Taking Stock of How Very Fucked We Are

This has been a bad week for the future of (gestures at everything) the world. Decisions have been made that will fuck us for years, if not forever. As the savagery of the administration of Donald Trump, our rapist president, snowballs, as the 10,000 person concentration camp warehouses are purchased, as corruption of a scale that should make Warren G. Harding come back from the dead and sodomize Trump with his teapot dome happens on a daily basis, as the rights of speech and assembly and press are routinely flushed down the law enforcement toilet, it's become clear that if Trump isn't going to do anything good for the world to make sure he's remembered, he may as well wreck the joint so he's never forgotten, like a wound that will never heal. 

How fucked are we? Extremely. Just two examples:

We're fucked when it comes to fighting disease. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (motto: "For some reason, we're run by people who seem to hate both food and drugs") declined to review the application for an mRNA flu shot from Moderna. I'm not gonna pretend to know the science behind it, but mRNA vaccines are more effective and more easily updated, and a flu version would save a fuckton of lives. Oh, and the reason the FDA gave, having to do with how Moderna conducted its clinical trials, is a fucking lie. We can go fuck ourselves with our older, less effective vaccine, which you should totally still get, that our Department of Health and Human Services will not encourage anyone to get.

The extra-ironic part of the whole thing is how much the United States has invested in Moderna in order to get mRNA vaccines going. That includes billions of dollars in grants in 2020 to get a Covid vaccine done, which was done quickly because of all the research before, again, thanks to the United States. Remember Operation Warp Speed? Remember who was president then before he realized that he needed the love of the antivax nutzoids? That's fucked in the head, in the ass, everywhere.

How fucked is it? Even before this, because of the decisions of noted toilet seat coke snorter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Moderna had decided to not invest in any late-stage vaccine trials. Said the CEO, "You cannot ‍make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market." So that means that mRNA research on, say, vaccines for Lyme disease and HIV, is done at Moderna, as is, likely, the development of more effective cancer therapies. Also, the trials for a general norovirus vaccine, which would help prevent the next pandemic, may well be scuttled. It's just fucked. And it's one of those things that fucks us far into the future.

The question is also what is going to be permanently fucked, as in we'll never recover. Sure, we may one day catch up on where we should have been with medical research. But some shit never gets better. It's like the difference between breaking your arm and losing it in a giant meat grinder. In one of those situations, you are never going to be the same, no matter how cool your robot arm is. 

So it went when Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, another Trump administration official who looks at least 15 years older than he really is, smarmily announced that Trump was undoing President Obama's 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases that led to regulation of emissions. It was an attempt by the Black president to do some goddamn good on the climate crisis, so, of course, in a White House filled with people for whom science is something you do when you saw the head off a beached whale for your own "research" and totally not so you can feel what it's like to fuck a whale skull, it had to go. 

The absolute dickish press release on it said, "The Trump EPA chooses consumer choice over posturing to climate change zealots every time." Apparently, simply believing in climate change makes you a zealot. I was going to quote from the press announcement from Trump and Zeldin, but just reading it made me want to throw the computer across the room. Just know that at one point, Trump dismisses any concerns about public health effects with "Don't worry about it because it has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam, a giant scam. This was a ripoff of the country by Obama and Biden, and let's say Obama started it and got it rolling" and then he talks about prescription drug prices because of course he does.

It's the beginning of the end for the Clear Air Act, which is where the power to regulate greenhouse gases was found to come from by the Supreme Court in 2007. It's also of a piece with all the rollbacks of regulations and undermining of clean energy research and projects, with Trump's weird antagonism to windmills driving public policy. Instead, the Pentagon is being forced to purchase coal as a payoff to fossil fuel donors, and that's like saying, "Fuck satellites and cell phones. The military will now be investing in Morse code tappy things."

The laughable part of this EPA shit is the claim that it will save $1.3 trillion, a number that is an insult to asses to say that's where it was pulled out of. That will all come in the form of cheaper cars, which apparently is more important than a future for the planet. Emissions will grow until they are 3 times what they are now, according to one analysis. Beyond climate crisis weather, pollution will cause more death and illness, shit that, like measles, we thought we had mostly figured out how to move beyond (with some notably awful exceptions, like Cancer Alley in Louisiana). One estimate says it will cost $4.7 trillion in added expenses over the next two decades, and that's not even counting for the loss in research and innovation on other sources of power. As we're lapped by the Chinese and, well, just about every other industrialized economy on solar and wind and nuclear power, it will make us into the backwards third world shithole filled with dumbass white people, which I assume is when we'll be great again.

So, yeah, it's hard sometimes to comprehend how overwhelmingly fucked we are. But you gotta take stock and see where we are as we try to figure out how to unfuck some of this.

Trump's Goddamn Name

One of the more unpleasant things about living in the NYC area used to be that you were damned to see shit with the Trump name on it. That changed starting with Donald Trump's first election to the presidency. Then the people who lived at Trump Place on the west side of Manhattan pushed to have his big goddamn name taken off the front of the condo complex, and it was. They call it "Riverside South" now, which is what it was before Trump dick-stamped it. Used to be when you drove down the West Side Highway in the 70s, you passed a "Donald J. Trump" Adopt-a-Highway sign. That's gone, too. A lot of shit that Trump made agreements to hammer his goddamn name on no longer have that name there due to contracts not renewed and the fact that property values go down if that name is associated with it. 

