An ugly word: “warfighter”

I’ve been hearing this word “warfighter” a lot lately, often coming out of the mouths of macho assholes like Pete Hegseth. It implies that the role of the military is simply fighting, fighting, fighting — and I’d rather see the military as a stabilizing force, less about fighting and acting more as resilient response to threats, and also as a practical investment in a region that would be squandered if they were actually fighting.

I’m not alone in feeling as if the term misrepresents what our soldiers (what’s wrong with that fine, familiar word?) actually do.

someone binged on YouTube videos of old recruiting commercials or watched “Top Gun” too many times in a row. He (or she) birthed the term “warfighter,” which quickly took root in all the government circles and is spreading slowly into conventional media as well.

“Warfighter” is perfect. It’s dripping in red, white, and blue at a time when the military has never been more popular, or more lionized.

I hate it. “Warfighter” is the rhetorical equivalent of a “Support the troops” bumper sticker or an American flag lapel pin. It reduces the complexity and ambiguity of modern national security, dragging it back to an imagined era of good wars, bad guys, and clear-cut victory. It’s hard not to hear the phrase and picture a G.I Joe lookalike waving an American flag.

Using “warfighter” destroys our capacity for reason at a time when it’s desperately needed. With strategic flops in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to take another stab at the national security paradigm. We should be thinking objectively about how to stabilize the international system, promote free enterprise, and share that burden across the full range of our allies. We need a clear strategy that Americans understand, but as well as our friends and, most importantly, our actual or potential enemies.

I have a son in the army. He’s never fought in a war. What he seems to do is plant his men into a place, build up infrastructure and facilities just in case a war breaks out, and then come home, or get transferred to another place that needs maintenance or upgrading. I would never call him a “warfighter,” because being a “warfighter” means you’ve actually failed.

Can we please get rid of Hegseth?

Speaking of Hegseth:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News.

The price tag for the project was several thousand dollars, according to two of the sources, at a time when the administration is searching for cost-cutting measures.

I’m not qualified to use the term as a hard-core civilian, but my uncles who served in WWII did teach me what a “REMF” was, and I’ve also read Catch-22 a few times.

Our government is occupied by pure evil

Law? We don’t need no stinkin’ law. We’re trying to banish children here. Kids are being hauled into court and told by a judge that they are trying to decide whether to kick them out of the country.

“The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States,” Judge Ubaid ul-Haq, presiding from a courtroom on Varick Street, told a group of about a dozen children on a recent morning on Webex.

“It’s my job to figure out if you have to leave,” ul-Haq continued. “It’s also my job to figure out if you should stay.”

The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

Enough. Enough. Shut down ICE, arrest every fucking member of the Trump administration, and give them some toys to play with while a humane judge decides what to do with them. How can that judge preside over a kangaroo court to decide on the fate of children?

Do they suspect those dozen kids are members of MS-13? Do they have tattoos?

They want to claim vaccines are a bioweapon now

Well, hello there, Minnesota Republicans. You just had to pop your little heads up and prove to the world that you are ignorant, stupid, or insane. Behold, HF 3219, the mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act:

A bill for an act
relating to public safety; designating mRNA injections and products as weapons
of mass destruction; prohibiting mRNA injections and products; proposing coding
for new law in Minnesota Statutes, chapter 609.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:

Section 1. SHORT TITLE.
This act may be known as the “mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act.”

Sec. 2. [609.7121] MRNA BIOWEAPONS PROHIBITION.
Subdivision 1. Legislative intent. It is the intent of the legislature to designate mRNA
injections and products as weapons of mass destruction according to section 609.712 and
to prohibit possession or distribution of the mRNA injections and products in the state.
Subd. 2. Definitions. (a) For purposes of this section, the following terms have the
meanings given.
(b) “mRNA injections and products” means:

(1) with regards to the COVID injections, mRNA or “modified” messenger RNA as
related to the gene altering agents. The structure was altered by substituting two
N-methyl-pseudouridine amino acids for the usual uridine components so as to elude immune
destruction of the mRNA, which then allows the mRNA that produces the pathogenic Spike
protein to exist within cells for a longer period of time;

(2) all injections or products containing mRNA or “modified” messenger RNA;

(3) any human gene therapy product for any infectious disease indication, regardless of
whether the administration is termed an immunization, vaccine, or any other term; or

(4) nanotechnology or nanoparticles that alter genes and create a biosynthetic cell
replication.

For the purposes of this section, mRNA does not mean naturally occurring mRNA defined
as messenger ribonucleic acid that is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds
to the genetic sequence of a gene.

(c) “State or local government official” means the governor, attorney general, state
attorneys, county sheriffs, and other state and local law enforcement.

