A Post-Election Resource
Posted on | November 13, 2024 | Comments Off on A Post-Election Resource
We are in the grip of change and our American Democracy is at risk. Change is one of the few human experiences that supports two dramatically opposed human emotions. On the one hand, change is fear, and on the other, change is exploration. And while you can support both emotions simultaneously, you can only do so for a short period of time before the tension created between the two forces you to choose one or the other.
At times like these, leadership really matters. Negative leaders embrace fear, using it as a currency to mobilize and organize populations to cement minority rules. In contrast, positive leaders are explorers who use a compelling value-centered vision as currency. Through role modeling and the strength of new ideas, they draw people in as they work through the challenges and shape an environment consistent with the majority’s long-term vision.
Negative leaders retrench and divide; positive leaders connect across the divide. Negative leaders segregate; positive leaders aggregate. Negative leaders build walls. Positive leaders build “islands of common stewardship.”
In our lifetime, we have witnessed the emergence of Intternet and HIV, of globalization and overnight delivery, of bubbles and bursts in our stock market, of the genomic revolution, and artificial intelligence. We have witnessed our health care system creak under the weight of a pandemic, and borne witness to an ongoing attempt to overthrow our democratic form of government. We are heavily armed, are always prepared for war, but show little desire for peace.
People are basically good, but they are not perfect.
People are basically kind, but when afraid can act unpredictably.
People are basically loving, but when misled can respond with hatred.
People are people.
Positive leaders are value driven role models and highly effective leaders worth emulating. They are also defenders and practitioners of Democracy.
What this book offers is one person’s stories, 10 cornerstone themes, and 52 personal challenges which are the distillation of values and lessons drawn from one life. They are no more valid than those of the reader.
Will Trump (with RFK as Intern) Play Doctor Again?
Posted on | November 12, 2024 | 4 Comments
Mike Magee
It has been a collision of past, present and future this week in the wake of Trump’s victory on November 5, 2024. The country, both for and against, has been unusually quiet. It is unclear whether this is in recognition of political exhaustion, or the desire of victors to be “good winners” and no longer “poor losers.”
Who exactly are “the enemy within” remains to be seen. But Trump is fast at work in defining his cabinet and top agency officials. In his first term as President, Trump famously placed himself at the front of the line of scientific experts sowing confusion and chaos in the early Covid response.
His 2024 campaign alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests health policy remains a strong interest. As his spokesperson suggested, his up-front leadership led to a resounding victory “because they trust his judgement and support his policies, including his promise to Make America Healthy Again alongside well-respected leaders like RFK Jr.”
For those with a memory of Trump’s checkered, and disruptive management of the Covid crisis, it is useful to remind ourselves of those days not long ago, and consider if throwing Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the mix back then would have been helpful.
I have been revisiting the Covid pandemic as I have prepared for a 3-session course on “AI and Medicine” at the University of Hartford’s Presidents College. The course includes a number of case studies, notably the multi-prong role of AI in addressing the Covid pandemic as it spun out of control in 2020.
The early Covid timeline reads like this:
December 1, 2019: A 70 year old man is admitted to the hospital in Wuhan, China with respiratory distress.
Mid-December, 2019: Multiple citizens in Wuhan, China are now gravely ill.
December 24, 2019: A post-mortem lung sample of a Wuhan patient yields a partial genetic sequence of the infectious viral agent. It is similar to the SARS virus that triggered an epidemic in 2003.
December 30, 2019: Word leaks out and reaches U.S. epidemiologist Marjorie Pollack, head of Promed, which alerts their 80,000 subscribers, including officials at the WHO, of a pending epidemic.
December 31, 2019: China’s National Health Commission directs the Wuhan health officers to formally announce the outbreak.
January 1,2020: Wuhan police threaten several local doctors for speaking out, labelling them as “rumormongers.”
January 3, 2020: Chinese government lets WHO know they are managing 44 confirmed cases.
January 5, 2020: A full genetic sequence of the virus is released. Chinese officials initially attempt to suppress the information.
