Tag: Louisa virginia

Bills of Mortality: America’s Declining Public Health System

London, 1664

Sometime between 20 and 27 December, Christmas week, a parish church bell rings in London announcing a death; two poor elderly women drop what they are doing and check in at the church. They are the parish’s official “searchers.”  The Sexton dispatches them to the place of death and they inspect – search — the body for signs of the cause of death. After inspecting the body, they report to the local constable that the cause of death was plague. No doubt they noted the bulbous telltale signs of plague, black death. The report of death goes up the chain of local government. Next Wednesday, the weekly Bill of Mortality is published. A curious reader would note that there was one plague death in London.

The Bill of Morality for the week of December 20-27 reported other deaths as well.  Small Pox or Flox, French Pox (the English term for Syphilis), Childbed (what we call Childbirth); Rising of the Lights (respiratory illness, lungs were called lights back then), and wormes.  There were 39 causes of death listed that week.  The Bill also reported the number of persons christened and the number of persons buried.  Burials always outnumbered christenings.  That week 116 boys and 113 girls were christened.  Buried were 144 males and 147 women.  

Months later, without another plague death, 43 plague deaths were reported from the week of May 30, 1665.  The following week that number was 112, the week after 168, the next week 267, the thereafter 470.  London was in the early stages of a new plague:  Black Death, Bubonic and Pneumonic plague.  By the time the plague burnt itself out over 100,000 Londoners were dead.  Thousands more had fled London, mostly the well off or political elites.  Then came the great fire of 1666.

It was brutal year for Londoners.  Households that had a plague death were quarantined.  The house was boarded up with the occupants inside, a guard posted outside, a white cross painted on the door, and the words “Lord have mercy upon us” painted on the side of the building.  Family or friends provided food or the household paid someone to bring food.  The 40-day quarantine was extended with each new infection.   Everyone inside died, mostly.  Locked up with the fleas hosting the bacteria Yersinia Pestis that jumped to humans once their rat hosts died.

Surveillance and Containment

London’s Bill of Mortality is an early example of municipal governments gathering and tracking data on disease and death.  Originally, when it was first established in 1515, the Bill was to track only plague.  This information was closely held by London’s government leaders.  By 1550, however, the scope of the Bill had expanded to include all causes of death. By the 17th century the Bills were no longer kept secret but published and posted throughout London.  One could even buy one for a penny or so.  

Today, most governments also conduct disease surveillance, and if necessary, move to contain any outbreaks of communicable diseases, through isolation or vaccination.  Given the advent of vaccines, preventative measures have been put in place to prevent outbreaks by creating a ‘herd immunity’ across communities.  The elimination of smallpox in the wild is perhaps the greatest vaccination success story.  Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved.  Smallpox, if you did not know, had a 30 percent fatality rate.  

Public health standards have evolved since London’s first Bill of Mortality was published.  The gold standard of surveillance, containment, and vaccination, have saved hundreds of millions of lives from premature death from smallpox, measles, polio, and other transmissible diseases.   Antibiotics and anti-virals treatments also played a key role in reducing or eliminating deaths where vaccinations are not available. 

America’s Public Health Care System in Shambles

Today, that gold standard in America is crumbling under the Trump administration’s deliberate and calculated actions to disable and disrupt the Centers for Disease Control among other public health services.  All because Trump has a personal vendetta against the CDC because of his own inept management of the COVID pandemic. Trump lied to the American people, delayed containment, and misled on all fronts regarding masking and treatments. Even going so far as to suggest ingesting or injecting bleach during a live news conference. He expected federal government public health professionals to be loyal to him. They were not.

Certainty after the COVID pandemic receded, lessons learned could of, and should have been, implemented to make our country’s public health care system better.  Gutting the system in an act of personal retribution because he thought government organizations were personally disloyal to him, is criminal, dangerous, and outrageously cruel. Children are needlessly dying because of him.

Today, the uncontained measles outbreaks in America are an example of the consequences of deliberately undermining and disabling the trifecta of surveillance, containment, and vaccination.  Pennsylvania is experiencing an unprecedented measles outbreak, with four reported deaths.  One of whom was a newborn.  Texas experienced an earlier outbreak which resulted in deaths as well.  Trump’s war on vaccinations is killing Americans. 

Despite two serious outbreaks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Junior, who oversees America’ public health infrastructure, continues to downplay measles outbreaks, denigrate vaccines, and cripple research funding.  He is a one-man plague on America’ health.  The causes of death attributed by Pennsylvania’ public health services have even been denied and questioned by Kennedy.  As I understand it, the CDC does not list the deaths as measles related.  17th century Londoner’s had more access to information about public health threats than today’s average American it seems.

The Next Global Pandemic

Smallpox was eliminated in the wild, however, smallpox virus samples still exist in vials in two places in the world.  One is in Atlanta, Georgia, at the CDC.  America has about 451 vials.  The other vials of smallpox are in Russia at their State Research Center of Virology.  They have about 120 vials.  Lost vials of smallpox virus have been discovered, worryingly, over the years.  For example, at an NIH lab in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2014, six vials were found.   In a lab near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 15 vials were uncovered in a lab in 2021.  Not a good indicator that all vials of smallpox are “safely” in government hands.  Then there is Putin’s Russia.

It would be foolish for any government to weaponize smallpox, to include the Russians.  Once unleashed it would end up killing millions of them as well.  However, in the hands of a millenarist apocalyptic terrorist group, smallpox may be a weapon of choice, where death is the message and smallpox the medium.

