Year-End Clearance: Some News Items That Shouldn’t Be Left Behind

In no particular order:

STOP THE CLOCK: The Supreme Court will on January 10th decide whether a controversial ban on the social media app TikTok, signed by President Biden in April of last year and about to take effect January 19th, violates the First Amendment. But Donald Trump’s lawyers have submitted a brief to the Court asking that their hearing be postponed until after Trump is inaugurated the day after, January 20th, so that the then-president can negotiate a compromise.

“President Trump alone possesses the consummate deal-making expertise, the electoral mandate and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government”

A baffled MSNBC host Christina Ruffini asked,

“Does the president even have standing to do this? And what kind of a motion is this? Is this an amicus brief, a writ? I don’t know what this is. Can he just involve himself in a case that he is not, you know, a party to?”

But Trump appointed three out of the nine justices, so he thinks he, still just a citizen, has a right to special deference.

THE GREAT ONE: It rises majestically to its snow-capped peak 20,310 above the near sea-level Alaska tundra, the most rapid ascent of any mountain on Earth. It was unaccountably named Mt. McKinley after the 25th president until President Obama’s Department of the Interior granted Alaska’s long-standing request that the mountain finally be renamed Denali, meaning “The High One” or “The Great One” in the language of Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascan people who have inhabited these lands for thousands of years.

But now, as part of Trump’s campaign to reverse everything of the nation’s first black president, Trump wants the mountain restored to the McKinley name. In a speech before the arch-conservative group Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Trump obscurely said:

“They took his name off Mount McKinley, right? That’s what they do to people. That’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it. . . That was not very gracious to somebody that did a good job.”

Alaskans are furious. Denali is the state’s official name for the mountain, ignoring the McKinley label. The mountain is located in Denali National Park and Preserve. Denali is a commonly used name elsewhere in Alaska, for an interior borough, schools, a highway. As for McKinley, he was from Ohio. He never set foot in Alaska.

MAGAFEST DESTINY: It was laughed at when proposed late in his presidency, but it has returned, and this time he means it. Mr. Trump again wants Greenland, calling it “an absolute necessity”, never mind that Denmark and Greenland have a long history dating back to the 10th century when Norse explorers settled there.

Additionally, he is irate that Jimmy Carter signed away control of the Panama Canal, which he says is now charging U.S. ships exorbitant rates to transit. He is irate, also, that the American flag is at half-mast for Carter, probably ignorant that control of the canal would have reverted to Panama a quarter century ago on the last day of 1999 under the Panama Canal Treaty.

As if that is not imperialism enough, Trump has begun calling Canada the 51st state, referring to President Justin Trudeau as its “governor”. Is it that he wants to show Vladimir Putin that he, too, can take away other countries’ land?

Fact is, Greenland would be valuable for national security reasons, a strategic choke point against Russia’s increasing activity across the top of the world now that ice melt has made navigation possible. It also has the rare earth minerals needed for this century’s technology that China, the world’s biggest source, is keeping for itself in retaliation against Biden’s export ban of semiconductor chips and technology that China is using to build its military against us.

Trump is also worried that the Panama Canal could fall into the “wrong hands”, taking note that a Hong Kong firm controls two ports near the canal. “We will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States”, he said to a crowd in Phoenix.

SOONER SUMMER SUNSETS: It is unclear what moved Donald Trump to deliver at this moment an edict on Truth Social that,

”The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

The costs were not enumerated, but neither was there any knowledge of how planet Earth tilts and curves. Down where he is, there are 10 ½ hours of daylight even on the shortest day of the northern hemisphere — the Winter Solstice, December 21. Mr. Trump doesn’t need the extra light for his golf afternoons. But he would take away the northern latitudes’ light in late afternoons from March to November.

VISA VITRIOL: A feud erupted at year-end when Trump hired Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence, a venture capitalist who has argued that there should be no green card and H-1B visa limits. A limited number of H-1Bs are handed out each year to foreigners with special skills needed by U.S. tech companies.