January 13, 2020: German scientists release a test for the virus.
mid-January, 2020: Hundreds are now ill in Wuhan, and people are beginning to die from respiratory failure.
January 23,2020: There are now outbreaks in other parts of China. 571 cases are reported.
A Wuhan Central Hospital worker reports at the time: “It erupted too fast, and then there were just too many people infected, Without ventilators, without specific drugs, even without enough manpower, how were we going to save people? If you’re unarmed on the battlefield, how can you kill the enemy?”
February 15, 2020: Moderna release a “clinical-grade, human safe manufacturing, batch (of mRNA) shipped to health clinics for testing” just 45 days after the genetic sequencing had been revealed.
What normally would take years, took a few weeks. As Moderna’s chief data and AI officer, Dave Johnson PhD said later, “We were building that early preclinical engine of a company, which is, how can we target a bunch of different ideas at once, run some experiments, learn really fast and do it again… if you wanna run a lot of experiments, you have to have a lot of mRNA. So we built out this massively parallel (AI aided) robotic processing of mRNA… as things evolved as you capture data in these systems, that’s where AI starts to show up. You know, instead of just capturing, you know, here’s what happened in an experiment, now you’re saying let’s use that data to make some predictions.”
What AI did was direct the re-engineering, through purposeful mRNA mediated mutations of the virus’s genetic code, helping to generate the first batch of mRNA Covid vaccine.
December 18, 2020: Moderna receives “emergency use authorization” from the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee.” Not a moment too soon, most would say. The death toll in the U.S. had already reached over 800,000, and projections of monthly fatalities ahead had reached 62,000.
It is now believed that rapid AI-aided development of the mRNA vaccine for Covid saved 15 to 20 million lives worldwide. The rapidity was the result AI driven hyper-accelerated mRNA generation. Prior to the integration of AI, Moderna was generating 30 samples of mRNA a month. By optimizing with AI, the yield exploded to more than 1000 per month. AI was then used again to predict how best to structure the vaccine to maximize a protein production response in the body…or as the company says, “more bang for the biological buck.”
Dave Johnson is quick to note that Moderna was fast at work with AI applications years before Chat-GPT became a household term. His background was software engineering and data science, and his PhD was in information physics. So it is not surprising that he’s comfortable forming non-human relationships. As he says, “We always think about it in terms of this human-machine collaboration, because they’re good at different things. Humans are really good at creativity and flexibility and insight, whereas machines are really good at precision and giving the exact same result every single time and doing it at scale and speed.”
As for a civilian like RFK Jr. playing doctor, that never seems to end well. Tommy Thompson tried managing the Anthrax crisis in 2001 and had to be rescued by Tony Fauci, MD. Fauci was there again in April of 2020 to clean up Trump’s bleach for Covid comments. Add to this a series of disastrous outcomes in red states where zealot bureaucrats have deemed themselves qualified to manage obstetrical emergences.
Will history repeat? We’ll know soon enough.
Tags: AI > Anthrax > ChatGPT > covid > Covid Vaccine > dave johnson phd > mRNA > RFK Jr. > Tommy Thompson > trump > Wuhan
Last day to register: AI and Medicine Course begins tomorrow.
Posted on | November 5, 2024 | Comments Off on Last day to register: AI and Medicine Course begins tomorrow.
Penn State College of Medicine’s Oath: A Vote For Democracy.
Posted on | November 2, 2024 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
Two years ago, prior to the 2022 election, mental health experts alerted the medical world to their version of an assessment scale for yet another new condition – “doomscrolling.”
As defined in the article, “Constant exposure to negative news on social media and news feeds could take the form of ‘doomscrolling’ which is commonly defined as a habit of scrolling through social media and news feeds where users obsessively seek for depressing and negative information.”
As the distressing recent MSG Rally well broadcast, there apparently are no guard rails remaining in Trump-led “doom making.” But that does not mean that the majorities that oppose him have to fall victim as well.
