Trump's Republican Followers in the Senate

How Can I Make $ Off A Vet?

Before there were any real codes of medical conduct or preventative FDA regulations, harsh curative experiments upon various groups of marginalized people and sick victims were kept quietly under wraps.  

The sordid history of such investigations reveals a willingness to discard moral guardrails for personal advancement or arbitrary prospect.

Without oversight or regulation, interest can quickly override rationality.  Here’s an example or two: “Perhaps one benefit of being an inmate at California’s San Quentin prison is the easy access to acclaimed Bay Area doctors. But if that’s the case, then a downside is that these doctors also have easy access to inmates. From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at San Quentin, used prisoners as test subjects in a variety of bizarre medical experiments. Stanley’s experiments included sterilization and potential treatments for the Spanish Flu. In one particularly disturbing experiment, Stanley performed testicle transplants on living prisoners using testicles from executed prisoners and, in some cases, from goats and boars.”

“In 1939, University of Iowa researchers Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor conducted a stuttering experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa. The children were separated into two groups, the first of which received positive speech therapy where children were praised for speech fluency. In the second group, children received negative speech therapy and were belittled for every speech imperfection. Normal-speaking children in the second group developed speech problems which they then retained for the rest of their lives. Terrified by the news of human experiments conducted by the Nazis, Johnson and Tudor never published the results of their‘Monster Study.’”

You can find an unsettling number of others at several sites including Best Psychological Degrees. 

You can also find another disturbing illustration of unapproved medical procedures occurring presently in Veteran Affairs, where a Senator from Nevada has secured an opportunity for himself and a company with whom his senior aide has had business connections for many years.

The Senator: Dean Heller.  His opponent: Democratic challenger Jacky Rosen.

Senator Heller is often described as a low-flying member of the Congress who follows closely and sits often near the current President, but remains carefully hidden and unknown.  According to Vox, he aligns with Trump in voting 92% of the time, and he has slashed Nevada’s health care funding by $257 million.  

But, Senator Heller is quick to see an opportunity even if ignorant of FDA regulations regarding the treatment(s) of patients working their way through PTSD issues in various VA hospitals. Senator Heller has been moving doctors at the Veteran Affairs Medical center in Reno, Nevada, to practice a mental health treatment still in experimental stages by a company with ties to his office.  Using the Trump Administration’s invitation for more alternative treatments, the promotion by Heller’s office of CereCare is troubling to the VFW and other organizations as it represents procedures that have not been scientifically demonstrated to be safe or even effective.

According to ProPublica, “The procedure that CereCare was pitching to the VA uses electrical scans of the brain and heart to detect a patient’s “intrinsic brainwave frequency” and find “the area of the brain in need of restoration,” according to materials brought to the meeting. CereCare then uses that data to apply electromagnetic pulses from a machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator.

“This procedure is off-label, meaning it uses equipment approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but in a way that is not approved by the agency. Off-label procedures are not uncommon or illegal, but the FDA has not signed off on their safety or effectiveness.”

Regulations?  Who needs regulations?  

In fact, we all do.

The Food and Drug Administration is the oldest comprehensive consumer protection agency in the U. S. federal government. Since 1848 the federal government has used chemical analysis to monitor the safety of agricultural products -- a responsibility inherited by the Department of Agriculture in 1862 and by later by the FDA. 

Although it was not known by its present name until 1930, FDA’s modern regulatory functions began with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, a law a quarter-century in the making that prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded food and drugs--had been the driving force behind this law and headed its enforcement in the early years, providing basic elements of protection that consumers had never known before that time. 

Since then, the FDA has changed along with social, economic, political and legal changes in the United States. Examining the history of these changes illuminates the evolving role that FDA has played in promoting public health and offers lessons to consider as we evaluate current regulatory challenges. 

But in this administration, the match between office and ability has little overlap and certainly not within the procedural treatment of the VA.  Who studied and agreed to the questionable and unapproved treatments for patients in the VA?  The President’s appointee Wisconsin Beer Baron Jake Leinenkugel who has no experience in dealing with treatments for the mentally injured or veterans suffering from war trauma.  In fact, Leinenkugel has also proposed the use of hyperbaric chambers for the assistance to disturbed veterans, but not because of any real scientific proof – just various companies’ lobbying.  

Meanwhile, Jacky Rosen is closing in on Heller’s lead in Nevada.  

Given Trump’s open invitation for alternative procedures, the White House is now under a flood of hopeful medical vendors with new ideas and possible procedures.  And, it is likely that other weak-willed Senators are facing lobbyists and others who have cash and new, improved concepts for alleviating our most sacred captive audience (our veterans) lucrative issues. 

Maybe testicle transplants?

