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Exploring Human Potential

The Planetary Playing Field For Humanity: Surviving Tomorrow’s “Hongerwinter”.

Posted on | September 4, 2023 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

When it comes to our earthly survival as a human species, words are often under-powered and off-the-mark. Clearer concepts, definitions and terms are required for clarity. Here are five terms that are useful and worth remembering:

  1. Planetary Boundaries
  2. Earth Systems
  3. Human Perturbations
  4. Planetary Scale Destabilization
  5. Holocene Epoch vs. Anthropocene Epoch 

These terms all tie back to a single source – a child of World War II, only seven when his home in Amsterdam was overrun by Nazis. His father was a waiter, his mother a cook in a local hospital. He’d later recall with a shudder the Fall of 1944, the beginning of “hongerwinter” (winter of  famine) which he blamed for stunting his growth and contributing to his short stature. The event also exposed him to death for the first time, losing several classmates to starvation and frozen temperatures that winter.

There were no early signs of brilliance. He attended a technical school and prepared for a life in construction. He met and married a Finnish girl, Terttu when he was 25, and they settled in a small town 200 km north of Stockholm. It was his wife who recognized his potential first, pointing him toward a newspaper ad for a job as a programmer at the Stockholm University’s Meterorologic Institute (MISU). No matter that he had no experience in data analytics. They moved to Stockholm. He worked and they both took college courses. By age 30, with sponsorship from the world’s expert on acid rain and first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Bert Bolin), he received a master’s degree in meteorology. Five years later, after focusing on stratospheric chemistry, he earned his doctorate.

When he died at 87, with Terttu, two daughters and three grandchildren at his side, Paul Crutzen was 87 years old.  A tribute in Scientific American at the time stated “Paul Crutzen [may have been] the greatest scientist of all time.” This was not because he had been granted the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (without ever having taken a chemistry course) for discovering how ozone was formed in the stratosphere; or for his coining the term “Nuclear Winter” to describe the planetary devastation that would follow a nuclear attack in 1984; or for being the major adviser on global warming to Pope Francis in preparing his encyclical Laudato Si’/”On Care For Our Common Home” prior to the Paris Climate Accords in 2015.

No, what Crutzen is especially remembered for is a momentary lapse in his usually pleasant and calm demeanor while serving on a panel of The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) for the the International Council for Science (ICSU) at its May, 2000 meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The speaker at the mic, in outlining the current challenge of maintaining the Earth’s life support systems referred once too often to the Holocene Epoch, that is the period of roughly the last 11,700 years of our planet’s existence when humans were able to survive, thrive and develop in general harmony with their host planet. In a moment of spontaneous scientific combustion, Dr. Crutzen muttered in a muted but still audible whisper, “Let’s stop it. We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene.”

A hushed silence fell over the crowd as the world’s top Earth scientists were forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth – man was destroying the planet. Summarized in a report a few days later, Crutzen wrote, “Considering these and many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere…it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.”

For scientists in the field, this was a call to action. As the American Meteorological Society later recounted, “From the perspective of Earth system science, many well-respected scientists in that field are convinced that the transformation from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, a term clearly defined by Crutzen in a moment of exasperation, is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Nine years later, Crutzen’s colleagues from Stockhom University, Will Steffen and Johan Rockstrom, published a paper on “the environmental limits within which humanity can safely operate.” In that paper, “A Safe Operating Space For Humanity” published in Nature, they proposed nine “planetary boundaries” to gauge “the continued development of human societies and the maintenance of the Earth system(ES) in a resilient and accommodating state.” In there view, measuring and ongoing monitoring of these boundaries would provide “a science-based analysis of the risk of human perturbations” that might “destabilize the ES on a planetary scale.”

But in the world of international geoscience, laying out human responsibility for planetary stress is one thing, but declaring an end to the 11,700 year Holocene Epoch was quite another. In effect, Crutzen was provoking a geological revolution, and that is why a hush fell over the crowd that day.

