The National Institutes of Health is a hugely successful organization behind modern biomedical research in the USA — among their many goals was establishing policy for dealing with infectious disease, as well as funding research in vaccines.

You already know what the know-nothings and anti-intellectuals of the MAGA movement think of the NIH. They’ve been opposing rational responses to the pandemic for years now, and one of the big names in the anti-NIH, anti-Fauci, anti-masking, anti-vaccine mob was Jay Bhattacharya. So guess what’s going to happen?

Bhattacharya, who holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. While that might have stymied his candidacy in prior administrations, Kennedy and his allies view his inexperience as a positive, saying they are seeking reformers willing to battle the bureaucracy.

Inexperience is a positive with these people.

Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years. We already know that Kennedy wants to starve infectious disease research, and with a MAGA ideologue running the NIH…people are going to die that wouldn’t need to.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this — NPR has always been a news source for comfortable liberals who want soft voices and current events delivered gently, without any trace of alarm. They’ve got tote bags to give away and coffee table books to sell! They’ve responded to the incoming wave of ignorance with a puff-piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that doesn’t use the word “unqualified” even once.

Trump has threatened to appoint RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He doesn’t have any expertise in public health, medicine, or science, but he has a slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” and that’s good enough.

Another word NPR doesn’t use is “conspiracy theorist.” They acknowledge that he has a few wacky ideas, but hey, he wants to stop the chronic disease epidemic in the USA, isn’t that a good thing?

Kennedy’s baseless claims have included that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain”; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender; and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. He’s also long said that vaccines cause autism and fail to protect people from diseases.

NPR never questions whether Kennedy’s policies would actually work, or for that matter, what his policies are. We’ve got a real health problem — obesity, diabetes, narcotics, etc. — but they don’t address his solutions, if any. What he has done is tap into MAGA paranoia.

He knit together an unlikely coalition — some from the left and some MAGA supporters — eager to take on the establishment.

“Bobby Kennedy and Trump have bonded over tying the core of MAGA — which is a distrust of institutions and getting corruption out of institutions — to our health care industries,” says Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy and the Trump transition team, who spoke with NPR before Kennedy’s nomination.

What corruption? Be specific. The corruption I see is that there are an awful lot of quacks getting rich writing pop-sci diet books, and pharma MBAs leading their companies to immense profits at the cost of every day Americans’ health. You’re not going to fix that by hounding doctors and scientists and imposing bogus health treatments on the public.

By the way, Calley Means is a Harvard MBA with connections to the Heritage Foundation but no medical background who wrote pop-sci book about nutrition. I imagine that RFK Jr has the “wrote a book about dieting” demographic solidly locked up.

Means — himself a former lobbyist for the food and drug industry — has emerged as one of the leading voices in the MAHA orbit. He and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, catapulted into the political sphere after publishing a bestseller on metabolic health. Both have business ventures in the health and wellness industry.

But have no fear! Means and RFK Jr have a simple plan to fix everything.

Means says a key to their plan is eliminating conflicts of interest.

See above reference to Means’ own interests.

When the article does cite critics of RFK Jr, it’s always with qualifications and padding, and never goes into much depth.

“There are some things that RFK Jr. gets right,” says former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden. “We do have a chronic disease crisis in this country, but we need to avoid simplistic solutions and stick with the science.”

Great — we have a “chronic disease crisis,” but what’s the solution? It never says. Is it “drink raw milk” (Kennedy has endorsed that)? Is it “end all vaccinations” (he thinks they cause autism, and change children’s gender identity)? Is it “tear down cell phone towers” (he thinks 5G is used for mind control)? Is it “take anti-depressants off the market” (he claims they cause mass shootings)? Is it “replace COVID vaccines with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine” (he thinks those are effective)? Or maybe it would help to insert more racism in science policy.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

Reading NPR’s article, you might come away with the impression that Kennedy is a grounded, qualified person trying to fix a real problem in how we let pharmaceutical companies run rampant — which I think is a genuine issue that resonates with the public — but it completely neglects to point out that Kennedy is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who will make everything worse. But that’s NPR for you.

If you’d like a more accurate perspective on the consequences of Kennedy running the bioscientific and medical establishment, read Science magazine.

Public health researchers are alarmed, especially given Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines. “I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told CNN.

Numerous critics of Kennedy have weighed in with concerns. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine expert Paul Offit told CNN Kennedy is a “science denialist.” Even Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during Trump’s presidency, said at a meeting this week that if Kennedy discourages people from getting vaccines, “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health,” economy, and security.

“We’re all in a state of panic,” this person added. “The damage that he can do is enormous. I don’t know anybody who isn’t worried about this.”

But then, Science isn’t in the business of spooning comforting pablum into the mouths of the well-off.

I see a tiny bit of hope for the future. Donald Trump is making all kinds of wild appointments right now, giving us a peek at the United States government for the next four years.

