Employees have been instructed to pull publications from review, not communicate with state health departments, and cancel long planned trainings.
These decisions will well and truly kill real people.
It’s scary to think what they may be able to accomplish with zero guardrails and essentially unlimited power.
This happened because Trump's administration essentially copy and pasted Heritage Foundation materials rather than carefully think through a realistic budget.
If you spend full budget for the first half of the fiscal year, but a final budget gets passed later that cuts your budget in half- you get no remaining money for the year, and then end up firing everyone, instead of half. This is why the federal agencies have the policy of immediately acting on the lowest proposed budget, instead of waiting to see what happens.
> For anyone unaware of us government agency structure. CDC is part of the department of health and human services ( HHS ) which has also frozen everything (see the NIH news as well). > Employees have been instructed to pull publications from review, not communicate with state health departments, and cancel long planned trainings. > These decisions will well and truly kill real people.
These are the executive orders we are talking about.
Are you strong enough of a person to address this? Or must you insult people's intelligence by dishonest accusations?
Also, what does ABC have to do with anything?
Adults can differentiate between direct and indirect causal relationships…it is basically the cognitive development definition of adulthood (c.f. Work by Piaget)
The fact Trump offered to pardon Ross was enough to make me feel incredibly guilty for not voting for him. I was surprised he found a way to get to me like that, but reality and practical negotiation can be quite persuasive over ideology.
I suspect Trump had at least one important thing to enough people that is 100% achievable and physically real-- a part of a wall, a pardon, a $2000 -- that he could beat out someone offering ideas/hopes/dreams.
There's not much to it. Trump wanted the libertarian vote, libertarians wanted Ross free.
He was pardoning a bunch of treasonists, he could clip in a little bit of good on the size.
Or is does he never make a mistake, never cause problems, never harm the people he says he's ready to mess with?
Source: Me. I voted Trump and proudly so, didn't deliberate in public much because noone was going to listen and nothing was going to change my vote anyway. Make America Great Again.
https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/kdhe-unprecedented-tube...
https://www.kake.com/home/health-officials-facing-unpreceden...
KHSB is the Kansas City NBC affiliate and KAKE is the Wichita ABC affiliate.
And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.
I think this + bad luck, really.
Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.
And yes. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but was such a common rationale for those who voted Trump. I'm shocked that he did not in fact keep a promise thst would have benefitted the working class.
- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.
- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.
- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.
Etc, etc.
There are cough other reasons for that as well:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...
And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.
[1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
[2] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.
Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662
Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:
* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%
* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%
* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%
* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.
* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.
* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries
* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%
Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.
(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...
Also, if look up biological weapons research papers from Wuhan, you’ll find that many were done in collaboration with the US, and with US funding.
Blaming Trump for COVID-19 makes no sense for other reasons too. There are so many other people to blame first. Fauci for funding GoF research at WIV through EHA. The CCP for being secretive and denying there was an outbreak for a while and not allowing investigations in Wuhan for over a year. The WHO for repeating CCP propaganda like claiming there was no human to human transmission roughly fourth months after the first scientists fell ill at WIV. Do you remember Pelosi and democrats downplaying the pandemic and accusing those who wanted to close borders of racism? She apparently had no regrets about all that:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-no-regrets-initial-c...
With all of this how can blame be placed on Trump? If anything his Operation Warp Speed program bailed out the planet from pandemic (with great work from vaccine manufacturers of course).
No. Either vote for one of the third party candidates (doesn't much matter which one), or vote write-in for a fictional character or "none of the above" or something.
The states do track undercount votes, But they don't mean anything in terms of the law that decides representation.
If we're ever going to claw ourselves out of this (or any) mess, we need ranked choice or something like it. The giant douche / turd sandwich dichotomy needs to end, for everyone on any side of the political spectrum.
Did you expect something else?
No matter what system of voting we use, unless we go back to only white landowning men can vote or something (doubt we want to do that), you can’t avoid the fact that 160 million+ people vote together for President.
The most viable solution looks less like changing to ranked choice and more like returning more governing power to lower levels of government (state and local) where there is less competition
If you're given the choice between two bad options, you aren't really given the choice. There's massive cross-aisle support for a lot of things (proper healthcare, more support for working families, lower inflation, holding the banks to some kind of standard, reducing corruption, etc.) that we could actually move the needle on if our votes mattered, but because the two parties have us between a rock (whoever we identify as our party) and a hard place (whoever the other guys are) it doesn't really matter who we vote for.
Now, I'm willing to concede that what you're talking about might be a thing, but there's really no way to know until we actually fix what we have and see if that becomes a problem. We've never really tried what we're supposed to have in the modern era.
