Dyslexia – Newsom vs. Trump

Posted on | March 24, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Under President Trump, learning disabilities – especially discussions related to syntax and the quality of language in general – have risen to epic proportions. In a recent “tit for tat” that pitted the Governor of California against the President of the United States, the language disability, dyslexia, received a thorough press airing.

Governor Gavin Newsom has been generally aware of his language learning disability since the age of 5. But over the past month, perhaps in part to address the issue before a 2028 Presidential run, he’s been leaning into his diagnosis of dyslexia stating: “To every kid with a learning disability: don’t let anyone — not even the President of the United States — bully you. Dyslexia isn’t a weakness. It’s your strength.”

His swipe at Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Over the past week, Trump has attempted to cut his competition down to size by challenging him on cognitive terms, not once or twice but three times. Not that the critique was particularly erudite. This past week, the president simply said, “Everything about him is dumb.” That drew a stern rebuke from the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity which reminded the President that approximately 20% of the US population is challenged by some form of this condition.

Fellow dyslectic, author and political commentator, Molly Jong-Fast,connected the dots to current events: “Mr. Trump is a bully, but beyond that he tries to flatten things. Sometimes voters respond to this flattening, this simplification of complicated issues, but ultimately his refusal to see nuance in things, his inability to plan ahead, to see second- or third-order effects is his undoing (see: this war he has gotten us into).”

In contrast, experts at the Yale Center cites Governor Newsom as a “success story” in part the result of harnessing his unique approach to human language and speech, and life in general. As Newsom puts it, “One of the things you learn with dyslexia is that you’re going to fail often and you’ve got to appreciate that; as they say, failures are a portal of discovery.”

On tour in support of his new memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery” last month, he revealed the challenge of being a politician unable to read a speech. He made a point of telling his Atlanta audience, “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

Experts like K-12 educational leader, John White, former state superintendent of education in Louisiana, thinks leaning into language is a smart move. He sees fertile political ground, adding “Literacy is a complicated issue, not like cutting taxes or landing a new corporate headquarters.”

Scientists couldn’t agree more. Language is indeed complicated. At least five areas have been identified as role players in coordinating human capacity for language and speech. French neurologist and anthropologist, Paul Broca, in analyzing patients with traumatic brain injuries in 1861 was the first to pinpoint the inferior frontal gyrus as critical to speech or language articulation. These days, “Broca’s area”remains poorly understood but is viewed as one of the central processing centers for segmenting and codifying syllables, words and phrases.

Thirteen years after Broca’s observations, German physician Carl Wernicki (in 1874), while studying a patient with aphasia (the inability to speak), pinpointed several loci in the temporal lobe as critical to language comprehension. Subsequently, “Wernicki’s area” was proven essential to word retrieval, repetition and reading aloud.

Nowadays, Broca and Wernicki areas are seen as only part of a much broader and complex system. For example, for visual memory, verbal coding of numbers, and turning written language into spoken language, the angular gyrus is expert at semantic processing. And the insular cortex is the focus in generation of language and sound which requires motor neuron coordination and interlinks with the sensory and limbic brain areas.

Speech and language disorders come in many shapes and sizes. Injury to Broca’s area can interrupt speech production, while injury to Werniche’s area is often associated with loss of speech recognition. And the list goes on.

As for dyslexia, it’s a problem with language processing. The learning issues vary widely and can include difficulties with word recognition, numeracy, spelling, writing, reading, word and symbol recognition. Taken together, these difficulties often translate into deficits in organization, motor skills, visual discernment, planning, social interaction, and short term memory. A common early flag is delayed literacy.

As the Yale experts put it, “Reading is complex. It requires our brains to connect letters to sounds, put those sounds in the right order, and pull the words together into sentences and paragraphs we can read and comprehend. People with dyslexia have trouble matching the letters they see on the page with the sounds those letters and combinations of letters make. And when they have trouble with that step, all the other steps are harder.”

But as Gavin Newsom reminds all in his travels around the nation, if someone calls you dumb, consider the source. Victimhood is a choice. Instead, the Governor of California promotes self-awareness and personal responsibility.

Judge Pauses Kennedy CDC .

Posted on | March 17, 2026 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

In early December, 2025, President Trump directed HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy to review the standing childhood immunization schedule. That schedule has historically guided the state school-entry requirements for vaccines as well as mandating no out-of-pocket costs to parents from vaccine insurers.

The order had followed Kennedy’s summary dismissal of all members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices replacing them with a suspect group of vaccine skeptics without any peer review.

Professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association quickly challenged the action in court. This week, the U.S. District Court Judge in Massachusetts, Judge Brian E. Murphy, dealt Trump and Kennedy a severe blow. Not mincing word, he labeled the assault on scientific integrity to be “fundamentally problematic.”

Judge Murphy suspended the appointment of 13 of the 15 new panel members, and stated that only 6 of the 25 “even under the most generous reading, have any meaningful experience in vaccines.” The swift rebuke followed the evaluation of the new groups work output by an independent coalition of scientific researchers which documented 60 misleading or false segments and vaccine claims in their inaugural December meeting.

AAP President Andrew Racine M.D. was quick to applaud the court’s decision, stating “This decision effectively means that a science-based process for developing immunization recommendations is not to be trifled with and represents a critical step to restoring scientific decision-making to federal vaccine policy that has kept children healthy for years.”

The action couldn’t come soon enough according to state Public Health officials across the country who have been struggling to turn around a Measles epidemic tied to lax vaccination rates. The first outbreak was reported by the Texas Department of State Health Services in West Texas in late January, 2025. By August, 2025, 762 cases had been confirmed. Ninety-nine of the patients had been hospitalized. There were two fatalities in school-aged children who lived in Gaines County, Texas. The children were not vaccinated and had no known underlying conditions.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been tracking the spread nationwide and the results are pretty scary. In 2025, there were 2213 cases throughout the nation. 11% of the patients have required hospitalization, and several children have died of complications. In just the first 2 1/2 months of 2026, public health officials have reported 1513 cases. In the past two weeks, nearly 300 new cases have been reported. Major outbreaks are currently occurring in South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Arizona. 94% of the cases hav occurred in unvaccinated patients.

We’ve known about the disease for a long, long time. The first published account dates back to Persia in the 9th century. It’s connection to a blood-born infectious agent was confirmed by Scottish physician, Francis Home, in 1757.

By 1912, the US Public Health Service deemed it a serious enough threat that reporting was now required. Over the next decade, 6000 cases on average were reported each year. By mid-century, 3 to 4 million people were infected each year, and approximately 50,000 were hospitalized and 500 died.

The first effective vaccine was licensed in 1963 by John Enders, and further refined in 1968. By 1989, it became clear that a booster would be required to reinforce waning immunity to the disease. By 2000, measles was declared eliminated thanks to an effective immunization program which reached 91% of the US population. But according to the AAP “as misinformation about vaccine safety has spread, vaccination rates have gone down and measles cases have gone up.”

A quarter of a century later, our nation finds itself in a “back to the future” quagmire. Judge Murphy has injected some sanity and paused action on all votes that were taken by the new advisers. As Trump and Kennedy complain of “judicial overreach” and a desire for “intellectual diversity” (yes, they actually have used the term), 27 states (including the Republican led states of Alaska, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Nevada) have formally announced they intend to follow the recommendations of the AAP on vaccine scheduling, and ignore a CDC that appears to be “off its rockers.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: AAP > ama > CDC > measles > robert kennedy jr. > vaccine policy

The American Problem: Comfort With Moral Contempt

Posted on | March 9, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

“The (American) problem runs deeper. Americans are not just skeptical of institutions. Many appear increasingly likely to judge their fellow citizens as morally bad. That is a different and more corrosive problem. Distrust can make people cautious. Moral contempt makes cooperation feel naive, compromise feel dangerous, and reform feel futile. They dehumanize so that cruelty becomes manageable.”

Kyle Saunders Ph.D.

This past week, the Pew Research Center, trusted source of high-quality research, released a public-facing study destined to shock (if not surprise) public policy leaders nationwide. In a survey of 25 nations across the planet “more people said that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality” – except one nation, the United States.

To be specific, 53% of the American respondents described the morals and ethics of others living in the country as bad, while 47% labeled them as good. For contrast, 92% of citizens in our northern neighbor, Canada, believed its neighbor’s morals and ethics to be good, with only 8% labeled them bad.

Back in December, 2025, Professor Saunders, Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, wrote that our nation appeared to have settled into a “low-trust equilibrium”, which was bad enough. As he explained back then, “My earlier piece argued that low institutional trust warps political cognition. High-trust environments produce debates about effects: Will this work? Who benefits? Low-trust environments produce debates about motives: What are they really after? Who is this meant to punish?”

