Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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Making Microbes Great Again
The Texas measles outbreak is just the beginning
By Paul Krugman | Feb 18, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-microbes-great-again
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,
fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18109301-b9b8-4127-aceb-db72c380c470_1028x657.avif
Source: CDC
I’m almost certain that I had measles as a child. My memories are a bit vague, and unfortunately my parents, who would surely have remembered the incident, have passed on. But I was born in 1953, and grew up in an era when, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “nearly all children got measles by the time they were 15 years old.”
However, measles cases declined precipitously after 1963, when a vaccine was licensed. (My wife, born in 1959, never caught it.) By 1980 all states had laws requiring that children entering school be vaccinated, although most allowed exemptions for religious beliefs. Measles vaccines don’t just protect the person vaccinated; by ensuring that very few children catch the disease, they also break potential chains of infection. So in 2000 the CDC declared measles in the United States eliminated.
But now there’s a significant outbreak in Texas. Only 48 cases have been identified so far (13 of whom have been hospitalized), but officials believe that there are hundreds more that haven’t been reported.
As far as I can tell, nobody following disease trends is surprised by this development, nor does anyone think it’s a one-time event; this is probably just the first of many outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases we thought had been eliminated.
The reason is simple. Measles was eliminated, for a while, because vaccination was near-universal. The “target” vaccination rate, sufficient to prevent community transmission, is 95 percent. But much of the nation has now fallen well below that target:
Source: KFF
So the widespread return of measles was just a matter of time.
How did this happen? The answer, of course, is politics, specifically Republican politics.
As an illuminating article in Lancet notes, anti-vaccine activism was originally a fringe movement with a “natural-living, left-leaning base.” Translation: it was more or less a hippie thing. In fact, you can still see some traces of those roots in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s incoherent views on health policy — views that unfortunately matter a lot now that he’s in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.
But the anti-vax movement became powerful and deadly when it took over much of the political right.
The groundwork for that takeover was laid in the Reagan years. Reagan wasn’t specifically anti-vaccine. But he was anti-science — because, as I wrote recently, once you start rejecting scientific research that tells you things you don’t want to hear, you’re basically rejecting the whole scientific enterprise. And he also rejected the idea that the government can ever be a force for good.
So when it comes to childhood vaccinations, what you have is the government telling you that your children must get their shots, because that’s what medical science says must be done. From right-wingers’ point of view, that’s a perfect storm of everything they hate.
And if evidence shows that vaccines and vaccine mandates work — if we went from a nation where almost every child caught measles to one in which the disease had effectively been eliminated — well, people who believe in looking at evidence are probably radical left-wing Marxists who hate America.
Which helps explain the perverse political reaction to what was, by any reasonable standard, one of medical science’s greatest triumphs: the incredibly rapid development of vaccines against Covid-19.
What’s especially perv
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From Comedy to Brutality
With his designs on Greenland and Gaza, Trump has signaled that his first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/03/13/from-comedy-to-brutality-f
intan-otoole/
Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:
Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!
He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland.
Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk — a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.
Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes — long-standing and loyal allies of the US — are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.”
After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member (from the Trump 45 administration) was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. “You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real.’”
At that time Prime Minister Frederiksen dismissed Trump’s Greenland proposition as “absurd.” And even though Trump was plainly furious at her rebuff, he also played it for laughs. He tweeted a Photoshop mock-up of a mammoth Trump Tower looming over some scattered huts in what looks like an Arctic seaside village: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”
We know from Baker and Glasser that after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, killing more than three thousand people in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US in a century, Trump asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, “How much hurricane disaster relief are we giving to Puerto Rico?” and added, “Can we just take that and use it for [the purchase of] Greenland?” Likewise, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, later told MSNBC that in 2018, before a flight to Puerto Rico to inspect the damage, Trump asked him and other officials whether the US could swap the Caribbean island for Greenland. Thus the cataclysmic consequences of climate chaos — and the people who have to live with them — would become Denmark’s problem, while the US would gain a clean, cool new frontier.
