Every American Voter Should Read One Of These Books Before November 5, 2024!

 

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." Thomas Paine  

 

I first began posting these book lists sometime shortly after it became apparent to most intelligent, politically aware people in America that TRAITOR Trump was just that, a TRAITOR, nothing more, nothing less.  He was that long before I ever posted one of these reading lists.  He is still a TRAITOR today.  He will still be a TRAITOR on the day he dies and finally leaves America and Americans to live in peace after he has destroyed everything he can on the way.  It is imperative, if America is to remain a democracy, that TRAITOR Trump must never be allowed anywhere near the White House or any other active component of government in this country.  He is unfit to hold any position of public trust at any level, all the way down to dogcatcher and constable in a small, poverty stricken district.  Do both yourself and the country a much needed favor and read at least one of these books on this list before you vote on November 5, 2024.  This is an election between Good and Evil, Patriotism and TREASON, Peace and Total Destruction of Everything Valuable in America.   

 

On Democracy by Timothy Snyder  This is Timothy Snyder's latest book, just having been releases a short while ago.  Like everything Snyder writes, it is described as being a book which "will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish."  It is a continuation of Snyder's deep concerns and fears for America and American Democracy if the voters of this country allow TRAITOR Trump to return to another TREASONOUS occupation of the White House.  In my opinion, Snyder is the greatest historian and historical writer in America today.  He is a professor of history at Yale University in an endowed chair and still manages to write at least one important book a year or more.  This is the link to his official website.  Anything which Snyder writes is a must read for any citizen of America who wishes to see our Democracy survive.  I will add a couple of his other books below with less commentary about them.  Just assume if he wrote it, you need to read it. 

 

The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump Edited by Bandy Lee, M. D. I reviewed this book here.  This is one of those books that every reasonably intelligent citizen of this country should read.  I have been promoting this book ever since the day the initial publicity campaign began when it was released.  This book was written in individual articles by 27 of the best, best known, most experienced, most respected psychiatrists in the country and edited by Dr. Bandy X. Lee, M. D. who is a psychiatrist and professor at Yale University.  Her credentials are incredible and so is this book.  Just as the letter to the senate from 2,400 law professors should have put an end to the legal career of Brett Kavanaugh, this book should have put an end to the public life of TRAITOR Trump.  Read this book even if you do not choose to read another book on this list or another book of any kind for the rest of your life. Do not let the fact that it is written by a bevy of psychiatrists deter you from reading it.  When you are done you will have a far better understanding of the serious and danger mental illness of TRAITOR Trump. 

 

The Road To Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder  This is Snyder's most recent book excluding the release last month of his latest, On Freedom.  The Road To Unfreedom is an excellent and well documented study of how Fascism has been spread by Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe.  It discusses Putin's dream of putting together a Russian empire extending all the way from Vladivostok to Lisbon covering most of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia.  Do not for a minute believe TRAITOR Trump when he tells you that he could "stop the war in Ukraine before" he took office if he should actually win an American election for the first time in his life.  Putin has expressed this plan for quite a few years in magazine and newspaper articles published under his name, in public speeches, and in all forms of media.  His attempt to subjugate Ukraine is geared toward giving Russia an open door to proceed further in this plan.  If he is allowed to overpower Ukraine, Poland will be next.  World War 3 will have begun and Putin will proceed until he is forcefully stopped, if that is even possible at that point.  

 

On Call by Anthony Fauci, M. D.  is the recently published memoir of Dr. Fauci who recently retired as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.  He was also the public face of the scientific fight against Covid and was daily defamed, insulted, minimized, and abused by TRAITOR Trump who is not now and never was fit to be a pimple on Dr. Fauci's ass.   More than 1million innocent American victims of Covid died because TRAITOR Trump refused to do anything to stop the pandemic after being informed by the intelligence and healthcare communities in January and February 2020 that the pandemic was coming and could destroy the country.  If NIH and the CDC had been allowed to fully do their jobs in early 2020, Covid would have been far less destructive and would have been confronted and dealt with successfully far sooner if TRAITOR Trump had not attempted to hamper every effort the scientific community made to do their jobs.  How do I know this?  For 5 years in the middle to late 1990's I spent many days at NIH.  My wife was a patient there during that period and we traveled there 2 or 3 times a year for a week at a time during that 5 year period.  So did my father-in-law.  I have never met Dr. Fauci, but I have met one other chair of an institute there.  I know NIH.  I have known people there at every level of employment from grounds keepers, food service workers, nurses, research staff, doctors, and one director of an institute.  Every one of them is a hero working daily in their own unique ways to help save the world.  If you don't read another word of Dr. Fauci's book read the section on Covid 19 and the pandemic which is only 67 pages long and will show you exactly what a TRAITOR TRAITOR Trump is and exactly what heroes the men and women of NIH  are.  It will also give you a great deal of insight into how greatly TRAITOR Trump has damaged this country morally and ethically over the last 10 years.

 

 Fascism by Madeleine Albright  Former Secretary of State Albright's book has been postively reviewed by most of the media people who have read it.  Secretary Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to the US to become our first female Secretary of State and one of our best.  This is her description of a Fascist: "A Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.”  There is no more accurate description of TRAITOR Trump.  Read this book and if you finish it before I do send me an e-mail or a comment on this blog post.

