Speaking of disease…

Another little change in national health policy has occurred.

States will no longer be required to report how many children they vaccinate to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to a December 30 letter to state health officials.

Maybe if we pretend that infectious disease no longer exists, it will stop happening. Crawl under your bed, close your eyes, and the horrible monster will disappear.

This is just the first phase, though. Over a year ago, Florida was pioneering the way forward.

As Florida moves to become the first in the United States to drop all childhood vaccine requirements, critics have warned of the plan’s potentially deadly public health consequences.

The move would scrap all required vaccine mandates for children, including those required for school attendance, such as polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps and tetanus.

The state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic, on Wednesday compared school vaccine mandates to slavery, calling them “immoral” intrusions on parents’ rights.

“Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right. Your body is a gift from God,” he said.

Children won’t be dying, if we stop reporting on it. Brilliant.

On a related note, I just saw this comment from Gwen Pearson that fits perfectly.

If you have ever dealt with lice, you know that they’re terribly difficult to get rid of, especially if one of the kids’ playmates is constantly recontaminating your family with the problem — if it’s happening at school, everyone in the classroom must take steps to eradicate the nits and lice. It’s the same story with measles, or whooping cough, or polio. Awareness is key, and our government wants to blind us.

It’s a pit of disease as well as ignorance

Nobody should be surprised by this:

Today (1/1/26) the Kentucky Department for Public Health announced that an unvaccinated, out-of-state individual with measles visited the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, on December 29, 2025. Local and regional health departments are scrambling to warn and inform the public.

It’s only what should be expected, given Ken Ham’s beliefs about disease prevention.

During the Covid pandemic and lockdown, Ken Ham railed against mask mandates, was involved in lawsuits against OSHA vaccine requirements and was ambivalent about vaccines. When writing about vaccine mandates and Covid lockdowns, Mr. Ham said:

Certainly, people died from the virus, although I think we are all confused at what the actual statistics are. People die every day from all sorts of diseases. But once a person dies, God’s Word tells us they will spend eternity in heaven or hell. So how essential is the church, the body of Christ (of which AiG is a part of), for people’s well-being? It is vital.

Once again, I’m wishing I believed in Hell…but only for Christians like Ken Ham.

Not even cool enough to be cyberpunk

Guess where I’ve been this morning?

I had a blood vessel pop in my eye a while back, and I had a follow-up check-up today. My eyes are still there. I still have an annoying blind spot in my right eye, just north of center, and it’s never going to go away, right up to the day I die. Oh well.

My eyes are still good enough that I can see that annoying tuft of hair rising up vertically front and center in my scalp. I’m turning into Tintin. An old, bearded, gray Tintin. So it goes.

Now I have to stop for a while — I got the usual pupil dilation eyedrops. Everything is blurry with bright star-like fringes around it, and it hurts to look at the screen.

Jesus has been arrested

It’s about time.

Jesus was running a camp for the homeless in Alabama — which sounds exactly like what the reincarnated Jesus would do — when the cops rousted him and his followers, broke up the camp, and arrested many of the people there. Personally, I don’t like the cult thing, but there ought to be a better way to deal with the poor and homeless than arresting for the crime of existing while destitute.

The religious group leader, who described himself to WBRC 6 as “the only begotten son of the living God,” recalled waking up to the warrant being executed after hearing a noise.

Now that part is just weird, but people are allowed to believe weird stuff. It’s not criminal.

The leader also told the outlet that he felt that the authorities’ approach was heavy-handed.

Yes, it was, and totally inappropriate. We live in one of the richest countries in the world, and it is obscene that so many people are forced to live in tents in a forest while Elon Musk is squatting on $700 billion dollars.

But I must remind the current incarnation of “the only begotten son of the living God” that his earlier incarnation was treated rather more harshly than he is. Not that that excuses the cops or the landowner, but we should keep in mind how the unchecked power of the state could be used.

Let Jesus go.

The scandals keep dribbling out

Swankiest little whorehouse in Palm Beach

Everything Trump says is, at best, a half-truth. He’s been claiming that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago because he was poaching his employees, which is partly true. What he doesn’t mention is that this was after years of privileged access to resort employees. We have more details published in the Wall Street Journal.