Frankly, I'd like to see some format of direct democracy rather than representative. Always seemed a little like an obvious grift to me.
So many american leftists just seem to ignore that and it makes things very difficult.
You're right, that the closer you get to that core of federal power the more resistance you come up against, but once there's a powerful enough popular groundswell (that is I suppose, and if and not a when) you can move to mass protests, general strikes, guillotines, etc. This is why it's important to talk about, esp. around those who don't really know about it yet.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
I often am blank on things where I cannot find any information and so cannot have an imformed vote.
To be clear, voting systems should have explicit options for protest votes; an explicit "I reject all candidates" option. Unfortunately, ours does not, by design; a blank ballot instead means "I endorse all candidates". Pretending otherwise will not change this.
Jeebus, I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but dems the times we live in I guess.
I try to rephrase it for them: you're not picking a team, you're picking your OPPONENT. And who do you think you're going to have a better chance of even picking the battlegrounds against?
I think it's related to the frustratingly common idea that a person's political involvement begins and ends with voting. We really have to do a lot better at educating people about how political involvement can be an anytime thing, not just every four years. Successful lobbyists (and those who employ them) have long ago figured this out, we need to make sure the common person does, too!
It would also force candidates to address a base rather than trying to just be 'not the other one'.
* 1/3 of adults voted for Trump
* 1/4 of the entire population voted for Trump (though, that's a bit of weird example since kids can't vote)
I’m so tired of this nonsense. If y’all bothered showing up for state and local races, you could even change elections in your state. But that would like, take effort, so I get why you’d rather shitpost about how worthless it all is.
Sorry, that reads, to me, like post hoc justification for nonsense. The only people who talk about voting not mattering are people who don’t vote - not people who skip one or two boxes on the form. Maybe you’re different.
There's a big difference between a country that has 50% support of a person and 25% support of a person.
There's a whole lot of people who strongly disdain both parties, on that basis and others. They are not remotely proportionally represented by either government or media, but they do exist and they don't support this administration.
Btw, there are all kinds of electoral solutions to the two party bind which you seem to have entirely accepted. Neither party will ever willingly bring those in.
the numbers are what's important, people. (sorry (not sorry) for the angry sarcasm)
TB is a very ancient, very scary disease that's co-evolved with us. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that large parts of modern medicine were invented specifically to get a handle on TB because it has historically ravaged entire populations when left untreated.
Because there's only been one reported car in 2025 in Kansas, I'd be surprised...
Maybe we can call them the “Duplicate Centers for Disease Control”. Sure sounds efficient.
Coordinating between them is the CDC's job. Having them all individually coordinate with everyone else would be wasteful and silly.
The general media consumes sources like this, obviously.
Doctors read bulletins like this so they're aware of what's going around and it can inform their clinical practice.
Typical media sources the CDC weekly publications.
Well, used to, anyways.
Where do you think typical media got their information from?
1. Is there an argument here that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report's unbroken publication record is so important it should switch votes?
2. They probably still filled the report in, so there is a chance it eventually gets published. No need to abandon hope yet.
This is all taking place on an online forum hosted in the US and managed by US entities.
And you (and like minded individuals) expect to not see US politics?
I appreciate that the US has an outsized presence on the intertubez, but you also need to realize you're first of all talking in the midst of Americans.
The ones that were published in the weeks prior to the current administration weren't talking about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak either.
So we're not really discussing the "US federal government department agency publishing (or not) data on that outbreak." Someone's implying that's what happened, and then people are spinning off into political discussions without even looking into the link they provided to see if that was actually the case.
It's not just going off topic to discuss politics. People are actively spreading misinformation to justify going off topic to discuss politics, and lots of other people are joining in without bothering to check if what was claimed is actually true. Two-thirds of the comments now are using the claims about the MMWR to discuss politics, and it doesn't look like anyone actually looked at the MMWR to see what it actually is.
My point still stands that if someone doesn't want to see conversations regarding the US, politics or otherwise, maybe he should stay out of threads regarding the US and maybe also find other forums not hosted in America and managed by Americans where the vast majority of participants will be Americans.
It's like taking a trip to Mars and complaining that all the dirt is red, y'know?
Online communities need constant self checking and introspection to not go off the deepend. This isn’t like Reddit where you can unsubscribe from the crazy big politics subreddits or unfollow people on Twitter. I still think the old ideal of HN where we have some higher goal than yet another US political rant forum is still worth fighting for.
> I couldn't care less beyond seeing what everyone was talking about in a thread about tuberculosis in the US.