 

  
Trump/Russia by Seth Hettena  This book provides an excellently researched timeline of the more than 30 year history of interactions between TRAITOR Trump and Russia.  Hettena's reputation as a reporter, researcher, and writer are excellent.  He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and that, in itself, is a recommendation of his mind and ability to function successfully in a high pressure environment.

 

 

The Restless Wave by John McCain  "Worse misfits have not been seen in a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub."  (John McCain, p. 327)  When I read that sentence in John McCain's last book, I laughed out loud.  I have not reviewed this book yet, and have a few pages left to read before I finish it but this book is the most pleasant surprise I have had in a book in quite some time.  I began reading it since McCain has recently died and he had up put some level of public resistance to TRAITOR Trump.  However, in 2016, he had failed to go the full mile and endorse Hillary Clinton for president instead of just refusing to endorse TRAITOR Trump. Yet this book is far more positive about Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama than toward TRAITOR Trump.  I had begun the book expecting to hear a pretty standard espousal of fairly Right Wing Repugnican politics and a play by play of McCain's career.  But the book is often very honest about McCain's serious misgivings, distrust, and opposition to TRAITOR Trump.  But once again, he fell short of taking the full step and calling a spade a spade.  But the book is very well worth reading.   

 

The Plot To Destroy America by Malcolm Nance Malcolm Nance is a career US Navy man and the author of several books on counter terrorism, intelligence, national security, and Islamic extremism.  He is a trained intelligence expert and cryptologist.  His unique perspective and ability to write about what he knows without endangering his security clearance or his reputation is remarkable.  Malcolm Nance is the kind of person you could expect someday to be a national security adviser to the next duly elected, legitimate administration to occupy the White House.

Russian Roulette by Michael Issikoff & David Corn  These two authors are writers for Yahoo News and Mother Jones Magazine respectively.  This book is another examination of the Russian interference in the 2016 election.  While I consider Mother Jones to be a far more reputable source of news than Yahoo, these two authors also have excellent reputations and their work is well respected.

Fear by Bob Woodward Bob Woodward needs no introductions anywhere in the world.  He is one of the two men who broke the story of the Watergate Conspiracy and eventually could be said to have helped bring about the resignation of Richard Nixon.  His reputation is flawless and he has steadily written political works since the 1970's.  Nearly all his books, more than a dozen, have been best sellers and above average works.  His ability to develop sources deep within sheltered organizations was first seen in the information he and his co-author Carl Bernstein obtained from Deep Throat who eventually revealed himself as a Deputy Director of The FBI.  This might be the first book some of you read or may have already read.  Tell me about it if you have.

The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy by Greg Miller This book was written by Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporter Greg Miller.  No author should ever need to have their resume bolstered after having been employed at the best newspaper in the nation and winning a Pulitzer Prize.  Place this book high on your list of works to be read as I have.  I can't wait to get to it and neither should you. 

Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever by Rick Wilson  Numerous reputable Republicans who desire to keep their reputations intact have spoken out over the last three years about the crimes and ignorance of TRAITOR Trump.  Many have left the Republican Party over his actions.  The rest should do the same.  Rick Wilson has a more than thirty year career as a Republican political operative and worked in the Department of Defense under Dick Cheney.  His resume and his political roots make this book worth examining. 

House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia by Craig Unger Craig Unger has a Harvard education and a growing list of books written primarily about connections between Republican politicians and less than desirable partners. This book examines the long history between TRAITOR Trump and the Russian Mafia whose upper echelon members own many of the apartments in Trump Tower.  Nothing more need be said about that connection when you look at the list of business deals and money laundering schemes which have been perpetrated between these prinicpals. This book seems to be worth the time to read it.  Let me know what you think if you get to it before I do. 

 

 

Collusion Secret Meetings, Dirty Money And How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Luke Harding  I have reviewed this book here.  This is the first historical book that I read about the crimes of the TRAITOR Trump. It was well worth the experience and has often guided me in my choices about other subsequent reading.  Luke Harding is a writer for The Guardian and is a tremendous writer, researcher, and fact finder in the very dangerous world of international politics.  He and his colleagues are on that list of journalists whom every American citizen should read regularly.  This book goes a very long way to explain and corroborate the information contained in the Steele Dossier which literally began the revelations about the crimes of TRAITOR Trump.  This book also does a great job of putting the timeline of the crimes of TRAITOR Trump into a logical frame for the less aware reader.  This book "reads like a spy novel" is what my friend and follower of this blog Steve Sargent said about it.  My response to that was "it is a spy novel". However, it is also the farthest thing in the world from fiction.  

Facts And Fears by James Clapper This book continues James Clapper's public denunciation of the crimes of TRAITOR Trump.  I have reviewed it here.  The one glaring shortcoming in the book is the use of acronyms for literally dozens of branches of the federal government and international agencies which Mr. Clapper worked with or for during his lifetime of public service.  For the person not well versed in the federal bureaucracy, this use of hundreds of acronyms is confusing and irritating in spite of the insertion of a list of full names in the back of the book.  But this book is one of the first on the list that I would suggest that you read.  It is a fine historical perspective on American intelligence efforts over the last forty years and brutally honest, especially so about the Russian collusion and hacking of our 2016 election.   

