Dr. Strangelove Lives! Jack D. Ripper is Surgeon General!

"Your body is a gift from God," Dr. Ladapo tells us. 

Vaccine mandates, which is to say vaccines (which cannot work unless nearly 100% are vaccinated) are evil. "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery."

So, there we have it. The surgeon general of the state of Florida has staked his claim to make Florida patient zero for the entire country. 

Texas was giving them a run for the most medieval stance on public health, but Florida will not be undone.

 Lunatic Fringe: Jack D. Ripper & Gov Strangelove

It will take some years, but we will surely see measles killing kids, gestational rubella presenting with deaf and deformed babies--rubella is part of the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, the MMR, so no measles vaccine and you get the other two as a bonus--rising influenza and COVID 19 deaths in infants and young children.

 

Here's the best story in public health, though. It has nothing to do with vaccines, but it's all about sacrificing an individual's rights for the public health, the common good.

2025: Mad Cow  2040: Jacob Creutzfeld 

A farmer in Oregon has a cow who tested positive for Mad Cow disease. He owns 300 head of cattle and it is unclear how his cow got Mad Cow Disease, but likely it was feed contaminated with the causative agent, which is something called a prion, which is not a virus, not a bacteria. 

You cannot do a blood test for Mad Cow Disease--only see it on autopsy of the brain. So there's no way of selecting which cows of the herd of 300 have it; you have to sacrifice all 300. 

If one cow ate the wrong feed, they may all have done that. So all 300 have to be killed. 

If the cows are not sacrificed, there might be 30,000 hamburgers made from their infected meat. If their infectious agent is transmitted to human beings, the result is something called Jacob-Creutzfeld disease. But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years. It will definitely happen, just not immediately

This is the farmer's livelihood. You are violating his property rights. You are telling him to do something he does not want to do for the sake of the community, for the sake of all those 30,000 Americans out there who will eat hamburgers made from his mad cows. Not every single hamburger eater will get Mad Cow/Jacob Creutzfield disease, but nobody can say how many. 

Prion disease causes Mad Cow disease in cattle, but when human beings eat hamburgers or other stuff from infected cattle, 15-20 years later they get  Jacob-Creutzfeld  disease which presents as a person who develops rapid onset of dementia and spasmodic muscle movements and quickly become bedridden and dies, drooling and twitching in bed. A horrific death. Caused by an infectious agent. Undetectable by blood tests. Potentially thousands of unsuspecting victims.

But that doesn't happen for 15-20 years.

All our current politicians will be dead or gone by then. (Including Dr. Ladapo and Gov. Desantis.)

But if public health officials insist on culling that herd, is that "slavery" as Dr. Ladapo calls it? Is this a violation of civil rights as Governor Desantis calls it? 

We are clearly insisting this individual, this farmer do something he does not want to do--kill all his cows. We call that acting for the common good, but we are trampling all over individual rights to do it.

Or is it protection for the nation?

That thing we call "public health?"

President Makes War Against Blue States

 

So now President Trump has declared war on the state of Colorado.

He is moving the Space Command, with all its jobs to Alabama.

Could it be because Colorado is where South Park is?

No, the President says it's because Colorado voted against him 3 times, which was very unfair and corrupt.

And Alabama, where he is moving the Space Command voted for him by 47 points.

So, that's only fair. If your state votes for Trump, you get whatever he can think to throw your way. If you vote against him, you are on his bad list and are a pariah state.

Personally, Mad Dog thinks he just did not like Steve Carell in "Space Force" that Netflix TV series which was set in a Colorado mountain and made the whole idea of a Space Command look like something of a joke. And if there's one thing Mr. Trump cannot abide is being a joke. Because, you know, everyone takes him if not literally, at least seriously.

New Hampshire, it should be noted, voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. 

We can only imagine what Trump will do to us.

Maybe he'll move the Portsmouth Navy yard to Mississippi. (The joke would be on Maine, of course, as the Portsmouth, NH Navy yard is actually, across the river from Portsmouth, NH,  in Maine.) And one of Maine's senators is Susan Collins who has pretended to be independent but has never voted against Trump on anything.

Of course, it goes without saying that Trump will drop a bomb on New York, where he was convicted of 39 felonies and Maryland, oh Maryland, are you ever in for it. Trump thinks "The Wire" was a documentary, and he is not far wrong there, but he is definitely going to send in the Marines to Baltimore and Montgomery County.

We are in for so much fun now. 

