RFK Jr has been a long-time vaccine skeptic. When he was up for his senate confirmation hearings for the post of secretary of health and human services, he downplayed that. But there was an incident in 2019 when he went to Samoa to spread his vaccine denial and afterwards there was a deadly outbreak of measles there. He had been chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group known for its anti-vaccine activism. In July 2018, two children died in Samoa even though they had been vaccinated and Kennedy and CHD exploited that tragedy to cast doubt on vaccines. It later turned out that the fault was not the MMR vaccine itself but that it had been improperly prepared and thus contaminated and two nurses were criminally charged and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

When questioned about that during his senate conformation hearings, he said that his visit to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. But now a letter, obtained through lawsuit filed against the State Department by the AP and the Guardian with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has surfaced that shows that the visit was all about vaccines.
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I have written multiple times before about the opioid overdoses crisis and the major role in its growth played by the Sackler family and their family-owned company Purdue Pharma. I just finished reading the excellent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe that carefully reveals the sordid history of the family in creating the crisis, something that the family went to great lengths to conceal from the public. He shows that while other companies also manufactured, distributed, and marketed the opioids that have caused so much suffering and deaths and continues to do so even today, the Sacklers played a special role in creating the crisis.

Drugs obtained from the poppy flower (opium and morphine) had long been known to be powerful in combating pain but were prescribed and used very sparingly because they were known to be highly addictive. They also carried with them social stigmas. Opium was associated with seedy underworld opium dens where people smoked pipes in dreamy semi-conscious states while morphine was a powerful drug that was injected and mainly used to treat incurable pain such as from cancer and was also used as a palliative at the end of life. Both those associations discouraged casual use.

What the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma did was develop and market a drug based on the opiod oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin. They claimed that they had eliminated the addictive aspects of the drug by encasing oxycodone in a coating that allowed the drug to be released slowly over a 12-hour period. They said that this eliminated the immediate highs and the subsequent lows of the drug that led to addiction. Furthermore, the drug could now be delivered in a tablet form, even though it required a prescription, and they made it seem like a mild over-the-counter painkiller like aspirin and acetaminophen. They marketed it with a vengeance to physicians and pharmacists, claiming that it should be the painkiller of choice for even everyday pain like that associated with sprains and arthritis and backache, and used their lobbying clout with the FDA and DEA to avoid close scrutiny of their claims by regulators in those agencies, even though they had little or no data to support those claims.
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Trump is known for his obsessions, wildly irrational beliefs that he holds on to despite any evidence to the contrary. One is his hatred of windmills. While that is well known, less known is his obsession with the technology used to rapidly accelerate fighter jets from the decks of aircraft carriers. Older ships have largely a mechanical system of catapults but more modern ships have shifted to an electromagnetic system. Trump, for some reason, hates the newer systems.

What is troubling is that he seems determined to impose his will on a new aircraft carrier that is being built and demanding that they change the system to his preferred one.
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I have become fascinated, for both technical and political reasons, with the saga over the Lincoln Reflecting Pool. That the original attempt to paint the pool blue was botched is now well established with even Trump lackey Jeanine Pirro conceding it. Trump will continue to claim that it was vandalized (even if he knows that the claim is false) but only his most deluded cult members will believe it. Pirro is pointing the finger at the Department of the Interior for not providing them with all the information thus requiring her to withdraw the prosecutions of the four alleged vandals, although it makes her look utterly incompetent in rushing to indict without having the facts. The Secretary of the Interior Doug Burghum is angrily pushing back.

Here is a review of the timeline of the pool renovations, including when Trump’s motorcade actually drove into the drained pool during the renovation. It is not clear if he drove over sections that had been painted (which would make him one of his alleged vandals) or the part that was still bare.

We tend to think that a solution will eventually be found, possibly at a high cost, because we have faith in the power of technological innovation to solve practical problems. But what if that faith is unfounded in this case? What then?
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Back in 1972, journalist David Halberstam wrote an excellent book with the title The Best and the Brightest that was a devastating critique of how Kennedy and Johnson stocked their administrations with those they considered considered brilliant people, consisting of highly credentialed people with elite educational backgrounds or who were seen as successful heads of industry. Those people took the US down a devastating path in Vietnam.

The book title refers to Kennedy’s “whiz kids”—leaders of industry and academia brought into his administration—whom Halberstam characterizes as insisting on “brilliant policies that defied common sense” in Vietnam, policies often implemented against the advice of career U.S. Department of State employees.

People who, for whatever reason, pride themselves on being extremely clever can often be blinded by their own sense of being brilliant and make decisions that are reckless and unwise. The beginning of Alexander Pope’s poem An Essay on Criticism succinctly warns about the danger of such shallow brilliance.

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Those who have achieved success in some area can succumb to thinking of themselves as being clever at everything. A truly intelligent person knows that their knowledge is both limited in depth and narrow in scope, knows that there are people with greater depth of knowledge in every area, and seeks them out for guidance. No one can accuse Trump of hiring the best and the brightest. He has seemingly chosen people on the basis of how sycophantic they are to him and they are turning out to be best described by the opposite of Halberstam’s title. They are the worst and the dimmest.
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The loony right has been obsessed with the belief that the Covid-19 virus did not jump from animals to humans but was because of a Chinese lab leak, and that scientists especially Anthony Fauci who spent 38 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and was a key figure in the fight to prevent the virus from harming more people than it did, was part of the cover-up.

Senator Rand Paul has been relentlessly pushing this notion and targeting Fauci and called him up before a special hearing. But Fauci refused to answer his questions and called him unhinged.

The hearing was centered around an assertion Paul has promoted for years: that the Covid pandemic began in 2020 as a “leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as virologists see a natural jump from animals to humans as more likely.

This belief underpinned Paul’s argument for bringing Fauci before the committee. If the pandemic was indeed started by a “lab leak”, Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided the institute with a sub-grant, he later told reporters.

His only witness was Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Trump and Joe Biden during the pandemic, and has become a political punching bag on the right.

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