The same warped logic was at work in Trump’s expression in early February of his opinion that the United States should annex the Gaza Strip: “I do see a long-term ownership position…. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” (It is telling that, in a Fox News interview six days later, the possession of Gaza had become personal: “I would own this.”) Greenland is largely uninhabited; with 56,000 people living in an area of over 800,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country on earth. Gaza has been rendered almost uninhabitable for its current population, and in Trump’s imagination those people can be made to disappear. Greenland is a postapocalyptic refuge; Gaza looks like the apocalypse has already happened. Each can be envisaged in this twisted thought
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JD Vance’s Debacle in Germany Exposes MAGA’s Sinister Global Endgame
By Michael Tomasky
https://newrepublic.com/article/191622/jd-vance-germany-maga-fascist-g
lobal-endgame
I’d be hard-pressed to argue that JD Vance’s meeting with the leader of the German fascist party on Friday was weakly covered by the press. Yet somehow, it hasn’t registered quite the degree of shock and revulsion here in the United States that it deserves to. That visit, along with Vance’s shocking speech at the Munich Security Conference, confirms every worst suspicion about this morally rudderless mountebank. The argot of diplomats and newspaper editorials, which express “concern” or even “grave concern,” doesn’t begin to describe how we Americans should feel about what Vance did last week in our name.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/berlin-says-vance-should-not-inte
rfere-german-politics-2025-02-14/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/world/europe/vance-europe-immigrati
on-ukraine.html
The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a “suspected extremist” organization by the German domestic intelligence agency. It has been shunned by all other parties; with a Bundestag election coming up February 23, the leading candidate, Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz, has vowed that he won’t form a government with the fascists. AfD’s leaders have constantly downplayed the country’s Nazi past. And the vice president of the United States just met with its leader. While shunning a meeting with the sitting chancellor.
This is not remotely normal. True, it’s not as if the United States has never allied itself with fascist regimes. There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, and some others. But those were all during the Cold War, and U.S. support was, though hardly defensible, merely defensive—that is, it was offered solely because these thugs were enthusiastically anti-communist. It was support based on one mutually shared interest.
Vance’s meeting—and Elon Musk’s earlier one, since he, too, is a member of our government, however shadily—is something much different. It’s ideologically motivated. Vance and Musk, and by extension their boss, President Donald Trump, like what AfD stands for, and they want the world to know they like it.
I never could have imagined, none of us could, that the government of the United States of America would openly ally itself with a fascist political party. In the heart of Europe. In Germany, for God’s sake. And while we’re imagining things, imagine this: Although the conservative Christian Democrats are ahead in the polling, with 29 percent, AfD is in second at 21 percent. Imagine that AfD somehow wins. The U.S. government will be openly cheering a fascist victory.
Combine this with what we already know about Ukraine. The Trump administration is going to give Putin whatever he wants. What exactly this is, we don’t yet know. But when Saudi Arabia is hosting talks that include the U.S. and Russia only, and not Ukraine or the other nations of Europe, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to smell the fix that’s in.
Trump wants Ukraine to basically turn over a big chunk of its wealth to him. The British Telegraph reported Monday that Trump wants $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s minerals, which the paper said would “amount to the US economic colonization of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” And take note of what Trump said last week, vis à vis the money the Biden administration spent helping Ukraine defend itself: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal. They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/17/revealed-trump-confide
ntial-plan-ukraine-stranglehold/
“They may be Russian someday.” We know what that means. That’s a nice little country you got there, I’d hate to see that something should happen to it.
Last year, many people warned that under a second Trump administration, the U.S. would fundamentally alter its posture toward the world. That ou
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Ukrainian Artillery Blasted A Russian Assault Group In Ulakly. It’s The Kind Of Battlefield Win That Gives Ukraine Leverage Over Donald Trump.
As long as Russian forces struggle to advance, Ukraine can reject Trump’s mineral extortion.
By David Axe | Feb 17, 2025, 04:10pm EST
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/02/17/ukrainian-artillery-b
lasted-a-russian-assault-group-in-ulakly-its-the-kind-of-battlefield-win-that-gives-ukraine-leverage-over-donald-trump/
In a cataclysm of artillery and drone strikes, Ukrainian forces smashed an attack by Russian troops in and around the town of Ulakly on or just before Sunday. Surveillance drones working for the Ukrainian Tivaz artillery group registered around 10 destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles.
The failed assault, one of several in the southeastern corner of Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine in recent days, may have signaled the failure of the Russian offensive in the area. The political implications are profound.
