Hand Foot Mouth Cock Sacky, Part II

Nathaniel has been sent home from daycare again, with suspected hand foot and mouth disease (aka coxsackie). As you may recall, he had this back in January. As you may also recall, I also had this back in January, with much more severe symptoms.

The timing is ... interesting. My parents were here to visit and literally left this morning. In fact, they were still at PDX airport when we got the call. I admit, my first thought was "great -- Nathaniel's sent home right when we lose extra babysitting." With a little time to reflect, I begrudgingly concluded that it was probably better that my seventy-five-year-old parents were not in our house with a highly contagious disease floating about.

As for Nathaniel, I don't begrudge him getting coxsackie again. He is a baby and his immune system is puny and weak. My immune system, by contrast, is strong and virile, and so I should resist the disease much better this time -- right?

We'll see. Right now, half of my brain is interpreting every twinge and ache as a blister that's about to burst forth, while the other half is wishfully insisting that these symptoms are entirely psychosomatic. I guess we'll know for sure in a few days. Hopefully, I don't nearly pass out in any public places this time.

Food Poisoning

I had food poisoning this weekend. Did I miss anything important?

I was all ready to write a very TMI blog post regaling you with the dirty details of my day -- which was exactly as miserable you might expect -- but I finally thought better of it. I will relay one story though (Yeah, it's a little gross. Feel free to skip this one).

As you know, when you throw up you can sometimes taste what food item it is that's coming back up. For me, last night, it was a donut.

At first, I was annoyed that that was what was being regurgitated. What a waste of a perfectly good donut!

But then I thought (and this was all occurring while I was hunched over the toilet), "well, if I have to throw up anything, isn't the donut the best thing to throw up? After all I already tasted and enjoyed it -- that's the fun part! All that's happening now is I skip the nutritional impact!"

And I was very pleased with myself for approximately two seconds, before I realized that I just invented an eating disorder from first principles. Whoops.

(Later in the day it happened again -- I was marveling at the fact that stuff kept coming out of me even as I wasn't putting any food into me, and I caught myself wondering how much weight I must have lost over the course of the day. The answer was: less than you'd think! Becoming violently ill is in fact not a good weight loss strategy, to say nothing of a general healthy living strategy, and I don't recommend it at all!).

Hand Foot Mouth Cock Sacky

It's been an eventful two weeks. And I'm not even talking about *gestures vaguely* the world.

Last week, Nathaniel started daycare. A few days later, on Thursday, I had my first day of class, and Nathaniel was diagnosed with hand foot and mouth disease -- aka coxsackie. My mom says the latter name "sounds better" than "hand foot and mouth disease". I'm unconvinced. While "hand foot and mouth disease" sounds like a reason to put a cow down, I'm not sure "cock sacky" is much of an improvement.

Anyway, Nathaniel was, as is his wont, completely unbothered by any of this. But it did send him home from daycare.

On Monday I had jury service. I arrived at the courthouse, checked in, found a seat in the holding pen, and then suddenly lost all color and started sweating profusely (I mean, profusely). I stumbled over to the main desk to ask for some water, which they provided ... along with calling the paramedics because "you don't look right." Thus ended David's jury service, and began several hours at the Kaiser Westside ER. Who doesn't love beginning a jury tenure seeing one of their fellows carted out on a gurney? (I actually asked the paramedics if this happened every week -- I kind of assumed that there was always someone who was "sick" and tried to get out of jury service -- but he told me that no, I was his first jury-pool patient).

I started to feel better Tuesday, except that I started to see some weird and painful blisters on my hands. And my feet. And maybe the back of my throat. And now today, on Nathaniel's first birthday, I think "I probably have hand foot and mouth disease." It's his birthday, but he's giving me presents. What a mensch. The bonus irony is that HFMD rarely is symptomatic in adults, but I guess I'm the reason why they hedge that a bit!

So now I'm tip-toeing around the house (not to keep quiet, but to avoid the painful spots on my heels), and thinking deep thoughts like "how does the blister decide to be on that centimeter of my finger, rather than the centimeter directly to its left?" It's not like the blisters are clustered around veins or arteries, or near parts of my body that are either especially high or low use. It all seems very arbitrary. I'm very curious about tracing the physical pathway of the virus load from when it enters my body to when it manifests in blisters in these very particular spots.

Unfortunately, the medical treatment for HFMD seems to boil down to "take a tylenol and buck up", so now it's just a matter of trying to rest and waiting to see if that ambulance ride from the courthouse to the hospital results in a $94,000 surprise medical bill. What fun.

The Parent's Geiger Counter

One of the strangest aspects of parenthood that they don't really tell you about is the fear. Once you have a baby, you're always just a little bit afraid.

Usually it really is just a little bit. Barely noticeable. But it's present -- like a little Geiger counter that crackles in the background (and periodically spikes with serious danger).

We had our first trip with Nathaniel to urgent care today. That sounds more serious than it is -- his daycare sent him home because he had a rash, and we needed a doctor to check him out before he was cleared to return. Turns out, he has Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (which is what we thought it was) -- perhaps the least serious childhood ailment out there, other than it being extremely contagious. To be honest, Nathaniel barely seemed bothered by it (when is he ever?).

And yet, as we were waiting in the doctor's office and I watched Nathaniel happily crawl and climb about, I looked at the splotchy red marks on his face and thighs and a tiny part of me thought -- could it be measles? Not that I know anything about measles, other than we had eradicated it and thanks to the anti-vaxx conspiracism of the GOP it's back. But that's that little bit of fear lurking in the background.

Meanwhile, also as we were waiting, I was reading about immigration agents shooting two people in Portland, shortly after ICE agents in Minneapolis orphaned a six-year-old boy. On the Portland shooting, someone remarked that the address was right by their own child's daycare, and then glumly remarked that soon all of us will have the story of the ICE shooting or kidnapping or violence that occurred "right by where we do [X]." We always like to talk about those "little bits of human connection" like they're a good thing, but sometimes what they do is emphasize "it could've been us."

I'm not unreasonable; I know the Geiger counter of fear would have always been there; it isn't an artifact of this administration. But it certainly is the case that the counter is crackled louder than it otherwise would, because our own government is intent on terrorizing the citizenry.

Sick Baby

Nathaniel is feeling under the weather.

He has a cough, which he caught from me, and before I go any further, he's fine. In fact, he's mostly been handling it like a champ. This really is the first time he's been truly sick-sick (he's had runny noses and such before, but he's frankly scarcely noticed them), and by and large he's being a real trooper.

But last night he got caught in a bit of a spiral where he coughed himself awake, and found that a bit scary and starting crying, which made it a bit harder to catch his breath, which exacerbated the cough ... and all of the sudden, it's a full meltdown. About an hour of screaming and sobbing and coughing, all while he's clearly exhausted. No fun.

