Politics

The Ruckus Clause

Music, Politics
Mar 28, 2025
1 Comments

Remember the Ruckus Clause in the Constitution – the one that says if you create a ruckus in this country while legally visiting from another country, your permit will be revoked and you will be sent back? Ruckus, mind you, defined as voicing an opinion that is opposed to administration think, not a crime, a riot, a participation in illegal activities – simply making use of free speech? Free speech guaranties that apparently no longer apply to green card holders or other legal foreign residents?

Well, I don’t remember it either, but here is Marco Rubio on the specifics of PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk:

“We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”

This is, of course, was the Tufts woman who was snatched by plain clothed, masked goons pushing her into a car and abducting her to an unknown site, unable to speak to her lawyer for 24+ hours and not until after she was in Louisiana — despite a court order that she not be moved from MA. For having voiced an opinion in a student news paper as one of four co-authors, a year ago no less, about Israeli attacks on Gaza and university divestment from funding warfare in the Middle East, with no evidence produced that she did anything unlawful. Rubio claims that they are doing it every day, having revoked around 300 visas so far on the basis of disliked speech, not criminal action.

Then there is the Russian dissident, a scientist from Harvard medical School, who was arrested yesterday upon re-entry at our borders, returning from a research trip to France and having some undeclared items due to messed up papers in her luggage. If she is deported to Russia she will likely not survive as a known, outspoken critic of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. some claim we are now helping to squash dissent as demanded by our newest ally.

Never mind all the tourists who have been detained, some under torture-like conditions, eventually needing medical attention.

I am trying to get the point across that many people shrug when “Venezuelan gang members” are shipped off to a gulag abroad without due process. That some people are more concerned when they are coming for foreign academics or simple tourists from western countries. That WE ALL should be frightened, however, for one and all, once the normalization of abduction, neglect of Habeus Corpus, and absence of any recourse that due process would allow, has taken place. Every single person can be snatched and disappeared, just as 1930s Germany or contemporary Russia model, with claims that the officials know what they are doing and punishing criminals – how can you prove that you are not, when sitting in a cell with 80 other women, unable to speak the language (some tourists) and no access to lawyers in Louisiana, if you are lucky, or El Salvador, if you are not?

Is it surprising that many countries in the world have now posted official travel warnings against visiting the United States? Or, more nightmarish to me, that prominent scholars of fascism have chosen to leave this country and teach abroad (historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale among them?)Not counting the brain drain of our best scientists leaving for countries where their work is revered and can continue in contrast to here with all the department closures?

I was thinking about all this while watching how various wildlife traverse our garden, how freely they move, with no borders to stop them and certainly no ICE or Customs personal snatching them into custody, moving them to unknown locations or sending them back to places where there is existential threat waiting for them.

The deer come and go.

The coyotes come and go, blissfully ignoring my wildly barking dog.

The squirrel has claimed the owl house.

The owl has claimed the redwood where the crows nest. (That is a crow behind the owl, unsuccessfully yelling at the owl.)

The finches and sparrows and various other birds freely come and go, ready to snatch nesting materials.

One of the people detained upon entry to the US last week was composer Andrew Balfour, on his way to perform with the Amabile Choirs at Carnegie Hall, conducting selections from his work Tapwe: Songs of Truth. There was some mistake in his papers, and he was held for hours in isolation, phone and luggage taken from him, until he was given a choice: he could wait (for days) for an immigration judge to decide his detention, or he could take a flight back home to Toronto, to which he was then escorted by armed guards. He was lucky – some have been kept in detention for 2 weeks, completely clueless about what the accusations consisted of.

Anyhow, Balfour is a singular musician in the sense that he has two things that matter for his creative focus: his love for sacred music by Renaissance composers, particularly British ones, and his identity as a Cree, infusing indigenous spirituality into the music he creates. The music I am linking to today takes scores from Byrd and Tallis, and arranges them around Cree and Ojibway words. The project, called Nagamo , which means “sing” in Cree, is not a translation of the old texts, but an infusion of indigenous perspective. It’s quite something.

If you are interested in the whole composition, go here.

Below are some parts that I picked, demonstrating diversity of melodic and rhythmic approaches.

And at the very end you can watch a short video that introduces the composers and his biography.

