I already didn’t take this seriously, but now any Trump supporter who is complaining about “DEI” and wants us to “return to Meritocracy” is just a hopeless case. RFK being head of the HHS is as far as you can get from merit based governance and it’s not even a joke. It hasn’t been a month yet and I am afraid it will only gets worse from here. We have an awful 4 years ahead of us. Let’s just hope there won’t be another pandemic with someone like RFK at the helm.
I can’t believe that I keep underestimating the venality and outright indifference to the public good of the present day Republican Party. I honestly believed there were at least four GOP senators who would make the obvious sane decision in this vote. The party’s moderate voice reason is now Mitch McConnell. This is where the country is.
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The lunatics clearly have taken over the asylum.
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Illustrates that the dumbing-down of the American voter has no bottom. I have always been in awe of the resilience of our country, but I fear that Lady Liberty may have been debased a bit too far this time…
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One flicker of hope I still hold: Trump’s actions will prove so ruinous to the country in so many ways that they will lead to a Reaganesque landslide in favour of the Democratic Party.
That they will be ruinous I have little doubt. That enough voters will realize this, and that the Dems won’t find a way to fuck up such an opportunity, I am rather less certain.
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. . . and are trying to extend the asylum’s grounds all the way from the 51st state to the Gulf of America.
Maybe its just me but I’ve always thought that her affect in the Statue of Liberty depiction gives the impression of Xanax t.i.d. (Consider all that she has seen in her life—and now this.) I suppose I should defer to the professional judgment of @Faizal_Ali.
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Yup, this is far from guaranteed. What if the new right-wing media environment is able to convince a sufficient proportion of the public that the reason why everything worsened under Trump is because of [insert any out-group]; e.g. Trump was unable to deport enough people because of the courts and congress, and the only remedy against this is to give Trump [or his replacement] even MORE power unrestricted by checks and balances? That’s a real possibility that we should be watching out for. When people are angry and losing hope of their future, they are willing to hand over power to a despot who promises change, even if it means risking making things worse, at least things won’t be the same.
IMO, the only hope for the democrats is them going full on populist ‘Berniecrats’ and start to promote young people in their ranks who support working class policies; and who aren’t afraid to engage in non-traditional media environments (yes, go on Joe Rogan). If they don’t change and don’t feel the need to change, it doesn’t matter if their policies are better than that of Republicans. People want change.
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Also wanted to add this to my OP
Of all people, Mitch McConnell seems to be the only voice of reason among the Republican party. He is a childhood survivor of Polio and has direct experience of vaccines saving millions of lives, hence why he voted against RFK’s nomination.
But I can’t say I am sympathetic to McConnell. He is also responsible for why republicans value power over principle; e.g. he blocked Obama’s nominated judge for SCOTUS and also hinted that Republicans will do everything they can to leave the vacant spot open for as long as they have to until they can get a Republican in the White House (this was before Trump became first time president).
In other words, people like McConnell broke politics and thus created an environment where people like Trump are able to thrive.
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Somehow quite appropriately, RFK Jr. looks like what you’d get if you microwaved Mel Gibson. He also sounds like it.
Not the most serious point I know, but there’s also some irony in the fact that they’ve found one of the most unhealthy-sounding people to be the american equivalent of the ministers of public health. I can never fully let go of the sense that he’s 10 seconds away from a stroke when I hear him speak.
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Oh absolutely. The “old” guard republicans were the corporate criminals who created this entire political environment in the first place, by their decades long campaigns of undermining both the funding, functioning of, and trust in all public institutions. And all so they could further their only real goal of maximizing pro-corporate profits and politics.
Principled conservatives never existed beyond the grassroots level. They would always lose elections to people able to out-do them in conservative races. Those being willing to say or do anything and everything to further scare religous and conservative american voters with feminsts, communists, n*****s, immigrations, homosexuals, etc.
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What about Xavier Becarra, RFK’s predecessor as head of HHS under the Biden administration?
According to you, what specifically is bad in the following executive order?
Yet, here he is, at 69. Not so bad for such an unhealthy-sounding person!
There’s nothing wrong with having good intentions in and of itself. But the measure of a good public health official (or a government body) isn’t their ability to write lists of things they claim they want to achieve. What you’d want is, well the same thing you’d want if you were an employer looking to hire a new worker. You don’t just look at their application to see what they write about themselves and their claims about how good they believe they will be for your company. What you want to look at is actually their CV, which hopefully shows:
- Demonstrated competence (do they have relevant education? Did they get good scores?).