• Tulsi Gabbard, director of intelligence
• Matt Gaetz, attorney general
• Pete Hegseth, defense secretary
• No one, Department of Education (it will be dissolved)
• RFK Jr, health secretary
• Ramaswamy & Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”, ha ha, Musk’s adolescence never ended)

It’s an odd thing in which to find solace, but it’s obvious that Trump is packing the highest levels of government with the worst, most incompetent, most inappropriate people he can find. There is a method to this madness. His purposes are 1) to spite the people who opposed him with appointments that will enrage his critics, 2) to reward the loons who supported him, and 3) to support the long-held Republican dream of dissolving government altogether. It’s a policy of chaos and destruction.

The saving grace is that Trump is not Lawful Evil. He isn’t making a well-planned, disciplined assault on our government with a cunning long-term goal. He’s Chaotic Evil. He’s in this for vengeance, wanton destruction, and self-aggrandizement, and he’s not subtle about it. And he’s not building a legacy that will last.

He’s following his hero’s, Hitler’s, pattern. Hitler was also a wild card who lashed out with the resources of a strong nation to achieve striking initial successes, which were then undermined by his own ego and incompetence (invading Russia? That’s insane). In the final analysis he left Germany a smoking ruin, shattered and divided, with about 80 million dead. That’s what the USA has to look forward to, I fear.

You may wonder what’s hopeful about that. Consider the alternative: what if Hitler had been a careful, disciplined genius, who succeeded in establishing the Thousand Year Reich? That would have been far worse. No one is going to regard Trump as a genius.

OK, here’s an even more optimistic take. The USA is about to embark on a 4 year long bender, we’re going to leave a swathe of destruction behind us, and eventually end up broke, stinking, and puking in a ditch, and we’re not going to be funny-drunk, we’re going to be bitter-angry-drunk. Sorry, world.

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If you’re not convinced yet, he wants to put Herschel Walker in charge of an imaginary missile defense shield. Madness.

A liberal feminist, Marla Rose, knocked on Nick Fuentes’ door. He reacted by immediately pepper-spraying her, knocking her down, and and stealing her phone. All she did was knock!

In a Facebook post, Rose elaborated on her motivations, citing Fuentes’ controversial reputation. “What would you do if a neo-Naz*, white supremacist who called on a holy war against J*ws and is a loud, proud misogynist lives in your town?” she wrote. Encouraged by a friend, Rose explained, “So I rang the doorbell, he immediately swung the door open like he was at damn Waco, sprayed me with a burning liquid…and pushed me down the stairs onto his sidewalk.”

Rose noted that a passerby called the police, after which EMTs checked her for injuries. “The nice EMTs took my vitals in the ambulance,” she added, sharing, “I am a little sore on my right side, where I fell, but I’m fine.” She also described the police response as dismissive, allegedly asking, “‘For what?’ I said, dumbfounded, ‘For ASSAULT.’ And he was like, ‘Well, you went to his door.’”

Public reactions have been polarized. While some supporters see Rose’s actions as justified given Fuentes’ past incitements on social media, critics argue that her approach and alleged doxxing crossed legal and ethical boundaries. Some have called for legal repercussions against Rose.

That’s exactly what I’d expect of the police.

I’m interested in these “legal repercussions.” Would they apply if a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness knocked on my door, too? The next little kid going door-to-door selling girl scout cookies better watch out, I’ve got the Nick Fuentes precedent saying I can beat her up and steal a box, and if she complains, I’ll have her arrested.

You can tell, though, that Nick Fuentes is terrified. All the fascists must know that the actions they take while in power will have…repercussions.

A common sense act has been introduced in congress, HR 926, asking for basic ethical requirements for the Supreme Court. It sounds like something that ought to be in place.

This bill makes various changes related to the ethical standards, financial disclosure requirements, and recusal requirements that apply to Supreme Court Justices.

Among the changes, the bill requires the Supreme Court to:

adopt a code of conduct for Justices and establish procedures to receive and investigate complaints of judicial misconduct;

adopt rules governing the disclosure of gifts, travel, and income received by the Justices and law clerks that are at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules; and

establish procedural rules requiring each party or amicus to disclose any gift, income, or reimbursement provided to Justices.

Additionally, the bill expands the circumstances under which a Justice or judge must be disqualified; and

requires the Supreme Court and the Judicial Conference to establish procedural rules for prohibiting the filing of or striking an amicus brief that would result in the disqualification of a Justice, judge, or magistrate judge.

That’s excellent, and there’s a push to get everyone to call up your state representative to support this bill.

I agree with the bill, BUT…

I have no hope.

The fascists take over the government in January, and they’ll kill this bill. They already have. It was introduced in February of 2023, and it’s gone nowhere. Are we supposed to expect a miracle in the next two months?