For such contingencies, the U.S. has about 360 million doses of smallpox vaccine as of 2003 stockpiled around the country.  Given the degradation of public health surveillance infrastructure, the mass firings of scientists and other experts in epidemiology, and vaccine hesitancy, America’s response would be delayed, slow, inadequate, and uncoordinated.  If 100 million Americans were infected by smallpox, at least 30 million would die.  Smallpox is a virus, so antibiotics would be useless and there are no approved antivirals for smallpox.  Antivirals have been tested on animal test subjects, but not humans, at this time.

The average 17th century Londoner lived in fear of the return of the black death, which appeared periodically.  Disease and death were a daily fixture, however, even without plague.  In the 15th century half of England perished in the great plague of 1438.  They even banned kissing.  Whole towns of people disappeared. After centuries of progress, America is going backwards.  While the smallpox epidemic envisioned above is remote, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  

The COVID pandemic should be a cautionary tale, yet, our government is dismantling our system of surveillance, containment, and vaccination.  For all intents and purposes, they are invoking God not science to save us.  They might as well paint “Lord have mercy upon us” on the side of the CDC in Atlanta…. You know the one with smallpox vials in it.

Groom of the Stool: A Bottom-up History of Political Power

I will start with the proposition that the most powerful person in the White House, and in our government, is Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old White House Appointments Secretary.   

Trump’s latest salvo against a free press came last week when Trump announced he was banning CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House. Media reports later emerged that Trump erupted in rage after Harp played him video excerpts of reporters and pundits criticizing his policies and missteps.   In a fit, and apparently without consulting his staff and cabinet, Trump unilaterally banned certain press organizations from the White House press pool, thus creating the current crisis of free speech and government transparency.

Meanwhile, Costco is rationing motor oil and diesel is at record highs.

I don’t know whether the reports of Harp’s involvement are true in whole, in part, or false.  Given that Harp continuously follows Trump around and feeds him news that inflates his ego and buoys his moods, the report sounds plausible.

Way back, and I mean way back, Henry VIII of England, who cut off the heads of a few of his many wives, created an official position within his royal court that is known as the “Groom of the Stool.”  This person’s primary responsibility was to attend to the King’s bowel movements, his morning ablutions.  One doesn’t learn these scraps of history reading grand political histories but bottom-up social histories.

Before the age of flush toilets and toilet paper, commodes weren’t exactly spread around the manors and castles, the king needed a place to poop when out doing kingly things.    The groom of the stool was entrusted with the king’s “stool” kit and ensured it was available wherever he went.  The stool was a box upon which he sat when needing to go.  The stool contained a chamber pot, a water source for washing up, and a cloth.  

For the curious, it’s why poop and stool are related.

There are no records to suggest that the groom of the stool ever wiped the royal buttock, which is probably true.  Nonetheless the groom of the stool did attend to the king’s most private moments.  This closeness and intimacy with the king also brought power and the groom of the stool was sought-after by courtiers.  As a result, over time, the groom of the stool became the King’s amanuensis, managed the King’s personal finances; basically, became a close and powerful advisor.  One of his privy advisors. 

For the very curious, it’s why privy and bathroom are related. 

The position of the groom of the stool eventually ended (yes, a pun) in 1901 or thereabouts.  I argue that Natalie Harp occupies a similar position of access and trust.  While she may not attend to Trump’s bathroom ablutions, she does spend much time in Trump’s private quarters, basically the 15th century equivalent of the privy chambers.

Harp apparently has almost 24-hour access to the president. We know she produces Trump’s social media posts, feeds him memes, for instance the racist video of the Obamas as apes, and eventually posts his Truth Social missives.  Dangerously, Harp seems to deliberately encourage Trump’s basest instincts, incites his racial animus, and foster Trump’s self-conception that he is ordained by God to rule. 

These Truth Social post double as official government policy.  This access and influence make her the most powerful person in our government.  She, in effect, develops and publishes government policy while simultaneously manages his public persona as this all-seeing divine ruler.  Part Sauron, part Jesus. Trump not Harp. Although it does seem she is channeling herself through Trump’s social media.

Who is this, Natalie Harp? Is she a love-struck fanatical follower?  Or is she a brilliant interloper masquerading as infatuated aid?  Or somewhere in-between?  Or worse, an asset of an intelligence service?

Undoubtedly foreign intelligence adversaries, to include China, Israel, and Russia knew about her and her relationship and access to Trump years ago, before he returned to office.  Any intelligence service, either friend or foe, would have at least thought about targeting her.  You can imagine the intelligence coup that would have been.  A false flag operation would have been a perfect avenue to approach her as a witting or unwitting asset.  

An intelligence service could not only gain daily insights into Trump’s mental state, his inner thoughts, but also intimate knowledge of his other medical conditions, medicines he is taking. Maybe even introduce listening devices. More importantly they would be able to reliably feed Trump information to influence his decisions, promote conspiracy theories, exploit his severe mental health decline. Basically, damage America from within and foster global economic and political chaos abroad.

Trump’s social media posts are for the most part insane and destabilizing.  One wonders if they go beyond Trump’s obvious mental incapacitation and are products of a clever intelligence operation.   I think the former and not the latter.  Regardless, they are, we know, produced by Harp.

As a modern-day groom of the stool, Harp, contrary to media portrayals of her as a love-struck assistant, a stereotype affixed to women and never men, would seem a brilliant tactician and strategist. In Trump’s Thunder Dome of a White House, she has made herself a very powerful person indeed. The courtiers of Henry VIII would be respectful of her, so that they would not lose their heads. She is not to be underestimated.

Early Voting Starts TODAY in Virginia

Time to get out and vote Virginia. Early voting starts today and it’s time our voices are heard loud and clear: No Kings In America. Given the apparent appetite of Trump to mess with the election process vote early.

