Category Archives: science

Guns Shows & the American Curse

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[The following is a guest post by Nadine Godwin, a longtime friend and former editor of Travel Weekly among other gifts. She routinely spends huge time investigation important issues that are being considered in federal agencies and preparing/circulating alerts, often with drafts of comments. Her messages to a select list of recipients date back to 2017]

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has proposed a rule that would effectively, for the first time ever, require almost anyone who sells guns on the Internet or at gun shows to obtain licenses to make those sales.

This matters because holders of federal firearm licenses are required to conduct background checks on their buyers, to sell only guns with serial numbers and to record the sales.

Currently, gun sellers on the Internet and at gun shows don’t have to be licensed, which means they don’t have to do background checks. This circumstance is often called the gun show loophole, but the loophole is way bigger than gun shows.

These days, nearly a quarter of all gun sales occur without background checks or adherence to the other rules associated with a license to sell firearms. Furthermore, up to 80% of firearms used to commit crimes are obtained from unlicensed sources, i.e., without background checks.

Meanwhile, Americans overwhelmingly (87% to 90%, depending on the poll) favor expanded background checks for gun buyers. I support the ATF proposal because I am one of that huge majority.

The deadline for comments on the ATF proposal is Dec. 7. 

Background + some details of the proposal

Sellers on the Internet and at gun shows aren’t licensed now because the relevant law, the 1968 Gun Control Act, was too vague about which gun sellers must be licensed. Besides which, Internet selling wasn’t a thing in 1968.

As a result, brick-and-mortar operations have gotten licenses, but other sellers have not been pressed to do so. Gun traffickers, individuals with dodgy backgrounds and buyers with lethal intent could thus make their purchases essentially unnoted. It is easy to see how this increases the odds for gun violence.

For the good news (my view), the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed last year, set the stage for expanding background checks.

Whereas the 1968 legislation required licenses for those with the “principal objective of livelihood and profit,” the 2022 Safer Communities law requires licenses for anyone who deals in guns “to predominately earn a profit.” That language isn’t very specific either, but it does contemplate licenses for anyone selling guns for profit even if profits aren’t a significant portion of the seller’s livelihood.

It was left to the ATF, the only federal agency with a mandate to regulate the gun industry, to create the rule that makes clear which sellers must be licensed, based on the updated language found in the 2022 law.

For starters, the ATF proposal states, a person is presumed to be in the business of selling firearms if among other things the person:

    • Repetitively sells or offers for sale firearms within 30 days after they were purchased,
    • Repetitively sells or offers for sale firearms that are new, or like new in their original packaging, or
    • Repetitively sells or offers for sale firearms of the same or similar make and model.

Furthermore, the proposal says, it will be presumed a person intends to “predominantly earn a profit” if among other things the person a) promotes a firearms business, however casually; b) keeps records documenting profits and losses; c) obtains a state or local business license for the sale of firearms, or d) buys a business insurance policy that covers firearms inventory.

The rule, if finalized, will apply to gun sales in flea markets and mail-order businesses as well as in the oft-discussed Internet and gun show venues.

The ATF estimates that anywhere from 24,540 to an astonishing 328,296 unlicensed persons selling guns for profit would be affected by this rule.

Geez, a lot of people sell guns!

What to do

The proposed rule wouldn’t require universal background checks for gun sales (our feckless Congress must legislate that), but it gets us a lot closer.

If you support this enhancement to ATF regulations, please speak up by filing comments by Dec. 7 here: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/ATF-2023-0002-0001.

I am adding a few sample messages, prepared by gun safety groups, that you can use for inspiration.

Finally, please share this letter with anyone you think might want to comment, as well.

Thanks

Nadine Godwin

P.S. For those who would like to know more about this proposal, I am also adding a helpful explainer. It was prepared by Giffords, a gun safety advocacy group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords after she was shot in the head and nearly killed while meeting with constituents in Arizona in 2011.

SAMPLE MESSAGES:

From Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

I strongly support the proposed rule to ensure that individuals who are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms are licensed, thus requiring them to complete background checks for all firearm sales and maintain records of those transactions, and that dealers who have lost their licenses may no longer sell firearms to the public.

A recent study found that more than one in five gun sales in the U.S. are conducted without a background check, amounting to millions of off-the-books gun transfers annually; many of these transactions are facilitated by individuals who profit from the repetitive sale of firearms yet avoid the oversight required of licensed dealers.

This is a public health and safety issue, and I urge the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to finalize the rule in order to prevent further firearm transfers to prohibited purchasers.

From Everytown for Gun Safety

Our background check system was created to keep firearms out of the hands of individuals who are not allowed to purchase or possess them. But loopholes in the system — like the ones that allow unlicensed gun sellers to sell guns online and at gun shows without running background checks on their buyers — undermine it.

That’s why ATF’s proposed rule must be finalized. It will help close loopholes in our background check system that have, for decades, been exploited by bad actors like gun traffickers, straw purchasers and other prohibited persons, including domestic abusers and convicted felons.

I support the proposed rule because it makes clear that firearms dealing can take place wherever and through whatever medium guns are bought and sold — whether at a gun show or at an online marketplace — and that conduct, such as selling guns of the same or similar kind and type, constitutes firearms dealing. Such gun sellers will need to become licensed dealers and, as licensed dealers, run background checks.

More to the point, the proposed rule will save lives. That’s why I support the proposed rule and why I encourage ATF to finalize it.

Another canned message prepared by Everytown for Gun Safety

I support the ATF’s proposed rule (Docket No ATF 2022R-17), which would dramatically reduce the number of guns sold without a background check.

I urge the ATF to finalize this rule as soon as possible. Guns sold without background checks — both online and at gun shows — are a huge source for gun traffickers and people looking to avoid a check. These guns often end up trafficked across state lines, recovered at crime scenes in major cities and used against police officers. This contributes to the gun violence epidemic plaguing our country.

The long-standing lack of clarity around which sellers must become licensed and run background checks has made this problem all the worse.

I support the clear commonsense standard laid out in this rule: Anyone offering guns for sale online or at a gun show is presumed to be trying to make a profit and should therefore be licensed and run a background check on each customer. This rule will save lives and should be urgently finalized.

GIFFORDS

COURAGE TO FIGHT GUN VIOLENCE

 FACT SHEET: FEDERAL REGULATION TOEXPAND BACKGROUND CHECKS

THE PROBLEM

Under current federal law, certain individuals with a history of felony convictions, domestic violence, or involuntary mental health commitments are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms. This law is enforced primarily through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which licensed gun dealers, those holding a Federal Firearms License (FFL), are required to contact, either directly through the FBI or indirectly through state or local law enforcement, to determine a person’s eligibility to possess firearmsbefore selling or transferring a firearm to them.

