#rfk jr will kill your kids

[rejectingrepublicans]

Why is RFK Jr’s skin always “medium rare”?

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

“As Kennedy pushed his anti-vaccination campaign — which Green has referred to as disinformation — the inoculation rate plummeted to 31% and the measles virus spread. Samoan leaders asked the Hawaii governor for help, so he went to their island with dozens of health care providers to help vaccinate as many people as possible. By this time, there were approximately 5,000 confirmed cases of measles, Green said, and the outbreak would lead to more than 80 deaths, most of them among children.

“This is no joke when you see pictures of a child with measles, when there are no hospitals around, when there are no ventilators to keep them alive,” said the Hawaii governor. “We witnessed a child literally dying in front of us, just moments as we came into the village. ... She was still warm when I put my hands on her face.”

[socialjusticeinamerica]

☠️

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Robert Kennedy, Jr. claiming "the man" is keeping the truth about vaccine dangers locked away.

Bobby. Come here.

Come. Here.

YOU'RE A FUCKING KENNEDY. YOU ARE THE MAN.

And like every anti-vaxxer, he's got fucking blood on his hands. The 2019 American Samoa measles outbreak was directly caused by his anti-vaxx work.

[solarbird]

For years now, I have been railing against the Republican Party as a literal – literal – Party of Plague. In these closing days of the campaign, they have quadrupled back down on this in ways that will kill millions of Americans.

Not “might.” Will.

Appointing RFK, Jr. as czar of public health and letting him “go wild” will kill millions. Again, not might: will. Not immediately, no, but over time. Trump himself is utterly refusing to promise he and his party won’t ban vaccines and said on Sunday that RFK Jr.’s pledge to eliminate fluoridation of water on day one “sounds OK to me.”

If they do this and make it stick, millions will die. And an outsized number of them will be children.

Courtesy McNadoMD on Mastodon, here are a few of the diseases mass vaccination eliminated from American life, and which banning vaccination will bring back, along with some of their symptoms and progression paths.Howdy folks! Friendly neighborhood ER doc here. Did you know that Trump’s folks want to take vaccines off of the market? That means you can’t get a shot even if you want one. Did you know that the tetanus shot is a vaccine? If you want your kids to be safe from lockjaw (caused by tetanus), you want vaccines to be available. You know what else is a vaccine? Rabies shots. If a rabid dog or bat bites your kid, do you want your kid to be able to be treated before they die of rabies?

Lockjaw and rabies:

Diphtheria:

Whooping cough:

Polio:

You get the idea, right?

These aren’t the only ones. These are just a few of those less often mentioned in these modern times, because people have forgot they exist.

When I say the Republican Party is a Party of Plague, when I say it is a goddamn death cult, I mean every single one of those words in every way you might think.

They are promising economic ruin and they are promising ethnic purges and now they are promising mass death of children.

All while killing pregnant people for their vile sense of domination, of course. Let us never forget that, since their families certainly won’t.

One of the things their apologists keep saying is that “Trump doesn’t mean it” and “Trump won’t do it,” and “That’s just Trump being Trump,” and they talk about “Trump derangement syndrome,” and say that we’re stupid for believing what their candidate fucking says he’ll do, and meanwhile, they get enraged about shit they completely make up about us and the candidates who are with us.

We react to things their candidates promise. They react to shit they make up wholesale about us. We are not the fucking same.

If only the political press would catch on to that fact.

The very last day of a campaign is a pretty lousy time to bring up another topic, even if it’s not really new. But this is, again, so murderously psychotic that I can’t not bring it back up.

Maybe you can bring it up, too, on this final day of this hellish and evil campaign, this Monday, November 4th, 2024.

Zero days remain.

It is Lastday.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

They were warned

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Truth is provisional! Sometimes, the things we understand to be true about the world change, and stuff we've "always done" has to change, too. There comes a day when the evidence against using radium suppositories is overwhelming, and then you really must dig that radium out of your colon and safely dispose of it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

So it's natural and right that in the world, there will be people who want to revisit the received wisdom and best practices for how we live our lives, regulate our economy, and organize our society. But not a license to simply throw out the systems we rely on. Sure, maybe they're outdated or unnecessary, but maybe not. That's where "Chesterton's Fence" comes in:

Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence

In other words, it's not enough to say, "This principle gets in the way of something I want to do, so let's throw it out because I'm pretty sure the inconvenience I'm experiencing is worse than the consequences of doing away with this principle." You need to have a theory of how you will prevent the harms the principle protects us from once you tear it down. That theory can be "the harms are imaginary" so it doesn't matter. Like, if you get rid of all the measures that defend us from hexes placed by evil witches, it's OK to say, "This is safe because evil witches aren't real and neither are hexes."

