Those who voted for Donald Trump clearly wanted Mr. Trump to disrupt, to ignore precedent, which to their way of thinking is to reject "woke," and now they may (or may not) get that.
As Michael Lewis documented in his 2018 book, "The Fifth Risk," Trump was never able to do much more than lower taxes on billionaires and build a part of a wall on the Southern Border, which often fell over or was scaled or tunneled under, so it did not much stem the tide of cross border crossings.
His impotence in "draining the swamp" derived mostly from an ignorance of what the swamp is, does and what keeps it full.
To chose just one of dozens of examples, he sent a man named Thomas Pyle to disembowel the Department of Energy, as a part of a "Landing Team" to assault the department, but the man never actually attended all the briefings about the Department's operations, so the landing wound up being a bunch of commandos seeking out woke civil servants, who had attended meetings about the Social Cost of Carbon, but the many jobs of the Department of Energy remained untouched--as it turns out if you are trying to negotiate with Iran to prevent it from making nuclear weapons, you have to know which parts of their nuclear program they must stop to prevent them from making a nuclear weapon. And for that you needed the physicists at the Department of Energy.
Obadiah Youngblood
Trump's shock troops simply never discovered what places like the DOE actually do. The names of the various Departments are misleading. The Department of Commerce actually has little to do with business, directly. It is really the Department of Statistics.
National labs like Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia simulate nuclear explosions so we don't have to do actual explosive tests to test our nuclear arsenal--all that is not in the Defense Department but in the Department of Energy.
It's confusing and Trump never got un-confused.
Rick Perry, who Trump sent to head DOE, who said the DOE didn't do anything worth doing, never bothered to get briefed on a single program run by the DOE.
But the DOE did provide low interest loans to Tesla so it could build a factory to make electronic (environmentally friendly) cars. But now, of course, Mr. Musk may find that inefficient. He doesn't want to talk about that.
A lot of the DOE budget went to maintaining the nuclear arsenals in their siloes scattered about the country, and another big share to cleaning up the mess generated in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The DOE still spends billions to clean up the radioactive mess it unleashed in Hanford, Washington between 1943 and 1987 making nuclear weapons. Trump wants to shut down that down, part of cleaning up the swamp, or more accurately, allowing the swamp to just sit there and glow. Hanford's county voted by 25 points for Trump.
One might say, well then, if that's what they want, let 'em glow.
The DOE is not really a department of energy--it's a department of science, figuring out what to do with nuclear waste from nuclear plants. Also tracking down and finding people who have sarin gas canisters they plan to release in football stadiums or subways.
Fracking was a DOE invention. Now, of course it's all "drill baby drill" for the MAGA crowd, but it was conceived of and launched by the government, specifically, the DOE.
Another thing we were lucky the Trump men did not manage to understand is the role of the DOE in defending and developing the electric grid. In the red West, locals shot up electrical transformers and cut wires to Apple and Google centers. The government had to protect these icons of free enterprise from crazies.
As time allows, Mad Dog may work through other goals of 2025: turning the USA into a Christian nation, abolishing the Federal Reserve, replacing the income tax with sales taxes, abolishing the Consumer Protection Board, taxing things made in the European Union and China into oblivion, so we no longer have to worry about competition from cheaper foreign goods, which is to say, abolishing the global economy in the USA.
The project is over 400 pages and, to say the least ambitious in its transformative goals.
It will take some time to visit all of it.
Until then, Mad Dog may just wait and see.
Trump vaccine for COVID developed in under one year, defying the expectations of Fake News media who quipped that it could not be done. Trump vaccine is estimated to have saved three million American lives. Biden Gaza pier cost taxpayers $230 million and broke apart in under twenty days. $7.12 Billion in military equipment left behind by Biden in Afghanistan, arming terrorist enemies of the USA who brutalize their women. I think US electorate is a good judge of competence. I think Mad Dog needs to be subject to vigorous fact checking.
ReplyDeleteOh, now we are giving the Bleach King credit for developing the COVID vaccines in record time--something RFKJR would decry.
