VIRUSES AND POLITICS

You may soon be visited by a “contact tracer” now being recruited by your state government, which is building armies of them. He or she could tell you that you’ve been in contact with a Covid-infected person and require that you be tested. They may even force you into stricter quarantine than you’re already enduring. It’s happening all over the country as you may have heard, but Maine and New Hampshire won’t need as many as Massachusetts which has far more Covid cases.

Though they have the same population, New Hampshire has twice the number of contact tracers (over sixty) than Maine has (thirty) for some reason. A former CDC Director says the entire United States needs 300,000. “The use of contact tracing is one of the oldest public health tactics, dating back centuries,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer for the National Association of County and City Health Officials according to WebMD. It’s been employed at the start of almost every public health threat except one.

My last few columns have dealt with the politicization of Covid-19, but that’s nothing new for the CDC. Dr. Anthony Fauci speaks often of his experience from the earliest stages of the AIDS epidemic and is now advising the USA to implement contact tracing for Covid as a key element in the plan to reopen our economy. Try as I might, I cannot find any online reference to Fauci recommending contract tracing for AIDS. In a 2005 interview broadcast on NHPBS Fauci was asked: “What do you see as some of the missed opportunities [of dealing with AIDS] in the United States in the early years?” 

Homosexual activists blamed everybody but themselves

Fauci didn’t mention contact tracing in his response, but he did say: “It may have been better to be much more aggressive in those very early years about targeting populations, such as the gay population, about safe sex … But I can tell you, having been there, the gay population themselves were very reluctant to hear the safe-sex message, because they were concerned that they had just recently won their sexual liberation that they had fought so many years for, and they didn't want this disease to be used as a way to retarget them.”

Fauci folded under pressure

At an early AIDS conference, Fauci urged homosexuals to use condoms, but, “To my surprise, there were a considerable number of people in the audience who actually got up to the microphone and hooted me down like I was trying to impose my standards of sexual conduct on them.” Fauci hasn’t survived government service for over fifty years without being politically malleable, and he bent to pressure from homosexual activists early on.

Although HIV in the first decades of the epidemic was a death sentence, and the biggest vector for transmission was anal sex, Fauci didn’t seem to push for contact tracing. Writing in a 1993 edition of The Atlantic, Chandler Burr said that, just before the FDA approved first HIV test, two powerful homosexual lobbies filed petitions to prevent the CDC from screening homosexual men. The CDC buckled and declared it would only use HIV tests to screen the blood supply.

Ronald Bayer

"U.S. officials had no alternative but to negotiate the course of AIDS policy with representatives of a well-organized gay community and their allies in the medical and political establishments," wrote Ronald Bayer, a professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health. "In this process, many of the traditional practices of public health that might have been brought to bear were dismissed as inappropriate.” AIDS thus became the first politically-protected disease and Dr. Anthony Fauci was complicit.

Not only was contact tracing not practiced with the HIV-infected, it was actually forbidden. “During the first years of the disease,” said Burr, “legislation urged by civil libertarians [like the ACLU] prohibited physicians and public-health officials from notifying even the spouses of living people who had tested positive for HIV [emphasis mine], some of whom continued to have unprotected sex with their partners.” Evidently the ACLU was more worried about privacy rights of the HIV-infected than the very lives of their spouses. Is Fauci still more sensitive to political pressure than to science? You be the judge.

Governor Mills extends quarantine

Fauci is pushing it hard, but the efficacy of contact tracing for anyone who came within six feet of a Covid-19 infected person in an urban environment is questionable. Sex partners of the HIV-infected would have been much easier to locate, excepting anonymous bathhouse encounters.

What's Not Happening

It’s been a while, but I haven’t seen any gunfights in the streets of Maine or New Hampshire the past few years and I live very near the border between the two. That’s what progressives predicted would occur if gun laws loosened and people didn’t have to get permits to carry concealed guns. I haven’t seen any newspaper articles or television reports about increased gun violence either after each state passed legislation eliminating concealed carry permits. It’s been three years in New Hampshire and more than four years in Maine, so were the progressives wrong when they predicted both states would turn into the wild, wild west?

Police chiefs in both states were also against the new laws claiming their officers would at risk. What do they say now? Nothing. Vermont never required concealed carry permits and it’s always been one of the safest states in the country. That fact was ignored by progressive gun control advocates when they argued against New Hampshire and Maine revisions of concealed carry permits to copy Vermont.

