Sam Pizzigati: UnitedHealth, Medicare Advantage and ‘social murder’
Grave with burial vault awaiting coffin.
Robert Lawton photo
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
More than 8,000 Americans die every day, many of them unnecessarily.
Why? Because the United States still doesn’t have a national health- care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.
One particular American’s death has driven that point home. On Dec. 4, a gunman murdered Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s 50-year-old CEO. The bullet casings from the shooting read “deny,” “defend” and “depose.” Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old highly educated man with a serious physical ailment, has been arrested in the case.
‘Deny,’’ “defend’’ and “depose” neatly sum up the gameplan America’s giant insurers so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.
Last year, United pulled down $281 billion in revenue, boosting annual profits 33 percent over 2021. Thompson himself pocketed $10.2 million in personal compensation. And Andrew Witty, CEO of the overall UnitedHealth operation, collected $23.5 million, making him the nation’s highest-paid health-insurance CEO. (Brian Thompson and two other executives had been sued for insider trading.)
All private insurers profit by denying help to sick people who need it. But UnitedHealth’s operations have become especially rewarding thanks to the shadowy world of “Medicare Advantage,” the program that gives America’s senior citizens the option to contract out their Medicare to private health-service providers.
These private providers collect fixed fees from the federal government for each of the senior citizens they enroll. They profit when the cost of providing care to those seniors amounts to less than what the government pays them in fees. And that gives private providers an ongoing incentive to limit the care their patients receive.
No Medicare Advantage provider, the American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik points out, has done more than UnitedHealthcare when it comes to “simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.” Industry-wide, Medicare Advantage providers deny 16 percent of patient claims. UnitedHealthcare denied 32 percent last year.
The public’s frustration with health-insurance companies erupted bitterly after Thompson’s murder. UnitedHealth’s official Facebook report on Thompson’s death quickly drew 35,000 responses using the “Haha” emote.
“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one reaction. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”
“Compassion withheld,” read another, “until documentation can be produced that determines the bullet holes were not a preexisting condition.”
Some of the fiercest reactions to Thompson’s death came from within the medical community.
“This is someone who has participated in social murder on a mass scale,” a medical student wrote in one typical post.
“My patients died,” a nurse spat out in another, “while those b—-s enjoyed 26 million dollars.”
“If there’s anything our fractured country seems to agree on,” mused Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis, “it’s that the health care system is tragically broken, and the companies profiting from it are morally bankrupt.”
“To most Americans,” agreed The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, “a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it.”
Among wealthier countries, Americans “die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths” despite spending almost twice as much on health care as others, a recent Commonwealth Fund Study found. And 25 percent of Americans, Gallup polling adds, have people in their family who have had to delay medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn’t afford it.
Thompson’s murder won’t change those stats. The system that enriched him lives on — and the incoming Trump administration figures to make that system even worse. The corporate-friendly Heritage Foundation, in its controversial Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, is proposing that Medicare Advantage become the “default option” for all new Medicare enrollees.
That would “essentially privatize Medicare” and significantly raise the program’s cost, warns analyst Heather Cox Richardson.
With Thompson’s death, America’s health-care powers feel and fear the American public’s anger now more than ever. The rest of us need to channel that anger toward ending this system that’s failed America’s health.
We need to remake health care into a vital public service — not a tool for profit.
Boston-based Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org, where a longer version of this op-ed originally appeared. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win. Follow him on Bluesky at @sgp.bsky.social.
Then call your cardiologist
Fish balls
“She boiled three good-sized potatoes for 25 minutes; then mashed them and stirred the fish into them. To this mixture she added five eggs, five generous teaspoons of butter and a little pepper {and} beat everything vigorously together. She cooked them in deep fat, picking up generous dabs of the mixture in a potbellied spoon. The resulting fish balls, eaten with her own brand of ketchup, made ambrosia seem like pretty dull stuff.’’
— Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957), American writer, especially known for his historical novels, in Trending into Maine (1938).
Avian and ancestor
“Goose and Ghost” (encaustic), by Nancy Whitcomb, in the 120th annual Little Pictures Show at the Providence Art Club through Dec. 22.
Alert the physics department
“Spark of Creation” (36 layers of glazes, oil on canvas), by Sloat Shaw, at the Cambridge (Mass.) Art Association.
Chris Powell: Public policies helped create Conn.’s underclass
New Haven
Emilie Foyer photo
MANCHESTER, Conn.
After three fatal shootings of young men in New Haven in less than two weeks, Mayor Justin Elicker gave news interviews to assure people that downtown is safe for holiday shopping, dining, and other festive activities. The mayor noted that, as with murders and shootings in other cities, most in New Haven involve people who know each other.
That is, no harm is likely to come to people visiting New Haven as long as they don't know anyone there. As for New Haven residents themselves, most figure that they'll probably be OK as long as they're not young men or associating with young men.
Essentially the mayor was saying that the mayhem is just a problem of the underclass. He noted that city social workers and police officers are pressing New Haven's young men to control their impulses to violence and change their dissolute lifestyle. Good luck with that.
