The KHIT Blog: My enervating decade of The Donald

Friday, July 17, 2026

My enervating decade of The Donald

Closer to 11 years now, actually. He was ramping up his noises about running for President in 2015. Many people found the notion utterly absurd. I did not.

In late 2015 I underwent 9 weeks of daily radiation therapy for treatment of prostate cancer. My rad tech folks and I joked that we should name my tumor "The Donald."

"So, what're we doin' today? Let's Nuke The Donald, shall we?"

In 2016 most people I knew still tended to blow Trump off. He was a gauche clown who didn't have a chance of winning the Presidency. Women in particular tended to be in the thrall of the prospect of Hillary smashing the Glass Ceiling. Her Sheet was compelling, particularly in contrast to the crude Donald Trump.

I was uneasy. I began voicing my concerns in April 2016 on another blog platform. Excerpt:

Where’s the “Pre-Crimes Unit” when you need one? 

Put aside the endless onslaught of reflexively arrogant, belligerent, and vulgar P.T. Barnum bombast. Forget the neurotic, tellingly insecure “The-Beautiful-Thing-About-Me-Is-I’m-REALLY-Rich” fixation, replete with gauche, ostentatiously cheesy gold-plated fixtures and escalators, and the “Finest Polished Marble.” Never mind the (made in China) monogrammed shirts and pastel silk ties, redolent of arriviste exhibitionist 60’s Manhattan throwback 4-Color Glossy tabloid “Style and Elegance.” Forget the creepy, objectifying, lecherous “Nice Tits,” “Down on Your Knees” sash, bikini, big hair, and spike heels misogyny. Forget that everyone who dares dispute Him is “A Loser,” “Weak,” “Stupid,” “A Moron,” “Disgusting,” “3rd-Rate,” “A Stiff,” “A Dope,” “A Low-Life” — someone to perhaps be the target of the latest 500 million dollar empty Trump lawsuit threat du jour.

Let pass the patently phony “I’m a Strong Evangelical” whose “favorite book” is “da BIBLE!” Forget the low-intellect Moths-To-The-Flame Totem comprising that stupidass Mexican Wall proposal. Forget the equally phony “I Have Many, Many Great Friends Here in ______________.” Forget the blindingly obvious time-worn boiler room grift M.O. of “Trump University®,” “Trump Network®,” “Trump Baja Ocean Resort®,” and “Trump Institute®.” Put aside that in the net worth ranking of world billionaires he’s a rounding error (Update: I’ve coined the hashtag “#BiglyFakeBillionaire”).

Forget his eye-rollingly fatuous “only rich people should be allowed to play golf.”

Forget that “maybe protestors should get roughed up.” “Maybe I’ll pay the [attackers’] legal expenses.”

Forget that “women must be punished” (well, uh, maybe not, at least until after Wisconsin).

Put aside all of that, along with the the rest of the maudlin, panoramic accruing expanse of its kindred lowbrow, cognitive-pollution Time Share Closer bullshit (see, btw, Harry Frankfurt’s instructive book “On Bullshit”).

Focus on, remember, and act against the truly important stuff.

Call them our Pre-Crimes Portents.

He’s dog-whistling war crimes. Without much subtlety, as is his style.

Our chronic domestic discord aside, in the face of a maddeningly complex, irredicibly dangerous, and all-too-requently corrupt world of international geopolitics comprised of ~7.4 billion contending people, Donald J. Trump proposes that we simply ignore or explicitly abrogate myriad inconvenient international obligations (akin to the way he has long viewed his multiple corporate bankruptcies as expedient “smart strategic defaults”); he would have us abandon NATO (an Inaugural Ball gift to Vladimir?). He would have us part company with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. He claims that 23% of humanity — Islam — “hates us” and should be banned from the U.S.

And — “wink, wink” — perhaps nuked.

Donald Trump would also apparently be OK with the Koreas and Japan all going nuclear. Were a war to break out, he simply says during a Rothschild, Wisconsin GOP primary rally “If it happens, it happens. Good luck. Enjoy yourselves.”...
_____

A PERSONAL NOTE:

Shortly after Donald Trump's 1st term Jan 20th inaugural my younger daughter Danielle was diagnosed with terminal Stage IV metastatic pancreatic cancer. Unreal. The ensuing 13 months until she succumbed were pure hell. The Trump clown car follies certainly did not help matters.

_____

FAST FORWARD TO JANUARY 2021

Lordy, did I ever get this wrong (below).

And, so here we are in mid-July 2026.

COUPLE MORE READS ON TRUMP

I'm up to close to 2 dozen books on The Donald by now.

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Friday, July 17, 2026

My enervating decade of The Donald

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