A tricky problem for Ghislaine Maxwell

Ghislaine Maxwell has a task.

She needs to say what Trump needs her to day. 

Her freedom depends on it. Maybe her life. 

Events and revelations are closing in on Donald Trump. Here is another example of what is being revealed about Jeffrey Epstein. Here he is, in a deposition:

Q: Have you ever had a personal relationship with Donald Trump?

A. What do you mean by "personal relationship," sir?

Q. Have you socialized with him?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Yes?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18? 

A. [ Pause.] Though l'd like to answer that question, at least today l'm going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.

Click

She is meeting with the Department of Justice. Pam Bondi's people.

Maxwell will come up with something. Her statement doesn't need to be honest. It doesn't even need to be plausible. It doesn't need to avoid contradicting other testimony or documentation.  She can say other people are lying, but she is telling the truth. 

Trump's MAGA supporters will leap on anything, so long as it absolves Trump and blames Democrats. Accuse Bill Clinton? Sure. Bill Gates? Sure. Barack Obama? Better yet.  After all, the MAGA conspiracy-believers insist Michelle Obama is male.

Conspiracy allegations do not need to be plausible.They need to be big-picture true, aligned with the greater world of presumed heroes and villains. "Truthy." They need to confirm what people want to be true. Donald Trump asserts his innocence. He says that all the photos of him with Epstein; and of him leering at young women at parties; of him saying he is attracted to very young women; of him bragging that he can walk into the dressing rooms of teen beauty pageants as a great benefit of owning the pageant: of him bragging that he can grab women's genitalia without even asking; and of jury verdicts finding him guilty of sexual predation -- that none of that is dispositive.  What is dispositive is that Trump denies criminal activity with Epstein.

Who do you believe? Trump or all that irrelevant evidence nonsense?

What Trump needs is an eyewitness alibi to seal the deal. He needs Ghislaine Maxwell to say Trump did nothing wrong. 

And that is what we will get.

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Making Artificial Intelligence safe for capitalism

"Regulating AI will be harder than regulating nuclear power. AI grew up in the wild."

New technology always seems Frankenstein-monster scary at first. 

We are in the Frankenstein-monster stage.

Tech billionaires at the Trump inauguration

There is plenty of material for the writer of a political blog. Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump are saying "treason;" business people are dealing with tariff uncertainty; Ghislaine Maxwell is cutting some sort of deal with Trump; the U.S. dollar is down; the stock market is up; and the Portland Trail Blazers are making crazy trades. Amid this, college classmate Jim Stodder shared an observation about a technology that I expect will change the world as profoundly as did the steam engine.

Stodder teaches international economics and securities regulation at Boston University. He left school for a decade to knock around as a roughneck in the oil fields. Then he returned to formal studies and received a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. His website is www.jimstodder.com

Stodder

Guest Post by Jim Stodder

                        Big Tech: Tired of Trump 

Elon was the first to jump ship, but he will not be the last.

Before the election the "tech bros" were aghast at the Biden administration’s clear intent to regulate the hell out of AI. Watch the Instagram exchange between Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz as they recall with incredulity how Biden staffers told them that AI was a national security issue every bit as serious as nuclear power. So it would be regulated just as stringently, with basic research results fenced off as “state secrets.”

As a result of such pronouncements, Andreesen and other tech bros decided to go all-in for Trump. We all saw Trump’s inauguration seating chart. Why has this ardor started to cool? Why are people like Dario Amodei CEO of Anthropic calling for more regulation, not less? Let me advance several reasons based on what economists call “Increasing Returns to Scale.”

Increasing Returns to Scale (IRS) means that when you double all the inputs, you more than double the output. Many people, with their instinctive distrust of the rich, think that’s always how Big Biz gets big, that everything works that way. It doesn’t. If it did, every industry would be dominated by just one gigantic firm – whoever got big first.

Virtually all firms – including ones based on AI – face a production function that looks like the letter “S”. With inputs collected into one variable on the X-axis, we have output as the Y-axis in a giant “S” curve, tilted and stretched up and to the right. In the early stages, the output curve grows steeper. Output per input is growing – we have IRS. But about half-way up, output starts to grow more slowly.

Most studies of AI scaling patterns can be summarized by similar S-curves, although that “fast first half” seems to last longer than just half the time or resources. We are now very much in the first part of the curve.

Most new technologies show such IRS in their early days, and it usually leads to cut-throat competition. What is unusual about AI technology is that this IRS stage may last a very long time. What does this say about our near future?