Subd. 3. Crime. Whoever knowingly manufactures, acquires, possesses, or makes readily
accessible to another mRNA injections and products is guilty of a crime and may be
sentenced as provided under section 609.712.
Subd. 5. State or local government official. A state or local government official must
use all lawful means necessary to enforce this section. A state or local government official
who does not enforce or investigate a violation under subdivision 3 when provided with
reasonable evidence of a violation is guilty of a crime and subject to the same penalties as
a person violating that subdivision.
Subd. 6. Civil action. A resident of the state may seek injunctive relief, declaratory
relief, and monetary damages from the state or a state and local government official for lack
of enforcement of this section.

Yep, they are designating mRNA vaccines as bioweapons, bioweapons of mass destruction, no less, and you can get up to 20 years in prison for manufacturing, possessing, distributing, or administering mRNA vaccines. This nonsense legislation has been peddled to legislatures all around the country by a guy named Joseph Sansone, a psychotherapist with a bug up his butt about vaccines.

You don’t believe me? Perhaps you will trust a far-right MAGA site that has all the assertions.

Minnesota Statutes § 609.712 criminalizes the development, possession, or use of weapons of mass destruction, including biological agents, recombinant or synthetic nucleic acids, and delivery systems that may cause widespread death, serious injury, or disruption to public safety. The statute defines “biological agents” broadly to include any virus or genetically engineered element capable of causing disease or biological malfunction in humans.

By referencing this statute, the legislature affirms that mRNA-based injections—particularly those using modified nucleosides to produce synthetic Spike proteins or alter gene expression—fit the statutory definition of a biological agent capable of mass harm. This bill, therefore, applies the existing legal framework of § 609.712 to classify and prohibit such products under criminal law within the state of Minnesota.

According to the peer-reviewed literature and the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the COVID-19 mRNA injections have caused widespread harm and death. In fact, they are estimated to have killed more people than 121 Hiroshima nuclear bombings:

Filing this bill would not have been possible without the critical work of Dr. Joseph Sansone, who originally drafted the model legislation on which this bill is based. His tireless advocacy and early legal framework helped pave the way for states like Minnesota to take bold action against experimental gene-based technologies.

WHO estimates about 15 million excess deaths worldwide from the COVID epidemic, so according to this quack, there were more people killed by the vaccine than by the virus, as determined by abuse of VAERS statistics.

That’s enough for a bevy of state politicians, every one of them a Republican, to propose criminalizing a useful and successful vaccine.

There have been no hearings on this bill yet, and it hasn’t passed beyond the demented MAGA masturbation stage. Let’s hope the stupidity dies a quick and painful death.

A bad way to protest

In the big cities, crosswalks are equipped with those little buttons pedestrians can press to request a light change, and that also have speakers to announce which direction is safe to cross, a safety feature for blind people. Even little Morris has a set of these at one intersection, at 4th and Atlantic, if you’re ever in the area and want to gawk at our advanced technology.

It turns out that some nefarious people have figured out how to hack the message that comes out of the speakers.

On April 12, 2025 the top story on the Palo Alto (California) online news site was “Silicon Valley Crosswalk Buttons Apparently Hacked to Imitate Musk, Zuckerberg Voices” It told the story, covered by other media too, of how someone hacked into audible pedestrian signals so they broadcast messages such as “From undermining democracy, to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to making the world less safe for trans people, nobody does it better than us – and I think that’s pretty neat..”

The Palo Alto Online story continued by sharing that “City employees determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted and have disabled the voice announcement feature on the crosswalks until repairs can be made.”

There’s a glaring hole in this story and in all the reporting I’ve seen about this “hack.” The missing piece is this: Those signals have a voice announcements (and capability for audible output) because they are accessible signals that the blind community across the country have advocated and fought for for decades.

Can you tell which street is safe to cross from that message?

I’m ashamed that that sounds like an anti-Zuckerberg message that a Leftist might make. Don’t do that, people. It’s insensitive and hurts the innocent.

You know, he’s not actually ever going to Mars

Elon Musk does not dream of colonizing distant worlds. His dream is to milk the federal government of every penny he can get, and his real goal is about tapping into lucrative defense contracts.

• SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said
• The SpaceX-led group is pitching the Pentagon on a ‘subscription model’ for missile defense, sources said
• SpaceX proposes a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites, sources said

Picture Musk controlling a military spacecraft…

“Golden Dome” is just another Trump boondoggle, an excuse to throw away more money. It’s in contradiction to his claim to be improving government efficiency, which is code speak for starving the poor and throwing more money to the top 1% and to defense contractors. He’s going to pick who those contractors get to be.