Of course few if any elective offices are more difficult than mayor of an impoverished city, and Elicker was trying to protect New Haven's image. But outsiders should worry about the urban underclass. For the policies that created and sustain it and concentrate it in the cities are state and national policies, not city policies, and they are disgracefully designed to discourage people from worrying about the underclass, designed to let people think that it's the natural order for young men in the cities to be killing and maiming each other.
What are these policies?
They extend far beyond exclusive suburban zoning, which at least Connecticut's political left dares to challenge.
These policies begin with the destruction of poor families with welfare subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. Such subsidies proclaim that no one needs to be prepared to support one's own children and that fathers aren't needed anymore, though fatherlessness correlates heavily with bad outcomes for children, especially boys. Most children in Connecticut's cities live without fathers.
These policies continue with the repeal of standards in education and their replacement with social promotion, thereby destroying the incentive to learn for children who lack prepared and competent parents. Education is mostly a matter of parenting; without well-parented students who accept an obligation to learn, schools can't accomplish much. So government in Connecticut pretends that education is all about teacher salaries and busies itself with raises instead.
But having grown the underclass so large, government lacks the courage necessary even to recognize the disaster it has created.
What politicians will try to fix the problem of family destruction when it means telling so many of their constituents -- in the cities, most of their constituents -- that they should not have responded to the damaging incentives government gave them?
What politicians will try to restore education when it means telling educators, the most pernicious special interest, that it is a fraud for them to advance uneducated students from grade to grade and then to graduate them when the kids are unprepared to do more than menial work and to be citizens, and that this fraud leads them to demoralization and crime?
Destruction of educational standards worsened in last month's election. At the urging of its teacher unions, Massachusetts voted at referendum to repeal its requirement that high school students pass a proficiency test to graduate. The test was accused of racism for being too difficult for minority students, but it wasn't racist. The racism is the welfare system's depriving those students of fathers.
Connecticut doesn't dare attempt a high school graduation test or any proficiency test of high school seniors, lest the public discover that the huge amounts spent in the name of education produce so little and that most graduates never master high school work.
How can people raised in the welfare system and delivered to adulthood so uneducated be expected to support themselves? They can't. Hence the desire for state government to appropriate more and more to subsidize people who can't take care of themselves and their kids -- more food, day care, medical care, housing subsidies, and such.
So Connecticut's underclass keeps growing -- and shooting itself.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
As murky as the present
“Ever/After”(photomontage), by Marion Belanger and Martha Lewis, at Hartford (Conn.) Art School Galleries in the show “Pathways: HAS Faculty Show,’’ through Dec. 14.
The artwork ranges from porcelain to augmented reality, and represents a collective commitment to curiosity, process, and making.
Arthur Allen: Experts say RFK Jr. could be a public-health disaster
Unvaccinated child with measles, which can be fatal.
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
The availability of safe, effective Covid vaccines less than a year into the pandemic marked a high point in the 300-year history of vaccination, seemingly heralding an age of protection against infectious diseases.
Now, after backlash against public-health interventions culminated in President-elect Donald Trump’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s best-known anti-vaccine activist, as its top health official, infectious-disease and public-health experts and vaccine advocates say a confluence of factors could cause renewed, deadly epidemics of measles, whooping cough, and meningitis, or even polio.
“The litany of things that will start to topple is profound,” said James Hodge, a public-health-law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We’re going to experience a seminal change in vaccine law and policy.”
“He’ll make America sick again,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public-health law at Georgetown University.
State legislators who question vaccine safety are poised to introduce bills to weaken school-entry vaccine requirements or do away with them altogether, said Northe Saunders, who tracks vaccine-related legislation for the SAFE Communities Coalition, a group supporting pro-vaccine legislation and lawmakers.
Even states that keep existing requirements will be vulnerable to decisions made by a Republican-controlled Congress as well as by Kennedy and former House member Dave Weldon, should they be confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, respectively.
Both men — Kennedy as an activist, Weldon as a medical doctor and congressman from 1995 to 2009— have endorsed debunked theories blaming vaccines for autism and other chronic diseases. (Weldon has been featured in anti-vaccine films in the years since he left Congress.) Both have accused the CDC of covering up evidence this was so, despite dozens of reputable scientific studies to the contrary.
Kennedy’s staff did not respond to requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, did not respond to requests for comment or interviews with Kennedy or Weldon.
Kennedy recently told NPR that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.”
It’s unclear how far the administration would go to discourage vaccination, but if levels drop enough, vaccine-preventable illnesses and deaths might soar.
“It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the U.S. and not suffer recurrence of these diseases,” said Gregory Poland, co-director of the Atria Academy of Science & Medicine. “One in 3,000 kids who gets measles is going to die. There’s no treatment for it. They are going to die.”
During a November 2019 measles epidemic that killed 80 children in Samoa, Kennedy wrote to the country’s prime minister falsely claiming that the measles vaccine was probably causing the deaths. Scott Gottlieb, who was Trump’s first FDA commissioner, said on CNBC on Nov. 29 that Kennedy “will cost lives in this country” if he undercuts vaccination.
