Keeping up with the Joneses

I thought that the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, signifying the attempt by some people to try and match the signifiers of wealth of their friends or neighbors, originated in some fictional account back in the distant past. But it turns out that it is based on real people

The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” first appeared in 1850 in The New Yorker, describing how the neighbors of Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, a wealthy New York socialite, were so intimidated by her summer home in the Hudson Valley that many were prompted to renovate their own properties to, as the magazine put it, keep up with the Joneses. 

Since then, the idiom has found a home in the competitive arena of middle-class America. For years, “keeping up with the Joneses” has conjured up images of a typically white, straight American family — husband, wife, two kids, a dog — standing on their front lawn, waving to their neighbors, the husband smiling as he clocks the neighbor’s new car and the wife wondering if the neighbors’ kids are dressed better than their own. It’s a nod to the pressure that comes when your home, family and a few key material possessions are treated as vital parts of your public presentation.

[Read more…]

Who knew I that am surrounded by witches?

Trump has fired the secretary of the navy John Phelan. Phelan’s only qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a rich crony of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein but his replacement Hung Cao, who previously lost two races for Congress in Virginia, while having military experience, is also seriously weird.

Cao’s record, however, is not without controversy. During his 2024 candidacy, for example, USA Today reported that the Republican, a decorated Navy veteran, “made repeated references to becoming disabled after he was ‘blown up’ in combat,” although his military record did not support those claims.
…

Complicating matters, shortly after launching his Senate campaign, Cao also expressed concerns about, of all things, witchcraft.

During one 2023 interview, Cao said witches had “taken over” a California city, and he wanted to prevent similar problems in the commonwealth.

“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said during an interview with a Christian pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — Monterey is a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

[Read more…]

Suppressing good news that goes against your agenda

You would think that a CDC report that showed reduced hospitalization and emergency room visits among healthy adults last winter would be good news, right? Not if it is for reasons that go against Trump-Kennedy vaccine dogma.

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots.
…

The report is gaining attention at a delicate political moment: The Trump administration has sought to soften its public posture on controversial vaccine actions ahead of the midterm elections. GOP pollsters have warned of the political risks of vaccine skepticism, and many voters oppose Kennedy’s efforts to roll back vaccine policies. Publishing findings showing the vaccine’s effectiveness would be at odds with the administration’s moves to restrict its use, particularly for children, former CDC officials say.

The report had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, which includes dozens of scientists, according to two of the three people who spoke to The Post. Stopping an MMWR report at that stage is highly unusual, former CDC officials say.

So there we are. Kennedy and his appointees are so anti-vaccine that they do not want success stories to be issued, presumably because that would highlight the benefits of vaccines and might result in more people desiring them. The fact that fewer people will succumb to the serious effects of covid-19 does not seem to matter to them.

It is these people who are sick.

Grifters all the way down

The Trump administration is rotten through and through.

The latest example is Julie Varvaro, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, who frequented sites that allowed her to seek ‘sugar daddies’, wealthy men who would shower her with gifts. She was appointed to such a high level post in 2025 even though she was just 29 and had graduated from college just the year before.

Now one of the men who took her up on her offer and spent a huge amount of money on her said that her demands for money and gifts were insatiable, including that he provide her with a credit card in her name so that she did not have to keep asking him for money, and he reported her to the the government and she has been suspended from her post.

I cannot do justice to the sleaziness described in the report. You have to read it for yourself and while reading it, keep reminding yourself that the person behaving this way is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, a very well-paying job that presumably requires some serious vetting, not some penniless intern.

If you have shameless profiteering right as the top with the Trump family, it is hardly surprising that rot will be found all the way down.

Remaking the image of socialism

I am a socialist.

I have no reservations about saying so. In Sri Lanka, that would be entirely uncontroversial since socialism was pretty much accepted as the mainstream political view. But in the US, it causes people to react with surprise because of the red-baiting rhetoric that has long been dominant at all levels of discourse. Socialists have been portrayed as, if not evil, at least as not part of the spectrum of acceptable political views. This is why whenever the opportunity presents itself in discussions about politics, I say that I am a socialist, just so that people realize that we are not scary weirdos. (At least, I do not think people see me as such.)

The neoliberal consensus that has dominated US politics has had as its central aim creating hatred for government in all its forms, as a means of privatizing its functions and abolishing any restraints on the ability of business and the oligarchs to rip off ordinary people. Since socialism believes that basic services such as health care and education and other aspects of daily life that impact the general population should be run by the people for the benefit of people and not private interests, the capitalist class has targeted socialists for vilification.