Trump allies objected. Wasn’t the president-to-be elected to deport immigrants who are taking jobs that should belong to Americans? Right-wing extremist and Trump Influencer Laura Loomer called Krishnan’s appointment “deeply disturbing”.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are users of H-1B talent. Musk tweeted about those objecting to H-1B visas, “Those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem”, and later explained “contemptible fools” to mean “those in the Republican Party who are hateful unrepentant racists”. H-1Bs are “the top 0.1% of engineering talent”, is Musk’s point. It’s like the NBA recruiting foreign players to “help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA”.

Ramaswamy claimed on X that recruiting foreign workers is necessary because America “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Musk agreed, saying that “the number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.”

Trump will have to figure out how to work both sides of this schism: The less-educated working class who elected him who think they are qualified for such jobs, and the billionaire tech-bros who know they aren’t. For now, it looks like he’s with Musk: Trump said a few days ago:

“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Of course Trump would be hiring common workers under the H-2B visa allotment, not H-1B; his properties hired 209 foreign workers in 2024 for jobs that Americans might have wanted, contrary to his pledge to supporters.

Will Bunch, columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer observes that Musk is “a man with 11 kids who spends Christmas Eve tweeting” on his soapbox X. Once holding liberal views, Musk has taken a decided turn to the right, tweeting one recent morning (at !:03 AM) support for Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) political party : “’Only the AfD can save Germany.” Next will he get behind Marine Le Pen in equally troubled France?

1846 TO 1848 REDUX: James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, a firm that does political risk analysis. He wrote in November at World Politics Review that,

“Trump appears to be moving toward a more aggressive use of the U.S. military at the border to combat migration, and his advisers are also building a case for cross-border military operations into Mexico. In other words, the signs are that the incoming Trump administration is preparing for an actual war against the drug cartels in 2025 that goes well beyond the ‘War on Drugs’ of the past.”

Several members of Trump’s team are reportedly on board with plans to launch military operations into Mexico. Political scientist Daniel Drezner, writing at Substack says that,

“When it comes to Mexico or the Panama Canal, however, it is hard to believe that Trump will back down. I sure don’t see Marco Rubio trying to talk him out of it. As I noted in the New York Times, ‘Mr. Rubio’s own hawkishness will mesh well with the MAGA view on Latin America; expect to see lots of American force used in that region.’”

President-elect Donald Trump’s expansionist cravings have left Russian propagandists “delighted”, according to a new report from The Daily Beast‘s Julia Davis.

She monitors and translates Russian state television news broadcasts. She says Kremlin insiders see Trump’s bellicosity toward neighbors as an equivalence acceptance of Russia’s war of conquest in neighboring Ukraine.

WHO KNEW?: In a mid-December press conference, the president-elect said,

“I’ve spoken to way over 100 people, where they called to congratulate not only the election but also the size of the election and the extent of the victory.”

But what really wow’d him was,

“You wouldn’t believe how many countries there are. There are a lot of countries.”

After four years a president and a president about-to-be, Mr. Trump was surprised there are a hundred countries, having no clue that there in fact 195. Former City University of New York professor and “This Week in Google” podcast host Jeff Jarvis was unforgiving: “The idiot you elected, America.”

PAY TO PRAY: You can participate in the inaugural festivities, but each has a price tag befitting its “benefits”. If you give $100,000 or raise $200,000 you attend church with the president-elect at the “One America, One Light Sunday Service” on January 19th.

CRIME FICTION: After the horrific slaughter in New Orleans, Trump tweeted,

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime level in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”

Crime, especially murder, has been dropping sharply for years in a row. The New Orleans suspect, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a Texan born in the United States and served in the U.S. Army.

DOES LIKE THIS IN THE CONSTITUTION: As one after another corporate billionaire came to present their one-million dollar inaugural offerings at dinner with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, seeming permanent resident Elon Musk invited himself to join them. And he had inserted himself into the funding deliberations in the House, telling Speaker Mike Johnson to scuttle an1,800-page bill and substitute a continuing resolution with just a few pages. The left-wing media took to calling him the “co-president” and then “President Musk”.