Kennedy’s nomination validates and enshrines public mistrust of government health programs, said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“The notion that he’d even be considered for that position makes people think he knows what he’s talking about,” Offit said. “He appeals to lessened trust, the idea that ‘There are things you don’t see, data they don’t present, that I’m going to find out so you can really make an informed decision.’”
Hodge has compiled a list of 20 actions the administration could take to weaken national vaccination programs, from spreading misinformation to delaying FDA vaccine approvals to dropping Department of Justice support for vaccine laws challenged by groups like Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded and led before campaigning for president.
Kennedy could also cripple the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which Congress created in 1986 to take care of children believed harmed by vaccines — while partially protecting vaccine makers from lawsuits.
Before the law passed, the threat of lawsuits had shrunk the number of companies making vaccines in the United States — from 26 in 1967 to 17 in 1980 — and the remaining pertussis-vaccine producers were threatening to stop making it. The vaccine injury program “played an integral role in keeping manufacturers in the business,” Poland said.
Kennedy could abolish the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, whose recommendation for using a vaccine determines whether the government pays for it through the 30-year-old Vaccines for Children program, which makes free immunizations available to more than half the children in the United States. Alternatively, Kennedy could stack the committee with allies who oppose new vaccines, and could, in theory at least, withdraw recommendations for vaccines like the 53-year-old measles-mumps-rubella shot, a favorite target of the anti-vaccine movement.
Meanwhile, infectious-disease threats are on the rise or on the horizon. Instead of preparing, as a typical incoming administration might, Kennedy has threatened to shake up the federal health agencies. Once in office, he’ll “give infectious disease a break” to focus on chronic ailments, he said at a Children’s Health Defense conference last month in Georgia.
The H5N1 virus, or bird flu, that has spread through cattle herds and infected at least 55 people could erupt in a new pandemic, and other threats like mosquito-borne dengue fever are rising in the U.S.
Traditional childhood diseases are also making their presence felt, in part because of neglected vaccination. The U.S. has seen 16 measles outbreaks this year — 89% of cases are in unvaccinated people — and a whooping cough epidemic is the worst since 2012.
“So that’s how we’re starting out,” said Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and virologist at the Baylor College of Medicine. “Then you throw into the mix one of the most outspoken and visible anti-vaccine activists at the head of HHS, and that gives me a lot of concern.”
The share prices of drug companies with big vaccine portfolios have plunged since Kennedy’s nomination. Even before Trump’s victory, vaccine exhaustion and skepticism had driven down demand for newer vaccines like GSK’s RSV and shingles shots.
Kennedy has ample options to slow or stop new vaccine releases or to slow sales of existing vaccines — for example, by requiring additional post-market studies or by highlighting questionable studies that suggest safety risks.
Kennedy, who has embraced conspiracy theories such as that HIV does not cause AIDS and that pesticides cause gender dysphoria, told NPR there are “huge deficits” in vaccine safety research. “We’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices,” he said.
Kennedy’s nomination “bodes ill for the development of new vaccines and the use of currently available vaccines,” said Stanley Plotkin, a vaccine-industry consultant and inventor of the rubella vaccine in the 1960s. “Vaccine development requires millions of dollars. Unless there is prospect of profit, commercial companies are not going to do it.”
Vaccine advocates, with less money on hand than the better-funded anti-vaccine advocates, see an uphill battle to defend vaccination in courts, legislatures, and the public square. People are rarely inclined to celebrate the absence of a conquered illness, making vaccines a hard sell even when they are working well.
While many wealthy people, including potion and supplement peddlers, have funded the anti-vaccine movement, “there hasn’t been an appetite from science-friendly people to give that kind of money to our side,” said Karen Ernst, director of Voices for Vaccines.
‘He’s Serious as Hell’
“RFK Jr. was a punch line for a lot of people, but he’s serious as hell,” Ernst said. “He has a lot of power, money, and a vast network of anti-vaccine parents who’ll show up at a moment’s notice.” That’s not been the case with groups like hers, Ernst said.
On Oct. 22, when an Idaho health board voted to stop providing covid vaccines in six counties, there were no vaccine advocates at the meeting. “We didn’t even know it was on the agenda,” Ernst said. “Mobilization on our side is always lagging. But I’m not giving up.”
The kaleidoscopic change has been jarring for Walter Orenstein, who persuaded states to tighten school mandates to fight measles outbreaks as head of the CDC’s immunization division from 1988 to 2004.
“People don’t understand the concept of community protection, and if they do they don’t seem to care,” said Orenstein, who saw some of the last cases of smallpox as a CDC epidemiologist in India in the 1970s, and frequently cared for children with meningitis caused by H. influenzae type B bacteria, a disease that has mostly disappeared because of a vaccine introduced in 1987.
“I was so naïve,” he said. “I thought that Covid would solidify acceptance of vaccines, but it was the opposite.”