Again, to reiterate, he is (and was) fine. We kept a close eye on him to make sure he wasn't actually struggling to breathe or anything like that, and there were no issues there. He was just (understandably) upset, and miserable, and honestly a bit scared, and obviously as a parent you hate seeing your kiddo like that.

As sicknesses go, this really is about as basic as you can get. But even still, as a parent, it's miserable. Nathaniel is a baby. He doesn't understand what's going on. He just knows he's in this bad situation and he's looking to you to help him, and there's really not all that much you can do other than give him cuddles and comfort. (The saddest part for me was that whenever one of us would hold him, he'd reach for the other parent, as if to say "surely, one of you can help me!").

This sort of thing happens to every baby and every parent. That doesn't make it easier; in fact, I suspect most parents would categorize times like this as among the toughest parts of being a parent.

But as I was cuddling him last night, watching him sob uncontrollably and feeling absolutely helpless in the face of his misery, my mind kept drifting to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Because as terrible as this experience was for a normal, non-dangerous childhood cough, I cannot fathom how I would feel grappling with this feeling of helpless impotence in the face of my baby's confused misery if it were a serious illness. Measles. Pertussis. Mumps. Things that could put him in the hospital. Things that could endanger his life.

Take this awful feeling I had last night, and magnify it to an incalculable degree. That is what Kennedy -- and all those who enabled him, a cadre that includes Donald Trump, most Republican Senators, and every one of their voters -- is unleashing on America. That my mind associates last night with that experience is testament to just how little I can comprehend -- am willing to comprehend -- what going through that hell would actually be like.

Having a sick baby should be the flip side of my vaccine post: you want to know what's way worse than the feeling of impotent helplessness watching your baby suffer from a cough? The feeling of impotent helplessness watching your baby hospitalized with the measles. The former is inevitable. The latter is eminently avoidable, and it is infuriating that this conspiratorial maniac is endangering my baby -- all of our babies -- by trying to put safe vaccines out of reach and facilitate the spread of dangerous diseases.

There are so many reasons why we as Americans should be ashamed of the choices we've made as a polity over the past few years. But amidst stiff competition, Robert Kennedy has to be very, very high on the list.

First They Came For Tylenol, Now Circumcisions

The latest stop in the RFK/Trump team's conspiracy-addled rampage against science was an assertion that "circumcisions" may be a cause of autism. This drew an accusation from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) that RFK was trafficking in antisemitism (a small but vocal cadre of antisemitic activists have centered their hatred of Jews on circumcision, which they present as tantamount to child abuse).

What I find most interesting about this latest foray in RFK nuttiness, though, is how it in many ways diverges from the more typical linkage antisemites tend to draw when it comes to Jews and public health. In general, the conspiracy claim historically has been that some mainstream medical practice is actually dangerous, but Jews avoid the risks via some secret Jewish handshake. On vaccines, for instance, the antisemite I feature in my "Things People Blame the Jews For" series alleged the following:

Go to Wal-Mart and look at the children in the check out line.... They usually all have blank stares now .... Walk the check outs until you see a kid who is totally engaged with people, smiling, bright and acting intelligently. Ask the mom if she vaccinated her baby, and if hse says yes, ask if she is Jewish.... I never figured out the method, but I can definitely state that somehow, "they" do not get the same shots.

Vaccines are bad, except the Jewish vaccines, which are fine. RFK himself has tapped into similar logic when he contended that the COVID virus was "engineered" to not target Ashkenazi Jews -- again, Jews presented as getting some secret healthcare privilege denied to the victimized masses.

But the circumcision argument cuts in the opposite direction: Jews are far more likely to be circumcised, and so if circumcision causes autism (and again, I cannot stress enough that the medical evidence here is "no, it doesn't, you idiot"), then Jews would be disproportionate victims. How nice of RFK to be looking out for our wellbeing (/sarcasm)!

Obtuse Corneal Hydrops

Well, my corneal hydrops are back. And just in time for me to get on a nine-hour flight to London with a four-month-old baby!

I've done some of my own research, which I know are among the scariest words a non-medical professional can speak (but like being a mad, ignorant voter, it's so fun!), but really I don't think I was able to do much damage, because it doesn't seem like much is known about the condition by anyone. 

Corneal hydrops occur when a layer of your cornea called Descemet's membrane rips, letting fluid leak where it shouldn't and resulting in extreme tearing and eye swelling. It is an uncommon side-effect of my already uncommon keratoconus -- don't I feel special -- and nobody really seems to know what causes it or how to prevent it. Likewise, in terms of treatment the prevailing medical opinion seems to be summarized as "suck it up, buttercup". There are some saline drops to draw out the fluid, and you can take Tylenol for the pain, and other similar OTC medications for other secondary symptoms (e.g., Sudafed for sinus congestion) but that's about it.

There was one interesting thing I did find, though. Virtually every source on corneal hydrops appends "acute" in front of it ("acute corneal hydrops"). The "acute" means that it presents suddenly and without warning. But that doesn't describe mine -- in my case, I start noticing symptoms progressively over the course of a week or so. In fact, even that's a bit misleading, since the "symptoms" that correlate with hydrops for me -- essentially, sinus-like symptoms on the left side of my face -- are not as far as I can tell normally associated with hydrops at all. But for me, they always go hand-in-hand, and they predict a forthcoming hydrops event with alarming accuracy.

So a week ago I started noticing those symptoms start to appear and wrote my doctor asking if there was anything I could do to forestall the hydrops before my trip. He replied, in so many words, "nope -- good luck!" I was able to manage the sinus-symptoms with OTC medication, but last night my eye finally -- for lack of a better word -- exploded. Have you ever woken up feeling dehydrated because of the amount of fluid you've lost leaking out of your eyeball? Because I have!

This is the third time I've had hydrops in the past year. The first time occurred while I was on a plane from Portland to Tallahassee, and it was deeply unpleasant (as in, the flight attendants who saw me asked if I needed paramedics to meet me at the gate). I think the dry airplane air exacerbates the effects dramatically. So you can imagine how excited I am to get on a nine-hour international red-eye flight with an infant while ailing with this particular condition.

We leave on Wednesday evening. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday ... basically, four and a half days for my condition to improve.  I'll stock up on eye drops and other palliative interventions, but still -- pray for me. (And remember, all of this could have been averted if we had a functioning health care system).

The Debunkers

Once, when I was in middle school, a friend and I saw a picture of a border guard from some eastern European country inside a Scholastic Magazine and decided it was a fake.