Many people in the three northern New England states still leave their doors unlocked and crime rates remain very low. Is that because guns here are as common as unlocked doors? That’s probably a factor but not the only one. Most people own guns here and know how to use them. That’s a deterrent, certainly, but they also know who their neighbors are. There’s a much stronger sense of community. People here tend to look out for each other and are wary of strangers and unfamiliar vehicles in their neighborhoods. 

Most rural towns in northern New England don’t have police departments either. They rely on county sheriff’s deputies and the state police. Because of logistics and geography, response times for those larger law enforcement agencies are slower than police departments are in New York City or Boston. Rural people know this so they’re not only more prepared to defend themselves, they’re more willing to do so as well. They’re much less likely to cower in the face of criminal aggression of any sort.

There’s been no let-up in gun crimes for either state since gun laws were relaxed, but the perpetrators usually had prior felony convictions, so carrying a gun remained illegal for them. That didn’t stop them, of course, but then it never did. If you look around and see where most gun crimes are committed, you’ll quickly learn that they’re places with strict gun control laws like Chicago and New York. Gun laws on those places have only been obeyed by the law-abiding. Criminals have historically ignored them.

Although Bernie Sanders has always been a doctrinaire lefty on nearly every issue since he was elected Mayor of Burlington, Vermont almost forty years ago, his position on gun control didn’t fit the mold. Is that because he knew he would never have been elected to state-wide office there if he favored gun restrictions? His army of supporters would likely argue that Bernie has always been guided by principle over political expediency, but is that changing?

According to an article by Russell Berman in the February 27 issue of The Atlantic: 

The senator from Vermont’s hallmark has been his consistency as an unbending progressive over four decades in elected office. Yet if Sanders has embodied left-wing purity more than any of the other potential Democratic nominees, gun policy is one area where his record has been far from pristine in the eyes of progressives… But it’s telling that on gun control, he has gone further this time around to repudiate his past positions and align himself with the Democratic Party’s mainstream opinion. “The world has changed, and my views have changed,” he said at the February debate in New Hampshire.

Was Bernie sincere about his gun control views forty years ago? Is he caving in to political expediency here in 2020? He really wants to be president, but what if he loses to Biden or Trump? Can he be reelected senator in Vermont now that he’s become a gun control advocate? We may never know because he’s not up again until 2024 and by then he’ll be eighty-two years old. Maybe he’ll retire. Maybe he’ll change his position again.

While Democrats consider abortion their most important issue, gun control seems to have become the next most important. Maine and New Hampshire have been voting Democrat the past few cycles, and Vermont has been solidly “blue” for even longer. Maine and New Hampshire, however, are moving the other way on gun control. While Vermont has become even more leftist, there’s no indication they’ll tighten up on guns.

Kearsarge

I call it “Kearsarge” and it dominates the view westward through our picture window from my recliner where I’d been spending a lot of time recovering from leg surgery. It wasn’t always called that, however. An old woman who owned a property I managed way back in the 20th century called it “Pequawket Mountain,” and that was the official name for it until 1957, the year it officially became “Kearsarge North.”

Why, though? New Hampshire already had a Mount Kearsarge in Merrimack County and what was wrong with “Pequawket Mountain”? That’s what the Pequawket Indians, the local Abenaki branch living in Fryeburg and Conway, called it. It’s one of the most prominent peaks looking west from Fryeburg and Lovell. A trail leading to the top begins in village of Kearsarge which is part of Conway, NH. Perhaps the village people pressured whatever official body decided such things to rename it.

From my property, the mountain is almost due west and its profile is classic. Its southern slope is a long, straight, thirty-degree diagonal leading to the summit after which it drops off with pleasing symmetry to the north for about a third the length of the southern slope. The effect is similar to a wave. As a child, before I ever saw Kearsarge, I drew mountains in almost exactly those relative dimensions. The profile seen from Kezar Lake five miles north of me is similar and I have taken many photographs from both venues. When seen from Fryeburg Village, Kearsarge’s profile is quite different — more a rounded dome than a wave. 

Last October, Kearsarge seemed to bend light at sunset

In early March, the sun sets right behind Kearsarge. I mark seasonal progress by how far north of it the sun descends each evening. By the summer solstice, sunsets will have proceeded northward past Mount Washington to the Baldfaces before turning back southward again until the winter solstice. Often I see stunning displays of light, clouds, colors, and mists too beautiful to describe. Afternoon thunderstorms come in over those mountains too, and my favorite sunsets occur when they break up just as the sun is nearing the horizon. Its rays poke through the mists just before it drops behind again.