The Louisa Democrats sent out a notice about sticky return envelopes for mail-in ballots:

STICKY SITUATION

We’ve heard from the Registrar’s Office that some mail-in ballot return envelopes are sticking together due to high humidity. You can contact the Louisa Registrar’s Office at 540-967-3427 to request a replacement envelope. Alternatively, if you’re able to open yours without significant damage, you can tape it closed and initial next to the tape.

The Mismeasure of Man: Democracy in America

As a young boy, around 8 I think, my family was stationed at West Point, New York. One of many places I lived as an Army brat. My favorite place to hangout and play was at the old stone fort overlooking the Hudson River:  Fort Putnam.  One’s childhood imagination filled the space with soldiers, and prisoners in the dungeons, as we played on the ramparts and nearby woods.

One day, wandering through the fort’s grounds, there was a young man digging a shallow pit, about four feet by four feet and several inches deep.  A small pile of dirt was nearby, along with a shovel, a small shallow wooden box with a screen, and some bags.  I stopped and asked what he was doing.  He said he was doing archaeology for a class project.  He showed me some bits of pottery and a handful of rusty nails.  He let me hold them.  He even let me do a little digging.  

About a decade later I was majoring in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology.  My favorite class, ever, was a lab in human osteology.  Bones, human bones.  Ancient bones. My favorite professor, Dr. Ann Palkovich, was giving the class.   The bones we were studying were from a dig in the middle east, Israel, I think.  They were approximately two millennia old.

Every Friday there was a quiz.  There were about a dozen small boxes, labeled with a number, and in that box was a fragment of a bone.   Our task was to identify it.  Was it a bone?  If so, was it a human bone?  If it was a human, what bone was it?  What side of the body?  As the course progressed, and our skills and knowledge developed, the bone fragments became smaller and smaller. 

One day, walking into the lab, sitting on the tables were skulls from the collection.  Their empty eye sockets – orbits technically – beckoned.  Holding one, looking into the empty orbits, one wondered what that person had seen, what their life was like.  Skeletons spoke to us.  They told us their age, height, sex, what diseases they may have had, a history of injuries, markers of malnutrition, signs of what labor they engaged in.

Skulls have a very disturbing history in anthropology I learned in another class.  Much of it dark. Stephen Gould’s Mismeasure of Man greatly influenced me; a tattered copy of his book sits next to my keyboard as I type.

 In the mid- to late-19th century, the emerging science of anthropology was consumed by racist notions of white European superiority.  There was a confluence of 18th century notions human species being divided into race-based species — endowed with different levels of intelligence—and empire, colonialism, and Darwinian evolution.  Scientifically determined racial hierarchies of intelligence and civilizations were developed, with white European men (and their descendants) at the very top, with blacks at the very bottom.  Women of every race were also inferior to the men within their race.

This combination of naturalists, anthropologists, and cranks set out to scientifically prove that whites were superior.  The skull was the key, they thought.  Skulls were collected (mostly looted and stolen) from around the world and the craniums volumes were measured.  Cranial volume was a measure of brains, or intelligence.  And wouldn’t you know it.  Skulls of white European origin men had the highest cranial volumes.  Blacks the lowest.  Criminals also had the lower cranial volumes…. as did women.

The results were rigged we know.  Through both intentional and unintentional selection biases, data was manipulated or ignored.   This era of scientific racism had massive consequences.  It informed government policies on immigration, policing, the penal system well into the 20th century.  It served to justify colonization, empire, slavery, Jim Crow, and oppression of certain peoples.  You see, they believed, blacks could never be civilized, or intelligent, or worthy of humane treatment.  

You hear this racist legacy now when a white person says a black person is articulate.  Or, read that Florida’s school curriculum requires teachers to teach that black slaves learned life affirming skills from their white owners.  Or when black and women generals are fired for no reason other than their skin color or gender.  Hegseth believes that blacks and women can’t achieve high ranks in the military without preferential, woke, promotions. They are, Hegseth is convinced, inherently inferior intellectually and morally.

I thought scientific racism had met an ignoble death.  But alas, it’s rearing its ugly head once again and is alive and well in Trump’s world.  It is a corner stone of America’s foreign and domestic policies of the current administration.  Trump’s national security policy paper claims that western European civilization is being diluted by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.  His constant demeaning of Africans – Somalis are low-IQ – or banning of visas from mostly African and Islamic countries, harken back to that dark age of scientific racism. 

Does Trump not know that the wheel was simultaneously invented in Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq), Turkey, and in Hungry (per recent study), some six thousand years ago while west Europeans were, well, still eating each other.

Does Trump not know that the chemical compound now known as gunpowder, was invented in China in the 9thcentury? Then about four centuries later the Chinese also invented the cannon.  According to a Ming dynasty book, they called it a “thousand ball thunder cannon.” Now that’s cool. West Europeans, were, well, still too uncivilized to invent a cannon.

Does Trump not know that an Arab mathematician at Baghdad University in the 9th century, wrote a book titled “Al-jabr ‘wa al-muquabala“?  Or, as we know it, Algebra.   Mohamed al-Kwarizimi, is the father of Algebra and the namesake of Algorithm. West Europeans, were, well, still in the Dark Ages. 

Does Trump not know that our number system 0 to 10 (the Arabic System) was invented in India, adopted by Arabic mathematicians?  That zero was not a western invention? In addition, trigonometry developed over millennia in Babylonia, India (sine, cosine, versine is attributed to an Indian mathematician and astronomer named Ayabhata), and the Arab world before reaching so-called western civilization, those great Teutonic cultures, who, were, well, still eating without proper utensils.

(Note to dumbass Texas: since you recently codified a state school curriculum denigrating Islam and the Arab world perhaps you ought to ban the teaching of high-level math. Don’t want them ‘Arab’ ideas to infect your children’s brains do you?)