It's one of those things that demonstrates what a moronic ego monster Trump is. He wants you to think his name is still associated with luxury (even if the supposed luxurious shit was never even remotely special) and success (which, well, other than tricking rubes into voting for him, raping girls and women, and laundering Russian oligarch cash, he isn't). And he wants some sense of permanence, a way to stay in this world even as he slips his morbidly obese mortal coil when he finally dies long after his expiration date.

Late last week, news came out that Trump made an offer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a man who would fold with a full house in his hand. Back in October, Trump froze spending on an immensely needed new train tunnel between New Jersey and New York City, as well as expansion of the Second Avenue subway line. He then told Schumer he would release the billions of dollars if Schumer could get Washington, DC's Dulles Airport and New York's Penn Station named after him, Donald Trump. You got it? Critical infrastructure to the nation's largest city, which was delayed because another dickhead Republican, Chris Christie, had killed it, is being held hostage because the president of the United States needs to have his goddamn name plastered on it. He can't just do it himself, as he did with the Kennedy Center (which he really couldn't do by law, but it's not like anyone is gonna enforce the law with this chucklefuck) and the US Institute of Peace, just forcing his name on the buildings like they're 15 year-olds at Mar-a-Lago. 

Seriously, our simpleton president thinks his goddamn name needs to be on anything he's associated with, like he's spraying the furniture like a cat. It's like he saw "Obamacare" and thought, "I want that," forgetting that "Obamacare" was originally a derisive name that Republicans gave the Affordable Care Act because they thought it would fail. Now, like with his fake "university" and his garbage steaks, Trump keeps forcing the government to put his name on shit. There's Trump Accounts, which opens an account with $1000 in it for "every American child born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028." The funds don't come from Trump. They come from the US Treasury (with some donations). But Trump Accounts are what they're called, you unpatriotic twatmite. And there's TrumpRx, which purports to be some fantasy of cheap drugs with prices negotiated by the federal government, except the prices are easily lower elsewhere, and you aren't buying drugs from the government. No, that would be socialism, you commie leech. TrumpRx gives you a coupon with a discount code to take to your pharmacy, just like Good Rx or your local supermarket flyer. Indeed, Good Rx or Mark Cuban's website are cheaper than TrumpRx, which just seems to exist to funnel funds into Trump's gaping maw.

There is something so gut-level pathetic here, like Trump's pathological need to be loved has merged with his carnival barker scammer self and his fear of dying without leaving anything worth a fuck on this earth. But the other element here is the one that overrides everything, and that is his mob boss belief that everything he does needs to be some deal that is advantageous to him personally. "What are you going to do for me?" is the way his lizard brain operates, even if doing something for him has nothing to do with things like congressionally-appropriated funding for a desperately needed project. The corollary to that is "What have you done for me?" and that came out in a couple of dumps on Truth Toilet. There, he posted that he was approving disaster relief funds for Tennessee and Mississippi, both states, as he points out, "I won three times!" 

We can't live like this, with the whims of a single insane man determining who wins and who loses, with him insisting that we all must call everything associated with the federal government by his goddamn name. But we also can't live with this pathetic loser desperate to be recognized as having done something great because to do so is to reward him for lying. He made up wars that he "solved" to get his name on a Nobel Prize. He claims to have done "more" for the country than any president ever, a demonstrative falsehood as prices climb higher and unrest is growing in the streets over the ICE savagery. He put his fucking flabby face on the annual national parks pass so you have to carry around his scowl for the year. He wants a fuckin' coin made with his dumb head on it. It's all part of a propaganda effort to take his incompetence and violence and corruption and turn us into one nation under him. Jesus fuck, even Victor Orban isn't this needy. Even Vladimir Putin doesn't spray his name on anything he can like an anxious toddler scrawling his barely-readable letters on walls and toys to claim them as his own. Even Xi Jinping isn't tossing his shit at everything to leave a smear to show he was there. 

Trump's goddamn name will need to be purged when he's gone. Jackhammered away, cut out, or bureaucratically removed. When he dies, we need to rid our nation of his monuments like they were Confederate statues made of Nazis.  I'm tired of that goddamn name, its ubiquity, its use as a weapon, its omnipresence. It's not marketing. It's abuse. 

Maybe we do need to leave his name on something, just to remind ourselves of what a shitty, destructive thing we did to the world. Maybe a monument to the defeat of MAGAism, a half-melted statue among a bunch of eternally burning red hats. Or maybe, if he ever is incarcerated for the insane number of crimes he's committed, we can name the prison he's held in after him. The Donald J. Trump Penitentiary for Traitors, War Criminals, and Donald Trump. 

Why Are We Not Purging People in the Epstein Files from the American Government?