Lawmakers opposed to vaccines could introduce legislation to remove school-entry requirements in nearly every state, Saunders said. One bill to do this has been introduced in Texas, where what’s known as the vaccine choice movement has been growing since 2015 and took off during the pandemic, fusing with parents’ rights and anti-government groups opposed to measures like mandatory shots and masking.
“The genie is out of the bottle, and you can’t put it back in,” said Rekha Lakshmanan, chief strategy officer at the Immunization Partnership in Texas. “It’s become this multiheaded thing that we’re having to reckon with.”
In the last full school year, more than 100,000 Texas public school students were exempted from one or more vaccinations, she said, and many of the 600,000 homeschooled Texas kids are also thought to be unvaccinated.
In Louisiana, the state surgeon general distributed a form letter to hospitals exempting medical professionals from flu vaccination, claiming the vaccine is unlikely to work and has “real and well established” risks. Research on flu vaccination refutes both claims.
The biggest threat to existing vaccination policies could be plans by the Trump administration to remove civil service protections for federal workers. That jeopardizes workers at federal health agencies whose day-to-day jobs are to prepare for and fight diseases and epidemics. “If you overturn the administrative state, the impact on public health will be long-term and serious,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who has the ear of the incoming president, imagines cost-cutting plans that are also seen as a threat.
“If you damage the core functions of the FDA, it’s like killing the goose that laid the golden egg, both for our health and for the economy,” said Jesse Goodman, the director of the Center on Medical Product Access, Safety and Stewardship at Georgetown University and a former chief science officer at the FDA. “It would be the exact opposite of what Kennedy is saying he wants, which is safe medical products. If we don’t have independent skilled scientists and clinicians at the agency, there’s an increased risk Americans will have unsafe foods and medicine.”
Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable illness could be alarming, but would they be enough to boost vaccination again? Ernst of Voices for Vaccines isn’t sure.
“We’re already having outbreaks. It would take years before enough children died before people said, ‘I guess measles is a bad thing,’” she said. “One kid won’t be enough. The story they’ll tell is, ‘There was something wrong with that kid. It can’t happen to my kid.’”
Arthur Allen is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter.
Jumping the gun on cod fishing?
Northwest Atlantic cod stocks were severely overfished in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to their abrupt collapse in 1992.
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Against the advice of scientists, Canada this year lifted a moratorium on cod fishing that was imposed back in 1994 after cod stocks plummeted off the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. There’s been a bit of revival in the past few years, but the stocks remain far below what they were for hundreds of years following European colonization. (The proximity of vast stocks of cod, which, importantly, could be easily salted and preserved, was part of what made New England and, to a lesser extent, the Maritime provinces, prosperous starting in the 18th Century. Indeed, what became known as Boston Brahmins also used to be called “The Codfish Aristocracy.’’)
The moratorium was lifted at least in part for political reasons. Newfoundland/Labrador suffered mightily and angrily from the fishing ban, which forced many “Newfies’’ to leave. Politics, public opinion and science often don’t happily co-exist. Look at America’s COVID experience.
In any case, Canada might now be jumping the gun, leading to another crash in cod stocks.
Meanwhile, warming water and changes in currents associated with climate change mean that the mix of fish species off New England and the Maritimes will continue to change in predictable and unpredictable ways over the next few years.
(I’m a halibut fan myself; that fish generally comes from the more northern waters off the Maritime provinces. I had some the other week at a business dinner in a New York restaurant that was so dark that I asked for a flashlight to read the menu and the alarming bill; I can’t afford Gotham anymore.)
Totalitarian Temptations
He probably won’t win the final election, set for Dec. 8, but far-right Romanian politician Calin Georgescu, who is anti-NATO, anti-Ukraine and pro-Russian, was the top voter in the country’s first election stage, on Nov. 24, when he won about 23 percent of the vote. But he’s still troubling for all those who treasure democracy.
He's an admirer of the country’s virulently anti-semitic fascist dictator and Hitler ally Ion Antonescu (1882-1946), who was executed for war crimes. He reflects the authoritarian/totalitarian temptation – a belief that a “strong leader’’ can end a nation’s frustrations. And for those uncooperative citizens not lusting for dictatorship to fix all their national woes? The sort of extreme Orwellian surveillance strategies being perfected by Xi Jinping’s tyranny in China can keep them well under control.
Joanne M. Pierce: An AI Jesus can’t absolve you of your sins
Jesus cleansing a leper, a medieval mosaic from the Monreale (Italy) Cathedral, late 12th to mid-13th centuries.
Text from The Conversation
WORCESTER, Mass.
This autumn, a Swiss Catholic church installed an AI Jesus in a confessional to interact with visitors.
The installation was a two-month project in religion, technology and art titled “Deus in Machina,” created at the University of Lucerne. The Latin title literally means “god from the machine”; it refers to a plot device used in Greek and Roman plays, introducing a god to resolve an impossible problem or conflict facing the characters.