There is, however, a significant loophole that exists when guns are sold by unlicensed individuals. Only those sellers who are required to obtain an FFL through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) must perform background checks via the NICS system. As a result of this loophole, unlicensed gun sellers frequently sell guns without background checks online, at gun shows, and through unregulated person-to-person sales.

This loophole makes it far too easy for people prohibited from purchasing or possessing guns to circumvent the laws on the books and obtain guns. Up to 80% of firearms used for criminal purposes were obtained fromunlicensed sources, meaning no background check was required. With the rise of social media and the expansion of internet access, new avenues for unlicensed gun sales have opened up via websites like Armslist.This expansion of access has made the background check loophole an even more salient issue, and in fact,nearly a quarter of gun sales in recent years have occurred without a background check.

“ENGAGED IN THE BUSINESS” AND CHANGES MADE BY BSCA

Fortunately, the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) provides a remedy for the above issue. The 1968 Gun Control Act (GCA) mandates that all those “engaged in the business” of selling firearms acquire an FFL. This status triggers federal laws and regulations that licensees must follow, including the requirement that they conduct a background check on potential purchasers. Before the BSCA,the GCA was unclear as to the level of sales activity that distinguishes someone who sells guns occasionally-and is thus not subject to licensing requirements-from someone who is “engaged in the business” of firearm sales and qualifies as a firearms dealer.

The BSCA updated the definition of “engaged in the business.” Now, instead of including only those who sellguns with “the principal objective of livelihood and profit,” the law includes anyone who deals guns “topredominately earn a profit.”

giffords.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, Nothing – Then …. [Repost]

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{Originally posted September 11, 2021 — two years later, nothing has changed]

In the beginning, the Earth was a void. Just a roundish rock, really. Lots of volcanoes and other nasty things in the early times. How it came to exist, or more importantly, why it came to exist is a question to which mankind will almost certainly never have the answer. Some people are happy to simply believe that some spirit put it here and then planted humans and all the other biological forms. Whatever.

In my worldview, over an unimaginably long time, evolution took its course. Single-celled “creatures” formed, evolved … you know the story in general outline. That’s more than enough for most of us. We could continue to struggle with the question of how to reconcile those biological facts with the spirit mythology but, for me at least, that’s a waste of time. It turns out that evolution gave humans the ability to believe two or more inconsistent concepts at the same time. We live with the cognitive dissonance, partly by compartmentalizing. You can pray on your knees in your worship space on Sunday to the spirit of your choice (there are many to choose from) and then drive in your high-tech car or search for information on your computer/smart-phone and never give a thought to how both are valid. So be it. It’s who we are.

But on this day, this day of terrible memories, on which many say they are inspired to new hope, we should be reminded of the intersection of inconsistent ideas and what that can mean. Men claiming to be men of faith who believed we were evil incarnate decided to teach us a lesson. They used their “faith” to justify killing almost 3,000 people and had hoped to kill many more.

In truth, the actions they took on 9/11 led to many, many more deaths and much, much more suffering. The words of the prince in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet come to mind:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,

That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love!

And I, for winking at your discords, too

Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punished.

Evolution produced the cerebral cortex in the human brain. Over millennia, homo sapiens became the Earth’s dominant species. With that came the capacity to change everything. We could do much more than just kill another animal or eat another plant to survive. We were way smarter than that. We learned agriculture, invented tools and machines, built enormous cities, how to fly in machines, how to write and share knowledge.

But there were hard times too. Times when food was scarce. Times when another “group” had access to resources other “groups” wanted. Dominance rather than sharing was apparently critical to survival and thus the prime instinct, to live on, led to competition, fighting, killing. More for me, less for you. I win, you lose. Too bad. At least for today.

Mankind evolved to be the smartest and dumbest creature on the planet. Able to perform miracles of learning and healing and loving, mankind also learned to hate, to fight even when the fight was self-defeating. To change the planet in ways that now make it likely to become uninhabitable. Yet, we continue. The same mistakes. The same hates.

Compartmentalizing.

Love your fellow man. Love nature. Then kill them both if you think it’s necessary to survive … or maybe just to have more. Acquisitiveness – another human trait. Get more stuff because more stuff is better than less stuff, and it shows other humans your superiority. Your dominance in the hierarchy. Humans are very invested in hierarchies. Animals, too, are invested in hierarchies and one might conclude that hierarchies are essential elements of life. But, of course, animals generally don’t just go invade their neighboring animals’ territory.

Is there another way? I don’t know. As a species, humans have the capacity to do the right thing. We’ve created countries, nation-states, wrapped ourselves in “national identity,” “ethnic identity,” “cultural identity,” “sexual identity,” take your pick. So many identities.

Identities help us know who is in our group and it doesn’t take much thought to see how this can be important in the world we have made. But identities are, by their nature, separating. Categorizing. If you’re X and I’m M, we’re in different groups and never the twain ….

So, here we are. Smart and stupid at the same time. Victims of our own intelligence. Suffering now from an unseen enemy, the coronavirus. Most of us are grateful for the science and scientists who brought us a life-saving vaccine. We are grateful for the healthcare workers who put themselves at risk when we are most desperate for their help and comfort. And some of us, a remarkably large number, believe in conspiracies, in dark images of evil people doing insane and immoral things. This group turns away from vaccines and other established public health measures and consumes instead known poisons and unknown other substances, placing their faith in politicians rather than scientists.

Those people walk among us. Many are our friends and neighbors. Many are dying. Yet they persist in believing the unbelievable. Compartmentalizing to prevent being told what to do or to have their “rights” diminished. These people don’t care much about the rest of us, though many often attend religious services and say many prayers. When there is a mass shooting, they send “thoughts and prayers,” but they resist meaningful measures to control violence, and the poverty and desperation that often precedes it, because … they have “rights.”

I am rambling so I will stop soon. I am distraught, I confess, at the idea that years of my inevitably shrinking future life are being stolen by ignorance and deceit. I’ll never get those years back. Neither will the victims of 9/11, the dead and the families and friends of the dead. Never get them back. The permanent silence that awaits us all draws closer by the day, and I wonder why it is that the smartest creatures on the planet continue to be the dumbest. I wonder why we can’t see and correct the self-destructive paths down which our evolutionary history has driven us. We can look back and see history. Other animals can’t. We can look ahead and predict the future. Other animals can’t. We don’t have to wait until the planetary water hole has completely dried up before figuring out a way to stop the loss. What is holding us back from using our intelligence to do what intelligence demands?