Rain squall one evening last summer

Never do I tire of watching all this, and it’s not just the sunsets. Our house is perched on the side of Christian Hill in Lovell which rises to our east. I don’t see rays of sun until after they have first lit up the eastern slopes of Kearsarge and the other mountains. It’s quite stunning after a winter storm during which snow or ice coats every branch of every tree on every mountain. The rising sun lights up each slope — first the very top and then proceeding downward to the base. On such mornings it seems our Creator is in a good mood and wants to show off.

Mount Washington one morning last year

After our house was built on what was then a fully-treed lot, it took me about ten years to open up the view. Each summer I’d cut enough for eight cords to keep the family warm over winter, then I’d twitch each tree up to the landing with an old Ford 8N farm tractor. It was a lot of work, but I saved money on oil, and there was the added benefit of seeing more mountains each succeeding year. I felt like a sculptor, and the more I did, the more our new house felt like home. 

Kearsarge from North Fryeburg corn field last month

When my wife started hinting at downsizing after the kids moved out, I knew I would have a hard time ever selling this place. I’d prefer to die here.

Kearsarge is one of the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine, which are relatively young compared to the Green Mountains of Vermont further west. According to prevailing geological opinion, the two ranges were formed by different mountain-building processes. The White Mountains were formed over 100 million years ago as subsurface magma intrusions later exposed by plate tectonics, glaciation, and other erosional processes. The Green Mountains were formed about 400 million years ago when tropical shorelines of an ancient sea were folded upward by continental drift and then also eroded by glaciers.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around such time spans but I keep trying. Four times, glaciers covered those mountains with ice over a mile thick above them, lastly only 20,000 years ago. The earliest humans we know of were in the area only13,000 years ago. Viewed from Lovell, Kearsarge is almost completely tree-covered except for areas recently clearcut. During winter, snow reflects sunlight back to me from those scars and it takes years for newer growth to cover them. They remind me of scars on my head when my mother exposed them using hair clippers to give me a “wiffle” after school let out for summer. By September, those scars were covered too.

Left & Right -- Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Mark Guerringue sits in the left chair. Our producer's first question asks about AG Barr’s recommendation of a reduced sentence for Roger Stone. Do we think Barr did it at the behest of President Trump?

I say Barr is sharp enough to know the former Mueller prosecutors who recommended the high sentence were out to get Donald Trump and his associates and doubt any collusion between the Barr and the president.

Mark thinks I’m “defending another criminal” and Stone gets what he deserves. He claims I believe in the Deep State which he says doesn’t exist except as “another conspiracy from the right.” He cites a retired FBI agent he spoke with who claims Trump was demoralizing to the FBI by his constant attacks.

I cite another retired FBI agent with whom I’ve spoken who has almost the same background as Mark’s guy but who has the opposite opinion and sees the Deep State for what it is.

Mark asks could Bernie, as an outsider, win the presidency the way Trump the outsider did four years ago? I don’t think he can because he isn’t flexible. His support is based on his unchanging nature, that even people who think him too radical-left trust him because he’s always been that way. Mark’s paper, the Conway Daily Sun, endorsed Bernie.

Mark believes that many of the Bernie supporters out there would vote for Trump if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination because they’re both outsiders. Mark says he voted for Amy Klobuchar in NH primary but wrote the editorial endorsing Bernie because “the job of the paper is to come up with the best candidate for the Democratic Party,” and does the same for the Republican Party.

Mark thinks Bernie will likely lose to Trump, but maybe not. If he gets elected he’ll push Medicare for all, but won’t get it. He’ll just tweak Obamacare. I read a quote from Pete Buttigieg two years ago endorsing Medicare for all, but he’s changed his mind since.

I raise Trump’s new Middle East Peace Plan in which Palestine gets the West Bank in exchange for acknowledging Israel’s right to exist — the old Oslo Plan essentially — but the Palestinians have only four years to accept it. If they don’t, the United States would support Isreal annexing the West Bank. What’s new now is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt won’t object to the plan. It’s a game-changer.

Mark asks what Trump could do to lose support from Republicans. I say he could stop appointing conservative judges and that would do it. Mark says the economy is doing well, and if that changes it could affect the November election, but incumbents usually win anyway.

