Hey! It’s been a while since we did a Music Monday!
They made a whole movie of this plotline. Far more recently, this and this happened.
Remember: a drivers license is evidence that you can legally drive a vehicle, and evidence of your identity. It is not and never has been evidence of citizenship. Most of us cannot prove our citizenship with documents we carry daily.
The old Oak Forest Hospital is slated for demolition and site redevelopment now. At one time it was a tuberculosis sanitarium. That’s when my grandmother was a patient there. She was one of the first patients who was actually cured of tuberculosis, or TB. The drugs which killed the bacteria left her deaf.
Tuberculosis and measles are both diseases that can travel quite a long way. That’s why patients with those diseases are placed on airborne precautions. You probably know there’s currently a measles outbreak impacting 13 states as I write — probably more by morning. That’s serious, make no mistake. But Tuberculosis is also a serious and much more common problem.
Every year near the end of March is World Tuberculosis Day. Normally the CDC has a massive release of data on that day. At this time I do not know whether the CDC will release that data. My local health district has already quietly released their data, which they normally hold until World Tuberculosis Day. My state has not. It is worth noting that locally, cases are up over where they were 2 years ago (but down from last year). This data is vital to me in a professional capacity to determine how much risk my patients and staff face from TB in the community.
Believe it or not there is a vaccine for TB! It was developed a couple of decades before we had a cure. We don’t generally use it here in the United States because it’s not as effective as would be desirable, we have a relatively low prevalence, and it interferes with the cheap “skin test” you may remember having done at some point in your life. But many of our nurses from places like South Korea or the Philippines have had this vaccine.
Now about curing TB. It’s not fun. Remember from the beginning of my post that the first treatments we had often had horrible life changing side effects. However, it was better than the alternative: dying. Unfortunately TB has developed resistance to many drugs over the years. It is important to treat TB even if it’s latent — meaning it’s not causing you to be very sick right now. Treatment can often involve multiple, very strong antibiotics, every day for months. In some cases, the local health department might call every day to make sure you took it.
And this brings me to another important point. People without insurance — or with lousy insurance — might not be able to afford those antibiotics. When that happens, they are not only a walking petri dish for incubating drug resistant strains of the disease, they are sharing their germs with everyone around them.
Also, tuberculosis does not care about your immigration status.
Places where people are crowded together — like jails and immigration detention centers — are a perfect place for one TB case to turn into dozens. Are you wondering how many undocumented immigrants are going to seek medical care for their TB or measles symptoms?
So the weekend “news” included the claim that 150 year olds are fraudulently receiving Social Security checks. Now, I could bore you with a half dozen sources debunking that claim. Or we can look at it logically. After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Someone 150 today would have been born in 1874 or 1875. Social security was passed into law in 1935 and regular monthly benefits began in 1940, when our hypothetical super-centenarian was already 65 years old! Today their kids would be well over 100 themselves, their grandchildren octogenarians or older, and their great grandchildren old enough to legitimately receive Social Security checks of their own. So we’re talking about a three to five generation grift, if true. That’s a lot of work.
Without thinking very hard I can think of three simpler and more likely explanations. First, someone got a digit of the birth year wrong. Someone born in 1974 or 1975 is just 50 years old, and might well be receiving Social Security as survivor benefits or disability benefits.
Second, it’s possible — less likely but possible — that a funeral home got a digit of a social security number wrong when reporting some decades ago and therefore mistakenly didn’t report someone as dead. Checks continue to go out, uncashed.
Oh, and a third and final explanation? Mr. Musk may have made the whole thing up to get you mad. After all, Republicans have been aching for excuses to slash or eliminate Social Security for a long time.
And Happy Hanukkah too.
Rodeo Week is in early December in Las Vegas. The MGM Lion wore his hat. I don’t think he’s amused.
That’s Carl Sagan. The guy from whom most of Generation X learned about space. A precursor to Neil deGrasse Tyson if you like. One of Mr. Sagan’s famous quotes is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Let’s just say that there’s an election coming up. Party A is running Candidate A. Party B is running Candidate B.
Imagine if you will, that Candidate A claims that Candidate B will, oh, I don’t know, institute a death penalty for jaywalking (notwithstanding that jaywalking in some places can be deadly without judicial action). Wow, that’s pretty extreme. Now you might be having one of several reactions: maybe “wow that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”; maybe “well it doesn’t surprise me that Party B would run someone with that kind of plan” or “well I always knew something was off about Candidate B”; and just maybe, you think “that’s kind of weird, maybe I should look into that a little further.”
If you thought the last thing, congratulations! You noticed an extraordinary claim and are at least looking for evidence, preferably the extraordinary kind.
You’ve got another week until Election Day. Go ahead and use that extraordinary brain of yours! Find out if Jewish Space Lasers or government hurricane control satellites are real. Learn what political parties and their candidates really think about guns instead of what their opponents claim they think. Take a read through Project 2025. Peek at the actual voting record and positions of your elected officials. Read about the Federal Reserve (from an actual reputable site, please). Learn how many houses sell in your area in a typical month and how many are available right now; come to your own conclusions about why housing costs what it does. Learn what an ectopic pregnancy, and read for just a few minutes about fatal birth defects (ah, you won’t want to spend a lot of time on that because it’s extremely sad and can be upsetting).
You’ll notice I’m not feeding you links. And you know I love links! I hope you’ll spend time on some relatively neutral sites like Wikipedia. When you go to the websites of the political parties, pay attention to what they want and ignore what they claim the other guys want. Don’t pay any attention to celebrities; they’re not running for anything. That includes the people on certain TV channels that claim to present news. If a candidate has a giant gap between what they say and what they do, pay attention to what they do.
When you are done, maybe you’ll be firmly convinced your initial opinion was correct. Maybe you’ll be looking for more information still. And just maybe you’ll have changed your mind about a thing or two. Whatever you decide, remember that what you do on your ballot is your business alone. It doesn’t have to align with your family or the sign in the yard, just with your heart. Whatever you learn, do the right thing.
Okay, I know the virus has actually been out there a while. And yes, I am monitoring the bird flu situation in a professional capacity.
While the vaccine currently out there is not perfect, it is better than the alternative to getting vaccinated: nothing. I urge you — both personally and professionally — keep your hands clean, get vaccinated, and stay home if you are sick. Remember that year we did a lot of things to keep from getting COVID? The flu rate sure was low that year!
Stay safe out there!