Let the music fill you with a sense of resolve – people have overcome injustice and trauma for centuries.

Stone Soup.

It looks like one of the organizations that help folks on the margins reenter social life equipped with new professional skills, is in the process of loosing employment services funding. I am turning to my Multnomah County/PDX friends and readers with an appeal for action today. The rest of you can enjoy my newest montages, or check out if similar cuts are on the docket in your own neighborhoods.

As you know, I care deeply for support of those less privileged than the rest of us, and Stone Soup is a local organization that has done a lot of work to help people back onto their feet with culinary education and job training. They are also first line defenders against hunger among the houseless in our city. I let them speak for themselves below, and am also attaching an easily modifiable template to write to your Multnomah County commissioner – which is the action I recommend today. Your email to your commissioner will perhaps produce momentum towards keeping these services in the FY26 budget for Multnomah County. At least we can try. (If you have forgotten your district number like I did – here is the easy way to find out!)

Stone Soup’s plight:

And here is the Commissioner Outreach Template- Stone Soup PDX

Subject: Restore Employment Services Funding in the FY26 Budget

Dear Commissioner [Last Name],

I’m writing to urge you to reinstate funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. The current proposed budget eliminates this critical funding for service agencies, threatening the ability of organizations like Stone Soup PDX to continue providing essential job training programs.

Stone Soup PDX equips individuals facing employment barriers with the skills they need to secure stable jobs in the food service industry. Without this funding, many of our community’s most vulnerable residents will lose access to workforce development programs that help them build self-sufficiency.

Investing in employment services isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a smart financial decision. For every $1 invested in Stone Soup PDX, local governments save $8 by reducing reliance on public assistance programs. By supporting job training initiatives, you are strengthening our workforce and ensuring a more economically vibrant Multnomah County.

I strongly urge you and your fellow commissioners to restore funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

It’ll take ten minutes and is one of the things we can so easily do to fight budget cuts that hurt the most vulnerable among us. Give it a thought, please! And if you want to link to this appeal on your social media to spread the word, that would be cool as well.

And another one in the interesting people department….

Art, Nature, Politics
Mar 3, 2025
0 Comments

It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.

Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees.

Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.

And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.

March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens.)

Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man … war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.

No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.

Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.)

The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded the deployment of home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”

Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet, (ca. 1912)

During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens, soon recognized by the USDA.

Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.

Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women’s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “‘land girls’ central to the anti-fascist ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902)

By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack—in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”

The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.

The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women’s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew’s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by ‘female vandals’ are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order. (Ref.)

Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler, ca. 1908

Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.

She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.

Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. “She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) of 1928).

Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (1878)

Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act, people!)?

What do you think I am saying?

Anna Ancher Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890)

Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.

“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette’s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”

smashing windows on private property and governmental buildings
disrupting the postal service
burning public buildings
attacking Church of England buildings
holding illegal demonstrations
burning politicians’ unoccupied homes
disrupting the 1911 census
ruining golf courses and male-only clubs
chaining themselves to buildings
disrupting political meetings
planting bombs
handcuffing themselves to railings
going on hunger strikes

Historians still argue whether or not the militant campaigns helped to further the women’s suffrage movement or whether it harmed it. But presumably they’ll agree, crocheting won’t do the job. And we did get the right to vote. For the time being.

Mary Cassatt Lydia Crocheting in the Garden (1880)

I’ll tackle that debate another day. For now, let’s enjoy the spring bloom!

And listen to Elisabeth Knight.

This, That, and the Other Thing.

Health, Politics
Feb 28, 2025
4 Comments

I know, it’s Friday. Week was long and hard for many. You need some things to smile about, and I will comply with cartoons that landed in my inbox. Well, may be more grimace than smile. Also a reminder: today is the day of Economic Blackout that intends to make our voices heard. Raid the pantry, avoid the stores.

I will also list some of the facts, undisputed by Republicans, that came into view this week, facts relevant to science and healthcare, as we had agreed would be my focus. Well, maybe you didn’t agree, and wished for all art all the time. Not going to happen. We need documentation when we talk to our grandchildren about the speed at which things changed in ways that would endanger them all in the long run.

