Fletcher Clark of MassWildlife came on the Long Hill Report to speak about the amazing Quaboag WildLife Management Area

Fletcher Clark, Habitat Biologist with MassWildlife came on the Long Hill Report to speak about all the wonderful aspects of the Wildlife Management Area south of the Quaboag River in Brookfield and West Brookfield.

The Long Hill Report of February 17, 2021 Dick Vaughan's Conversations with...this time avec moi

 Dick Vaughan, Long time Central Mass businessman, political activist and civic trench worker has me on to his monthly show to opine on current affairs nationally and here in the People's Republic.

In the end, there was no Trump card to be played

Column from the February, 2021 Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine 

The Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz is most famous for the quote, "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means."  Might one turn it around and say politics is merely the continuation of war with other means?

 

Do the events of early January, 2021 resonate with the Clausewitz dictum or its opposite?  Either way, it has been disconcerting.

 

Are we close to civil war?  We asked our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of War or Politics by Other Means (LHIftSoWoPbOM for short) if we are on the verge of intramural incivility.

 

The Institute put more effort than usual into the question, which meant we had to wait for their thoughts as the post deliberation siesta was longer.

 

Their grand verdict, "The beginning of a civil war is difficult to predict, but you will know you are in one when it's been going on for a while.  Boy, will you know it."

 

One should be careful of how what happened at the capitol building is characterized, but such a convention has not been observed. Granted, the actions of the people who entered the Halls of Congress invited extreme comments, which is why it is important to be careful.

 

That said, your columnist admits to having had some hope when Trump came out of the woodwork to roil the nation's body politic even if his economic program was a mix of the usual and his name calling childish.  

 

What appealed to me was of all the major party aspirants, he suggested getting along with a nuclear power who, with us, could incinerate the earth and make any worry about global warming irrelevant.

 

His statement that what might come in Syria would be worse if Assad lost was obvious if we look at all our Middle East adventures and how they've turned out.

 

With our 24-hour news cycle and social media, what was said during the 2016 presidential campaign is down the memory hole and for the people who ran against Trump, it is probably better forgotten.

 

Former Ohio governor, John Kasich said, "frankly, it's time that we punched the Russians in the nose."   My memory is not perfect, and I cannot find that he was asked what he thought the Russians might do.

 

Chris Christie suggested we shoot down Russian planes which prompted Senator Rand Paul to say, "Well, I think if you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate,"

 

The Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton, also was for the no-fly zone idea, and why not?  She had warrior cred from the ongoing Libya debacle.

 

Candidate Trump did have the Iran obsession which was a bad idea, but leaving Afghanistan and not bugging Syria would have given less scope for that foolishness.

 

So, the Donald won and did little of what he said he would do, but was artful in blaming others.  His base, with some defections, stayed with him.  Where were they to go?  They were not courted by the Dems.

 

The 2020 election ended with recount theater.  Election skullduggery has a long history, but the incumbent exhausted all possibilities in suits in various courts and it was time to go.  

 

It was not to be.  Either Trump had a rational reason to believe the validity of his case or he was beyond sense.  How people reacted was based on partisanship, but the stage was set for the events of January 6.

 

Donald would encourage followers to go to the Capitol, bugged out and did not follow.  After, he was relatively quiet and more or less hors de combat.  One is almost reminded of historian Barbara Tuchman's book, The Proud Tower.  The future World War I premier of France, Clemenceau said of a would-be dictator who chickened out by suiciding at his mistress' grave, "the man on horseback" was only "the soul of a second lieutenant."

 

In light of the Capitol invasion, it would be interesting to take a look at a historical event of extreme behavior in the life of a legislature.  It was the day every senator was murdered by a mob.

 

The Senators refused to run and were slaughtered where they sat.  All of them. Scurrying would've been beneath their dignity.

 

Surely, dear readers, you are thinking this never happened, and your columnist a fabulist.  He begs you to remember that history does not begin with Lexington and Concord.  Much came before.

 

The year was 397 B.C.  The Gauls had just defeated the whole Roman army in one charge and entered Rome to rampage and plunder.  The senators (i.e. the original senate, not our johnny come lately) were older men who had no intention of running.