A Higher Loyalty Truth Lies And Leadership by James Comey  First and foremost, I want to say that this book is about James Comey and his life of public service much more than it is about his firing and public victimization by TRAITOR Trump.  I have reviewed it here.  This book, just as is true of James Clapper's is much more about facts and history than it is about any emotion the author might feel toward the current illegal occupant of the White House.  It is an excellent piece of work which I do not believe would have ever been written if Mr. Comey had not felt that it was his duty as a patriot and lifetime public servant to do so because of the criminality of TRAITOR Trump.  Read it!  Learn from it!  Familiarize yourself with and utilize the truths it contains. 

 

United States Constitution The US Constitution and individual rights will be under attack from the first second the Republicans take control of the US government.  Donald Trump has already, on numerous occasions, stated a desire to restrict freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and all rights of Muslim citizens and immigrants in general.  Every citizen should have a solid understanding of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.  Every citizen should also be willing to stand up and speak out in defense of these basic principles of American Democracy at any time Trump or his generally uneducated, ignorant, and unprincipled followers make attacks on these concepts.  The Capitol Net publishes pocket copies of the Constitution and many other important American political documents which are cheap and easily ordered from their web site.   Capitol Net will actually send you a free pocket copy of the Constitution upon request. Get a copy, read it, study it, understand it, carry it with you wherever you go, and be prepared to confront ignorance about the foundations of American Democracy wherever you encounter it. 

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay Do not ever listen to and accept the opinion of another about what the Founding Fathers thought, intended, or wanted.  Read what they said for yourself and form your own opinion.  

"Mein Kampf" by Adolph Hitler Donald Trump's campaign was a carbon copy of the campaign Hitler used to gain power in Germany.  One of Trump's ex-wives has stated that he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches by his bed.  Many of the same techniques Adolph Hitler and Vladimir Putin have used to gain and maintain power are the same being used by Donald Trump today and that use is not accidental. The Big Lie is being used every day by TRAITOR Trump just as it was used by Adolph Hitler.  It is deliberate emulation of Adolph Hitler. 

Black Earth The Holocaust As History And Warning by Timothy Snyder One of the most cogent quotations from history comes from the philosopher George Santayana:  "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  Donald Trump is backed by a coalition of extremist groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Nazi Party.  Trump has consistently refused to condemn them, their ideologies, or their actions.  Here is a link to a great story from Mother Jones about those groups.  Most of the followers of these groups are psychologically very similar to the German citizens who became Hitler's Brown Shirts and SS Troopers.  And the most important thing to remember about the Germans who carried out Adolph Hitler's crimes against humanity is that before Adolph Hitler rose to power those people were considered to be ordinary German citizens just as most of Trump's followers would have us believe they are ordinary American citizens.  This book by Timothy Snyder looks at the Holocaust both as a historical event and as an event that could be repeated if the people of today do not heed the warnings provided by the Holocaust.  This is one of the most important books to have been written in the last 25 years. 

Stubborn Twig: Three Generations In The Life Of A Japanese American Family For those of you who do not believe that anything remotely resembling the crimes of the Holocaust could happen in America, this book is a must read as Donald Trump rises to power after having preached disrespect, disregard, and unconstitutional labeling of groups in America such as the media, Muslims and immigrants.  It details the life of a very successful and patriotic Japanese American family which had their land and property seized during World War II and were sent off to interment camps simply because of their ethnicity.  Yes, it can happen in America and it already has under the administration of one of the greatest American Presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  

The Cherokee Removal A Brief History With Documents edited by Theda Perdue & Michael Green  For those of you who have read "Stubborn Twig..." and still find yourselves saying it couldn't happen here, it already has...twice, once to the Japanese Americans and once to the Cherokee.  In many ways, the disrespect that Trump shows to Muslims and immigrants is a lot like the attitude which Andrew Jackson showed the Native Americans.  

The United States Of Appalachia How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment To America by Jeff Biggers  This book will teach you a great deal about the birth of American Democracy, especially for those of you who have never heard of the State Of Franklin.  Jeff Biggers will also show you a lot about how a few dedicated citizens can change a country for the better. 

A Nation Defiant Polish Resistance To The German Occupation Of Poland by Richard S. Fuegner  The only way the country will be able to successfully resist, confront, and stop the destruction of American Democracy by Traitor Trump and his henchmen will be by utilizing a committed, determined, and well organized populist resistance.  Such a resistance is forming in America and can win this battle in the long run but that resistance must learn techniques which have been successful in other periods and other places.  This is an excellent book about the Polish resistance and will teach you a lot.

When Even Angels Wept by Lately Thomas During 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led an effort known as the Communist Witch Hunts which destroyed the lives and careers of many thousand falsely accused Americans.  Senator McCarthy, another classic megalomaniac, led a senate investigation into alleged communism in the country and dragged hundreds and thousands of innocent socially active people in front of the committee where they were pilloried, denigrated, and defamed with little to no evidence in most cases.  Many of these people spent the rest of their lives unemployed, defamed, and in poverty.  But Senator McCarthy was confronted and stopped before he could completely destroy the country and American Democracy.  This is a great book to learn about one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the country and to utilize that knowledge to prevent TRAITOR Trump and his henchmen from perpetrating another such crime.  

I hope every person who reads this post will go on to read at least one of the listed works, especially the United States Constitution, which will be under attack for the next four years by the Republican Party whether or not Donald Trump is successfully prosecuted for treason.  

 

Life With A Rare Genetic Disorder

 I wrote this about four years ago as a potential submission to an online magazine which is focused on the disability community and it was not published there. I've never done anything with it otherwise and finally decided to post it here since I do think it is worth reading and someone might actually get something positive from it.  I have also added a small addendum at the bottom about one related recent event. 

