GeorgiaDon

It's just symbolic pissing in the wind. It won't have any effect unless it also passes in the House, and Johnson won't ever let it come up for a vote. I wonder if the House budget has a line item for knee pads for Republican members. They can sure use them.

That's fair. Also more sea turtles than I could have imagined. I feel quite privileged, as I get to teach a course there every year.

You can do that in the Galapagos, and the weather's a lot better than Antarctica. Probably cheaper too, although not inexpensive. I'll be back there in a couple of months.

For example, the color line that is terminating every female or non-white person from senior levels of command in the US military, and replacing them with white males. MAGA begs the question: when you say "make America great again", when exactly do you want to return to? When was America "great"? What year do you have in mind? 1950? 1925? 1850? It certainly seems that for a large number of MAGA devotees that was a time when women and minorities knew their place, which was far from any position of leadership. When even being able to vote was a bridge too far. When medicine consisted of leeching and cod liver oil, not vaccines or any science-based elitist crap. Maybe back when real leaders like Andrew Jackson (who Trump so admires) were willing to force the Cherokee off their land, to die on the Trail of Tears on their way to some God-forsaken patch of semi-desert in Oklahoma. Except of course when that land turned out to have a lot of oil, that had to get taken from them too. When, exactly, was America "great" in the eyes of MAGA? What is the destination? Because as you go back, and you don't have to go back far, it might look better for white males but it sucked for everyone else. That's what all this anti-DEI bullshit is about, a desire to return to the past when all those "other people" knew their proper place.

I'll be damned if I kneel before your color line.

Measles also has an even more important secondary effect. It's long been known that people who get measles have a highly significantly increased risk of dying from other infectious diseases for up to 5 years after the measles episode. A couple of years ago it was discovered that the measles virus kills or inhibits B-cells, the cells that produce antibodies, including memory B-cells, which are responsible for much of the immune memory you develop after vaccination or after exposure to infectious agents. The immune response is suppresses to a degree similar to HIV for about a year, and it takes up to 5 years to recover normal immune function. It is estimated that before widespread vaccination, measles was involved, directly or indirectly, in as much as 50% of childhood deaths from whooping cough, rubella, and other serious infections.

What's up next?? Ontario raises surcharge on electricity. Trump raises tariffs, and Ontario cuts off electricity. Trump declares national emergency and martial law, orders invasion of Canada to take control of electricity (hydro and nuclear) and just for good measure the Alberta tar sands in order to protect American national security. Also under guise of martial law, Trump suspends habeus corpus, freedom of the press, and all elections until further notice (in other words, never). Additionally, he declares the USA to be Christian-only, just for good measure. What do you all think? Insane conspiracy theory, or entirely possible?

Musk and Trump are "trimming waste and inefficiency in the government" in the same way that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease only ablates the parts of the brain you don't really need. I suspect the motivation really is to render most of the government (the parts that actually deliver services to the people) unable to function, in order to then abolish them altogether. It's not a coincidence that the people driving this destruction are either oligarchs who stand to profit off the wreckage, or Christian Nationalists (such as Russel Vought and Pete Hegseth) who see evangelical Christian churches taking over once secular government is out of the way.

Who gets to judge those things, though? Currently it is a crew of inexperienced 19-23 year old coders who might be able to write script but clearly have not a clue about anything else. Cuts are being made on the basis of what Elon Musk thinks is useful to himself. He is of course well known for his lack of ability to care about anyone except himself and his 10,000 offspring (or so I infer from his statements and behavior), so condemning a few million people to die of malaria, HIV, or starvation is a small price to pay if he gets his tax cuts and trip to be the king of Mars. When Congress creates programs and allocates money, the Executive Branch has no constitutional authority to kill or defund those programs. The Executive can lobby Congress to get rid of such programs, but to do so they would have to convince Congress to take responsibility. Unfortunately the current cult formerly known as the Republican Party is all too happy to let Musk, who doesn't have to worry about re-election, take the heat for killing programs and ruining many lives, at least until he goes after Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (which will begin any day now) and 2/3 of the people who vote R suddenly find themselves in line at the soup kitchen. I fear, though, that virtually every Republican congresscritter will discover that they have no idea where to look for their cojones after Trump and Musk cut them off and fed them to a drove of pigs.

Business is about making a profit for the owners or shareholders. Government is (or should be) about providing services that are not inherently profitable, such as protecting peoples rights and safety, regulating business to limit their tendency to maximize profit by screwing over people, supporting basic research that isn't profitable in the near term but eventually may lead to advances that can be picked up on by industry to develop products such as new drugs, and so on. It's infuriating (to say the least) to see the US government being taken over by grifters who clearly seek to personally profit, either by direct means or indirectly by eliminating the ability of government to prevent them from running roughshod over everybody else. "it's just the way it is" is just a slightly different way of saying "fuck anybody who I don't like".

And somehow that made him the best choice for president?

Hard to believe I’ve been coming here to Speaker’s Corner for 20 years for my daily dose of enlightenment and aggravation. It’s really been the best place to hear a diversity of opinions from real people, a diversity I can’t encounter at work or the drop zone where it would be inappropriate to talk about so many of the topics we can kick around here. I’ve learned something from all of you, and I’ll really miss getting perspective from you even if sometimes it makes me gnash my teeth. So I’d like to wish all of you fair winds and following seas. Don

I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence that they chose a young white woman as their fake victim.