Mission for our next president: institute the damnatio memoriae

In yet another pointless sop to his ego, the president has renamed the Institute of Peace after himself.

The Trump administration has renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after President Donald Trump and has planted the president’s name on the organization’s headquarters despite an ongoing fight over the institute’s control.

It’s the latest twist in a seesaw court battle over who controls the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on peace initiatives. It was an early target of the Department of Government Efficiency this year.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it renamed the organization to the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.” The new name could be seen on its building, which is near the State Department.

This is the first I’ve heard of the US Institute of Peace — apparently it was founded by Reagan, has floundered ineffectively for decades, and was recently gutted by DOGE, so I can’t be too wound up about this renaming. It’s still yet another transparent ploy by Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and I’m disgusted by the game he’s playing.

Our next president had better be motivated to expunge the Trump name from every building and every document, unless it is to damn him to hell. Our national shame is being advertised everywhere, and I hate it.

You mean Legally Blonde was not a documentary?

I wish I could say that I hope Trump is learning something, but I doubt that he is. It seems that appointing attractive young women to high positions in his legal team has drawbacks — not that he should discriminate against young women, but that being blonde is not sufficient qualification before the law.

So the Trump administration’s cases against Letitia James and James Comey have been thrown out, on the basis that the lead prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan was not qualified, and that she was illegally appointed. She was sternly rebuked by the judge, which must have been embarrassing for her.

Then a panel of judges disqualified Alina Habba straight out of her job as the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Trump hadn’t bothered to get congressional approval for her appointment, as part of his ongoing campaign to become the authoritarian emperor who doesn’t need laws, legislatures, or courts.

Their qualifications seem to have been being attractive enough to catch the king’s eye, and then being slavishly sycophantic. Please, can Pam Bondi be next in line for public disgrace?

Again, this isn’t about their looks, although Trump definitely has a type — it’s about letting their appearance override their lack of competence.

Sorry, I’m going to be pessimistic again

Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?

How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?

After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.

Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?

ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.

Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.

We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.

“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”

The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.

But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.

“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.

There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.

Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”

That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.

We are so screwed in so many ways.

Somebody got paid

The US government hates drug dealers so much that they’re willing to blow up fishing boats to kill them extrajudicially — boats that might contain only fishermen, but because some are “narcoboats,” the Secretary of War believes he is authorized to “kill everybody”.

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Some current and former US officials and experts have said, according to the Post, that the Trump administration’s missile strikes in the Caribbean may be unlawful. To date, more than 80 people have been killed in the series of military strikes, targeting at least 22 more boats.

No wonder our president thinks telling our military to not follow unlawful orders is sedition — he’s eager to commit murder under the excuse that he opposes drug trafficking. Curiously, though, while he’s slaughtering low-level possible narcotics dealers without evidence that they actually are criminals, he’s showing mercy to rich, convicted kingpins of the drug trade who made millions of dollars shipping cocaine into the US.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

What’s the difference between a poor South American guy working on a small boat in the ocean and a rich Central American who probably has many millions of dollars salted away in shady banks? I don’t think it’s geography. I suspect someone got an awful lot of money to whisper in a senile president’s ear. Said president might have also wet his beak in the bribe.

Hey, does anyone else think this whole business of presidents being able to circumvent the law and nullify the decisions of the courts to reek of royal privilege?

The most cutting burn ever

Also, the worst case of getting old ever. Dorothy Fuldheim was a well-respected and cutting edge newscaster from Cleveland from the 1930s until her death in 1984. She made the mistake of going on the Johnny Carson show in 1979, with Richard Pryor…and you can guess how that went. It was a classic example of clueless white person who doesn’t believe poverty is real meeting a black person who actually knows what the real world is like.

Suddenly, it’s clear how Ronald Reagan got elected.

Thankful for…

I think Tom Tomorrow is being sarcastic here.

I tried to think of what we, the resistance, could be sincerely grateful for, and one happy phenomenon is that MAGA seems to be weakening. They’re going through a fair bit of civil strife, Trump is becoming so incoherent that even some of his fans are noticing, I am hoping that he will die of natural causes sometime soon. See, that’s something to be optimistic about.

They couldn’t find Americans gullible enough?

Aren’t all “influencers” phony to some degree?

Strange news: analyzing the top MAGA users on Twitter reveals that many of them are not American.

The account MAGANationX, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”, is actually operated from eastern Europe, according to the Daily Beast. Another popular profile, IvankaNews, an Ivanka Trump fan account with around one million followers that frequently posts about illegal immigration, Islam and support for Trump, was revealed to be based in Nigeria.