Life With A Rare Genetic Disorder

 

On a bright, sunshiny day in June 1992, my wife Candice walked down an irregular stone path to the main overlook of New River Gorge National Park on her father’s arm and we were married.  At the time, she was in her early twenties, seventeen years younger than me, and so far as we knew she was perfectly healthy.  She had been running college track just a couple of years before at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.  She quickly obtained a job as a state social worker in Eastern Kentucky where I had been raised and quickly adapted to life in Appalachia although she had never been in the region before we met. 

Four or five years later, she began having difficulty with walking over irregular terrain and the thing I remember most vividly is that sometimes she would simply lock up in the soft dirt of our garden.  We began a series of encounters with neurologists and tests for every neurological disease known to the medical world.  All the tests results were negative and one doctor even told us Candice’s symptoms were psychosomatic.   This cycle eventually brought us to Dr. Joseph Berger, M. D., at the University of Kentucky Hospital in Lexington where he was the department chair and a professor of both neurology and psychiatry.  Dr. Berger is one of the most intelligent, professional, and dedicated humans I have ever known.  After several visits and a repeat of the tests for ALS, MS, MD, and other diseases, all of which were still negative, Dr. Berger sat down with us one day and said, “I don’t know.” for about a half hour which is still one of the strangest experiences I have ever had.  He suggested that we consider going to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, which Candice agreed to do. 

At NIH, we met Dr. Elif Arioglu, M. D., an equally brilliant, caring, and dedicated young Turkish Muslim woman who was on a fellowship at NIH.  She became Candice’s regular primary physician during the five years or so we traveled to Bethesda.  Candice’s initial health history at NIH was done by the Director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Dr. Simeon Taylor.  When he walked into the room and introduced himself along with his job title, I realized even more than I had when Dr. Berger said “I don’t know” that we were in truly deep water. I knew that if the president had been ill with similar problems Dr. Taylor and his associates would have been on the job.  

The Human Genome Project was in full swing during the time we were traveling to NIH and we learned about it and got some hope that when the human genome was fully understood we might have a solution to Candice’s problems.  Candice was enrolled in some research protocols, tested in every way known to modern medical science, and provided maintenance medications and some adaptive equipment as her disease continued to progress.  We met some of the most brilliant medical practitioners and researchers in the world along with a growing group of the most exotic patients and diseases we could imagine.  NIH was a highly educational and sometimes inspiring place to spend four or five days every three to six months.  But five years rolled by with no easy answers.  Dr. Berger and Dr. Arioglu eventually co-authored two journal articles about Candice’s condition and her father who had a similar body type and other mild symptoms was also brought into the NIH programs for a few years. 

But nobody came up with any ready answers and eventually Candice grew tired of the endless poking, prodding, tests, and the endless parade of brilliant medical students who repeatedly asked the same questions for their own education.  After five years, she withdrew from NIH but had continued to work for the state of Kentucky the entire time.  She found it necessary to transfer from the Department for Social Services as an investigative worker after she progressed from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair.  But for ten years, she continued as a food stamp worker, and eventually secretary, at the local food stamp office before she finally retired on disability after having worked in that office for ten years after she had progressed into a manual wheelchair.  During this period of slow steps backward, she also began to drive with hand controls and eventually took her state pension and Social Security.  We remodeled our house with an accessible bathroom and ramps.  We learned to adjust to life with a wheelchair and a ramp van.  But answers were not forthcoming other than knowing that she had a rare inherited genetic condition which was linked to both spinocerebellar degeneration and lipodystrophy.  Finally, a researcher in the Toronto area who was working on diabetes research, was able to use NIH generated data along with the data from her one visit years before to the Cincinnati Children's Hospital and isolate the particular genetic flaw which caused Candice’s problems.  Dr. Berger finally told us a few years into the problems that the flaw had been found in only two other patients in all of North America and that he believed all three had a common ancestor.  But there were no further answers.

No one ever believes they, or someone they love, will become a patient with a disease for the medical journals.  Those things don’t happen to ordinary people.  But it happened to Candice and me.  By the time Candice had decided she could no longer work in an office setting, the medical records we mailed to the Social Security Administration were shipped in a medium sized cardboard container with the first piece of paper in the box being a letter from Dr. Berger stating that in his professional opinion Candice was totally disabled.  We have no idea if any worker at Social Security ever read that entire box of records and we suspect that the collective weight of Dr. Berger’s letter and the weight of the box settled the disability case whether the records were ever read or not. 

Over the past twenty years, Candice and I have adjusted to our lives together as well as any two people could.  We have traveled to both Canada and Mexico.  We attend concerts regularly and love to find new things to see, do, and experience.  But we still wonder how life might have been different if NIH had truly been the magical place we thought it might be the first time we entered those doors.  Dr. Arioglu has taught medicine at the University of Michigan for most of the last twenty years.  Dr. Berger has retired from the University of Kentucky and works with the same dedication as always as the Chief of the Multiple Sclerosis Division at the University of Pennsylvania.  Candice and I still live in the same modified home in Eastern Kentucky and work to accept our lives together without any answers. 

