Come on, horseshit is the obvious answer. It doesn’t snell as bad, and you get a much bigger serving!
Not me. Back in 2015, I was saying Buchanan was our worst President, followed by Hoover. W was in third place.
Now everyone’s moved down a rank.
That’s what I thought was going to happen after Trump 1.0. Yet here we are suffering through Trump 2.0 because 77 million people thought 1.0 was just dandy.
Yeah, people say, “History will remember what a bastard he was,” but Andrew Jackson’s still on the twenty dollar bill, isn’t he?
George W Bush behind Franklin Pierce, “The winner of many a hard fought bottle”?
Pierce was an alcoholic and a doughface but he didn’t falsify intelligence reports in order to start a war which he then lost.
Now I’ll grant that Lyndon Johnson also did that. But Johnson ranks ahead of Bush because of his civil rights record.
From a few days ago:
Fauci allies, Covid vaccine officials get ax at NIH
As an anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years attacking Anthony Fauci and sowing doubts about the successful effort he led to develop a Covid vaccine.
As HHS secretary, he’s exacting his revenge.
Kennedy on Tuesday fired Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and reassigned at least three of Fauci’s longtime colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, as part of a purge of senior officials involved in the government’s development and distribution of the Covid vaccine, eight people familiar with the matter said.
Fauci’s wife’s position involves not vaccine research but bioethics:
Dr. Christine Grady’s contributions are both conceptual and empirical and are primarily in the ethics of clinical research, including informed consent, vulnerability, study design, recruitment, and international research ethics, as well as ethical issues faced by nurses and other health care providers.
The firing and concern for ethics and protecting the vulnerable make it a two-fer, I imagine.
He sure as hell contributed to the Civil War happening.
And now, this:
If approved by Congress, the plan would represent a huge blow to efforts to understand climate change, says Craig McLean, OAR’s longtime director who retired in 2022. “It wouldn’t just gut it. It would shut it down.” Scientifically, he adds, obliterating OAR would send the United States back to the 1950s—all because the Trump administration doesn’t like the answers to scientific questions NOAA has been studying for a half-century, according to McLean.
…
Such NASA cuts would require ending the operations of a huge host of earth science satellites. They could also result in the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which has thousands of employees and is one of the agency’s premier centers for earth science research. The cuts would also end plans for Mars Sample Return, the DAVINCI mission to Venus, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is almost fully assembled.
…
Other NOAA divisions would also be hit. OMB is seeking to radically rework the next-generation geostationary weather satellites planned by the agency’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). That includes cutting its planned atmospheric pollution and ocean color instruments because, as the document puts it, the satellites will deliver exclusively “weather” data. It could also cut the infrared sounder, which tracks changes in the vertical distribution of temperature and moistures, catching storms before they form, and a lightning mapper.
The degree of contempt that these people have for not only basic scientific knowledge but valuable and safety-critical applied science is unbounded, all because they want to create a Potemkin village of denial about basic environmental observations that disagrees with their facile and demonstrably wrong ideology, and incidentally make not only the United States but the entire world data blind to a potentially existential threat.
Stranger
Donald Trump is a man who looks at the Taliban and wishes that he could run a group like that, and wants the US to look like Afghanistan but with him as a warlord. That seems like the only rational explanation for the unhinged attempts he has made at transforming this country since he took office.
The Christian Nationalists who support Trump would certainly love a Christian version of the Taliban in the US.
(Bolding mine)
As many did in 2016 and 2024.
And so we all got dogshit. Or horseshit. Whichever is worse.
ETA: Bolded should be “refuse the plate, period”, in the above quote. It’s not showing up that way on my screen.
Well, they are doing it. Most of NOAA is getting cut including anything to do with climate surveillance, storm weather prediction and modeling, and any kind of public outreach. The Fifth National Climate Assessment Report has already been taken offline in violation of federal law (backups are available on other sites but no future assessments will be forthcoming) and thousands of climate and meteorological modeling experts are soon to be unemployed, with many projects which are in process and near completion abandoned, and data analysis which farmers, mariners, aviation, urban planners, et cetera depend to for planning no longer available. So we can ‘save money’ for tax breaks for the überwealthy.
Stranger
Thank Og for UKMET … at least American hurricane forecasters won’t be flying totally blind.
But still … aren’t there billionaire interests that the NOAA was helping to protect? Especially in the energy sector? Climate change denial is worth those preventable severe-storm losses, I guess.
The Met is a great resource which does a lot of independent modeling and analysis as well as some really excellent outreach and education, but it is fundamentally dependent upon data mostlhy acquired from NASA and NOAA satellites. Without that data they’re very limited in what they can do from a global model validation and verification standpoint.
“Climate change denial” (or minimization) is so entrenched in American politics at this point that you sound like some kind of radical doomsayer if you actually talk about realistic projections of climate heating. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is the only senator who routinely speaks in assembly about the severe impacts of climate change we will be facing in coming decades and the need for surveillance and adaptation. The billionaires know that climate change is coming and they don’t really care (especially the ‘energy sector’ which despite the advances in renewables is still heavily based upon extraction and processing of hydrocarbon fuels). The SiVal tech bros are all building bunkers and envisioning a fantasy future where they live inside of walled cities with vertical farms, insulated by private paramilitary groups paid in ‘crypto’. They imagine that their money will insulate them against exceeding planetary boundaries and the collapse of agricultural, manufacturing, and social systems, and at least in the near term they are mostly right, at least until their private security realizes that they have nothing to lose by turning on their masters.
Stranger
ETA: this is in response to @Atamasama before I realized how old his comment about Christian Nationalists was.
I’m not a climate ‘activist’. Though I completely understand what is going on. It’s probably too late to make significant changes.
My Wife and I did buy a new/used house. And it’s well set up for solar PV panels. We bought a system. The system should take care of 90% of our electrical needs. But new house and all, you don’t know, until you know.
Our other house is passive solar. While very high in the Colorado Rockies, that gets buried in snow, the passive solar (sun) does excellent work (an altitude bonus, very clear skies. On the other hand, the sun 'el kill ya). We are trying to sell that place.
Daniel Swains forum Weather West is a great resource for California , as is he. He is a well trained climate scientist, and very clear in his presentations.
He does You Tube “office hours” during disasters in this state. He correctly called our debris flow disaster here in Santa Barbara, (altho many had fire evactuation fatigue and did not pay attention) Will be watching for his views on the Texas flooding.
One can help sponsor him as well, as some of his funding is drying up. (f*ing gop/trmpers)
10 am Pacific time You Tube presentation by Dr. Swain