So called western civilization is greatly indebted to other “civilizations.”  All those right-wing gun owners who don’t want to be replaced and fear western civilization is in terminal decline fearfully clutch guns made possible by those barbarians, the Chinese. 

Perhaps the one thing so-called western civilization can lay claim to is Democracy.  A Greek word meaning rule by the people.  Our Constitution’s preamble, “We the people….” traces directly back to Ancient Athens.  Mind you, in the late 19th century as Greeks emigrated to the U.S. they weren’t welcomed.  One person wrote they were ‘broken men from a broken land.’

Paradoxically, America’s claim to fame – a constitutional republic where the people rule – our one true gift to the world, is being laid to waste day-by-day by Trump, his administration, and his supporters that insatiably guzzle his tonic of racism and white supremacy.  Quite the contradiction to destroy democracy to save it from the clutches of non-western civilization.

The movement of people, and thus, ideas and inventions over millennia are what makes humans so powerful.  When you block the movement of people, you also block innovation and new ideas.  These inventions and ideas are what power our modern way of life in America.  A cumulative synthesis of ideas spanning peoples across the globe. Building walls and rejecting new people invites a slow decline and death of American civilization, not a golden age, but a new dark age.

Birth of A Monarch

A couple years ago, my wife and I created a rain garden.  We selected plants that liked their feet wet, to include a swamp milkweed. To our surprise, last August the milkweed was chock full of monarch caterpillars voraciously consuming it.  They ate, and ate, and ate, until all that was left were the stalks.  Not a leaf in sight.  Then, as fast as they had appeared, they disappeared.  Where did they go?  A week later, we noted several green chrysalises in the garden.  About ten of them.  The caterpillars had alighted from the milkweed and found shelter in nearby ornamental grasses.  

The chrysalises were beautiful, a deep green with a golden beaded band near the top.  The green transformed after a week, it seemed overnight, to black, but in reality, the chrysalises were turning translucent.  The black was the emergent butterfly, patches of fiery orange could also be seen through the translucent chrysalis. Any day or moment they would emerge, I thought. 

By then I felt like an expectant father.  Protective, pacing the gardens edge, counting the chrysalises, trying to divine when they would emerge. You see, there were no contractions to count, no water breaking, no nurses to explain.  

Hourly I checked on them.  I mostly missed the emergence of the monarchs over the next day and a half, stepping out to see new monarchs unfolding their wings, flapping them at times, but mostly, it seemed they rested, gaining strength and taking in the world and preparing for their journey.  This was the generation that would return to Mexico this fall.

The next day, exactly at dawn, I came out of the house to check on the remaining chrysalises.  I spied an emerging monarch.  “No, no,” I thought, as I ran back into the house and got my camera, sporting a macro lens for this moment.  No time for a tripod.  Back out in a flash, I crouched in the garden, focusing the best I could in the low light.  The slight breeze did not help as the monarch swayed.  

The monarch was already outside the chrysalis and beginning to unfold its wings.  Wow, I thought, they pop out damn quick.  Given the low light and hand holding the camera I hoped the images were in focus.  Some were, some weren’t. Over the course of two days, we counted about a dozen monarchs that emerged from known and unknown chrysalises.

This spring we planted two more swamp milkweeds, hoping to entice more monarchs to lay eggs.  This August we counted abut 13 caterpillars, and like last year, after voraciously denuding the milkweeds, they disappeared.  We only found and counted 4 chrysalises, however.  Disappointed, we hoped we missed some, not finding them in the ornamental grasses.

Yesterday, two of the four chrysalises turned translucent.  Learning from last year, I pre-staged my camera and tripod beside the front door.  I was determined not to miss the emergence of this year’s batch of Monarchs. 

This morning, when I checked them early, the Monarchs had not yet emerged.  Them, around late morning, a summer shower ripped through.  Heavy rains, winds and gusts, one of several storms pummeling central Virginia over these past few weeks.  After lunch, I went back out to check and discovered both Monarchs had emerged.  

Damn, missed the emergence again.  

As I photographed and observed the two, to my surprise, four more Monarchs emerged from the grasses.  A total of six, with two known chrysalises remaining.  What a beautiful moment.  

In this dreary time, with an angry Monarch spreading his wings across America, one must take in and relish the beautiful moments in life.  I have written enough about these dark times and wanted to write about hope and the goodness that can still be found. I found it with these Monarchs.

Godspeed to these emerging Monarchs and wish them a safe journey back to Mexico where there they will produce a new generation of Monarchs to spread their wings and migrate north across this great continent.

The Power Grab:  NextEra Energy and Virginia’s Dominion Power.

NextEra Energy wants to buy Dominion Power for $67 billion, or thereabouts.  That’s not good for you, for me, for Louisa, or for Virginia.

This week Virginia’s Lt. Governor Ghazal Hashmi started a listening tour in Loudoun County to hear what voters have to say about the proposed acquisition or merger.  According to reporting from one packed public hearing, the critiques and concerns were many.  Only one person, it was reported, approved of the merger.  NextEra is expanding and buying electric company utilities up the east coast, not just Virginia.  

It is a juggernaut.  While it boasts of being Florida’s largest public electric utility, it has its corporate fingers and tentacles everywhere: Data centers, power grids, transmission lines, battery storage, solar power, gas fired power plants to power data center campuses, nuclear plants.  Last year It partnered with Google Cloud to “scale multiple gigawatts of power” for new data centers across the U.S. 

With the acquisition of Dominion Power, NextEra claims it will be the “largest regulated electric utility business by market capitalization and one of the world’s largest energy infrastructure companies,” adding for emphasis, “with an unmatched operating platform benefiting customers.” Ha! 