But you'd better be sure! After all, some preventative measures work so well that no living person has experienced the harms they guard us against. It's easy to mistake these for imaginary or exaggerated. Think of the antivaxers who are ideologically committed to a world in which human beings do not have a shared destiny, meaning that no one has a moral claim over the choices you make. Motivated reasoning lets those people rationalize their way into imagining that measles – a deadly and ferociously contagious disease that was a scourge for millennia until we all but extinguished it – was no big deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles:_A_Dangerous_Illness

There's nothing wrong with asking whether longstanding health measures need to be carried on, or whether they can be sunset. But antivaxers' sloppy, reckless reasoning about contagious disease is inexcusable. They were warned, repeatedly, about the mass death and widespread lifelong disability that would follow from their pursuit of an ideological commitment to living as though their decisions have no effect on others. They pressed ahead anyway, inventing ever-more fanciful reasons why health is a purely private matter, and why "public health" was either a myth or a Communist conspiracy:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes/brief-vinay-prasad-pick-me-campaign

When RFK Jr kills your kids with measles or permanently disables them with polio, he doesn't get to say "I was just inquiring as to the efficacy of a longstanding measure, as is right and proper." He was told why the vaccine fence was there, and he came up with objectively very stupid reasons why that didn't matter, and then he killed your kids. He was warned.

Fuck that guy.

Or take Bill Clinton. From 1933 until 1999, American banks were regulated under the Glass-Steagall Act, which "structurally separated" them. Under structural separation, a "retail bank" – the bank that holds your savings and mortgage and provides you with a checkbook – could not be "investment bank." That meant it couldn't own or invest in businesses that competed with the businesses its depositors and borrowers ran. It couldn't get into other lines of business, either, like insurance underwriting.

Glass-Steagall was a fence that stood between retail banks and the casino economy. It was there for a fucking great reason: the failure to structurally separate banks allowed them to act like casinos, inflating a giant market bubble that popped on Black Friday in October 1929, kicking off the Great Depression. Congress built the structural separation fence to keep banks from doing it again.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton agitated for getting rid of Glass-Steagall. He argued that new economic controls would allow the government to prevent another giant bubble and crash. This time, the banks would behave themselves. After all, hadn't they demonstrated their prudence for seven decades?

In fact, they hadn't. Every time banks figured out how to slip out of regulatory constraints they inflated another huge bubble, leading to another massive crash that made the rich obscenely richer and destroyed ordinary savers' lives. Clinton took office just as one of these finance-sector bombs – the S&L Crisis – was detonating. Clinton had no basis – apart from wishful thinking – to believe that deregulating banks would lead to anything but another gigantic crash.

But Clinton let his self interest – in presiding over a sugar-high economic expansion driven by deregulation – overrule his prudence (about the crash that would follow). Sure enough, in the last months of Clinton's presidency, the stock market imploded with the March 2000 dot-bomb. And because Congress learned nothing from the dot-com crash and declined to restore the Glass-Steagall fence, the crash led to another bubble, this time in subprime mortgages, and then, inevitably, we suffered the Great Financial Crisis.

Look: there's no virtue in having bank regulations for the sake of having them. It is conceptually possible for bank regulations to be useless or even harmful. There's nothing wrong with investigating whether the 70-year old Glass-Steagall Act was still needed in 1999. But Clinton was provided with a mountain of evidence about why Glass-Steagall was the only thing standing between Americans and economic chaos, including the evidence of the S&L Crisis, which was still underway when he took office, and he ignored all of them. If you lost everything – your home, your savings, your pension – in the dot-bomb or the Great Financial Crisis, Bill Clinton is to blame. He was warned. he ignored the warnings.

Fuck that guy.

No, seriously, fuck Bill Clinton. Deregulating banks wasn't Clinton's only passion. He also wanted to ban working cryptography. The cornerstone of Clinton's tech policy was the "Clipper Chip," a backdoored encryption chip that, by law, every technology was supposed to use. If Clipper had gone into effect, then cops, spooks, and anyone who could suborn, bribe, or trick a cop or a spook could break into any computer, server, mobile device, or embedded system in America.

When Clinton was told – over and over, in small, easy-to-understand words – that there was no way to make a security system that only worked when "bad guys" tried to break into it, but collapsed immediately if a "good guy" wanted to bypass it. We explained to him – oh, how we explained to him! – that working encryption would be all that stood between your pacemaker's firmware and a malicious update that killed you where you stood; all that stood between your antilock brakes' firmware and a malicious update that sent you careening off a cliff; all that stood between businesses and corporate espionage, all that stood between America and foreign state adversaries wanting to learn its secrets.

In response, Clinton said the same thing that all of his successors in the Crypto Wars have said: NERD HARDER! Just figure it out. Cops need to look at bad guys' phones, so you need to figure out how to make encryption that keeps teenagers safe from sextortionists, but melts away the second a cop tries to unlock a suspect's phone. Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister. When he was told that the laws of mathematics dictated that it was impossible to build selectively effective encryption of the sort he was demanding, he replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-end-end-encryption-ban-says-laws-mathematics-dont-apply-down

Fuck that guy. Fuck Bill Clinton. Fuck a succession of UK Prime Ministers who have repeatedly attempted to ban working encryption. Fuck 'em all. The stakes here are obscenely high. They have been warned, and all they say in response is "NERD HARDER!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

Now, of course, "crypto means cryptography," but the other crypto – cryptocurrency – deserves a look-in here. Cryptocurrency proponents advocate for a system of deregulated money creation, AKA "wildcat currencies." They say, variously, that central banks are no longer needed; or that we never needed central banks to regulate the money supply. Let's take away that fence. Why not? It's not fit for purpose today, and maybe it never was.

Why do we have central banks? The Fed – which is far from a perfect institution and could use substantial reform or even replacement – was created because the age of wildcat currencies was a nightmare. Wildcat currencies created wild economic swings, massive booms and even bigger busts. Wildcat currencies are the reason that abandoned haunted mansions feature so heavily in the American imagination: American towns and cities were dotted with giant mansions built by financiers who'd grown rich as bubbles expanded, then lost it all after the crash.

