Tag Archives: Charles Goldman

Federal spending needs a scalpel, not a chain saw

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Regarding the budget carnage in Washington, DC, here’s a few things I feel strongly about. I’m interested to know if you agree or disagree.

1. A federal budget deficit of $1.8 TRILLION is unacceptable and unsustainable. The federal government needs to end deficit spending and enact a balanced budget amendment.

2. Federal spending, especially on the military, has grown way too big.

3. There absolutely is waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget.

Agree, yes? Yet Elon Musk’s metaphor for addressing legitimate budgetary concerns is a chain saw. I’ve used a chain saw (on wood, to be clear). It’s not a delicate or discerning tool. Cutting federal waste, fraud, and abuse with a chain saw will eliminate much more than the fat. Americans are seeing that, and more and more are unhappy about it.

To “muskify” (my latest linguistic contribution) programs that benefit most Americans and protect our environment, national parks, water, and air might be deemed juvenile if it weren’t so devastating. Devastating as in life-and-death devastating. Continue Reading →

Anticipatory DISobedience

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We’re hearing a lot about “anticipatory obedience.” Terrified of what President Trump might do, some media, universities, corporations, and even individuals are choosing to censure themselves. One of the earliest examples happened last fall, when the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (both owned by billionaires) chose NOT to endorse a candidate for President.

Historian Timothy Snyder has been warning people and institutions against caving in to authoritarian power in advance. Snyder was quoted in The Guardian, saying, “the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.”
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How some animals are adapting to climate change

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With so many reasons to feel despondent about the state of the world, I was greatly encouraged last week by this article in The Guardian: Shrinking trees and tuskless elephants: the strange ways species are adapting to humans.

I had no idea that so many species are evolving — and evolving quickly! — in response to humanity’s massive footprint. Fox squirrels, for example, have done particularly well in our Des Moines neighborhood of Sherman Hill. On our block, they now own most of the houses, while the rich, loose soil of Birds & Bees Urban Farm is their preferred pantry for nut storage.

To be clear, we have to stop messing up the planet. Plants and animals evolving is not the long-term solution. The sixth major extinction continues, alas. But the adaptations presented in The Guardian story are intriguing, encouraging, and worth noting. Charles and I talk about some of them during the first segment of this week’s program, as a lead-in to our discussion about viruses and whether bird flu might jump to humans. Continue Reading →

Merry Christmas

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Here’s a 1:34 piano rendition of my favorite Christmas song, O Holy Night. Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone. Click on the image to listen:

Charles Goldman and I have some good conversations on this week’s program, and Kathy takes a quick trip around the world to see what others favor for Christmas and holiday meals. If you listen, I’ve got five questions for you:

1.  Will Pete Hegseth be confirmed as Secretary of Defense, notwithstanding his unabashed Christian nationalism?

2. Should psilocybin be legalized?

3. If Chinese company ByteDance refuses to sell TikTok, should TikTok be banned?

4. If confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will RFK, Jr be able to take a bite out of the ultra-processed foods industry?

5. Have you ever eaten a goose for Christmas?

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Sorry about those drones. Our bad.

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As I write this column, the mystery of the New Jersey drones remains unsolved. To end the suspense, I’ve decided to come clean. The drones are probes sent out by a mothership sent to bring Charles and me back to our home planet. (See undoctored photo for proof of our true identity. Photo credit, Kathy Byrnes. Not an alien.)

Because Charles and I live in Iowa, a.k.a. fly-over country (definitely the best place to be whether you’re evading aliens, rising seas, wildfires, costly housing, or insufferable coastal elites), our alien-homies never thought to look beyond “greater New York” to track us down. Silly aliens.

So, in the interest of ending this plague of drones ruining Christmas for New Jerseyans, Charles and I are turning ourselves in. Come get us, you bug-eyed bastards.

Charles and l will soon board the mothership for the long flight back to our home planet, where we expect to be tried for defamation for much of what we’ve said on this program over the past 15 years. Hey, it’ll probably turn out better for us than being sued for defamation by Donald Trump. Continue Reading →

Is it fair of AOC to call the Green Party “predatory”?

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Attacks by Democratic partisans against Green Party candidates — and Republican partisans against Libertarian Party candidates — is standard fodder during any presidential election.

But the tradition took an interesting twist recently when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) eviscerated Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein. The attack took many off guard, given that AOC is arguably the Democratic member of Congress most closely aligned with the Green’s platform.

In a recent TikTok video, AOC said of Stein, “If all you do is show up once every four years, you are not serious. To me, it does not read as authentic. It reads as predatory.” Continue Reading →

US/NATO missiles bombing Russia could lead to nuclear war

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I usually look forward to writing this blog. Not so much when the topic is nuclear war.

Ok, so now that I’ve lost half my audience (I get it: who wants to discuss nuclear war?), let me ask the remaining half to indulge the urgency of this message.

Not my message, so much, but the message of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and others. The work of this prestigious organization includes the Doomsday Clock in response to the threat of nuclear war and other existential dangers.

Earlier this year, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board wrote that, “in large part because of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine” they were moving the Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, “the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”

If we were 90 seconds from global catastrophe before President Biden said he might allow Ukraine to launch long-range missiles deep inside Russia, the Clock certainly has advanced further in the wrong direction.
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Ed eats crow on RFK prediction

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To eat crow is defined as “admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position.” Before I figuratively ingest a healthy portion of said bird, I’ll remind my readers of a few times I got it right.

In an article published in Bleeding Heartland in August 25, 2016, I said, “I think this whole election is so volatile and so many people dislike Clinton that it could go that way. I mean, Trump could win.”

In my May 17, 2023, blog, I wrote, “Democrats should be in panic mode about Biden’s poll numbers. The way things are going, Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in November, 2024.”

A year later, Biden’s poll numbers were only getting worse. In my June 26 blog, the day before the historic debate between Biden and Trump, I wrote, “Pundits and commentators will, however, rate Biden’s performance somewhere between mediocre and a total bomb. Over the course of the next two months, the Party Elites will roll out Biden’s chosen successor.”

While I think I can make a good case that I read the political tea leaves correctly more often than not, I was way off when I wrote in my November 9, 2023 blog, “my prediction as to who will win the presidency: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”
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Mushrooms shed new light on death

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In my early 20s, I was briefly fascinated by a series of books written by Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda wrote about a shaman’s use of plant-based psychedelics (specifically peyote and jimsonweed) to aid truth-seekers in their quest for spiritual growth. Regardless of the veracity of Castaneda’s work (a 1973 Time story described him as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla”), I found the content of his writing fascinating, even alluring.

That said, I was never tempted to experiment with psychedelic plants. For me life was, and continues to be, interesting enough without the ingestion of mind-altering substances.

But my perception of the topic received a jolt during this week’s conversation with Dr. Charles Goldman, my good friend and frequent cohost.

Charles is a cancer surgeon and recently retired as the head of palliative care at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. In the course of our discussion about psilocybin (a.k.a., magic mushrooms), Charles shared a perspective I’d never considered: Perhaps a psychedelic experience with psilocybin doesn’t simply alter one’s perception but actually allows one to access elements within the brain that normally are suppressed in preference to our frontal lobe “executive” functions. Perhaps psilocybin allow users to experience things that are just as “real” as the day-to-day human experience but are simply not interpretable via logic and cognition. Continue Reading →