We had a grand time picking out details in the photo that "proved" it wasn't real. The guard's uniform had English on it, not Cyrillic. The rifle he was carrying was wrong (how we knew what rifle he was supposed to be carrying, I don't know). There were other "problems" as well that I can't remember now. But I do remember feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out that the magazine ran a fake photo; when the reality is that the photo was almost certainly real. We were vastly overreading minor "discrepancies" that probably weren't ultimately discrepancies at all.

The New York Times has a really interesting (and long) profile on a TikTok star who announced she had cancer, and then faced an organized community committed to "proving" that she was lying about it for influence, clout, or clicks.

The story doesn't hide the ball for long: unless her oncologist is in on the grift, the woman really has cancer. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to see how many people got so committed, for so long, into being sure she was faking it.

In particular, I noticed the deployment of a sort of Potemkin expertise. The debunkers seized on little details and discrepancies which they persistently viewed as the critical cracks in an otherwise elaborate facade. The tenor was an interesting mix of obviousness ("anyone could spot this is a fake, look at the rubes falling for such a clear con") and sophistication ("look how meticulous my investigation is; the story falls apart when an expert looks at it"). The latter component I think does more work than the former: it concocts an aura of authority that both reassures other readers that the claims are backed up by evidence, and also makes them feel good about being critical consumers not taken in by ruses and cons (when the irony, of course, is that they've talked themselves into not believing the truth).

When I read this story, it reminded me of a similar army of "debunkers" who pore over any claim of atrocity or calamity in Israel/Palestine to "prove" that a claim forwarded by seemingly credible sources (doctors, international media outlets, and so on) is actually a hoax or a lie. For example, this account is dedicated to minute analysis of videos or pictures that purport to show, say, famine in Gaza or bombed out civilian infrastructure, picking out bits and pieces that "prove" it's being staged. There's a whole ecosystem of people on this beat (and not just on the "pro-Israel" side), and their tenor and behavior is very reminiscent of the fanatical debunkers described in the NYT article above. They project expertise via hyper-fixation on detail, and present themselves as simply trying to uncover the truth. But they're obviously not dispassionate; the tiny nits and picks they make to "debunk" adverse narratives are never paired with a similar fine-toothed comb aimed at stories more to their taste. It's not even real skepticism, let alone critical analysis. Yet they have an eager audience from those eager to believe they're seeing through a ruse, who revel in the twin joys of faux-sophistication and confirmation bias.

Now, to be sure, the TikTok case is in many ways simpler: it doesn't have any clear political valence, and it is a single incident capable of being definitively declared true or false. Across the many, many reported incidents of catastrophe and calamity in Israel and Palestine, things tend to be muddier, with more obvious incentives to slant (or invent) claims for political purposes, and there will be inevitably a distribution of results following initial claims. Some will be borne out, some will turn out to be overstated, not what they are initially claimed to be, or even outright falsified. There is value in actual critical assessment and reassessment of what people say is happening inside a war zone -- not the least because even among perfectly good faith actors the chaos of a war zone doesn't lend itself to the conjunction of perfect accuracy and immediate reporting.

Nonetheless, I can't help but think part (though not all) of the deception relies on a persistent assumption that every social calamity is complete and totalizing, such that if there's anything interrupting the grimness then it just cannot be cancer/fascism/famine whatever.

And that's not true. There are times one is living with cancer and yet isn't an emaciated patient confined to her bed. That can be part of cancer, one of the scariest parts of cancer, but a picture that doesn't fit that template doesn't prove the cancer is made up. There are times one is living in a fascist state but does not see jackbooted thugs grabbing people off the streets. That is one of the scariest parts of fascism, but a day one just goes to the market as normal and doesn't see any secret police at all doesn't necessarily falsify the fascism. Cancer isn't always like that, fascism isn't always like that. And famine, too, doesn't always look like "The Vulture and the Little Girl"; a picture of a market with some food in it does not necessarily mean there isn't a famine.

That's why those little bits and pieces aren't the smoking guns they purport to be. Reality isn't as clean as we think it is. People with cancer still go to parks. People under fascism still enjoy nights out on the town. Places afflicting by famine still typically have some food somewhere. Buildings that have been bombed still have unexpected pieces that remain standing.

Each of those faux-"discrepancies" becomes grist for the debunking mill. But it's not real critical analysis; it's just food to keep believing what one already wants to believe.

Don't Accommodate Conspiracists

The other day, Yair Rosenberg flagged a bill introduced by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY, and almost certainly the most openly antisemitic member of Congress in office today), titled the "Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act," which would require all persons running for office to disclose what countries (other than the United States) they hold citizenship in. Nominally targeting dual citizens, the bill, Rosenberg observed, was clearly inspired by various "lists" circulating on neo-Nazi sites which allege that all Jewish members of Congress are dual citizens of (and thus dually-loyal to) Israel. To that, Rosenberg wrote, "Ironically, the bill would debunk one of the very conspiracy theories that inspired it" (since the disclosure list would reveal that no Jewish MoC has Israeli citizenship).

I meant no disrespect to Yair when I replied that the bill would not "debunk" the conspiracy at all. "[T]he nature of these conspiracies immunizes them from debunking." The truth is already out there, and has not accomplished anything -- so offering more "truth" isn't going to serve as remedy. Rather, I said "When you humor conspiracy theorists by suggesting they have 'legitimate' concerns, you only encourage them."

This is a lesson that generalizes. "Voter fraud", for instance, is an essentially non-existent problem in this country. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court endorsed the state's right to impose voter ID laws to tackle the perception of widespread voter fraud -- even though that perception was (by the Court's own admission) not remotely grounded in the objective record. The Court rationalized its decision as enabling the state to generate greater "confidence" in election results in the face of this widespread, albeit objectively false, sentiment that voter fraud was a serious problem.

This, to put it mildly, did not work. Humoring those who harbored lurid and outlandish beliefs about voter fraud did not cause them to develop greater "confidence" in the electoral system; it instead encouraged them to dig in deeper (culminating, of course, in Trump's attempted insurrection following the 2020 election). A second's worth of reflection could have predicted this would be so: their original fears weren't grounded in reality, so obviously a reality-based solution isn't going to assuage them. All it does it suggest they are on the right track. But whatever grievance or paranoia generated their conspiracy to begin with -- most likely "minorities are sometimes winning elections when I don't want them to" -- that isn't effected at all. You cannot indulge.