I have another problem. If you actually go to the site promoted in that image, the first thing you will see is a plea for donations. It’s all about money. They also ask for your phone number, which I’ll never give out again. I made a donation to the Harris campaign months ago, and they passed my number to other organizations, so I was getting dozens of text messages every goddamned day. They all had a stop code you could send to end the noise, but I discovered that they honored it in name only. The organization I requested to stop would stop, but then they’d pass my number to a different, related organization, and the texts would continue. “Retired Democrats 2024”? “Blue Battleground Project”? “GenBlue PAC”? I didn’t sign up for any of those, and somehow they got my number. I don’t trust Democratic fundraisers.

Maybe we should start by demanding an ethical standard for all political organizations?

I know this is a mixed message. I think putting an ethical standard on the Supreme Court is important, but the Democrats are proving themselves venal and ineffectual.

The rich have a well-funded network that has been poisoning the collective mind of the country, yet somehow they have failed to penetrate my soft, permeable, liberal skull. How could that be?

There it is, they targeted “gaming, sports, fitness” thereby completely bypassing all of my interests.

Another point not mentioned: have you ever noticed that the biggest, most popular YouTube channels are typically targeted at…children? Mr Beast, PewDiePie, Logan Paul, etc. Then there are lesser channels with a teenaged audience, like Fresh and Fit or Andrew Tate. I’ve skipped over those by getting old. I’m so lucky.

There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports.

The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.
…
While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.

The people and organizations behind these flights have been playing dumb for years — they don’t want to talk about them. They drive busses loaded with people right up to the boarding stairs for these planes; they position jailers and vehicles to obscure any view of the people being herded into the planes. They don’t want us to know about them.

The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”

Yes, we know they are, thanks to dedicated defenders of civil liberties who try to monitor these flights.

The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air’s network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington’s congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.

Those dang liberals in Western Washington state began shutting off support to these flights, and ICE began getting even more secretive about them.

A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.

First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.

But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.

Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.

Wait a minute…if these flights are perfectly legal, why is ICE trying to hide them?

I repeat: WHY ANY SECRECY AT ALL?

And why does ICE only release strongly edited, even blurred, images of detainees on flights? It’s almost as if they think we might see some brutality.

The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.

It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

What ICE’s online videos don’t show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.

You will not be surprised that ICE has not bothered to place those guards, thanks to the diligent work of outside observers, documenting everything despite the best efforts of ICE to conceal them.

The flights continue. They will increase in numbers, if Republicans get their way.

But, you say, I am a native born American. I’m not at risk of deportation. Consider this: “A relatively overlooked set of companies whose shares have also seen stellar surges are the controversial American private prison firms. “

The immediate reading of the prison stock rally is that the Republicans have positioned themselves as ‘tough on crime’ – though former President Bill Clinton did much to bring the Democratic party to the game as well – meaning that the number of incarcerated persons under the Trump administration is likely to increase.

There are already about 1.9 million people in American prisons – about 0.5% of the U.S. population, estimated at 345 million in 2024 – per the data from the Prison Policy Initiative.

It is worth pointing out that the figure is comparable to incarceration rates in the USSR at the height of the infamous GULAG System. Adam Gopnik even wrote in 2012 that the U.S. has more people under ‘correctional supervision’ than the Soviet Union ever did.

(By the way, screw Bill Clinton, too.)

I think a clear sign of an expanding fascist state is the police hiding their activities, as well as an eager industry looking forward to building even more prisons.

I lived for 8 years under President Ronald Reagan, a shallow, stupid, evil man who wrecked the economy and laughed as gay men, and others, died of AIDS, who made deals with our enemies to get elected, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

I lived for 8 years under President George W. Bush, a bumbling incompetent, a spoiled scion of Texan wealth, a man who got us into a wasteful, pointless war with the wrong country and killed over half a million people, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

Then I lived for 4 years under President Donald Trump, a narcissistic grifter, a rapist, a racist, a convicted felon, a misogynist, a man who promised to deport 20 million people, a demagogue who threatened vengeance on Americans who opposed him, a senile monster, and we re-elected him.

I am now wise enough to finally say, “It will get much, much worse.” We have the president the American people deserve.

My deepest apologies to the millions who will suffer and die in the near future.

I went to the polls as soon as they opened. Here in small town America, voting is painless — no lines, no problems, just instant service and quick gratification.

However, it did feel a bit grim and unsatisfying. I felt like I’d been sent out to stop a raging, drug-addled hippopotamus with a hatpin, and my vote was just the tiniest little pinprick. I’ll feel better about it if everyone gets out there with their individually ineffectual hatpin and stabs the beast to the heart. We can do it!

The news is hideous and diseased — every new poll inspires a frenzy of speculation, and gets promoted heavily on the networks, depending on whether the results meet their biases or not. Unfortunately, that provides an incentive to the Poll Industry to do more polls and to found more polling companies, further undermining their credibility. The latest flurry of rabid prognostication was triggered by a poll that suggested Iowans might favor Harris.

I honestly don’t give a fuck. I have come to despise both polls and the media’s reliance on them to generate “news”.

I am pleased to see that Bob agrees with me.

P.S. Especially Nate Silver, you can just fuck off to the moon.