Maybe we’re just not intelligent enough. I don’t know.

Reaching Deeper Into the Bottom of the GOP Barrel

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The latest nominee for Speaker of the (barely) Republican-controlled House of Representatives is James Michael (Mike) Johnson, “representing” the 4th District of Louisiana. His official website touts the “7 Core Principles of Conservatism,” the customary blather about the “rule of law,” “free markets,” “limited government,” etc.

Last on the list is “Human Dignity:”

Because all men are created equal and in the image of God, every human life has inestimable dignity and value, and every person should be measured only by the content of their character. A just government protects life, honors marriage and family as the primary institutions of a healthy society, and embraces the vital cultural influences of religion and morality. Public policy should always encourage education and emphasize the virtue of hard work as a pathway out of poverty, while public assistance programs should be reserved only for those who are truly in need. In American, everyone who plays by the rules should get a fair shot. By preserving these ideals, we will maintain the goodness of America that has been the secret to our greatness.

Let’s unpack some of that.

For starters, note that Johnson conveniently picks up the “all men are created equal” from the Declaration of Independence but then, in a classic Republican head-fake, translates “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” into “in the image of God.” You will see below why this slight-of-hand is central to who Johnson is.

Here’s what Mike Johnson really stands for:

  • Opposed to abortion access.
  • Opposed to medical marijuana.
  • Opposed to same-sex marriage.
  • Falsely claimed Trump had fully cooperated with the Mueller investigation.
  • Opposed to certification of the 2020 election.
  • Voted to overturn 2020 election result in Pennsylvania.
  • Voted against establishing the national commission to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
  • Supported Trump’s 2017 Muslim ban.
  • Supports ending military aid to Ukraine so it can be absorbed by Russia.

[Wikipedia: https://tinyurl.com/3m38bmsx]

So much for the “rule of law” and the “inalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness.”

Johnson is a religious zealot who appears to lack a basic understanding of the principle of separation of church and state while claiming devotion to the rule of law and the Constitution.

This is the man the GOP now has focused its attention on to elect as Speaker of the House, next in line behind the Vice President to succeed to the powers of the presidency.

 

When Will We Learn?

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Two cases in point.

Case One:

The Yale School of Public Health reports that

Some “non-menthol” cigarettes that are being marketed as a “fresh” alternative in states where traditional menthol cigarettes are banned use synthetic chemicals to mimic menthol’s distinct cooling sensations, researchers at Yale and Duke University have found.

The synthetic additives could undermine existing policies and a U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on menthol cigarettes expected later this year that is intended to discourage new smokers and address the harmful health effects of tobacco use.

https://tinyurl.com/35r7t7wz

….

Hundreds of municipalities across the United States and some states – Massachusetts and California – have already restricted the sale of flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes.

In a study published Oct. 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from the Yale School of Public Health, the Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering at Yale, and Duke School of Medicine identified a synthetic flavoring agent known as WS-3 in the newly introduced “non-menthol” cigarettes that delivers similar, or stronger, cooling sensations as menthol but without the minty aroma or taste.

….

Flavored tobacco products such as menthol cigarettes tend to reduce tobacco’s harsh effects making them particularly popular among young people and those just starting to smoke. Historically, menthol cigarettes have also been aggressively marketed towards African Americans, with up to 90% of African Americans who smoke using menthol cigarettes.

It seems likely that this “gap” in the regulatory regime for death-dealing cigarettes results from the regulations being based on specific chemicals rather than on the effects of flavor-enhancing chemicals regardless of type. The lesson to be learned from this, yet again, is that industries looking to make money regardless of impacts on public health will always look for an escape route and finding such routes is always easier when the “thing to avoid” is named rather than relying on the effects of the danger factor or the way it influences behavior.

The historical conduct of the tobacco industry, among others, should be a lesson for governments at all levels that you have to think very deeply about what you’re trying to prevent and how such prevention may be avoided. This doesn’t seem that hard.

Case Two:

The Virginia Highway Use Fee (the “HUF”).

I only recently learned about this assessment even though we bought a highly fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle in late 2020. The fee is not a lot of money, but the purpose of the fee is offensive and counter to other goals, or what should be other goals, as we try to offset some of the worst environmental effects of our dependency on automobiles.

The fee is $25 a year. The Virginia law provides a way of saving, maybe, $5 of the fee but is very complicated and, in my judgment, not worth the effort that involves obtaining another “reader” for your windshield, taking and reporting readings, etc. No thanks. Not to save $5.

More troubling is the motivation for this fee.

According to the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles,

     You pay the HUF if you register a:

    • Fuel-efficient vehicle, which is a vehicle that has a combined fuel economy of 25 miles per gallon (MPG) or greater
    • Vehicle made in a year in which the average combined MPG rating for all vehicles produced in that year is 25 MPG or greater
    • Low Speed Vehicles, pay an annual $25 HUF

The highway use fee (HUF) helps make up for the fuel taxes that drivers with fuel-efficient and electric vehicles spend less on, because they’re not using as much fuel.

Among the vehicles exempted from the HUF are:

  • Vehicles with a combined MPG rating less than 25 MPG
  • Autocycles
  • Motorcycles
  • Mopeds

The HUF was started in 2020 but in July 2022,

the state launched an alternative program to let drivers pay the fee at a per-mile rate — a cost savings for those who drive less than the average amount, which officials peg at 11,600 miles annually. For drivers of battery-powered cars, that fee works out to a penny per mile. [https://tinyurl.com/yh4kt6tx]

In plain English, Virginia wants to penalize you for using a fuel-efficient vehicle (like a hybrid or fully electric, that, by the way, costs more than a regular gas-using vehicle) by forcing you to pay taxes based on gasoline consumption you don’t use, BUT you can potentially reduce the penalty slightly by signing up for the complex pay-per-mile program.

Or you can have what’s behind Curtain No. 1.

Seriously, this crazy scheme is a product of multiple conflicting forces, including Congress’s failure to increase gas taxes since 1993, the attraction of fuel-efficient vehicles and the inability of states to see the clear alternative of just taxing vehicles sufficiently to provide the revenue they need for road maintenance without depending on gasoline consumption. The current system must be beloved in the hallowed halls of the oil companies as it disincentivizes the purchase of fuel-efficient vehicles.

The more one looks at these systems of regulation, the more our government looks like something created by the Keystone Kops. If you don’t know what they are, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Cops

 

Can We Please Stop Blaming Everything on the Pandemic?