Why AI Must be Highly Regulated

1. A long IRS means small leads turn into much bigger ones.

2. The resources needed for “frontier” level AI are unprecedented, with some some CEOs predicting we will soon need data centers in the hundred-billion-dollar range. (See minute 18:20 in this Lex Fridman interview.)

3. Gigantic scale makes government control unavoidable, since:

  --- a. Governments will have to help raise, protect, and ensure this investment.

  --- b. The power of the AI-elite will make the robber barons look like small-town hustlers. Either the government controls them, or they own the government. I’m betting on the latter, at least for the medium-term.

4. The AI companies are starting to demand government regulation because:

  --- a. It provides a screen against the anger of the public at this new concentration of wealth and power.

  --- b. Regulation will reinforce the dominance of established U.S. firms like Open AI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

  --- c. Investors want more predictability, not Trumpian chaos.

  --- d. Given the deep concern of most AI experts about the human control and “alignment” of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an all-out “arms race” for AGI makes catastrophic outcomes more likely.

  --- e. The AGI arms-race with China is in full swing. This makes it harder for US leaders to tell our own companies to tread more carefully. Nonetheless, we have no hope of “arms control” – persuading the Chinese to increase regulation and safety-checking – unless we are doing it with our own companies.

  --- f. The computer power of AI is centralized – but the data it needs are everywhere. We have a massive opportunity for data sharing with our allies. This will require not just U.S. regulation, but U.S. laws for data privacy and protection – such as those the EU has been pioneering. If we want to compete with China, we need the full cooperation of all our former allies. Someone should tell Trump.

5. Regulating AI will be much harder than regulating nuclear power. Nuclear power was developed and initially provided by the federal government alone. AI grew up “in the wild”. It will remain so unless it can somehow be corralled. 

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The new media landscape.

 First Amendment:  

"Congress shall make no law. . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . "

 It doesn't say anything about forbidding a president from intimidating the media into doing his will. 

Big institutions are not a bulwark against tyranny. Big means vulnerable.

Let's look at recent milestones.

*** Trump sued ABC for defamation, demanding $16 million because ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos used the word "rape" to describe Trump's sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll.

*** The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, whose fortune comes from Amazon, learned that Trump threatened to interfere with postal delivery of Amazon's packages in retaliation for unfavorable stories about Trump. The Post rescinded a planned presidential endorsement of Harris and announced editorial changes saying that henceforth all editorials would be about personal liberties and free markets. 

*** Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, now X, made a $250 million contribution to the Trump campaign, while simultaneously turning the content feed of X in a highly Trump-positive direction. Musk is rewarded with the job of reorganizing the federal workforce.

*** Prior to the 2024 election the Des Moines Register published a poll from a well-established Iowa pollster reporting that Kamala Harris had gone into the lead in Iowa. The poll turned out to be inaccurate. Trump sued the newspaper and pollster, calling the poll and its publication an act of election interference and fraud. 

*** The TV news show 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Kamala Harris. Trump complained about the editing and sued. The corporate parent, Paramount Global, has a merger pending. It settled the lawsuit by offering a $16 million gift to the Trump presidential library.

*** TV host Steven Colbert, a Trump critic, called this a "bribe" on air. CBS announced the show was cancelled. Trump claimed credit. Trump announced that CBS has now sweetened the deal with another $20 million in free advertising for him.

*** Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing a letter Trump allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein. 

I had misunderstood something. I had thought that very wealthy media patrons like Jeff Bezos or the Redstone family, or large media companies owned by public companies, would have the financial and legal ability to stand up to political pressure. I had it backwards. Giant wealth protects itself. Put most generously to them, the leaders of those companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. They must protect their financial interests, not amorphous values such as truth, integrity, or democracy. So they settle lawsuits and bend to meet the demands of a tyrant. Today they bend to Trump, but in the future perhaps some leftist socialist tyrant as dangerous as Trump, a Stalin perhaps, will do the same based on the Trump precedent. (Republicans should be careful what they wish for.)

It turns out that the people who can afford to tell the truth as they see it are people who are independent, like myself, or people with nothing to lose. It isn't a perfect solution.  Independent voices on YouTube, TikTok, Reels, X, Substack, Blogspot  and the like can be idiots, trollers, and fakes. They can lie, be misinformed, and be blinded by bias. But they cannot be easily intimidated by a president because they are small, usually, and their real motivation is audience and influence. Some don't stay small and grow to have an audience of millions. This free-for-all has its own perverse set of incentives -- outrage gets clicks -- but they are different ones from those of corporate conglomerates. 