Prudent management of the money supply didn't end those booms and busts, but it substantially dampened them, ending the so-called "business cycle" that once terrorized Americans, destroying their towns and livelihoods and wiping out their savings.

It shouldn't surprise us that a new wildcat money sector, flogging "decentralized" cryptocurrencies (that they are nevertheless weirdly anxious to swap for your gross, boring old "fiat" money) has created a series of massive booms and busts, with insiders getting richer and richer, and retail investors losing everything.

If there was ever any doubt about whether wildcat currencies could be made safe by putting them on a blockchain, it is gone. Wildcat currencies are as dangerous today as they were in the 18th and 19th century – only moreso, since this new bad paper relies on the endless consumption of whole rainforests' worth of carbon, endangering not just our economy, but also the habitability of the planet Earth.

And nevertheless, the Trump administration is promising a new crypto golden age (or, ahem, a Gilded Age). And there are plenty of Democrats who continue to throw in with the rotten, corrupt crypto industry, which flushed billions into the 2024 election to bring Trump to office. The result is absolutely going to be more massive bubbles and life-destroying implosions. Fuck those guys. They were warned, and they did it anyway.

Speaking of the climate emergency: greetings from smoky Los Angeles! My city's on fire. This was not an unforeseeable disaster. Malibu is the most on-fire place in the world:

https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/

Since 1919, the region has been managed on the basis of "total fire suppression." This policy continued long after science showed that this creates "fire debt" in the form of accumulated fuel. The longer you go between fires, the hotter and more destructive those fires become, and the relationship is nonlinear. A 50-year fire isn't 250% more intense than a 20-year fire: it's 50,000% more intense.

Despite this, California has invested peanuts in regular controlled burns, which has created biennial uncontrolled burns – wildfires that cost thousands of times more than any controlled burn.

Speaking of underinvestment: PG&E has spent decades extracting dividends for its investors and bonuses for its execs, while engaging in near-total neglect of maintenance of its high-voltage transmission lines. Even with normal winds, these lines routinely fall down and start blazes.

But we don't have normal winds. The climate emergency has been steadily worsening for decades. LA is just the latest place to be on fire, or under water, or under ice, or baking in wet bulb temperatures. Last week in southern California, we were warned to expect gusts of 120mph.

They were warned. #ExxonKnew: in the early 1970s, Exxon's own scientists warned them that fossil fuel consumption would kick off climate change so drastic that it would endanger human civilzation. Exxon responded by burying the reports and investing in climate denial:

https://exxonknew.org/

They were warned! Warned about fire debt. Warned about transmission lines. Warned about climate change. And specific, named people, who individually had the power to heed these warnings and stave off disaster, ignored the warnings. They didn't make honest mistakes, either: they ignored the warnings because doing so made them extraordinarily, disgustingly rich. They used this money to create dynastic fortunes, and have created entire lineages of ultra-wealthy princelings in $900,000 watches who owe it all to our suffering and impending dooml

Fuck those guys. Fuck 'em all.

We've had so many missed opportunities, chances to make good policy or at least not make bad policy. The enshitternet didn't happen on its own. It was the foreseeable result of choices – again, choices made by named individuals who became very wealthy by ignoring the warnings all around them.

Let's go back to Bill Clinton, because more than anyone else, Clinton presided over some terrible technology regulations. In 1998, Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a bill championed by Barney Frank (fuck that guy, too). Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony, punishable by a five year prison sentence, and a $500,000 fine, to tamper with a "digital lock."

That means that if HP uses a digital lock to prevent you from using third-party ink, it's a literal crime to bypass that lock. Which is why HP ink now costs $10,000/gallon, and why you print your shopping lists with colored water that costs more, ounce for ounce, than the sperm of a Kentucky Derby winner:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Clinton was warned that DMCA 1201 would soon metastasize into every kind of device – not just the games consoles and DVD players where it was first used, but medical implants, tractors, cars, home appliances – anything you could put a microchip into (Jay Freeman calls this "felony contempt of business-model"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

He ignored those warnings and signed the DMCA anyway (fuck that guy). Then, under Bush (fuck that guy), the US Trade Representative went all around the world demanding that America's trading partners adopt versions of this law (fuck that guy). In 2001, the European Parliament capitulated, enacting the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 is a copy-paste of DMCA 1201 (fuck all those people).

Fast forward 20 years, and boy is there a lot of shit with microchips that can be boobytrapped with rent-extracting logic bombs that are illegal to research, describe, or disable.

Like choo-choo trains.

Last year, the Polish hacking group Dragon Sector was contacted by a public sector train company whose Newag trains kept going out of service. The operator suspected that Newag had boobytrapped the trains to punish the train company for getting its maintenance from a third-party contractor. When Dragon Sector investigated, they discovered that Newag had indeed riddled the trains' firmware with boobytraps. Trains that were taken to locations known to have third-party maintenance workshops were immediately bricked (hilariously, this bomb would detonate if trains just passed through stations near to these workshops, which is why another train company had to remove all the GPSes from its trains – they kept slamming to a halt when they approached a station near a third-party workshop). But Newag's logic bombs would brick trains for all kinds of reasons – merely keeping a train stationary for too many days would result in its being bricked. Installing a third-party component in a locomotive would also trigger a bomb, bricking the train.