But the recent Pew results have shifted his analysis. Pew’s prior work tracking changing perceptions comparing 2016 to 2022 had detected that “growing numbers of both Republicans and Democrats describing people in the other party as immoral.” As he sees it now, “Distrusting your government is a political position. Concluding that your fellow citizens are morally deficient is closer to a civilizational verdict…That’s a different animal.”

Connecting the social and political dots is Saunders job. And as an American political scientist, he doesn’t like what he sees. In his words, “This isn’t just ‘think Democrats are bad’ or ‘think Republicans are bad.’ It’s ‘I think Americans are bad.’ The target has generalized. The moral condemnation has leaked out of its partisan container and settled into the air everyone breathes.”

Professor Saunders isn’t the first to raise these concerns. In the classic 2010 New Yorker article titled “Tocqueville in America” by literary critic James Wood, the writer picked 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…”

This weeks billionaire numbers and their political impact do nothing to reassure. The top 1% in the U.S. now possess $56 trillion. and 300 billionaires and their families made 19% of all U.S. 2024 political contributions with roughly 2/3 going to Republican candidates.

Sadly, Wood’s words remind us 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, Burke says, “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.”

Professor Saunders believes that humans “dehumanize so that cruelty becomes manageable.” He sees dehumanization as a strategy, a first move with a targeted endpoint. For him, “Dehumanization isn’t the result of violence, hatred, or moral failure. It’s a precondition — a cognitive reorganization that makes harm possible by eliminating the friction that would otherwise prevent it. People don’t dehumanize because they’re already cruel. It’s a prerequisite first step on the path to cruelty.”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: Kenneth Burke > Kyle Saunders > low trust equi;librium > moral contempt > Pew Research > Tocqueville

Greatness Through The Eyes of Goodness.

Posted on | March 5, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

For nearly a quarter century I’ve been answering the question, “Why is health political?” I will not force the “gentle reader” through that explanation one more time. But it is worth noting that no administration in my lifetime has made my point more clearly than the current one. It has forced on each of us a crash course in participatory democracy.

What’s wrong in the social science realm of health? Consider for example the mental health crises affecting teens across the nation, or the sharp decline in relationships and child bearing in young adult men and women, or the attack on vaccine policy by the wayward Kennedy, or the attempted dismantling of ACA health insurance coverage for millions, or the outright cruelty of ICE agents toward citizens and legal aliens, or the callous attitude toward Middle East casualties of soldiers and civilians by the President and the “Secretary of War”… and I could go on.

How should our nation begin to address these grievances? With our grandchildren either in or fast approaching higher education, I’ve been making a related case (as I see it) for the value and importance of a liberal arts education. In a strange way, Trump, in his attacks on the law and democracy, has instigated a resurgence of interest in history, philosophy, religion, political science, literature and the arts – even in this age of fantastical AI exuberance.

My own alma mater has been steadfast in its vision. As they state on their own website, “The liberal arts education at Le Moyne is rooted in the Jesuit tradition, which emphasizes the education of the whole person and the search for meaning and value as integral parts of an intellectual life. This commitment to a liberal arts education allows students to develop a broad range of skills and knowledge, fostering ethical leadership, service, and a commitment to social justice. The college’s Core Curriculum is central to its mission, ensuring that all students receive a thorough education in the liberal arts, which includes knowledge across multiple disciplines and the confidence to engage in intellectual inquiry as members of a global community.”

In simpler terms, LeMoyne’s front page headlines “We strive for greatness always through the eyes of goodness.” I thought of this last evening as I watched James Talarico’s speech accepting his Democratic Primary nomination for Senate in Texas. In part explaining his convincing victory numbers as a result of his ability to attract a large turnout of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans, he issued what will certainly be his rallying cry: “The people of this state have given this country a little bit of hope, and a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing.”

Who is in danger? Talarico has tagged not only billionaires, but especially Christian Nationalists who he says “divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don’t notice that they’re defunding our schools, gutting our health care and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It is the oldest strategy in the world: Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.”

This week CUNY Political Scientist, Peter Beinart, laid out a remarkable opinion piece in the New York Times, leaning heavily on liberal arts to make a convincing case against empire building and king Trump. In opposing national sovereignty and international law conventions, he spotlights the President’s source of guidance – “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Beinart bolsters his case against Trump by digging deep into our own history, political science, literature and religion. Included in the journey are President William McKinley (intent on Caribbean Empire building), and his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, who claimed McKinley’s action “is not a step forward toward a broader destiny; it is a step backward, toward the narrow views of kings and emperors.” John Quincy Adams appears in 1821 stating such purposeful aggressions would undermine “the fundamental maxims of American policy (and) would insensibly change (democratic practice) from liberty to force.”