But coming out of the original 2000 Mexico meeting of the International Geosphere-Biospere Program, participants were energized and decided to form a 40 member global Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). One arm focused on defining planetary boundaries (PB), and specific data measures for each, while another would explore sites that might provide geologic proof in soil samples of the irreversible impact of humans on their planet, and support the now widely held belief that a new geologic epic had indeed been launched 

After extensive analysis, a new paradigm with 9 planetary boundaries was published in 2009 and reviewed in 2015 and included “a science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilize Earth state at a planetary scale.” The list with associated measures for six of the nine measures included:

  1. Climate Change (CO2 concentration in the atmosphere < 350 ppm);
  2. Ocean Acidification (Seawater Aragonite levels – crystal calcium carbonate ≥ 80% of pre-industrial levels).
  3. Stratospheric Ozone (less than 5% reduction in total atmospheric O3 from a pre-industrial level).
  4. Nitrogen/Phosphorous Cycle  (artificial eutrophication of air, soil, water)
  5. Global Freshwater supply (< 4000 km3/yr of consumptive use of runoff resources).
  6. Land System use(< 15% of the ice-free land surface under cropland).
  7. Biosphere Integrity (an annual rate of loss of biological diversity of < 10 extinctions per million species).
  8. Novel Chemicals (emissions of toxic compounds such as synthetic organic pollutants and radioactive materials, but also genetically modified organisms, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).
  9. Atmospheric Aerosols (natural and manmade dust deposited in the lower atmosphere).

The control measures track shifts from Holocene conditions that are human mitigated. For example, CO2 concentrations during Holocene fluctuated around 280 ppm. Since 1950, they have risen to exceed 350 ppm, a level that geologic studies demonstrate last existed on our planet 300,000 years ago. In 2022, the level hit a new record of 417 ppm

The Planetary Boundary (PB) framework was designed to promote maintenance of a “desired Holocene state” that has served human development well. A “safe operating space” for human society development on Earth is not a luxury. By 2015, it was determined that four of the planetary boundaries had already been breached including climate change, biosphere integrity (diversity), biogeochemical flows ( nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), and land-system change. Seven years later, in 2022, a 5th boundary (introduction of novel entities – formerly “chemical pollution”) was crossed.

At the same time, the 40 member Anthropocene Working Group labored on in search of a single site that might yield a core geologic bore sample that proved that man in real time had shifted Earth’s basic geology. In 2023, Colin Waters, the AWG’s chair reported “We see a clear, abrupt, and global transition from the previous Earth epoch to something new”, and announced the six finalists –  “a peat bog in Poland’s Sudeten Mountains;  Searsville Lake, in California; Crawford Lake, in Ontario; a seafloor in the Baltic Sea;  a bay in Japan;  a water-filled volcanic crater in China; an ice core drilled from the Antarctic Peninsula;  and two coral reefs, in Australia and the Gulf of Mexico.”

On July 11, 2023, Canadian Geographic proudly broadcast, “The Anthropocene is here — and tiny Crawford Lake has been chosen as the global ground zero.” As the article stated “Its nomination still needs to be voted on by three higher bodies of geologists over the coming year, but if they, too, approve the candidacy, Crawford Lake will be endowed with the ‘golden spike,’ a literal brass marker that signifies that the planet shifted, in about 1950, from one unit of geological time to the next.”

Why Crawford Lake? Turns out this “humble little lake” has a very rare geochemical mix including a depth to surface area mix that prevents top and bottom layer mixing, and prominent oxygen levels within its bottom layer. The fact that it is a “meromictic” lake (meaning its top and bottom layers never mix) makes it unique in all of North America. Over the years, as material settled to the lake bottom it was sealed by distinct couplets of calcite deposits that market summer and winter. This allowed core samples to be accurately dated. For example, in 1970, corn pollen found in one of the layers was able to be accurately dated by stratigraphers to the Middle Ages.

What they are looking for in the soil and stone are concrete markers? According to published reports, dry ice frozen core samples were able to be dated back over 1000 years. More relevant to the Anthropocene, “By 1950 or so, a rapid, dramatic increase of carbon-based particles shows up from industrial processes, including coal-fired steel-making in a nearby Hamilton foundry, as well as a rapid rise in plutonium from nuclear testing, a change in nitrogen isotopes from fertilizer use, and the chemical fallout from acid rain.” 

These, and other findings, allowed 75 local scientists to champion Crawford Lakes candidacy with Francine McCarthy, a geologist at Brock University in the lead. She stated, “If people see that stratigraphers, a conservative bunch of geologists, are willing to put a line on the timescale and call it by the name that recognizes — that admits — the role of humans as a causal agency, then that’s mammoth.”