Healthcare issues directly related to us:

According to the Washington Post, the most upsetting news to the population in general, are the elimination of cancer research and treatment programs, both at the NIH and the VA. It makes no sense to even the most devoted Republicans. In other health news:

Measles epidemic amongst unvaccinated populations led to first deaths. Since the incubation time is about two weeks, we will see an explosion of cases overall in the coming weeks – our HHS Tsar JFK Jr. flicked it off with a comment that these epidemics are not out of the norm.
A) not true. B) Easily fixed if we had programs to encourage and normalize vaccinations.

The meeting to decide which flu vaccine to produce for the fall was called off by same anti-vaxxer health Tsar. Mid-March is the time when people discuss the recommendations for vaccine choice by the WHO (which we have left) and then pharma organizations start production which will need about 6 months to be ready for early flu season. Here are the pitfalls of his decision: if we don’t produce vaccines at all, for fear their approval might be killed by anti-vaccination sentiment from said Tsar (with investment in the production then a total loss), we will have a harrowing epidemic. If we go ahead and make a best guess as to which strains to target, given that official information channels are now foreclosed, we might have a vaccination campaign in the fall, but it might be useless, since vaccine ineffective. “See?”The Tsar can then claim, “Vaccinations don’t work.” – I, by the way, as many of my elderly friends, have a huge stake in this – the flu could simply kill me, given the state of my immune system. The CDC says, for the US in 2023-2024: “Flu vaccines prevent about 9.8 million illnesses, 4.8 million doctor visits, 120,000 hospital stays, and 7,900 deaths.”

According to WSJ, HHS weighs rescinding Moderna bird flu vaccine contract: The Trump administration confirmed it is reevaluating a $590 million human bird flu vaccine contract awarded to Moderna in the waning days of the Biden administration.

Rest of the world:

Musk and Trump terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts.

All malaria supplies protecting 53 million people, mostly children, including bed nets, diagnostics, preventive drugs, and treatments – terminated.
All tuberculosis programs, including the Global TB Drug Facility – terminated. – This will lead to treatment resistant strains that will hurt US citizens as well.
All supplies of US-manufactured emergency food packets for starving children on the brink of death – terminated. newrepublic.com
USAID’s contract for supplying essential medicines for maternal and child health in countries worldwide – terminated.
Services from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation – just one organization – reaching 350,000 people on HIV treatment, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women – terminated.
Every USAID program in the former Soviet countries in Central Asia, including health programs to combat tuberculosis, along with agricultural programs – terminated. www.voanews.com.
The Ebola programs were terminated, “a mistake” according to Musk, that he said was rectified. A bold lie, responded the director of the program. A few staff were given waivers to return to work, but the funds remain cut, and the office leases terminated, making the work impossible.

And regarding our health, if not lives, impacted by fire:

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has made steep cuts to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of the Interior. This reportedly impacts funding appropriated to fight wildfires across the country. The most significant budget cuts is setting the limit for BLM firefighters’ credit cards and travel credit cards to just $1, making it impossible for them to buy supplies or travel to wildfire sites. Additionally, the Trump administration froze the disbursement of approximately $3 billion in wildfire mitigation-related funds. This includes things like clearing dead branches and undergrowth that can help wildfires spread quickly if not removed ahead of time. (Ref.)

Over 1000 staff has been shrunk from NOOA, leaving us without weather warning and maritime predictions. The majority of staff at the only two Tsunami Warning Centers in the US have been fired.

Again, please explain to me what the goal of this is. The remaining people cannot do the work alone. The dire consequences will hurt the population in unimaginably deep ways- what is the possible justification for this?

Music today was written during (and about) the Influenza (Spanish Flu) epidemic in 1918. Darius Milhaud was greatly influenced by the horrors he witnessed. The Sonata’s final movement, “Douloureux,” is perhaps a funeral march. The deadliest flu epidemic, before vaccines, cost, in a range of estimates, between 25 and 50 million lives.