I was interested in the issue in Kansas because I read the article. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
>. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
Patient zero starts somewhere. It's not national news per se when a few individuals die of an unidentified disease either.
I don’t care enough anyway I just use HN less and less every year like all the old userbase. The only old usernames I recognize at the top of threads these days are the ones who like the politics stuff (I could list at least 4-5). Just my own nostalgia for a dying small community of thoughtful nerds.
Sure it is. This is the internet, Hacker News is just one website someone could choose not to patronize among countless others.
If you don't want to see US centric conversations, don't patronize American websites like Hacker News and certainly centralized American services like Reddit or X.
Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.
But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.
His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
I'm not sure what you gain by telling yourself that.
I could just as easily assert, without any evidence (i.e., like you), that every single person who didn't vote loves Trump and supports all his policies.
> If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
That has nothing to do with whether people support him. 20 or more (exact number varies on the reporting) women say that he sexually assaulted them, he was convicted of one sexual assault, and yet white women still voted for him.
This is like a cliche from the chess world, where the guy who lost the game, then does a postmortem to convince everyone that he was actually winning the whole time. "Except for that one little blunder."
The Dems keep losing losing losing, but rather than figure out how to fight better, you instead try to convince yourself that people support you. And then you go back to debating Israel v Palestine or trans pronouns while our own country descends into tyranny. (Literally - many progressives I know.)
Meanwhile, Trump owns the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court!
And you didn't really offer much feedback here. Which is part of the problems. I don't really care to bicker over single issue details like this.
Yeah, I'm not the one unable to read evidence.
Polls also repeatedly show people dislike a large amount of his policies.
And it's a fact he didn't even get 50% of voters to vote for him.
And, the people have no power now. It's the administration we have to look at if we want to do anything actionable.
There's always the midterms. Politicians shouldn't get too complacent if their party screws up.
That mindset makes sense on a surface level. So it's not stupidity. But the lack of introspection on if Biden made things worse or simply stopped things from getting much much worse was definitely not taken into account.
I'd personally call it stupidity. But it doesn't mean people are stupid overall.
Speaking as one Trump voter among many others, I knew exactly what he accomplished in his first term and what a hypothetical second term could look like. I also understood what his campaign platform and promises were and by and large I support them, including significantly reducing the federal government overall across the board.
What we are seeing now with January 6 and pro-life pardons among other pardons, the new United States DOGE Service, exits from Paris Agreement and WHO, mass deportations of illegal aliens and securing of the southern border, tariffs on imports and especially on countries who aren't amicable, removal of DEI and other equity-based programmes from the federal government with extreme prejudice, among many many other policies and mandates are all things I expected and wanted to see when I voted for Trump.
No doubt there are voters who voted Trump simply along party lines or other reasons, but just as much are voters who gave the election some thought and voted Trump.
If you don't agree with me then that's unfortunate, but my vote isn't yours.
If you can't understand that, let me put it in simpler terms: That was a "My heart goes out to you!" salute and I am happy for Musk for being happy that we the American people won the election against all odds.
Let's not forget when the convention stage was exactly (not almost) an odal rune.
https://auschwitz.info/en/welcome/announcements/artikel/lese...
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
One thing you could do to see what other people think the same is to video yourself doing this exact motion, then send it to your co workers telling them your heart goes out to them.
So no, that is not a Nazi salute unless you are going to be fair and count all such gestures from everyone as Nazi salutes.
People are free to hate Musk if they want, that's their prerogative; but if they are going to be disingenuous about it I am going to call them out and lose whatever respect I might have had for them.
>“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Ironically, it is "The Party" (the Left) telling me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears and submit to their programming that it's a Nazi salute. Fuck that noise and I hope you realize the irony of your argument.
Every time someone tries to support this they use stills, and when you pull the video of the events, its clear that—unlile Musk—while there may be similarity of hand position at one point, the actual gesture (which is a movement, not just a momentary position) is not the “Roman”/fascist/Nazi salute, while Musk's is exactly that salute.
Considering the vast majority of the hit pieces use stills of Musk, onus is on them.
>while Musk's is exactly that salute.
You can make practically anything into Nazi hate speech if you drill down hard enough putting any and all inconvenient factors aside.
There's plenty of valid shit to criticize Musk for, but if you're going to evoke Godwin's Law[1] or Reductio ad Hitlerum[2] to justify your distaste for him then I'm going to roll my eyes and move on. That shit didn't work before and it certainly isn't going to work now.
So, you haven't seen the videos of each for yourself somehow? Well, let’s correct that.