As recently as two weeks ago, the Russians had the momentum. They’d just ejected the Ukrainian Khortytsia Operational Strategic Group from Velyka Novosilka, a few miles south of Ulakly, and were poised to pursue the retreating Ukrainians and potentially achieve a breakthrough in the area where Donetsk Oblast meets Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
Now a Russian breakthrough appears unlikely. “Exhausted by losses and intense battles over the past month, the enemy will not be able to quickly pursue Khortytsia OSG whose units are retreating from Velyka Novosilka,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies explained.
Not only have the Russians suffered heavy losses in their modest advance along the Donetsk-Zaporizhzhia corner, they’re also experiencing broader shortages of troops and equipment that have compelled them to prioritize their attacks.
Desperate to eradicate the Ukrainian-held salient in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast and equally eager to capture the fortress city of Pokrovsk, 18 miles north of Ulakly, the Russians are diverting resources from southern Donetsk. “The enemy will not be able to break through to Zaporizhzhia or Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts, as they lack the necessary troops, funds and resources,” CDS assessed.
In conclusion, “the plan to collapse the southern Ukrainian front and advance toward Zaporizhzhia is unfeasible,” the analysis group asserted.
The exhaustion of the Russian offensive in southeastern Ukraine comes at a perilous time for the Kremlin. The administration of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump has threatened to abandon Ukraine unless the government in Kyiv consents to Trump’s $500-billion mineral extortion scheme. At the same time, Trump reportedly is considering pulling U.S. troops from NATO states bordering Russia.
Ukraine—and Europe in general—is grappling with the possibility that 80 years of strong U.S. support for European security may come to a bizarre and abrupt end. Given the chaos resulting from the American retreat, the regime of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin should be in the strongest possible position to demand huge territorial concessions in exchange for ending its wider war on Ukraine.
But Russia isn’t actually winning on the battlefield in Ukraine. Where its forces make gains, the advance is usually measured in yards—and might cost entire infantry companies with scores of troops.
Yes, the Ukrainian military is struggling to mobilize sufficient forces. But the Russian military is struggling, too—and it’s the one that must advance hundreds of miles against a technologically advanced foe in order to achieve Moscow’s original objectives, including regime change in Kyiv, by force alone.
“The Russian military has objectively failed,” analyst Andrew Perpetua pointed out. “And they do not have the strength to ever recover from the degree to which they have failed. Russia cannot win this war on a battlefield.” But it can win at the negotiating table if, for some reason, Ukraine caves to American pressure to end the war on terms favorable to Russia.
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MAGA's maniacal reaction to Tom Hanks proves they are his 'SNL' character | Opinion
There are so many things that co-presidents Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing that deserve outrage. MAGA reserved theirs for a TV comedy skit.
By EJ Montini | Feb 18, 2025
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2025/02/18/to
m-hanks-saturday-night-live-trump-maga/79025292007/
The most zealous supporters of President Donald Trump practically broke the internet with maniacal rants protesting actor Tom Hanks’ comic portrayal of a guy named “Doug” wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat during the 50th anniversary show of “Saturday Night Live.”
Strangely (or maybe not), these same people did not go nuts or flood the internet with protests when Trump and co-president Elon Musk fired several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, many with training in FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, at a time when airplane safety is a growing concern.
But watching Hanks speak with a southern accent in a skit about “Black Jeopardy” really, really irked them.
Unlike when Trump and Musk laid off vital employees of the Veterans Health Administration, which U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called “attempting to balance the budget on the backs of veterans.”
That didn’t trouble them in the least.
Tom Hanks makes MAGA furious, but not this
Not like Hanks cutting it up with SNL cast member Kenan Thompson, which made them absolutely furious.
Then again, these same MAGA faithful expressed no outrage whatsoever when Musk tried to give his bro gang of hackers access to Americans’ most private financial information, including Social Security benefits, VA benefits and much more.
But they went positively ballistic over Hanks reprising a role in a skit first performed eight years ago.
Not a peep from them, on the other hand, when hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health were let go, including “disease detectives” at the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
All of which puts Americans at risk.
They are completely unbothered by Elon Musk
Hank backing away from a Black man’s handshake during a comedy TV skit, though, had them foaming at the mouth.
Yet when Trump gave enormous power to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an unofficial government agency with no congressional approval, they didn’t blink.
But Hanks wearing a denim jacket over an American Eagle T-shirt. Terrible! Outrageous!