For better or worse, the media landscape has returned to something closer to what existed at the nation's founding. There weren't a few, big media outlets with institutional credibility to protect. There were thousands of tiny, independent newspapers, pamphleteers, bulletin boards, book authors, and gossipers, each wanting attention. 

The situation isn't ideal, yet somehow, in that environment 250 years ago, we formed a country that worked out pretty well, all things considered. We may not be so lucky now.

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Or course Democrats are conflicted about Israel and Palestine.

Here is today's headline in the Washington Post:

Democrats are conflicted; Republicans perhaps not so much. 

Republicans have leadership from Trump who says that Israel is right to evict the Palestinian squatters in Gaza who are delaying development of prime real estate. Trump's has a "just get it done, quick and dirty" style and he sells the value of this approach to Republicans in immigration enforcement, in police use of force, and by strong countries dominating their regions. Trump doesn't apologize for strategic cruelty; sometimes a hard job requires harsh measures, and Trump revels in that reality. Israel has a hard job to do to fulfill its own sense of national destiny.

Democrats are more conflicted about cruelty. They don't have a single strong leader. They hear from many voices. Some describe Palestinians primarily as victims overrun by Zionist colonists in the manner of White settlers expanding and breaking treaties with Native Americans. Others say that Israel is our true friend, that Palestinians choose to be badly led and have brought trouble on themselves. Democrats hear all that and are divided. Whatever else, necessary or unnecessary, justified or unjustified, what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza appears cruel. Democrats agree on that.

Liberals and conservatives segment into the political parties, although imperfectly. Jonathan Haidt, the American psychologist and political scientist, articulated the difference between their moral values. Liberals care about fairness (good) and cruelty (bad) and mostly stop there. They can be open-minded about other values. But conservatives care about additional issues along with those two: Respect for authority, loyalty to the group, and sanctity are also moral values for them. It is not surprising to me that Republicans are currently associated with flag-waving patriotism more than are Democrats. Identity with the group and authority are moral absolutes. A Democrat can see Colon Kaepernick take a knee at the National Anthem and think, "Who does he hurt? Nobody. And besides, he is protesting police cruelty." A Republican sees it and thinks he is dissing the USA. 

A Republican Christian likes to see Trump holding up the Bible. Our team wins! A Democratic Christian sees Trump cruelly flouting every element of the Sermon on the Mount preaching  humility and kindness to strangers. Hypocrite.

A person strongly oriented toward the preservation of boundaries of a group sees the presence of immigrants here illegally as an offense per se. Add to it a strong respect for authority, and we have a broad group of people happy to see ICE agents using rough force to clean out the squatters, presumably criminals, rapists, and pet-eaters. Illegal immigrants hit all three moral absolutes: group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Democrats tend to see it as a matter of fairness and cruelty. It isn't fair that so many people in the U.S. are the grandchildren of people who came to the U.S. seeking opportunity, but now we shut the door. And it is cruel to round up hard-working people to send them home, or even worse, to prison or some third-country.

Loyalty and sanctity make Israel's effort to create a Jewish state an easier decision for a Trump-led Republican. Israel is a U.S. ally and they want a nation of loyal people, respecting the same sacred beliefs, protected from impurities. Makes sense. Democrats want something that is apparently impossible there, a democratic multicultural state, or two of them side by side. Neither side apparently wants that. Democrats under Biden had a split-the-difference unsatisfactory response: help Israel but urge them not to be too cruel. The result was slow, visible cruelty.

Democrats see the cruelty more vividly than they see the value in an avowedly Jewish nation in a region hostile to its presence. Republicans have a solution that generally unites their party: support Israel in whatever it does. Democrats have a dilemma that will fester and divide them. They want the impossible. A genocidal final solution would disgust the world, so it is politically impossible for Israel. The practical accommodation to that is slow misery, played out in public. There is no endgame to this. It is a problem for the world and for Democrats.

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GMOs: Courting danger.

     “I see that the EPA is shutting down its scientific research. So, don't worry, no cancer risk.”
              Note to Peter Sage in response to his blog regarding the 2014 GMO ban in Jackson County

I wrote on Thursday that I had voted against the ban on growing GMO plants in Jackson County.

I wrote that herbicide with glyphosate would control noxious weeds in GMO alfalfa, and that the GMO ban blocked that use.

I showed this photo of my nephew holding a puncture vine we had found and pulled from inside a field of alfalfa. This is what I am dealing with, I wrote.

I got pushback from readers. 