 

Now, this is not meant as a knock on our senators or lower house members.  Were I in Congress, I would have been first out the door.  It was easier for the Romans to maintain gravitas, not having to deal with twitter, constantly thinking about re-election and how one looks on camera.

 

The mob at our Capitol was not the Senone Gauls who took Rome.  They went in, vandalized, ran riot and left without firing a shot.  Some of it was silly cosplay (yeah, that's redundant).  Compared to Governor de Launay at the Bastille, it was a walk in the park.

 

How did it look abroad?  Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas:

 

"Not a coup, not even a riot (these guys are strolling inside the Capitol) but a dramatic, unbelievable failure of basic policing

 

Coups require others to take advantage of this type of disruption and move swiftly, immediately, and decisively. Nothing indicates such dynamics are at play here

 

Having said that, the symbolic shock is enormous and its consequences hard to foretell"

 

His comment about policing is correct.  Capitol Police are a force directly under the control of Congress and the eye was not on the ball.  That it was not even near a coup is obvious as there was no detachment of insurrectionists to secure anything else.  As to the shock, it may turn out more than symbolic.

 

In this country, Mike Davis at the New Left Review blog was a little more salty in his column, Riot on the Hill: 

 

"Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)"

 

No matter, there have been lurid stories of how it was almost a rightist putsch.  They were shouted from the media rooftops, but quietly, if not obscurely, retracted.

 

The claim that Capitol Rioters wanted to capture and assassinate officials had to be corrected and were.  

 

This prompted Max Abrahms, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (discussed in the August 2019 issue column, Strangers on a Peace Train) to observe, 

 

"Over and over we’re seeing the media run alarmist headlines of right wing extremism since the Capitol attack that are walked back, retracted, or unsubstantiated in the report.

 

This is the same media that is warning about the dangers of disseminating unreliable information."

 

Professor Abrahms has also speculated that as the Bush Doctrine was, "We need to fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here."  The Biden Doctrine will be, "We need to fight the terrorists here so we don’t have to fight them there."

 

I am not sure about that as Biden is taking on his team many from the Obama administration that gave us Libya and Syria as well as Yemen.  Their specialty is foreign wars.

 

The new administration will also be taking on the usual suspects for most departments.  No one can be surprised at Janet Yellen at Treasury.

 

All in all, it is the restoration of the "party of government."  Trump changed nothing.

 

Let us all hope they know what they are doing.  It would be a heck of a thing if they made the recent ancien regime look good.

Rapid Antigen Testing is absolutely necessary January 2021 column from the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living

 Testing, Let's Not Flunk This Time

 

By Richard Morchoe

 

In the August issue, your columnist was beating the drum for a grassroots movement to bring about a regime of rapid testing for Covid-19.  The groundswell of support was truly sleep inducing.  The definition of quixotic is exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.  C'est moi.

 

If a Nobel prize winner and a couple of members of congress can't rouse the country, what should one expect?  Up on Long Hill, we got the message that it was time to move on.

 

And, why not? We had a dip in cases and some reopening phases and vaccines were promised and it would soon be the Brave New Normal.

 

Then came the new surge and the locking down is coming back.  Governor Baker is in crisis mode again and one should not be surprised if he mandates we wear a mask in the shower.

 

The chief executive of our neighbor to the west, Andrew Cuomo, will not be out-panicked by Charlie.  His New York Excellency shut down indoor dining even though his own contact tracing data has restaurants and bars accounting for only 1.43 percent of Covid-19 exposures.

 

There is a feeling of deja vu about all this.  In the June issue, we noted that Andrew was faced with stats that said the infections happen inside the home.  Did he think reality shifted between then and now?

 

But, but, you say, the vaccines are on the way.  It's almost over.

 

Your columnist heard on the radio that the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed is four years for mumps.  If that is so, the speed at which the cure is being developed now seems miraculous.  Yet, the resources being thrown at the development are such that, if ever in history it could happen, now is the time.

 

It just might be.  There is no dearth of optimism and it all might come to pass, yet, it is not certain.  The rollout will not be at the speed of light.  Dr. Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden's Surgeon General nominee says it is more realistic to assume it would be closer ”to mid-summer or early fall when the vaccine makes its way to the general population."

 

So, back up on Long Hill, we are again beating the drum for testing.