Another user also uncovered several additional cases. Dark Maga, a smaller account with roughly 15,000 followers, is run from Thailand. MAGA Scope, which has more than 51,000 followers, operates out of Nigeria, while MAGA Beacon is based in south Asia.

Users on Reddit also joined the exposé effort, posting examples of accounts that appeared to misrepresent their origins. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of a woman who claimed to live in Texas but instead appeared to be located in Russia, though as of Sunday, the user named in the post appears to have a US location. Many in the comments posted other examples they found.

Bots spreading misinformation and propaganda has been a long-running problem on Twitter, a problem that has been significantly exacerbated since Musk bought it in October 2022 and then renamed it X. Its AI chatbot, Grok, has also been found to frequently make and amplify false claims.

You have to wonder what the incentives are for these influencers. Is it just the account/advertising revenue? Are they subidized by foreign governments, or by American billionaires? Or perhaps they’re just patriotic Eastern Europeans or Nigerians or SE Asians who hate America?

It does say something that these popular MAGA jerks, who have managed to fool a great many Americans, aren’t actually interested in making America great.

Republicans must hate nurses

We have preprofessional programs here at UMM, which, if we gave a good goddamn about the opinions ot the Trump administration, we’d have to revise, because they’ve deleted one of our popular majors from the category.

Nursing has been excluded as a “professional degree” by the Trump administration as the Department of Education prepares to make massive cuts to providing student loans.

That’s a surprising absence. If you go to the doctor, you’re most likely first going to encounter a nurse. Nurses get all the grunt work in health care, and are an indispensable part of the medical system, yet somehow the Trump Department of Education (I thought he was going to get rid of that?) has decided it’s less worthy, and is reducing nursing students’ eligibility for loans. Maybe this is a first step in making nursing training free? Somehow I doubt that.

Even worse, they have designated certain other fields of study as “professional” and worthy of encouragement. Notice anything peculiar in this list?

  • Medicine
  • Pharmacy
  • Dentistry
  • Optometry
  • Law
  • Veterinary medicine
  • Osteopathic medicine
  • Podiatry
  • Chiropractic
  • Theology
  • Clinical psychology

I will admit that after the destruction wrought by RFK’s Health and Human Services, many people might feel a need to call on a priest.

MTG jumping ship

Oh, get stuffed with your ludicrous “free speech” whining.

I’ve been on a news fast the last few days — it’s a tool for maintaining my sanity — and I totally missed this unexpected news:

Greene abruptly resigned from Congress, effective 5 January, in a 10-minute video post outlining her unhappiness with Republicans on issues including the public release of the Jeffrey Epstein files in the government’s possession, US financing of foreign conflicts, Trump’s decision to potentially back a candidate against her, and the cost of living and healthcare.

Well, good riddance. Of course she also spoiled her exit by comparing herself to a “battered wife,” which was wildly inappropriated — she’s getting rich off her connections, is featured on the national news all the time, and has more power to influence public policy than most of us. I’m not buying it. At least Ocasio-Cortez sees right through her.

“She’s carefully timing her departure just 1-2 days after her pension kicks in,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement on her Instagram account, and criticized her voting record on healthcare.
¬
But Ocasio-Cortez said Greene “is saying a lot but her ACTIONS have not backed up the rhetoric. For all her talk, she’s STILL voting with them to gut healthcare … ”

Greene voted in the summer for cuts to Medicaid and the reduction of enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but then in October criticized the ACA cuts as premiums soared.

She’ll be back, unfortunately. She loves the spotlight too much.

The most suspicious creeps among us

They even dress the part of criminal thugs

The police just busted a sex trafficking ring in Bloomington, Minnesota — a dozen men were caught in the act of trying to coerce sex out of a minor. Among the arrested was a revelation: who would be the person most aware of vulnerable individuals? Who is normally protected by the police and is able to freely extort and threaten people? Who would really be a great benefit to a criminal organization, who was used to trampling on the rights of people? You guessed it.

One of the men, he said, is an employee for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who could face federal charges. Hodges said the ICE employee works as an auditor.

“When he was arrested, he said, ‘I’m ICE, boys,'” Hodges said during a press conference Tuesday. “Well, unfortunately for him, we locked him up.”

It is amusing that he thought announcing that he was ICE was a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I had my way we’d just automatically arrest every ICE officer and strip them of their position.