Some of the criticism of my post focused on GMO plants themselves, saying they were the product of dangerous science. Some criticism focused on pollen from GMO plants mixing with neighbors' crops. And some critics were worried about the herbicide spray containing glyphosate, which otherwise could have been used to kill noxious weeds within a field of glyphosate-immune GMO alfalfa. They say that glyphosate herbicide is too dangerous to use.

I had a political point: People who may not know much about farm problems were making rules for farmers, and farmers might resent it.

Now retired, Joe Yetter was a career physician in the U.S. military. He was a Democratic candidate for Congress in my congressional district in Oregon. He came in second, which is predictable in this bright red district. He reflects on how humans have changed nature over the past 10,000 years. Doing so is both useful and dangerous. It is human nature to risk doing dangerous things. 

Joe Yetter with two examples of an invasive species

Guest Post by Joe Yetter, M.D.

I was living in Douglas County, Oregon, back in 2014. If I had lived in Jackson County, I probably would have voted for the ban that Peter voted against.

But, dang, it’s complicated.

Let’s start with the admission that life is wildly promiscuous. Bacteria of different genera swap genes faster than lovers swap clothes when caught in flagrante delicto. Most angiosperms (about 80% of all plants on Earth) are the product of ancient unions across the boundaries of species. Trillions of mutations in organisms on Earth are occurring at this moment, any of which may be passed down, or passed from bacterium to human, to insect, to plant, to virus, like notes passed across the aisles in an unruly classroom, instructions for the building of lives. 

This tangled bank is far more tangled and twisted than Darwin could ever have dreamed.

Let’s add to that the knowledge that we humans are animals shaped by the forces of evolution, and admit that culture is one of the forces driving evolution—we domesticated lactating ruminants, and we** turned off our own genes that shut down lactase production after weaning (and so do our cats and dogs).  Our domesticated dogs evolve amylase to digest potato starch—a nutrient they never enjoyed in the wild. Rice promotes cultures based on community and cooperation, as opposed to the cultures of nomadic herders. Chickens are the most successful bird species, ever, thanks to our intervention; thanks, Colonel Sanders.

We mostly ignorant and painfully brief humans have acquired a Promethean power. Our ancestors allowed wolves in by the fire and turned them into Chihuahuas and Corgis, turned wild carrots into something edible, and sorted peas into wrinkled and smooth. What we have now is a power almost beyond comprehension, thanks to scientists like Doudna. CRISPR, gene drives, et al. are not the same as an ancient farmer’s picking the fattest corn kernels for next year’s planting. A child with new genes to replace her sickle cell genes is not the same as any creature that has existed, ever.

Wild carrot

Domesticated commercial carrot

 When I was six, I got a Daisy BB gun.

“Try not to put your eye out with it,” Mom said that Christmas morning, and Dad took me out to the backyard with it. I didn’t put my eye out, and in later years my eyes beheld .22s, .410s, 12 gauges, .30-06s, and so on, under the tree. 

Now, what we have today is not the equivalent of a BB gun or a .30-06, or even a howitzer. It’s the equivalent of the atom bomb of 80 years ago. And in the coming years, it will be beyond the hydrogen bomb in relative terms. 

Prometheus visited this gift upon the whole world. It is everywhere now.

With all that in perspective, the ban on GMO agriculture in Jackson County is pitiful and inconsequential. It was, no doubt, well-intended: protect our farmers from pollen drifting and making seeds unsalable in Europe and beyond. Or it was simply ill-founded fear of the unknown, and all sorts of misinformation.

But BB guns really can put out eyes. And atom bombs do vaporize people. So good aim and restraint are invaluable. It’s wise to organize society and its laws based on reason and caution. It’s reasonable for governments to fund research and to regulate for the public good. Right now, our federal government is in the process of dismantling science, and is in the business of allowing polluters to spew more lead and arsenic and greenhouse gases into the environment. They are also easing regulations on pesticides known to harm humans and other animals and plants and microbial life.

I’d suggest is that voters act with the same sentiments that motivated the GMO ban in 2014, but armed with more knowledge and less prejudice than I would have had in 2014. 

Make government do proper science, and regulate accordingly.

**we: well not all of us. Lactose-intolerance varies across populations. Same is true for our cats and dogs, regarding lactase and amylase.

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Easy Sunday: Conspiracy trap. A warning.

Watch out, America!

The Trump letter to the Wall Street Journal is a trap.

Here is how I figure it:

1. Of course Trump is guilty of shameful things done to young women alongside Jeffrey Epstein. Some acts are likely criminal -- that remains to be revealed -- but surely plenty of what he did would be embarrassing. Trump is a sexual hound-dog who likes them young. We know that. 