One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”
SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.

I bet the defense industry is deferential — they want more money.

Because he’s actually an evil villain, Musk has another devious plan to unfold.

In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.
The subscription model, which has not been previously reported, could skirt some Pentagon procurement protocols allowing the system to be rolled out faster, the two sources said. While the approach would not violate any rules, the government may then be locked into a subscription and lose control over its ongoing development and pricing, they added.

He’ll be an obscenely wealthy man who possesses total control of a thousand military satellites floating above the United States! This sounds like the plot to a James Bond movie.

This is how eugenicists talk

This is also how Nazis talk.

In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause. While Kennedy didn’t explicitly discuss vaccines, his remarks made it clear, again, that he’ll likely use the power and money of the federal government to prop up the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He also repeatedly made crude and stigmatizing references to people with profound autism (which he calls “severe” autism, an outdated term) painting a picture of such people as a burden on society and to their families.

“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.”

“The epidemic,” Kennedy said at another point, “is real.” Autism, he added, “destroys families and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, our children.” Many children, he claimed, were “fully functional” and “regressed.”

Vaccines do not cause autism. I repeat, vaccines do not cause autism — this bogus claim has been tested repeatedly and in depth. This is a red herring, one that RFK jr will pursue at great cost to our country and to the health of our children. He does not actually care about children, his priority is defending his delusions.

The world has gone down this road before. This talk is a prelude to first institutionalizing autistic children, then sterilizing them, and then quietly, and no doubt painlessly at first, exterminating them. They’re useless, a drain on society, so why not get rid of them?

Furthermore, look at this chilling gem from the CDC report: white kids aren’t afflicted as much as black and hispanic kids. We already know this administration is racist as fuck, so here’s more fodder for the white nationalists.

RFK Jr. called today’s press conference to discuss new findings published this week in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found an increase in apparent autism rates, from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31. The report, based on 2022 data, found that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder was higher in 8-year-old children than in previous years, and higher in Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islander children than in white children.

Knut

I’ve mentioned before that my grandson is autistic. He has learning and language disabilities, but he’s going to a special school and his language is getting much better.

He loves playing with his father’s phone — he has figured out how to call me, so every once in a while I’ll get a surprise FaceTime call, and he’ll say “Hi, grandpa,” and then be at loss for words for a while, and he’ll close by saying “I love you, grandpa,” and go back to playing. He likes playing music on the phone, and has somehow figured out how to send his playlist in a text message to me. He seems to be on an Elton John kick right now, and he’s a fan of the Bee Gees.

He’s a human being, and his family loves him. How dare this incompetent, over-privileged fantasist dehumanize him?

Is blood the only alternative to comedians?

Jon Stewart exposes the over-the-top stupidity and arrogance of the president, and also the embarrassing sycophancy of the Republicans who fawn over him, but is it enough?

I think I’ve had enough of comedians covering this crisis with funny voices and schtick. When will people get serious about this horrible man? It’s clear that the rot has consumed the senate, the house (with exceptions: Sanders and AOC are not treating this as a joke), and the supreme court, but all we have left are the court jesters? I appreciate that they’re speaking up, but we desperately need someone, many someones, serious to deal with this ludicrous lump with way too much power. Laugh at him, please, but at some point we need to kick him off his throne and embarrass all the suck-ups he is surrounded by.

In the next step, this absolute clown is going to follow the lead of the Chinese president, who is even more of an authoritarian than our president. Chinese billionaires don’t get to rest easy.

The Alibaba founder [Jack Ma] had accused Chinese banks of operating with a “pawn-shop mentality”. He had also claimed that the authorities were trying to “use the way to manage a railway station to manage an airport” when it came to regulating the new world of digital finance.

These statements angered the banking establishment and reportedly reached the attention of President Xi Jinping.

Soon Ma and his close colleagues were summoned for a meeting with the regulators, and Ant Group’s flotation was halted in its tracks.

Shares in Ma’s companies fell, wiping nearly $76bn (£54bn) off its value.

After that meeting, Jack Ma was nowhere to be seen.

I don’t like billionaires, I want them taxed until they squeal, but disappearing anyone, whether they are a student protester or a bloated billionaire, is not acceptable…but that’s the direction we’re going in. It’s making me think back to my old history classes, learning about Roman emperors who would tell rich and powerful people to fall on their swords so their estates could be confiscated, and they would do it. Probably while satirists wrote comical poems and plays and scribbled graffiti on the walls, but they were still dead.

It really is time to stop laughing and stop trying to appease the tyrant. Tyrants are never appeased.