Others come forward as well including Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Kenneth Galbraith. Taken into account Beinart’s impressive essay and Talarico’s acceptance speech, side by side in a short 24 hours, reminds us all that the soul of our democracy requires health, unity, and the capacity to awaken “our better angels.”

To paraphrase the LeMoyne motto, our greatness must flow from our goodness. The core of a well educated electorate is knowledge, wisdom, and values. In its absence, we are left with ignorance, greed, and hatred.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: empire building > healthy democracy > LeMoyne College > No King > oue better angels > peter beinart > Talarico > trump

The Blurry Line Between Tolerance and Rejection

Posted on | February 23, 2026 | Comments Off on The Blurry Line Between Tolerance and Rejection

Mike Magee

Are you for us, or against us? Will you tolerate border incursions, or deter, destroy, and extract? Will you bend (and how far) to accommodate your former enemies and betray your friends?

These questions may sound provocative and political, but they have nothing to do with our current leadership disarray in the U.S. Rather they refer to an active scientific debate raging in the field of Immunology. As one scientist noted recently, “Immunologists generally view the notion of self and non-self as part of a broader, more contextual understanding of immune function, rather than a rigid dogma.”

For nearly a century, experts in the field leaned heavily on the belief that “self” was static and concrete rather than a “context-dependent state.” In the 19th century, the debate was as likely to engage philosophers and theologians, as it did biologists and mathematicians. The consensus back then was that the human organism was committed to identifying and preserving its cells and vital chemicals, which required means to identify and destroy any entities (dead or alive) that penetrated human space.

But what does it mean to be “oneself?” Until recently most experts leaned on concrete boundaries and substrates. Yet recent forays into the biologic underpinnings of memory and consciousness suggested that human life is dynamic, interactive, and evolutionary.

At the dawn of the 20th century scientists theorized that serum proteins had the capacity to identify specific biologic molecules. In time, they were revealed as highly organized and responsive systems including the complement cascade and a range of immunoglobulins or antibodies.

In response to war injuries in WW II, attempted transplantation led to tissue rejection, and in response the discovery of individual specific Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) and Major Histocompatibility Complexes (MHC) – “self-markers” if you will that added a piece to the puzzle and triggered a “convergence of ideas.” Frank Macfarlane Burnet is credited with first uncovering that lymphocytes play a critical role as immune mediators. They posses special receptors on their cell surface capable of recognizing and binding foreign proteins. Each replicating clone of lymphocytes is specific to one invader. Once bound, “the forbidden clone” is marked for destruction and digestion. One’s own proteins are not bound, and therefore not destroyed.

In the late 1980’s, Charles Janeway, suggested that our immune system wasn’t so much focused on random invading protein antigens, but rather reliant on receptors that existed on the surface of innate white blood cells that had memory and had evolved and been inherited and handed down through generations. This tipped the scale away from the classical two-phase definition of our cellular and humoral defense department that included an initial general innate response followed by a second target specific adaptive strike when necessary.

The newer still evolving theory envisions an innate system with swagger that is based on “ancient pattern recognition” embedded with evolutionary knowledge of what is dangerous, and what is not. This newer vision includes a higher level of tolerance and understanding extended to certain “foreign elements” that mean no harm. This subtle shift redefines the role of the immune soldier, once a border cop, but now a transit manager.

Why the new emphasis on plasticity? Because reality was not cooperating with classically held beliefs. For some time researchers were aware for example that fetal cells that escaped into a mother’s circulation could continue to thrive, unattacked as foreign for a lifetime. The mothers “foreign cells” suggested a “fetal-maternal tolerance” termed microchimerism. That same type of free pass was also extended to consensual microbiome bacteria that appeared integrated into endocrine and neurologic control systems. And finally, in the field of transplant immunology, it became possible to use modified pharmacologic intervention to prod the recipient’s defense system to grudgingly accept foreign tissue that had been partially, but not completely matched to a recipient’s tissue type.

The field of Immunology is just catching up with the reality that we humans are willing hosts of trillions of microbes. How exactly they get a “stay out of jail” card remains a mystery for the moment. But one thing is certain, they are critical to our normal physiologic functioning. And the reverse is true as well, that the immune response can be “pathologically misdirected” with cataclysmic over response as in “anaphylaxis,” or chronic self-destructive inflammatory cascades as in the case of autoimmune diseases such as hemolytic anemia or rheumatoid arthritis.

