TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2025
Our series resumes tomorrow: Over at the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has given voice to a matter of opinion.
Her column appeared on the Post's web site one hour before we walked in the door. On the front page of the site, it was teased in the following manner:
Ruth Marcus
The most damaging two weeks in history
Yikes! That's the way it's teased!
Greedily, we clicked the link. Marcus was giving voice to a matter of opinion. Headline included, her column starts like this:
Trump 2.0: The most damaging first two weeks in presidential history
No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. As we enter Week 3 of President Donald Trump’s second term, the chaos and disruption of his first look quaint by comparison. The country survived Trump 1. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively—all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.
This column will concentrate on the third piece of that trifecta: efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government...
As you can see, the tease slightly overstates the claim. That said, Marcus continues along from there, giving voice to several (arresting) matters of judgment, assessment, opinion.
Some people will agree with her views. Other people will not. Senators Collins and Tillis will give it plenty of thought and will then announce that they don't.
Others will agree with Marcus' arresting assessments. Of one thing we can all be sure:
If "irreparable harm" is being inflicted, it isn't being inflicted by madmen! We can say that with some assurance because, as we noted yesterday, there's no such clinical term.
That said, the bizarre statements continue from the commander and his lieutenant. Also, the extremely unusual actions continue on an array of governmental fronts.
Some may refer to this as a "putsch," even as a series of "putsches" (actual plural form). We think such people would be speaking in a highly colloquial manner.
Yesterday, we promised to stop playing cute with this deadly serious topic. Given the madness-adjacent behavior which seems to be all around us, that might be a difficult promise to keep.
For ourselves, we lost the entire day to the rigors of medical science. We plan to resume our series tomorrow.
We're shooting toward a series of questions about the people who are conducting the actions to which Marcus refers in her column. Is something possibly "wrong" with these people? And how exactly does the logic of such an assessment work?
In the strictest clinical sense, there are literally hundreds of ways for something to be (clinically) "wrong" with a person. The possibilities go on and on and on and on. We may discuss that tomorrow.
Could something be "wrong" with the people in question? We still think that's a seminal question about a deadly serious matter.
Also this:
For the record, we're still recommending that you feel "pity" for the (metaphorical) "poor immigrant"—even as you try to strip them of the "power to do evil."
That was Dylan's advice long ago—and once again, he's hot.
I and many conservatives agree with Marcus that these may be the two most consequential weeks in American history.
ReplyDeleteSo nowadays “conservatives” believe that the President can simply do what he wants without oversight, explicit congressional approval, or following the law, a president who by the way lies with every breath he takes and has shown a level of corruption unknown to the presidency? That doesn’t sound like “conservatism” DiC, it’s radical authoritarianism. Even Trump’s voters deserve to know what he is eliminating, because, well, it may be them ir their families who end up suffering.
Delete@5:21 - You made somef serious charges. Can you back them up with examples? What has President done that was
Delete-- corrupt?
-- without Congressional approval?
-- illegal?
I'm surprised you complain about voters deserving to know what Trump is eliminating. IMO Trump has been particularly open, with frequent pressers and honest, if sometimes rude, answers. Can you provide examples of actions Trump is keeping secret?
@5:33 Isn't it obvious what is happening now? Just read the news, David.
DeleteYou have to be careful because a lot of the news you may read is propaganda intended to scare you. Eg. someone was implying the other day that USAID was a good organization.
DeleteGood, bad or indifferent, there are legal and
DeleteConstitutional processes to change its mission and funding or close it down, 7:05 you poor grinning glib horse's ass.
Marcus is not overstating her claim, as Somerby says without argument or evidence.
ReplyDeleteMedical treatment is not "the rigors of medical science". Whatever Somerby did, it was at most an application of a finding arising from medical science, just like Tang came from the NASA science program. Somerby's ignorance about what science is does not give him license to mock the importance of real medical science.
ReplyDeleteSomerby couldn’t even understand Albert Einstein’s clear, elementary explanation of relativity.
DeleteWhen mentally ill people try to destroy the govt, you don't sit around discussing which way they might be ill. You take away the keys to keep them from doing more damage. Somerby's conceit about madness is not real, even to him, or he would express more urgency about preventing damage to us all.
ReplyDeleteI sure hope he doesn’t lose his social security because of musk’s meddling.
DeleteHe could lose his medical coverage too. He wasn't in the military, so he isn't going to the VA.
DeleteHell, Trump had some goon back in his first term who wanted to privatize the VA, some other billionaire sociopath, I think.
DeleteGuantanamo is just the right size to hold the most virulent of Trump's co-conspirators.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bobdylan.com/songs/i-pity-poor-immigrant/
ReplyDeleteDylan did not give the advice Somerby attributes to him.
No one voted for Elon Musk.
ReplyDeleteAnd the Senate didn’t confirm him.