WHAT WAR IS

Poetry, Politics
Feb 26, 2025
1 Comments

WHAT WAR IS

Maybe someday they’ll decide to write a textbook
only we won’t be invited to contribute

because others always know better what war is

because others always know better

okay

but just one chapter

give us one chapter

you won’t find any supplemental material anyway

this will be a chapter on silence

whoever hasn’t been in war doesn’t know what silence is

but to the contrary, they know

that we don’t know

the way fish don’t know about the water that sustains them and the oil that kills them

the way a field mouse doesn’t know about the dark that hides it from the hawk but

it hides the hawk too

let us write this chapter

i know you’re afraid of blood so we’ll write it with water

the water the wounded man asked for when he could no longer swallow and just

looked at it

water that seeps through a shelled-out roof

water that can replace tears

yes – we’ll come to you with water

we’ll leave no permanent marks

on your slogans and values that we’ve so flagrantly misused

that you can’t even show them to your children anymore

these will be our few pages

and only a few will know they aren’t empty

by Ostap Slyvynsky

Timothy Snyder introduced us to this poet and poem on Monday, the three year-anniversary of the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The words speak for themselves. Will we heed them?

The poem is contained in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA). It is available at bookshop.org, or your local bookstore. (As a reminder: this Friday, February 28th, has been dedicated to buying or paying NOTHING, a nation-wide economic boycott to protest the new administration and the businesses raising prices because they can. Put gas in the car and get your groceries on Thursday…)

***

Two recommended long reads that you might want to pick up:

Aisha Ahmad, Political Science Professor at the University of Toronto, writes about the consequences of a potential war with Canada.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and writes about a way to think about the current President and his posse’s approach to governing, relating back to a term originally coined by Max Weber: Patrimonialism.

“Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.”

Today minimalist music. The Book of Sounds was composed by Hans Otte between 1979 and 1982. Played here by Carlos Cipa, himself a contemporary classical composer and pianist.

2023 photo montage series about war and nuclear proliferation.

Valentine’s Day 2025.

Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”

Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)

First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.

Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.

“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”

They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.

The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.

While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)

You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:

A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding

The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran
Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community
Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in
partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement,
are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.

This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful
conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.

Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123
Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace

Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.

A Proclamation for Peace

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.

Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;

Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;

Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.

by Kim Stafford

Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.

Another Thought Experiment.

Biology, Bird Photography, Health, Poetry, Politics
Feb 10, 2025
1 Comments

When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.

I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.

Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”

So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)

From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.

Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis

Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.

Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.

What would you do?

Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?

Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…

What will we do?

I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.

***

Omnicide

And when our children ask,
Why did you do nothing as the world
was dying? what will we tell them?

Will we say, We didn’t know how
sick it was, or admit that We gathered
our rosebuds while we could,

Old Time was still a-flying—?
It’s now the end of everything,
our children will say, go crawl

into your arks and sail off destitute into
your doom, and leave us only
your shadows. And our children

will light candles across seven continents
empty now of lions, kangaroos, ravens,
squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—

devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants,
cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs,
vultures, lizards, and alley cats.

Our children will hide in caves with blind
cockroaches, together feeding on the algae
glowing in neon greens and blues

across dolomite and limestone walls.
They’ll leave no pictographs behind,
no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.

Such silence now, they’ll say, this you’ve
bequeathed us, this human indifference.
And we’ll beg them, Survive.

BY MAURYA SIMON

Music today is from France, with entirely home-made and recycled instruments, a funky melange that should cheer us up. Always music.

Evaporation.

Walk with me through a landscape touched by frost, a layer of glistening, crystalline beauty sheathing every blade of grass, leaf and branches. Something delicate, fragile, lasting just hours before the rising temperatures make the sublime views disappear, melting the hoar frost and then evaporating the water.

Rising temperatures, across the span of seasons, not just during a 24 hour cycle, are the main culprit globally, it turns out, for our ever increasing droughts. It is not the lack of rainfall, but evaporation of water due to heat that account for over 60% of the exceptional drought in the American West. And so we face dry wells, dwindling reservoirs, parched ground, forest fires.

Some, of course, believe that all you have to do is turn on “a valve” and let the water run, providing needed help to farmers and fire fighters alike. The current President of the United States among them. And so he did, ordering his Army Corps of Engineers to release a maximum amount of water in California’s San Joaquin Valley, with an unheard-of one-hour notice to local authorities.

“Consistent with the direction in the Executive Order on Emergency Measures to Provide Water Resources in California, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is releasing water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Success Lake to ensure California has water available to respond to the wildfires.”