ReplyDeleteFact is, it was two researchers at U PENN who did the mRNA platform which allowed for the rapid development, not to mention the many pharma companies which turned on the machines--read A Shot To Save the World. You have drunk too deeply from the MAGA Kool aide. Developing and distributing that vaccine was one of the greatest triumphs of Western Medicine and it had many authors, and it proved the one thing MAGA is terrified of hearing: Government can be not just a force for good, but can save the nation. Not for the first time, BTW. Trump, in fact, either got in the way or stood by helplessly, while Dr. Fauci, the NIH, several universities and a lot of "elites" actually saved the day. Of course, FOX and MAGA will always hide away when the battle is on, only to emerge later, when the dust settles to claim they were responsible for the victory. Delusion is so handy.
I suggest the phantom should read Paul mango book warp speed. Trump did not invent the vaccine but he did expedite the development and approval and deployment of the vaccine. That is a fact. Another fact is that prominent democrats including Harris and cuomo initially encouraged Americans not to take a vaccine rushed through the fda process.
ReplyDeleteSee facts regarding Democrats anti science position on vaccine
ReplyDeletehttps://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/trump-campaign-press-release-fact-kamala-harriss-anti-vaccine-rhetoric-anti-science-and
Oh, those stubborn "facts."
ReplyDeleteTrump did not manage of obstruct the efforts of those forces (NIH, Dr. Fauci, FDA, universities) all of which pushed for the rapid development of a vaccine but while was clueless, and not in the least helpful. The only thing he contributed was he was incompetent enough to not be able to get in the way.
Of course, I am surprised to see you would allow the idea Trump did not invent the vaccine in his own lab, distribute it all by himself.
It is a truth of modern America that no matter what nastiness may happen over the next 4 years, you and all those who voted for Mr. Trump will never believe anything adverse can be laid at the door of Mr. Trump or that your vote or your support of the Republicans was at fault.
You will always remember it was President Trump who always encouraged everyone to get vaccinated and to vaccinate their kids, because he never asserted that vaccines could harm beautiful children, and you will fondly recall Mr. Trump's wonderful new version of Obamacare, which is so much better than Obamacare, is still saving lives to this day.
No matter what good may have accrued in life, it's all owing to Mr. Trump and all the bad stuff is Biden's fault, and later Harris's fault.
Such clarity must be a wonderful thing to live with.
To this day, there are those who claim the only way America recovered from the Depression was that Roosevelt started a war to jump start the economy, and the NRA and all the New Deal did nothing to raise the nation out of those bleak years.
The same is now true for Trump.
After years of trying to kill Social Security and Medicare, those two programs are now claimed by the Republicans who claim to be their saviors. For Trumpists, all success is fathered by Trump and all failure by the other side.
History, as Orwell showed us, is whatever you wish it to be, like the man who beats his wife and claims to be the real victim, who was only trying to prevent her from harming herself.
And Oh, By the Way, the co-author of "Warp Speed" is none other than Tom Cotton, Republican Senator from Arkansas, last seen raising his first in solidarity with the mob attacking the Capitol on January 6. Now, there is an impeccable source for learning about the history of the efforts to vaccinate America and rescue our nation from the scourge of COVID.
ReplyDeleteWho will you be citing next? Alex Jones? Rush Limbaugh? (Oh, wait he's not available for comment.) Well, the real authority is no doubt now RFT, JR, who is, after all the authority to be in charge of Health and Human Services.
One should also not ignore the fact that there is high degree of probability that Fauci and his Nih grants may have underwritten the gain of function science that unleashed the china plague upon the world through a lab leak. It is the elites that have cost count lives thinking they were always right
ReplyDeleteAnd I include the feckless Biden Harris USA support for Ukraine that is bringing us close to nuclear war
ReplyDeleteOh, that old thing. "GAIN OF FUNCTION!"
ReplyDeleteAs if you, or any of the folks who trot that phrase out to sound as if they know what they are talking about, when you haven't a clue.
As Fauci has said, he can't be sure if it was a lab leak, but if you listen to the folks on This Week in Virology, who DO know what they're talking about and who have examined the evidence ad nauseam, the smart money is on the most common thing--spill over from bats.
But as Fauci has noted, it really doesn't matter: We should still have labs working on viruses so we can identify their genomes quickly and raise vaccines and know what we can expect from them.
And thank God the American government was working with the Wuhan lab over the years, so the genome could be identified so quickly and the Chinese scientist who did it made it available on the internet. (Of course, once the American Right started howling, the Chinese government shut down communication from its own scientists, who would love to have helped the world wide scientific community, but got muzzled.)