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A short while ago, Vox.com published an article decrying how people are acting in public now: People forgot how to act in public https://tinyurl.com/mur5rx3x Reports describe concert attendees throwing phones & other items at performers (I cheered when I read about Cardi B launching her microphone at the person who threw a drink at her), Broadway audiences engaging in grotesque displays, and people using cell phones disruptively during movies. The conclusion, after consulting some “experts,” was that this behavior related to the forced closures and isolation everyone experienced during the pandemic.

I found the article confusing.  On the one hand, it claimed people during the pandemic had simply “forgotten” how to act. Now that they can return to these collective experiences, “[w]hen someone makes a scene in public at a group event, we’re disturbed in large part because these gatherings are extremely important to our intellectual and emotional selves …. The “collective effervescence” of live events is something humans crave, whether they know it or not.”

The quoted term apparently refers to the fact that while we’re buying a ticket for the performance, we’re also “buying that electric feeling of a crowd of humans appreciating the same thing …. these events are moments of highly pleasurable social connections.” The idea seems to be that in addition to our personal experience of the performance, we are also stimulated by the enjoyment of others around us, even though we don’t know any of them, and we resent the disruption of that collective and connective response by people who seem more interested in what’s on their phones.

I readily admit that I prefer the other people attending a show to actively enjoy it, but only up to the point just before their “enjoyment” lapses into hysterical enthusiasm that detracts from the show. We experienced this during the musical MJ in New York a while back. Some members of the audience, seated near us, apparently came to believe that the actor playing Michael Jackson was Michael Jackson inexplicably risen from the grave and there for their personal entertainment, in return for which they were obliged to scream and shriek at every cool move the actor made to imitate the real MJ. The noise was overwhelming and detracted from our experience of the show. The “collective effervescence” spilled over into something else.

Tne academic cited in the Vox article thought that “the lockdown’s impact on social gatherings has affected our social skills, such as conversation and general awareness … and I’m sure it has impacted social skills.”

The pendulum swing from gathering in real life to being relegated to social media to now, in 2023, coming back to real-life events may explain why some people are being disruptive and not fully comprehending the impact they’re having on their fellow audience members. They’re using the modes of social connection they got accustomed to — posting a video from a movie theater, scrolling through social media during a Broadway play, or treating a concert like a performance they’re watching from home — in a setting that’s inappropriate. In some cases, it’s an upsettingly tangible example of the self-interested behavior we’ve come to call “main character syndrome,” wherein a person seems to believe that everything that happens around them only contributes to their own story.

That is a bridge too far for me.

I suspect the explanation lies in a broader social phenomenon associated with generational attributes that lead some groups (broad generalization here) to only be seriously interested in things that are about themselves. They therefore can easily block out the interests of those around them. This explains the hysterical laughter and ultra-loud conversations in restaurants that ignore the impact on people at adjoining tables. These people simply don’t care that their “good times” are affecting other people’s “good times,” because everything important and relevant is just about them and them alone.

Make all the excuses you want, but I reject the idea that people in the space of one year lost entirely their awareness of the people around them to such an extent that upon returning to a movie theater, for example, they think it’s fine to text and even talk. We’ve attended three movies in the past month and in every case the end of the previews includes a prominent, loud warning to “don’t text, don’t talk, don’t ruin the movie.” That same warning was played at movies well before the pandemic closed everything. People who violate that warning simply don’t care much about anyone else. They didn’t care before or during the pandemic either. They saw the pandemic as an unjust inconvenience in the world that should still be revolving around them exclusively.

As for the “fans” throwing things at performers, I have tried to understand what might cause such odd behavior. Several possibilities came to mind:

  1. The throwers are obscenely wealthy, which explains their up-front seats, and don’t place real value on their phone – they have more than one or can easily afford another.
  2. The perps are resentful of the notoriety of the performers and want to show them they’re not so special compared to the anonymous ticket-holder in the audience, so “take that, Taylor Swift; you’re not so special.”
  3. The perps have been suppressing their violent hostility toward everyone in authority and now they can release their angst against a live target who is “up” on the stage while they are stuck “down” here with the other screaming masses.

There is no way to sort this out. The truth probably is “all of the above and more” for many people in the audience. But it’s not the pandemic.

So, please, let’s stop with the overreaching explanations for why people behave like inconsiderate boors. It’s most likely because they are inconsiderate boors. The pandemic may have made us more aware of their presences because collective activities still seem “new,” but these particular people are the same as they always were. Once a boor, always a boor, someone once said. You can see them taking videos at the ballet immediately after being told to turn off their phones and put them away because videoing the performance is “strictly prohibited.” Better not sit near me ….

 

A Group of Election Pundits Walked Into a Bar ….

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And they began to debate the Republican debate and, just like the real debate, they agreed on almost nothing of importance.

After reading several “expert” analyses of the debate, it’s clear the “experts” are as uncertain as the candidates. Not surprising, I suppose, given that this was the first debate and Trump, the most prominent criminal in American political history, decided to debate from another location where he could not be called to account for his endless lies, incompetence, and criminality.

Speaking of which, most of the Republican “contenders” did agree on one thing: if Trump wins the nomination, they’ll support him against Joe Biden. There is little doubt that if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were to rise from their graves and run as a Democratic ticket, the Republican contenders would support Trump for president over them. Trump’s hold on these people tells you all you need to know about this collection of losers. They will say nothing to offend the MAGA crowd that, perfectly happy with a fascist criminal like Trump, will determine the Republican nomination. Even Mike Pence, who has “boldly” observed the obvious – that Trump had demanded he raise Trump’s ambition over the Constitution — raised his hand when asked if he would support Trump as the nominee.

Profiles in courage, these are not.

One of the more substantive treatments of the debate was produced by Vox.com, seen in full at https://tinyurl.com/2bw44t8y. The author noted that the early part of the debate was a simulacrum of a Republican-style debate from yesteryear in which issues like abortion bans (they all want to control women’s bodies and health decisions, the reality of climate change (they all agree with Trump that it’s a hoax), urban crime (we need more guns), K-12 education (education is for libtards – ban the books!), immigration (furriners, keep ‘em out), the Russia-Ukraine war (appease Putin with Ukraine’s territory – communism bad, Putin OK), and the rise of China (COVID, the gift that keeps on giving).

The Vox view was that an absent Donald Trump still won the debate. The moderators, despite their Fox “News” credentials, also came in as losers (they always lose control of “debates,” apparently even when Trump is absent–remarkable).

How any of these folks expect to win much support from the MAGA crowd, or indeed any remaining “Republicans,” if they’re not willing to say anything bad about the MAGA love child remains a complete mystery. Is this just some kind of “show” designed to fool people into thinking the Republican Party is legitimate and has real options in its ranks to the fascism promoted by Trump? It’s a mystery. Seriously, why bother going through the motions when anyone there with a plausible case to make (?) is terrified of speaking ill of the poll leader?

