Author: Nick Bergus

CDC Director, Citing Botched Pandemic Response, Calls for CDC Reorganization

Sharon LaFraniere, reporting for The New York Times:

“For 75 years, C.D.C. and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations,” Dr. Walensky said in a startling acknowledgment of the agency’s failings. “My goal is a new, public health, action-oriented culture at C.D.C. that emphasizes accountability, collaboration, communication and timeliness.”

The CDC’s response was certainly hurt by the Trump Administration’s operational ineptitude, but we still had many government agencies that still accomplished their basic functions between 2017 and 2021. A central theme in The Premonition was the CDC’s failure to take a wartime footing.

The best time to fix the CDC is 75 years ago. The second best time is today.

This Universe and an Alternative One

The first image released from the Webb telescope offered the deepest view humans have had yet into the universe, showing light that is 4.6 billion years old.

There’s a alternate universe where religion has a long and rich history of respect for scientific inquiry since science allows us to see the grand order of the natural world, glimpse the true awesomeness of the universe and know humanity’s fundamental inability to comprehend it all.

A Post-Roe World

My wife and I were in our mid-30s, financially secure with good careers and a safety net, and parents of a happy, healthy 9-year-old when we first considered abortion.

We did not want a bigger family and, despite being stable and secure, were scared and uncertain.

So on a weekend, we sent our kid to their grandparents to spend the night, took a pregnancy test and got rip roaring drunk in the wash of relief that followed its coming back negative.

I booked a vasectomy following a simple conversation with my doctor and a referral to a urologist. The hardest part was figuring out paying a bill through some third-party system since my primary provider was affiliated with the Catholic Church. (You know.)

Today, we are now in the shocking-but-not-surprising place that our world is officially a post-Roe world. It hurts. It’s infuriating. It’s a lot of other things I don’t have words for.

Whatever emotional pain I feel pales in comparison to physical and emotional hurt, and entirely predictable disfigurement and death, that will come with abortion bans in Republican states across the nation.

There will still be abortions. These abortions will be more dangerous for those who cannot travel to states where the medical procedure remains legal, and our neighbors and loved ones and friends will feel less safe, less in control and less cared for, no mater their station.

Fuck these illegitimate, undemocratic, lying justices.

1,000 Miles

In March, I bought a brand-new electric-assist bicycle. I just hit 1,000 miles on the odometer.

I don’t ride it much for recreation, so that 1,000 miles represents 1,000 miles of replaced gas-powered car trips, including three days a week of replacing my 24-mile-round-trip commute, weekly grocery runs and other trips out of the house.

Planning my week around bike riding is becoming second nature. For the time being, we have two cars, but there’s only been a couple of occasions where we’ve used both.

While a full Midwestern winter is still an unattempted hurdle, I’ve ridden in temperatures below freezing (get a balaclava and warm gloves) and, now, in a heat advisory (just sweat, but at least you’ll get a good breeze). I think we can probably ditch one of our cars.

The speed and silence of the bike means you get close encounters with nature. I’ve startled deer, almost hit a raccoon and been attacked by a goose.

There is great joy in being able to ride with traffic at the speed limit, with drivers still seeing you as a slow-moving bike as you quickly fend off their attempts to pass. Short trips are faster, since you can almost always find parking near the front door.

There are certainly cyclists who look down their nose at ebikes, who call it cheating. OK, I’ll still pass them on my commute home without guilt.

Over these past 130 days, I’ve found this “magic flying machine,” as my wife calls hers, has returned a great amount of joy in cycling for me.

Jan. 6 in June 2022

Revisiting footage from Jan. 6, 2021, in June 2022, even just this was more powerful, more terrifying, than I thought it would be. Just this 10-minute clip, part of the first two-hour hearing, took me back 17 months.

I used the word “coup” then. The Select Committee used the word “coup” yesterday.

Many members of the GOP are trying to change the subject because it’s hard to see it as anything but an attempted coup.

How San Francisco Became a Failed City

Nellie Bowles writing in The Atlantic:

These are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

Iowa City is not San Francisco, but our politics, and, I suspect, our problems, share some similarities.