In their talk at last year's Chaos Communications Congress, the Dragon Sector folks describe how they have been legally terrorized by Newag, which has repeatedly sued them for violating its "intellectual property" by revealing its sleazy, corrupt business practices. They also note that Newag continues to sell lots of trains in Poland, despite the widespread knowledge of its dirty business model, because public train operators are bound by procurement rules, and as long as Newag is the cheapest bidder, they get the contract:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure

The laws that let Newag make millions off a nakedly corrupt enterprise – and put the individuals who blew the whistle on it at risk of losing everything – were passed by Members of the European Parliament who were warned that this would happen, and they ignored those warnings, and now it's happening. Fuck those people, every one of 'em.

It's not just European parliamentarians who ignored warnings and did the bidding of the US Trade Representative, enacting laws that banned tampering with digital locks. In 2010, two Canadian Conservative Party ministers in the Stephen Harper government brought forward similar legislation. These ministers, Tony Clement (now a disgraced sex-pest and PPE grifter) and James Moore (today, a sleazeball white-shoe corporate lawyer), held a consultation on this proposal.

6, 138 people wrote in to say, "Don't do this, it will be hugely destructive." 54 respondents wrote in support of it. Clement and Moore threw out the 6,138 opposing comments. Moore explained why: these were the "babyish" responses of "radical extremists." The law passed in 2012.

Last year, the Canadian Parliament passed bills guaranteeing Canadians the Right to Repair and the right to interoperability. But Canadians can't act on either of these laws, because they would have to tamper with a digital lock to do so, and that's illegal, thanks to Tony Clement and James Moore. Who were warned. And who ignored those warnings. Fuck those guys:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton had a ton of proposals for regulating the internet, but nowhere among those proposals will you find a consumer privacy law. The last time an American president signed a consumer privacy law was 1988, when Reagan signed the Video Privacy Protection Act and ensured that Americans would never have to worry that video-store clerks where telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes they took home.

In the years since, Congress has enacted exactly zero consumer privacy laws. None. This has allowed the out-of-control, unregulated data broker sector to metastasize into a cancer on the American people. This is an industry that fuels stalkers, discriminatory financial and hiring algorithms, and an ad-tech sector that lets advertisers target categories like "teenagers with depression," "seniors with dementia" and "armed service personnel with gambling addictions."

When the people cry out for privacy protections, Congress – and the surveillance industry shills that fund them – say we don't need a privacy law. The market will solve this problem. People are selling their privacy willingly, and it would be an "undue interference in the market" if we took away your "freedom to contract" by barring companies from spying on you after you clicked the "I agree" button.

These people have been repeatedly warned about the severe dangers to the American public – as workers, as citizens, as community members, and as consumers – from the national privacy free-for-all, and have done nothing. Fuck them, every one:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Now, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and not every one of Bill Clinton's internet policies was terrible. He had exactly one great policy, and, ironically, that's the one there's the most energy for dismantling. That policy is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (a law that was otherwise such a dumpster fire that the courts struck it down). Chances are, you have been systematically misled about the history, use, and language of Section 230, which is wild, because it's exactly 26 words long and fits in a single tweet:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Section 230 was passed because when companies were held liable for their users' speech, they "solved" this problem by just blocking every controversial thing a user said. Without Section 230, there would be no Black Lives Matter, no #MeToo – no online spaces where the powerful were held to account. Meanwhile, rich and powerful people would continue to enjoy online platforms where they and their bootlickers could pump out the most grotesque nonsense imaginable, either because they owned those platforms (ahem, Twitter and Truth Social) or because rich and powerful people can afford the professional advice needed to navigate the content-moderation bureaucracies of large systems.

We know exactly what the internet looks like when platforms are civilly liable for their users' speech: it's an internet where marginalized and powerless people are silenced, and where the people who've got a boot on their throats are the only voices you can hear:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

The evidence for this isn't limited to the era of AOL and Prodigy. In 2018, Trump signed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that held platforms liable for "sex trafficking." Advocates for this law – like Ashton Kutcher, who campaigns against sexual assault unless it involves one of his friends, in which case he petitions the judge for leniency – were warned that it would be used to shut down all consensual sex work online, making sex workers's lives much more dangerous. This warnings were immediately borne out, and they have been repeatedly borne out every month since. Killing CDA 230 for sex work brought back pimping, exposed sex workers to grave threats to their personal safety, and made them much poorer:

https://decriminalizesex.work/advocacy/sesta-fosta/what-is-sesta-fosta/

It also pushed sex trafficking and other nonconsensual sex into privateforums that are much harder for law enforcement to monitor and intervene in, making it that much harder to catch sex traffickers:

https://cdt.org/insights/its-all-downsides-hybrid-fosta-sesta-hinders-law-enforcement-hurts-victims-and-speakers/

This is exactly what SESTA/FOSTA's advocates were warned of. They were warned. They did it anyway. Fuck those people.

Maybe you have a theory about how platforms can be held civilly liable for their users' speech without harming marginalized people in exactly the way that SESTA/FOSTA, it had better amount to more than "platforms are evil monopolists and CDA 230 makes their lives easier." Yes, they're evil monopolists. Yes, 230 makes their lives easier. But without 230, small forums – private message boards, Mastodon servers, Bluesky, etc – couldn't possibly operate.