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: ancient pattern recognition > burnet > forbidden clone > HLA > immunoglobulins > immunology > janeway > MHC > non-self > protein tags > rejection > self > tolerance

Is “Self vs. Non-Self” in Immunology as iron-clad as we thought?

Posted on | February 17, 2026 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In 1872, English mathematician and sometimes poet, Augustus de Morgan, wrote this catching rhyme: “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”

This truism about competition among species for access to nutrition and reproduction could have come in handy to Napoleon 60 years earlier when he tragically underestimated his enemies will to live. It wasn’t so much the stubborn Russians as it was microbes that were his undoing.

When he launched his invasion with a staggering force of 615,000 men, 200,000 horses, and 1,372 mobile guns, he appeared unstoppable. But on his way to Moscow, (according to Tolstoy’s account of the misadventure in “War and Peace”) he lost 130,000 men to Shigella dysentery. Confronted with harsh weather and a Russian force that refused to engage in defense of Moscow, Napoleon lost 2/3 of his remaining retreating force to Typhus, carried by Rickettsia prowazekki, housed in body lice embedded in his soldiers rancid clothing.

Under more favorable circumstances, the soldiers immune systems would have been their ally. Human bioengineering has evolved side by side with pathogenic microbes determined to chemically out smart their human hosts.

Humans rely on innate and adaptive mechanisms to detect and destroy pathogens. But to do so while sparing their own cells, they must be able to distinguish self from non-self. And they must adapt and remember, producing long-lived immune cells and protein receptors that allow them to “capture” and destroy repeat offenders.

If the system experiences a breakdown in self-tolerance, the protective processes may over-shoot and result in a chronic inflammatory response that destroys healthy tissues and marks the emergence of auto-immune diseases.

One special circumstance where immuno-tolerance is both normal and essential is maternal self-suppression during pregnancy which allows two separate immunologic organisms to survive intimate relations side-by-side.

At four weeks of pregnancy, the tiny developing fetus is already developing cells that will ultimately differentiate into immune blood cells. By the third month of pregnancy, these cells are traveling through blood channels to the liver, spleen and thymus. Some of them – B cells from bone marrow, and T-cells in the thymus – are already functional, but not needed. the womb is sterile. By 19 weeks, immune cells have also been distributed to intestinal lymph nodes.

Mothers and babies are not identical genetically. And yet the mother’s immune system spares the developing fetal cells. While housed in the sterile womb, fetal cells don’t require an active immune system of their own. Also by the fourth or fifth week of developing, the fetus has seeded the mother’s circulatory system with fetal cells, and these are tolerated and not rejected as foreign. Studies have shown that up to 0.1% of a mother’s adult cells may genetically map to her child. This is termed “microchimerism.”

As long as the child is in-utero, its immune system sleeps, and the mother tolerates her exposure to occasional fetal cells as benign and acceptable. All that changes at birth.

The newborn child is “immunogenically naive” and at risk as he/she passes through the bacterial rich vaginal canal. That is not to say the child is weapon-less. Beginning at 13 weeks, mothers antibodies have been crossing over the placenta into the fetus. By late in the 3rd trimester, these are abundant. The mother’s breast milk/colostrum is also rich in antibodies, and immunologically actives cells, granules, and enzymatic fluids. These provide immediate short-lived immune protection, and a chance to catch-up. But the supply of fast responding neutrophils is limited in this two-month process, and the newborn is vulnerable to a range of infections, most especially Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, Klebsiella , Hemophilis influenza and Meningococcus.

When the baby’s immune system kicks in (after 2 months), every pathogen is brand new. It has no memory until adaptive immunity (in the form of B and T-cell lymphocytes) generates specific immunoglobulin antibodies and receptors that can tag future invaders for destruction. This is why pediatricians instruct new parents that any fever before two months of age requires immediate examination.

It is fair to say that a great deal remains to be understood in the field of immunology. But researchers believe that further study of fetal immunity could unleash an array of new discoveries. “Tolerance to the fetal allograft” carries a great deal of academic interest for sure. But understanding the intricate chemical and physiologic systems that make this possible, many believe, could lead to clinical breakthroughs in cancer therapy, management of auto-immune disease, and avoidance of degenerative inflammatory diseases that accompany aging.

Increasingly, leading research immunologists are challenging the very foundations of self identity that have anchored the discipline. Consider these words directed at the long held theory of “self vs. non-self” from a May, 2025 publication in Frontiers in Immunology:

“Its partial obsolescence is, in fact, a tribute to how far immunology has come. As we move into deeper explorations of microbiome-immune interactions and epigenetic plasticity, the field will undoubtedly continue to change. The fundamental question of how an organism maintains its integrity in an ever-changing environment of microbes, tissues, and signals remains as relevant as ever, but the answers we seek must match the complexity and dynamism of biological reality. If this means embracing the ‘end of a dogma,’ it also heralds the dawn of a more integrative immunological science.”