2. Trump needs to look like a victim of the powerful elites in the media, the Deep State prosecutors, and Democrats. Always the victim. "How come everybody's always picking on me?" That is how he presents himself as fighting back. 

3. Trump knew he had an Epstein problem. He is, after all, guilty as sin of preying on beautiful young women, and Epstein kept records. There are already victims who talk. There are pictures. Video. And Ghislaine Maxwell is still alive. 

4. Trump has had six months with confederates in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence services to set up his trap.

5. Trump looks "off his game," as I have written and others have observed. He looks flummoxed and ham-handed on the Epstein mess, saying there would be an announcement of big problems, then reversing himself. He looks guilty. In fact, Trump is the highly skilled message manipulator I have always credited him with being. He isn't "off his game." He is playing his game. 

6. The world is falling for it, saying Trump is flailing. Trump is secretly thrilled.

7. To get out of the Epstein mess and revelations of politically-damaging behavior with very young women, Trump needs to discredit his attackers. 

8. Trump knows full well this strategy works from his experience with the help Russia gave him in 2016. Even the Republican U.S. Senate's investigation showed that Russia helped his campaign. But one element of the investigation, the Steele Dossier, contained dubious information about a "pee tape" and Hillary Clinton's campaign helped fund that material. Trump uses that to discredit the entire accusation of Russia's help, calling the whole thing "the Russia hoax." He changed the story -- at least as believed by his MAGA base -- from Russia-helping-Trump to Steele-Dossier-hoax.

9. The letter in the file with Trump's drawing and the signature as pubic hair sent to The Wall Street Journal is, in fact, fake. It wasn't writen by Trump. It was carefully placed there by confederates in the FBI and leaked to the WSJ, so they would reveal it. It is the new version of the Steele Dossier. His $10 billion lawsuit against the WSJ is the device for making sure it will go through evidence discovery and the letter be revealed as fake.

10. When the WSJ-reported letter is revealed as fake, the media, prosecutors, Democrats, and the whole notion of "truth" in relation to the Epstein mess will be discredited. So when embarrassing things come out about Trump showing him to be a disgusting sexual predator, it will all be dubious. He has inoculated himself. Believe nothing! Fake news! 

11. This will be a story about fake evidence not Trump pushing himself onto very young women with Epstein's help. 

12. Trump is a master of manipulating the message and turning the tables on his accusers. Trump will not just survive this. He will come out ahead. He will have stuck it to the WSJ and Fox News, which had the temerity to show some independent news judgment. That will teach them. Trump is good at this, and we are being played.

A note to readers:

Readers often misinterpret me. They presume that anyone who describes Trump's superb skills as a political athlete and con man must be praising Trump. "How come you say such nice things about Satan?" one reader wrote me, saying she was cancelling her subscription. My saying that Trump is skilled at lying and and getting away with disgusting behavior that endangers our democracy is not saying "nice things." I am explaining how a person of such corrupt character could be elected president of the U.S. and stay out of prison. 

I am not praising him. I am warning us.

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Ex-pat health care: The Mexico experience

I'm pretty happy with Medicare. 

It is simple for me as a patient.

Doctors seem to accept it although I hear they take such a huge discount on what they are paid that it barely covers the overhead of their practices. I give them my Medicare card, supplemental card, and pharmacy card. They copy them and they seem to know what to do to collect money for the service.

It isn't free healthcare.  I paid into Medicare for the entirety of my working life-- 50 years. Now, retired, Medicare subtracts $670.50 a month from my Social Security and I pay another $125/month in supplemental insurance. Paperwork goes back and forth between the provider and Medicare and the insurance and then I pay some token amount about three months after the service. 

College classmate Erich Almasy has retired in Mexico. He describes his own experience accessing health care in Mexico. 

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

Health Care in México

One of the first things that people moving to México ask about is health care. Can I find a decent doctor? Will I be able to afford checkups, medicines, and even surgery? What if I get cancer? My personal experience is that the health care we receive here is as good or better than any we received in the United States or Canada. And certainly a lot cheaper.


A little backstory. My wife and I lived in Canada for twenty years, where we got used to handing over our health card and getting no bill: higher taxes but peace of mind. When we left six years ago, waiting times were getting longer but still tolerable. On our way south to our new home in México, we stopped in Pennsylvania and signed up for Medicare Part B. We had been in Canada when we turned 65 and had not signed up for the monthly Part B premium because we could not have used Medicare in Canada and had no doctors in the United States. In its infinite wisdom, Medicare said we would have to pay a penalty for each year we had not signed up, after saving it roughly $40,000. We disputed this, and three years later, Medicare agreed and refunded our penalty, but by that time, we had canceled it because of cost and accessibility. And so, we arrived in San Miguel de Allende without health insurance.