There's a reason Mark Zuckerberg wants to kill CDA 230, and it's not because he wants to send Facebook to the digital graveyard. Zuck knows that FB can operate in a post-230 world by automating the deletion of all controversial speech, and he knows that small services that might "disrupt" Facebook's hegemony would be immediately extinguished by eliminating 230:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/zuckerberg-calls-changes-techs-section-230-protections-rcna486

It's depressing to see so many comrades in the fight against Big Tech getting suckered into carrying water for Zuck, demanding the eradication of CDA 230. Please, I beg you: look at the evidence for what happens when you remove that fence. Heed the warnings. Don't be like Bill Clinton, or California fire suppression officials, or James Moore and Tony Clement, or the European Parliament, or the US Trade Rep, or cryptocurrency freaks, or Malcolm Turnbull.

Or Ashton fucking Kutcher.

Because, you know, fuck those guys.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/13/wanting-it-badly/#is-not-enough

[lazyscience]

So for my followers who come with a factory-installed uterus I know you're concerned about your health and autonomy. And you well should be

But here's something all of you should be thinking about and planning for no matter what your plumbing - if Trump goes through with putting RFK Jr. in a position of power as far as the Department of Health and Human Services, he could do a LOT of damage as far as vaccines. Vaccines are not super profitable for pharma companies, despite what cranks think; they take a LOT of development for only a few uses. Vaccines are driven by public health requirements and a lot of places would shrug and say "ok, bet" if there isn't a guaranteed market for them.

The professional medical community will still have recommendations about when and how to vaccinate, but they won't have the force of law, and insurance will probably smell blood in the water and start kicking up a fuss about covering vaccines when they're not required. So then when doctors recommend them there'll be suspicion and pushback that they're just doing it for "kickbacks" even though the only doctor who would have gotten paid for vaccine is ironically Andrew Wakefield, the lying fuckshit, because his whole "vaccines cause autism" lie was to push his OWN, SPECIAL proprietary vaccines that wouldn't cause his made-up syndrome, because NO vaccines were causing it. May he roast somewhere warm when the devil comes for him.

This will not happen immediately, but. Because there will no doubt be anticipatory compliance on the part of drug companies and healthcare systems. I HIGHLY advise you get the fuck out there and get your Tdap updated (tetanus, diptheria and pertussis). Whooping cough is out there, and it is horrible for babies. If you are eligible for shingles vaccine and haven't done it, get that. Get your COVID vax if you haven't, there might not BE another one, at least not that's available in the US.

If you have kids, especially make sure THEY'RE up to date because their classmates might very well not be mandated to get them any more - state regulations will undoubtedly vary, but with the current composition of the Court, it will rule in favor of every possible exemption for antivaxxers as possible because the conservatives are all "fuck the weakest of us, I got mine fuck you." And expect idiocy like "pox parties" to spread (not like the average suburban parent can tell measles from rubella from chicken pox from hand foot and mouth by fuckin' looking at it, who knows what the christ they're going to be passing around). Measles is NOT just a "bit of a rash." Rubella is the world's leading preventable cause of birth defects. Chickenpox can result in scarring, encephalitis causing blindness or even death, and the risk of shingles later in life. I have a cousin who would be 57 this year who died as a toddler from hemophilus influenzae strain B meningitis, one of those "too many" childhood vaccines that were invented in the 1990s. Tell my aunt that's too many vaccines -oh, wait, you can't, she fucking killed herself out of grief her baby died.

tweens? get them the HPV vaccine if they haven't gotten it (given its associations with sex it'll probably be one of the first to go, but it prevents CANCER. who wants their child to get cervical cancer, or penile cancer, or throat cancer, or rectal cancer? IT PREVENTS CANCER. JUST DO IT.)

Similarly, if you have a child with any kind of immune issue that precludes vaccination, I would very much look into homeschooling, because bye-bye herd immunity.

If you have teenage kids, encourage them to update their Tdap and get the meningiococcal meningitis vaccine if they haven't been mandated to already by campus policy. Tetanus and meningitis aren't common, but they are frequently permanently life-altering when they're not fatal. We're talking months in the hospital. I'm old enough that I remember people fucking dying in college, and the panic that went around campus every time one of those breakouts happened in the state wondering if it would make its way to our campus.

Stay safe out there. I have no idea what this will do to our already teetering healthcare system but I don't think it'll be pretty. Everybody pray Trump pulls his usual scam and hangs RFK Jr. out to dry, because while the plutocrats consider regulations an unnecessary burden, they don't have a stake in creating a public health state of emergency when we already have a workforce not keeping up with demand, unlike Captain Convenient Brain Worm.

[mugiwara-lucy]

Wow….as if this lunatic wasn’t already dangerous enough; our favorite anti-vaccination loon RFK Jr now wants to ban POLIO VACCINATIONS:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/health/aaron-siri-rfk-jr-vaccines.html

What in the actual FUCK is wrong with idiot?! Don’t forget he got over EIGHTY children killed in Samoa with his Anti-Vaccination bullshit

And he also wants kids to drink RAW MILK:

And the MAGAts think he’s good for health because he has a six pack…

Guys if you do NOT want to see the return of Polio, Whooping Cough and Measles…PLEASE call your local representatives to make sure this dumbass does NOT get selected!