I think we know a monopolistic octopus when we see one.

They are, it seems, bad neighbors as well.

NextEra describes itself as “the largest electric power and energy infrastructure company in North America and is a leading provider of electricity to American homes and businesses. Headquartered in Juno Beach, Florida, NextEra Energy is a Fortune 200 company that owns Florida Power & Light Company, America’s largest electric utility, which provides reliable electricity to approximately 12 million people across Florida. NextEra Energy also owns one of the largest energy infrastructure development companies in the U.S., NextEra Energy Resources, LLC. NextEra Energy and its affiliated entities are meeting America’s growing energy needs with a diverse mix of energy sources, including natural gas, nuclear, renewable energy and battery storage.”

NextEra has been in federal court recently.  

In April NextEra agreed to a $150 million settlement with investors who alleged “fraud and deceit.”  I think the settlement is merely window dressing and housekeeping before it becomes an issue with Virginia’s regulatory body.  The settlement, it appears is still under review, by a federal appeals court, before final approval.

Clean Virginia, an advocacy group that has filed motions with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission regarding the proposed merger, stated that the merger “would hand Virginia’s electric grid to a company with a troubling track record of raising bills in Florida, heavily interfering in state politics and prioritizing corporate profit over the public interest” (https://www.cleanvirginia.org/2026/07/15/mergerapplicationfiled/).  This included ‘ghost candidates’ and surveillance of a journalist.

It has its own political arm:  NextEra Political Action Committee.  In fact, there was a Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigation in 2022 which alleged campaign finance law violations.  In 2024 the FEC closed the investigation, citing it did not find illegal activity.   Hmmmmm.

Additionally, according to online reporting, NextEra’s PAC has donated approximately $60 million to various politicians in various states.  Our new governor received some of that largess.  It was reported that Governor Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration committee received two donations from NextEra totaling $15k.  While $15k seems like a small amount, it opens the door for larger donations.  Like a free bag of dope.  Spanberger, now that she is on the bandwagon to challenge the merger and apparently the first governor in Virginia history to “intervene” in the regulator process, should return the donation.

Campaign donations, public utilities, and politicians go together like a peanut butter and banana sandwich on white bread, and, are not a new combination to Virginia.  A recent Virginia Mercury article reporting on the NextEra merger, “Public Utilities Shouldn’t be Funding the Campaigns of the People who Govern them,” journalist Ivy Main highlighted the perils of taking unlimited donations from public utilities.  According to the article, Virginia’s House speaker Don Scott reportedly has received nearly $4million in donations from Dominion Energy over the years.  Wow, $4 million (https://virginiamercury.com/2026/08/31/public-utilities-shouldnt-be-funding-the-campaigns-of-the-people-who-govern-them/#).  

Overall, the merger would be a disaster in my opinion for Virginians already battling high electricity prices and a tsunami of data centers, Louisa County included.  NextEra has a history of price spikes.  In Florida they raised the rates 33 percent from 2021 to 2026 and has a poor history of customer service, unauthorized charges, doubling or tripling rates after the initial, introductory, contract expired.  

Basically, the merger would create a monopoly with NextEra’s tentacles everywhere, from our pocketbooks to politicians’ pockets.  Monopolies mean higher prices, poorer service, and more woe. Let’s not move on to that next era of monopolies.

Time to write your local representatives and Governor Spanberger.  The final decision by regulators is January. Tell them “NO” to the merger.

Les Enfants Terribles

“The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world,” wrote American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History. Stop, pause and think deeply about those words.  That thought is both simple and profound, I think.

Niebuhr was an influential voice of conscience as the shadow of the Cold War darkened the world and McCarthyism was eating at America’s soul. He wrote through the lens of a mid-century white male American gaze, eliding some of America’s worst excesses as a nation, or, at times, obliquely referencing them.   But who doesn’t write though the lens of the present and one’s lived experiences.   

His salient points, nonetheless, were about virtue, and in his book’s case: not rejecting the “Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue” while America pursues it Cold War battles with the Soviet Union through proxy wars.   He wanted America to avoid the trap that our way, the American way, was the one true way. 

You can imagine, were he alive today, Niebuhr would be a tenacious critic of Trump and the Christian right’s cult of virility; embodied by Stephen Miller’s pronouncement that the only virtues in the world are power, strength, and violence. Niebuhr’s and Trump’s concepts of virtue and Christianity are diametrically opposite. 

As for an infant being secure in his world, I think Niebuhr was critiquing the naiveté of the growing popularity of the myth of American exceptionalism and government policies that flowed from that belief.  The hubris that Americans of European heritage were a chosen people, in a land created by God for them, blinded them to history’s lessons.  We see that myth once again resonant in America.  Our government is run by these man-infants, these enfants terribles who naively and mistakenly believe that they are God’s chosen, that they speak for God, that only they have the virtue to lead America.  

Well before Niebuhr, many, many centuries ago, Abu al-Ala al Ma’arri  — a freethinking  poet, philosopher, and writer, some would say heretic — was born in Syria in the late 10th century.  He was skeptical and suspicious of any religion’s claim to absolute truth.  

Blinded by smallpox while young, he was nonetheless a prolific author, dictating his many works.  I came across a quote of his while reading about the crusades.  At the time, I was posted to Beirut and had borrowed a three-volume work on the crusades to help pass the nights away.   While al Ma’arri lived before the first crusaders set foot in Jerusalem in 1099, he did live in an Arab world where Shia and Sunni battled over the soul of Islam, territory, and power.  