I bring up the UK out of the EU and mistakenly say “Trump endorsed Jeremy Corbyn.” I meant Bernie endorsed him and I compare Boris Johnson to Trump. I see Brexit as a move toward decentralization of government similar to what conservatives want in the United States. Mark sees the EU as politically stabilizing for a Europe which erupted in wars large and small every generation. 

We take the second question from the producer: “How will Mitt Romney’s vote to convict affect his political career?”  Mark says he’ll make history as the only senator the same party as an impeached president to vote guilty but it won’t hurt his career. I say Romney comes across as a wimp and he’s been that way on the national stage. It’s why he lost to Obama. He lacks spine.

Mark says Iowa and NH should continue as first-in-the-nation caucus and primary because they’re demographically representative of the USA as a whole. I suspect the major parties will likely move away from those states.

The Transgender Juggernaut

Last Saturday’s Conway Daily Sun reported on a “Drag Queen Story Hour” at the local public library scheduled for later this month. According to the national organization for drag queens who want to read books to children, the target demographic is children aged 3-8. Books that “may be read” include: "Jacob's New Dress" by Sarah and Ian Hoffman and "Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.” Children must be accompanied by an adult so parental permission is assumed. If that’s something to which parents want to expose their kids, so be it.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a further assault on societal sexual norms. I mean it’s not as if homosexual men are suddenly dedicated to raising literacy rates. The library program is voluntary but elementary schools are mandatory and supported by our tax dollars. Similar homosexual propaganda is endorsed by teachers’ unions and education bureaucrats at all levels and we’re paying for it.

Just before I retired from teaching, I learned that a boy in the lower grades thought he was a girl. His parents evidently believed he was and insisted that everyone at the local elementary school behave as if he were. I figured I’d be gone before he got to my classroom and wouldn’t have to deal with the situation, and that’s the way it worked out. All elementary staff used female pronouns and he used the girls’ bathroom. I don’t know how long his confusion lasted and I wondered if the parents went ahead with puberty-blocking drugs and penis amputation for him as well.

Perhaps the boy overcame his confusion. Seventy or eighty percent do according to brave psychiatrists not afraid to speak out, but when everyone with whom a sexually confused young person comes in contact cooperates with the pretense it will likely persist. I felt bad for the little boy because the rate of suicide attempts for so-called transgenders was and is higher than 40%. The LGBTQIA (and whatever other letters have added to the ever-expanding acronym) lobby insists it’s because of discrimination by people who continue to maintain that humans are male and female and cannot switch sex on a whim.

Others dispute that. According to Daniel Payne writing in the Federalist: “[I]t utterly ignores the most salient feature of transgender individuals: that they are mentally ill and need serious treatment. This is not a moral or ethical judgment. It is, rather, a fact. Individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so—and one would quite reasonably expect a higher suicide rate from a portion of the population that suffers from so significant a mental illness (particularly a mental illness it is fashionable to indulge rather than treat).”

It was possible that a sexually confused student might transfer into my class and I resolved that I would not call her “him” or him “her” even if school authorities insisted and if I were fired I’d sue. I didn’t want to hurt the student’s feelings but I had a responsibility to other students. If I went along I’d signal that I believed it was possible to change from male to female or vice versa, and I didn’t. I wouldn’t pretend to admire the emperor’s new clothes or Morris’s tangerine dress as it were. I would resist the education Thought Police as well.

Mainstream media ignore developments counter to the LGBTQIA narrative so you’re not likely to read about so-called “transgenders” who regret their transition and seek to reverse their surgery. The Daily Wire quotes Professor Miroslav Djordjevic of Belgrade, one of the world’s leading genital reconstructive surgeons: “Definitely reversal surgery and regret in transgender persons is one of the very hot topics. Generally, we have to support all research in this field.” But universities will not fund it because it counters the LGBTQIA narrative.

Last week, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a bill banning “conversion therapy” defined as: “any practice or treatment that seeks or claims to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” Maine therapists could lose their license if they help a child accept his/her biological sex. Canada’s Supreme Court ruled last month that a parent must allow his 14-year-old daughter to receive male hormone injections. Last year, an Ohio judge removed a female child from her parents’ custody because they refused to allow hormone injections.

Last year, Brown University Assistant Professor Lisa Littman MD published a research study on ROGD — “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” in PLOS One a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Among her findings: “Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a[an adolescent female] peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.” To this former teacher of adolescent girls, her conclusions seemed eminently plausible.