Were Paul Crutzen alive, he would surely agree that the announcement of the 39th Epoch in our 4.6 billion year planetary history was not a call for celebration, but rather a call to action. The challenge for human and planetary survival is now scientifically linked, and no less urgent than was Paul’s own childhood survival in 1944 if we are to avoid a  “hongerwinter” of our own.

 

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Can We Make Sense Of American Health Care? And How Would We Do That?

Posted on | August 29, 2023 | 6 Comments

Mike Magee

This past week my wife and I were at a family event to celebrate a 70th birthday. Our extended family has more than a few doctors. One who had read CODE BLUE and had a strong interest in health policy asked if I felt I (and others) were too hard on doctors. My response was yes, but that it was intentional and came with the territory. Combining scientific, sometimes life and death expertise, with high-touch compassion, understanding and partnership has always been a “big ask,” but that was what we and others had signed up for as “health professionals.”

But can a health professional be “professional”  in a fundamentally misaligned health system? And,if not, does a health professional have a responsibility to engage in an effort to reform and transform the system to behave professionally?

Professionals are generally members of a vocation with special training, highly educated, enjoy special trust and work autonomy, abide by strict moral and ethical obligations, and in return are generally self-regulating. Their academic training is expected to reliably provide those they serve with special skills, judgement, and services. When they deliver, society responds with confidence and trust and durable long-term relationships.

My inquiring family member and many of his contemporaries have come to believe that this is nigh impossible under the current heavily corporatized, profit driven, inequitable, under-insured, and widely inaccessible system. They have begun to voice that being an ethical and competent professional in an unprofessional system is not possible, and not their fault.

When system redesign guru, W. Edward Deming, the father of Quality Control Management, and the man credited with assisting the Japanese in transforming their auto industry, he had this to say in 1993 about transformation: “The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside…The individual, once transformed, will: set an example; be a good listener, but will not compromise; continually teach other people; and help people to pull away from their current practices and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past.”

Six years later Don Berwick MD, Emeritus President of the Institute For Healthcare Improvement and now Harvard Health Policy professor, delivered a classic speech, “Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care”,  sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation. In it Don recounted the events surrounding the tragic fire at Mann Gulch, Montana which claimed the lives of 13 “smokejumpers” on August 5, 1949. He reviewed the lessons learned in a system analysis by Professor Karl E. Weich of the University of Michigan, in his paper titled,“The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.”

Berwick explained, “Sensemaking is the process through which the fluid, multilayered world is given order, within which people can orient themselves, find purpose, and take effective action. Weick is a postmodern thinker. He believes that there is little or no preexisting sense of organization in the world—that is, no order that comes before the definition of order. Organizations don’t discover sense, they create it…In groups of interdependent people, organizations create sense out of possible chaos. Organizations unravel when sensemaking collapses, when they can no longer supply meaning, when they cling to interpretations that no longer work.”

Now roughly a quarter century ago, Berwick concluded, “I love medicine. I love the purpose of our work. But we are unraveling, I think… I love the purpose of our work. But we are unraveling, I think. Sense is collapsing… We need to face reality…Why did it take the Mann Gulch crew so long to realize they were in trouble? The soundest explanation is not that the threat was too small to see; it is that it was too big. Some problems are too overwhelming to name. I now think that that is where we have come in health care; I have been radicalized.”

Clearly the profit-driven visions we are currently using are under-powered, and we seem to be heading in the wrong direction with information technology and AI which are fully prepared to make permanent a system that is moving patients to despair and doctors to early retirement. What are the questions my family member and his health policy colleagues should be asking now?

1. How do we make America and all Americans healthy?

2. What will be our national health care plan, and who will be in charge?

3. How do we balance national and state responsibilities?

4. How do we maintain balanced humanistic and scientific care, and preserve patient and health professional autonomy over complex life and death decision making?

5. How do we advance healthy behaviors while providing high touch access to health professionals for acute and moderate issues?

6. How do we use information technology and AI to expand human and social, rather than just financial, capital?

7. How do we prioritize investment in human contact between patients and health professionals over wealth enhancement and brick and mortar expansions.

8. How do we put a smile (independent of money) back on the faces of doctors, nurses and patients.

9. How do we separate hospital and physician profit driven research from direct patient care?

10. How do we move to geographic annual budgeting of comprehensive care and eliminate individual billing/reimbursement operations?