All hell broke loose, with local authorities, farmers, Republican State Senators all trying to persuade Trump’s minions to stop the planned volume of release, for fear of flooding the down stream communities, since the river channels could not hold the masses of water. Local water management officials called on members of Congress to intervene, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Reps. David Valadao and Vince Fong. None responded to requests for comment. Farmers needed to move equipment, migrant workers needed to flee from their riverbed camps near harvesting locations, Potterville fields needed to be protected. It was reckless endangerment of a community that had voted this President in, even after the authorities managed to curb the outflow somewhat from what had been initially intended.

It was also an act in the President’s renewed California water wars that was based on completely wrong assumptions about the potential uses of this water for firefighting in L.A., one big mountain chain to the South blocking the natural dispersion of water. Just one assumption in a series of spurious claims about the state’s water policies.

The release of billions of gallons of water will have long-term hurtful consequences in the valley region. The water, now running off into the Pacific Ocean, was stored for farmers’ irrigation needs in the dry season. Agricultural business has already been hurt on multiple fronts with water scarcity, the rounding up of undocumented agricultural workers, and now the tariffs. Depleting the reservoir of water at this time will increase the vulnerability of agricultural communities in the summer, already struggling with ground water pumping restrictions.

Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which tries to compensate for the fact that farming has for decades used twice the amount of groundwater than is replenished by nature. This has caused the land to sink, causing enormous infra- structure damage that the state is now trying to staunch. The restrictions led to plummeting values of farms, endangering many smaller agricultural operations who cannot pay their loans. “The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that about 500,000 acres – one-fifth of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland – may need to be taken out of cultivation by 2040 to stabilize aquifers. Small and medium-scale farmers appear most vulnerable.” (Ref.)

Value evaporating.

Common sense evaporating.

Water evaporating, flowing useless at this time of year for communities falsely claimed to be helped.

Our protections from unscientific, vengeance-, ideology- or greed-driven decisions, evaporating.

As of this writing, we have a non-elected civilian with unidentified, potentially non-American minions downloading on his personal servers every single data point of every American’s existence he found while forcing access to the US Treasury. Our social security numbers: no longer protected. Data about our taxes, our income, our health status, you name it: an open book to be read by potentially hostile powers. The U.S.Treasury holds the nation’s money. Its dispersement (or withholding) is now under the control of someone who is unaccountable and was not able to receive top security clearance and is under investigation for flouting security clearance rules.

We are talking all of our tax money, the social security money we earned and paid in, the money for clean air, safe food and water, safe air travel and highway management, medical research, and so on. A system responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds now at the whims of unaccountable individuals. As our own Senator Wyden warned, this creates potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities, given Musk’s significant business ties to China. It also creates potential havoc for upcoming debt ceiling negotiations, given the assurances needed for ongoing payment flow.

A private citizen taking control of established government offices, seizing physical control of government payment systems, now able to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally chooses. Closing entire departments (USAID) and locking out thousands of government employees. An unvetted, congressionally un-appointed individual illegally usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse, shredding the constitutional protection guaranteed by the separation of powers. Some call it a constitutional crisis. Others fear that It is no less than a coup.

Democracy evaporating.

We are advised to make our voices heard, seemingly the only thing we can do right now.

Once again, here is the easiest way to find out how to contact your state representatives, your governor, your senators, whoever you wish to address with questions about what they intend to do to protect you, your entitlements and the privacy of your data. A question as simple as that.

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

For those of us in Oregon:

Senator Jeff Merkley: (202) 224-3753

Senator Ron Wyden: (202) 224-5244

Congresswoman Janelle Bynum: (202) 225-5711

OR Governor Tina Kotek : (503) 378-4582

OR State Attorney General Dan Rayfield: (503) 378-6002

Call. PLEASE. Drip is not enough. Needs to be a flood, slowing down evaporation of our rights. Blue state calls matter, too.

And now for the good news: Rebecca Solnit has started her own occasional newsletter – you can sign up for free here. Probably the most encouraging and empathetic writer out there next to Heather Cox Richardson.

Let’s end with a defiant smile: here is a body of water not likely to evaporate soon. He/she/it/they even have their own social media announcements now.

Music today about cold times, followed by something better….

Who decides what we remember?

