Nothing to see here

As we slip quietly into 2026, it’s reassuring that the new year is shaping up to be as calm, orderly, and pleasingly uneventful as 2025. 

The papers report that nothing strange is happening. Institutions of American democracy are functioning smoothly and normally. There is no state violence within our borders—only peaceful coexistence. Everyone agrees on basic facts. And public communications from elected officials and social-media commentators alike are rigorously—almost devotionally—tethered to reality, couched in acknowledgements of complexity and nuance, and suffused with loving-kindness.

So far, so good. Kudos and shoulder pats all ‘round. If so inclined, you may hug. 

Which brings me—more or less inevitably—to the name of this refreshed newsletter, now incorporating work begun at the Berkshire Argus. RGM stands for “Reason Gone Mad,” the title I chose twenty-odd years ago for a twice-weekly column for The Berkshire Eagle that was also published on my early, newfangled website. The phrase traces to “Humor is reason gone mad,” long attributed to Groucho Marx and now repeated far and wide.

But as with so many things confidently asserted on the internet, this attribution is almost certainly wrong—just as Gandhi, much to my surprise, never actually said, “A smile don’t cost nothing, sugar.” I know, right?

The word dispatch, of course, has several meanings: a brief report or communication; the act of sending off; to kill with quick efficiency. And, in a long-since-forgotten usage, it can also mean “a smile don’t cost nothing, sugar.”

To me, Reason Gone Mad is an active—and uncomfortably accurate—description of the present moment, one whose starting point you’re free to choose for yourself. And for our purposes, a dispatch is a report sent quickly from where things are happening: field notes, observations, and arguments that may be serious or less so.

None of this represents a turn away from reporting, rigor, or facts. It is, instead, an acknowledgment that amid unfolding, accelerating madness, a straight face has become increasingly difficult to maintain—especially given how many absurdities are now delivered with one, even without help from Botox. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

Anyway, that’s the name. Onward, sugar.

∎ The B.H.S. Data Breach, Revisited ∎

Large institutions, in particular, need scrutiny

As I reported last summer, Berkshire Health Systems told federal regulators in July that approximately one thousand of its patients had been affected by improper access to patient records by what it described as a “rogue employee.” Information exposed included full names, dates of birth, account numbers, diagnosis codes, and visit notes, but not Social Security numbers or financial information, B.H.S. said.

The company’s more recent filings with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that number has now climbed to 1,421 patients—an increase of forty per cent since July. B.H.S. also updated Connecticut regulators, where initial disclosures listed sixteen residents affected; that figure has since more than doubled to thirty-four, according to the Connecticut Attorney General’s office.

That growth was not entirely unexpected. In its earlier filing, B.H.S. told regulators that its investigation was ongoing and that it anticipated identifying additional affected patients as its review continued. Still, the updated figures underscore how incomplete the picture was when the first group of patients were notified in August—and how much still remains unclear.

Those patients, meanwhile, have been told very little and continue to piece things together on their own. On condition of anonymity, some shared their breach-notification letters with me (I’d welcome more examples). At least one letter lists multiple B.H.S.-affiliated locations as sites of improper access—then says there was only a single instance on a single day.

How one event occurs in several places simultaneously is left unexplained, leaving patients to assume clerical error, a flawed review process, or perhaps striking evidence of quantum nonlocality—physics’ shorthand for something that appears to happen in more than one place at the same moment.

This week I sent detailed questions to B.H.S. spokesperson Michael Leary seeking clarification on the revised patient counts, the status of its investigation, notification letter inconsistencies, and whether any additional employees were involved. Leary did not respond to multiple emails or a phone message.

One point worth revisiting is how B.H.S. framed the scope of its investigation. In communications with federal regulators, the three-thousand-employee health system described itself as “a small nonprofit health system in rural Berkshire County” and said it was limiting how far back it would review patient-access records on that basis. While acknowledging that improper access may have begun as early as 2014, B.H.S. said it would look back only three years, to October 2022, citing the constraints of its data archive and a small compliance staff.

That framing may have been technically convenient, and a means to reduce what could be a much larger universe of affected patients, but it sits uneasily beside information from B.H.S.’s own audited financial statements submitted to the state. In fiscal year 2024, B.H.S. reported approximately $883 million in total revenue and $107 million in net cash from operations—hardly the financial profile of a small corner clinic or resource-constrained rural provider.