A quick note about our home here: San Miguel is one of the most popular tourist sites for Mexicans, who visit on vacations, for weddings, and to buy second homes. It has become as expensive or more costly than Mexico City, with over 600 restaurants in a city of 180,000. Expats make up between eight and ten percent of the local population. Rated globally as one of the most desirable small-city destinations by Conde Nast and other publications, we are a 500-year-old Spanish Colonial, UNESCO World Heritage site. Based in the desert highlands of central México, we are about four hours by bus from the capital.


After arrival, we bought international health insurance from one of the world’s most reputable companies at the time. I say “at the time” because when COVID hit, they refused to cover it and promptly went bankrupt. I still receive regular messages (but no refund) from the creditors’ committee. Faced with reliance upon local health care options, we were pleasantly surprised. Exhaustive, six-page blood, stool, urine, bone density, and for my wife, mammogram tests cost less than $125. Our physician, an American/Mexican nicknamed the “Gringo Doctor,” charges $75 for a 90-minute review of every line item in the tests. No previous doctor had ever done that. For a hand injury, a next-day MRI was $250.


Our physician is even more valuable because she is associated with major hospitals both in San Miguel and an hour away in the large city of Santiago de Querétaro. She can provide referrals for any specialist, and then she books an immediate appointment. When I dislocated my collarbone in a fall, she set up a next-day appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who specialized in shoulders. Most medicines that require a prescription up north are over-the-counter here. For antibiotics, sleeping pills, and opioid painkillers, we receive prescriptions from her via email or ZOOM. In a few cases, local doctors charge “Gringo Pricing,” but after being quoted $500 for a colonoscopy, I found a better doctor in Querétaro who bundled in an endoscopy for $175. Like all health care, it pays to shop.


Many Canadian residents maintain their Canadian healthcare by returning “home” every six months or pretending to. A large number of Americans are more comfortable with the doctors they have in the States and fly back to use Medicare or health insurance. However, an increasing number of expats I know stay here for major procedures, including prostate, back surgery, and even cancer. A good friend who is in a position to afford a U.S.-based option chose to have his lung cancer treated here after comparative research.


Outside of medical treatments, I am most impressed with dental and veterinary health care here. In Canada, both were outside of any national scheme, and prices were as high as in the United States. A dental checkup with X-rays was typically over $350, and any procedure for one of our dogs could cost from $500 to $1,000. In San Miguel, a dental cleaning, checkup, and online X-ray are $60, with a new crown about $125. Our vet is the most expensive in town, but when one of our dogs was poisoned, he came in on a Sunday afternoon to diagnose and treat for $100. Medical (especially plastic surgery) and dental tourism in México has become so popular that a national resort just opened a medical clinic/hotel/resort in San Miguel. The Mexican town of Los Algodones (across the border from Yuma, Arizona) is known as “Molar City” because it has only 5,400 people but 600 dental clinics. Now you know where to get your implants!


According to the U.S. Department of State, 1.6 million Americans live in México. When Trump was elected, the Biden administration was attempting to make it possible for expats to utilize Mexican health care through Medicare. It was estimated that this would save the Medicare system upwards of $50 billion annually.

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TACO Trump: Chickening out is what protects his mandate/

Trump announced that he told AG Pam Bondi to release Epstein's records.

It's a switch.

It's TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

It's smart.

Trump acknowledges no higher authority than himself. Not the Constitution, the law, the courts, the Congress, or any tradition or norms. When Trump said, "He who saves his country does not violate any law," he meant it. Americans should take it both seriously and literally. Trump thinks he has a mandate and that he embodies the will of the people. Therefore, his astonishing selfishness and narcissism is patriotic and virtuous; after all, what is good for Trump is good for America. 

Trump's understanding that his authority comes directly from the people is his point of vulnerability. He has to stay popular.

I had prepared a blog post for this morning based on the premise that Trump is underperforming his usual skill level in message management for sticking with the "nothing to see here" line. It began:

Trump is making a ham-handed mess of the Epstein matter. He's usually better than this.

Now it's getting worse.

If a sketch comedy like Saturday Night Live wanted an exaggerated character to look guilty while throwing up red flags they might have someone telling police not to look in one specific closet in the apartment, that the closet contents are boring, that if there were anything in that closet it was put there by the previous tenant. 

Trump is way off his game.