Imagine if King George III had decided to send in troops to towns which annoyed him, like Boston, New York and Philadelphia. And Yorktown, Virginia.

Oh, wait. 

Smarter Than Anyone

Paul Offit, MD, the University of Pennsylvania pediatrician and vaccinologist, reminds us about RFK JR:

Secy Jack D. Ripper

1/ RFKJR does not believe in germ theory, i.e. that viruses and bacteria cause specific diseases.

2/ He believes (along with certain African dictators) that HIV does not cause AIDS. What exactly does cause AIDS in his mind is not entirely clear, but Mad Dog cannot imagine whatever RFKJR thinks does cause AIDS is something anyone ought to worry about.

3/ RFKJR believes vaccines are at best, not beneficial and, at worst, vaccines are harmful. Fortunately, for Americans since Sam Adams had his family inoculated against small pox around the time of the American revolution, to the mid twentieth century when the polio vaccine finally freed America of the specter of polio, RFKJR was not in charge.

 Luckily for Pasteur's patients in 1895, there was no RFKJR in France, where Pasteur successfully treated people bitten by rabid dogs saved them from certain death from the rabies virus. And luckily, at least for the time being, we still have rabies vaccines.  One can only imagine what combination of diet and clean living RFKJR would prescribe for your kid if she were bitten by a rabid animal.

4/ RFKJR does not like Pasteurization of milk or other liquids which might spoil, and extolls the health benefits of unpasteurized milk, and would not just make America Healthy Again, but would take us back to the 19th century in American public health. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 19th century, because Pasteur was already saving lives in the 19th century. Actually, RFKJR would take us back to before the 18th century, as small pox vaccines were successfully used even then.

5/ RFKJR  thinks swimming in bacterial ladened fresh water is good for your immune system, which is good news for certain microorganism:  leptospirosis, crytospiridium, cholera bacilli,  polio virus, hepatitis A and B viruses, giardia parasites and  COVID virus all of which are removed by water treatment plants in large cities and small towns. 

Alexandre Yersin

6/ RFKJR also likes the measles virus, which he says wards off malignant disease somehow prevents heart disease and autoimmune disease. 

Maybe, if measles kills people young, they never live old enough to develop heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disease. 

More children have died of measles since RFKJR took office and got himself a pulpit since the turn of the century.

It used to be you had to be a child living in an ultra Orthodox Hasidic community, where they don't believe in vaccines,  to die from measles. Now, you can be a typical WASPy kid from Texas and meet that fate because your parents don't believe in experts but they have faith in Trump and RFKJR.

 Measles vaccine is usually combined with rubella vaccine. Rubella contracted by pregnant women results in deafness and other fetal malformations, so we are not yet even close to being able to tally up the damage RFKJR will do to the next generation, not to mention current citizens.

7/ Another RFKJR target: fluoridated water, which prevents childhood and adult dental cavities. If you are old enough, you remember Colonel Jack D. Ripper of "Dr. Strangelove" who launched a nuclear war while complaining about  how fluoride was "poisoning our precious bodily fluids." 

We all laughed at Jack D. Ripper because he was just so absurd. 

Now, Jack D. Ripper has come to life, no longer a fictional super villain, like the Joker, but a real life Joker.

RFKJR promised Donald Trump he would be a wrecker of establishment norms in healthcare, and he has kept that promise as a one man train wreck.

Of course, we only have RFKJR because he fits Donald Trump's most important sales pitch: Experts are wrong and that includes scientists. The only people you can believe are Donald Trump and his mob.

On the bright side, eventually as thousands die from these preventable diseases, germ theory may make a come back.

But, of course, it's also possible that whatever damages RFKJR  and Mr. Trump cause, they will simply blame on Democrats and Woke ideology, and the average American will never actually know what hit him.

It will be the Trump/Roy Cohn thing: Whatever you are guilty of, accuse your opponent of that. Me, Caused epidemics to erupt? No, you!

RFKJR likes to think of a himself as a contrarian, who is standing up to entrenched scientific belief and speaking the truth to all those ossified "experts" who belief things like viruses cause disease.

Of course, the history of medicine is the history of men who were contrarians. 

That's what science is, you know?  Make an observation and then try to prove it, even if it contradicts current dogma.