My alma mater isn’t feeling so good

I graduated from the University of Washington, which is a major research institution, with lots of NIH money usually flowing through it. Usually. Everything changed this year.

Universities are reeling. The Trump administration has executed a flurry of research grant terminations at large, private institutions like Johns Hopkins and Princeton University. In a recent court case against NIH, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the administration targeted cuts to grants about topics it disfavors like diversity, LGBTQ issues and gender identity.

Among public universities, the University of Washington is one of the hardest hit, and researchers and students have said the fallout from the cuts has upended their careers and forced some to consider leaving the U.S.

“We’re going to have a big brain drain in the U.S. of these really talented folks,” said Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, the vice dean of research and graduate education at UW Medicine. “It’s not just a switch that you flip, right? If people move out into another direction with their careers, they often don’t come back.”

In a statement to NBC News, NIH said it was dedicated to restoring “gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

That last bit sounds like something Jay Bhattacharya would say, and it’s a lie. We had “gold-standard, evidence-based science” before the fringe pseudoscience kooks took over, and whatever it is they’re restoring, it isn’t evidence-based science.

Several institutions out there around Puget Sound are important centers of Alzheimer’s research — I guess that disease doesn’t fall under MAHA’s list of good research, which mainly seems to center on denying vaccines and peddling pointless supplements and killing the scientific establishment.

“Many of us are in the same boat” as the University of Washington, said Dr. Helena Chui, the principal investigator at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Southern California. “It’s a very strong network, and it would be easy to wreck, but it took years to build.”

All this destruction in the name of making the government more “efficient” and reducing deficits, all while the Trump administration is burning money at a furious rate.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department found that government spending since the inauguration in January is $154 billion more than in the same period in 2024 during the Biden administration.

I have to ask where that $154 billion went…

Civil war in the Minnesota Republicans!

That’s some headline I saw on the front page of the Star Tribune this morning.

Fed up with attacks, Minnesota Republicans wage war against far-right group
Republicans push to “cut out the cancer” of Action 4 Liberty, a group that has repeatedly attacked elected officials and tried to replace them with hardliners.

Say what? Republicans opposing the extremists in their ranks? This is good to see…except the mainstream Republicans are only opposing this one radical group because it’s fighting against the extremism of the mainstream Republicans.

Top officials in the Minnesota Republican Party recently gathered to take an unprecedented vote: formally condemning a right-wing group that has antagonized GOP elected officials for years.

Action 4 Liberty was repeatedly attacking Republicans in the divided Minnesota House for compromising with Democrats, while also encouraging “grassroots Patriots” to oust party officers at local conventions and replace them with hardline activists.

The state GOP’s executive committee declared that leaders of Action 4 Liberty are more focused on “tearing down Republicans” than helping the party win elections: “The leadership of the organization instead works only to enrich themselves, attack those actually making a difference, and claim victories they had nothing to do with,” read the declaration brought forward by committee member Bobby Benson, who’s the state chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer.

This is a counter-move led by Tom Emmer’s wing of the party, and Emmer is an unpleasant conservative hardliner and big fan of Donald Trump. Action 4 Liberty is just an even more extreme subset of the Minnesota Republicans — they call Tom Emmer a Globilist[sic] RINO which tells you how far out these guys are. This isn’t an effort to make the Republicans a little more sane, it’s just a civil war within the party that’s going to bring more chaos to the far right, and leave them unchanged.

Action 4 Liberty has had some recent successes, which leave me unimpressed.

Action 4 Liberty has enlisted grassroots activists across the state in its effort to push the GOP further to the right, telling them to seek party positions and primary incumbent lawmakers. Its success has varied over the years, with many of its candidates losing primary battles to more moderate Republicans. But last year, the group rallied activists who ousted state GOP Chair David Hann, endorsed far-right Republican Royce White for U.S. Senate and blocked GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach from winning the party’s endorsement.

Michelle Fischbach is my representative, and she’s a horrid conservative. I am pleased to see her blocked from accomplishing anything. It is amusing that it’s her fellow Republicans who are busy standing in her way.

The DFL doesn’t care which crazy faction controls the MNGOP, since they’re going to suck no matter what.

Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement after MNGOP Chair David Hann was deposed on Saturday with the help of far-right activists, including the group Action 4 Liberty.

“The Minnesota GOP has been completely captured by the most extreme, fringe activists in Minnesota politics,” said Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin. “Control of Minnesota’s entire state government is on the ballot in 2026. Today’s chaos shows that if Minnesota Republicans regain power, they will be beholden to the same far-right fringe that now dominates the national Republican Party.”

The Minnesota GOP has not won a statewide election in Minnesota in almost two decades.