That story line is out of date. He has TACOed. Still relevant is that Trump looks guilty of something, and that he wants desperately to cover it up. His telephone call to The Wall Street Journal showed his commitment to the cover-up. He urged them to kill a story about  a letter in their possession, purported to be from Trump, offering birthday congratulations to Epstein while mentioning secrets. This letter was written a year after he told New York Magazine:

I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.

My own sense is that Trump can weather any revelations regarding sexual misbehavior, including testimony by former 14-year-old victims or even photographs and video of Trump with them. It won't matter to his base. They know Trump is a highly sexed predator who takes what he wants, be it Greenland, the power to set tariffs and deport immigrants, or beautiful young women. Trump will deny it and say the evidence was created by Biden or Obama or Hillary. Trump supporters just don't care about Trump's sexual predation. They care that he is deporting immigrants.

They also care that Trump is covering something up. They don't like him saying "nothing to see here, move on." Trump does not need to open the files in fact, but he needs to look like he is trying to do it. So that is the new line. Fortunately for Trump, there will be impediments in the form of sealed grand jury testimony, protection of victims, and questions about manufactured evidence. It is possible that Bondi will have to pretend to be defying Trump if she says some material must stay sealed. That would be a fun little show: an independent and courageous Pam Bondi saying "no" to Trump.

Trump stops doing things if he gets clear negative signals. Stock market signals. Bond market signals. Falling-dollar signals. Signals of low turnout at a military parade. Signals of angry posts on Truth Social from MAGA fans. Negative signals from MAGA influencers. Trump is a good salesman. He watches his customers.

Courts may slow the Trump agenda, but Trump doesn't respect them, and he will use pretense and the elastic power of the Constitution to do pretty much what he wants. Trump will stop when he observes that the public doesn't like what he is doing. That is the off-switch for Trump: negative public opinion. Trump will sell his version of the truth. There is a lot to dislike about the Trump agenda, and he is still covering up in the Epstein mess and the public may see through this. Or not.

Democrats need to be selling, too.

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GMO ban in Jackson Countuy Oregon: a decade later

In 2014, Jackson County voters banned the cultivation of genetically modified crops in the county. It was a landslide victory, 66-33.

Nearly everyone I know voted for it. 

I voted against it.

During the campaign and its aftermath voters heard some farmers and gardeners express fear of contamination from Frankenstein-weird crops growing around them, perhaps with pollen blowing in from a neighbor. Elise Higley, a Jackson County farmer and leader of the group urging the ban, said: 

Family farmers should not have to live in fear that our farms will be contaminated by genetically engineered crops

The argument in favor of the ban sounded a lot like the fear expressed by anti-vaxxers during Covid. 

  -- The science was new and might be dangerous.  

  -- Changing genes to make something new is profoundly unnatural. 

  -- It was a plot by billionaires and corporations to dominate the little guy, so resist. 

  -- People who were vaccinated shed vaccination molecules, so they are dangerous to others. 

  -- Natural is healthier.

My sense at the time was that this was an unnecessary concern. Humans have been modifying crops with seed selection and hybridization since the beginning of agriculture, and now scientists are looking at genes to do it. I felt about GMO crops the way I felt, and feel, about vaccinations, that it is useful science. People want hardier, bigger, more drought-resistant and disease-resistant crops. Healthier plants mean less overall use of pesticides and herbicides --  a positive outcome. Vaccinations mean overall less medicine. Here is how we changed corn from its natural start:

Here is watermelon, captured in a still life painting by Giovanni Stanchi 350 years ago:

In the GMO debate there was consensus from both the city-dwelling, anti-Monsanto, let's-everybody-cheer-for-organic-food left, and the suspicious-of-science right.  But the group that carried the vote to a landslide came from the places in the county that vote Democratic. Not rural areas.

All this came to mind this week when the farmer who grows alfalfa on my farm found some puncture vine in his newly planted field of alfalfa. Newly planted alfalfa looks like this.

Alfalfa is a protein-rich food widely used as livestock feed. It grows rapidly. In Southern Oregon it can be cut three or sometimes four times a year and put into bales.

I have mentioned puncture vine before -- a nasty plant spread by seed that stick to tires. It grows quickly and lays flat on the ground. It is hard to notice, and then it grows and goes to seed. Can you see it next to his hand and distinguish it from the alfalfa? No? It's hard to see, which is my point.

Here it is, held by my grandnephew Liam Flenniken, who is doing a great job helping me this summer. He pulled it carefully, so as not to dislodge the sharp and prickly seeds. We carefully put the undisturbed plant into a big plastic bag to put in the garbage.