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The 1 Question Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum Should Ask Tonight.

Posted on | August 23, 2023 | Comments Off on The 1 Question Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum Should Ask Tonight.

Mike Magee

This evening, the Republican Party will sponsor their first Primary Debate. It will be historic in featuring the absence of their lead contender for the 2024 Presidential campaign, a candidate who appears committed to the destruction of his own political party

Events over the past year clearly have confirmed that we are a “work in progress” even as we stubbornly affirm our good intentions to create a society committed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

With the Dobbs’ decision, our Supreme Court has unleashed long-abandoned regressive state laws designed to reinforce selective patriarchy and undermine the stability and confidence of America’s women and families. As a result, our nation’s health professionals, and the patients they care for, potentially find themselves “on the wrong side of the law.”

Three months ago, our former President decided to deliver a message to North Carolina Republican supporters claiming that he was engaged in the “final battle” with “corrupt” forces, most especially the “Deep State” that was “out to get him.” This is the same state that politically birthed Mark Meadows, former Congressman from the 11th District of North Carolina, a position he resigned to become Trump’s Chief of Staff on March 21, 2020. That ultimately landed him a position on the roster of 19 individuals indicted by District Attorney Fani Willis on RICO charges for conspiracy and racketeering.

Trump and Meadow’s actions stand in stark contrast to the ethics and values I experienced in the UNC surgery program in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1973 to 1978.  They also do not reflect the standards advanced in North Carolina’s K-12 lesson plan, titled “The Rule of Law,” which begins with the Teddy Roosevelt quote, “No man is above the law, and no man is below it” from his 1903 State of the Union address.

The plan affirms that law is fundamental to societal health stating:

“The rule of law is basically an agreement that everyone will play by the rules. This allows us to enjoy a more peaceful and safe existence. The rule of law also ensures the protection of certain rights for each of us. Ideally, the rule of law applies equally to everyone, meaning you are treated fairly and equally, under the same set of rules, regardless of who you are.”

The curricular plan asks a question I’d love to hear FOX news co-moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, ask this evening.

“How do laws affect each of us, and what functions do laws serve in our society?

According to the NC curricular plan, here are the answers the K-12 teachers (and tonight’s FOX moderators) should be looking for. 

1.“Laws serve as standards of conduct…

2. Laws maintain order, ensure predictability, and provide security. 

3. Many laws in America grant and protect particular individual rights and freedoms, ensure equality, and advocate for the common good.

4. Laws guarantee certain benefits to citizens (e.g., schools, health services, etc.)

5. Laws assign responsibilities to citizens (e.g., paying taxes.)

6. Laws define what duties the government will perform and can also limit the power of governmental officials.

7. Laws can facilitate different forms of change (e.g., toxic waste disposal, anti-discrimination, prohibition of spousal abuse, etc.)

8. Laws are used to manage different forms of conflict, relying on courts, lawyers, and judges for such.

9. Ideally, laws should be well designed to ensure justice; they should be designed so that the average citizen can interpret, understand, and thus follow them.” 

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The Lash of St. Francis Cuts Deep 84 Years Later.

Posted on | August 20, 2023 | Comments Off on The Lash of St. Francis Cuts Deep 84 Years Later.

Mike Magee

On September 25, 1939, Southern California woke with fear of The Lash of St. Francis or El Cordonazo on the horizon. The term refers to northwestern tracking, cyclone-laden storms that can hit the western shores of Mexico and California most commonly around the Feast of Saint Francis, on October 4th. This one made landfall at San Pedro, California.

The calamity that day in Southern California was a rare event, the only one of its kind in the 20th century. The last one to hit, prior to this was in San Diego on October 2,1858. The Earth’s rotation normally assures that such cyclones in this region move from east to west, and out to sea. But the 1939 storm was the exception, and the big problem was the rain, some 5 1/2 inches over a 24 hour period (though the town of Indio, in the Coachella Valley of Southern California‘s Colorado Desert region experienced 7 inches and buried the valley in 4 feet of water. Forty five died on land, and 48 perished at sea. One positive – the storm marked the end of a 1-week heat wave where Los Angeles reached 107 F degrees and claimed 100 lives.