As noted in the USAToday report, https://tinyurl.com/34bt8suy, Vivek Ramaswamy, the other billionaire candidate (do we need another billionaire president??), called Trump “the best president of the 21st century.” One positive thought about Ramaswamy: if he became president, the aliens hanging out at Area 51 would break out and immediately head back into outer space, never to return to what will remain of Earth after its habitable phase ends at the hands of climate change (I know, I know, climate change is the Democrats new hoax – Trump said so and therefore it must be true, nothing to worry about, move along).

A clear example of what we could expect in the way of logical thinking from a President Ramaswamy may be found in this quote:

Your claim that Donald Trump is motivated by vengeance and grievance would be a lot more credible if your entire campaign were not based on vengeance and grievance against Donald Trump.

Think about that for a moment: Trump can’t be “motivated by vengeance and grievance” because their campaigns are based on “vengeance and grievance against him.”

But then, of course, the great moralist Mike Pence scolded the only woman on the stage regarding a national abortion ban by offering this beauty: “consensus is the opposite of leadership.” What he meant to say was “when I’m president, I won’t care what people think; I’ll tell you female hussies what to do and you’ll do it or else.”

All in all, it was a rough night for rationality. And history, as always in Republican circles, took a back seat to ideology. While there was minority support for continuing to help Ukraine resist Russian aggression, there was much sentiment for the old “America First” claptrap: appease Russia with a big piece of Ukraine and hope the Russian Bear’s appetite for conquest is sated. Isolationism in another wrapper. It has never worked but, hey, Republicans need to have something to say, so ….

What’s left of the Republican Party thus has only this to offer: a multiply-indicted criminal lunatic or one of a cast of confused, ignorant wannabes who haven’t got the courage of their, or anyone’s, convictions to challenge the lunatic. Elect one of these beauties and it’s game over.

The Music We Cannot Hear

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I have finally finished my slog through the third book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell (2022). You may know that Mukherjee won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for the extraordinary work, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

I say “slog,” because I understood only a fraction of what I read in this remarkable book and could only take it in small doses. Even then it was a challenge, not because of exposition issues but because I simply cannot understand how scientists know what they know. Much of the story of the cell, which is really a multitude of highly differentiated “things,” has been learned in fairly recent times, but that reality is one of the keys to what I did come to realize as I moved through the astonishing complexities of cell-level biology.

The realization was how most of what we think is known by those who know this stuff is the product of accumulated trial, and sometimes egregious error, by a vast array of people over extended periods of time. Typically, someone in a laboratory somewhere comes up with some idea, inspiration, theory, call it what you will. He (typically a “he,” but thankfully less so over time) works on it, sometimes for years and then, with or without a meaningful or useful conclusion, moves on to other pastures.

Then, and this is the key to the whole story, years, sometimes decades later, some other scientist in a lab somewhere else, or maybe just in a library, finds a paper about the earlier person’s work, decides to take it up for further exploration perhaps with the benefit of intervening developments in the science, expands the theory, tests it and … sometimes … makes a major new discovery. The old idea may be rejected entirely or merely extended with the use of new technologies.

This narrative occurs over and over and over again through time. One discovery or idea builds on another, then is added to by someone else, then another person or entire team takes it up and … discovery occurs. Truth emerges. Theory becomes practice. Concepts become medical solutions to previously unsolvable mysteries of illness. One thing builds on another. Along the way there are many false starts, mis-directions, failed experiments, misunderstandings.

Sometimes the “establishment” rejects out of hand a new idea that challenges the current orthodoxy. Reputations are ruined for some along the way. Some give up and just move on to other subjects until someone else, somewhere, picks up the trail, has a new insight, solves a seemingly unsolvable mystery.

Thus, are born immunotherapy and a multitude of medical “miracles” never conceived of. Transplants of organs become possible. Open heart surgeries. On and on. It’s never easy and there is often resistance to progress. When embryonic stem cells were being investigated,

…critics, mostly from the religious right, would have none of it. They argued that human embryos had been destroyed – defiled – during the production of these cells and that embryos constituted humans. That these IVF [in vitro fertilization]-produced embryos were yet to acquire sentience, had no organs, were no more than a ball of undifferentiated cells that would otherwise have been discarded anyway, hardly placated them; it was their potential to form future humans that made them currently human …. In 2001 President George W. Bush, pressured by opponents of ES cell research, passed a law restricting federal funding to research involving ES cells that had already been derived …; any attempts to make new ES cells could not be federally supported. In Germany and Italy, too, research on human ES cells was highly restricted and, in some cases, banned.

The book touches on other “cutting edge” dilemmas, as well, such as human enhancement through genetic engineering.

But for me, the main story was the way in which science moves forward. Working scientists separated by time and space find each other and each other’s work, building on it and bring humanity the most remarkable discoveries. Not least of these were the vaccines that brought an end, more or less, to the COVID pandemic. At least for now. The work will continue, just as the challenges will continue to come. And the song of the cell will expand into new rhythms, new stanzas, new understandings without end.

Our Burning World

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[Note: This post has been in development for a long time. I was inspired to finally post it when I finished Lopez’s essays, discussed below, and then by the tragedy that has unfolded in Maui. The devastation of Hawaii’s island gem is just the latest example of the fate that awaits us if global action is not taken promptly to combat climate change. We’ve seen it in California and many other places in the United States and the world over. Time is running out.]

Reading the accomplishments of author/environmentalist Barry Lopez, author of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece, Arctic Dreams, is more than enough to give anyone a deep sense of inadequacy. https://tinyurl.com/4wpfch3a I recently finished his posthumous collection of essays, aptly titled Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (2022).  I was stunned to learn that Lopez had died on Christmas Day 2020, shortly after my wife and I moved back to the Washington DC area (in DC itself for the first time), after having survived the pandemic in New York City.

Lopez wrote Of Wolves and Men a decade earlier than Arctic Dreams. According to Wikipedia, “López is a surname of Spanish origin. It was originally a patronymic, meaning “Son of Lope”, Lope itself being a Spanish given name deriving from Latin lupus, meaning “wolf”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B3pez This is an interesting juxtaposition in light of Lopez’s interest in natural history. Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist. Of that book, Amazon.com accurately says that it,

reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf’s preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions,

Lopez’s profound ability to think deeply about everything he observed and to connect his observations to larger principles was amazing. And he did it with prose so powerful that you stop to reread sentences and whole paragraphs just to be sure you understood every insight he was recording. Here are a few examples from his 2019 memoir, Horizon:

It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

What cataclysm, I often wonder, or better, what act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?

