Another day, another hosepipe of bad news heading our direction. Stories of the day include another mass shooting of children, this time during a school mass in Minnesota. The right wing has seized upon the fact that the mentally ill perpetrator was trans and are banging the alarm bells to round up and incarcerate the dangerous trans folk before they can kill more of our children. So I did a little research. There have been about four and a half thousand shootings with more than one victim over the last decade in the US and of those, fewer than ten were committed by trans identified individuals. There never seems to be any discussion of how we have hollowed out the mental health system of this country systematically over the last fifty years, how we allow pretty much anyone to purchase firearms that have no purpose other than as weapons of war and mass killing, and how there are now more guns in the country in private hands than there are people. That combination pretty much ensures we will continue to have mass shootings until we as a society make demands that the gun lobby cannot overcome. Of course, the perpatrator posted for weeks on the internet about their intentions but as the DHS office in charge of monitoring domestic terrorism was turned over to a 22 year old intern who promptly fired 80% of the staff and instructed the remaining 20% to focus on ICE/Border issues, no one was paying attention.
The second one is that the government continues to insist on opening more and more detention centers for undocumented residents, going so far as to repurpose the Japanese American internment camp at Fort Bliss in Texas, site of one of the more shameful incidents in 20th century American history, for a new life and purpose. Meanwhile, in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz is to be closed after having been in existence for less than two months at a loss to the Florida tax payers of a quarter billion dollars, revealing just what a grift and performative exercise this whole thing is. Especially after it was revealed that ICE detained and questioned a working fire crew battling the Bear Gulch blaze in Washington because there’s nothing more dangerous to the homeland than an active group of firefighters trying to control a forest fire that’s been raging for some weeks. The ICE goons keep going after soft targets as it might actually strain them or put them in some danger to actually go after known gang members. On a closer to home and tangential note, a dispute is boiling up between a local municipality and a Hispanic focused grocery store that certainly has a colorful stench surrounding it.
Then there is the insanity in the health system. The head of DHHS, the esteemed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he can diagnose children as having ‘inflammation’ and mitochondrial challenges’ just by looking at them and that this is what public health needs to focus on. I’ve been in clinical medicine for more than forty years now and WTF is ‘mitochondrial challenge’? There’s a new piece of quackery that arises every few years to entice the gullible to buy expensive supplements to fix the basic problems of human existence like physical and psychic discomfort and somatization and body changes of aging and I guess this is just the latest. At least there will be Covid shots availble this fall but the indications are being ratcheted way down. You’ll need to be over 65 or have a medical condition which will make you more susceptible to infection to fit the new criteria. (Pro Tip – most pharmacies will allow you to self attest to the ‘more susceptible to infection’ category). The senior leadership at the CDC is exiting rapidly following the twisting of science to try to validate political positions rather than rationally seeing where the science leads. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the best minds regarding public health and infectious disease released a scathing resignation letter pointing out just what is wrong with RFKs handling of our health systems. Of course the right wing is piling on with the usual invective because 1. He’s openly gay. 2. He has a funny name and therefore can’t be a real American and 3. He dared use the phrase ‘pregnant persons’. I’ll let you look it up and read it on your own time. I can’t help but wonder what Bill Cassidy, who was the deciding vote to confirm RFK and is a physician thinks of his basic betrayal of basic medical ethics.
After seeing a bit of this weeks cringey cabinet meeting in which sycophantic phrases were bandied about like so many shuttlecocks in a game of existential badminton, I can’t help but wonder who is really calling the shots in DC. The president appears to be barely coherent. The cabinet appear to be about to go all Night of the Long Knives on each other. And yet the orders keep rolling on our completely reshaping society and how we interact with each other. Somebody somewhere is making sure this happens. And it’s not Elon Musk. He and Peter Thiel are probably playing around with the huge data set that contains all three hundred million plus social security numbers tied to all of our other personal data which DOGE uploaded to the cloud and which is now being used by who knows whom for who knows what purposes. That particular move will make it very easy to start putting Big Brother is Watching You in place for us all.
The administration seems to be intent on securing DC with sympathetic individuals. National Guard units from red states have been called up to ‘combat crime’ but they’re all stationed around the Mall and other low crime tourist areas where they are easily seen and photographed and they have been put to work doing the jobs normally done by federal employees that were axed in the DOGE purge such as clearing litter, spreading mulch, and basic repair work. And now the administration has taken over Union Station from Amtrak. I can’t help but wonder if this is a plan to secure the city from anyone coming in to remove the current administration should they decide to stay, no matter the outcome of coming elections. At least the airports are not within DC proper and will be a little harder to claim. I looked up the top states for violent crime rates – The top 5 are New Mexico, Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee. Four of those five are solidly red states. The administration appears to be going after Illinois next. It’s number thirty on the list. (Alabama is number eighteen).
Then there’s the economic meltdown from the craziness of Trump’s tariffs. The removal of the de minimis exemption for packages has pretty much paused most of the world’s postal systems from shipping anything to the US as the rules are completely unclear and changing from day to day. If you enjoy ordering things from international retailers, forget it. It ain’t happening. Not to mention all of the small businesses that rely on small lot shipments internationally to stay afloat. Gone. The administration appears to want to remove us from the global economy which has allowed us to grow and sustained us for the last century. I suppose we can become a hermit kingdom and international pariah. It’s worked out so well for North Korea.
There are some glimmers of hope. Pope Leo and the Catholic Conference of Bishops have come out swinging for gun control after this week’s shooting. A few of the Democratic governors, most notably Newsom and Pritzker, have started to understand how to battle the administration in the political arena. Pretty much every special election in the last few months has shown a ten to twenty point swing towards the democrats due to the extreme unpopularity of the majority of the policies descending from the White House. But we’ve still got over a year until the midterm election. It’s going to be a very long year.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 