This hologram of Jesus Christ on a screen was animated by an artificial intelligence program. The AI’s programming included theological texts, and visitors were invited to pose questions to the AI Jesus, viewed on a monitor behind a latticework screen. Users were advised not to disclose any personal information and confirm that they knew they were engaging with the avatar at their own risk.
AI Jesus confessional.
Some headlines stated that the AI Jesus was actually engaged in the ritual act of hearing people’s confessions of their sins, but this wasn’t the case. However, even though AI Jesus was not actually hearing confessions, as a specialist in the history of Christian worship, I was disturbed by the act of placing the AI project in a real confessional that parishioners would ordinarily use.
A confessional is a booth where Catholic priests hear parishioners’ confessions of their sins and grant them absolution, forgiveness, in the name of God. Confession and repentance always take place within the human community that is the church. Human believers confess their sins to human priests or bishops.
Early history
The New Testament scriptures clearly stress a human, communal context for admitting and repenting for sins.
In the Gospel of John, for example, Jesus speaks to his apostles, saying, “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven, and whose sins you shall retain they are retained.” And in the epistle of James, Christians are urged to confess their sins to one another.
Churches in the earliest centuries encouraged public confession of more serious sins, such as fornication or idolatry. Church leaders, called bishops, absolved sinners and welcomed them back into the community.
From the third century on, the process of forgiving sins became more ritualized. Most confessions of sins remained private – one on one with a priest or bishop. Sinners would express their sorrow in doing penance individually by prayer and fasting.
However, some Christians guilty of certain major offenses, such as murder, idolatry, apostasy or sexual misconduct, would be treated very differently.
These sinners would do public penance as a group. Some were required to stand on the steps of the church and ask for prayers. Others might be admitted in for worship but were required to stand in the back or be dismissed before the scriptures were read. Penitents were expected to fast and pray, sometimes for years, before being ritually reconciled to the church community by the bishop.
Medieval developments
During the first centuries of the Middle Ages, public penance fell into disuse, and emphasis was increasingly placed on verbally confessing sins to an individual priest. After privately completing the penitential prayers or acts assigned by the confessor, the penitent would return for absolution.
The concept of Purgatory also became a widespread part of Western Christian spirituality. It was understood to be a stage of the afterlife where the souls of the deceased who died before confession with minor sins, or had not completed penance, would be cleansed by spiritual suffering before being admitted to heaven.
Living friends or family of the deceased were encouraged to offer prayers and undertake private penitential acts, such as giving alms – gifts of money or clothes – to the poor, to reduce the time these souls would have to spend in this interim state.
Other developments took place in the later Middle Ages. Based on the work of the theologian Peter Lombard, penance was declared a sacrament, one of the major rites of the Catholic Church. In 1215, a new church document mandated that every Catholic go to confession and receive Holy Communion at least once a year.
Priests who revealed the identity of any penitent faced severe penalties. Guidebooks for priests, generally called Handbooks for Confessors, listed various types of sins and suggested appropriate penances for each.
The first confessionals
Until the 16th century, those wishing to confess their sins had to arrange meeting places with their clergy, sometimes just inside the local church when it was empty.
But the Catholic Council of Trent changed this. The 14th session in 1551 addressed penance and confession, stressing the importance of privately confessing to priests ordained to forgive in Christ’s name.
Soon after, Charles Borromeo, the cardinal archbishop of Milan, installed the first confessionals along the walls of his cathedral. These booths were designed with a physical barrier between priest and penitent to preserve anonymity and prevent other abuses, such as inappropriate sexual conduct.
Similar confessionals appeared in Catholic churches over the following centuries: The main element was a screen or veil between the priest confessor and the layperson, kneeling at his side. Later, curtains or doors were added to increase privacy and ensure confidentiality.
A 17th-century confessional at the Toulouse St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Didier Descouens via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Rites of penance in contemporary times
In 1962, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council. Its first document, issued in December 1963, set new norms for promoting and reforming Catholic liturgy.
Since 1975, Catholics have three forms of the rite of penance and reconciliation. The first form structures private confession, while the second and third forms apply to groups of people in special liturgical rites. The second form, often used at set times during the year, offers those attending the opportunity to go to confession privately with one of the many priests present.
The third form can be used in special circumstances, when death threatens with no time for individual confession, like a natural disaster or pandemic. Those assembled are given general absolution, and survivors confess privately afterward.
In addition, these reforms prompted the development of a second location for confession: Instead of being restricted to the confessional booth, Catholics now had the option of confessing their sins face-to-face with the priest.
To facilitate this, some Catholic communities added a reconciliation room to their churches. Upon entering the room, the penitent could choose anonymity by using the kneeler in front of a traditional screen or walk around the screen to a chair set facing the priest.
Over the following decades, the Catholic experience of penance changed. Catholics went to confession less often, or stopped altogether. Many confessionals remained empty or were used for storage. Many parishes began to schedule confessions by appointment only. Some priests might insist on face-to-face confession, and some penitents might prefer the anonymous form only. The anonymous form takes priority, since the confidentiality of the sacrament must be maintained.