Or take vaccines. We've gotten, it seems, a column a week lecturing the medical profession that they must figure out ways to "reassure" "vaccine-hesitant" Americans who, while perhaps objectively misinformed, also have "legitimate concerns" that need to be addressed. Again, the notion that more robust studies or in-depth research could "assuage" "concerns" misapprehends how anti-vaccine sentiment works. RFK Jr. does not want to be "reassured" about vaccine safety, he wants to believe that vaccines are dangerous, and will actively resist efforts at appeasement that still end up concluding that vaccines are in fact, safe. The fact that vaccine safety is settled science means that science must be unsettled. That's no doubt why the new NIH head is so enthusiastic about promoting "dissent" -- not from the administration's new orthodoxies about transgender healthcare, of course, but about the utility of vaccination. It's certainly why RFK picked a serial fraudster to lead the new "studies" into the alleged links between vaccines and autism. When you accommodate the cranks, they get crankier.

"Media bias", same thing. And there's a branch of criticism of academia that, I think, falls into this category as well. Here, too, we are regularly regaled with lectures on how, while Trump's assault on academic freedom may be a step too far, universities did maybe bring it on themselves with their stifling group think and endorsement of wacky leftist priorities. I took a sinful amount of pleasure reading Tressie McMillan Cottom positively curb-stomp Bret Stephens as the latter tried to trot out his tired applause lines about the alleged woes of contemporary academia. Actually, there are plenty of robust debates inside our classrooms. Actually, humanities majors do fine in the job market. Actually, the "lowest-quality institutions" extant in academia today are not "Columbia" and "Berkeley", they're predatory for-profit institutions who plunged hundreds of thousands of Americans into crushing debt by falsely promising a "career-ready" education ("colleges not unlike the one that our current dear leader once ran as a purely economic enterprise.").

For academia, too, there are no reforms that are going to satisfy people prone to believe that the academia is compromised of "factories of Maoist cadres", because the actual state of academia bears no relation to their views on it. Accommodating their fantasies won't make them back off, it will just convince them they've been vindicated.

This doesn't mean that there are no steps university stakeholders should take to improve the robustness of discussion and debate on campus, ensure that campus communities of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints feel included and are treated equitably, and so on -- any more than urging that we dismiss anti-vaccine cranks means that we stop caring about medical quality control and safety testing. Rather, the point is we should do these things for ourselves, not for earning elusive and probably chimerical "credibility" from insatiable critics. Chasing their approval is a fool's errand.

Unmasking a Social Collapse

The image of masked federal agents seizing Rumeysa Ozturk on the street for the "offense" of writing a disfavored op-ed on Gaza is chilling enough. But surely there is an extra dose of irony in the masks themselves, seeing how the MAGA right has specifically identified banning masks as one of its main demands in its ongoing assault on academia in general and protests in particular.

Of course, wearing a mask has also become a progressive marker of good citizenship in recent years. There's always irony enough to go around.

In so many ways, masks are a microcosm of everything that's gone wrong in our politics over the last five years. First, we saw the histrionic conservative protests over mask mandates, where wearing a scrap of fabric over one's face in the middle of a lethal pandemic was portrayed as the greatest civil rights violation in living memory. Soon, not content with not wearing their own masks, the right extended outward to try to actively curtail voluntarily masking by others, using spurious comparisons to the KKK as flimsy justification for what was obviously kulturkampf.

A few years later, though, as masks became de rigueur in the protester scene, we saw a few too many progressives get a little too cute in merging the medical justification for masking with an obvious desire to shield people from accountability for criminal activity or violation of campus rules. The idea that the protesters who stormed an Israel history class at Columbia wore masks out of respect for avoiding contagious disease is ludicrous.

But it wasn't long afterwards that the progressives' legitimate concerns were validated once again, as unmasked individuals associated with campus protests found themselves easy marks for Trump's authoritarian predations. It was Mahmoud Khalil's decision not to wear a mask, after all, that made him a prime target to inaugurate Trump's censorial crackdown on international students. Here masking isn't about evading legitimate consequences for unlawful acts, it's about protecting oneself from out-of-control abuses of power.

And of course, the masked officers making sure to conceal their identity while abducting a student off the street for WrongThink makes for the full circle: a terrifying encroachment on civil liberties that brings to mind the secret police of history's most repressive regimes.

The reality is that the ethics surrounding masks seem uniquely resistant to being formalized into rules, and instead demand a modicum of virtue and common sense. Anyone should be able to tell the moral difference between masking as a prophylactic health measure, versus masking to shield oneself from public accountability. Yet any malicious actor can easily say, without being easily refuted, that they are wearing their mask for medical reasons. How would one refute that?

A healthy society resolves these problems simply by being healthy. We accept frankly trivial burdens like mask mandates if its necessary to stop a pandemic. We recognize that masked hooligans trashing a classroom are not the same as EMTs in an ambulance. We expect our police to conduct their operations in a manner that permits review and accountability, so that we can all be confident the law will be followed.

Our society is not healthy. And so choices that should be taken for granted, no longer can be.

Will My Child Grow Up To Be a Human?

The other day, Jill and I were playing a common game with our baby -- telling him all the different things he could be when he grows up.

"Are you going to be ... a writer?" "Are you going to be a hockey player?" "Are you going to be an artist?" "Are you going to be a crypto bro?" (we grimaced for the last one).

Our baby is ten weeks old. He isn't much of anything yet. We don't know what he's going to be. And in the present moment, that unknown doesn't just inspire hope and anticipation. It also inspires deep anxiety and worry. We don't know if our child is going to grow up to be the type of person who is under attack by his own government.

For example, we don't know if our baby is going to have a learning disability. And that matters, given the crusade conservative politicians have launched against education programs for disabled children; one conservative commentator on Fox & Friends bluntly described the conservative position on "making sure disabled kids have access to a public education" as "we're against it."

We don't know if our baby is going to have a serious or chronic medical condition. That matters, given the  deep desire by the Trump administration to gut the American healthcare system, coupled with the bloody swath they're already cutting through critical medical research programs.

We don't know if our baby is going to be gay, or trans, or otherwise queer. That matters, given the inhumane attacks on queer personhood that have been promoted over the past few weeks, threatening to undo decades of progress towards actualizing the American promise of equal justice under law.

Of course, he might not turn out to be any of these things. We don't know, just like we don't know if he'll be a writer or a hockey player or an artist or (shudder) a crypto bro.

So we just have to wait and see, and hope that whatever our child grows into, it'll be one of the categories our country still recognizes as fully human.

Vaccine Day

Today was our baby's two-month checkup, and that included a suite of vaccination shots.

It was not fun.

We have a remarkably mellow and relaxed baby. He rarely fusses. He started sleeping through the night basically immediately. When we arrived at the doctor's office he was smiling and cheerful, happily interacting with us and the doctor and the nurses (which made us feel very guilty -- "you don't know what's coming"). He's even gotten a few pricks before in his first few weeks of life and handled them with aplomb.