Instead, B.H.S. is a vertically integrated healthcare system that serves an entire county: it’s the largest employer in Berkshire County, operator of all three county hospitals, and owns many of the region’s medical practices. By design, it functions as the backbone of healthcare a significant portion of the county’s 129,000 residents. Nearly everyone here relies on it—including me.

That centrality is both a strength and a vulnerability. The issues described here involve administrative systems and compliance, not the day-to-day medical care delivered by B.H.S. clinicians, many of whom are beloved in the communities they serve. But should B.H.S. seriously falter—financially, operationally, or ethically—the consequences would be profound for those providers and patients alike. Elsewhere in Massachusetts, the collapse of Steward Health Care showed how the failure of a community’s dominant healthcare system can jeopardize access to care, disrupt entire communities, and force emergency government intervention.

That tension between indispensability and accountability is precisely why scrutiny of B.H.S.—something that has never been a priority of a local news ecosystem more comfortable chronicling large and powerful institutions than interrogating them—matters. When an institution is this large, this central, and this insulated from competition, even routine failures—like an ongoing data breach that allegedly went unnoticed for more than a decade, with little public explanation of privacy-auditing failures—deserve more daylight and examination.

∎ NOTED ∎

We interrupt this newsletter...

Whatever You Say, Buddy
I’ve been eating a plant-based diet for nearly thirty years. But after reading that Dr. (of law, not medicine) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, urged Americans to make meat and full-fat dairy central pillars of their diet, immediate action was required. Moving swiftly, I decamped to an upscale New York City steakhouse where I have now been in residence for several days, attempting to make up for decades of misguided restraint.

Right now my breath smells of au jus and I can feel my coronary arteries narrowing in real time, and yet—taking my cue from the administration’s approach to science and White House décor alike—I know the new diet advice must be “gold standard.” (To their credit, federal health officials wisely continue to caution against added sugar and ultra-processed foods.) I will keep readers—and my cardiologist, now at the ready via speed dial—posted.

Slow and Steady
The internal, eyes-only, wall-sized, eighty-four-inch R.G.M. Freedom of Information Act Tracking Monitor currently displays a couple dozen regional, state, and federal public-records requests that are in process. Or, in some cases, already in transit between government file cabinets and a future edition of the newsletter you’re holding in your electron-stained hands.

But for some of them, particularly at the federal level, I’m not holding my prime-rib-tainted breath: a FOIA officer at one Cabinet-level agency told me this week that, following significant FOIA staff reductions last year, newly submitted requests to that agency were unlikely to be processed for a very, very, very long time. Transparency of various sorts may be written into law, but as in other areas of American life, we’ve learned over the past year that’s no longer a guarantee.

A Small Victory
Elsewhere in Massachusetts, the independent journalist Andrew Quemere, whose dogged reporting on police misconduct relies heavily on public records, won a battle in his effort to compel Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan, who is responsible for Franklin and Hampshire counties, to release the names and case numbers of police officers “charged with crimes like possession of child pornography, assault and battery, and driving under the influence,” according to an update on Quemere’s website.

The ruling is the latest development in Quemere’s three-year odyssey through the state’s public-records system, which offers oversight without enforcement: the Supervisor of Records, housed in the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office, lacks authority to compel compliance with its orders. Satisfaction, such as it is, can require litigation at one’s own expense to force release of documents that legally must be disclosed. In this case, a judge also awarded Quemere attorney’s fees—another small victory, achieved the hard way.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
Just as millions of Americans began paying markedly higher health-insurance premiums this week, President Donald Trump announced that taxpayers must prepare to spend more—much more—on the military. He proposed a fifty per cent increase in annual defense spending, from an already eye-popping one trillion dollars this year to a nearly unfathomable one and a half trillion dollars in the next fiscal year. The justification, he said, is “very troubled and dangerous times.” In one interview, the president referred to “some real threats out there,” though without specifying what—or who—they might be.

I have not yet checked The Google, but odds are good that some familiar phrases are trending: arsonists running the fire department; the call is coming from inside the house; and that old chestnut, the self-licking ice-cream cone.