Al Ma’arri’s truism stuck with me.  I even printed and framed the quote, hung it in my office for years:  “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:  Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”  It was reminder to me of the sectarianism, fanaticism, and zealotry that drove (and drives) much of our world’s history.  In Beirut, the grim reminders of sectarian civil war were everywhere.  

It’s about extremism.  Whether it be religious bigotry and zealotry predicated on deliberate interpretations, misreadings, or misconceptions of religious texts to murder the other; or scientific Darwinism used to justify the sterilization or murder of the mentally and physically disabled.

We never seem to learn the lessons of sectarian violence.  If anyone is the personification of this ideation of no brains but religious certitude and bigotry it is Secretary of Defense Hegseth.   For Trump in general, and Hegseth in particular, the Iran war wasn’t really a war to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, although it was part of the equation. The war is really about going to war with Islam on a global scale, punishing a transgressive Iran for not becoming supplicants like the Saudis or Emirates.  

Netanyahu, for his part, exploited Trump’s and Hegseth’s biases and infant-like world view for his own purposes.  For all his faults, and there are many, Netanyahu is not naïve like an infant, he sees the world for its complexities.

As for domestic politics, most every single consequential executive order issued by this President revolves around a form of white male Christian sectarianism and zealotry:  American history (who counts and who’s erased), DEI (reinstating white male privilege), Immigration/birthright citizenship (racist replacement theory), access to reproductive rights (male control of the female body), and vaccinations (God decides who lives or dies). 

Our government, it seems every day, is falling deeper into the latter half of al-Ma’rri’s dictum and continues to self-radicalize as Trump’s misjudgments tanks the economy and he is humiliated on the world’s stage by Iran.   It is bad enough that the Executive Branch has been captured by these enfants terribles, but when Congress and the Supreme Court are also controlled by this gang of enfants terribles, things become dangerous.  

Trump’s strongman grip strangling America’s democratic institutions is starting to slip as he becomes weaker politically, but his weakness is also simultaneously a time of greater danger.  All strongmen flail violently when the end nears.  Miller’s virtues — power, strength, violence — are a warning.

Democratic institutions like the courts should be rallying around the Constitution, and they are at the lower levels.  But, given the Superme Court’s recent stay of a lower court’s order blocking implementation of parts of Trump’s executive order regarding mail in ballots, I doubt the Court will block Trump’s meddling and interfering with the mid-term elections. 

America has had periods of rupture before and come back stronger.  Will our country recover from the coming rupture this November?  We have seen what Trump’s acolytes can and will do to overturn an election.  Unlike January 6, 2021, the guard rails are gone.  They are acting for God, they believe.  Will Trump’s paramilitaries (DHS) rain pain on Americans after the mid-terms?  Will the military occupy blue cities and seize ballot boxes?  Will the Justice Department conduct mass arrests and detentions of Trump’s political opponents, blue state governors?  Will Speaker Johnson refuse to seat newly elected democrats in the House?  I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I thought they were far-fetched.  Ten years ago, I would say these are crazy questions.  Now, you feel in your gut that they aren’t far from the mark.

 Our 250-year-old experiment in in serious jeopardy, both at home and abroad.  We are a nation without friends.  A bully pushing agendas driven by sectarian ideologies.  Even our geographic neighbors – Canada and Mexico — hate us, it seems with a passion.  Why? Because we the people choose this nut job now residing in the White House.  We put him there. We choose this path with eyes wide open.   Most Americans who voted choose to reelect a Machiavellian, narcist, psychopath with a god-complex whose first disastrous term ended in an attempted coup.  What could go wrong?

V is for Voting

Famously, presidential candidate Bill Clinton posted a reminder note that said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  A cue that wonky policy sound bites or nuanced discourses on the pro and cons of a particular policy only go so far with the average voter.  For most voters, it comes down to kitchen table issues:  

Can I pay the mortgage or rent? 

Can I feed my kids?

Can I afford a middle-class life?  

They measure these questions against the previous few years:  Am I better off today than I was four or two years ago?

For conservatives and Republicans, continuing failures to successfully manage kitchen table issues – remember 2008 and 2020, the Great Recession and then the COVID pandemic – brought them down a path to embrace the most divisive candidate, and then President, in modern American politics.  Kitchen sink issues were replaced by xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and its corollary misogyny, and racial animus.  

The basic kitchen table question must be revived.  Am I, and the people of Louisa, better off today than they were January 20, 2025?

I say, “No.”  The people of Louisa are worse off by most kitchen table measures.  

Louisa’s farmers are hard hit.  High diesel and gas prices, record fertilizer costs combined with low prices for commodities, and disappearing lucrative foreign markets, like China, are crushing Louisa, and American, family farmers.  This is the result of Trump’s misguided tariff war with China.

While unemployment remains at 3.9 percent, core inflation continues to shrink paychecks.  Wage shrinkage from inflation continues to be a self-inflicted wound.  Trump’s economic nationalism, which includes steep tariffs on most countries, continues to drive inflation up and shrink real wages.  

The disastrous never-ending war on Iran continues to keep gas at over $4.00 a gallon and diesel at over $5.00.  Borrowing money is increasingly costly as investors sour on America’s ten-year bond, raising interest rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and small farm and business loans. 

Food Insecurity: The Louisa Resource Center Council’s Food Bank has seen record numbers of visitors, I learned, over the past year.  Louisa County Public Schools this  summer — starting June 8 — began a summer school age nutrition program serving meals at various locations throughout the county. The meals are free of charge, and available for any child ages 2 to 18. No ID is required. This program speaks to the ongoing food crisis for vulnerable children in our county. How is it we have the first trillionaire, yet our children go hungry?