Optimism is a choice and an effective political message. No one can deny a range of legitimate concerns. Faced with continued background noise from residual effects of the pandemic, we’ve been forced to absorb global warming induced weather disasters, renegade AI, sectional warfare around the globe, and the fact that (inexplicably) most elected Republican leaders have chosen to compromise all values and decency to preserve their jobs.
With real challenges like these, our troubled world needs to stay focused on values and resilience. This means aligning our humanity with our approach to self-governance. John J. Patrick PhD, in his book Understanding Democracy, lists the ideals of democracy to include “civility, honesty, charity, compassion, courage, loyalty, patriotism, and self restraint.”
We live under a constitutional and representative democracy, as do two-thirds of our fellow citizens in over 100 nations around the world. The health of these democracies varies widely. The case for democracy emphasizes its capacity to enhance dignity and self-worth, promote well-being, advance equal opportunity, protect equal rights, advance economic productivity, promote peace and order, resolve conflicts peacefully, hold rulers accountable, and achieve legitimacy through community based action.
One of the challenges of democracy is to find the right balance in pursuing “the common good” which has dual (and often competing) arms. One arm is communitarian well-being and the other, individual well-being. Blending personal and public interests is complex.
Both nursing and medicine have worked to bridge this gap through “professionalism,” and launched new graduates by voicing “oaths” or promises to themselves, their colleagues, and our society as a whole.
Louis Lasagna, MD‘s 1964 Oath included a communitarian connector: “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”
Nursing has also relied on professional Oaths. The first was the Nightingale Pledge, created in 1893 by the Farrand Training School for Nurses and named after Florence Nightingale. It is believed to be based on the Hippocratic Oath, and was modernized in 1935. In the 1950’s, the American Nurses Association (ANA), created a formal Code of Ethics, including Nursing’s 9 Provisions (or Pledges) committing to: compassion and respect, patient-focus, advocacy, active decision making, self-health, ethical environment, scholarly pursuit, collaborative teamwork, professional integrity and social justice.
The Penn State College of Medicine’s Oath in 2022 recognized that “We’re all in this together.” They gave top billing to the patient, with the oath to the patients, not to Greek gods: “By all that I hold highest, I promise my patients competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to their best interest, compassion, and absolute discretion, and confidentiality within the law.”
As citizens and caregivers of our Democracy, in these final moments before the 2024 election, we can ill afford to go weak-kneed, and collapse into a pile of doomsayers. The vote is your’s.
As for me, I will cast my Presidential vote with the pledgers of Penn State College of Medicine for “competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to their best interest, compassion, and absolute discretion, and confidentiality within the law.” I will vote for Kamala Harris.
Tags: Ameerican Nurses Association > ANA > Democracy > doomscrolling > John J. Patrick > Louis Lasagna > MSG Rally 2024 > Nightengale Pledge > penn state college of medicine > Penn State College of Medicine Oath > understanding democracy
Our 60’s Hippie Casts Her Vote.
Posted on | October 31, 2024 | 4 Comments
Pat Magee Jaksha
Mike Magee
This is my sister, Pat, #3 (I was #4) of 12 children born to Grace and Bill Magee. She was born on Elvis Presley’s birthday – 1 year and 12 days before I was born. That was 14 months after our father had returned from Europe at the close of WW II. He was a soldier and a healer, a happy warrior, an optimistic fighter, a good person who earned the respect of many.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Their 3rd child, Pat, is also a soldier and a healer, a happy warrior, an optimistic fighter, a good person who has earned the respect of many. She also shares with her late father an easy manner, a quick and infectious laugh, a clever wit, and a strong moral backbone. She displays and lives her values, but not in a pushy or insufferable way.
Pat can take a hit, and still be standing. Here she is above, decked out for Halloween in the 1960’s Hippie costume her daughter, Mandy, helped her pick out for Halloween festivities at “Sunrise of Edgewater” where she now lives.
