Month: September 2025

The 2025-2026 flu and Covid vaccines


The “check in” kiosk at a CVS MinuteClinic, where no staff was visible for up to half an hour at a time.

It took some effort this year to get the new Covid vaccine. I needed to get that taken care of this week, because starting next week I’ll be five different airline flights through four different airports, not to mention several train trips in Scotland.

The friction, of course, is caused by the Robert Kennedy Jr.’s deranged tampering with the American health care system. The situation varies from state to state. Here in North Carolina, most people get vaccines at pharmacies, particularly CVS. However, a state regulation does not allow pharmacists to do vaccinations unless the vaccine has been approved by the federal Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices (ACIP). Back in June Kennedy dismissed all seventeen members of that committee and has been appointing his own goons to the committee. The committee doesn’t even meet until September 18. Who knows what it will do?

I had to do some asking around to figure out how to get the vaccine before the ACIP meeting. The solution turned out to be CVS MinuteClinics. The MinuteClinics have nurse practitioners, and nurse practitioners are not affected by North Carolina’s limitations on what pharmacists can do. I had to wait an hour to get the shot. There weren’t all that many people waiting. But the MinuteClinic was grossly understaffed.

Stories in the media were absolutely no help in figuring out the situation in North Carolina. I found out about the MinuteClinic solution through a Facebook group for the Democratic Party. Is this an indicator of how even accurate information will become politicized as the fascists push propaganda and call everything else fake news?

I was able to get the flu shot at a pharmacy last week because the flu vaccine is not being held up by the ACIP meeting. My Humana Medicare Advantage insurance paid for both vaccines.

All of a sudden, getting vaccines (and figuring out whether insurance will pay) has become an obstacle course, a political statement, and an act of resistance. Republicans are politicizing the health-care system, putting politicians in charge of public health while marginalizing medical people.

We can only hope that we don’t have a pandemic while know-nothings are running the government. If know-nothing people who like know-nothing governments want to exercise their freedom to die of preventable diseases, fine and good riddance. But they’re going to make things as hard as possible for the rest of us.

Traditional values??


From my morning walk: a happy goat

David Brooks

Show me a conservative intellectual and I will show you someone who is insufferably morally smug, with blind spots half a galaxy wide.

I do give David Brooks credit for halfway recognizing that everything he has flacked for for many years has gone to the devil. Still, he identifies as a conservative, and periodically he writes a piece intended to sustain his moral smugness and to flatter conservatives and conservatism.

His column in the New York Times this morning is a masterpiece of self-deception: Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks writes: “As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we’re not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty.”

It is conservatism, he would have us believe, that knows how to nurture this human capital. Then he shoots himself right between the eyes by citing a study on how Swedish culture protects people of Swedish descent from poverty, even though Sweden is always at or near the top of the list of the world’s most liberal countries.

Because of his blind spot, it doesn’t occur to Brooks to ask himself who conservatives throw money at: the rich and the super-rich. Did the trillions of dollars redistributed upward, and the creation of hundreds of American billionaires, make the rich virtuous? Is it more virtuous to throw money at the rich than at poor people who can barely afford to feed their children?

I have a fantasy of running into Brooks in an airport restaurant while he’s having his $78 hamburger. “You’re a pretty nice man,” I’d say to him. “But you’re an idiot.”

Ken is in the New York Times again

Ken has an article in the Aug. 30 New York Times, The Era of the American Lawn Is Over. On his Substack page, he also has a short video showing his wee front and back gardens near Edinburgh.

The price of silver

One often hears it said that people who grew up during the Great Depression remain frugal for the rest of their lives. Those of us who remember the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s will never forget it. I’m convinced that I can smell a financial calamity well before it happens, because of the irrational exuberance and the obvious unsustainability. That unsustainability never unwinds gradually. It always comes crashing down.

On January 17, 1980, silver reached a high of $49.95 per ounce. Two months later, the Hunt brothers (who were trying to corner the silver market) missed a margin call, and the price of silver fell to $10.80 per ounce.

This morning, as I write, silver is priced at $41.46 per ounce, having risen by around $10 an ounce in the past few months. If you have some silver, that’s nice. But it is not a good economic indicator. Irrational exuberance continues in the stock market, but many warning signs are flashing in the bond market and in gold and currency markets.

As I see it, there is a calamity in our near future. Irrational exuberance tends to last much longer than a rational person can understand. When bubbles will burst is impossible to predict.

The August jobs report was just released. “U.S. labor markets stalled this summer,” writes the New York Times. Yet the stock market is up, apparently because the weakening labor market means that the Fed will reduce interest rates. We should ask ourselves: Who benefits more from low interest rates than from a healthy economy? (Hint: people who play with other people’s money — the people who always cause financial crises.)

To my lights, it’s time to fasten our seatbelts and prepare for turbulence. A financial crisis is never good, even when governments are wise and rational in managing it. But we Americans are now passengers in a ship of fools and con men, who, given choices, will always choose the worst, then double down.


Originally published September 5, 1957. Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by Douglas Martin, the Charlotte News, via Wikimedia Commons. This photo was selected as the 1957 World Press Photo of the Year. Click here for high resolution.

The deplorables, an anniversary

The photo above was first published 68 years ago today. We must never forget who the deplorables are, what they are, what their values are, and what they are capable of. The photo is of Dorothy Counts, taunted by white students at Harry P. Harding High School.