Doctors have made observations, often before they had a theoretical basis to explain why those things observed happened. Ignaz Semmelweiss, in Hungary, observed that women who gave birth on the midwifery ward never got post delivery infections whereas those delivered by physicians, who delivered their babies after having visited the autopsy rooms and other wards without washing their hands, often got "childbirth fever" and died.  He was working before Pasteur's germ theory.  He insisted all doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution but he did not know what the hand washing actually did to prevent these deaths. He insulted a lot of respected physicians and they did not like it. He was drummed out of the medical profession for his efforts. He was a contrarian, but he had some numbers to prove his point. He didn't just make a claim; he tried to do a study to prove it.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Lister was insisting on surgeons washing their hands in carbolic acid, but he had some knowledge of Pasteur's germ theory and he fared better and while his approach ruffled feathers, he was eventually embraced as results got tabulated and science, which is all about proving what you say is true, not simply announcing your faith in some idea.

RFKJR is, of course, an anti-scientist. He operates on faith. He just says something is true and because he believes it, he insists it is true, no matter what studies, experiments, scientific observations tabulated in double blind studies say. He often alludes to "all the studies" or "there are enough studies," but he never actually gives the actual study, the actual reference in the scientific literature. Or, one should say, when he does giver a reference it is always to some joker who has been so thoroughly discredited his name is a joke--like the guy who said vaccines cause autism.

Science depends on results: So when polio infections nearly disappeared after widespread polio vaccines, it was scientific to connect those two things.

When Alexandre Yersin discovered a bacillus in the buboes of patients dying of the Black Plague and raised antibodies to it and treated patients with his vaccine and stopped an outbreak of Plague in Vietnam, results spoke for themselves.

All those centuries of belief about the Black Death evaporated: The Plague was not caused by bad diet, by the moral turpitude of European villagers, and it was not God's wrath against sinners in European nations. It turned out it was a micro organism you could not see with the naked eye.

Imagine that.

And a scientist figured that out. He was trained by Pasteur and he believed in germ theory and he proved germ theory was right.

But now we don't have Yersin or Pasteur or Lister.

We have Donald Trump, who wants us to feel we are better than all those scientists. We have RFKJR who wants to protect our precious bodily fluids and forget about germs and viruses.  Alexandre Yersin, actual scientist.

And we are all just as smart as anyone from some laboratory, or from some snooty university.  

We just know stuff. 

Don't that just make you feel smart and strong? 

 

New Truths

 

So now Trump is saying windmills cause cancer, (not to mention a bird Holocaust), solar energy is bad and coal is clean and oil and gas are the way to the future. 

Also, vaccines cause more death and disease than the diseases they are designed to prevent (beginning with polio, which, don't you know, is merely a sign of bad diet and sedentary lifestyle.)

COVID was a Chinese plot. It was hatched to scare the world into depression in that Wuhan lab, but then the mRNA COVID vaccine contained it because Trump was up on that research, but COVID vaccine now is bad, so forget that Operation Warp Speed triumph, and let's not do any more harm with vaccines.

Ebola is and always will be confined to "shithole countries."

Confederate generals were fighting for a genteel way of life and slavery was actually good for those backward slaves from shithole countries. 

January 6 rioters who were pardoned by Trump are victims of the deep swamp, and they were actually heroes, trying to save the country, disguised as ordinary tourists but they  simply could not find any bathrooms in the Capitol building, so they, you know, just defecated on the walls and they should be compensated for all the embarrassment, which was in large part because Congress was too cheap to fund public bathrooms. 

Our economy is going gangbusters but is in such a crisis that Mr. President needs emergency powers to seize control of the purse strings of government and impose tariffs.

A thriving economy, you see, is an emergency.

Also Jeffrey Epstein was actually rehabilitating all those fourteen years old girls who came from shithole homes, and the Donald was always a father figure to them, but he hardly knew Epstein and never visit any of his islands. And Donald never got the credit he deserved for what he did for those girls, some of whom got needed attention in his beauty pageants. 

FEMA and the CDC and the NIH and most universities are worse than useless. Ditto for medical research. Air traffic controllers should not be of the female persuasion, and certainly never pilots, because, you know, it was a female helicopter pilot that ran into that airplane at Washington National airport, which just proves the point, because, you know, a case like that says it all.

Also, the best way to stop street crime in blue cities is to send National Guard troops from Red states to stomp it out, because those boys from Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi, really know how to keep those gang members (whose families all come from shithole countries) down and under control, just like Randy Newman said in that song, "Rednecks."

In fact, the murder rates in those three states (Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi) make the murder rates in New York City look like minor league play, so those Guard units are very experienced in murder.