He will get MANY AMERICANS KILLED with his bullshit.

He’s not just an idiot but a DANGEROUS one.

I don’t care how many six packs he has, he will get MORE AMERICANS KILLED THAN COVID DID.

With H5N1, I have NO FAITH in Trump or his administration. Their actions during COVID speak for themselves.

[gwydionmisha]

Reminder: He deliberately killed hundreds of kids in Samoa by persuading their parents not to save their lives by vaccinating them.

Have something you want to tell your Senators? If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Five Calls to your critters: https://5calls.org/

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

[boreal-sea]

@subconsciousjedi

What about RFK Jr.'s policies and beliefs below do you like? What makes him a good candidate in your eyes? What makes him better than Biden and Trump?

Here is just a short list of some of RFK Jr.'s policies/beliefs:

He supports Israel. I'm putting this up top because this is the one issue everyone has decided makes Biden "hyper-corrupt", so I'm flat out letting you know that RFK Jr. supports Israel too. In fact, he considers their war against Hamas a "moral war".

He is anti-vax and thinks vaccines cause autism. He started the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vax organization that spreads anti-vax propaganda. He helped cause a massive outbreak of measles in America Samoa that killed 83 people including children in 2018.

He believes and spreads many conspiracy theories, including that HIV might not be the only/true cause of AIDS, antidepressants cause school shootings, herbicides turn kids trans, and Wifi and 5G cause cancer.

So again, what about those policies and beliefs do you LIKE? What among those beliefs makes him BETTER than Biden?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rfk-jr-abortion-vaccines-housing-foreign-policy-2024-03-20/

“By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.””

— Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

[its-suanneschafer-author]

As a physician, I strongly oppose the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, to serve as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. I sent the letter below to my senators. You can use the letter below (which includes parts of the ActionNetwork.org letter) or click here to send their letter: https://actionnetwork.org/.../tell-your-senators-oppose.../

Donald Trump announced that he will nominate unhinged vaccine skeptic RFK, Jr. as his secretary of Health and Human Services. 

As a physician of a certain age, I spent weeks surviving various childhood illnesses, missing between one and three weeks of school every year during my elementary school years. These diseases—measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis A, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type b, rotovirus, tetanus, pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza, along with the more recent Covid-19 are largely controlled now, but with the emergence of anti-vaccine movement, vaccination rates in the US have fallen and soon these disease may gain ascendance again. They still have the potential to kill people, particularly the young.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He has no medical, public health, or immunological experience or training. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at HHS let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency.  His theories are crackpot at best. His idiotic anti-vax beliefs single-handedly orchestrated a measles outbreak that struck the tiny Pacific nation of Samoa and caused over 5707 people to have measles in the outbreak at the end of 2019. In just three and a half months, 83 died and 1868 were admitted to hospital. Vaccination rates as low as 31% were to blame, which largely resulted from input from RFK Jr. Due to his influence, Samoa became an example of what can happen in an under-immunised population which, under RFK Jr’s leadership, the United States will become. 

Trump’s bungling of public health policy during the Covid pandemic cost hundreds of thousands of lives. By appointing Kennedy as his Secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe.

Kennedy is a science-denying, morally bankrupt conspiracy theorist who will endanger people’s lives if placed in a position of authority over health.

​Kennedy has repeatedly made his opposition to vaccines clear. He said on a 2023 podcast “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and has urged people to resist CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccinated.​

We also recently learned​ that the lawyer helping Kennedy pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

​Kennedy also said he would recommend water agencies stop adding fluoride to drinking water, which is asinine because Fluoride strengthens teeth and is viewed as one of the biggest public health successes of the past century. 

And Kennedy has made a variety of other claims not backed by science, such as questioning whether HIV causes AIDS and suggesting antidepressants lead to school shootings.​​

The U.S. Senate should unanimously reject this nomination. Please vote NO.

[academy13]

So, historical fact time, yesterday was the first time in 43 years, or since 1981, that anyone had shot at a president or presidential candidate. I know there are attempts we are very much not aware of, but this one was the first very public attempt since Ronald Regan and boy howdy am I drawing comparisons there.

Also interesting to me is that RFK Jr is in this race and his family has a well known Thing with assassinations, considering both his uncle and his father were assassinated. And RFK was the last time someone got killed while running for president.

Don the Con is perhaps the most unique person in the history of US political assassination attempts being both a former president AND a candidate for president.

Now, I don't know what happens from here on out, but it's about to get real interesting because the only thing we've got for certain is that the likely assassin is dead, but we don't know motivations or anything else. That hasn't come out yet, as you know... investigators have to do their thing. One thing I do know though, is that the GOP have to be FREAKING because their convention is right around the corner, and suddenly your security concerns just changed. As in the convention starts on Monday, and one of your candidates just got SHOT AT. Speaking as someone who works as a security guard, what happened in Pennsylvania just set off that entire sector, like its always a big deal when an important person in any country gets shot at, but again, the last time in the US it was someone that was a candidate or actually president was Ronald Regan. Like half the security at that rally wasn't even born yet, some of the people in the audience might not have even had their kids yet. Some of that audience was probably just out of the damn womb.