Housing costs in Louisa soar:  Housing costs have been increasing for well over a decade.  The median sales price for a home in Louisa is $445k, up from $234k a decade ago.  The price per square foot, however, increased close of 6 percent over the past year.  This is a huge rise, directly correlated to Trump’s tariffs.  His recent 50 percent tariff on Canadian wood products, will only make matters worse regarding affordable housing.

Access to health care continues to shrink: Deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare subsidies and the elimination of the Affordable Health Care Act premium subsidies have left many folks in Louisa County with no health care or delayed health care, many of them vulnerable children.

Meanwhile, as the denizens of Louisa pay the price for Trump’s mismanagement of about everything he touches, he and his family have profited to the tune of $2 billion dollars, mostly in the dark world of crypto currency.  The swamp he promised to drain has turned into a deep sea of corruption.

You can also frame the “are you better off today” question in terms of our democracy.  Is America’s democracy better today than it was before January 20, 2025?

I think most Americans would respond with an emphatic “No.”

By most measures, America is backsliding from the hallmarks of liberal democracy:  Pluralism, the rule of law, a healthy civil society, a government with three coequal branches, government transparency, equal access to voting and representation in government at local, state, and federal offices.

Sustained attacks on America’s institutions such as a non-partisan civil service, an apolitical military, Congressional powers, the federal courts, an independent justice Department have severely degraded America’s 250-year experiment.

Our Justice Department has become so rotten that a man was arrested and charged with vandalizing the Lincoln reflecting pool just to support Trump’s claims that his embarrassingly botched reflecting pool make over was sabotaged.  Prosecutors lied to and mislead the grand jury that indicted him.   This is what dictators do.

Despite all these challenges and threats to our democracy, we must still care …. and take the time and effort to vote.  The Democratic primary is this coming Tuesday, August 4.  Get out and vote for one of the three Democratic candidates for our district (Tom Perriello, Rob Tracinski, and Suzanne Krzyaowski).

As for this November, Rep. John McGuire (R) must go.  He has done nothing over the past two years for the folks of Louisa County or the 5th Congressional District.  His main job has been to kiss Trump’s big, beautiful orange ass. His legislative achievements for Louisa: a ‘big fat nothing burger’ as right-wing influencers are fond of saying.  Mostly culture war stuff.  He did vote for the big, beautiful bill, however, which crushes Medicaid and Medicare services to Louisa’s poorly paid working class and her seniors, and refuses to reign in Trump’s never ending illegal war with Iran.  As for Louisas farmers, he has been a big fat zero.  

Seems he is more interested in the stock market as he bought Nvidia stock twice this year and other stocks that his House Committee assignments oversee.  Once a couple of weeks after Trump purchased his own Nvidia shares.  Hmmmm?

Now, as we near the November mid-terms, Trump is increasingly signaling he will not accept the results.  He is positioning the Justice Department, the country’s intelligence services, and the Department of Homeland security to support his claims of fraud.  Will the military stay above the fray or go all in with Trump? What will the Supreme Court do?  

This raises the very serious question that are on many minds.  Will there be a peaceful transfer of power after the mid-terms?  Voter turnout this November must be huge. A democratic win must be overwhelming. Not by one or two points but by tremendous majorities.  Trump won’t dare to challenge a massive electoral loss, especially in deep red counties and states.  At least I hope he doesn’t.  But he is crazy, and not all there, so who knows.  If he does, then we must be prepared take a different tact, massive civil disobedience in coordination with court action. 

So, ask yourself, and ask your family or friends, are we better off today than we were in January 2025?  No. So, let’s get out and make our voices heard next week and in November. 

Screwworm:  Putting the Screws to Texas and John McGuire

Screwworms infestations were detected in Texas recently, according to media and government reports.  The screwworm, known as the New World Screw worm, is a fly that lays eggs on open wounds, for instance on livestock, that then grow into flesh eating maggots.  It can be fatal if not treated.

The screwworm was eradicated from the U.S. in the 1960s.  For decades, the U.S. worked to keep the screwworm at bay, working closely with Mexican and Central American governments.  This included the U.S. government funding facilities to produce and distribute sterile flies, for instance.  In 2023, the screwworm started migrating north again, probably climate change related, no?  As a result of further northward migration, a ban importing cattle from Mexico was recently put in place.  This is a key contributor to the shortage of beef cattle in the U.S., in fact, a 75-year low.  

If the screwworm infestation becomes more widespread in Texas, the state could suffer close to $2 billion dollars in economic losses.  Canada banned livestock imports from Texas temporarily.  A 1976 screwworm outbreak in Texas caused economic losses between $700 million and $1.8 billion in 2024 dollars, according to a Congressional Research Report submitted as part of a bill introduced in 2025: H.R. 3392 (more on that bill a bit later). 

The response to the new infestation has been, to say the least, interesting.  Texas ranchers are blaming the federal government for being too slow to respond.  Yep, the same Texas ranchers I suspect who voted for Trump, once, twice, and most likely thrice.  They, I would imagine, cheered on the DOGE cuts to USAID and USDA, two agencies that are instrumental in programs to contain the screwworm south of the border. Things could have been different, but ….

On May 14, 2025, Texas Republican Tony Gonzalez introduced the “STOP Screwworms Act” in the House of Representatives.  H.R. 3392 required the Secretary of Agriculture to “establish a New World Screwworm fly rearing facility, and for other purposes.”  It never got past being introduced, much less become law.  It was a bipartisan bill, with over 50 cosponsors.  The same CRS report mentioned above outlined the devastating impact an infestation could have on Texas and other border states if no action was taken.  

The failure of this bill to pass and become law illustrates how screwed up and incompetent the House of Representative is under the control of the Republicans and Speaker Johnson. Not to be outdone, the current Trump appointed Secretary of Agriculture blames, wait, wait, wait….. Biden and open borders.  The cattle ranchers aren’t buying it.  