For his own part, Heller has bombastically responded that he will never apologize for supporting policies that could lead to additional treatment options for Nevada veterans because “no one who has served this country should be waiting for care once they return from combat.”   

Draping your connections to a lobby or company in the American flag and the blood of our veterans is despicable. 

If you have friends or family in Nevada, get on the phone now.  Urge them to vote Rosen and why. 

One week to go.

Okay, You Hate Trump, But What Are You For...?

“Okay, You Hate Trump, But What Are You For…?

A couple of days ago, Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for the right-leaning board of the Chicago Tribune offered up another of his hastily sketched tropes of weaknesses in the political left’s drive to unseat the Republican hold on the Congress.  I say hastily because I am always drawn to Stantis’ difficulty in drawing hands.  

Take a look, and you’ll find they most often appear without rudimentary fingers, just nubs grasping items in a fist-like squeeze.  I don’t know why it bothers me so much.  Maybe because hands and fingers take time and thought.  And political cartoons should, too.  

Like the hands on his “subjects,” his messages are also underdeveloped and often similarly conservative/right.  Take his pen and ink portrait of October 24, 2018, which strongly suggests that those opposed to Trump (the Democratic Party) have little more than an irrational hatred for the reality-TV star rather any substantive suggestions to better our country.

I guess at this point on October 24, the buck-toothed and white-eyed donkeys in his inking might respond possibly – "health care, no pre-existing conditions, environmental protection of any sort, some regulation on fossil fuel drilling and polluting, a plan to draw in the violence instigated by access to weapons of war, a long-term action plan for climate change, a schema for assimilating those fleeing poverty and violence, fair voting rights for all, a prevention to the rocketing deficit after the tax giveaway, a guarantee that social security and Medicare will remain"…well, I could go on and so could the donkeys.

 But maybe the real answer is this: a respite.  A RESPITE.

We have had enough. We have endured enough.  When the man who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America stated that “the carnage stops now and it stops here.”  Trump did not tell the truth.

HE is the carnage.

Charlottesville was only the start.  After the last week, we have seen what a leader sowing division, disrespect, tribalism, and racism can wring.  And we as a people have been wrung out.

David Remnick, in the New Yorker pens an invaluable comment regarding this man’s inability to take any road but the wrong one, to fail at bringing anyone together in favor of dividing and generating hatred, to identify every crisis as one in which he has been personally targeted unfairly.  

Suggesting that “The Midterm Elections Are a Referendum on Donald Trump,” Remnick writes:

“What is there left to know about Donald Trump? Robert Mueller, various state officials, and a legion of reporters around the country are dedicated to penetrating any stubborn mysteries that still linger, yet who can argue that there is insufficient evidence to make a rational judgment about the character of the man, the nature of his Presidency, and the climate he has done so much to create and befoul?

“Law enforcement will continue to investigate the incident in the days ahead. But what’s already clear is that it occurred at a moment of tragic division and conspiracy-mongering generated, foremost and daily, by the President of the United States. The right has no monopoly on insult and incivility—the online universe can be a sewer of spite—but there is no real equivalence: no modern President has adopted and weaponized such malevolent rhetoric as a lingua franca.

“Trump is a masterful demagogue of the entertainment age. His instruments are resentment, sarcasm, unbounded insult, casual mendacity, and the swaggering assertion of dominance. From his desk in the Oval Office, on Twitter, and at political rallies across the country, he spews poison into the atmosphere. Trump is an agent of climate change, an unceasing generator of toxic gas that raises the national temperature.

“At a rally in Wisconsin, on Wednesday, the President reacted to the news of the multiple bombs with a barely perfunctory call for a ‘civil tone.”’Of course, he didn’t mean it, not remotely. He made it plain that civility is for suckers, a joke. ‘By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight?’ he said, with a smirk. ‘Have you ever seen this? We’re all behaving very well.’ The next morning, in a characteristically brazen tweet, Trump amped up the toxicity. A bomb had been sent to a media outlet. The fault was the media’s. ‘A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,’ he wrote. ‘Mainstream Media must clean up its act, fast!’ At 3 a.m. on Friday, he tweeted his fury at CNN.

“When the leaders of the Republican Party first acquainted themselves with Trump’s rhetoric and character a few years ago, many of them were appalled. Ted Cruz, after hearing Trump insult his wife’s appearance and insinuate that his father bore some responsibility for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, called his rival a ‘pathological liar,’ a ‘snivelling coward.’ But, after Cruz became one more casualty of the 2016 Republican primaries, and reckoned that he could not hold his Senate seat while attacking Trump, he, like almost every other light of the ‘party of Lincoln,’ capitulated. The G.O.P. is now Ted Cruz writ large, a political party that has debased itself in the image of its standard-bearer.

Please read the entire article in the Nov. 5^thedition of the New Yorker or on line.  