         ….

The desire to know ourselves better, to understand especially the source and the nature of our dread, looms before us now like a specter in a half-lit world, a weird dawn breaking over a scene of carnage: unbreathable air, human diasporas, the Sixth Extinction, ungovernable political mobs.

And this:

It might have been useful once to identify and denounce enemy cultures, those that were seen as ruthless and exploitive, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to social justice at the highest levels; but … I feel that this time has passed. People in every country today can identify with the very same threats to their lives and to the lives of their progeny. And many know their governments, elected or self-appointed, are too cowardly, too compromised, or too mean-spirited, to help them.

One of Lopez’s great gifts was the ability to view and understand situations through the eyes of multiple cultures. It was as if he had multiple minds in one body. Lopez, ever the brilliant storyteller, related the life of Ranald MacDonald, the product of a mixed marriage – a Chinook mother and a white father – who was born in 1824, a time when, not unlike today in some respects, being of “mixed blood” was a huge obstacle to advancement.

MacDonald traveled and had many jobs, coming to have a deep connection to the indigenous people of the Pacific and believing that the Japanese were related to American Indians. He also thought that Western industrialization was an imminent threat to Japan, that had been virtually sealed off for over a hundred years from Western contact. MacDonald managed to get to Japan and during a brief period of acceptance by the Japanese taught 14 members of the shogun’s court to speak English in the hope that it would help them deal with the Western merchants and military he believed, correctly, were soon coming to Japan. MacDonald died in relative obscurity, but Lopez gave a moving tribute to his life as one of the many people of talent and inspiration who was limited by racist and cultural biases throughout his life.

Then, there is Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, that I have not read, and the sequel, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, that I am about to describe. As I understand it, the central story line of Sapiens was the emergence of humans as the dominant animal on the planet. These people are us — empowered by superior intelligence, opposable thumbs, tool-making ability, and all the rest — to reshape the earth in ways that were perceived as important to the survival and continued dominance of humankind over all other species on the planet. The supreme irony is that “homo sapiens” refers to the only surviving sub-tribe of Hominina and translates to “wise men.”Deus translates, of course, to “god” or “deity.” I will just leave that there. You get the idea.

Harari opens Homo Deus with the assertion that the primary historical scourges of mankind – famine, plague and war – have largely been conquered. As a result, he predicts man will now turn his main attentions to “a serious bid for immortality,” the arguably logical extension of the struggle against famine and disease. The first 70 pages of Homo Deus lay the foundation for what is to come. He argues that it was not the larger brains as such, with attendant superior (to other animals) intelligence, that enabled the planetary domination by humans. Instead, he says, it was the ability of homo sapiens to cooperate with strangers that was the key to it all.

Harari’s opening argument is obviously a very big idea and likely some people will take issue with it. So be it. The point is that these are “frontier concepts,” things most of us likely have not often thought about in depth but that have a lot to do with the future of our species. They were certainly subjects of little or no interest to Trump and his cabinet of policy makers and grifters. But Harari has thought about these issues profoundly. I won’t be around to see if he’s right but I am powerfully interested in understanding his provocative thinking.

His writing will not appeal to evangelical Christians or others similarly inclined. Harari leaves no doubt that he does not believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, pointing to, among other things, the absence of evidence. Above all else, Harari, a historian by trade, is an evidence guy. If no evidence appears after extensive investigation, the “thing” most likely does not exist and never did. Me too.

There is another aspect to this, one that I have touched on before. See, for example, the post entitled The Larger Meaning of “Hidden Figures.”  https://shiningseausa.com/?s=hidden+figures  We have in these two people – Lopez and Harari — examples of humans who, in slightly different circumstances, might well have been ostracized and prevented from reaching their potential as students and later as teachers for the rest of us. Lopez was as American as apple pie, but he bore a family name of Spanish origin. It is not hard to imagine that the Trump administration saw him as a target, because of his name and because he was a truth-teller who wrote and lectured about environmental policies that are anathema to Trump and the Republican Party. Imagine what will happen if Trump, armed with years of new grievances, regains power.

Harari is an even easier target. He was born and grew up in a secular Jewish family with Lebanese and Eastern European roots. That might not have been a problem for the Trump administration, given its attachment to the right-wing leadership of Israel, but there is more: Harari is openly gay and married to a man (in a civil ceremony in Toronto – those Canadians again!). They live in a kind of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms, some might call it a commune. Or socialism! OMG! People working together for the common good. Outrageous.

Reading the challenging and awe-inspiring ideas of these two people, I am reminded yet again of all the other “non-white” men and women whose race-based suppression has deprived all of us of the untold benefits of people capable of seeing things more deeply and thinking in frontier concepts that open our minds to new possibilities.

And to what end? What coherent mental process leads people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump to the conclusion that some people, solely because of their ethnic heritage, are a danger to American society and should be removed from it? How does Miller rationalize his strident opposition to immigration in light of his mother’s Jewish parents having come here from Belarus in 1903?

We will never know but the point is that suppression of the “other” risks the loss for everyone of life-enhancing contributions to the improvement of society. We will never be able to “know” what we have lost, but it is certain that the loss has happened and continues. If, as is often speculated, this suppression is based on fear of displacement by the unknown, the leaders of the suppression should look at what is known. THAT is what they should be afraid of, the “scene of carnage” described by Lopez.

Some of Lopez’s last words in print are compelling:

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc – ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war – we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas – the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is foolish – can have no future with us….

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known….

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?….

Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way – global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments – and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

Rest in peace, Barry Lopez.

Why Are Doctors Not Allowed to Practice Everywhere?

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For reasons I don’t recall, I subscribe to the JAMA Network, which is a monthly medical journal published by the American Medical Association with a large variety of articles about the biomedical sciences. I’m reasonably sure my interest was driven by the pandemic. In any case, much of the contents are beyond my ability to understand. But every so often, I find something compelling either about some disease or, in the present case, about the manner and method by which medicine is practiced in our peculiar collection of regions we call “states.”

The present issue is how we have collectively prevented doctors from counseling patients across state lines into states where they are not “admitted to practice.”

As a retired lawyer, I certainly understand the reason we limit, with a notable exception, unadmitted lawyers from the practice of law in states in which they have not passed the state bar exam. That reason is that the laws of each state often vary significantly, particularly regarding the details of procedure but also in many substantive areas such as estate law. It would be problematic to permit lawyers with no knowledge of those laws and procedures to regularly give advice to clients in those states.

