amerika

[Recusant]

Elements of my countries hierarchy are hellbound to kill the timid liberals. The Lunatic In Chief has systematically installed crackpot officials in the form of secretary of Health, defense, education,  etc. 

The secretary of health is unhinged and irresponsible yet he has power over the masses. He has the influence to dictate terms to our Center for Disease Control (CDC)

See attached:  https://www.npr.org/2025/10/06/nx-s1-5563869/cdc-covid-vaccine-recommendation?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Boyz and Gurlzs,  we inna heap of trubble

You said it. The anti-intellectualism that's been a consistent element of the American psyche for a long time has never produced positive results as far as I'm aware. Rather the contrary. This latest ascendancy of aggressive ignorance (including the hijinks of the Kennedy scion) is almost certainly not going to help the country in any way.

[Icarus]

Perhaps a mere variation ..... the incidence of whooping cough in my state is now twice what it was during all of 2024.

We do have some of the nations better universities in Florida.  Unfortunately, we also have a predominance of ignorant rubes who inhabit the hinterlands as well as the cities.








 

[Recusant]

Perhaps a mere variation ..... the incidence of whooping cough in my state is now twice what it was during all of 2024.

We do have some of the nations better universities in Florida.  Unfortunately, we also have a predominance of ignorant rubes who inhabit the hinterlands as well as the cities.

I checked it out and it's not just Florida it's all across the US, with the west coast also showing a prominent increase in cases. From the stories I saw though, Florida is leading the nation in the strength of its outbreak. As for why, there was some discussion of how the COVID pandemic had knocked the incidence of whooping cough/pertussis back because people were being more careful during the pandemic.

Of course a greater number of people not getting properly vaccinated is a significant component. One article I read mentioned that not long ago, pertussis had been considered basically eliminated because of effective vaccination programs. It may be a while before those days return, now that people have politicized vaccination. 

[Icarus]

Individual crackpots like RFK jr. and my own state surgeon general, Dr. Ledapo, need to be removed from any position of authority and perhaps shipped to the Patagonian hinterlands. They and other deniers of long standing scientific evidence are responsible for preventable sickness and deaths of too many humans.

Our anti vaxxer citizens are not evil people, they are merely dangerously gullible.

[billy rubin]

we didnt vaccinate our five children with the normal concoction of reccommended series. at the time.  som e of the recommendations didnt make sense to us. polio had been almost completely eradicated in the USA, and the only people being infected were those whe were spending time abroad in regions of poor hygiene, and americans who had contracted it from the vaccination itself. both were low-risk, but in our case higher than non-vaccinating.

we didnt vaccinate against hepatitis B because my infant children werent sharing needles or engaging in unprotected sex. or chicken pox, because it was relatively low risk. seems like we did vaccinate against measles, which can get out of control quickly.

 no we didnt, says he wife, but some of the kids are vaccinated against measles  as adults.

all the kids have tetanus vaccinations, and i seem to recall a TB vaccine in there somewhere.

im a firm believer in the importance of vaccines in preventing infections, but i dont believe in the knee-jerk one-size-fits-all approach. we did it on a case by case basis.

chicken pox was a good example. its relatively low-risk in healthy kids, but you have to watch for encephalitis. the government recommendations for the vaccination at the time were-- i kid you not-- that avoiding the disease let mothers continue to put their young children into day care so they wouldnt miss any work days. all our kids went through it unscathed, as i did, but if they hadnt i would have had them vaccinated later as it can be serious in adulthood.

ivebeen vaccinated against smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid fever, cholera, tetanus, covid 19, and who knows what over the years. didnt have one against dengue fever, which almost killed me.

[Recusant]

The US risking "loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad"? I'd say that ship has sailed. There is hope that it won't devolve into a failed democracy with Christofascist minority rule, but it's well on its way. Among other things the US Supreme Court getting set to essentially repeal the Voting Rights Act, giving the Trumpists a huge advantage in congressional elections.

"U.S. on Path to Authoritarianism Warn Ex-Intelligence Officials" | New Civil Rights Movement

The Steady State, a network of nearly 350 former U.S. Intelligence Community officials, says its members have applied the tools of their professions to determine that the United States is headed toward authoritarian rule. Calling its overall findings "sobering," the group points to President Donald Trump's executive branch overreach as the "primary" cause, and warns that, without organized resistance, that rule could become permanent.

In the executive summary of their newly-published, 29-page report, "Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline," The Steady State "concludes—with moderate to high confidence—that the cumulative effect of multiple reinforcing dynamics is placing the nation on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism," which they define as "a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control."

[. . .]

In a scathing rebuke, they write that "the primary driver of the U.S.'s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach. President Donald J. Trump has leveraged emergency powers, executive orders, federalized military forces, and bureaucratic politicization to consolidate control and weaken checks and balances."

Without "organized resistance by institutions, civil society, and the public," the group warns, "the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion, risking further consolidation of executive dominance and a loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad."

[Continues . . .]

[Recusant]

Close allies putting some space between themselves and the US. Rightly so. Trump has already been alienating them; it doesn't pay to ignore something like that. Even if the US manages to elect a Democratic president in a few years, there's no guarantee it doesn't revert to full-blown idiocy four years later.

Hegseth, the Trumpist "Secretary of War" has ordered that high-ranking US military no longer attend international security conferences. He says that such gatherings of allied military and associated endeavors promote "the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States." 

"We will never fucking trust you again" | The Line

Late last month, attending the Halifax International Security Forum, I was having the damndest feeling. Can you have déja vu for something that you only experienced via fiction? Because it was kind of like that.

The fiction in question was a novel by an Australian, published during the Second Iraq War. Anti-American sentiment was running rampant all over the world. The premise of the novel is out there in the realm of sci-fi — America disappears. Specifically, Americans disappear — some mysterious wave of energy scours most of North America clean of life. Virtually all of the U.S. is wiped out; most of Canada and Mexico, too. Somewhat to the surprise of the anti-Americans, this does not result in an improvement in life on Planet Earth

[. . .]

Let me give you an example from an on-the-record session that I can quote directly. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (Democrat-New Hampshire) was the head of this year's CODEL (US Congressional Delegation) and had a one-on-one chat with moderator Nick Schifrin, an American journalist from PBS. You can see it all here. But things got really interesting when Canadian senator Stan Kucher got up to ask a question. It's at the 18-minute-ish mark of the video linked to above. Kucher rattled off various criticisms of the "peace deal" that has been proposed for Ukraine, a deal that was dismissively described at the forum as a real estate transaction. After making his own views on the proposed deal clear (he's not a fan), Kucher said this to Shaheen: "We've talked about allyship. What should the allies, who uphold democratic values, in the reality that the United States has walked away from them ... what should the allies do?"

Pretty blunt by the standards of most Canadian senators I've ever talked to. I expected Shaheen to reject the premise of the question.

She didn't.

[Continues . . .]

[billy rubin]

blunt.

and completely on point.