The whole lab leak thing is essentially anti-science. "Oh, let's not have labs, because they might leak!"
Ever hear of Ft. Dietrick, Maryland? Know what they harbor there? Makes Wuhan Lab for virology look pretty tame.
As for Ukraine, it's curious that all the big boy, tough guy Alex Jones types are now scared to death about Putin and his nukes, and happy to allow a strong guy Putin to simply roll over any neighbor, for fear he'll use a nuke.
So where does that leave us? Russia can overpower any neighbor one by one b/c America is shaking in its boots about the nukes?
So now we have Tom Cotton and that mob bleating about Russia and its nukes trying the Neville Chamberlain chamber pot approach to dealing with dictators.
The Trump approach will likely be a little different. He'll sell out Poland or the Baltic states as long as Putin deposits a check into the Trump account. With Trump, it's always about "the Deal," and the deal begins and ends in Trump's pocket.
Here are two semi official takes on Trump's response to the COVID pandemic. The first from the National Institutes of Health, the next for the National Archives (entered by Trump.)
ReplyDeletehttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9115435/
One might think these two descriptions are talking about two entirely different historic events.
And here's the Trump White House version:
ReplyDeletehttps://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-trumps-historic-coronavirus-response/
History: one long argument.
If Obama administration did one thing right it was in suspending gain of function research for three years recognizing the threat to humanity. Again another fact that is omitted in this conversation. Moreover the wuhan lab did not have the rigorous bio safety measures needed to conduct gain of function science and any future funding of that facility is now terminated. The incompetent nih and elites who claim competence may have in their arrogance contributed to the death over of a million Americans and the callousness of that action exemplifies the liberal attitude of indifference to perverse outcomes from action they think are in the best interest of society. The same for Ukraine foreign policy which if not stopped will kill many more innocent people including in the worst case scenario a catastrophic nuclear exchange. Liberals have become dangerously reckless with their arrogance.
ReplyDeleteWell, you seem to know way more about gain of function than the virologists of TWiV.
ReplyDeleteWhat, pray tell, do you mean, exactly by "gain of function?"
And what level did the Wuhan lab have? Level 3 or Level 4? And what level would/should be necessary to work with coronaviruses?
The "incompetent NIH" elites, and the university elites did something nobody, not even the elites, thought possible: they delivered an astonishingly effective vaccine (>90% effective in preventing ICU admission--the vaccine was never meant to prevent infection) in a year's time. Most vaccines previous to the mRNA vaccines had taken years to develop and then were only 50% effective in preventing hospitalization.
You echo/channel the FOX lines faithfully, but, like FOX, you do not have anything more than a superficial understanding of what the phrases you use--e.g. "gain of function"--mean.
As if using a scientific sounding phrase, "gain of function" you affect some sort of medical sophistication which is, at core, phony.
It took me weeks of listening to TWiV ,4 hours a week, to even begin to feel really comfortable with the ideas of "gain of function," herd immunity, genetic drift, cytokine storm, innate immunity vs adaptive immunity. The TWiV crowd are not political--they are virologists, immunologists and they enlist the occasional vaccinologist, epidemiologist to expand what they do not know.
I do not have the answer to Ukraine.
Neither do you.
And neither does Tom Cotton or J.D. Vance.
If there were something Americans could do, and if that answer were obvious, we would have done it already.
Nobody wants a nuclear Holocaust, but if the Russian dictator can march into any European country he wishes to claim by simply saying the words, "I have nukes," then we really have no security.
You might want to consider expanding your thinking by reading some opposing or some would say "researched" stuff.
Maybe start with Frederick Lewis Allen, and sliding into Howard Zinn (if you are really adventurous) or even Oliver Stone's history of the US.
And try writing a response without resorting to the words "liberal" or "elite" or "arrogance," and simply sticking to uncharged words and elaboration of what, when, who and how, rather than judgments on each of these notions. The judgments will emanate from the facts you marshal.
So, for example, to describe Trump's approach to the problem of how to stem COVID as a contagion, and how to treat it once it has entered an individual, you can simply quote his press conference where he turned to Dr. Brix and asked why doctors could not simply inject bleach into the veins of those suffering with COVID. You don't need to describe this suggestion with adjectives--just simply report what he said and allow the reader to decide if Mr. Trump is someone who can be trusted with regard to managing a disease.
