 

While the current U.S. president is certainly responsible for aggravating an already dire situation, he didn’t start this and he is not alone when it comes to sharing some of the blame for this pandemic’s mismanagement. We have long ignored pandemic threats in search of profits. Our nation’s capitalistic healthcare system is founded on maximizing returns on investments so we plan for normal caseloads and not for worst-case scenarios. We’ve been here before and as the adage goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

Long before air travel allowed humans to move around the globe in a day, we had The Black Death of 1346-1353, the Third Cholera Pandemic of 1852-1860, the Flu Pandemic of 1889-1890, the Sixth Cholera Pandemic of 1910-1911, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920.  After international air travel became available in the 1950s, we had the Asian Flu of 1956-1958, the Flu Pandemic of 1968, the Swine Flu of 2009-2010, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic of 2008-2012. So, in the year 2020, why are we now surprised that we are facing another pandemic? We were warned. We knew this was coming. We didn’t have a plan and we didn’t have the administrative agencies in place to enact the plan that we didn’t have.

Quick check

In a November 14, 2017 article published on the Global Biodefense website titled April Showers..., Bring Pandemics, they stated that, “One might expect that the risk of a new pandemic is highest at the height of the flu season in winter, when viruses are most abundant and most likely to spread.  Instead, all six flu pandemics that have occurred since 1889 emerged in spring and summer months.”

"Statistical simulations suggest that Northern Hemisphere flu pandemics are most likely to emerge in late spring or early summer at the tail end of the normal flu season, according to a new study   published in PLOS Computational Biology."

We can’t have a capitalistic healthcare system and expect that it will build expensive emergency room facilities and invest in equipment where they will never see a financial return. It is the responsibility of the federal government to foresee things like pandemics and be prepared. This should not be a time for non-medical legislative bodies to try to figure out how to respond; the response plan should have already been in place. At the first sign of a possible viral outbreak, we should have merely activated the response outlined in the plan. In this country, some of this administrative capability was in place but had been recently dismantled in order to afford us the ability to further fan the flames of an already healthy economy. We issued unneeded tax cuts and corporate financial incentives and the economy soared to new heights.  Bigger, faster, and more furious are not always good things, even when discussing an economy. When the pandemic hit, as many knew it would, the global economy slowed to a near halt, the stock market plummeted, we lost all the gains of the past three years, and we are now headed toward a recession. The “fast and furious” approach quite often results in a crash and burn.  Take a bow, Mr. President.

Our response?  A perfect 10.   Donald Trump, March 16, 2020

As a fellow apex predator, I have realized that certain situations can change that cocky status in an instant. I can remember from my youth skin diving and spearfishing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I had speared a large red snapper in his reef hideaway and while I pondered how to get my spear and its prize back to the dock, I spotted a much larger-than-me shark that seemed to be looking for his own dinner. I was no longer at the top of the food chain; I was the next link.

The Three Little Pigs

I feel our legislators need to go back to nursery school and relearn the lesson of The Three Little Pigs. When our economy was strong, it was then time to invest in our infrastructure.  That investment would have included a physical ability to shore up our medical response capability at such time as the need would surely arise.  That investment would have had long term benefits in terms of new jobs and much needed physical improvements that had been long overlooked.  We needed a strong brick-like system and not one made of sticks and straw.

The wolf came down the chimney...

 
The short-term tax breaks and corporate incentives may prove more costly than we could have imagined.  Well, now the big bad wolf is at our door and he may just blow our fragile economy off its foundation, not to mention the human misery and loss of life. Had we been the smart pig of storybook fame, we would now be feasting on wolf stew.

Leadership in the Age of Trump

Leadership takes all forms

Leadership skills are not taught but learned through observation and developed through character. We have seen Donald J. Trump at the helm of our country for these past three years. He was elected president of our United States and we expected him to lead the country. In this endeavor, he has failed. No better example of his failed leadership skills could be shown, than in his handling of the recent coronavirus crisis.

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." Arnold Glasow

It is at times such as these that leaders show their true mettle. When experts in the field of pandemics and medicine gave Trump advice that could possibly head off a more serious spread of the virus, provide first responders with the tools necessary to treat the sick, and generally act in a humane manner, he ignored their advice. He started spouting rhetoric that would make him look better and improve his chances in the upcoming election.

COVID-19 Test Kit

At a March 6th press conference, Trump stated that the coronavirus test kits were as “perfect” as his infamous phone call with the Ukrainian president.  I’ll buy some of that since one of the three modules in the kit was a failure and corrected kits were needed.  He went on to say that, he didn’t want the passengers on an infected cruise ship now off the California coast to come ashore because it would hurt his numbers. His quote, “I like the numbers being where they are.  I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.” This is not a leader worrying about the fate of others in a time of crisis, but a leader more concerned with his reelection.  Think about that attitude for just a moment.  No expression of empathy or sympathy for the crew and passengers stuck aboard a ship full of sick people; he’s worried about his “numbers” and how those numbers might affect him.  That is not a leader.