History repeated itself 84 years later this weekend, with a memorable “Lash” on the backend of a summer heat wave. The human, economic and ecological tolls remain to be calculated. But one thing is for certain, global warming has arrived and with it the production of both heat and water, and a new, all too familiar meteorological phenomenon, the “atmospheric river.”

NOAA defines “atmospheric river” this way: “Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere – like rivers in the sky – that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics. While atmospheric rivers can vary greatly in size and strength, the average atmospheric river carries an amount of water vapor roughly equivalent to the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Exceptionally strong atmospheric rivers can transport up to 15 times that amount. When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow.”

To be clear, these drenching above-ground collections of water are generally a blessing because they provide most of the much needed precipitation to California dry areas and replenish the water cycles in the region. But as the Earth has warmed, they more frequently represent “too much of a good thing”, and are now responsible for 90% of California’s flood damage.

NASA reports that “the increases in water vapor are a consequence of global warming. Higher temperatures increase evaporation of water over land and sea. The warmer area holds on to more water vapor, and slows down condensation and precipitation. The trapped water floating in the sky absorbs even more heat, which in turn attracts even more water vapor – creating a disastrous “positive feedback loop.”

By sucking up water vapor, the phenomenon makes dry regions drier, and by forming and dumping the “rivers”, creates wetter wet regions and tragic flooding. Specifically, here are five predicable repercussions of human behavior induced alterations in global atmospheric health.

1. Heavier Rainfall: For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 here F) rise in atmospheric temperature, air is able to absorb 7% more water. Since pre-industrial revolution, atmospheric temperature has risen 1.3 degrees Celsius. By the end of this century, if trend lines are uninterrupted, rainfall amounts could increase up to 60% over current levels.

2.  Massive Infrastructure Destruction: Flood damage in the billions is nearly certain as storms become more intense, prolonged, and closer spaced. Atmospheric river events could increase three or four-fold compared to pre-industrial times. Expect an additional $1 billion in flood damage for every 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature.

3. Diminished Snowpack Reserves: Atmospheric rivers are associated with less snowfall in western U.S. mountain ranges. Intense rainfall on existing snow accelerates melting and extreme flooding from rapid water runoff. Termed “rain-on-snow” events, areas at greatest risk are the Canadian Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Colorado River network.

4. Geographic Shifts: Warmer atmospheres show signs of altering the jet stream, pushing it closer to the equator. Experts have predicted that this will result in winter expansion of atmospheric river events in Southern California. Paradoxically, soils are drying out due to increased soil evaporation, less snowpack cover, and erosion from rapid downpours.

5. Loss of Sea Ice: Recent studies reveal that shrinking ice cover in the Artics is not simply a function of warming temperatures. A new contributor is that the atmospheric rivers are increasingly moving north toward the Arctic pole. It is now believed that the resultant water on ice is responsible for at least 1/3 of the loss of winter ice. They do this not only by the melting effect of direct water on ice over 10 days following each downpour , but also by magnifying “downward long wave radiation”

As this most recent weather calamity confirms, human instigated extreme climate driven events are now inescapable in the short term. This storm is currently dumping 3 to 6 inches across the region, with 10 inches in some locations coming close to overwhelming the deep LA water trenches. Equally evident is that our modern (and aging) infrastructure – including roads, spill ways, bridges, dams, building codes, and rescue and safety operations – require a rapid redesign.

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Tocqueville Warned of Trump. America Wasn’t Listening.

Posted on | August 14, 2023 | Comments Off on Tocqueville Warned of Trump. America Wasn’t Listening.

Mike Magee

This week, with a fourth indictment come due, a tragic Donald Trump headed back to social media, digging himself into a hole that will eventually lead to some personal hell. But before Donald Trump, there was William Frederick Kohler. 

He made his appearance on the American stage on February 28, 1995, an historian who had just completed his “Great Work” – The Guilt and Innocence of Hitler’s Germany. He was odd and dark and duplicitous. His life’s work was ready to go. All that was left was to write the introduction to his book. Instead his attention was diverted, as he followed his impulse to memorialize his own story dedicated to the “concealment of history beneath my exposition of it.”