Some ranchers have proposed self-funding screwworm eradication programs given the federal governments slow and incompetent response. You know, you get slow and incompetent when programs are defunded, scientists hounded out of government service, and all sorts of other stupid stuff.  

Meanwhile, as the screwworm infestation gets worse, our President keeps a razor sharp focus on……the reflecting pool, his billion-dollar ballroom, and his birthday bash UFC fight at the White House’s Thunderdome.   Texans.  What the hell did you think was going to happen?  It’s your own damn fault.

Another thing that irritates me is that when there was a 2025 measles outbreak in West Texas that infected close to 800 kids, of whom about 100 were hospitalized, and two died.  All hell should have broken loose, but no.  Texans seemed to shrug.  Fits the anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-government ideology of Texas. Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human services blamed the vaccines and suggested suspect treatments.  Where was the outcry?  I guess you all like your cattle more than your kids.  About 70 percent of kids are vaccinated in Texas, that is below the national average.  

Come on Texas, you can do better.  The federal government’s slow and haphazard response should be a warning to farmers and ranchers that still support Trump, in Texas and my home state of Virginia.  He’s not your friend.  Do you trust a politician whose hands have never touched dirt, or had a callous, or owned a dog, or got up before sunrise?  

But, I imagine you’re busy trying to find buyers for soybeans and corn crops you planted and worrying whether you can afford the diesel fuel or fertilizer as Trump’s incompetent and haphazard war of choice with Iran drags.  You farmers and ranchers all need some “straight” talk and tough love at times:  You screwed yourselves.  

This November, put a stop to the chaos. Make Congress vote for you and not Trump. Vote for Democratic candidates and family farmer friendly policies, not for corporate farm monopolies.  

John McGuire, our representative, has not introduced or sponsored one bill to directly help the farmers of his district. He doesn’t serve on any farm or agricultural subcommittees.  He did vote for two key bipartisan farm bills, however, which included funding for a new fire truck for Louisa County and monies for the Nottoway Sheriff’s office, hardly direct help to our farmers here in Louisa.  He did sponsor a bill to “Make the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful” in 2025.  

The sugar farmers love him it seems, as he gets campaign donations from them and their associations.  For instance, the America Sugar Cane League, the Michigan Sugar Growers PAC, and the Sugar Growers Cooperative Florida.  Do we even grow sugarcane in Virginia?  Did I mention he has been buying Nvidia stock this year?  Twice (January and May).

Philomela: The Nightingale, Epstein, and Trump

Philomel means lover of song. In classic literature and prose, philomel was substituted with the nightingale.  William Shakespeare, for example, employed the nightingale, or even philomel, at least 33 times in his plays and sonnets as symbols of song, grief, and trauma. Its’ origins trace back to Greek and Roman mythology; of how the gods created the nightingale.

It is a tragic story, and like many Greek and Roman mythologies, is racked with violence, sexual violence in particular.  This story contains such tales.  There are several versions of the myth, I learned, and over the ages this story has been reinterpreted in prose and art. 

The story I still thing resonates today, Greek and Roman Gods were powerful beings, they not only abused their powers to indulge their thirst for vengeance and lusts but also silence their victims. They also had soft spots and intervened at the last second in supposed acts of generosity and kindness. Today we have powerful men who use their money and office to silence victims.

The story of Philomela is one such example.  Philomela was the younger sister of Pronce who was married to Tereus, the king of the Thracians.  Philomela’s voice was considered beautiful, like a birds song.  Tereus developed an obsession for Philomela.  He raped her, and to stop her from telling his wife much less anyone else, cut out her tongue.  Philomela, however, used her master weaving skills to make a purple robe or shawl with hidden messages of the rape.  Through the symbols woven into the shawl or robe, Pronce learned of the rape, and in a rage killed her (Pronce’s) and Tereus’ son, cooked him, and served him to Tereus.

When Tereus found out, he raged, grabbed an axe, and chased Philomela and Ponce out of his palace, intending to murder them.  He caught up with them, but, at that point, before he killed them, the Gods turned all three into birds.  Ponce became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, and Tereus a hoopoe, a very orangey, colorful bird known for its feathered crown.

Over a week ago, news media reported that E. Jean Carroll, was being investigated by the Department of Justice for perjury.  Carroll, famously sued Trump for defamation a few years ago, and won a $83.3 million settlement.  The civil jury found that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in New York City.  The judge called it rape.  Trump has appealed the civil courts verdict, asking that the settlement be set aside.  It sits before the Supreme Court today.  

You can smell the corruption all the way from Illinois and the White House. Trump, as President, presides over the Department of Justice.  The acting Attorney General is a former attorney for Trump.  The Trump appointed U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Bourtos, is overseeing the investigation. As a side note he is an alumnus of UVA law school.

As the fate of the civil case and judgment against Trump rests before the Supreme Court, Trump is using the Department of Justice to ‘cut out the tongue’ of E. Jean Carroll.  She is today’s Philomela.  It is outrageous.  It is also meant, I think, to silence victims of Epstein and his many friends from coming forward.  

Trump is a vile and heinous man and thinks nothing to use the full weight of his immense presidential powers, both legal and illegal, to go after and silence his accusers.  He fancies himself a deity.  Congress and the Supreme Court have allowed him to be a king and deity.

He needs to be turned into a hoopoe, orange feathered crown and all. A massive turn out this November will effectively turn him into a flightless Hoopoe of sorts.  The Greek and Roman gods did have a sense of humor, however.  Perhaps they would turn Trump into the Dodo bird or better yet a fluffy-backed tit-babbler or a blue-footed booby.