The past few years have been a test of Pat’s strength, and spirit, and resilience. She lost her beloved husband of 52 years, Dave, on November 25, 2022, to Covid related complications. With a range of medical issues of her own, she moved within weeks from her life long home in Tucson, Arizona, where she had been an elementary school teacher, to New York City to be close to her only daughter and husband, Mike, and only granddaughter, Marlowe.
Two complex surgeries, and challenging recoveries followed, and multiple city moves before settling into her new home in Edgewater, NJ, a stone’s throw from where we grew up and our father practiced medicine in an office attached to the house in Fort Lee. She wasn’t alone. Besides frequent visits from her younger sisters, Sue and Kathy, who lived in the area, she had many new friends in-residence, some even who had been patients of our father as children many years ago.
As kids, when we would get down, our Mom and Dad would tell us to “Keep the Faith.” That meant to look forward, not backwards; to not waste time feeling sorry for ourselves; to be strong and above all, not give up. Pat has done all that – and a little more, a secret sauce that lights up her eyes. When she was in pain, or struggling to stand independently, those eyes that are striking mirrored determination. But as you see reflected in the picture above, they now sparkle with joyfulness and thankfulness.
Pat is alive and standing on her own again. Like many Americans, she has faced challenges, some large enough to justify just giving up, and no one would have blamed her for that. But she never did. When I spoke to her about this picture yesterday, she had one regret. She said she meant to wear her “I voted” sticker when our sister Sue took the shot. She voted by mail in her new (and our old) state of New Jersey. Keep the Faith!
“Our Fathers, Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Names.”
Posted on | October 27, 2024 | 6 Comments
Mike Magee
My father and Arnold Palmer had a great deal in common – and none of it involved golf. They were both men of faith and lived into their 80’s. My father was Catholic, and Arnold Palmer was Presbyterian. But on the day that Palmer died (September 25, 2016), Benedictine Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki of St. Vincent’s Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, was at his bedside.
Nowicki and Palmer’s friendship dated back a half century. He and his wife would often attend 7:30 a.m. Sunday Mass at the abbey.
At the time of Palmer’s death, the Benedictine monk said, “Arnie sort of appealed to everyone. There were no barriers, race, color, creed — those were things that never entered into is mind. He was welcoming to everybody and treated everyone with tremendous warmth and respect.”
But eight years and one month after his death, Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer Wears felt compelled to rise up and defend her father’s honor. In the Latrobe Airport, named after him, Donald Trump (according to FOX News) “discussed the golf legend’s manhood and how other players would react to Palmer in the showers.” Specifically, in an effort to relate to the local audience, Trump said, “He was all man. This man was so strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there; they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
The reaction from his daughter, a registered Independent from North Carolina, was swift. She labeled his words, “disrespectful” and “inappropriate”… “appropriating someone he admires to bolster his own image, people deserve better.” Her words in defense of her father, who was no longer there to speak for himself, called to mind my sister Sue’s Eulogy to our father. It focused on the values and qualities in him that she admired – honesty, hard work, compassion, integrity, humility, kindness, and love for others.
In one memorable turn in Church the day of our Dad’s burial, Sue said, “He taught us honesty. I was a little girl when Dad first impressed upon me the importance of honesty. He related a story to me about his own childhood. He had gone to the store and when he paid the shopkeeper there was some question about the amount of change he was due. He said more. The shopkeeper was uncertain but took Dad’s word because he said, ‘He had never known Bill Magee to tell a lie.’ He finished that story by saying to me, ‘There is nothing more important than honesty. People may not always like what you have to say, but if they can believe you then they will always trust you.’ That was a lesson Dad taught over and over again. His personal honesty and his integrity were beyond reproach.”
I believe my sister Sue and Peg would see eye to eye. Sue said of our Dad, “He was hard working. He was a man with heart. He was a gentleman.” In Mr. Palmer’s defense, Peg said much the same. When asked what her Dad would have thought if he were alive to hear Trump’s remarks, she replied, “He would have thought ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walk out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”
Both my father and Arnold Palmer were life long Republicans, conservatives, served in the military, were great admirers of Ronald Reagan, and attendees at Catholic Sunday masses. But I believe they were also wise enough to know that no policy gain – on federal funding of private schools, or limits on abortion and contraception, or lower taxes, or conservative Supreme Court Justices – would ever be enough of a rationalization to signal to an evil and dishonest man like Trump that the traits he embodies are acceptable for America.
