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.