And perhaps more importantly: - A solid history of achievement in the relevant field.
The people now in charge of public health in the US have neither. They are crackpots. The man in charge has gotten children killed with his anti-vaxxer nonsense.
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This has got to be a setup.
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Do you think the ones previously in charge were luminaries? And if yes, why is it the case that the US is the country in the world that has spent the most in healthcare expenditures, yet has performed so poorly in terms of population health? Isn’t there something wrong here that need to be fixed?
There sure is! There isn’t enough time in the day for me to adequately rant about this, but I can hit the highlights.
- A For-Profit Health Care that serves shareholders before patients. It’s not that they do not want to provide quality care for all, but they must complete to stay profitable rather than compete to provide better care.
- An insurance industry that essentially skims money off the top of health care costs. They are highly incentivized for health care to cost more.
- Health care administration - all the services that process the bills and insurance claims to make a complex system “easier” for the patient. They are highly incentivized to make it hard file claims and pay bills, which make this service indispensable (and increases patient costs). It’s also a shield for insurance companies to avoid paying claims.
The amount of money spend on healthcare in the US is HUGE, and the HC industry doesn’t care much about RFKjr so long as they are left alone to rake in the profits. We NEED a single-payer system. (Ironically, Tru,p might actually be in a position to make a single-payer system into law, but I don’t see that happening.)
Disclaimer: I have benefitted from this system for much of my career, in that some of those profits when to fund research efforts. My current role is less dependent on hospital profits and more on NIH funding … which is also taking a drastic cut. The 15% cap on grant overhead costs means 30-70% less being spent on cancer research, among other things. That’s another topic.
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Read the full thing. There isn’t anything ‘specifically’ bad about it
My comment was still awaiting approval, but I see there is a problem with this line here.
The verb ‘Read’ is meant to be past tense with me being the subject.
I read the full thing. There isn’t anything ‘specifically’ bad about it
Just to avoid confusion.
‘Whatabout’ him? If he is not an HIV-denier nor an anti-vaxxer, that would already make him better than RFK Jr. by a long mile.
Of course, people like RFK Jr. shouldn’t be used as a benchmark to judge someone’s competence related to public health. It’s like comparing someone to arsonists when deciding whether they are qualified to be a firefighter… but then here we are… with an ‘arsonist leading the fire department’.
I read the full thing. There isn’t anything ‘specifically’ bad about it… nor is there much ‘specifically’ good since there is not much ‘specific’ to be found within it. It’s worded in a way that is like saying ‘We are going to do good things and not do bad things’, which sounds neat but what ‘specifically’ are they going to do to address public health? That’s not stated. In fact, the only planned actions that are mentioned is them planning to provide an ‘assessment’ within 100 days of the EO publication and based on that assessment they are going to submit ‘strategy’ to the president within 180 days of the EO publication, whic promises to:
…address appropriately restructuring the Federal Government’s response to the childhood chronic disease crisis, including by ending Federal practices that exacerbate the health crisis or unsuccessfully attempt to address it, and by adding powerful new solutions that will end childhood chronic disease.
But again… exactly what ‘federal practices’ are they going to end and what ‘powerful new solutions’ will they advocate for? Are the recommendations going to be sound? We will have to wait and see.
What doesn’t give me hope is RFK Jr. As mentioned, he is an HIV denier. He claims AIDS is caused by “the gay life style” and “poppers” specifically. He is also a well-known anti-vaxxer. Despite his insistence of not being against vaccines, he has flat-out stated that “there are no safe and effective vaccines” on a Lex Fridman podcast. What is he going to do when there is an outbreak of a disease for which there is a working vaccine available?
Oh wait… there already is one of Measles… because of course there is.
RFK Jr. will probably not promote vaccination in order to prevents such outbreaks. And RFK Jr. doesn’t exactly have a stellar record with Measles specifically… and that’s putting it mildly. The infamous Samoa 2019 outbreak which followed a sharp decline of vaccination, which in turn was due to anti-vaxxers abusing the death of 2 children who died in 2018 because nurses incorrectly prepared the MMR vaccine by mixing the vaccine powder with expired Atracurium (a muscle relaxant) instead of sterile water. The muscle relaxant was the cause of death, not the vaccine itself. However, anti-vaxxers don’t care about the facts and they spread the myth of vaccines killing children on social media from 2018 to 2019. One of them was RFK Jr. who visited Samoa in June 2019 and he also talked to the prime minister. Only a few months after RFK’s visit, the outbreak began eventually killing 83. To this day RFK Jr. doesn’t show any regrets or changing his tune after this event.