It didn’t bother them at all, however, when Musk — a self-proclaimed champion of free speech — said, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They deserve a long prison sentence.”
Maybe MAGA is worse than that 'SNL' character
Musk was upset about a segment the program did on killing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides disaster relief to impoverished countries, particularly those working on democratic reforms.
During the program, it was said about Musk: “The world’s richest man cut off aid for the world’s poorest people.”
The fact that MAGA is angrier and more upset at Hanks than they are with the world’s richest man cutting off aid to the world’s poorest people might prove that Trump supporters outraged by Hanks’ MAGA portrayal could have a point.
It could be they’re not exactly versions of the Hanks character.
It could be they’re worse.
Conservatives BLAST Tom Hanks's MAGA Character On SNL: 'Hate Mongering'
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I can’t resist posting one memorable Twitter exchange:
Andrew Tate wouldn't fuck that broad with your shriveled up micropenis.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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'Backfired spectacularly': European officials reportedly now view US as an 'adversary'
By Sarah K. Burris | February 17, 2025 5:33PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/european-union-trump-2671169459/
If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it didn't work, according to one senior diplomat.
According to who? Give a name.
Quote:
Vance not only didn't persuade his audience, he insulted them, the Financial Times reported Monday.
Fuck his authoritarian audience.
Democrats are on their way to becoming full blown Nazis now.
It suits you.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Is the Answer to Trump Hiding in Plain Sight?
By Luke Winkie | Feb 18, 2025, 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/hasan-piker-donald-trump-n
ews-elon-musk-jd-vance.html
. . . Once it becomes clear that a second Trump administration is poised to be just as destructive as advertised, Democrats are once again mired in a communications crisis. With Musk slashing the administrative state to ribbons, the specter of destabilizing tariffs, and a renewed assault on the rights of undocumented immigrants, where was the opposition? It was another stark reminder of just how overmatched the party appears to be, stricken by an enfeebling inability to summon the venom—the anger—its base is feeling.
Piker has never missed an opportunity to express his wrath. The day after the inauguration, he flew to Japan with plans of waking up in the middle of the night to broadcast on Twitch during his usual West Coast time slot.
“If you recognize that Republicans are devastating to the country, to the globe, to the lives of Americans and the lives of your neighbors, then you have to do everything in your power to fight back,” he said on a recent stream, his face softened by the milky lens of a webcam. Piker was analyzing Trump’s order to transform Guantánamo Bay into a detention camp for migrants, an action he believes is the first step toward far more heinous anti-immigration measures. It’s a classic Piker fixation, the sort of thing that innervates his fury for the inert center of the Democratic Party. To him, ceding any policy territory to the conservative elements of your coalition is death. It only provides cover for the Republicans to push further, to savor more cruelty, to inflict more pain.
“This is why I kept criticizing the Democrats during the election cycle. This is why I kept losing my mind,” Piker said. “I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t want Trump to win, and it seems like you guys want him to win, or at least don’t care enough to do what is necessary to stop him from winning.’ And here we are.”
There are more days like this coming for Piker. More executive orders, more electoral defeats, more tepid reactions from the Democrats that he finds anemic or otherwise annoying. The terrible scale of this American era comes rushing at full blast through three computer monitors—on the other end is Piker, and 30,000 people who want to believe in a better future.
“You have nobody to protect you but yourselves and your neighbors,” Piker said at the conclusion of that inauguration stream. “Who knows what will happen tomorrow, but I will be there to cover it. As always.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Holy shit.
You're sucking Hasan Piker's dick now?
Democrats will never win an election again.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments
Tuesday, Feb 18, 2025 - 12:15 PM
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.
Mind you, it's not as if such a federal tracking system wasn't already in place -- it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there's little hope in figuring out where all that money went.
"In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those "optional" days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going," DOGE added.
Musk celebrated the move. "Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity going live!" he tweeted. "This was a combined effort of DOGE, USTreasury and FederalReserve. Nice work by all."
I wonder if there's any indication who the departmental payor was, i.e. DoD? HUD? Homeland Security?
That way you could figure out who abused the system the most.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Why aren't people talking about the Epstein List, the Diddy List and the JFK/MLK files?
If we're going to drain the swamp, you're going to be able to take out a lot of the major players from both sides when those become public.
We were promised them, after the Joe Biden* admin and his criminal party blocked us from seeing them.
Where are they?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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