Just saying...as we say in New Hampshire.
By gain of function I am referring to that spike protein that appears to be more refined than one would expect in natural evolution specifically the presence of an unusual furin cleavage site (FCS) in SARS-CoV-2 (10) that augments the pathogenicity and transmissibility of the virus relative to related viruses like SARS-CoV-1 (11, 12). SARS-CoV-2 is, to date, the only identified member of the subgenus sarbecovirus that contains an FCS, although these are present in other coronaviruses. I think you know that.
ReplyDeleteAs for Howard Zinn he was a self described anarchist who failed to understand the crucial role of the United States in world history and in securing justice for the oppressed. Pedagogical espousal of presentism and finding fault outside historical context while intellectually stimulating is nothing more than sophistry. Here is a basic fact the 101st airborne division of the United States has done more to help liberate the oppressed including death camps of tyranny than anarchists have ever done for all their ideological fervor.
ReplyDeleteThen you know that virologists alter viruses all the time, and in fact use viruses as vectors to deliver vaccines.
ReplyDeleteYou say the spike had "more refinements than one would expect" and the Furin Cleavage Site was suspicious for human manipulation, as if someone tried to alter its transmissibility and pathogenicity.
All this was addressed, point by point over at least 6 episodes of TWiV and found to be bogus.
As soon as you trot out the Furin Cleavage Site stuff it sounds oh so sophisticated, but that's all on QAnon and they knew nothing more about it than you do--but the TWiV guys knew way more than that, and addressed each of these charges and refuted them.
But that would require you to actually listen to the episodes. I'm not willing to spend the time to search out which episodes, as I listened to these about 2 years ago but if you go to the TWiV site, if you were that interested, it is there. I suspect you will not devote the time to do this.
Of course, this whole story on QAnon was fabricated to suggest the Chinese were secretly working on a virus they meant to unleash on the West to destroy our economies, or that they were simply unable to contain it. Or, if you are a Marjorie Taylor Greene fan, they were working on a virus which would only kill White Christians and spare all the Asians and Jews, to complement the Jewish Space Lasers.
Fact is, a lot of folks who are more at home in virology labs than either you or I examined these allegations ad nauseam, and my sophistication ends so far short of theirs I have to accept on faith, what they say is likely closer to the truth than that QAnon conspiracy that the pandemic was not simply a bad luck spill over, as so many other epidemics have been, but something nasty and conspiratorial.
And as is often true of the QAnon folks, they latch onto some detail which sounds like it could only be known but a deeply embedded sophisticate but is simply a gaudy bauble worn by someone to signify deep knowledge.
You also include what I take as references by including #'s in parentheses (10, 11, 12) but I do not see the actual journals. Again, the use of this sort of notation looks like an attempt to appear informed, sophisticated and knowing, but it's phony and until I see the actual references, it looks like a scam.
I really don't care what Howard Zinn is described as being. "Anarchist" has never meant much to me beyond someone who wants no prevailing authority, and that could fit many Trump voters.
I read his book, not a description of him. "A Peoples History..." and also Hofstadter "Anti-intellectualism..." and recommend them to you not b/c I think you'd agree with them, but because it would be an exercise in audi alteram partem. (Hear the other side.)
I'm doing the same with Frederick Lewis Allen currently. I don't buy everything he says, but some of what he says is new to me and I'll read more about it.
I'm with you on the 101st Airborne, as I saw the same TV series, and the 101st was by no means alone; it was part of a huge, concerted effort to undo dictatorship and push democracies to triumph.
I've often thought how lucky it was that Hitler survived that briefcase bomb, b/c if he had been taken out, and the generals had arranged a peace the concentration camps might never have been uncovered and the rest of the Third Reich may have been let off the hook and allowed to fester.
So Hitler's shredded trousers might be seen by some as a token of divine intervention.
In fact, Patton was running around proclaiming the Germans were the pure White guys and we should be pushing ahead into the Soviet Union to subdue those mongrel Slavic races. His death put an end to that talk.
So, sometimes the fates seem to blow in the right direction.