But historically I can think of a few motivations, and given Donald's history there's a few other possibilities. Whatever does come out once they get through more investigation won't surprise me too much I fear, I called Don getting shot at a while ago. I'm mostly surprised it took so long. He's a pretty good target considering how high profile he's been for years, it's an even better look when he's been in high office and keeps shooting his mouth off, and generally making himself a target (if you watch the footage there's at least a couple of times the Secret Service has to maneuver so as to get him to stay in the damn cover they're providing. I'm pretty sure they all but shoved him into the SUV because he tried to stand and do his whole 'FIGHT!' thing and some poor bastard had to hiss 'Get in the car you fucking clown there's a gunman' because they didn't know if there was more than one person or if more shots were gonna come or what.

But ah, one more example of the Orange entering the history books in a way he doesn't want to be in them, which honestly entertains me more than it should because Find Out is proving interesting

[msclaritea]

"An insurrection of upper-middle class white people | Will Bunch Newsletter

They flew from their affluent suburbs to the U.S. Capitol, ready to die for the cause of white privilege

The stunning pro-President-Trump insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol less than a week ago must have been a carnival for one’s olfactory bulb, as the stinging aroma of tear gas blended with the pungent odors of the occasional joint, or maybe the piles of dung that some of the cruder mob members left in the hallways once graced by icons like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and LBJ. The only thing that wasn’t in the air on Wednesday was the smell of what so many have falsely tied to Trump’s authoritarian movement — any whiff of “economic anxiety.”

When fascism finally came to America in the form of an attempted coup to halt our presidential election, it came from lush-green suburbs all across this land, flying business class on Delta or United and staying in four-star hotels with three-martini lobby bars — the better to keep warm after a long day of taking selfies with friendly cops or pummeling the unfriendly ones, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and generally standing athwart democracy yelling “Halt!”

Long ridiculed as deplorables rising up from the muck of Rust Belt trailer parks, the Donald Trump counter-revolution has finally revealed itself as an upper-middle-class affair.

What else can one think after seeing the photo of Jenna Ryan, real-estate broker from the upscale Dallas exurb of Frisco (also a “conservative” radio talker) posing in front of the private jet that whisked her to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally and subsequent storming of the Capitol, where she smiled in front of a window broken by other rioters and tweeted that “if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next”?

Maybe Ryan is an extreme example, but her compatriots in rushing Capitol Hill on Wednesday included a father of three from another upscale Dallas suburb named Larry Rendall Brock Jr., whose 1989 degree in international relations from the Air Force Academy apparently never taught him that it’s a bad idea to be photographed leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a combat helmet, tactical gear, and holding zip-tie handcuffs.

One might also expect a criminal defense lawyer like McCall Calhoun of Americus, Ga., to know that it’s surely illegal to surge past a line of cops into the U.S. Capitol, even if, as you later told a newspaper, you believed your fellow rioters wer people who “don’t want to lose their democratic republic.” Or that it’s bad form to do this after tweeting about a looming civil war or the potential hanging of President-elect Joe Biden.

Political junkies like us remember 2000′s “Brooks Brothers riot” of well-heeled GOP activists and lobbyists that successfully halted Florida vote recounting in populous Dade County. Apparently what we witnessed Wednesday was the “Pottery Barn insurrection.” As key figures who invaded the Capitol have been steadily identified over the last five or six days, it’s remarkable how many alleged lawbreakers emerged from upscale zip codes.

The stay-at-home dad husband of a physician. The son of an elected judge in Brooklyn. The owners of numerous small businesses, as well as assorted state legislators. The New York Times spent four years looking for Trump voters in Ohio diners, but apparently that’s not where they would have found failed actor Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, the infamous shirtless rioter with the painted face and horns, who reportedly hasn’t eaten since his arrest because there’s no organic food in jail.

Yes, many of the 74 million citizens who voted for the guy who then incited an attempted coup do fit the stereotype of struggling or laid-off blue-collar worker in a rusted-out rural community. But those folks aren’t the ones who can take a Wednesday off and fly hundreds of miles, let alone plunk down hundreds of dollars, to get to the nation’s hub. While the Capitol mob was bulked up with other Trumpists — including an alarming number of off-duty police officers, as well as some neo-Nazi or KKK types who’ve been around forever — it was the 401(k) crowd that formed the front line of America’s first real putsch.

If that surprises you, then you weren’t really paying attention. For the last four years, political scientists have been trying to wrap their brains around Trump’s shocking 2016 victory in the Electoral College while trying to tell us that the 45th president’s true base is a lot of things — but it’s not poor. In fact, polling guru Nate Silver noted during 2016′s primaries that the average Trump voter had a median household income of $72,000, which was both higher than the national average and also higher than the numbers that year for supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Interestingly, Silver and other analysts have found that Trump performs particularly well with voters with high incomes yet often without college diplomas (although he also does better with degree holders than he gets credit for). A researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, the political scientist Diana Mutz, found that Trump voters generally weren’t struggling economically yet did feel great anxiety about their status — whether the threat was the rise of a foreign power like China or the idea that America, and its government, was becoming increasingly nonwhite.

That explains a lot. It explains why the Republican Party, arguably in a long downward moral spiral, lost its mind when America elected its first Black president in Barack Obama. It explains why so many people with the luxuries of a laptop and free time (things that actual poor folks have in short supply) look for conspiracies like QAnon to explain a society that no longer makes sense for them, or why so much of the hatred on the right is expended not at the CEOs who outsourced American jobs but at the cap-and-gown-wearing eggheads like journalists or scientists they find intellectually arrogant.