But these shots he, understandably, did not like. And it was heartbreaking seeing his eyes suddenly go wide when the needle went in, followed by him screaming and crying hysterically. Indeed, I think today we saw actual tears for the very first time. He was clearly both hurt and scared, and that's an awful thing to witness as a parent. (My parents reminded me that as a kid I was so afraid of shots that I ran around the exam table to try and avoid them -- imagine how difficult that was for them to deal with!).

He was, to be sure, fine. In fact, objectively speaking, he was a real trooper. Some cuddles from mom and dad, and a quick feeding from the rest of his bottle (which we wisely had on hand), and he calmed down pretty quickly. He slept the entire car ride home, and for most of the rest of the day he was a little sleepier and a little fussier than normal, but basically okay. By bedtime, he was essentially back to normal. I'm pretty sure the whole process was a lot harder on us emotionally than it was on him.

I do not believe child vaccination is "a personal decision". Occasionally it is a medical decision, for a small number of children for whom vaccination is temporarily or permanently dangerous. But for most people, vaccination is no more and no less than a civic duty -- an unpleasant one, to be sure, but just something you have to do as part of being a good citizen. As someone who hated shots well into adulthood, I very much understand why babies don't like them. But I'm not a baby, so I get mine. It's that simple.

Anti-vaxx sentiment is often chalked up to conspiracy theorizing and lack of trust in established institutions, and I have no doubt that plays a role. I wonder, though, how much anti-vaxx sentiment ultimately boils down to it being really hard, and really unpleasant, to consciously elect to do something that hurts (even if very temporarily, and even for their greater benefit) your child. It is, in a sense, very understandable that parents would want to avoid that wherever possible -- we do try to avoid that wherever possible. And so when some quack comes along and dangles an excuse not to do it, of course it can be tempting -- particularly for parents who lack support, or who are predisposed to second-guess doctors and other "elites", or who are simply exhausted.

This is not, to be clear, a justification or an apologia for avoiding vaccination. Much the opposite, it is a searing indictment of those charlatans who exploit this latent parental instinct in order to make both their children and all children less healthy and less safe. I can't think of anyone lower, and the fact that one such hustler is in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services fills me with immeasurable shame, and rage.

Ailing

An inevitable event every new parent dreads is the first time their baby gets sick. But a less remarked on, but almost as frightening prospect is the first time you, the parent, gets sick while caring for a baby.

This past week, my keratoconus has been acting up. Looking back on my chart notes from the last time this happens, it appears I have corneal hydrops, which starts manifesting as dry eyes and quickly progresses into significant eye irritation, light sensitivity, and extreme tearing (the other day tears literally started jetting from my eyes when I woke up). In my case, these symptoms also come alongside sinus symptoms on my left side -- so my left nostril is running and I have pain in my left orbital socket and along the teeth the upper left part of my jaw.

Being "sick" (I'll address the quotation marks in a moment) is never fun, but it is far less fun when you have an infant in your care. When it's just you and/or your fellow adult companion, you can kind of slough off your responsibilities temporarily until you're feeling better. No reasonable person will hold it against you if you push back a deadline or skip out on making dinner. In most cases, your loved ones will be able to shuffle some of their responsibilities around to help you. You get taken care of.

But an infant is, of course, quite needy, and it can't press pause on its needs to accommodate yours. If I need to tap out of my evening care shift, my wife has to take it, and then she isn't getting the sleep she needs. If we need to go to the doctor's and I'm not up to driving, then she has to drive, which means he has to come and she has to be up to driving, which, again, is harder when she's getting even less sleep than normal because I'm out of commission. The normal feeling of bodily vulnerability is accentuated because one also feels a little more trapped than usual. There's an extra layer of emotional unpleasantness that is a poor complement to the physical unpleasantness.

The saving grace right now is that I don't have an infection or anything else that could be transmitted to my baby. So at least I don't have to worry about that.

But in classic me-form, that got me thinking about linguistics. How do I generically (but not too generically) describe my condition? Stipulate that "not feeling well" is the umbrella generic term covering all health related reasons why one might, well, not feel well. Under that umbrella, there are some more specific terms.

For example, saying I'm "sick" feels wrong because sickness, to me, refers to an infection. If I told people I was "sick", they'd immediately assume I had some sort of bug. Perhaps more broadly it can include being made unwell by any foreign substance (hence why food poisoning or, for that matter, regular poisoning still to me qualifies one as being "sick"), but it still wouldn't fit what's happening here.

Likewise, Jill suggested "injured". But that for me suggests some discrete moment of trauma that I endured. If I got hit in the eye with a baseball and it felt like this, then I'd be injured. A flare-up of a chronic condition, not triggered by anything particular I'm aware of, doesn't seem to fit.

So -- if your chronic condition does develop a novel complication that makes one feel especially unwell, what are you. Not sick, not injured. "Ailing" also works, but feels too Victorian. Is that the best we can do?

What Will Go Wrong Hardest, Fastest?

It's hard to keep track of the firehose of sewage the Trump administration has already started pumping out in its first few days. From civil rights to cybersecurity, the administration has been taking a wrecking ball to the American governmental project, with consequences that will likely reverberate for years, if not decades.

But I don't want to wait that long. I'm curious: which of Trump's endeavors are likely to blow up hardest, fastest, in a way that is noticeable to the broader public?

For example, take the cancellation of scheduled funding meetings at the National Institute of Health. This is a terrible thing, that will needlessly obstruct critical medical research. But while it's certainly noticeable to the doctors and scientists on the inside, the public impact of it won't be felt for a long time. It's not like there's a cancer cure that was scheduled to come out tomorrow that now is being shelved.

Ditto Pete Hegseth likely getting confirmed as Secretary of Defense. It is very bad that an alcoholic sexual predator is overseeing America's military, but we're not going to lose Buffalo to a Canadian invasion in the short-term. The fallout -- in terms of military readiness, efficiency, professionalism, and so on -- will occur over a longer timescale.

By contrast, the myriad governmental hiring freezes Trump has announced do seem to be breaking out of containment, insofar as they are kneecapping many people who in many cases were all set to move long distances to start a new job, only to have it abruptly pulled out from under them. I'm already seeing a few "leopards ate my face" posts by Trump supporters who are sure that Trump couldn't possibly have meant to do exactly what he said he was going to do.

Tariffs are another good candidate for something that will immediately, dramatically, and noticeably impact American pocketbooks -- especially if they set off another bout of inflation.

But maybe there's something else that will explode harder, faster, and stronger than I anticipate. I would say I can't wait to find out, but I suspect my preferences will have little to say on the matter.

The Making of a Murder-Cheerer

Last week, I spent some time at the eye doctor to address periodic swelling, irritation, and pain in my left eye. This happens periodically, but it got especially bad during my trip to Florida (to the point where airline attendants asked if I needed paramedics to meet me once we landed). The doctor was quite nice but suggested that incidents like this are a symptom of my keratoconus worsening and there probably wasn't much to be done at this point other than hope it doesn't happen too often and ride it out when it does.