Poetry, Politics
Jan 30, 2025
2 Comments

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
—Bertolt Brecht

I would not be surprised if one or another of you read the document below and thought: “History is written by the victors…”

The special observances to be eliminated by fiat of the new administration include Black history month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, Women’s History Month, and so on.

Memorial Site of Concentration Camp Buchenwald.

Once you discard the public remembering and teaching of history, you can fill in the blanks with anything you like, likely falsehoods that will stay with the next generations who have no access to the actual records, if it is done thoroughly enough. The current attacks on the contents of teaching materials, and even independent sources like Wikipedia (reported in Newsweek,) clearly speak to the issue. As journalist Adam Server from The Atlantic commented: “They want to ban the teaching of the unpleasant facts of American history because people might conclude injustices in the past that contribute to inequalities in the present should be rectified, instead of their belief, which is that some groups of people are inherently superior to others.”

The quote about victors shaping the narrative in their preferred fashion was attributed to Winston Churchill for the longest time. Falsely, as it turns out. People then pointed to words uttered by Reichsmarschall and war criminal Hermann Göring, a coward who did not even face his Nürnberg Trial sentence of death by hanging, resorting to suicide by poison the night before. “Der Sieger wird immer der Richter und der Besiegte stets der Angeklagte sein,” “the victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.”

Apparently, the sentiment had been around for a much longer time, in various European nations, France in 1842, Italy in 1852 and Great Britain in 1889. It arrived at our own shores a few years later:

“In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech: “In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,” Vest said, “for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.” (Ref.)

Well, if you have (and abuse) the power to erase history when it is at odds with your ideology, you sound more like a loser than a victor to me. Might as well go golfing on Holocaust Remembrance Day…. (yes, he did.)

The real question is, of course, what can be done when the powers that be try to eliminate our remembering of acts of horror as well as acts of heroism, acts of oppression met by acts of resistance, of an evolution of rights for those who had been denied them since times immemorial. The prohibitions of public remembrances, the choice of names for institutions, the restriction of text book contents might not be easy to stop, particularly when appeals to “forgetting” are voiced by some of the largest communication platform owners in the world. (e.g. Musk’s contribution to the neo-Nazi party AfD rally last week in Germany.)

But this can be counterbalanced by art (although admittedly much harder to distribute to large enough audiences.) Films that try to document the past as it unfolded can be useful and convey content pretty directly. Poetry can be a teacher. One of the best collections I can think of is Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting (1993). The classic anthology contains hundreds of poems centered around events that changed history. No other than Nelson Mandela introduced the book at the time:

“Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.”

Primroses and bush anemones under the beeches of KZ Buchenwald (Beechwood) near Weimar.

A more recent one is Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), edited and translated by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght. This volumes contains work by many lesser known poets, intended, with the help of 35 translators from languages as varied as Yiddish, Norwegian, Japanese and Hungarian, to present the poems in original and translation, with a contextual note for each. It is a remarkable book.

A particularly timely read, too. I am writing this on the day of the signing of an Executive Order to prepare a 30,000 capacity migrant detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. The site of previous human right abuses (including torture) identified by the UN, Amnesty International and Red Cross. A site three times the size of Auschwitz, outside of U.S jurisdiction (leased from Cuba,) so that many of our legal protections don’t apply and access of observers and journalists can be restricted or altogether prohibited. The justification, at this point, is that it will house undocumented immigrants, to be deported. When will the first US citizen be shipped off shore as well? According to NBC news, the President himself “suggested Monday that the United States could pay a “small fee” to foreign countries to imprison Americans (bolded by me) who are repeat criminal offenders, floating a kind of modern-day penal colony. Trump billed the idea as a cost-saving measure in remarks at a conference for House Republicans in Miami.” Gitmo next?

Crematorium at Buchenwald

Photographs today from my visits to memorial sites of German concentration camps.

Music today is unfortunately just a snippet of a piece we should have access to in its entirety. Click on the blue arrow in the lower left corner to listen to the excerpt of Jüdische Chronik, organized by Paul Dessau.

KZ Ravensbrück

The Vanished

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn’t the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They’ve been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don’t make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.

Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.

The vanished are just.
That’s how we’ll fade, too.

BY HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

TRANSLATED BY RITA DOVE

Nelly Sachs, to whom the poem is dedicated, was one of the foremost Holocaust poets who escaped to Sweden. The German original can be read here. It references themes of one of her famous poems, Flight and Metamorphosis.