In 2002, Pope John Paul II addressed some of these problems, insisting that parishes make every effort to schedule set hours for confessions. Pope Francis himself has become concerned with reviving the sacrament of penance. In fact, he demonstrated its importance by presenting himself for confession, face-to-face, at a confessional in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Perhaps, in the future, a program like AI Jesus could offer Catholics and interested questioners from other faiths information, advice, referrals and limited spiritual counseling around the clock. But from the Catholic perspective, an AI, with no experience of having a human body, emotions and hope for transcendence, cannot authentically absolve human sins.
Joanne M. Pierce is a professor emerita of religious studies at The College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester.
She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations.
‘Fragility and strength’
“Striped Beach with Boy”(lumiere paints on cotton, quilted), by West Hartford, Conn.-based artist and retired lawyer Diane Cadrain, in her show “The Ripple Effect: Images of Cape Cod,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through Dec. 29.
“I attempt to create images that combine fragility with strength and the evanescent with the eternal. The sand ripples on the beaches of Cape Cod are perfect subjects for me because they are always changing, but always the same, and despite the visual strength of their patterns, they can be washed away with the next tide.”
Llewellyn King: Old newspaper days, and television, too
Linotype machine keyboard.
— Photo by Emdx
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
On Dec. 13, I will receive an award and give a dinner talk at the National Press Club in Washington, recognizing my 68 years as a journalist and my 58 years as a member of the club.
This recognition is from a club subsection, known as the Owls. Silver Owls are those who have roosted at the club for 25 years or longer; Golden Owls, 50 years or more; and Platinum Owls, 60 years or longer.
You may think that the hot-type days in newspapers are long past, along with black-and-white television. They may be, but the denizens of that time live on — or some of us do.
We will crowd the storied National Press Club ballroom to raise a glass to the time when headlines had to fit to an exact letter count, when wire services moved the news over teleprinters at 64 words a minute: It could be the biggest story in the world, but it would be moved slower than the speed of reading.
The trick was to break the news into very short takes and move it on several printers. The principal teleprinter of the news services, UPI, AP and Reuters, was equipped with a “bulletin” bell which rang when the biggest news, like an assassination, broke.
In the composing room, where “metal” (you dared not call it lead, even though it was predominantly lead with some tin and antimony) was cast into type and into “furniture,” the rules and the spacing bars that went between the lines of type, craftsmanship ruled.
At one side of that great hive were the Linotype machines, operated by skilled people who could change fonts and type sizes by levering up or down the brass boxes that contained the dies of the type. They were the kings and queens of that art, secure and unflappable. Each Linotype machine contained a thousand parts, according to the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass.
In a rush the printers (note to laymen: printers set and handled the type), the people who ran the presses were pressmen, could assemble a whole page in minutes. If news had broken or, heaven forfend, a page had been “pied” (dropped, type all over the floor) then everything had to be reset and assembled.
Television — when I first worked in it in London, in the days of black-and-white — had its own foibles and culture, and the love of a glass of something.
The equivalent of the printers were the film editors, craftsmen and women all. One of the most skilled, who had had a long career in movies, would entertain us at the in-house bar in the BBC news studios in North London, by swinging a full pint mug of beer over his head without spilling any.
With the same dedication, he would slice and link the celluloid on deadline. He was the man who would save the day, especially if film came in late. Tape was in its infancy.
In the newsrooms on newspapers, tactically just one floor above the composing room, there were the journalists — that irregular army of misfits and egotists who made up a subculture unique to themselves. In Britain, they were referred to somewhere as “the shabby people who smell of drink.” That was true of journalists all over the world in those days. I can attest, bear witness. I was there.
Among the journalists, writers, editors, cartoonists, columnists, photographers, designers, secretaries and librarians were a cast of characters that was almost always the same in every newsroom, print or television. There was the Beau Brummell, the lover, the agony aunt, the gossip, the budding author, and the drunk (who wrote better than anyone else and was tolerated because of that). Then sadly, the gambler.
It seemed to me the drinkers had camaraderie and laughter, the gamblers just losses.
That began to change about 1970, when I was at The Washington Post. There were still drinkers who did the deed at the New York Lounge, a hole in the wall next to the more famous but less used by us Post Pub. But the drinking was definitely down. Among the younger members of the staff, pot was the recreational drug. The older ones still favored a drink.
In London, the big newspapers and the BBC maintained bars in their offices. It made it easy to find people when they were needed.
At the venerable New York Herald Tribune after the first edition closed at 7:30 p.m., the entire editorial staff, it seemed, went downstairs and around the block to the Artist (cq) and Writers, also called Bleaks. It wasn’t known for the quality of its carbonated water, unless that was mixed with something brown.
At the Baltimore News-American, there was a secret route through the mechanical departments, enabling thirsty scribblers to reach the nearest bar undetected.
At the Washington Daily News, which belonged to the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers, the editor was known to favor the nearest bar, an Irish establishment called Matt Kane’s.