The main reason that so many reasonably well-off folks tried to shut down American democracy wasn’t because they feared losing their paycheck, but because they feared losing their white privilege. Donald Trump had promised that “I alone can fix it” — that he’d protect them from a society where Black and brown essential workers could expect help from their government during a pandemic or ask the police to stop killing them, a world that where just being white no longer guaranteed the status they were promised as kids. They truly believed that Biden, Kamala Harris, and the 82 million were going to end their white power, and they saw Jan. 6 as their last chance to save it. The Capitol still stands, but the rest of us are going to be spending decades cleaning up their mess.

History lesson

Philadelphia Police carry a protester away from a July 4, 1966 anti-Vietnam War protest held at Independence Hall. A new study proves police are twice as likely to break up a left-wing demonstration than a right-wing one, like Wednesday's storming of the U.S. Capitol.

In the end, as the FBI and other agencies step up their investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection, there will likely be hundreds of arrests. But the now-under-fire Capitol Police arrested only 13 rioters while the attack was underway, and only a few dozen more were busted by cops for violating the 6 p.m. curfew. No one must have been more shocked by this than the survivors of the May 1971 anti-Vietnam War protests in Washington, one of the largest demonstrations in American history. In marked contrast to last week’s light police presence, the heavy-handed tactics from the administration of Richard Nixon included secretly canceling a national-park permit for the protests and then sending in a whopping 12,000 military troops to augment an already sizable police and National Guard presence. Over three days, an astonishing 12,614 people — many who were protesting peacefully and not violating any laws — were rounded up in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. Authorities detained thousands at RFK Stadium because there was nowhere else to put them.

The shameful 1971 incident proved a point that seemed clear last Wednesday and has now been established with research: Police who are aggressive with leftist social-justice protesters treat right-wing disturbances with kid gloves. Last year’s Black Lives Matter protests as well as anti-lockdown rallies on the far right inspired the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project to dig deeper. It found police were twice as likely to break up the left-wing protests, and when they did disperse a gathering, cops used force against leftists more often (51% of the time) than against right-wingers (34%.) This unequal treatment under the law is one more way that American policing is broken."

[academy13]

Had a bit of a think at work today, and I think between McCarthyism and no less than THREE assassinations in less than a decade, Boomers got really fucked. Older Boomers grew up hearing Joe McCarthy's kind of insane Red Scare bullshit (semi-related to the Lavender Scare) and then when the Boomers born in 1946 Second World War turned 13 JFK was assassinated. Two years later, Malcom X. Then in 68, MLK, and two months after that RFK. Like all that, even with the younger Boomers being not even quite teens yet (my mom was 10 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon), would have a pretty big impact. And then Watergate happens. I'm not even gonna touch on the Texas Tower Shooting or Kent State (or even Jackson State, which is a similar shooting to Kent State but far less known because it happened ten days later and I think that definitely played a role in it being less known on top of the school also being historically black), because we all know mass shootings make an impact, just more so then than now because we're so damned used to them.

But basically, three decades and a lot of shit happens in the US that Boomers are around for, I mean we know RFK Jr is seriously messed up and he's literally related to two of the assassinated people. And then AIDS happens, and a lot of people who may have been able to help out now, die because one, trying to figure out how to treat a new disease, as we know very well by now, is really freaking hard, and a lot of people are being sort of homophobic and hoping it kills off all the queers without realizing that diseases don't really give a fuck about your gender or sexuality, it's just gonna do what it does.

So that's McCarthy's rhetoric, like four assinations that I'm aware of, three school shootings, Watergate, the AIDS Crisis, and that's only 4 decades. Younger Boomers didn't get McCarthy first hand, but the after was part of their world growing up.

I'm just saying, much like us, they had a lot of shit happen, we just had it all happen in a much shorter time frame. And a lot of the leadership they would have had right now, the people who would've been better at handling this absolute shit show, got fucking killed because Ronald Regan wouldn't admit AIDS was a fucking problem.

And this is just the US mind you, so I think the Boomers who survived, are a little more messed up than they're willing to admit, especially the old fucks in charge of shit they shouldn't be in charge of, got really scared by the things that happened when they were growing up and as they came of age. I personally think they're scared of being irrelevant, they want it the way it was when they were kids because its comfortable and less scary than the change they lived through was, even if some of their own parents or leaders didn't completely like it. But those people were smart enough to see the next generation stepping up to the plate and see that 'oh hey lets listen to the majority of people'. Of course though, that made Evangelicals uncomfy, but what doesn't? They'd clutch their pearls if you showed them the most Hayes Code approved movie.

In short, we're sitting here in this period of time in US history because one of the largest demographics in history decided fucking over everyone was more important than the other some-odd BILLON people on the planet (by the way, a century ago the world's population was 2 billion people, it steadily increased over the 20th century, currently there are 8 billion people on the planet. So when the 60s hit, the number hit 3 billion, of which a substantial chunk was the Boomers)

[thestuckylibrary]

#marco rubles#anti-vaxxer rfk jr#make polio great again#republican assholes#maga morons#rfk jr will kill your kids

Why is RFK Jr’s skin always “medium rare”?