I say "at this point" because at an earlier point there was something to be done -- a surgical proceeding called corneal cross-linking. Cross-linking surgery doesn't "fix" keratoconus, it just stops further deterioration, but since keratoconus is a degenerative condition that's no small thing. I was slated to get cross-linking surgery while at Berkeley, but at the last moment my insurer denied coverage as not medically necessary since I could still see with contact lenses. Again, remember that what cross-linking does is stop degeneration -- that is, the surgery would preserve the status quo where I could see with contact lenses -- so the fact that I currently could see with contact lenses is exactly why the surgery was being recommended to me. Nonetheless, even though the surgery had been scheduled for months, the insurer issued its denial just a day or two before, giving me essentially no time to appeal or gather additional medical information to support why the surgery was, in fact, necessary.

Several years later (now in Portland), I was able to get the surgery -- but only in my right eye. My left eye had, in the intervening years, deteriorated to the point where it was no longer a candidate for the procedure. And that deterioration is likely permanent, and (given the periodic swelling etc.) possibly still ongoing. My doctor said that if things continue to get worse in that eye, the only real treatment option available is a full-blown corneal transplant -- quite a bit more intense (and expensive) than cross-linking would have been, and not something I'm especially excited to pursue. There's not even the karmic satisfaction of the insurer having to pay more, because I'm on different insurance now compared to when the surgery was initially denied!

My experience is, of course, not uncommon. We've all been swapping stories on this subject prompted by the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. My case is not to the degree of being denied life-saving care, but permanent vision loss in an eye is not exactly frivolous either. Like many Americans, I have persistent ambient anxiety about what would happen if I faced a major medical crisis, and that anxiety is less about the crisis itself and more wondering in what ways will my insurer try to screw me over in my most vulnerable moment in order to financially ruin me.

There are very, very good reasons for Americans to loathe their health insurance companies. But even still, it is alarming how many people are outright thrilled to have witnessed a street murder. The cause of this excitement is, no doubt, in significant part justifiable fury at the injustices health insurers wreak on regular people. But that more systemic explanation I think has to be cut with acknowledgment that a significant portion of people seem to be excited at the prospect of being justified in cheering a murder. They are luxuriating in this feeling of justified schadenfreude, and are encouraging others to feel similarly, and are hoping to feel it again and again.

No matter how one identifies the cause, such a situation is not a sign of a healthy society. For me, there were eerie echoes of the days after October 7, where we also saw too many people be not just thrilled at seeing Israelis murdered, but thrilled at their mutual, collectively reinforcing justifications at why they were right to be thrilled. Certainly, Thompson was far more directly complicit in injustice than a group of teenaged concertgoers, whose "complicity" was basically being Israelis full stop. But to the celebrators, this is a difference of degree and not kind -- they labored hard to establish why being Israeli was a form of culpable complicity for which the proper punishment was death and the proper affect was a hearty cheer. And that effort to stretch so one can properly enjoy the murder is powerful evidence that the desire to enjoy murders is the actual driving motivation, with the political or strategic apologias just epiphenomenal window dressing. How far down the pecking order at UHC is it warranted to be excited at extermination? To the adjusters? To the HR professionals? To the janitors? We all know the Tumblr accounts who would rush to point out we should cheer not just the death of the Himmlers but every German Nazi, top to bottom -- so why not apply that logic to UHC? Or to Israel? Or to any other institution complicit in systemic injustice -- a category which can include without too much in the way of struggle every institution? (This was one of the lessons of The Good Place -- while everyone has an obligation to try to do the right thing, overindulgence in "complicity" arguments makes everyone guilty and places everyone in hell).

The terrible realization many of us had, and are having again, is that for many the orientation towards Israel/Palestine or the American healthcare system isn't "let's create a just political structure for all" but rather "I want to see the right people be hurt," and the thirst for the latter is what drives the nominal political commitments rather than vice versa. Even where one can sympathize with the causes, this sort of outlook never leads anywhere good; more often than not, it's just people coming up with stories for why they should be permitted to revel in the misery of others. As a species, we should know well that our problem is not that we are too skittish about justifying brutality and violence, and so we should be hesitant about any political momentum which takes the form of accentuating and accelerating a popular desire to enjoy murder.

It is no answer to point out the many, many more people whose lives have been ruined by unjust insurance denials (UHC has the highest denial rate in the country, denying a full third of all filed claims). For one, anyone who reads a story about one of these denials and lets out a whoop and high fives would be a bad person too. More fundamentally, I also return to one of the most outstanding articles I've ever read, Robin West's "Sex, Law, and Consent," which does a superb job explaining how direct interpersonal injustices are qualitatively different than "systemic" ones even when the latter cause greater tangible loss than the former. We experience being robbed or burgled differently from being on the receiving end of wage theft, even if the latter might actually take more dollars from our pocket; West extends this analysis to how we think of rape vis-a-vis the broader suite of patriarchal norms which regularly generate "consent" to sexual activities that are not truly or enthusiastically desired. Again, this doesn't mean that UHC's conduct in the healthcare system isn't an example of serious injustice -- it is, just like wage theft is and just like structural sexism is -- but the point is that we're not simply delusional in viewing street murder as qualitatively different notwithstanding the fact that it is but one dead body.

I say all this because there is not, or should not be, a tension between "the murder of Brian Thompson is bad" and "we are obligated to create a more just and humane healthcare system that is not liable to the exploitations and predations of entities like UnitedHealthCare." Anxiety about insurer-driven financial ruin notwithstanding, and direct experience with insurer manipulation causing permanent medical injury notwithstanding, I never wanted Brian Thompson to die, and I cannot relate to thousands of internet strangers who did want him to die. What I want is for our health care system to work for us and to take care of us. That's all. My first response to Thompson's murder was to write:

The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is outrageous. We as a society must do everything in our power to ensure that a tragedy like this never occurs again. If that means implementing national universal healthcare so that anger over a failing private system isn't displaced onto violence, so be it.

And while yes, that was intentionally snarky, I also meant it with total earnestness. We should hate murder. And we should commit ourselves to creating a just healthcare system that doesn't generate justified seething hatred amongst ordinary Americans.

Yet here we see another element of our despairing time, which is that the proof is in the pudding in terms of what drives social change. Just like it may be sadly true that manipulative echo chambers are a more effective political strategy that earnest and honest engagement with people of diverse political views, it may be sadly true that violence and social disruption are able to drive necessary political change where persuasion and law fail. It is a bad precedent when we let terroristic violence drive even salutary social change, and the lesson to draw from that is to make salutary social changes without being prompted to do so by terroristic violence. And if we can't learn that lesson, then I'm at a loss except to say that it inherently puts us in a very grim place, and nobody should be excited to live there.