The connection between the GMO election, the alfalfa crop, and this weed is that this alfalfa, as per the local law, is from non-GMO alfalfa seed. There is one effective way to kill the puncture vine and other weeds without killing the alfalfa: planting GMO alfalfa seeds that are immune to the herbicide glyphosate. The farmer could spray the herbicide onto the field, and it would kill the puncture vine and other weeds but leave the alfalfa. But he can't do that, not in Jackson County.

I understand a person wanting to choose what plants they grow on their farm or garden. But I consider the Jackson County decision to forbid everyone from growing GMO plants to be parallel to a decision to forbid anyone in Jackson County from vaccinating their children for measles, polio, or anything else. 

My sense is that people who voted for the GMO ban made an easy, sentimental decision. The ban didn't affect them. It stopped other people. People who knew little about weed control in a farm context had an idea that it would a good thing if local organic farmers could say that the county is a haven for "natural" food, and it would be helpful to some farmers if they could say their crops came from a non-GMO county. It was an easy vote for well-intentioned people who have never set foot in an alfalfa field. 

Democrats wonder why they do very poorly in rural America, and why people in precincts like this one feel picked on by people who don't understand their lives. 

I realize I am an outlier here. Most of my local readers voted yes. It was an easy vote mostly affecting others. A gesture.

But there were victims to that vote, and unintended consequences. What kind of consequences? Well, Donald Trump is president because of massive majorities in farm districts, that's one. 

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Trash talk: Gavin Newsom is making his move.

Trash talk.

Your party's activists love it

It's a way to communicate toughness and willingness to fight for your team.

It's no secret that Gavin Newsom is angling to be elected president. He is governor of California, he is term-limited, tall, good-looking, and wealthy. So of course he is running for president.

I am not sure he is electable nationally. Americans have a love-hate relationship with California. It creates billionaires and is by far the greatest wealth-growing environment in the world, but it also represents what a majority of Americans resent. California comes across as too woke, too expensive, too progressive, and so environmentally conscious that California environmentalists can't build environmental projects in California because they might hurt the California environment. 

People in California understand Newsom to be a moderating force in California politics, but the rest of the country doesn't realize that yet. His national brand is still "California," not "Gavin Newsom, the can-do, left-center leader of a state where fortunes are created."

Newsom called Stephen Miller a "fascist cuck." Criticizing Miller is good politics for a Democrat. On Friday, July 11, Miller posted on X, calling an LA judge a "communist judge" following her ruling that blocks ICE from making arrests at Home Depots and car washes. Newsom's official State of California press office responded with this:

The "fascist" adjective needs no explanation, but Miller's wife, Katie, quit a job at the White House to go to work for Musk, which was enough to elicit gossip and the cuck reference. 

On Saturday, July 12, JD Vance visited Disneyland in Anaheim, California, with his family, and that, too, was an opportunity. Newsom tweeted on X at 1:44 p.m. 

Tired: trashing California for political purposes

Wired: visiting & vacationing in California more than hour home state this year.

That wasn't quite enough, so at 3:03 he added: 

 "Hope you enjoy your family time, @JDVance. The families you're tearing apart certainly won't."

 On Monday, July 14, Newsom called Donald Trump a "son of a bitch" in an appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show. Appearing there is part of the general trend of male politicians to "man up." (Pete Buttigieg, JD Vance, and Ted Cruz have grown beards; Josh Hawley wrote a book on masculinity.) Shawn Ryan, a former CIA contractor who sells tactical training and fighting gear, has a podcast and online show. Newsom repeated the phrase he has been using, "It's weakness masquerading as strength." That is Newsom doing brand judo on Trump. When Trump does something "strong," the public should re-interpret it as weakness performed by an overcompensating phony.  

Newsom added, "That's what I don't like about the son of a bitch." 

I am not a big fan of Newsom adopting the Trump tactic of trolling and name-calling. There is a me-too quality to it. But my instincts here may be out of date for this media environment. Maybe trolling the other party needs to be everybody's brand in a world where people get news via social media. Policy discussion bores most people. Many people think they want serious political discussion of the issues, but people at the margin who decide elections respond to quick shots that position a politician in the political universe. One defines oneself by one’s fights. A brand is built with a half-dozen mentally-sticky impressions, not with a legislative record. Newsom is becoming less "California pretty-boy progressive with big hair" and more "Mr. Tough Guy." He's the guy who defends his state, who "talks shit," who stands up to presidents. 

Over the course of three days, Newsom picked fights with the Big Three of Democratic contempt, Miller, Vance, and Trump. He is projecting a simple body-language message: He shares your contempt for them, and he is willing to take them on.

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