“But no, he’s not going to be president that I can tell you”, Trump assured us. “And I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country.”

Obama appointee Eric Columbus had fun with that: “The last guy Trump claimed wasn’t born in this country was president for eight years.”

Trump Taps Bhattacharya to Run NIH.     Who?

Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, Patel — The media loops through these controversial choices day after day. Certain of the less-noticed Trump picks are no less controversial but are overlooked. Here’s one of particular importance at a time when viruses pose an increasing threat to the human race.

settled opinion

The right has arrived at a widespread view that lockdown mandates and remote teaching in 2020 and 2021 were the wrong remedies for confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s hindsight that gives no quarter to the epidemiological “experts” – now spoken of with scorn — who had to come up with methods to combat a plague not experienced in a hundred years.

So it was deemed “karmic justice”, said a full-page Wall Street Journal interview, when President-elect Trump tapped Jay (Jayanta) Bhattacharya to be
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The professor at Stanford University was much vilified for his contrarian views in the early months of the outbreak. The article is titled “The Man Who Fought Fauci—and Won” and tells us that his Bengali first name means “one who is victorious in the end.” The newspaper says, “Bhattacharya is as qualified as you can get to be head of the National Institutes of Health”, not least for his nomination being “a triumph of free speech”.

Dr. Bhattacharya is both a physician and economist, a combination that led to statistical conclusions first voiced in March and April of 2020 that made him a pariah in epidemiological circles. He co-authored an op-ed titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?” that argued, followed by a study a month later, that the number of asymptotic and undetected cases vastly outnumbered those confirmed by testing, meaning that the death rate relative to all infections was much lower than the alarm sounded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH. Consequently, there was little justification for…

“the extraordinary measures …[of] shelter-in-place orders and quarantines… being carried out in cities and states around the country.”

This was not helpful. Dr. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, had persuaded President Trump that a few weeks of stay-at-home shutdown of the economy was the right medicine to halt the spread of the virus. The nation was watching on television the refrigerator trucks in New York City hauling away the dead and Governor Cuomo pleading with the federal government for respirators. The death count was of greater alarm than the death rate.

To combat the spread of the disease, the CDC and NIH were following the standard public health practices of the past – avoidance of contact (“social distancing” of six-feet), masks, and
In the U.S., close to 1,500 healthcare workers
aiding the rest of us have died from Covid.

vaccines when they miraculously became available in early 2021. They were dealing with unknowns. Use of hand sanitizers were urged because it was not yet known that Covid was transmitted as an aerosol. Schools closed, because it was not yet known that children proved less susceptible. “Remote learning” was substituted, the fear being kids in classrooms would become Covid carriers and take the virus home to mom, dad, and highly vulnerable grandparents.

Bhattacharya, however, called the lockdown measures “the single biggest public health mistake”, that the “scientific establishment utterly failed during Covid”, that scientists embraced ideas that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and of course the harm to children from school closures.”

the great barrington declaration

Months later, in October of 2020, Dr. Bhattacharya and two colleagues, Oxford University Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta and Swedish bio-statistician and former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, published an open letter which they called the “Great Barrington Declaration” (named after the town where it was presented). Dr. Bhattacharya is no stranger to this publication. Here’s what we reported at the time about the declaration:

”It makes no mention of wearing masks, distancing, crowd avoidance, nor any other of the preventives urged for months by scientists and medical professionals. It offers neither footnotes nor data traditional to scientific documents.”

It was something of a petition — its website, in 29 languages, asking for endorsement and claiming that 500,000 “concerned citizens” had signed on, among them over 10,000 medical and public health scientists, and over 28,000 medical practitioners, was its claim. Our report continues:

”The declaration claims that herd immunity can be achieved when as little as 10% to 20% of a population has been infected and carries antibodies, a proposition which the mainstream community finds preposterous. Francis Collins, who heads the National Institutes of Health, calls the theory ‘fringe’ and ‘dangerous’. Fauci called it ‘ridiculous’… It ‘is just nonsense’, said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produces the widely-cited epidemic model that the White House itself has used in its briefings. A recipe for ‘carnage’ tweeted Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. ‘Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,’ was the reaction of the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak’.