Are humans smart enough to figure this all out? Maybe not.

But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who used to be a biomedical researcher, switched over to AI to give humans the edge over Augustus de Morgan’s fear. As he recently said, “One of the observations that I most had when I worked in that field was the incredible complexity of it…And I had this sense of: Man, this is too complicated for humans. We’re making progress on all these problems of biology and medicine, but we’re making progress relatively slowly….So what drew me to the field of A.I. was this idea of: Could we make progress more quickly?”

Category: Uncategorized
Tags: adaptive immunity > augustus de morgan > fetal immune system > immunology > microchimerism > non-self > self > war and peace

Bad Bunny’s Valentine Card To All Americans.

Posted on | February 10, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Bad Bunny came to the rescue, and 135 million citizens worldwide were ready and waiting for relief. A 13 minute oasis, and WOW – the power of culture in the hands of a gifted artist. The human sugar cane set, ravaged electric grid but heads held high, joyful music and dance, choice to go all in on Spanish and multigenerational love, and “God Bless Our Americas” with a multi-flag flying exit – all memorable and directional (Good hearts everywhere, follow us!)

That was Sunday. And what a lead-in to this Saturday’s Valentines Day. As Bad Bunny’s (AKA Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) flag-waving brown, black, and white band redefined the boundaries of America The Beautiful, the electronic billboard challenged ICE and beyond in full caps – “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”

Bad Bunny carried the football that read “TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA”. But who threw the pass? One obvious candidate would be Sonia Maria Sotomayor, the first Hispanic U.S. Supreme Court Justice. She is the child of Puerto Rican immigrants. Two years after she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, her father, who spoke only Spanish and had a 3rd grade education, died. Her mother was an orphan from a rural area on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast. She emigrated to New York City during WW II and served as a practical nurse in the Women’s Army Corp. Working long hours to raise her daughter, much of Sonia’s support came from her grandmother who she said provided “protection and purpose,” and from their large extended family they would visit in Puerto Rico each summer.”

At her swearing in on May 26, 2009, President Obama referenced her knowledge of the law and vast experience, but then added, “We need something more… Experience being tested by obstacles and barriers, by hardship and misfortune, experience insisting, persisting, and ultimately, overcoming those barriers. It is experience that can give a person a common touch and a sense of compassion, an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”

That common touch was on full display with Benito and his joyful troop this past weekend. It was present as well on June 30, 2022, when another woman of color was tracing the same steps as Justice Sotomayor. Her name means “lovely one”, and when she was appointed to her current role, she said, “I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free.”

The “lovely one” was born in Washington, D.C. on September 14, 1970. To honor their ancestry, her parents, whose ancestors were slaves, reached out to a relative who was serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa at the time, requesting a list of African names for their daughter

Ketanji Onyika was their choice. It is Tshiluba, a Bantu language from a southern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to experts, “The language is rich in proverbs, such as ‘Bilengele mbiasa munkelende’ (Good things are found among thorns), reflecting deep cultural wisdom.” One word in the language speaks volumes. For example: Ilunga – a very complicated word to translate and useful in our current circumstances. “It means ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time’.”

As with Benito last Sunday, human goodness and endurance, love and joy, were on full display on June 30, 2022. Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson, the new Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, had endured nearly 24 hours of rigorous, and at times deeply offensive questioning, under the glare of TV lights, to make history. Her then 11-year old daughter, Leila Jackson, recommended her in 2016, to President Obama, for a vacant position on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Scalia. Leila wrote of her mother, “She is determined, honest, and never breaks a promise to anyone, even if there are other things she’d rather do. She can demonstrate commitment, and is loyal and never brags.”

So we will brag for her, and Justice Sotomayer, for Benito and Puerto Rico and for all our Americas in all their splendid diversity.

As for the football that Bad Bunny spiked in the end zone, according to chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, it was a vintage Wilson ball from the late ’60s. And Benito’s #64 white jersey? It was a tribute to his uncle. He played football and that was his number. McCarthy spoke for us all when he said, “It was a great gesture. Family is everything, and it’s nice to see that even the world’s biggest stars remain cognizant of who and where they came from.”

Happy Valentines Day to Americans of good will everywhere!