Although there have been socialist movements in the working classes and unions, and prominent socialists like Eugene Debs in the US, they did not achieve governmental power. Bernie Sanders was one of the few who broke through that barrier, first being elected as mayor of the town of Burlington in Vermont, then going on to Congress, first as a representative and then as a senator. He never shied away from the label of socialist, and his strong and consistent message of advocating for the interests of ordinary people and attacking the wealthy has made the face of socialism acceptable to a significant portion of the population.
[Read more…]

The Starmer-Mandelson puzzle

Over in the UK, Keir Starmer finds himself in very hot water, with his job as prime minister on the line over all manner of issues that have nothing to do with actual policy.

It was always clear from the beginning that Starmer was never going to be a progressive in the mold of Jeremy Corbyn. He was your typical neoliberal politician, tinkering at the margins of policies that might benefit ordinary people while keeping intact that stranglehold that the capitalist classes have on major issues. His election campaign did not make any bold proposals but he and his party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority when voters rejected the 14 years of Conservative Party rule that included the clown car of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and because Rishi Sunak could do little to salvage anything from that debacle.

But at least one would be justified in having the impression that the calm Starmer would be competent in his job, appointing people who would enable him to run things smoothly. And yet he has proven himself to be really poor at it, especially in his judgment of people to appoint to high posts. This has resulted in a high number of people resigning. The biggest names have been Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff.
[Read more…]

Good riddance to yet another Trump cabinet member

Labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is ‘leaving’ Trump’s Cabinet (i.e., she was fired) after investigations into several abuse of power allegations.

At least four Labor Department officials have already been forced from their jobs as the investigation progressed, including Chavez-DeRemer’s former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, as well as a member of her security detail, with whom she was accused of having the affair, The New York Times reported.

The New Yorker‘s E. Tammy Kim has this summary.

Chavez-DeRemer was facing a litany of allegations of professional misconduct. The Labor Department’s inspector general had been investigating her, her advisers, and her family for months. Her chief of staff, Jihun Han—who, I reported last year, threatened employees with criminal prosecution for talking to the press—was pushed out in March; so was a security guard with whom the Secretary was allegedly having an affair. Chavez-DeRemer has been accused of drinking on the job and billing taxpayers for extravagant pleasure trips. The Times reported that she commanded a staffer to bring ‘sauvi B’ to her hotel room. She also instructed female employees to ‘pay attention’ to her father and husband. The latter was banned from the department’s headquarters after at least three women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching. (He has denied wrongdoing, and a police investigation, per the Washington Post, was closed in February.)

Giving even her husband and father ‘access’ to female employees shows a high level of arrogance, not to mention giving new meaning to the term ‘family values’. It is just plain weird.

But while those abuses are bad enough, her policies were also terrible.

What she doesn’t deny is the agenda she pushed in her brief time as Secretary: the repeal of minimum-wage guarantees for home-care workers, the rollback of mine-safety rules, the defunding of training programs for women in construction, the elimination of grants to end child and slave labor.

These people have no shame.

The dangerous allure of self-medication

Before a new drug is approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration in the US, say for cancer treatment, it has to go through quite a stringent process of at least three phases of clinical trials, with each phase having a different purpose.

  • Phase I trials test if a new treatment is safe and look for the best way to give the treatment. Doctors also look for signs that cancer responds to the new treatment.
  • Phase II trials test if one type of cancer responds to the new treatment.
  • Phase III trials test if a new treatment is better than a standard treatment.
  • Phase IV trials find more information about long-term benefits and side effects.

The Phase I trial stage is where a new treatment can get shut down quickly if it shows signs of causing harm. Phase II is meant to show that the treatment does work in the way advertised. Phase III can be a difficult bar to reach because you need to show that the new treatment is better than what is already available.

Nowadays most people think of these measures as reasonable precautions to prevent people from being harmed by untested drugs and other treatments. But as Dhruv Khullar writes, the idea that the government should be able to decide what people can put into their bodies has been, at least in the US, a controversial issue, and at one time there was nothing to stop people from doing whatever they liked.
 [Read more…]

Vance gets smacked down by Catholic bishops

Whatever one’s views are about the Catholic Church, there is no question that it takes its doctrines seriously, devoting enormous amounts of time to research and develop its theology, even if the final product sometimes has the aim of justifying its often horrendous history of violence and abuse and misogyny.

The question of when it is justifiable to use force and violence is one that transcends religion and is problematic for everyone. This is one of those areas that the church has studied quite deeply and it has arrived at the so-called ‘just war theory’, of under what circumstances going to war is defensible. The originator of this theory was St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century, and it was developed further by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Pope Leo is a member of the Augustinian order, the first person from that order to become a pope and is currently visiting the site of Hippo, where Augustine was bishop for 34 years in order to pay homage to founder of his order.
[Read more…]