Think of vaccines. The standard threshold for herd immunity is at least 60% and more usually 70% of the population having had a disease…The point is that there must be a high enough proportion of persons in any cluster, gathering, or crowd to cause a virus to have difficulty finding someone with no antibody defenses…But with only 10% to 20% having been infected, a virus can easily find targets….The Washington Post did an analysis that showed that for the United States, with a population of 328 million, to reach a 65% herd immunity threshold could lead to 2.13 million deaths.”

The White House was considering adoption of the Barrington method. Trump’s new science adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist having no experience with respiratory diseases, was taken with the theory of “herd immunity” and brought the declaration’s authors to the White House. Our report objected:

”How would older people be protected, as the Great Barrington document blithely assumes?…How could the
nation’s hospitals possibly deal with the onslaught of cases if the disease were allowed to run wild? Does this administration care at all for the safety — both physical and mental — of the nation’s doctors, nurses, and hospital staff?”

All of this is forgotten. Conservative media remembers only the economic setback and the learning loss of school children without regard for the consequences of letting the virus run free. They forget what the Great Barrington Declaration actually said, and celebrates it as virtuous contrarian free speech.

Now riding the wave of revisionist approval, Dr. Bhattacharya presses his case as if proven valid. He bears particular animosity toward Dr. Fauci given his opposite view of how the pandemic should have been handled, referring to him and others as a “small number of scientific bureaucrats” who dominated “for a very long time.” The scientific elite denies…

“scientific facts like immunity…the rights to bodily autonomy, to informed consent, to free speech… deciding that any dissent against their ideas was so dangerous that they weren’t going to permit it.”

These violations “embraced by scientists as necessary to control the pandemic” were unnecessary and failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, in Bhattacharya’s view.
It fails to mention that hundreds of thousands of the 1.2 million Americans who died from Covid effectively practiced Dr. Bhattacharya’s herd immunity by refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated.

paired with RFK Jr

The National Institutes of Health is ritually spoken of as the crown jewel of the America health system. It is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With a budget of $48 billion, the NIH employs roughly 20,000 people at its 27 institutions devoted to different diseases and research. It awards grants of another $31 billion annually for work done by outside organizations and universities.

HHS is soon to be run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., if the president-elect has his way. “Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research”.

Dr. Bhattacharya has no experience running a large organization but has big plans. He finds the NIH “sclerotic” and offers data that the median age of its researches is a decade older then forty years ago.

“The NIH has not given support for the ideas of younger people that it once did…We’re spending all this money, but we’re not getting the kind of innovation one would expect from this kind of investment.”

He wants to redirect the NIH to chronic diseases such as heart and cardiovascular disease and cancer. The $8 to $10 billion spent on infectious disease is disproportionate, he maintains. His advocacy of herd immunity by allowing “natural infection” squares with Kennedy, who believes vaccines cause autism and says “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective”, and he Covid-19 vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Last November, according to NBC News, Kennedy told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’” Deliberate inattention – what sounds like a shutdown of research — at a time when a number of viruses threaten us is more than troubling, especially as we see H5N1 (bird flu) cross over from dairy herds to humans and watch for human-to-human transmissions with what could be a 50% death rate.

Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist currently at the University of Saskatchewan, has worked with the NIH, and has been “on the frontlines of communication” in the media about Covid-19. She is surprisingly outspoken about Dr. Bhattacharya, writing at X:

”Despite his mild manners, Bhattacharya is a self-interested extremist who gives cover to anti-vaxxers & promotes policies that will kill people. He will set American health, innovation, & science back for a generation. He’s not here to reform NIH. He’s here to destroy it.”