Copyright 2019 by Roger D. Hicks

ADDENDUM

This addendum is being written on New Year's Eve 2023 and about two weeks ago our phone rang for the second time over the last twenty years with Dr. Elif Arioglu (Oral), now married about twenty years with two grown sons, seeking the latest news about Candice and her health and also asking if she might be interested in participating in some of Dr. Arioglu (Oral's) ongoing research at the University of Michigan.  We have always both respected and appreciated this woman who, despite her intense work schedule as a doctor, medical researcher, educator, and director of two research programs at the university, has never forgotten us and has found time to become more a friend than a doctor we once knew.  If you have to be saddled with such a rare medical condition, it is an incredible blessing to also be gifted with knowing such a brilliant and caring doctor.   

The Ark Encounter, Right Wing Radical "Religion" And Tax Scams

 

Every year at about this time or a bit earlier, in spring, summer, and early fall, on Facebook travel based groups, especially those which are focused on Kentucky, Southern Ohio, and Southern Indiana, there are numerous questions from people from all over the USA and even the world about how to find, buy tickets for, and access other services around the location of The Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky.  I always respond to those questions, and smilingly accept the fake outrage of the questioners, and advice the questioners about the unresolved tax shams which have been perpetrated by The Ark Encounter and its ownership against the state of Kentucky and Grant County.  Over the years since the idea of The Ark Encounter became reality in Northern Kentucky, the state and local governments bent over backward to award the management several million dollars worth of tax waivers, reductions, and outright gifts of tax abeyance.  There is an extensive and extensively documented history of The Ark Encounter and its ownership having failed to live up to, or even attempt to live up to, the promises they made the state and county in order to gain those millions of dollars of sweetheart tax deals.  Their avoidance of their responsibilities and promises has been nothing short of criminal.  

On July 21, 2017, the Louisville Courier Journal ran a story under this headline, "Ark Park Violates Agreement, gets over $18million in state tax breaks suspended". The story clearly describes the underhanded actions of the owners which caused the state of Kentucky to lose that $18Million.  One may assume that the newspaper editorship feels strongly about the misdeeds they have documented so thoroughly based on the fact that they leave this article up for free access when they almost always insist on subscriptions from viewers in order to read their stories.  

Four days later, on July 25, 2017, the national magazine "Forbes" also ran a major story about the tax affair which contains a very succinct and accurate description of how the scam worked: 

"...Ark Encounter LLC transferred the property where the Ark is parked for now to Crosswater Canyon Inc for a nominal sum.  Since the  tourism cabinet had made its deal with Ark Encounter LLC, it suspended the tax incentive.  So Crosswater transferred the property back to Ark Encounter LLC." Forbes, July 25, 2017)

Nearly three years later on February 24, 2020, across the river in Ohio. "The Cincinnati Enquirer" ran a story under the beautifully constructed headline "Opinion: Ham fleeced a town that gave him his Ark Encounter". David MacMillan, the author of that story has this to say about his credentials for questioning the scam, "As a former Kentucky creationist turned science advocate, I’m honored to be one of the voices in the film (We Believe In Dinosaurs) critical of the Ark Encounter. I’ve written at length about my past with Answers in Genesis and about the struggle of leaving science denial."  Obviously, Mr. MacMillan knows his subject matter well, having once believed their lies.   

On July 16, 2017, (yes, it was a busy week for journalists covering the story) the Kentucky School Boards Association opinion of the deal was covered by Linda Blackford who wrote about the $10  (ten dollars) property transfer by Ham and associates which stiffed the state and county of their millions.  This is obviously a story which will not, and should not ever die. Like thousands of other Kentucky citizens, I hate a tax cheat and that is exactly what The Ark Encounter and its management are and are likely to forever be.  Literally no one I know in Kentucky is naive enough to believe that The Ark Enconter's management and staff are ever likely to be struck by a sudden, unforeseen desire to actually practice the "Christianity" they espouse without any prior proof and repent, pay the money back, and move on to become good citizens.  

Recently, I literally blundered into the book whose cover is portrayed at the top of  this page, "Saving Darwin" by Karl W. Giberson, who is a former professor of physics at Nazarene College and Director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College. Currently, Dr. Giberson is a faculty member at Stonehill College where he serves as the Scholar-in-Residence in science and religion.  He is the author of roughly a dozen books most of which discuss the subject matter of the intersection of science and religion.  The author of the foreword to "Saving Darwin" which prompted this blog post is Dr. Francis S. Collins, M. D., Ph.D, the former Director of The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and has this to say in that foreword: 

"...a "creation museum" has opened just outside Cincinnati, depicting humans frolicking with dinosaurs, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they were separated in history by sixty million years. What's going on here?  How can  the most advanced technological country in the world also be home to such antiscientific thinking?" (Saving Darwin, pp. v)

I had purchased this book without any prior knowledge of the interior arguments it presents but I was so pleasantly surprised to find the above writing by such a distinguished scientist as Dr. Francis S. Collins that I knew I had to write about the book, and this quotation specifically, in this blog. During his tenure at NIH, Dr. Francis S. Collins was the Director of the Human Genome Project.  Let me say clearly that I am not a scientist and I have never met Dr. Francis S. Collins or Dr. Karl W. Giberson.  But I do have a Master of Education Degree in Human Development from Lindsey Wilson College and I have spent many days at the National Institutes of Health with my wife in the early and mid-1990's  during a five year period at the height of the Human Genome Project while she was a research subject due to having a rare genetic anomaly.  I have met numerous individuals at NIH who were deeply involved in the Human Genome Project. I am not just a naive Kentuckian who is simply outraged by the actions of the management of The Ark Encounter. I am a reasonably well educated person with more than ordinary knowledge of some of work which Dr. Francis led at NIH.  I consider it a very serendipitous event that I strayed into this book and this quote from Dr. Francis.  