 

Back in August, the advocates of mass testing were easy to ignore.  Lately, the face of rapid testing has been receiving better media exposure than the people previously crying in the wilderness, and well he should.

 

Michael Mina is getting traction in the battle for testing and with his credentials that is understandable.  From just a part of his bio:

 

"Dr. Michael Mina, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a core member of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics (CCDD). He is additionally an Assistant Professor in Immunology and Infectious Diseases at HSPH and Associate Medical Director in Clinical Microbiology (molecular diagnostics) in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School."

 

Switching radio channels while driving, I came upon WGBH's local Morning Edition show and host Joe Mathieu was talking to Mina who was making excellent sense.

 

In the discussion with Mathieu, Doctor Mina stated, "yet we never figured out — and even attempted to figure out — how to use testing strategically across this country."

 

If we think about the coverage that has been ongoing, he is right.  The PCR test is administered reactively upon suspicion of infection.  There is no one telling us all to get tested and when.  When would be as often as necessary, which is a question open for discussion.

 

Mina wants us to do rapid, mass testing and in his conversation with Mathieu, it did sound a bit radical.

 

The radio show took place November 23, 2020 and Mathieu asked, "could we have enough tests by Christmas?"

 

 Dr. Mina answered: "If we could have 10 to 20 million of these tests every single day across all of America, that would be enough to stop the outbreaks across the United States. It doesn't take a lot. 10 million might sound like a lot to the average person, but actually it's really not a huge number of the tests. The US government, if it wanted to act in a coordinated and thoughtful fashion about what are the best strategies to fight this virus, could produce the manufacturing capacity for what I estimate to be less than .01 percent of the cost that this virus is actually taking across our country in terms of a dollar sign."

 

Obviously, it is too late for Christmas, but the sooner we start the better.  In August, your columnist called for a Manhattan type project to get testing going.  If Doctor Mina is right, we could have opened up the country by now.  He explains how it works, 

 

"If we can get these up to 50 percent of households and ask 50 percent of people in this country to use a test twice a week — they wake up, they brush their teeth on a Monday and a Friday and they take a COVID test — it doesn't take full buy in; you just have to get half of a community. And so we could actually start to see it in weeks the prevalence would half, and then half again and half again. We won't use these to completely eradicate a virus like this. It's extremely difficult to eradicate a virus, but we can use this to open the economy back up, to get the whole prevalence of the virus down and be able to be safer as we move about the world again."

 

If we take his point about eradicating a virus, the implication is that it cannot completely be done, then we must face that opening up will not be perfect, but as it is inevitable, we must do the best we can; testing now, vaccinating eventually, and, actually living life again.

 

Mina has been on other radio shows and in the press.  It is wonderful to see the exposure and one has to ask why now?  It does seem odd, so we referred it to our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Why Now. Their answer, why quibble?   just be glad someone is paying attention and hope it is not just for the nonce.

 

Lest one think your columnist a skeptic, that is something he admits to.  That is not all I am.  Due to my age, I have probably had more experience with vaccines than most people alive today.  Going overseas decades ago, you had to have your shots.  The army pumped a lot of stuff into my arm when I arrived at Fort Dix.  

 

There was the polio scare.

 

A man related to my family by marriage came down with it.  Life would shortly end in an iron lung.  His son, also afflicted, would survive and be brought back to health by a rigorous regimen.

 

Children were told not to play with the neighbors’ kids due to fear of spreading the disease.

 

Then, one Sunday afternoon, our family went to a building up from Weymouth Landing and joined the line in front.  Eventually, we entered a room and the doctor took the arm of each child and gave a shot of the Salk Vaccine.  No more would our parents worry that after playing with friends we would come home infected.  

 

Today, polio does not exist, almost.  It is not the fault of the developed world, and with luck, we shall get there.

 

The memory of that fall day, more than 60 years ago, is better than many recent memories.  No one hopes that the science on this vaccine works more than I do.

 

Please note, there is something as citizens we can all do.  Your columnist is in monomania mode and hopes you will share his current obsession.  Dr. Mina suggested going to https://www.rapidtests.org/, click on where it says write your rep at the top and help light the fire.  It is easy to do.  I pestered family members and now I'm bugging you.