DeleteTwo thousand people work in the Executive Branch. The citizens only voted for two of them.
DeleteAnd none of those 2000 people have ever invaded the treasury and taken command of the Treasury. That's not how it fucking works in our Constitutional republic, you fascist prick.
DeleteEvery person in the federal government has a job description that clearly defines their duties and states who they report to and what the limits of their authority are.
DeleteYou fight back against destructive madmen. Here is an example how:
ReplyDelete"The national physicians' group Doctors for America has launched an effort to stop Donald Trump's administration.
On Tuesday, the branches under the Department of Health and Human Services removed thousands of pages of health data and information from federal websites, Axios reported.
On Friday, it was announced that government websites would go offline as they deleted pages and removed information. The doctors group argues that the new agency heads "abused their discretion and arbitrarily deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients," the report said.
The information that was being deleted dealt with gender identity, diversity, HIV/AIDS and vaccine guidelines.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C. district court, specifically cites the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, but looks at the umbrella of the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Health and Human Services. It asks simply to restore the webpages and datasets and requests that the court bar them from any additional content being removed.
Dr. Dorothy Fink is currently the acting secretary of HHS, overseeing these major changes. Trump's appointee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has not been approved by the full Senate. During his Senate confirmation hearings, he was not questioned about what was unfolding at HHS or whether he supported it.
Doctors for America has approximately 27,000 members." [Rawstory]
This is how stupid Trump and his minions are being:
ReplyDelete"President Donald Trump's administration reportedly threatened to halt grants for scientific studies that mention words like "female," "women," "systemic" or "trauma."
Darby Saxbe, a professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California, shared a leaked list of words that could cause scientific studies to be flagged by the National Science Foundation.
"This is a crisis for academic freedom & science," Saxbe wrote. "These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged."
"The word 'systemic' is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?" she continued. " If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word 'biased' gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA."
"This is what makes them so stupid. Clearly, they only have an elementary school education. Good grief. Why use words at all?"
Although a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump's federal grant funding freeze, the NSF was continuing to flag scientific studies, according to reports." [Rawstory]
This is what is happening to medical science under Trump:
ReplyDelete"by Issam AHMED
Medical researchers left to compile national data by hand, contraceptive guidelines deemed essential by doctors erased, and the nation's largest tuberculosis outbreak left unreported: President Donald Trump's administration has thrown the US health system into uncharted territory.
Here's a look at some of the biggest impacts.
- Key medical journal goes silent -
Within days of Trump taking office last month, the Health and Human Services Department imposed an indefinite "pause" on communications.
One of its first casualties was The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a venerable epidemiological digest published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
For the first time in 60 years, the journal -- which once published the first case studies of what would become the AIDS crisis -- has missed two editions, with no word on when it will return.
"MMWR is the voice of science. The delay in publishing is dangerous," wrote former CDC director Tom Frieden on BlueSky.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Faust, a physician and Harvard instructor who runs the Inside Medicine Substack, reported that CDC scientists have been instructed to retract or pause all papers submitted to external journals to remove language deemed offensive -- including the word "gender."
- Critical resources for doctors scrubbed -
Doctors nationwide are reeling after the sudden removal of a CDC app that helped determine the suitability of contraceptives based on patients' medical history and medications.
Also deleted: Clinical Guidance for PrEP (a critical HIV-prevention tool), resources on intimate partner violence, and guidelines on LGBTQ+ behavioral health.
Some pages have been restored but now carry an ominous banner: "CDC's website is being modified to comply with President Trump's Executive Orders." Others remain missing, causing widespread confusion.
Jessica Valenti, a feminist author and founder of the Abortion Every Day Substack, has been archiving the deleted materials on CDCguidelines.com to preserve the original, inclusive versions.
"The hope is to have it be a resource for the people who need it," she told AFP, adding that even if documents are restored, words like "trans" may be scrubbed from them.
- Infectious outbreaks unreported -
As medical associations sound the alarm over the lack of federal health communication, outbreaks are slipping under the radar.
In Kansas City, Kansas, the largest tuberculosis outbreak in US history is unfolding with 67 active cases since 2024 -- yet no national health authority has reported on it.
"The National Medical Association (NMA) is calling for a swift resolution to the federal health communications freeze, which has the potential to exacerbate this outbreak and other public health threats," wrote the group, which represents African American physicians.
Similarly, a measles outbreak among unvaccinated schoolchildren in Texas has gone unreported at the national level.
Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who studies influenza trends, wrote on her blog that she has resorted to manually tallying cases from all 50 state health departments because the CDC's central data repository has been taken down.
© Agence France-Presse" [Rawstory]
Somerby should think twice about going to see any doctor for any medical procedure given this attack on health care available to citizens of the US.
Trump says he’ll take over the Gaza Strip.
ReplyDelete