No one on earth should ever ignore the wisdom in that quote or brush it off as an attack by an unqualified detractor of The Ark Encounter.  Every year since The Ark Encounter began to cheat the taxpayers of Kentucky, I have watched their actions with increasing loss of whatever minimal respect I might have ever had for them.  I have steadily tried to educate their gullible and misled patrons about their tax cheating and the fallacies which are inherent in everything they do and say.  I will continue to do that so long as those taxes go on unreturned and so long as their lies about human origins are being spread. I will write further on this blog about this story as I finish reading the book.  I will also suggest, as I always have, that their naive patrons go instead, or at least go also, to The Big Bone Lick State Historic Site in Union, Kentucky, which is a state park of long standing located just a thirty minute drive from The Ark Encounter.  Big Bone Lick was a major research site due to the site having been the scene at which numerous dinosaur fossils were discovered.  The state website describes Big Bone Lick in this manner: 

"Big Bone Lick is the perfect place to get hands-on lessons in history, science, and environmental education. Engage your class, youth group, home school group, or scout troop through a field trip to the park. Your group will experience fun programs and exploration in an outdoor setting. Park Interpreters can also bring programs to your classroom, school, or organization to enrich any curriculum. Programs can be presented to adults as well. Field trips and outreach programs may have a small fee. For more information and scheduling, please contact the park at (859) 384-3522."  (Kentucky State Parks)

If you must go to The Ark Encounter, please be open minded and give yourself an opportunity to learn the truth about science and evolution at Big Bone Lick in Union, Kentucky.  

Covid 19, The Black Plague, And The Real Guilty Party

 

 

I am in the process of reading a book called "Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia" by Steven Stoll which has been widely lauded as a book about the problems of Appalachia which it happens has been written by a professor at Fordham University which is about as far from Appalachia as you can get.  This has been a common problem with books supposedly written about Appalachia in that they have often been best accepted when written by people who have little or no personal experience in Appalachia.  But Stoll is an excellent researcher who focuses the book on a long history of socio-economic issues examined from a historical perspective and I am nearly a hundred pages into the book without any clear understanding of what he seems to think went, or is going, wrong with Appalachia.  I have to admit that this a pretty long introduction by anyone's standards.  But in all that tangential socio-economic writing, I did find a real jewel from Stoll's extensive research on a vast number of topics which is highly relevant to today's world and the Covid 19 pandemic.  Here is the section of the book to which I am referring which can be found on page 51:

"Twelve galleys heavy with trade from Jaffa sailed into the port of Messina.  The Genoese crew groaned in the hold, suffering in sickness.  At least one staggered onto the wharf.  The first Sicilian he greeted received a bacterial infection from a sneeze, a cough, or maybe a flea bite.  Three days later the sailor was dead along with every Sicilian who had stood close enough to smell his breath.  The afflicted buckled with fever and hard, bleeding ulcers--the first European victims of the Black Death.  Over the next four years, as many as 50 million people perished from the plague--representing between 30 and 50 percent of the inhabitants of Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Syria, and Palestine, as well as parts of Egypt, the German Empire, and Azerbaijan.  So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell.  Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away.  "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats."  Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo."

The dead left entire town empty, fields unharvested.  The social order came apart.  People became scarce.  One region in southern France did not regain its pre-plague population until the nineteenth century.  Marginal places like mountainsides and wetlands, some settled as early as the eleventh century, lost their human presence altogether."  (Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal Of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, page 51)

There could not be a more horrifying snapshot of death and destruction written than the one above from Stoll's book.  Yet, there are very basic parallels between what he has described in Europe in the middle 14th century and what is happening in America and the world with Covid 19 today.   The Black Plague was estimated to have caused somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million deaths across the world.  It lasted roughly from 1347 to 1351.  According to Reuters, there have been, as of today, October 12, 2021, 38million cases and more than 5million deaths from Covid 19 worldwide.  There have been at least 700,000 deaths in the USA, more deaths than from the 1918 influenza epidemic, more deaths than from World War II, more deaths than any short term cause in the history of America.  And the great majority of those deaths could have been eliminated, if any appropriate action had been taken by the White House in January through March of 2020 after the intelligence community and the health care community both informed the White House that the pandemic was spreading from China and could destroy the world.  In what at the time was still being called "The President's Daily Briefing", despite the fact that TRAITOR Trump was simply the beneficiary of a Russian theft of an American election, a senior CIA official was telling the illegitimate occupant of the White House that an existential threat was facing the country and absolutely nothing was being done about it by the recipient of that erroneously named briefing.  On both January 23, 2020, and January 28, 2020, TRAITOR Trump was told, if he even listened, that Covid 19 was spreading worldwide and could destroy the world.  Nothing was done in response to those briefings.  