There is, as stated, a notable exception, which is that out-of-state lawyers may appear in trials and some other court proceedings if they associate with “local counsel,” an attorney who is admitted to practice in that jurisdiction. The “foreign” attorney may do all the work, but “local counsel” must sign off on it as assurance to the court that the foreign attorney is complying with local law and procedure.

Turning then to the issue of “foreign” doctors “practicing medicine” by, in modern times, counseling patients using technologies like Zoom for “televisits,” I have wondered for some time why the states restrict this activity. Laws and procedures differ from state to state, but is the science on which medical practice is based different from state to state? I am not aware that it is.

Yet, as reported in Jama Network, https://tinyurl.com/5dab4tcm, Providing Responsible Health Care for Out-of-State Patients:

while exceptions may have been made here and there during the pandemic, the states have returned to their prior position of barring “foreign” doctors from remotely advising patients:

…physicians have increasingly been told by lawyers and compliance officers that calling patients located in another state is a legal gray area and introduces a risk of sanctions. States have accelerated this concern. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office recently warned out-of-state physicians that, without a New Jersey medical license, “any practice by way of telemedicine, will constitute the unlicensed practice of your profession, and may subject you to administrative and criminal action” (email communication, March 31, 2023). These restrictions are impeding other communications as well. When Virginia ended its temporary pandemic regulations around physician licensure, Johns Hopkins had to inform more than 1000 patients they were no longer eligible to utilize telehealth appointments with its providers.

Physicians given this advice are understandably frustrated because these restraints disrupt and reduce the quality of the care they provide. This is especially true for specialty physicians who serve a broad geographic area and physicians whose practice is near a state border. For example, many states lack any pediatric subspecialists and the majority of the population must travel more than 100 miles.

Notwithstanding the negative consequences for patients who may have a long-standing successful relationship with a doctor in another state where the patient, for example, once lived, state laws say such relationships must end. The law of Texas is typical:

Any “person who is physically located in another jurisdiction but who, through the use of any medium, including an electronic medium, performs an act that is part of a patient care service initiated in this state…that would affect the diagnosis or treatment of the patient, is considered to be engaged in the practice of medicine.

I didn’t know this, but the JAMA article notes that many telemedicine visits are now accomplished by persistent and/or desperate patients who “sit in cars or coffee shops on smartphones, searching for good WiFi and sharing tips about the best parking lots that are just across the state border.”

 These constraints severely inconvenience patients, especially those with serious illness, physical disabilities, or lower income and limited resources; threaten patient privacy; encourage discontinuity of care; and might force private health care conversations to take place in ineffective and public settings.

Have we lost our collective minds?

Not only is this bad for patients, but it places doctors in a precarious legal situation in which the “best” solution for them is simply to “fire the patient.” Every doctor these days carries medical malpractice insurance. Is continuing to advise an out-of-state patient malpractice under those policies? Or is the opposite true, that failing to continue giving needed advice is malpractice? What about the not-unusual situation where the patient cannot reach a local doctor and seeks out his former doctor in the prior state of residence? Should that doctor respond? Not respond? It’s a Hobson’s choice.

The authors of the JAMA article propose several common-sense solutions that, for example, allow for “any follow-up care after a relationship has been appropriately established through in-person or virtual means.” A “bigger” solution would be federal preemption of the field that would override state laws. Examples include expansion of the principles in the Sports Medicine Licensure Clarity Act in which reasonable exceptions for licensure are created to cover clinicians who travel with a sports team to another state and provide care, even if they are not licensed in the state in which the sporting event occurs.

Interestingly, the authors note that:

the delivery of medical care could be defined as being rendered where the physician is located, although that could potentially upend our existing system and impact state licensure authority. Although congressional action would mean the federal government supersedes, or preempts, existing state regulations, the advantage of either federal legislative approach is uniformity and clarity, rather than requiring physicians to navigate through 50 different approaches to the issue.

Indeed, such action would likely face a gauntlet of opposition from local doctors wanting to preserve their “monopoly” on access to local patients, present and future. Therein lies, I believe, the root of this problem. If someone can convince me that medical practice should vary from state to state in the manner of local law, I will confess error. Until then, I will assign “blame” for the present shameful situation on doctor protecting their turf.

If it was medically acceptable to do interstate televisits during the pandemic, then it must be true that there is no medical problem in the post-pandemic period to allow interstate doctor-patient communications as they choose.

This situation cries out for a federal solution. I understand that some states limit medical services such as assistance in death (known as Death with Dignity) which is forbidden in Virginia but allowed in many other states. A federal solution would leave responsibility for knowing such local restrictions to the doctors in question. Beyond that, let them practice their magnificent craft unimpeded by artificial state boundaries and licensure rules designed to protect doctors’ incomes rather than promote the welfare of all patients.

New York City is Back!

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You may recall that when the pandemic struck in 2020 with its epicenter at New York City, people, especially the well-to-do, fled the city in droves. Like many other predictions about the long-term effects of the pandemic, many observers declared the city permanently “dead.”

Turns out, like many a political poll, those doomsayers were wrong. To paraphrase the misquote attributed to Mark Twain, the reports of New York City’s demise were exaggerated. Recent data indicates large in-migration to the great city. While it’s not scientific, we can testify that the Big Apple is indeed back in business.

We took Amtrak from Washington for Memorial Day weekend and what a weekend it was! We arrived late Friday afternoon and were confronted with the usual late afternoon bedlam around the no-longer-new Moynihan Penn station. We rushed in a bone-jarring taxi ride up 8th Avenue to our hotel to change, met a dear friend for dinner at PJ Clarke’s, then walked with her to Dizzy’s Club to see the 9:30 performance of the Bill Charlap Trio. Because we were among the first to arrive, they seated us in the second tier of tables directly in front of the piano (the first row of tables is reserved for couples).

We have seen Charlap several times, and considered him the quintessential New York piano jazzman, playing tunes like Autumn in New York with somewhat mellow tones redolent of a moody late-night experience in the one of the world’s greatest cities. His music typically creates a sense of leaning into the vibe of the city, a kind of calm within a storm.

This night, however, Charlap was in a different zone, on full tilt from the first note and usually ending each song with a dramatic crashing of the keys, reminiscent of the great Cyrus Chestnut. It was a spectacular virtuoso performance from start to finish, accompanied by two of New York’s most in-demand sidemen: Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington on drums. We’ve seen both many times with different leaders, and they never disappoint. We were blown away by the power and musical drama of a world-class jazz trio, one of the greatest nights of jazz we’ve ever seen.