At the National Press Club celebration, we will raise one to the days of wine and roses, great stories and wordsmithing, and the fabulous adventure of it — the bad food, terrible hours, poor pay, long stakeouts, days far from home, and always, as my late first wife and great journalist, Doreen King, said, “the inner core of panic” about getting things right. We do care, more than our readers and viewers know.
There is, for all of its tribulations, no greater, more exciting place to be than in a newsroom as big news is breaking.
You are there, inside history.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island.
White House Chronicle
Kennedy could menace Boston medical complex
View over the Longwood Medical Area.
Text edited from an article in The Boston Guardian
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian’s board.)
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becomes secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services he could pose serious funding and economic problems for the Longwood Medical Area (LMA).
Institutions in Longwood rely heavily on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But Kennedy has said he’ll redirect half of the agency’s budget to holistic health, and Trump is expected to propose steep cuts to its research budget.
The LMA makes Boston a hub of health-care innovation and comprises a sizeable part of the city’s economy.
If the NIH budget is cut, Longwood’s research capabilities would decrease. But the city could also suffer significant economic consequences.
“The LMA is one of the densest clusters of research activity in the nation, with more NIH awards for its research endeavors than other similar academic biomedical clusters in the U.S.,” said David Sweeney, the president and CEO of the Longwood Collective, a non-profit organization which maintains the area.
The LMA also receives the most NIH research funding per capita in the United States. Institutions in the LMA have collectively received $1.2 billion in NIH-funded research grants in 2024, according to the Longwood Collective. In 2023, they received $1.4 billion.
“Most NIH-funded Boston hospitals are located in the Longwood Medical Area, making it an epicenter of medical training, research, and health care,” the Boston Planning Department stated in its most recent annual report on NIH funding throughout the city. The LMA contains 21 hospitals.
NIH funding is important because it is cost-effective compared to other types of funding. “It has the highest cost reimbursable rate across all sponsor types,” a spokesperson for the Mass General Brigham hospitals said. “Most awards are for four or five fiscal years, which provides financial stability to people working on these grants.”
If NIH funding were cut, the spokesperson said, it would take about five years to notice a decline. As existing NIH grants ran out, researchers would need to apply for other funds, which might not be as lucrative or stable, and they might struggle to upkeep their current volume in research output.
That also suggests possible economic decline.
“This research funding plays a major role in supporting the innovation ecosystem in the state and its associated reputational, workforce, and business creation benefits,” the Longwood Collective stated in a 2020 economic impact report, citing spending by LMA employees, students, and institutions. “All of these activities form the economic ‘ripple effect’ of the activity occurring within the LMA.”
The news about Kennedy has already had economic effects in the state. The Boston Business Journal reported the other week that stock prices for such major Massachusetts life-science companies as Moderna, Biogen and Vertex Pharmaceuticals plummeted after his nomination.
Kennedy has said he plans to immediately replace 600 NIH employees, restructure the agency from 27 departments to 15, and commit half of its research funding towards “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has previously criticized the NIH for not funding research on whether and how vaccines impact autism.
Heading for a concussion
“Morning Run” (oil on canvas), by Peterboro, N.H., artist Gary Shepard at Vermont Artisan Designs, Brattleboro, Vt., Dec. 6-Jan. 2.
Compare them
W.E.B. Du Bois in 1907.
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.’’
— W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), in John Brown.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil-rights activist. Born and raised in Great Barrington, Mass., in The Berkshires, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, compared to most of America, and especially compared to the ruthless racism of the Jim Crow South.
Great Barrington in 1884.
Chris Powell: Not ready for ranked voting?
Ranked-choice voting in U.S.
Dark green: Some statewide elections.
Light green: Local option for municipalities to opt in.
Blue: Option for localities in some jurisdictions.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Gov. Ned Lamont and some good-government activists want Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting. This is the mechanism of "instant runoff" elections in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Candidates receiving the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are transferred to the remaining candidates in accordance with voter preferences until one candidate achieves a majority, not a mere plurality.
Under ranked-choice voting people still get only one vote but are allowed to change it prospectively.
The governor has appointed a group to study the issue.
Ranked-choice voting might get complicated with an office for which there were many candidates, but it would be pretty simple where there were only three or four.
Building a majority for the winner is the great virtue of ranked-choice voting. It works against candidates who represent extremes but who might win if a moderate majority is divided among two or more candidates.
In recent decades Connecticut has had some notable elections that had three or more candidates and whose winners well may not have won a runoff.
There was the 1994 election for governor, a four-way race won by John G. Rowland, a Republican, with only 36% of the vote, the total vote being split by minor-party liberal and minor-party conservative candidates.
The state's election for U.S. senator in 1970 was won by Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Republican, with only 42% of the vote, as the Democratic vote was split by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd's independent candidacy after his party rejected him for embezzling campaign funds.
Those elections are reasons for Connecticut Democrats and liberals particularly to aspire to ranked-choice voting. But Connecticut Republicans and conservatives have a reason to aspire to it as well, though they haven't realized it yet.