Per the report published on Tuesday, Trump sent young women who worked for the Palm Beach resort to Epstein’s home for massage sessions, a perk afforded to some members of the Florida club. The resort kept up this practice for years, even though Epstein was not a member of the club.

The outlet reported that “the house calls went on… even as spa employees warned each other about Epstein.” Employees told the paper that Epstein “known among staff for being sexually suggestive and exposing himself during the appointments.”

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell is known to have used the resort to recruit women and girls for the late sex trafficker. One of Epstein’s most vocal accusers, Virginia Giuffre, was pulled into Epstein’s orbit while working at Mar-a-Lago. Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year, had refuted accusations that Trump was involved in Epstein’s sex crimes.

The president said earlier this year that Epstein’s poaching of employees like Giuffre was part of the reason their friendship came to an end. The report dug into the much-discussed falling out between Trump and Epstein in 2003. Per employees who spoke to the outlet, Trump barred Maxwell and Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after an 18-year-old employee returned from a house call and said that Epstein “pressured her for sex.”

Mar-A-Lago was a pedophile hunting ground for years and years, and even if Trump didn’t directly rape any young women, he was an enabler who turned a blind eye to Epstein/Maxwell calling up and asking to have women delivered for “massages”.

I’m ready for 2025 to end

It’s New Year’s Eve. Goddamn, this has been an awful year.

There is nothing magical about this date, it’s just another day in a long series of them, we’re just going to change the number of the year, but there are things I’ll be wishing to happen (while having low expectations that anything will happen.)

For 2026, I would like to see the rule of law creep back. I want white nationalism to be repudiated. I want vengeance: I want the fascists in government arrested and locked away.

Is that too much to ask?

If not, throw in the end of capitalism, the collapse of the AI bubble, and the death of Trump.

Minnesotans have been following this tale of local con artists for years. It’s nothing new.

I’ve been hearing about corruption in Minnesota for many years. The short summary, since I’ve been regularly seeing articles about it in our newspapers since at least the start of the COVID pandemic, is that the state exercised poor regulatory oversight of charitable foundations, and some bad actors moved in to exploit that. The problem exploded during COVID as state and federal services were expanded to cope with the social disruption caused by the disease, and a few people figured out that founding phony charities was a good strategy for siphoning off tax dollars…a lot of tax dollars.

Honestly, I was tuning out all the news about the Feeding Our Future scam back in 2020, because it was all about the state slowly stamping out all the scammers. We’ve had a steady throb of stories in this state about crooks getting arrested for lying about these fake charities, slowly getting prosecuted, and typically getting convicted — the justice system grinds slowly, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved, and while many have been convicted, even today most of them haven’t been sentenced. When your local news is a steady drip of incremental stories about infamous con artists getting court dates, it’s hard to sustain focus. It’s been a slow cleanup of a ghastly mess, where frauds were claiming to set up meal delivery for schools, getting paid by the state, and then not actually delivering anything.

Except now it’s blowing up again because Republicans have discovered a racist angle to it. A lot of the schools not-served by these services were in poor Somali communities, with the complicity of Somali con artists, because as usual poor people are ripe for the picking with promises of free money. So now there’s a story Republicans can seize upon: poor black people were stealing our money! Never mind that state officials were aware of the problem and have been trying to do cleanup and improve regulatory oversight for over a decade and that it’s not just a Somali problem.

For instance, here’s the organizer of the scheme, Aimee Bock:

Whoops. I guess we’re going to have to round up all the white women and deport them. Just can’t trust ’em.

Keep in mind that Minnesota has a population of 80,000 people of Somali descent. Something like 80 were involved in the crime, so sure, indicting over 3 million white women in the state because Aimee Bock stole millions of dollars seems fair.

For a more thorough overview of the scheme, here’s a fast-talking white woman to compress the whole convoluted mess into 24 minutes.

One of the more crazy accusations coming out of the demented Right is the claim that the Minnesota state flag, which is blue and has a star on it, was designed to resemble the Somali flag, which is blue and has a star on it. You be the judge.