An additional treat we didn’t expect – Charlap rose from the bench several times to talk about the history of the music and the composers, something rare among jazz artists who mostly just want to play.

The final surprise occurred in the men’s room as I was leaving. Charlap and I ended up there together. I could not avoid engaging him, so I told him how spectacular we thought the performance had been. Characteristically, I think, he seemed genuinely moved and, after asking my name, thanked me profusely. No sign of artistic hubris, just happy that he had succeeded in making us happy.

We stumbled back to our hotel and collapsed, wasted, over-stimulated and completely thrilled by what we had seen.

Saturday arrived with some of the most spectacular Spring weather New York City has ever experienced. We met another friend at the Tavern-on-the-Green where the walkers, bikers, scooters, pedi-cabs, and runners were thronging on the main road around Central Park. People were everywhere soaking up the sun and blessedly mild temperature and humidity.

After brunch, we subwayed to Astoria and visited the Museum of the Moving Image, a surprisingly interesting place where my wife practiced her puppetry skills with one of the Muppet characters. The place is like many specialty museums – overwhelming in its scope and depth. Three learning experiences stood out to me: (1) most of the dialogue in movies is added after the filming of the (typically) multiple takes of each scene; (2) in televised baseball games, the camera shots (and dialogue of the broadcasters) are coordinated by a person who constantly directs which camera is live on the TV screen, often changing every few seconds, and the announcers have to keep up extemporaneously; and (3) the technology behind the Muppets is extraordinarily sophisticated and complex, remarkable to see in action.

We highly recommend this museum to everyone interested in how things work and the illusions that television and movies create.

We taxied to 31st Avenue for the Asia & Pacific Islander Festival, a smallish gathering on a closed-off street where my wife’s New York hula troupe was performing. She had a joyous reunion with some old friends not seen since 2019, before the pandemic shut everything down. The aloha was strong in this group.

We raced back to Manhattan on the subway, changed clothes, had dinner at The Smith and walked across the street to the always spectacular Lincoln Center. We had great orchestra seats to what became one of the most exciting ballet evenings we have ever experienced.

New York City Ballet never disappoints and often just takes your breath away with the precision, stamina and virtuosic moves that are their trademark. This night was no exception.

Fancy Free was first up and surprised me with its energy and interest. The concept is that a trio of sailors are in town at a bar looking for companionship (it was in fact Fleet Week in NYC, so this made sense). A competition ensues when they meet just two women and, after a brief encounter with a third, end up with no one. The ladies are simply not having it. The contest for the females’ allegiance is sometimes intense, but in the end the young men are drawn back to their comradeship. Fancy Free is not my favorite style of ballet, but the dancers were amazing, and the choreography kept my attention throughout.

The music is by Leonard Bernstein with choreography by Jerome Robbins, whose work is, of course, brilliant. The musical and dancing style connection with West Side Story soon became very clear. Familiar but not distracting.

We knew this was the teaser for what followed: Agon, which means “struggle” or “conflict” in Greek. Music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by, who else, George Balanchine. We did not know what to expect but had seen a video about the famous pas de deux narrated by Maria Kowroski [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiPOZ0NS_2E] that helped us understand what was going on. Agon was described in the Playbill this way:

The dance critic Alistair McCauley says that many who saw the first performance of Agon were struck by how the music and movement created an impression of “shapes, phrases, rhythms and sounds that hadn’t been encountered before, but embodied New York modernism itself.”

https://tinyurl.com/3hm6ysmb The ballet is more than 60 years old but seems completely modern in style and costumes. Remarkable in every way, and, as usual, NYCB was at the top of its game. We both were entranced by the spectacle.

The evening was completed with Brandenburg, music by Johann Sebastian Bach and choreography by Jerome Robbins. Performed to excerpts from four of the Brandenburg Concertos with a large ensemble, the dancing was joyous. We were delighted to see Mira Nadon, who was promoted to the rank of soloist dancer in January 2022, and to principal just a year later. She is the first Asian-American female principal dancer at NYCB and a delight to watch. Brandenburg is long, maybe too much for us, although we were exhausted after our busy Friday and Saturday. There is, however, no denying the exceptional quality of the dancing throughout.

The next morning, we subwayed to Brooklyn to have brunch with another couple, also dear friends, and enjoyed, as always, a lively discussion of many things New York and beyond. We then walked together to the riverfront where the view of the Statue of Liberty was stunning in the late morning sun.

Sunday afternoon was, for me, yet another wonderful surprise. We had front row tickets at the Shubert Theatre for the matinee performance of Some Like It Hot, the updated adaptation of the Tony Curtis-Jack Lemon 1959 movie. Two down-on-their-luck musicians witness a mob hit and must flee for their lives. They disguise as women and join a newly formed, also struggling, all-female band.

I had given little thought to this show and expected an overly loud rock-music-based show. Wrong in every aspect. This was one of the funniest shows we have ever seen, and we’ve seen most of the great Broadway musicals. The music, dancing, acting were spectacular in every way. We both thought sitting so close might be problematic, but it was fascinating to see the dancers so close, performing incredibly high-energy moves in a somewhat constrained space and never missing a beat. Each dancer attending to his or her own space and actions with the result reminiscent of whirling dervishes. I noticed particularly the racial expressions and eye contact the dancers had with the audience – subtle but essential to the overall effect of the action. Perfect synchrony and stunning to see up close.

Each of the primary actor/singers was exceptional but note must be made of the role of Sugar played this day by the understudy, Kayla Pecchioni, who was remarkable in every way. Returning to my earlier mention of an updated adaptation, for this show, one of the two musicians is a Black man, played to perfection by J. Harrison Ghee. His facial expressions alone were worth the price of admission, but the man can also sing, dance and act. The updated show touches issues of race and gender, both handled with great humor in, for example, the song, You Can’t Have Me (If You Don’t Have Him), that gave the show a modern relevance.

While obviously presenting a very different vibe than masterpieces like Miss Saigon that have moved me to tears, Some Like It Hot is one of the most entertaining shows I have ever seen. It was, we both thought, flawless. If you get the chance to see it, don’t miss the opportunity. You will not be disappointed.

Our weekend escapade ended that evening with dinner at a wonderful New York style red-sauce Italian restaurant called Il Corso at 54 West 55th Street. The waiters were extremely attentive and helpful, and the food was phenomenal, especially the soup of the day, a puree of chickpeas and potatoes with some special spices. Remarkable and highly recommended.

Overall, then, our weekend in New York City was a smash hit in every way. Spectacular weather and phenomenal entertainment by the best-of-the-best. Unforgettable. Can’t wait to return.