The further away you get from Washington, D.C., in fact the better Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller look.

And with our new Supreme Court, well, they can just retire, because, after all, they've said anything Trump does is just fine and he has the right to do it, so why should they bother hearing cases, unless it's to certify he's right about everything, which we already know, so we could save their salaries and close that vestigial branch down.

And Congress, well, once we get the Gerrymander done in Texas and Ohio and Pennsylvania we really won't need to ask much from Congress. That's 435 salaries we might just dump into the Potomac and go home. 

Why, just the other day there was a three hour cabinet meeting, which, if you watched it, you'll know, was just a lovefest for Mr. Trump, as one cabinet officer after another said how wonderful Trump had made everything from Commerce to Agriculture to Health to Homeland Security, which is really important since all those areas are scary bad in America right now and would be a lot worse if it weren't for that steady hand on the tiller in Washington, DC at the White House, which, by the way, is looking worlds better now that it's been turned into a ballroom with a concrete rose garden and gilt up with gold everywhere, but especially in the Oval Office, which really needed an upgrade, because, you know, all those losers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Obama and whoever had stunk the place up. 

And there's no more war in Ukraine--that's just fake news from the failing New York Times and NPR. That war is over. And if Donald Trump does not get the Nobel Peace prize for ending it, then the Nobel Peace prize is history, just like Twitter and there will be a new Peace Prize: The TRUTH PEACE PRIZE and it's first and ultimately only winner, year after year will be Donald J. Trump, as it should be. Because, that's the TRUTH.

So, that's the Truth. All said.

And done.

The swamp is drained.

The Man Who Would Be King

 

May 4, 1970, the day which still lives in infamy, when the National Guard arrived on campus at Kent State and inexplicably shot dead unarmed students.

Mary Ann Vecchio with dead Jeffrey Miller, Kent State

"We should not be afraid. THEY should be afraid," Trump has told his fans. 

And this is the way you do that. 

Send in the National Guard and shoot a few people as an example to the others.

Nixon called the Kent State students "Bums."

The folks in Kent, Ohio, as James Mitchener documented in his book, "Kent State," thought the university students were worse than that. They thought those students deserved it.

What was incomprehensible to us on that day, that those guard soldiers would hate students enough to shoot them in cold blood, became more comprehensible, as you read through Mitchener's pages: There was deep seeded resentment among the blue collar folk of that town, and their sons, who were in uniform with guns exercised that resentment toward the rich, privileged, pampered students. 

Those who would today be called leftist, elitist DEI advocates at universities Trump is trying to transform at best, and destroy at worst.

And so they shot them down.

It was very American, as My Lai attested.

Lyndon Johnson called out the Guard to DC after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, when city blocks were actually set on fire. 

Washington, DC 1968: Real Emergency

Then the Guard appeared with fixed bayonets in dangerous, burning parts of town, during an actual true serious emergency.

Guard in DC 1968: Actual Emergency

Not like now, when they are just strutting around the monuments and the Mall with nothing to do. There is no actual emergency in DC, at least not where the Guard is.

Guard in Trump's DC Now

The Guard is running away from the nasties. They are just there for show.

And now, Mr. Trump sends National Guard to blue cities with the same intent, maybe. 

Does he really want to provoke another Kent State?

Thus far, he has behaved only comically. 

Friends from DC tell me the Guard patrols only the safest parts of town. They are nowhere to be seen in the actual dangerous parts of DC. 

Georgie Porgie

Puddin and pie.

Kissed the girls.

And made them cry.

But when the boys came out to play.

Georgie Porgie ran away.

Children Pay the Price in Minneapolis

 

Just last week, Mad Dog happened to visit the Twin Cities, staying in St. Paul, just across the street from the Children's Hospital, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is on a hill above the hospital.

Cathedral on a Hill

Today, that hospital, and its sister hospital in Minneapolis, are trying to save children who were shot at their church school.

Mad Dog climbed up that steep hill to the cathedral and sent these photos home to his co conspirator back in Hampton, who remarked, "A simple church to minister to the poor, as Jesus did." 

Well, okay, but it is a beautiful Cathedral, and in a city which is not known to be fabulously wealthy, it surprised Mad Dog--just as those cathedrals in small European cities did.

Actually, Mad Dog had to inquire if it was Catholic, as he has always associated Minnesota with the Lutherans, as anyone who listened to Garrison Keillor would. 

So now,  the report of yet another slaughter of children by a male gunman, as they attended opening ceremonies at their Catholic school.