Littman was vilified by the LGBTQIA lobby for “using transphobic dogwhistles” because she pulled the rug out from under the fashionable transgender juggernaut now getting its nose in the tent of the Conway Public Library.

Two Heroes

Two heroic men are in hiding today because they stood up for what they believe is right. Both are ordained priests of the Roman Catholic Church — one a lowly parish priest and the other an archbishop and Vatican diplomat. I admire them because they did what others are afraid to do while knowing it would bring a world of hurt down upon them. It might even cost them their lives.

Maybe the archbishop’s display of courage inspired the priest, I don’t know, but Archbishop Vigano, former papal nuncio [Vatican ambassador] to the United States, published an eleven-page testimony last July which shook the Catholic Church to its roots. It named names, specified dates, and referred to documents held in the Vatican by the pope’s closest advisors and by Vigano’s successor in Washington, DC. Vigano claims his church, my church, is under the influence of a “homosexual network,” many of whose members are sexual predators or their enablers. Vigano accuses Pope Francis of covering for them and calls on him to resign. 

The Vigano testimony was released to media worldwide while Pope Francis was in Ireland. Reporters swarmed him on the plane back to Rome but he refused to say anything — an unusual reaction from a pope who had never been shy about commenting on controversial issues. Three months later he’s still silent on the matter and has refused requests from other church officials to authorize an investigation.

Vigano further states, “The homosexual networks present in the church must be eradicated,” but there’s no evidence of that happening yet in the Vatican. Here in the United States, however, at least one priest is trying. An article in the Chicago Sun-Times September 18th states: “A North Side priest… burned a gay-friendly flag outside his Avondale church last week — against the wishes of the cardinal he claims is trying to minimize the clergy sex-abuse crisis.” It was a rainbow flag with a superimposed cross which had hung in the sanctuary.

That priest, Father Paul Kalchik has gone into hiding after being removed as pastor of Resurrection Church by Cardinal Archbishop Blaise Cupich who threatened to send the Chicago Police in to arrest him. Cupich was appointed Archbishop of Chicago by Pope Francis after being recommended by the now-disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Archbishop Vigano cited both Cupich and McCarrick as bishops who covered up for predator priests.

Cupich and McCarrick

Father Kalchik had succeeded three former pastors of the gay-friendly Resurrection Catholic Church, one of whom had been found dead in his rectory while hooked up to a “sex machine,” according to conservative Catholic lifesitenews.com. Kalchik had twice been sexually molested himself, the second time by a priest. Cardinal Cupich ordered Kalchik to submit to a psychological evaluation at the notorious St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland, but Kalchik refuses to go.

St Luke Institute

He has good reason to refuse. Several priests have likened the St. Luke’s Institute to a Soviet reprogramming facility, for conservative priests. It was once headed by former Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire Chancellor Edward Arsenault who according to catholicculture.org: “resigned from his post as head of the St. Luke Institute in Maryland in 2013 after he was charged with financial as well as sexual improprieties.” Arsenault’s former boss in Manchester Diocese was Bishop John McCormack — called a “Pedophile Pimp” by the majority leader of the NH House of Representatives. The founder of St. Luke’s Institute, Father Michael Peterson, died of AIDS. In 2009, St. Luke’s Institute granted its highest award to guess who: Cardinal McCarrick, or “Uncle Ted” as he wished to be called by the many seminarians he sexually abused.

As one of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, I take no joy in recounting the sorry state of corruption in my church. As someone who was twice summoned to court to answer completely false charges of “harassment” by homosexual activists, I understand something about what Father Kalchik and Archbishop Vigano are up against. The charges against me were dismissed. I didn’t fear for my life. I didn’t have to go into hiding. It cost me $4000 in attorney’s fees and two entire days in a courtroom listening to people lie about me under oath. Several of my columns were entered as evidence of “homophobia.” but then it was over and I “won.”

Not really though. Even though they lost, homosexual activists put me through the ringer and that was the whole point. Now they’re putting the screws to Kalchik and Vigano, but the powerful homosexual network in the Catholic Church has been outed and its days are numbered. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas ordered that Vigano’s testimony be distributed in parishes across his diocese. Several other US and European cardinals and bishops have also voiced support. The “Lavender Mafia” won’t be able to smooth this over the way they did in 2002 after the Boston Globe Spotlight report.

Father Kalchik

This time, we have priests and bishops with a spine.