I’ve been trying to write something about the newly-released tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files for the past couple of hours, and every time I tried to come up with something worth saying, I'd come across some absolutely terrible thing that's repulsive or chilling or in someway stomach turning and, you know, I don’t even know what point to make anymore about all of this. We know it’s awful, we know it's fucked. 

I mean, like you read emails between people who are procuring "young girls" for Epstein, you read this from someone to Epstein's assistant Leslie Groff, where someone was obviously grooming a girl but then failed to close the deal and says, "I have to tell you that unfortunately my meeting with the girl didn't go well yesterday. I knew this young girl for a while. I thought she is easy going and open mind. I couldn't talk with her over the phone about anything. So, we finally met and I realized that she is very conservative," and you just wonder how many people fucking knew and you figure it must be dozens, at least, and I'm talking beyond the victims.

I’ll come across something that that reveals just what a complete utter fucking douche Jeffrey Epstein, and everyone around him was and how all of these people were just begging for his approval and blessings and access to his "pussy network," as one puts it, and I just want them all burned to the ground, even if that includes Bill Gates or Noam Chomsky. Oh, sure, I suppose I could say something about about the various people that have come up. There's Epstein messaging Deepak Chopra at what I assume is the Aspen Ideas Festival, another circle jerk of celebrities and rich pukes, "my very close friends joi ito. head of mit media lab, ehud barak former defense ministere and prime misiter of israel are both in aspen with you, i have sent them notes that you are one of the family, they will find you if you don't find them first." The fuck does that mean, "one of the family"? Creepy shit right there. And why can't he fucking type? It's like one hand is on his dick at all times.

I could bring up all of these other scholars and other people who were some reason enamored by this fucking guy. The thing that gets me is Epstein was shit, a garbage person. His own messages and emails are loaded with dudebros and chicks all talking about pussy. Literally. One email exchange is Epstein asking someone whose name shouldn't be redacted, "Any pussy today?" and getting a "thumbs-up" photo in reply. Another is Epstein asking someone else (a woman, I think), "Any dick or pussy yet?" In another long text exchange, he brings up what he'd say to Congress: "With sasse calling for a senate hearing, I guess I can mimic kavanaugh. Yes senator I like pussy , pussy, yes. Don't you senator." Another email is just him sending someone a link to a photo of "huge pussy lips." Or this exchange where someone asks him, "What would be the 3 questions you would ask to Paul Allen if you were meeting him today?" Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. He gives two serious ones and then "third questions would you like to see my pussy." It's just the shittiest people acting in the shittiest ways all the goddamn time, like they never grew after hitting 12 years old, like most men with any money or power. (Yeah, I put "pussy" into the search field for the files. Someone had to.)

It's not just that people flattered him for money. They really truly believed (and perhaps were) friends with him, ready to defend him even when the worst charges were coming out, like Chomsky did in February 2019. We get all of these just unexpected people in there like Roger Schank, who was an early AI theorist, because Epstein believed he was part of some intellectual vanguard, working with great "thinkers" to lead the way to the future, which I assume included being able to round up and fuck all the young girls he wanted, you know, part and parcel of the insanity of rich people thinking they can get away with everything because they are rich and enough fucking idiots think that endows them with some kind of supernatural insight and that convinces most of them that they really do have that kind of insight and that's how we get people like Epstein and Trump and Elon Musk.

So I guess what I keep coming back to is we know who’s involved here. We know that, in some way, at some level, perhaps extensively, starting with being a child rapist, Donald Trump is implicated. We know that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is in there planning to visit Epstein's pedophile island. There's Musk, Steve Bannon, and all these people that are still somehow involved in our public life, and yet there’s no price, and I can’t get my head around that. I mean, I understand that rich people don’t get punished, but I also understand that rich people don’t get caught. That’s the thing. That’s why rich people get away with it. They don’t get caught. Everybody here is caught. 

Or at least accused, and accused with such detail and, in Trump's case, such consistency of stories, and so publicly (and we don't know what else still waits in the millions of pages that haven't been released, let alone the video recordings and photos), that it boggles the mind that we're not talking about a complete meltdown on Capitol Hill, if not the entire goddamned country. I remember when Barack Obama sat in the church where Reverent Jeremiah Wright preached and because Wright had occasionally said some controversial things, it almost undid Obama's candidacy in 2008. I remember Republicans (and some Democrats) losing their minds over the association and his presence in the space where Wright was. That proximity was enough. That was just with someone exercising multiple First Amendment rights. Here, it's with a motherfucking pedophile pimp who was convicted of hiring a child prostitute and was arrested for a shit-ton more a few years later. If you hung out with that guy, if you sent women to work for him, how does that not reflect poorly on you?

At the very least, Democrats and the Republicans who have made this a huge issue should be demanding a special counsel to investigate all of this, but that would mean independence from Trump and that shit just doesn't happen in this government. They should still push for it. And it should be in the front of voters' minds: you give us a majority and we will purge this government of the pedophiles. We will get justice for the victims who were treated so horrifically.

Wouldn't that be a delicious irony? According to QAnon, Trump was supposed to bring down the pedophile-filled Deep State of Democrats. Instead, he installed the pedophiles and protected them. And Democrats are the ones who could bring it to an end. Emphasis on "could."