Helpful Advice.

Walk with me, but bring the gloves, on a brilliantly sunny and cold day at the wetlands. Puddles covered with ice, ponds slightly frozen, fallen leaves coated with sparkling crystals putting to shame any jewelry store – display.

My avian friends are warming up in the sun. For every heron at rest, there is an egret flying to the next perch, surveying their realm.

The sky occasionally fills with geese spooked by some raptor, and I wish I could add the sound here of them chattering and honking, a spectacular chorus. Eventually they come to rest, returning to snoozing.

I, on the other hand, have not been snoozing this week, driven by a sentiment probably shared by many of you: What can we do? I have been reading quite a bit, soaking up good advice from trusted sources, and making use of many helpful sites that display what we need to know in straightforward and legible ways.

Much of the advice overlaps: inform yourself, pace yourself, don’t give up in advance, protect the most vulnerable, engage, build and cherish community from the ground up. Two things I found particularly helpful:

Ask yourself what your strengths are: not all of us are able or willing to do public work, or join committees, or have the resources to support causes financially, or get engaged in elective office. We all have something to contribute, however. If you like baking, organize bake sales. Agreed, chocolate chip cookies are not going to defeat fascism, but a community nourished by seeing members contribute in whatever ways they can, will be more resistent and more effective in coming together and taking the necessary steps.
Focus on your interest. You cannot fight on every front. Pick the arenas where you have the most expertise or the most passion, and join efforts there.

In my case, I have a platform with this blog where I can summarize both relevant sources and write about my interpretations of them. I can do much of the reading you don’t have time for, and pick the best pieces with a critical eye on informational value, not necessarily ideology. I am also deeply interested in science and climate crisis, so that is where I will be particularly involved. Note, though, it really is up to everyone – if you are interested in protecting immigrants, DEI-or women’s rights, or fight against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or newly established prison camps, it matters. There is no hierarchy of what needs to be protected- there is much under attack and requires advocates.

Here are Robert Reich, Dave Troy, and Timothy Snyder with pragmatic advice lists. And here is a helpful conversation between Jen Rubin and Heather Cox Richardson.

Here is a nifty google drive action tracker listing all the Executive Orders and memos proclaimed so far, grouped by targets. That allows you to inform yourself about your area of interest and what is currently affecting the status quo.

***

Given one of my interests, science, here is another bit of news (in more detail in Paul Krugman’s assessment today):

As of now there is a new communications ban from HHS. The gag order includes the publication of scientific information, including reports that are already done, prohibits emergency alerts for pandemic information, or rising health risks, including weekly data on respiratory disease developments.

Meetings and report releases for the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic Resistance are canceled. HHS is searching for DEIA programs and threatening anyone who disguises them. They are asking for people to report colleagues.

NIH study sections are canceled/postponed. These are the sections that approve grant proposals and provide funding for institutional research. This affects more than 300.000 researchers and 2500 institutions. All travel is suspended and conference publications must be approved in advance by a presidential appointee. That affects nearly $50 billion of scientific research.

Pausing public health communications and research means delays in responding to emerging threats, like H5N1. But these measures also have an economic impact. Public health protects more than health—it safeguards our economy. Disruptions in systems can ripple across industries, as we’ve already seen with avian flu and egg prices.

Note that every $1 spent by NIH generates $2.46. For example, in 2023, $47B in NIH spending generated ~$93B. Halting it all will cost us money, create worse health outcome and might motivate all the scientific talent that is now losing their grant funded jobs to go elsewhere. As of now, it is all gone, with health and education directly implicated.

If you click this link, it offers map and you can tap on your state and find out what is affected by the new administration’s directive towards the National Institute for Health (NIH). Here are the OR and CA impacts, respectively.

Before we are getting too discouraged, here is the long read for the weekend that argues the world isn’t as bad as you think. I agree with much of it, but also want to point out that it is psychologically much harder to relinquish a right or protective matter that you already held or is available to you, than experiencing improvements of a state of need. If we know we can protect our children with vaccines or health risk alerts and they are subsequently blocked by political maniacs, it is a huge blow, individually for all the little ones I love and societally for what the future will hold.