Secretive and opaque, he was focused on a very special audience he labeled the “Party of the Disappointed People”, a group with whom he shared the affinity “that the loss has been caused in great part by others.” He hid the pages of the new and very personal (but incomplete) story from wife Marta inside the pages of the near completed Nazi history. And for some reason, he inexplicably headed to his basement and began to dig a tunnel to escape (or uncover) evil.

Kohler, like Trump, was not normal. Those who have analyzed his character describe him this way:  “Preoccupied with evil, the nature of truth, and the effects of an individual’s relationship with others, he recalls his bookish childhood with a mother who drank to remember the ‘good old days’ and a bigoted father; graduate work in prewar Germany, where he hurled a brick on Kristallnacht; his unhappy marriage; and the lost love of his life, Lou, a former student. Kohler’s story exhibits the same inconsistencies and deceits he finds in history: Kohler, the personal memoirist … is as unreliable as Kohler, the eminent historian. A virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”

Kohler is the fictional creation of philosopher and novelist William H. Gass, author of the award winning novel, “The Tunnel.”  The author is described in the opening line of his 2017 New York Times obituary as “a proudly postmodern author who valued form and language more than literary conventions like plot and character.” He died on December 7 of that year, at age 93, in St. Louis, where he had taught philosophy and linguistics for 30 years. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he was translocated to Warren, Ohio at 6 months, and raised according to his own account by “an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother.” These revealing personal details trace back to a writing style he developed and labeled, “metafiction,” or stories in which the author inserts himself.

Of more relevance to America’s current political dilemma is that Gass received his PhD from Cornell in 1954, in return for his dissertation “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.” A metaphor, as we know, is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them (as in drowning in money).” 

Gass’s love of metaphor is on full display in “The Tunnel”.  You can almost hear the beloved high school advanced placement English teacher pleadingly asking her sleepy students “What do you think the tunnel represents?” Of the novel, one critic wrote, “As the novel progresses we see the lies, half-truths, violent emotions, and relative chaos of Kohler’s life laid bare, and while he continues to dig away at the memories of his past he also begins digging a tunnel out from the basement where he works, a reflection of his tunneling through himself.”

Beyond Gass’s own story line, and that of William Frederick Kohler, one can easily catch glimpses of  Donald Trump.  As he entered the strange world of politics, he embraced the use of metaphor with memorable 3 and 4 world phrases like “drain the swamp”, “the system is rigged,” and “take our country back.”

Andrew Hines, PhD,  a specialist on the history of metaphor theory in the western tradition, traced the use of metaphor back to ancient times, to leaders seeking control of the “body politic.”  Reflecting on Trump’s rise in 2016, he wrote: “In classical rhetoric, Aristotle even went so far as to say that the ability to discern these types of similarities was a sign of genius. As he saw it, a similarity between two things – a workforce and an army, say – can generate a new type of meaning for the listener. It can collapse all the complex problems and ideas together and thereby make them both intelligible and gripping.”

Trump mixes old, worn out “dead” metaphors like “take our country back” with occasional “live” ones. When he hits the mark, he makes news. For example, in a 2016 foreign policy speech, he used the metaphor, “shake the rust off American foreign policy” only to have it within days appropriated as a headline in the Financial Times.

Some have described Trump’s fragmented, sometimes confusing and incoherent style as “metaphorical chaos.” But Georgetown linguistics professor Jennifer Sclafani has suggested it is intentional, commenting that his speeches “may come off as incoherent and unintelligible when we compare it with the organized structure of other candidates’ answers. On the other hand, his conversational style can also help construct an identity for him as authentic, relatable and trustworthy, which are qualities that voters look for in a presidential candidate.”

Dr. Sclafani is the inventor of the term, “idiolect,” which she is careful to remind “is not the language of idiots, but an idiosyncratic form of language that is unique to an individual.” Nonetheless, she believes Trump’s style qualifies and works as authentic and relatable. His supporters, to deploy another metaphor, see him as “a straight shooter.” The problem for him now is complex. He has run out of targets who care what he says, and the hole he has dug has left him increasingly isolated even from those who fear him the most.

In the classic 2010 New Yorker article titled “Tocqueville in America” by literary critic James Wood, the writer picks apart some of Tocqueville’s less flattering observations about the nation he visited as a French aristocratic traveler in 1831. Considering the epic two volume “Democracy in America,” he prophetically lets loose with these words, “In the book’s second volume, he warns that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism… In such conditions, we might…meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one…”

Sadly, his words remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.

Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”

Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature “idiolect”; as admiring of Nazism as William Kohler and as taken with sticky metaphors as William Gass in search of his own “Party of the Disappointed People.” Loyal indeed, like zombies, his followers and the Republican Party have followed him into the basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been  “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale.”

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Why We Need To Hold Bad Lawyers (and Their Law Schools) Accountable.

Posted on | August 7, 2023 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

In 2002, psychologist Emily Pronin and her co-authors, in an article titled, You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight, laid out the concept of “Naive Realism.”

As she explained, “We insist that our ‘outsider perspective’ affords us insights about our peers that they are denied by their defensiveness, egocentricity, or other sources of bias. By contrast, we rarely entertain the notion that others are seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves. (We) talk when we would do well to listen…” Point well taken, but these (most would agree) are trying times.

The problem of our divisions is certainly worse now, two decades later, than when it was first labeled. 2023 headlines speak to “political polarization,” “division,” “factual inaccuracy,” and “loss of civility.”  And yet, we hold tight to the “rightness”of justice under the law, and set out to demonstrate with extreme confidence that our democratic institutions, under assault, have mostly held.

Madison was well aware of extreme labeling of opponents as “unreasonable, biased, or ill-motivated.” He warned on February 8, 1788 in Federalist 51 that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” His solution? Our legal system, and checks and balances.

Hamilton, in the first paragraph of Federalist 1, tees up the same issue, in the form of an unsettling warning. He writes, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

The “force” on January 6 was no accident. Hours before the armed insurrection of Congress that morning, USA Today published  “By the numbers: President Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the election.” The article led with, “Trump and allies filed scores of lawsuits, tried to convince state legislatures to take action, organized protests and held hearings. None of it worked…Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election (in state and federal courts), 61 have failed…Some cases were dismissed for lack of standing and others based on the merits of the voter fraud allegations. The decisions have came from both Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges – including federal judges appointed by Trump.”

By all accounts, our nation and her citizens, owe our Judicial branch (its judges, lawyers, and legal guideposts) a debt of gratitude. Without hyperbole, now understanding Trump for who and what he is, our Judiciary saved our democracy – for the moment. Literally thousands of lawyers were engaged, heard rational and irrational arguments from multiple sides, considered evidence and facts (or their absence), and decided these cases under urgent conditions on their merits.

Much of the credit goes to attorney Marc Elias (Duke Law School/1993), a voting rights expert, who headed the team that resisted the “Elite Strike Force Legal Team” in the 62 cases above. The six Trump co-conspirators who led the Strike Force were long on credentials and short on ethics and values. They included Rudy Guiliani (NYU/1968), John Eastman (U. Chicago/1995), Sidney Powell (UNC/1978), Jeffrey Clark (Georgetown/1995), Kenneth Chesebro (Harvard/1986), and Boris Epshteyn, alleged #6 (Georgetown/2007.)

As Attorney Elias  reminds us, “In the intervening years since the 2020 election, many of these lawyers have become objects of ridicule, the punchline in jokes. But mocking the lawyers who facilitated Trump’s criminal conduct risks minimizing their culpability. More importantly, it obscures the deep and problematic culture that appears to pervade the ranks of the Republican legal establishment…The indictment makes clear that this was not a conspiracy of sleazy political operatives or even violent insurrectionists. Instead, the indictment reveals that this attack on democracy was effectuated by lawyers using bad faith legal maneuvers and intentional acts…Over and over, the indictment alleges that these lawyers enabled and carried out a criminal conspiracy against democracy in an attempt to ‘disenfranchise millions of voters.’ Trump may have been the ringleader, but he alone could not have filed frivolous lawsuits, enticed fake electors with concocted legal theories or used the law to try to pressure the vice president.”

If “societies of men are really capable… of establishing good government from reflection and choice,” we need a Judiciary steeped in values and the law, people like Marc Elias. As well, we need to hold lawyers who have disgraced their alma maters and dishonored their profession to be brought to justice. The place for that is not the public square where “asymmetric insights” might be questioned or challenged as concocted or biased. Rather, it is in a court of law, with camera and lights aglow, where Guiliani, Eastman, Powell, Clark, Chesebro and Epshteyn (alleged), may be afforded the very rights they worked so diligently to undermine.