Cruise ship Princess enters San Francisco Bay

In this most recent crisis, our president should be a leader and a source of trustworthy information. Instead, he promotes outright lies and various falsehoods intended to make him look better. His claim that he would have one million coronavirus test kits available by last Friday (March 6, 2020) was missed by a mere 925,000 kits. He claimed that anyone who wanted to be tested could be tested. We now know that even people who have been exposed and were showing symptoms had been denied testing due to “procedures” and most probably a lack of available test kits. Trump has also claimed, against all the advice of medical professionals, that he will have a vaccine available in weeks or a couple of months at the outside. An optimistic best-case scenario puts the availability of a new vaccine for the coronavirus at least a year away.

This misinformation, spread by our president, follows a very dangerous pattern of deceit involving this potential pandemic.  In 1918, then-president Woodrow Wilson did much the same thing when he launched a dangerous campaign to shore up his support and suppress criticism.  (Sound familiar?)  He established a Committee on Public Information.  Wilson also signed the Sedition Act, criminalizing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government” or anything else that might impede the war effort.  This stifling of the information under the guise of supporting the war effort ended up allowing the disease to spread from a military camp in Kansas to citizens all across the nation.  A Navy ship carried the virus to Philadelphia, and sailors started dying, but the city’s public health director, a political appointee named Wilmer Krusen, dismissed it as “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” As the toll grew, Krusen assured the public that the city was on track to “nip the epidemic in the bud.”  (Sound familiar?)  This so-called Spanish Flu went on to kill more people than all who died in World War I and World War II, combined.

Woodrow Wilson and Trump have much in common.

Good leadership involves an earned trust.  Great leadership adds to that the ability to lead by example.  Bad leadership is merely obedience demanded with repercussions for non-compliance.  Donald J. Trump falls into the latter category.
We can perhaps overlook Trump’s multiple attempted cutbacks of CDC funding, after all, his attempts failed. We might also overlook the fact that he left positions vacant that were designated to handle pandemics. To quote Monty Python, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” 

Spanish Inquisition sketch from Monty Python

We can chalk up his elimination of a position in 2018, on the National Security Council that would have been responsible for coordinating efforts to combat infectious disease to just another in a long string of bad policy decisions. Trump’s closing of the USAID program known as PREDICT that was tasked with the detection and discovery of zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential, like COVID-19, could also be put in the category of whoops-shouldna-done-that.

Joe BTFSPLK of Li'l Abner fame

We can overlook and forgive quite a bit in hindsight. The problem, of course, is that Donald J. Trump seems to be the zoonotic embodiment of Joe Btfsplk of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. For those of you not up on your 1970’s cartoons, Joe Btfsplk was a well-meaning jinx who brought disaster to all around him. He walked around with a small bad luck raincloud showering him from up above.  He was a walking disaster.  This character fits Trump with all but the “well-meaning” part of the description.  I was always partial to Daisy Mae myself but, at my age, I have trouble remembering why.  Wait, I’m beginning to remember.

Li'l Abner character Daisy Mae

We know that Trump is aware of the seriousness of the coronavirus; after all, this crisis has recently tanked the stock market and wiped out much of his administration’s major accomplishment.  This virus thing might hinder his chances of getting reelected.  He’s not worried about a bunch of old people dying as long as he isn’t one of them.

The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.  

Arnold Glasow

Trump’s next major move shows he slept through any management classes that dealt with responsible leadership; he put Alex Azar in charge of our nation’s medical needs. Now, don’t get me wrong, delegation is a good thing if you pick the right person with qualifications and give them the authority to get the job done.  But here we find that Mr. Azar’s background in medicine is that he was trained as a lawyer. This is not to diminish his credentials since he was General Counsel to Health and Human Services and was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly & Co. Given Trump’s slim, almost bare cabinet pickings, Azar was actually a find.  But, then Trump out-Trumped himself with a marginalization of the recently minted Azar as chief of the task force.  He unceremoniously shoved Mr. Azar behind the new coronavirus scapegoat, Mike Pence. Yes, that Mike Pence.

Who's on first?

You see, Mike Pence is a firm believer in science as long as it doesn’t conflict with his interpretation of the Bible, his broken moral compass, or any visions his boss receives from on-high.  In this case, “on-high” is anything from Fox News’ Sean Hannity.  As governor of Indiana in 2015, he rejected a clean needle exchange for drug addicts during the HIV outbreak.  The suffering of the homosexual community was, after all, God’s will.  Pence later “prayed on it,” and eventually lifted the ban. How many people died as a result of this delay is just a matter of conjecture.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing.   Peter Drucker

Pence also said that “despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” In a strict interpretation of his quote, you might say he is right because it is cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other related illnesses that actually do the killing. Mike Pence also doesn’t think condoms are effective in preventing STDs. His quote, “truly safe sex is no sex.”  Add to all this his denial of climate change because we (America) have the cleanest air and water in the world (actually, we rank #10), and there you have a fair handle on his scientific credentials. Oh, I almost forgot, he still thinks being gay can be “corrected” with conversion therapy. Will anyone be surprised if he ever comes out of the closet?