Trump needs to be surrounded by vast sea of MAGA hat wearing admirers for affirmation. How antithetical to the man who’s name he took in vain last week. In contrast, Archabbot Nowicki recalled a visit with Mr. Palmer at the Bay Hill Golf Club in Orlando, Florida this way: “He had given one of our commencement addresses. He talked about the importance of decorum. He said, ‘That means when you enter a room that you take your hat off.’” At the club, a man “came into the dining room and had his hat on. Arnie said very gently to him, ‘Will you please take off your hat?’ He had that respect for people.”
If Bill Magee and Arnold Palmer were alive today, I believe they would never vote for Trump – Never, Never, Never!
Tags: Arnold Palmer > Douglas R. Nowicki > Eilliam P. Magee MD > Latrobe > MAGA > MAGA Republicans > PA > Peg Palmer Wears > Ronald Reagan > Sr. > Sue Ross
Washington’s “Coup d’oleil” Is Laser Focused On Trump and Project 2025.
Posted on | October 21, 2024 | 4 Comments
Mike Magee
John Plumb knows a bit about George Washington and what Trump has lately been calling “the enemy within.” A Navy Officer for 22 years, and current Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, he holds a PhD in aerospace engineering and is a student of warfare.
One of his favorite topics is George Washington who he says possessed what the French call “coup d’oleil” or the “inner eye.” According to Plumb, that refers to “the ability to see and comprehensively assess the whole problem, now and in the future.” He is especially interested in how Washington applied this approach to politics, not simple to the Revolutionary War battlefield.
Specifically Washington forewarned us in 1796 of Trump and Project 2025. In his Farewell Address, he peered into the future and didn’t like what he saw – specifically “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.” He predicted these predators would “agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindling the animosity of one part against another, fomenting occasional riot and insurrection…opening the door to foreign influence and corruption.”
Washington did his best to raise the alarms stating that it was “the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain” the Trump’s of his day. Most preferred to align with the thinking of modern day Princeton psychologist, Emily Pronin, whose 2002 article was titled “You Don’t Know Me, But I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight.” In that paper she seems to suggest that Kelly Conway was right, when she appeared on Meet The Press on January 21, 2017, and suggested that truth was in the eye of the beholder, and that “alternate facts” are just as valid as the regular variety.
Pronin suggested our species was subject to “Naive Realism” which she defined as “insisting that our ‘outsider perspective’ affords us insights about our peers that they are denied by their defensiveness, egocentricity, or other sources of bias. By contrast, we rarely entertain the notion that others are seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves.”
Madison in 1788 suggested that governing a nation where there was no truth, just perception, would be a hard slog at best. In Federalist 51, he writes, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
His solution? Our legal system, and checks and balances. On January 6, 2020, by all measures, we honored our commitment to the Founding Fathers. As reports that day outlined, “By the numbers: President Trump’s failed in efforts to overturn the election.” The article led with, “Trump and allies filed scores of lawsuits, tried to convince state legislatures to take action, organized protests and held hearings. None of it worked…Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election (in state and federal courts), 61 have failed. By all accounts, our nation and her citizens, owed our Judicial branch (its judges, lawyers, and legal guideposts) a debt of gratitude. Our Judiciary saved our democracy – for the moment.” For the moment indeed.
Washington’s “inner eye” over the remaining two weeks before November 5th must be laser focused.
- We must not be “naive” about the threat presented by the return of Donald Trump.
- We must be pragmatic, prepared, and above all “realistic.”
Washington knew exactly what he was talking about.
Tags: alternate facts > emily pronin > Farewell Address > Federalist 51 > george washington > insurrection > january 6 > John Plumb > kelly conway > madison > naive realism > the enemy within > trump
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