In a 2021 discussion of the role of lawyers and law schools in fostering civil public debate, Jennifer Robbennolt and Vikram Omar write, “Lawyers are not immune from these human tendencies. But good lawyers have, and good law schools teach, values, knowledge, and skills that can aid in fostering and modeling more productive debate and resolution of conflict.”

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Facts Matter And Truth Doesn’t Hurt.

Posted on | August 2, 2023 | Comments Off on Facts Matter And Truth Doesn’t Hurt.

Mike Magee

If you wanted to create a motto for the summer of 2023 – one that would stand the test of time from the medical exam rooms of Ohio to the gilded bathrooms of Mar-a-lago – it would have to be Jack Smith’s “Facts matter!” If that is true on a national scale, it is equally true in states across the nation where doctors increasingly are coming out from behind self-imposed clinical curtains and going public. 

As reported in ProPublica last week, “Doctors who previously never mixed work with politics are jumping into the abortion debate by lobbying state lawmakers, campaigning, forming political action committees and trying to get reproductive rights protected by state law.”

A few examples:

1. One thousand Ohio doctors signed a full-page ad titled “A Message to our Patients on the loss of Reproductive Rights” in the Columbus Dispatch in response to actions of a state legislature highjacked by radicalized Republicans enacting a 6-week abortion ban post the Dobbs decision. This was after their coalition delivered a protest letter with 700,000 signatures earlier to the State House.

2. Dr. Damla Karsan, a Houston obstetrician, faced off Texas legislators  on July 20th, lending truth to power when she said , “I feel like I’m being handicapped. I’m looking for clarity, a promise that I will not be persecuted for providing care with informed consent from patients that someone interprets is not worthy of the medical exception.”

3. In Nebraska, the doctor-led “Campaign for a Healthy Nebraska” raised $400,000 to hire political consultants to launch a women’s health rights campaign which helped the Nebraska Medical Society “find its inner voice” and openly oppose abortion restrictions in that state.  State Senator Danielle Conrad was impressed. She said, “It’s really just incredible from my vantage point to see how these doctors have been able to not be hobbled by those decades of political baggage, to step forward with this fresh, clear medical perspective and be able to engage more people.”

4. A month earlier, Dr’s Katie McHugh, Gabriel Bosslet, Caroline Rouse and Tracey Wilkinson penned an Op-Ed in STAT in support of their colleague, Dr. Caitland Bernard, who had come to the rescue of a 10 year old Ohio rape victim who had fled to Indiana to gain access to an abortion. Caitlin was shamefully fined $3,000 by the Indiana State Licensing Board. Her colleagues wrote, “While a relatively minor punishment, this finding should send a chill through the medical community and beyond. But that chill shouldn’t be silencing.”

5. In Michigan, a doctor-led group, the Committee to Protect Health Care, teamed up with the ACLU, and successfully passed “Proposal 3, a constitutional amendment to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution.” Dr. Rob Davidson declared, “This is a historic victory for reproductive rights in Michigan, and the Committee to Protect Health Care was proud to help get Proposal 3 across the finish line.”

Yesterday’s indictment of  Donald Trump, the citizen, squarely places him and his legislative enablers in Washington and Republican led statehouses across our nation on the wrong side of the truth. As reported, he is accused of “three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States; a second to obstruct an official government proceeding, the certification of the Electoral College vote; and a third to deprive people of a civil right, the right to have their votes counted.” 

But what he and his Republican supporters in Washington and state houses across the nation are primarily guilty of, is not simply lying and deceit, but attempting to destroy our democracy and disenfranchise our voters. That is why prosecution under Civil Rights statutes employed in the past to address the savagery of the KKK, are totally appropriate here. Jack Smith’s “stand tall” leadership is a model for us all, and that includes our doctors and nurses.

As I have repeatedly argued, the health of our democracy is inseparably interwoven with the health of our system of caring for each other. At the helm of this system, our health professionals have survived the hurricane force winds of a pandemic, an inequitable and inefficient health delivery system, and a medical-industrial complex that is more focused on seizing patents than serving patients.

And yet, today we take heart. Our care givers, in growing numbers, are rediscovering their strength and their voices. Like Jack Smith, they are speaking up, in opposition to a small group of bitter and evil leaders, who have earned our active condemnation, and now must face the weight of the law. 

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