*** edited ***
If you start bashing MY President i will remove
you from my friends list…
I’m going to start posting stuff to FB and tagging this onto it, just for grins. 
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Experts say that food prices will be among the first to rise in response to the new tariffs (especially on Mexican imports.) So I imagined a more interesting world where there was a “Total Tariffs within the above:” line at the bottom of the receipt from Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc.
It would force MAGAs to ask, “Why aren’t the other countries paying these tariffs like Trump promised?”
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The United States will identify the cause of autism by September, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Thursday, setting a deadline for an answer that has eluded scientists for decades.
Never say Reuters doesn’t have a sense of humour.
Kennedy sets September deadline to identify cause of rising US autism rates | Reuters
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RFK Jr news from the Washington Post:
Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. has suggested that Americans who eat doughnuts, guzzle sodas or smoke should not be provided with health care.
‘If you’re smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, should you expect society to pay when you get sick?,’ the leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement asked.
In a CBS interview this week, the nation’s top health official noted that it is the American people’s choice to ‘eat doughnuts all day’ and he would not to take it away.
However, he went on to say that doughnut and soda lovers cannot expect ‘society to care for them’ since there is possibility for them to get ‘very sick’.
Kennedy had previously said that he wants to stop the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps, from subsidizing unhealthy foods, like soda .
He has also repeatedly called soda ‘poison,’ and has been one of the foremost critics of the substance.
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My favorite part:
“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy said."
. . . unless it is linked to climate change, ivermectin, Vitamin A supplements, unpasteurized milk, or brain worms.
Kennedy’s brain worm could not be reached for comment.
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That might make some sort of, admittedly very callous, sense in a country with socialised medicine, where “society” actually paid for health care. In the US, with predominately private health care, it would seem to make no sense whatsoever.
What is RFK Jr even proposing? Forbidding people who smoke, eat doughnuts or drink soda from getting (and thus paying for) health insurance? I’m sure that would go over well with the ‘Freedom Caucus’, let alone the general public.
It’s like the Trump Administration is staffed pervasively by people lacking an inner censor – so blurt out any old mad thought without stopping to make sure it makes sense first.
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I wonder what sort of drop in attendees there will be for various academic conferences in the U.S. this year. In my working years, so many scholars from Europe (and lesser numbers from Mexico and Central America, Australia, Taiwan) attended the major academic conferences. But I’m seeing so many horror stories like this of people experiencing crazy Gestapo-like conditions. Some tell of finally being released but after being detained for many hours after already being exhausted from a long international flight.
It reminds me of the stories people brought back after travels to Germany in the late 1930’s as the environment became more frightening. (Needless to say, what had previously been a popular tourist destination became a country most stayed away from. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be apprehensive about travel there.)
I’m only at the very early research stage but I’m finding myself looking into possibly becoming an expat with friends in Indonesia or Malaysia.
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Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it
(archived full version)
A few days before they were to submit a scientific paper together, an evolutionary biologist in Europe received an unexpected request from two co-authors in the United States.
After much thought, the co-authors said they preferred not to risk publishing at this time. One had just lost a job because of a canceled government grant; the other feared a similar fate if they went ahead with the paper. Although both were legally in the U.S., they worried they might lose their residency if their names appeared on a potentially controversial article.
The subject: evolution.
[Hat-tip: PT]
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More tariff flip-flopping:
In statistics we refer to this as a “significant trend”. 
In States where tourism is a major source of revenue, this is going to cause pain.
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There may be many causes of autism, but the chief cause of the “epidemic” is straightforward and obvious – the criteria for describing someone as “autistic” have changed and loosened a lot in recent decades. When I was young, one had to be basically nonverbal to be called that. Now we have people giving fluent lectures and writing books about how they are autistic.
Maybe RFKJr will figure this out and announce that by fall – that most of the epidemic is due to the loosening of the criteria for declaring someone autistic. More likely he will come up with crackpot stuff and announce that HHS has validated that view.
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I have no doubt the experts have explained all this to RFK Jr. repeatedly but he prefers to waste the money and make a show of it.
Yet, even if some expert had NOT explained this to him personally, what you described has been well covered by the media for years. I don’t see how an informed person could miss it. (I know. RFK Jr. has chosen for a long time not to be informed.) TV reports and even popular magazines and websites are constantly describing how doctors, teachers, and others are much better prepared to identify people on-the-spectrum and get them assistance.
Meanwhile, it saddens to me to think of a number of young people I knew back in the 1960’s and 1970’s who everybody described as “That kid ain’t right” or “That kid is weird” and they simply had a different life circumstance which we now call Asperger Syndrome (now considered part of the Autism Spectrum Disorder.)
I assume that under this administration there will be far fewer resources (and motivation) for schools to assist such students. I hope I’m proven wrong.
Meanwhile, although this deportation story is sad enough:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/14/trump-presidency-news-tariffs-deportations/
… I heard something on the radio about Trump saying he wants to start sending some convicted U.S. citizens overseas to similar prisons. Why is Trump against the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs overseas but is fine with outsourcing prison staff jobs?
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The Trump Administration is apparently deporting people at random now:
How long, I wonder, before they accidentally deport an American citizen because that citizen have the wrong color skin, and they didn’t bother to check further?
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Like they haven’t already?
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Pff why are you whining about this gang rapist? Look at him, look at his beard. Rapist. Gang member. Drug cartel hitman. Cry more liberal tears please. Gonna find some cultural Marxist college professor to tell us he’s a good boy now? Or some deep-state Biden stooge never-Trumper judge that hates america to want him back?
Stop being such a crybaby and just accept America is becoming Greater Than Evertm. Bigly. Nobody knew it could get this big this fast. It makes people’s heads spin.
/sarcasm
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Speaking of “America is becoming Greater Than Evertm. Bigly”, I just watched a Youtube video on how the tariffs could kneecap Boeing (large amounts of imported parts, years-long process for certification, even if they can find local manufacturers, huge exposure to countervailing tariffs for planes exported – Chinese government has already ordered Chinese airlines to cease accepting new Boeing planes).
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Are we tired of winning yet?
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