If I don't like you, I'll fire you!  If you don't like me, I will fire you!  -- Lou Grant

Well, Trump has his “task force” in place. He now has someone to blame for this mess if it gets out of hand. To Trump, “getting out of hand,” means that a nasty pandemic is getting in the way of his reelection. Any failures here would mean that Pence goes on the well-worn chopping block and Trump picks a new running mate (rumored to be Nikki Haley).  Trump learned from Lou Grant of The Mary Tyler Moore Show who, when asked to what he attributed his managerial success said, “I learned how to delegate blame.”  That’s how I remembered it.  When I looked it up I found that his actual statement was just slightly different...

“If you’ve noticed, I’m one of the few producers without a peptic ulcer. One of the reasons for that is, I’m able to delegate blame.”  

Lou Grant, Season 1, The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Nobody wishes that this new coronavirus gets out of hand. No matter how much you may despise Trump for his other failures; we can all hope this isn’t one of them. We can, however, add his blatant failure of leadership in this crisis right where it belongs.  Trump will own it. Even if it just fades away next month, his lack of leadership in this event shows that he is unfit to lead our country. We can only hope this nation survives his ineptitude long enough to replace him with our usual cadre of well-meaning run-of-the-mill greedy politicians.  As leaders go, I am more interested in the likes of Dwight D. Eisenhower than William Travis.  Travis was a fine patriot, but everyone in his command died at the Alamo.

Enough to Make You Batty

In the last several days I have managed to watch the first two episodes of an interesting, if not scary, documentary titled Un-Natural Selection on Netflix. I followed that with an article I read in The Week magazine about the origins of the Covid-19 virus and I got a bit concerned.

Unnatural Selection Title Slide Episode 3

The Netflix documentary series highlighted several related topics dealing with genetic engineering. It told me that, contrary to my previous notions about CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) and genetic engineering, there are kitchen and garage entrepreneurs performing these feats with materials and equipment they legally bought on the Internet. They are creating glow-in-the-dark frogs, dogs that can be more muscular, certain muscle enhancements for humans, and home-brew HIV medications, among other experiments.  I had previously assumed that such activity was so expensive and complicated that it would only be done in advanced labs; I was wrong.

Does your new apple taste a bit fishy?

The article on Covid-19 (Coronavirus) dealt with its origins in China, which traced the animal to human connection to a bat virus that somehow mutated with genetic material from a soldierfish and then infected humans. This all happened naturally without human intervention save for the humans being infected and then spreading it around. Then the article went on to mention that in 2014, a laptop was captured from ISIS that contained instructions on how to weaponize plague bacteria.

Bats are reservoirs for more than 60 viruses that can infect humans.

Therefore, genetic engineering is well within the grasp of mere mortals with at least a rudimentary knowledge of science, and we now know that someone in ISIS is considering that possibility.  We can imagine that ISIS’s intentions are not to make a better tomato but probably something more nefarious. That sounds like a nightmare scenario that our intelligence services would be wise to address. I feel a bit uncomfortable with my newfound knowledge when I realize that our intelligence services have been ridiculed and marginalized by our current administration for reasons that are not readily apparent.

Perhaps VP Pence could investigate

While genetic engineering advancements have a huge upside with cures and treatments for debilitating and deadly diseases, the power to play Darwin-on-steroids appears to be well beyond the bioethicists’ current debate schedule. This technology is now outside government-monitored labs and in the hands of anyone with motivation to do good or evil.  We have dealt with H1N1, H5N1, MERS, SARS, and Ebola, which were accidents of nature that killed millions of people over the years; 50 million died in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic alone.  What if people decided to manufacture their own novel virus?

This is a sign that was posted during 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

Covid-19 is a novel virus in that, while influenza viruses move around the globe every year, they are not novel until they carry different hemagglutinin or neuraminidase protein than the strains already in circulation.  No, I didn’t recently get a medical degree but that explanation made clear(?) why this new Coronavirus qualifies for the “pandemic” label. While a repeat of the tragedy of 1918 is highly unlikely now that we have better drugs and treatments, it is having a broader impact on our new global economy. Our just-in-time manufacturing ability and modern transportation methods have increased our vulnerability beyond the impact of the illness.

Many of these viruses are zoonotic in that they can jump species and many are linked to bats. My fear is that, with newly available technologies and home genetic engineering, what happens when some random human goes “bat-shit crazy” and decides to nudge evolution and brew up a new virus cocktail of their own?

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows.

Perhaps it's time to break out the torches and get the village people to storm the castle?  I'll play the Indian.

It's Alive!