As so many have noted, school shootings, and mass shootings in America are now so common we have lost track of when the last one was, or where. They are not common events, statistically, but they have a special currency.

Depending on how such shootings are defined and reported, the most common number on Google is 1,300 school shootings over the past 25 years, or 52 a year, or one a week, in a country of 330 million occupying an entire continent. On the other hand, googling, there have been only 14 deaths on commercial airplane flights over that same 25 year period, which might suggest it is safer flying from Boston to San Francisco, statistically, than going to school.

Crime statistics are endlessly arguable, although it's pretty clear from virtually every source, violent crime in American cities has declined precipitately, the reasons being variously ascribed to an aging population, the advent of abortion on demand, which resulted in fewer unwanted, unloved and unattended males. But, of course, now we hear from Stephen Miller that violent crime is on a rampage, which, of course, only Donald Trump and the might of the U.S. military can constrain. One wonders whether Trump will dispatch the Marines to Minneapolis. Mad Dog doubts that, as the population there is of Scandinavian origin, predominantly, so in Trumps eyes, it could not be all that bad and in need of tanks and bludgeons, George Floyd notwithstanding.

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

There are two problems Mad Dog is pretty sure he has no easy answer for: 

1. Homelessness  and 

2. Mass shootings.

In both cases, the role of insanity, mental instability, whatever you want to call it, plays at least some role.  

In the case of the homeless, there are clearly some homeless who are homeless by choice, intractably homeless, because their own mental makeup makes them unable and/or unwilling to live indoors near or with or in close proximity to other people. Some homeless, clearly would love to live in shelters with a roof and four walls, but do not have access to that. But some, likely a small percentage, really do not want to live in a fixed address indoors. Some are simply wedded to a life of addiction which makes rent, rules, social stability simply impossible. Others are simply victims of a quasi capitalist economy with too few safety nets. Those who study homelessness seem to indicate it is a problem which might be solved by government intervention. Certainly, big corporations have shown no inclination to solve this problem as there is no profit to be made, unlike with prisoners, who can be cash cows in private prisons.

Some cities in Texas have reduced homelessness with what appears to be simple solutions: changing zoning codes so inexpensive housing can be built.

Other solutions, most notably the infamous "housing projects" for the poor in cities like Baltimore became dens of iniquity and were actually razed out of frustration, when government and citizens decided they were worse than the original problem. "The Wire" documents this story in great detail. In other cities, New York City, housing projects have been significantly more successful. There are more roofs on housing projects in NYC (>700,000) than there are roofs in all of the city of Boston. 

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

As for school shootings, the reduction in access to guns and, more likely, to bullets may be something which at least reduces the likelihood of such anathemas. There are experiments in Australia, and even in America, where efforts at gun control seemed to coincide with reductions in overall shooting deaths, but school shootings, mass shootings in general, may not follow form, inasmuch as they seem to be special cases.

Even defining what constitutes a mass shooting is controversial, but nobody has any trouble defining what constitutes a school shooting from Columbine to Sandy Hook at  Newtown, Connecticut is not in doubt. (Unless of course, you are Alex Jones, who claimed Sandy Hook never happened, and whose lawyer said, on national TV, unless you were at the morgue yourself, to see the bodies of the children, personally, you could not be sure the whole thing was any more real than the moon landing.)

Mad Dog tried to visit the Portsmouth High School not long ago, and it felt like he was entering a high security prison, with walls of bullet proof glass in panels arrayed in such a way nobody could progress rapidly through them.

Trying to ride his bicycle through the parking lot of Marston [elementary] School in Hampton, as a short cut to the beach, Mad Dog was stopped by a police officer stationed there and questioned about whether he had a child in the school and he replied, no, he was just taking a short cut to the beach. He was sent packing. 

We will likely never know what motivated the Minneapolis shooter: He ended his own life before he could be questioned.

Chris Rock has a riff about "Black crimes" and "White Crimes" and he says that when you hear someone has shot kids in a school playground, you know it's a young White male. 

Christopher Hitchens once observed that people who do unimaginably horrific things, like blowing up a bomb in a crowded market, or blowing up a school, or shooting children, are either motivated by religious fervor, which is the only thing which can justify such vile behavior in otherwise ostensibly sane people, or they are psychotic.  

Even though this most recent shooting was at a Catholic school, one suspects it was not because the kids and their teachers were Catholics, although, as has been noted, we'll never know.

All we'll know is this is primarily an American phenomenon. 