∎ The More Things Change... ∎

For residents of Housatonic, Massachusetts, it’s déjà vu all over again

Some local disputes are best understood not as brief controversies but as long-running serials, with new episodes airing every few years.

This week, the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities held a hearing related to Housatonic Water Works, the privately owned company that provides water to roughly eight hundred residents in northern Great Barrington. The company is seeking approval for loans to help fund a state-mandated filtration upgrade aimed at addressing elevated levels of manganese, a naturally occurring element that can discolor water—turning it shades of tan, yellow, or brown—particularly during the summer months.

The loans would supplement state grants and accompany sharply higher water rates, which the D.P.U. has already approved as part of the company’s plan to address longstanding water-quality issues.

As reported previously, the town’s Select Board has spent years exploring a possible purchase of the utility—an idea that has surfaced, receded, and resurfaced repeatedly for nearly a century. In the meantime, the company has delayed making improvements for years; it was also sanctioned in October 2024 for withholding problematic water-test results from regulators that showed manganese levels above healthy limits.

When rightly frustrated Housatonic residents say these problems have persisted for “years,” however, they may not realize the full extent of the timeline.

Nearly ninety years ago, in February 1937, the state’s public-utility commission convened a strikingly similar hearing on Housatonic Water Works. The issue then, too, was water quality—and the company’s proposal to install a filtration system to address decades of complaints about smell, taste, and color.

An engineer hired by the company attributed the longstanding troubles to organisms that “contain a potent oil which gives off an odor sometimes resembling the odor of a cucumber or pig pen,” along with harmless fungi that, he said, would turn the water “a rust color.”

Regulators, then as now, emphasized that the water was safe from the standpoint of bacterial contamination, even if it was frequently discolored and, frequently in the mid-nineteen-thirties, “[gave] off a disagreeable odor and taste” and could have “a very strong odor of fish.”

Frederick A. Pearson, the company’s vice president and general manager at the time, said he was prepared to proceed with improvements—provided residents, who had petitioned the state to force installation of filtration, were willing to pay. “Your insistence on this proposition involves your acceptance of increased water rates,” he told his long-suffering customers.

“Water Company Promises Supply ‘Second to None’ If Users Will Pay Cost,” read a headline in the daily Berkshire County Eagle. The paper noted, however, “the question of the company’s financial ability to make the improvements recommended”—which, it turns out, has aged painfully well. In July 2024, the D.P.U. approved a rate increase of ninety per cent over five years for H.W.W. customers, pairing it with deadlines—many soon missed—for bringing a new filtration plant on-line.

In what now reads as an unusual reversal of expectations—and a curious lobbying strategy before a nineteen-thirties regulatory board—Pearson credited the village’s sometimes murky, unfiltered water with the robust health of its children and the longevity of its residents. “I have many times thought to myself, ‘How much of this good health and vigor is due to the full-bodied richness of vitamins supplied with this water?’” he said. Filtration, he warned, would usher in a less nourishing era with unknown impacts on public health: “Henceforth,” he said, “you must bring up your children on the silver-clear, devitalized pap of modern civilization.”

(Good news: The domain name devitalizedpap.com is, somehow, still available for registration.)

To Pearson—whose down-is-up view of the health benefits of murky water carries a faintly familiar, raw-milk-adjacent logic—this was not cause for celebration. “The future,” he said, incorrectly, “will see the last of complaint about Long Pond water. I cannot repress a feeling of sadness over this event!”

∎ FROM THE RGM ARCHIVES ∎

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of an unfortunately still timely Reason Gone Mad column, “Down the Slippery Slope,” which examined signs that the country had become a rogue nation. It’s available at the Internet Archive.

∎ AND FINALLY... ∎

A small request from the RGM Tech Department: Please reply to this email. I’m told it will, this one time, help the gnomes who run the internet understand that this newsletter, sent from a new e-mail address and reactivated web domain, is not spam—technically, at least, as opinions may vary.

Feel free to use your reply to suggest topics for investigation, pass along news tips, recipes, a favorite expletive, or just to offer a hearty thank you to the gnomes for their tireless work keeping swindles, scams, and viruses out of our inboxes.