There are also various others crank beliefs to be noted. RFK has dabbled into outright Germ theory denialism; repeating the classic Germ-Denialist claim that on his death bed Louis Pasteur recanted his own Germ theory and admitted Antoine Béchamp’s Terrain theory was right. Related to this, he promotes raw milk over pasteurized milk; despite the fact that the former is not more nutritious but substantial increases the risk of infectious disease. There are also other problems I have, like his simple solutions to complex problems, e.g. replacing seed oil with beef tallow, but these are rather minor compared to the aforementioned issues.
Another reason for my lack of hope is Trump and the republicans, who also don’t have a good track record for promoting public health either. Trump promised to come up with a replacement of Obama care, but all he got was - quote - “concepts of a plan” - end quote - years later. The republicans still they tried to repeal Obama care anyway even without something to replace it, which luckily did not work because of the epic thumbs-down by Obama’s very opponent, John McCain. One of those instances when a republican did a good thing, but is also hated by their own party for it. Furthermore, Trump’s administration restricted dietary science used to update food guidelines. Specific discussions that were omitted were those on:
…sodium levels or considering the effects of red meat or ultra-processed foods, even though these are a growing part of Americans’ diet.
and
…any recommendations concerning the effect on the environment of large scale beef consumption.
And while I am on this…
The Trump administration also rolled back health and nutrition standards on school lunch food (originally championed by Michelle Obama), allowing more pizzas, fries and burgers while providing less fruits, veggies and whole grains. The people previously in charged were definitely not “luminaries”, but a lot better than Trump and RFK Jr.
Yes, it’s the health, insurance, and food industries which operate to maximize profit even if it comes at the expensive of people’s rights to health care and adequate nutrition. This is one point that RFK Jr. would likely agree with when asked, but there are two things to consider.
(1) There are people like Bernie Sanders who have raised awareness of these issues, but without the pseudo-scientific crankery baggage of the caliber that RFK Jr. carries. That’s not to say I don’t have any problems with Bernie Sanders, e.g. he is anti-nuclear (and so is RFK Jr.).
On a related note, during the recent confirmation hearings, Bernie Sanders raised some of the very same points that you are making here to RFK Jr., e.g. the fact that the US spends more money per capita on health to other developed nations, while still having lower life expectancy, which is especially the case for working-class people who are dying 6 to 7 years earlier than the top 1%. Sanders asked whether he would agree that health care should be guaranteed by the US government as a human right. RFK Jr. responded with the following:
In the way that free speech is a human right? I would say it is different, because if - with free speech it doesn’t cost anybody anything, but in health care if you smoke cigarettes for 20 years and you get cancer, do you - you are now taking from the pool…
Very telling how RFK Jr. suddenly re-frames public health issues, putting it on personal responsibility instead of the for profit industries. So, according to people like Bobby, if you get sick “That’d be a you problem” and ‘don’t make it a financial burden on the system’… Oh brother, this guy STINKS!!
(2) The second point to consider is the fact that RFK Jr. has firmly aligned himself with the very ilk who are starkly opposed to his own principles. Specifically his principles that are good also IMO. For example, RFK Jr. is well known for being an environmental activist prior to when his anti-vax phase kicked-off. He advocates renewable energy to tackle climate change. Both environmental protection and climate change are related to public health too. Yet, RFK Jr. is now buddies with people who don’t think these are real issues. Trump thinks climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese. In 2016, RFK Jr. said Trump supporters ranged from “belligerent idiots” to “outright Nazis”. He even stated that Trump is a “threat to democracy” and compared him to Hitler and George Wallace.
Why was RFK Jr. willing to compromise his pro-environmental principles that motivated him for many decades? My guess… RFK Jr. was desperate to become relevant in government. He first tried running as a democrat, then he tried as an independent, but eventually caved in and endorsed Trump… which proved to be the path of least resistance to power that RFK Jr. was looking for. Bobby is an opportunist.
Also, FYI (since you made this relevant). Bobby takes testosterone… which, despite bobby’s instance to the contrary, is indeed an anabolic steroid.
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Arsonists usually know a lot about fire. RFKJ is more like a cuttlefish leading the fire department.
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Egads, I thought that RFK Jr being a fount of misinformation was established and settled a few months ago. But the ‘usual suspects’ are still trying to ‘do their own sketchy research’.
It’s like visiting the ‘memory unit’ of a nursing home.
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