That reason is Connecticut's Working Families Party, which exists to push the Democratic Party to the left. The Working Families Party ordinarily cross-endorses Democrats who lean left but will threaten to run its own candidates against Democrats who aren't leftist enough, thus splitting the Democratic vote and aiding Republicans. Ranked-choice voting would eliminate the Working Families Party's leverage over Democrats, since people voting for a Working Families candidate almost certainly would list the Democratic candidate as their second choice over any Republican. Then moderate Democrats wouldn't have to worry about the far-left party anymore.
Meanwhile Connecticut has no far-right minor party to threaten Republican candidates in the same way. (Neighboring New York has both liberal and conservative minor parties that exist to push the major parties left and right, respectively.)
Indeed, with ranked-choice voting no major-party candidates would not have to worry about any "spoiler" candidates anymore.
Unfortunately, a week after the recent election a report from Connecticut's Hearst newspapers indicated that the state isn't ready for ranked-choice voting and may not even be fully competent to hold ordinary elections.
Hearst's investigation found that at least six municipalities reported to the secretary of the state voting data with gross mistakes -- like more votes cast than registered voters and even more precincts reporting than real precincts. As might have been expected, Hartford failed in both respects, reporting more precincts than it had and more voters participating than votes cast.
Hearst's investigation noticed these errors before election officials did.
There was no suggestion of corruption here, just negligence, but it may be chronic. For the Hearst report added, "Last year Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas traveled to East Haven more than 2½ months after Connecticut's municipal elections to bestow an award for high voter turnout, only to learn that the apparent large number of voters was due to a data-entry error."
Running an election can be exhausting, and registrars and their aides are often heroic. Connecticut's recent conversion to early voting may make things harder. But before Connecticut tries revolutionizing more of its voting procedures, it should perfect the current ones. That's the study group the governor should appoint.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Danbury’s deadly hat industry
From the New England Historical Society
The 19th-Century hat factories of Danbury, Conn., made physical wrecks of thousands of workers. They turned them into mad hatters with symptoms known as the Danbury shakes.
In a Danbury hat mill.
]
Hat makers used mercuric nitrate to make hats. Many developed mercury poisoning, manifested as drooling, pathological shyness, irritability and tremor. Mercury poisoning looked a lot like drunkenness, a handy misconception for employers to exploit.
Here’s the whole article.
William Morgan: Journey to the exotic White Mountains
In the autumn of 1907 Bertha made a trip to the White Mountains. While there she posted a picture postcard to her friend Emma Merrill in Raymond, N.H., a town halfway between Concord and Portsmouth. The ubiquitous Detroit Photographic Company labeled its panorama “Presidential Range from Look-Off, White Mountains, N.H.” The colored photo shows a surprisingly flat landscape in the foreground, with a few houses and barns. Some might mistake the view for that of the Dolomites rising above Italy’s Po Valley.
We forget how provincial New Hampshire was a century and a quarter ago and how exotic the White Mountains must have seemed.
I had a girlfriend from Concord once, and her parents took their honeymoon in northern New Hampshire. More recently, while I was renewing my driver’s license in Keene, a farmer in line in front of me, allowed as to how he had never been to Concord.
Did Bertha take any more trips in her lifetime? We have tantalizing little information to form any sort of a picture of her. Yet Find a Grave connects us with Emma J. Merrill, who is buried in New Pine Grove Cemetery, in Raymond. She died in 1954 at 79. Her husband, William, died the same year; their gravestone tells us that he was two years younger than Emma. Bertha’s postcard, which I bought for a dollar in New Bedford, saves the two women from obscurity.
William Morgan is a Providence-based architectural historian, critic and photographer. He is author of numerous books with New England themes, including The Cape Cod Cottage, which is being published by Abbeville Press this winter.
A color trip
“Color Cascade’’ in the show “Experience Night Lights,’’ at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, in Boylston, Mass., through Jan. 5.
The organization says:
“Wander through formal gardens and conservatories illuminated by more than a quarter of a million artfully arranged lights. With displays showcasing a creative new theme each year, this dazzling, one-of-a-kind spectacle is unmatched in the region. Festive activities such as outdoor skating, s’mores roasting, and holiday shopping promise an unforgettable experience for visitors of all ages.’’
Boylston Commons
— Photo by Allen Karsina
Offshore wind turbines vs. damage from trawling and fossil-fuel addiction
Components of offshore wind turbines being staged for Vineyard Wind 1 at New Bedford.
Wosketomp photo
From ecoRI.org column by Frank Carini
Ever since the Block Island Wind Farm first became an idea more than a decade ago, the commercial fishing industry has that warned offshore turbines will industrialize the ocean and hurt ecosystems….
Offshore wind turbines, especially during construction, certainly add to the cacophony of underwater noise created by yachts (mega or otherwise), container ships, barges, oil and gas drilling, sonar, and military exercises that stress marine mammals and other sea life.
Centuries of commercial fishing and whaling also industrialized the oceans. They have had a profound impact on the marine environment. Combined with the extraction, transportation, and the burning of fossil fuels at sea, these two industries have caused significant marine distress.