I have no answers here. But I again cannot help but feel that it is fundamentally unhealthy when people feel, and are encouraged to feel, excitement over murder. For too many people, the murder of Brian Thompson isn't about murder or even about generating justice in the healthcare space. It rather is an opportunity to enjoy the spectacle of a murder, and feel righteous in doing so. That instinct is one we should be very wary about letting flower unchecked, in ourselves or in others.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXIX: American Healthcare Inequities

I really do try to stay off the bad place. You know that trope in cartoons where the protagonist runs away from monsters or a blizzard or some other element of chaos, and slams the door behind him? And then after a bit of quiet, he opens the door a tiny crack to see if the coast is clear, and the maelstrom immediately swirls in the doorway and tries to batter its way inside for the split second before he slams it shut again?

Yeah, that's what checking Twitter is like these days. Peek your head in for even a moment, and it's just immediately somebody denying 10/7 atrocities or a tsunami of Nazi reply guys or, as we have here, a sparkling new 21st Century Jewish Doctors' Plot.

Over at the good somewhat better place, I alluded to these posts to call them "a crystalline example of anti-Zionism in its 'antisemitism is the socialism of fools' guise," but also to observe that the degree to which sentiments like these are accepted or repudiated in the relevant communities of interest will depend almost entirely on how they're treated by non-Jewish non-Zionists. Obviously, the folks pushing or considering this line don't care a whit what I think, but Jewish anti-Zionists may be dismayed to learn their opinions will be equally irrelevant. The non-Jewish non-Zionists might have the epistemic authority to be able to arrest its momentum, but it will be hard -- in large part, because posts like this, precisely because of their antisemitism, are genuinely helpful to anti-Zionism's growth and influence in American politics. 

It is a great and comforting lie that "antisemitism hurts our [anti-Zionist] movement". Antisemitism is one of the most powerful mobilizing forces the world has ever seen; it would be stunning if it did not provide at least some help to any movement that managed to successfully harness it. To the extent Americans can be persuaded that Jewish nationalism is why the US doesn't have good health care, that's very likely to make more Americans anti-Zionist and so benefit anti-Zionism as a movement. It would be, when you think about, far too convenient if "opposing antisemitism" only entailed opposing things that already hurt the movement -- that's a cost-free action. The trouble comes when opposing antisemitism means actually forgoing useful tactics and ceding promising opportunities -- but that's where the rubber hits the road. 

(This doesn't mean that the only problem with Dr. Marya's supposition is that it hurts Jews. It does, in this case, also hurt the movement for health care equity insofar as it diverts scarce political mobilizing resources towards attacking a "cause" that almost certainly plays no role in the effects she wishes to undo -- hence, the "socialism of fools" moniker. In terms of raw political calculus, the trade-off at issue here is "more effective anti-Zionism" pitted against "less effective health care equity advocacy" -- alongside, of course, the danger toward Jews).

But substantive issues aside, I also want to flag a move in the last pictured post, where Dr. Marya -- after calling Zionism as "supremacist, racist ideology" which may be a "structural impediment" to American healthcare equity -- contends that to accuse her of antisemitism is "an ad hominem attack" that obstructs "substantive debate".

Do you see the issue? This is what I was getting at in my Fathom essay: the easy, almost reflexive treatment of "antisemitism" as, not a subject or component of "substantive debate", but as an obstacle to it. This invariably occurs in tandem with the speaker demanding absolute free rein to open fire on Zionism as racist and white supremacist and colonialist and apartheid and genocidal. We must have an open debate on the merits about those important allegations! But not so "open" that "antisemitism" can be part of the discussion. Alone among the "isms", it is cordoned off from "substantive debate" and treated as an ad hominem attack. This, to borrow (as I did in the Fathom essay) from Jerome McCristal Culp Jr., is not open debate at all, it is a "a coerced argument … that concedes the key intellectual contest." That this happens even in this context, where the issue to be "substantive debated" is as transparently absurd as "Zionist doctors are why we can't have nice health care things in America", is demonstrative of just how deep-seated the reflex runs.

I cannot quite say I respect the position that all of these "isms" (racism and antisemitism and colonialism and so on) are toxic to "open debate" and must be avoided -- it's too clearly unworkable and renders impossible too many obviously essential social conversations -- but at least that's a facially coherent position. The notion that antisemitism alone carries this toxicity (or, for people with different politic, every "ism" but antisemitism does) and for that reason "doesn't count" as part of the "substantive debate" is incoherent save for its naked partisanship. But its incoherence in no way is arresting its prominence: it is held by many and seducing many more. All we can do is flag its absurdity and demand that, if open conversations are to be had, then this is part of the piper that must be paid. There is no entitlement to not have to think about antisemitism, even if you really, really don't want to. And a claim of antisemitism is an argument, not a smear.

.... And Getting Worse Roundup

This will not be my cheeriest roundup. But there are a bunch of links burning a hole in my pocket, so here you go.

* * * *

Apropos yesterday's post on Fugitive Uterus Laws, a Washington Post article on similar efforts underway to set up checkpoint towns in Texas designed to capture any pregnant women who has designs on leaving the state for freedom.

North Carolina Republicans considering impeaching a state supreme court justice because she talked about racism. While I can't fault Slate for juxtaposing this against the undisclosed largesse heaped upon Justice Thomas, my mind more rapidly went to efforts in Wisconsin to impeach a state supreme court justice because she might vote for democracy.

A politically engaged fifteen year old kid asked a (not even that tough!) question that made Ron DeSantis uncomfortable on the campaign trail. So he sent his goons to rough him up.

You see, the real problem with the "War on Drugs" is that it's too metaphorical.

The latest Fifth Circuit crack-pottery: it's probably illegal for the FDA to tell humans they're not horses (yes, this is the latest conservative institution to burn its remaining dignity in defense of ivermectin conspiracies).

Georgia school district: saying the word "gay" around fifth graders is like graphically describing the horrors of the Holocaust to kindergarteners. 

Whither #TeamVaccineNanoBot?

The COVID vaccines have been widely available for well over two years now. Surely, if Biden/Soros/Gates/the Rothschilds were going to flip a switch and take over our bodies with the nefarious nanobot technology they deviously microchipped us with via the vaccine, it would have happened by now. So I'll ask: what happened to team nanobot?

In all seriousness: how do the conspiracy theorists explain that none of their dire predictions have come to pass? In even greater seriousness, I know the answer is: they won't bother to explain; conspiracy theorists happily skip to the next mania without bothering to look back whenever their last round of doomsayings come to nothing. But I still feel a deep urge to hold their feet to the fire and say "where are your nanobots now, huh?"