In the quote above from Steven Stoll's book, there is this somewhat lenghty description of the multitude of deaths due to the Black Plague in Europe: "So many Italians died so quickly that rotting corpses lay for days and weeks until neighbors noticed the smell.  Entire families needed to be dragged to doorsteps so that undertakers could carry them away.  "No tears, or candles, or mourners" ushered off the dead wrote Giovanni Boccacio; "in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown to dead goats."  Bodies were dumped in shallow trenches, "stowed tier upon tier, like ship's cargo."  There have also been striking parallels to the events in that description in America.  In New York City and Miami, refrigerator trucks had to be brought into hospital parking lots to hold the dead because funeral homes were so busy that they could not even store the dead. Television news showed workers in a large city cemetery on Long Island burying dozens of dead in cheap wood coffins in long trenches which had been dug with backhoes. Recently, in the heart of Appalachia in Hazard, Kentucky, the Appalachian Regional Healthcare system, the largest operator of hospitals in the Eastern Kentucky area, reported that their morgue was "at capacity" and a local funeral home was loaning their morgue to the hospital for temporary storage of the bodies of Covid 19 victims.  In a recent week in my home county of Morgan County Kentucky which has a population of slightly more than 13,000 people, one local funeral home had 4 dead bodies waiting to be buried and had buried more than 10 in the preceding month.  Historically, over the 28 years I have lived in this county, each of the two local funeral homes would rarely have two dead bodies awaiting burial at any given time.  During the recent week I am discussing, one of those funeral homes held a joint funeral for two elderly sisters who had both died from Covid.  And those numbers are not an anomaly in today's world in any place in America.  Thirty-five hospitals in Kentucky have been forced to call for assistance from  the National Guard.  The life expectancy in America in 2020 dropped by nearly two years overall and both African Americans and Hispanics saw even greater shrinking of their life expectancy.  

Never forget that this could have been greatly mitigated in America if the TRAITOR Trump had been competent in his illegal occupancy of the White House.  He was unconcerned in early 2020 and has been ever since. He has laughingly suggested that Americans could treat Covid 19 by injecting cleaning chemicals into their bodies and promoted several untested and unapproved drugs as cures for Covid 19 as his followers have begun to use horse wormer in the hope they might live over the disease.  All 700,000 deaths from Covid 19 in America are on his hands.  

Some Immigrants I Have Known

As I have watched the steadily increasing coercion and terrorism being directed at immigrants by TRAITOR and International Terrorist Trump, I have thought frequently that I needed to write this blog post.  Yet I have put it off time after time since January 20, 2017.  Due to current circumstances in American politics, I can no longer procrastinate about this post or this issue.  I will insist on saying that I have not avoided speaking my mind on this topic to anyone when the subject arose and I have always been willing to say that it is my considered opinion that any immigrant who wishes to come to America is worth more to this country than the TRAITOR and International Terrorist Trump.  During the course of their first year in America, nearly all immigrants will pay more in taxes to the US government than TRAITOR & International Terrorist Trump can prove he has paid in the last twenty years.  Any immigrant who is being forced out of the country by the current illegitimate and TREASONOUS Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate which lives in the White House would be welcome in my home to which I will never invite any Right Wing Radical Repugnican supporter of TRAITOR and International Terrorist Trump. 

Now that I have prefaced this post about some of the immigrants I have known, I will get down to the meat of the writing about these people who have crossed my trajectory and, almost without exception, enriched my life.  I honesty do not remember clearly the first immigrant I met but I remember stories I heard in childhood from old Appalachian coal miners about the immigrants they worked with in the mines of Eastern Kentucky.  My father, Ballard Hicks, and my maternal grandfather, Woots Hicks, both worked many years in the mines of Floyd County Kentucky and worked with many Italian, Hungarian, Polish, German, Romanian, and Czech immigrants who had often been specifically recruited and brought to the US to work in the mines because the coal companies of the time wanted hard workers who had no connections in the immediate community which meant they had no significant support system other than the coal company and, possibly, other immigrants from their own country.  In the stories I heard miners tell about these immigrants,  I do not remember any particularly disparaging remarks about them from anyone.  I heard numerous stories about how hard they worked, how they often got paid less than American citizens for the same work, and how well they were respected by their American coworkers.  The great majority of these immigrant miners stayed in America for the rest of their lives and most achieved citizenship while working an incredibly difficult job for companies who often used the old statement that "a mule is worth more than a miner.  When a mule dies, you have to buy another mule but you can always hire another miner if one dies." Companies which applied that type of thinking always applied it equally to all their miners whether American citizens or immigrants.  

Many of the descendants of these immigrant miners achieved great things in America based on the values which their parents taught them.  Daniel Mongiardo, descendant of Italian stone masons who were brought to Hazard, KY, by coal companies, became both a doctor and the Lieutenant Governor of the state.  One of my professors in the 1970's was Peter J. Laska, the descendant of Ukranian immigrant coal miners in Northern West Virginia, achieved a Ph.D. degree and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. His book of poetry "D. C. Images And Other Poems" was a finalist for the award in 1976. Peter Laska is one of my closest friends, professional mentors, and role models.  In Logan, West Virginia, I became friends with Monty Stagnoli, the descendant of Italian coal miners who had been brought to Harlan, KY, by coal companies and became a grocery store manager for a major chain. I have also come to know the highly respected West Virginia novelist Marie Manilla whose novels and short stories are read and studied all across America. Her novel "The Patron Saint Of Ugly" won the Weatherford Award as the best Appalachian novel of 2014. All of these people achieved more than most of their classmates who were descended from people who had been considered Americans for far more generations.  

