HFHS - Vaccine Mandate

Bob Riney, CEO, Henry Ford Health System
March 31, 2025

In the latest episode of The BOBcast, I'm joined by Nicole Sherard-Freeman — a powerhouse leader with deep roots in Detroit and a bold vision for the future. We talk about rebuilding trust, the power of collaboration, truly listening and much more. As she always does, Nicole brought intellect, heart and tons of real-world experience to the conversation. If you're interested in Detroit’s future — or what authentic leadership looks like — check out the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!

Spotify: shorturl.at/Lw09D 

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Tony Pivetta
April 13, 2025

Cool! No doubt that means you talked about "rebuilding trust, the power of collaboration, truly listening and much more" with those brave HFHS employees who lost their jobs because they did the research and decided the COVID-19 jabs were neither safe nor effective!

No doubt a formal apology, reinstatement, and back back are all in the works. "Authentic leadership" demands nothing less!

What's that? Oh.

Non-Targeted Babies

"A non-targeted baby that dies in an airstrike is a tragedy.

"A baby that dies at the hands of his captors by being beaten to death is a violation of human decency. "Both babies died. Both are innocent. Both deaths are tragic. But there is zero moral equivalence between the two realities. "Those who understand this are members of the human family. Those who don't, not so much."

~Gad Saad

Onward, Upward, and Foreword!

I stumble upon a vocabulary quiz in an online U.K. magazine. It consists of 15 commonly confused word pairs. You know, words like lie and lay, affect and effect, tortuous and torturous, horde and hoard, etc. The editors claim only 1.5 percent of the U.K. population get all 15 right.

Little do the editors know! Watch this working class hick from Westland, Mich., U.S.A. do his thing!

I scoff. I take the stupid test. I click on the submit button and smugly await confirmation of my excellence.

"CONGRATULATIONS!" comes the reply. "YOU SCORED 14/15! THE 92ND PERCENTILE!"

What?!

I scroll down to review my checked responses. Sure enough, a red "X" mars the sea of green check marks. It glares at me from the left margin next to the passage "Don't just delve into the book. Make sure you read the Forward/ Foreword."

Wait. The word is forward, isn't it? That's what you read before you proceed, i.e., move forward in the book, right? Right?! I swivel round my chair and pluck Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln off the bookshelf behind me. Sure enough, right there on page ix looms the late Prof. Walter Williams' . . . Foreword.

How many books have I read over the years? How many forewords to those books? How many times have I looked that first-page, front-and-centered, all-caps word square in the face and presumed to have read it?

Still I processed foreword "forward"?! The self-loathing runs thick on this one.

Purveyor of Pep

It's a bitterly cold February morning. I'm on southbound Woodward Avenue in Detroit, just north of Seven Mile Road, when I spy a figure on the side of the road holding a sign and pointing at Westbound Seven Mile traffic. He turns his body 60 degrees--Woodward intersects Seven Mile at an angle--to face northbound Woodward traffic, and then turns again, 120 degrees, to face eastbound Seven Mile traffic. 

The guy's not panhandling. He's just standing and pointing at incoming traffic. He wants people to read his sign. 

I'm about a hundred feet away when he turns to face my direction. He's a young black gentleman. Smiling broadly, he's all bundled up--wool cap, scarf, parka, boots, and mittens--and now he's pointing at me. I read his sign: "I SEE GREATNESS IN YOU!"

Maybe he had a few screws loose. I don't know. This much I can tell you: he made my life a little more beautiful that day. 

Everybody's Hitler!

Ayatollah Khomeini was Hitler. Noriega was Hitler. Milosevic was Hitler. Osama bin Laden was Hitler. Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Khadafy was Hitler. Putin is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler.

When everybody's Hitler, nobody's Hitler. Maybe not even Hitler.

"Justifying" Terrorism

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability . . . . Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

~IDF Maj. Gen. (ret) Yitzhak Brick, 12/3/2023

"Gee, why do they hate us?"

~Bewildered American, 9/11/2001

Everything's A Miracle!

 I come home from work one evening some years ago. It's a Monday in February, it's cold, the sky's gray and the trees are bare, and I've had a trying day at the office. As I put my key in the side door, I can see my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter waiting for me on the landing through the window.

It wasn't unusual for her to come to the door to greet me. On this day, though, she's really excited about something. She's jumping up and down in place! I open the door and she can't wait to tell me the news.

"Daddy! Daddy! Red bird! Fence! Fly away!"

She grabs me by the hand and escorts me to her bedroom window. There on the fence enclosing our humble backyard, in the middle of a dreary Michigan winter, a cardinal landed. Then it flew away.

Everything's a miracle. Sometimes you just have to look at the world through a child's eyes to remind yourself of it.