Alas, that is likely to remain just a fantasy. But we can still take the opportunity to reflect on just how stupid anti-vaxx activists are and ever will continue to be. Remember: they're always wrong, until finally, they're still wrong.

Scientists Aren't Gods. Fifth Circuit Judges Are Gods

The Fifth Circuit has released its decision in the mifepristone case. In essence (and I read this quickly, so take with a grain of salt), the court did not overturn the initial FDA approval of mifepristone or the approval of generic variants (the former because the claim was time-barred; the latter because the plaintiffs showed no specific evidence that they were additionally injured by generic approvals). However, it upheld the district court's stay on subsequent FDA decisions which made mifepristone more readily accessible (e.g., allowing it to be prescribed by telemedicine). The new FDA regulations were, the court concluded, "arbitrary and capricious" primarily because while the agency did analyze the risks latent in the individual alterations it was making to the regulatory schema and found them to be negligible, the FDA did not specifically analyze how all these changes might interact when aggregated together.

The decision is, as the panel took pains to repeatedly note, stayed until the Supreme Court has an opportunity to act.

In May, I proffered three possibilities of what the Fifth Circuit would do in this case. The first was that they would take the Supreme Court's hint and reverse the district court. The second was that they would largely affirm the district court but try to file off the "rougher edges" to make it more likely the Supreme Court would uphold the ruling. And the third would be to let their freak flag fly and go all in on defending the extremity of the district court ruling.

What we got was mostly in that middle camp. The court didn't accept the most extreme iterations of the district court's ruling which would have completely taken mifepristone off the shelves nationwide. And its analysis, for the most part, styles itself as sober review of the administrative record and standing doctrine. But the end result was still the court stretching the law to force a substantial rollback in its accessibility. The hope, I think it is clear, is to present this ruling as the "reasonable" conservative position that doesn't go as far as the district court and so one that liberals can't really complain about if it is upheld (spoiler: we can and should).

Judge Ho concurred in part and dissented in part because he would have upheld the district court's decision in its entirety, and in contrast to the majority his opinion was squarely in the realm of possibility number three. He went whole hog on every possible avenue for showing his right-wing culture warrior bona fides, including florid discussions of the importance of the doctor's "conscience rights" to be mad that they have to treat patients who are suffering from medical emergencies they disapprove of and a full-scale defense of the applicability of the Comstock Act to block any sort of approval for abortion medication.

There is stiff competition for who is the worst federal appellate judge. But I'm not sure there's any competition for who the most arrogant federal appellate judge is (and it's no surprise, perhaps, that it's a University of Chicago Law alum taking the crown). In that vein, one passage of Judge Ho's opinion especially stood out to me -- his strident defense of the judiciary refusing to accord deference to the scientists at the FDA.

In this appeal, neither the FDA nor Danco is content to simply argue that the district court erred. They disparage the ruling as “an unprecedented judicial assault on a careful regulatory process.” The “non-expert” district court issued an “unprecedented order countermanding the scientific judgment of the Food and Drug Administration.” 

Their message is simple: The scientists at the FDA can do no wrong. So courts have no business reviewing their actions. 

That’s mistaken on multiple levels.  

[....] 

Scientists have contributed an enormous amount to improving our lives. But scientists are human beings just like the rest of us. They’re not perfect. See, e.g., Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, 10 F.4th 430, 464–70 (5th Cir. 2021) (en banc) (Ho, J., concurring). None of us are. We all make mistakes.

And the FDA has made plenty....

The scientists at the FDA deserve our respect and our gratitude, but not our blind deference. That would defy Congress’s clear directive that courts conduct independent legal review of FDA action under the APA. 

Of course it is true that scientists can make mistakes. Judges can make mistakes too (this case is replete with them). And since "we all make mistakes," the actual germane question is who is more likely -- scientific experts or generalist judges -- to make a mistake when it comes to assessing highly technical medical and scientific decisions on drug approval. And the answer there is obvious: judges are far more likely to be mistaken. Hence why the standard of review is "arbitrary and capricious". The agency doesn't get blind deference, but it still gets regular deference. Absent blatant, smack-you-in-the-face mistakes -- the sort that go beyond disputes about best practices or disagreements on matters of judgment and slide all the way into "arbitrary" or "capricious" conduct -- judges defer to the scientists because judges know that in normal circumstances they're more likely to cause a mistake than to correct one.

In this case, the FDA analyzed the risks of its new regulations enhancing public access to mifepristone and found that they were negligible. Would it have been better if it is specifically analyzed how these risks might change when all the regulatory changes were aggregated? I have no idea (since again, I'm not a scientific expert, and I'm modest enough not to venture a guess). But it is hard to argue that the decision to rely on the individual negligibility of the risks is either "arbitrary" or "capricious". That sort of pot-shot second-guessing of scientific judgment is exactly what normal judicial modesty and deference should foreclose. 

But Judge Ho's eagerness to emphasize the fallibility of the FDA's scientists is quite predictably paired with a blind refusal to recognize his own parallel status as a mere mortal. In our constitutional system, it seems, scientists aren't gods; only Fifth Circuit judges are.

Wisconsin is a Failed State

Folks are cackling at a line-item veto Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) made which took a one-year increase to the school budget and, though some clever deletions, turned it into a four-hundred year increase. The veto goes "for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year, add $325." The new version reads: "for 2023-2425, add $325."

Obviously, this is hilarious and, as trolling goes, it's trolling for good. And there's nothing new about this in Wisconsin either -- when I teach about the line-item veto, I show an example from former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who similarly vetoed individual bits and bobs from an enacted law to create a brand new spending program where none previously existed.

But still, it's fair to say that this is not how a functioning government should proceed.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republicans have blocked a proposal to require schoolchildren be vaccinated against meningitis. It's become increasingly clear that the anti-vaxx takeover of the GOP no longer has anything to do with COVID, and has become a general opposition to public health initiatives of all stripes. While this isn't Wisconsin specific, it is another instance of the state's ludicrously-gerrymandered legislature drinking fully and deeply of the waters of the death cult.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the chaos that has afflicted the Wisconsin Supreme Court in recent years. Of course, we all remember when one justice on that august court tried to choke out his esteemed colleague. More recently, members of that Court have repeatedly flirted with 2020 election denialism. One former member compared affirmative action to slavery. And while it may be the single funniest thing I've ever witnessed, having the Court's liberal faction celebrate the victory of a progressive challenger by marching into a watch party room to "it's bad bitch o'clock" also probably isn't exactly the sign of a perfectly healthy judicial body.

So yeah, Wisconsin isn't in great shape. Maybe folks should try Minnesota instead?