Mad Dog,
ReplyDeleteAnon sure couldn’t wait to inform you of your failure to acknowledge Trump’s triumphs as Commander in Chief during Covid. You’re quite right- one does have to hand it to the Trump gang in their dogged dedication to rewriting history. The 2020 election was stolen, the January 6th rioters are patriots and richest of all—Donald was our covid savior. Trump- he of the give ingesting bleach a whirl-is now credited with saving the day.
I also agree with your assertion that Anon and company believe reading a couple articles by the same “authorities” who decry “the Deep State” is the same as studying viruses and viral transmission for decades. Who needs virologists when there’s the internet. Why rely on experience and scientific inquiry when there’s hubris, hearsay and hunches to light the way. The same methodology that will surely be employed by the Trump 2.0 cabinet. And this is the crew that will be steering the ship. Me thinks we’re screwed…
Maud
It is fascinating to see how people from Ron Desantis to RFKJR extract the trappings of knowledge--e.g. "Furin Cleavage Site"--to sound impressive, but their true knowledge is paper thin and simply a ruse.
ReplyDeleteListen to Rich Condit, Vincent Racaniello, Kathy Spindler, Alan Dove and Brianne Barker tease apart and drill down into the Furin Cleavage Site thing, and you can hear the difference between precision in thought, rigorous examination and the phony, dime store expertise of the Furin Cleavage crowd.
But, of course, really knowing stuff requires a lot of effort and time. In 2020-2022 I happened to have that time b/c I had to walk my dog, and he very much appreciated the 2 hour format of TWiV, which means long walks for him. I have forgotten more about cleavage sites, and Level 4 labs and the maps which pinpointed the wet market than any of the QAnon sloths ever knew.
I did just Google TWiV and Furin and it would not take more than listening to about 3 or 4 episodes (6-8 hours) to learn all about why this virus was in all likelihood a bat to wet market to human cascade, as so many other viruses have been.
But, of course, even Tony Fauci has said he has no way of knowing, and we will likely never know, if this happened or was in fact a lab leak. But as Dr. Fauci says, "So what?" What would the result of knowing be? Shut down all the virus labs? Better to shut down the we markets.
In medicine you always learn: Do not do a diagnostic test if there is no therapeutic implication.
The same is true here: why waste time and money tracing the source of the outbreak if it will not lead to actionable results?
Fact is, we should be doing far more tracking of bats in caves and tracking other potential epidemic viruses in the wild, not less.
And where do you examine what you find in the wild?
In a laboratory.
What is revealing is when you listen to the QAnon crowd you never hear them in the setting of having a dissenting opinion voiced. Rush Limbaugh built a career on this. Just rant, but don't allow for a really spirited rejoinder.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't you just love to hear RFK JR debate Tony Fauci, or Henry Masur, or Rich Condit about the risk v benefit for vaccines, particularly the measles vaccine?
Here is just one letter following the Twiv episode
ReplyDeleteI concur with this analysis at the amino acid level. I would add, however, that even if two virus isolates have an IDENTICAL amino acid sequence, that would not automatically make one the origin of the other. In my post 10 days ago, Tackling Rumors of a Suspicious Origin of nCoV2019 , I showed that mutations in the 3rd wobble base in an otherwise conserved region accumulate as to make seemingly identical viruses very much separated in time – indeed over decades.
It is time to leave playing “who’s ur daddy” to daytime television. No known viral RNA sequence is the daddy of SARS-CoV-2. No match. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. It is all bat guano. Whatever analogy you like. A thrust of distrust and recrimination is not the path to protecting the planet from a viral catastrophe.
Bill Gallaher
And another
ReplyDeleteThis is what real science sounds like:For a precursor virus to acquire the polybasic cleavage site and mutations in the spike protein suitable for human ACE2 receptor binding, an animal host would likely have to have a high population density – to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently – and an ACE2 gene that is similar to the human orthologue.
There is one animal species meeting these 3 criteria:
The species is common with a high population density, some running in the wild;
BLASTing the short SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site PRRARS against coronavirus, there is only one species ranked above bat, and the hit is also in spike protein;
In a peer reviewed article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.25726 544), the species’ key ACE2 amino acids are closer to human than between pangolin and human. Another paper in preprint
So how many "Furin cleavage" QAnons know what a "wobble base" is?
ReplyDelete