RESIST AND VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6^TH.  

Polar Bear Gone By 2100?

I Love Polar Bears.  Do You?

Do you recall the polar bear Aussie at the Brookfield Zoo?  Sue and I loved him.  He was euthanized in 2017 after a life of nearly 32 years at the zoo.

That’s a remarkable life-span for a Polar Bear, but he was a remarkable animal.  My wife and I used to go there to watch him glide effortlessly in the pool of water like a sleek-leviathan Olympian swimmer gliding back to the blocks. Aussie always lifted his back leg in the water in some kind of signature and frivolous show for the audiences.  

Brought to Brookfield from Australia in the 1980’s, Aussie’s life of 32 years would be the equivalent of well over 100 in human years according to then vice president of clinical medicine for the Chicago Zoological Society. 

I hope children today will be able to see such natural wonder.

I hope that such a wonder can remain naturally.

Given the loss of habitat in polar regions, Polar Bears International now predicts the likelihood that two-thirds of Polar Bears will be gone by 2050, and, if unchecked climate change continues, the loss of the wild species by 2100.

But then came Trump, enter stage Far Right.

The current administration is now opening oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  “The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the largest and wildest of our nation’s wildlife refuges. The Coastal Plain is the biological heart of the Refuge, providing essential habitat for a variety of wildlife, including imperiled polar bears, the Porcupine caribou herd and hundreds of species of migratory birds. It is an area sacred to the Gwich’in nation, who depend on the Refuge for their way of life.” 

In order to satisfy oil companies and locate possible oil reserves in this once protected eco-system, the various companies seeking oil for greater oil corporations will begin a winter assault on the land using seismic explorationsto determine the likelihood of oil reserves.  In other words, companies employed by oil corporations will be making large scale sensor impacts in the banks and grounds to detect possible reserves.  The companies, led by SAExploration, will “along with our partners, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) and Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation (KIC), (be) pleased to submit their plan of operations for the Marsh Creek 3D Program. Together ASRC, KIC, and SAE, through its joint venture with the Kuukpik Corporation (Kuukpik-SAE), are in the process of forming a joint venture, Iñupiat Geophysical Partnership, LLC. SAE is requesting permits on behalf of its partners to conduct a seismic survey within the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) beginning during the winter season of 2018- 2019 initially.  My underline

According to many researchers, America is about to become the top producer if crude oil, without needing to drill in the Arctic National Refuge. But American becoming great again is about pillaging, not conserving. 

Unfortunately for the diminishing populations of Polar Bears, this unnecessary search for new oil reserves in a once protected area will negatively affect the many breeding female polar bears which burrow into the snow and land to birth their young in the winter/spring.  It’s not just the habitat; now, it’s their breeding grounds which will be under pressure by exploitation.

Research provided by Steven C. Amstrup indicates that the influence of disturbance, including seismic events over and around Polar Bear dens will result in catastrophic loss of life to younger cubs and new-born cubs during the winter to spring months.  “Reluctance to abandon a den can be viewed as ‘tolerance’ of disturbances near dens, and bears may just hold tight and be fine while industrial activities occur nearby. But when the disturbance is both intensive and expansive, like 3D seismic testing, that apparent tolerance could have negative consequences. Available observations illustrate that some bears will not leave until

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the den is actually invaded. Whether from an innate feeling of security in a den or habituation to noises and vibrations of vehicles moving around them; the ‘comfort level’ many polar bears show with activities outside their dens could result in waiting too long to leave a den when the disturbance is truly dangerous for them. It seems the heavy vehicle and activities associated with surveying the seismic lines only 65 meters from the den described above were the impetus for this bear to emerge, her behavior and other observations suggest however her den could have been runover had the seismic survey path been displaced 65 meters. In that circumstance, even if the female bear was able to leave a den ahead of oncoming vehicles, her departure threshold might have been exceeded so suddenly as to prompt hurried evacuation resulting in cubs being left behind and either crushed or abandoned. “

SAExploration promises to have a biologist hired by SAExplorations on hand to make sure all goes well.  They’ll also listen to concerns by local Native Community people.  Sound promising to you?

Me neither.  

Of course, Republicans and the Koch Bros. have tried over 50 times to get into the ANWR to drill.  Now they’re there.

You might want to call about this if you are concerned.

Department of Energy: Rick Perry – 202 586 5000 

White House: 202 456 1111

The Alaskan Officials involved: 

Ted Smith
Operations Supervisor 907-522-4499 907-301-5434 cell

Suzan Simonds
Permits and Regulatory Manager 907-522-4499
907-331-8140 cell

Rick Trupp
General Manager of Alaska 907-522-4499 

Oversight Panel Suzan Simonds 907-522-4499 907-331-8140 

OR AT LEAST VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6^TH.