At least we perceive it as such.

Occasionally, you hear about school killings and mass kidnapping in Africa. And who knows what is happening in Asia? 

But, Mad Dog's impression is "This America, man."

From Anti-Woke to Bizarre: To Mock a Killing Bird

 "Like a tunnel that you follow

To a tunnel of its own

Down a hollow to a cavern

Where the sun has never shown."

--The Windmills of Your Mind

Alan and Marilyn Bergman

"They kill all the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Go to a windmill someday. You'll see more birds than you've ever seen in your life."

--Trump, 2019, Florida

"If you love birds, you'd never walk under a windmill, because its a very sad, sad sight. It's like a cemetery."

--Trump 2019

"A windmill will kill many bald eagles. It's true...why is it OK for these windmills to destroy the bird population?"

--Trump 2019

-M. McCarthy

"There're made in China and they kill birds and they're horrible."

--Trump 2020

"Acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Matthew Giacona, issued a letter Friday to Orsted [the windmill project] ordering it to 'halt all ongoing activities.' In particular, BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States," Giacona wrote without specifying any issues or detailing the concerns."

--The Boston Globe

"With the significant investments made in this project already and its obvious benefit to our economy and climate, the Trump Administration's attempt to halt it can only be characterized as bizarre."

--R.I. attorney general Peter Neronha

Giacona: Security Risk

Mad Dog has flown over the North Sea many times and he has always, with each new viewing, been impressed by the sea of windmills in those waters, and also he has seen the same along the coasts of northern Scotland. 

Europe gets 20% of its energy from wind. Denmark alone gets 60% of its energy from wind. China gets 11%.

In the dark north, wind is better than sun.

In California, sun is better--Kern County has a sea of solar panels.

In Texas and on the Great Plains both sources are plentiful and booming.

But Donald Trump hates windmills.

His stated reason for hating windmills is his love for birds.

But, like so much of what he says, we cannot take him literally, which is to say, we cannot believe a word he says.

Birds are killed by windows, predators (cats and predatory birds) and hunters in about that order. Windmills kill a small number of birds.

And what possible security risk could windmills pose? They do not melt down and cause Three Mile Island type risks. They do not explode. But perhaps they vibrate and scare whales. Or maybe submarines crash into them. Or maybe they threaten Shell Oil. 

"Bald Eagles must be protected to the fullest extent of the law from dangerous wind turbines," President Trump's Secretary of the Interior tells us. But the good Secretary does not mention that Mr. Trump's affection for bald eagles does not seem last much longer than his affection for his wives: 

 "President Trump called for gutting the very law that applies,  the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, calling it a burden to oil and gas producers."

--The New York Times

Of course, like most of Trump's grand insights and deep affections, this one derives from a desire for revenge. 

"When Trump bought the Menie estate, about eight miles north of Aberdeen, in 2006, he promised to create the 'world's greatest' golf course. But he soon became infuriated at plans to construct an offshore wind farm nearby, arguing that the windmills--as he prefers to call the structures would ruin the view...They generate enough electricity to supply up to 80,000 homes...Trump battled the plans through the Scottish courts then appealed to the UK's Supreme Court--but he was unable to stop the "monsters" from going ahead."

--The New York Times

The Orsted windmills, 15 miles south of Rhode Island (a very blue state) are "key to Rhode Islands economic development, energy security and long-term affordability for our residents," Rhode Island governor Daniel McKee said. 

So, this is Trump's chance to stick it to a blue state, to stick it to windmills and to suck up to  fossil fuel interests. It's a trifecta for Trump.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a withering critic of Trump in the US Senate said,

"As payback to Trump's fossil fuel backers, the Trump administration is seeking to weaponize federal bureaucracy to try and kill clean energy projects that will save Americans money and reduce the carbon pollution that is driving the climate crisis."

And, of course, we all know this is true. 

Trump knows we all understand his tariffs on Canada have nothing to do with Fentanyl.

Trump knows we all understand his strangulation of hard-earned medical research funds to Harvard has nothing to do with antisemitism at that university with its Jewish president. (More likely it has something to do with Harvard rejecting his son's application.)

It's all about revenge and a new kind of Woke-ism--we are awakened to the idea that Mr. Trump has no scruples, and no law matters. Don't tell him about the law, tell him about how long the other side can last in court, and how he can get his pound of flesh. (And that phrase, in Mr. Trump's case, should be used advisedly.)

For Trump, it's all about pay back.