Another week of WHUT

I still skim the news daily, but I swear even quick dips into the political news is like testing the hot water just poured from a boiling kettle.

It’s HARD, watching our authoritarian dingdong executive and his unhindered cabal of corrupt handlers strip back a century of scientific progress, stake out the shape of a Christofascist regime unparalleled since Wehrmacht Germany, and abandon the last vestiges of a century of social reforms that have been fought tooth and nail since they first dropped.

But let’s face it, it’s not like the “social safety net” has been working for most of my adult life. The New Deal and the Great Society that worked so well other countries emulated them (and we cribbed them from other places, tbd)were fought tooth and nail from the instant they passed. Then all the half-measure progress was gutted in 1982, got put through a shredder in the mid 90’s (thanks to the neoliberal Democratic boomers who had worse ideas about financial reform than JFK’s advisors did about military operations) and the threadbare remains are now being used to mop up a pile of shit post DOGE.

And hey, the demonizing minorities thing is going great, too. I really wish someone would run the numbers on immigrants, detentions, concentration camps (that’s what they ARE, CALL THEM WHAT THEY ARE FFS) and start pointing out that there just aren’t enough immigrants in this country to meet the ICE quotas.

ICE doesn’t exist to arrest immigrants. ICE and CBP together make up a personal army. ICE is Nero’s Praetorian Guard, and Rome is fucking burning to the ground around us. And we’re all going to end up as kindling for the fire eventually.

But that’s okay, because all it’s gonna take is one little mutation or two to bird flu or some other zoonotic organism, and this country’s going to pandemic itself to death in no time flat. Covid-19 was an appetizer. It’s made us all more vulnerable to infections, so hey, yeah, why not stop vaccinating and destroy the industries and institutions combatting against infectious diseases?

Dismantling the R&D pipeline behind vaccine innovation just as the world is facing waves of novel organisms is societal suicide. Add in the abdication of all responsibility for public infection safety (removing all childhood vaccination mandates? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?) and it’s gonna start looking a lot like 1925 around here.

I have no problem with the latest brainwork about changing the name of the Department of Defense, actually. CALL IT WHAT IT IS. It’s a War Department. Let’s stop pretending the US has been defending anything except commercial interests since before the Korean War. (Sorry, the Korean Conflict.)

Anyway. That’s this week in Make America Sick Again, Make America A Laughingstock Again, Make America Isolated Again.