But we should discuss the actual immigrants who have been my friends, mentors, professors, coworkers, and, in some cases, heroes and role models.  In the early 1980's, when I was working as a door to door salesman in Logan, WV, I was incredibly lucky to meet a family of immigrants from Afghanistan.  I sold a vacuum cleaner to Mrs. Amena Loynab, the wife of Dr. Noor Loynab, who was practicing medicine in Logan, WV.  I was often brought into their home in Whitman, WV, for supplies or repairs related to that vacuum cleaner.  The home was always spotless and I was always made to feel extremely welcome there.  When I expressed an interest in the Koran, Amena Loynab loaned me her personal Koran wrapped in a bright yellow scarf to protect it.  Every time I ever went to that home, I was invited in, placed at the table and offered food which almost always included the best baklava I have ever eaten.  I always remember that Amena Loynab's aged father, who spoke only Arabic, would be in the house and would always pass through when he realized I was there.  He would always say nothing to me but would give a short stern speech in Arabic to his daughter which I always assumed was a reprimand about allowing a man inside the house when her husband was not present.  But, regardless of whatever he said, I was always brought into the home and treated as a respected guest. Dr. Loynab was then and still is a highly respected physician in Logan who always treated anyone who came through his office door regardless of their poverty or any other negative factors.  I will always cherish the memories I have of this immigrant family.  

In 1992, I was living and working in Lexington, KY, and, for about two years, I worked on a horse farm which was a profession I had practiced in the 1970's and 1980's for nearly twenty years. I had returned to horse farm work in 1992 temporarily as I was searching for my second job placement in the human services professions.  During that time, I worked with two Mexican immigrant brothers who were some of the best horsemen I have ever known.  They also had a third brother who, as an immigrant, became one of the best, most highly respected and sought after, farriers in Central Kentucky, an area where a second rate blacksmith cannot last a week.  These brothers were friendly, open, honest, compassionate people and I will always remember an occasion when one of them gave me a dozen fresh ears of corn from their personal food supply simply because he wanted to do something nice for my wife and I.  I will always remember these brothers fondly.  

In the early 1990's, my wife Candice began to develop serious neurological symptoms which eventually caused her to spend the last eighteen years in a wheelchair.  We eventually learned from Dr. Joseph Berger, M. D. , the current Associate Chief of the Multiple Sclerosis Division of the University of Pennsylvania and retired Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Kentucky, that he was unable to diagnose the cause of her problems.  Dr. Berger referred us to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where we traveled regularly for nearly five years only to eventually learn that Candice's problems were due to a rare and untreatable genetic anomaly.  But from the first day we arrived at NIH, we were blessed to know and Candice was blessed to be treated by Dr. Elif Arioglu Oral, M. D., a young, brilliant female Muslim physician from Turkey who at the time was on a fellowship at NIH.  Today, she is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine.  She was one of the best, most intelligent, most compassionate, and most honest humans I have ever known. 

When I was working on my Master of Education Degree in Counseling and Human Development at Lindsey Wilson College, from 2002 to 2005, I was blessed to know and learn from Dr. Daya Singh Sandhu, Ph.D.   Dr. Sandhu came to America with degrees from a college in his native India in English and went on to switch from English to Counseling, and, in the process, became one of the most experienced, best respected professors and authors on the topic of mental health counseling in all of America. He went on to earn three further degrees including his doctoral degree after coming to the USA.  He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited at least thirteen books on counseling related subjects most of which were published by the American Counseling Association Press.  He also has published fifty professionally refereed articles in counseling journals and has published at least eighty chapters in professional books edited by others. Dr. Sandhu is an Indian Sikh, a religion which is often misunderstood and villified by Americans who know nothing about it.  But Dr. Sandhu is one of the most compassionate, professional professors I ever had to the good fortune to know.  When I met Dr. Sandhu, he was teaching a course in substance abuse counseling in the masters degree program during his summer vacation from his full time job as Director of the Counseling and Human Development Department at the University of Louisville, a job from which he subsequently retired to join the full time faculty at Lindsey Wilson College.  There were about fifteen of us graduate students in that course.  On the last day of class in that substance abuse counseling course, he took the entire class to lunch at Pizza Hut out of his own pocket.  He was available, professional, compassionate, and served as a mentor to many of us in that graduate cohort.  I will always cherish the time I able to spend under his instruction and mentoring and I firmly believe I was a better counseling professional for the remainder of my years of practice because I knew Dr. Sandhu.  

This list of immigrants I have known and benefited from includes a housewife and mother, two medical doctors,two common laborers in the Thoroughbred horse business, a farrier in the Thoroughbred business where unskilled blacksmiths were quickly shown to the farm gate, a couple of college professors, and all of them were excellent people.  They included Catholics, Muslims, and a Sikh.  I would trust any of that group of immigrants in any situation more than I ever could anyone willing to work for TRAITOR and International Terrorist Trump.  I would invite them into my home gladly and I never would do the same for anyone who ever worked for the TRAITOR and International Terrorist Trump.  Any and all of those immigrants is more valuable to this country than any person, citizen or not, who is stupid enough to believe the lies coming from the Russian Owned Criminal Syndicate which lives in the White House today.  Any of those immigrants is much more highly developed morally than anyone who would participate in the separation of children from their parents and agree to incarcerate those children in tent cities in the desert.  It is long past time for this country to come to its senses and stop this rapid political, moral, and social degeneration at the hands of a Russian Agent who committed TREASON in order to steal an election.