Musk video, with more uncontrovesial Nazis for comparison.
https://x.com/BartoSitek/status/1882081868423860315?t=8F0hL-...
Video of some of the gestures from Democrats usually referenced in stills as being just like Musk’s salute
https://x.com/ExposingNV/status/1881647306724049116?t=CGKtg0...
I reiterate: Evoking Godwin's Law or Reductio ad Hitlerum is not going to work.
It didn't work when Harris called Trump a fascist, nor all the times before that, and it won't work now either. It defies context and it's not even funny let alone accurate.
In the first video all the gestures from all the people are so similar that if they had been wearing motion capture suits and you gave any random person that motion capture data and asked them to pick out which one was not a Nazi salute they would do no better than chance.
The guy doing it would need to be an actual Nazi, for starters. Musk is many things and avenues of criticizing him are plentiful, but a Nazi in the real sense he is not.
People call Musk (and many many others) a "Nazi" simply because they hate him without paying regard to what a Nazi even is. Nazi is a dirty word, you call someone a dirty word to hate on him. It's all meaningless, and even worse the overuse of Nazi in this manner dilutes its meaning that most people eventually stop caring being called one.
Even symbols like the Iron Cross and Jerusalem Cross that have nothing to do with Nazism are labeled Nazi symbols, again diluting the value of calling someone or something a Nazi.
Stop calling everyone and everything you hate or even just slightly disagree with a Nazi. Seriously. It only signals a surrendering of thought given to any better arguments for your cause (Godwin's Law) and alienates you from everyone outside your small echo chamber. The worst chain of events is that if this keeps up, we absolutely will see actual Nazis come into positions of power and nobody will care because the boy cried wolf far too many fucking times.
I'll repeat the question you didn't answer - are you comfortable doing this exact motion on video and sending it to your coworkers, family and friends? Do you think there might be fallout or repercussions?
I'll ask another question. Is there anything that he could have been done differently to make it more like a sieg heil? To me, it looks identical. What is missing that would in your mind make it a nazi salute?
Finally, if you did come to the conclusion that this was a nazi salute by the richest man on the planet at a political rally seen by the entire world, would that change anything for you personally?
Sure, why wouldn't I? I'm not fucking Hitler and anyone worth caring about knows that.
>Do you think there might be fallout or repercussions?
No, other than from people looking to deliberately cause problems where there are none.
>Is there anything that he could have been done differently to make it more like a sieg heil? To me, it looks identical. What is missing that would in your mind make it a nazi salute?
Actually think, speak, and act like an actual Nazi.
>if you did come to the conclusion that this was a nazi salute by the richest man on the planet at a political rally seen by the entire world, would that change anything for you personally?
If I thought of this as a Nazi salute that also means he was doing many other things to demonstrate he's a Nazi, so no: Nothing in my thought process would change.
Proper judgments of a man's character are made over a sufficiently long period of time, one singular act isn't going to move the needle in a significant direction one way or another.
If I thought Musk was a Nazi now then I would have come to the conclusion he is a Nazi a long time ago (and to be clear we are speaking in your hypothetical scenario).
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/europe/israel-holocaust-memor...
So even though Elon Musk went to a rally for the far right party in germany on january 9th, talked about immigration, hitler, said germans need to get over their nazi guilt, and encouraged people to vote for the 'far right' party, then gave a nazi salute in front of the world 11 days later, because you decided he wasn't a nazi a long time ago, he must not be now?
Do you have a description of what kind of evidence would convince you someone is a modern nazi or 'poor character'?
Yeah, being against rampant immigration(?) is a very Nazi stance. Sure.
Naw. There's nothing Nazi about wanting to control or restrict who comes into your country; entering a country as a foreigner is a privilege, not a right.
As an aside, efforts to exclude AfD from elections is what is actually Nazi about German goings on. It's not really my place to speak about Germany's domestic affairs as an American, but if you want my honest opinion the German Left is projecting on the Right with authoritarian fury.
>said germans need to get over their nazi guilt,
Speaking as a Japanese, in my opinion Germans should indeed get over their Nazi guilt. History should never be forgotten and the lessons should be taught and remembered, but to drag that guilt across generations is ridiculous. Children are not responsible for the sins of their parents, let alone farther back.
Japan needs to get over Imperial Japan guilt and be proud about being Japanese again too; Japan's case isn't quite as bad as Germany's but there's still a ways to go.
>Do you have a description of what kind of evidence would convince you someone is a modern nazi or 'poor character'?
There are many, some that come to mind include:
* Support racism. Hitler was big on elevating what he called Aryans as the One True Race and exterminating Jews with extreme prejudice.
Musk (and Trump, Republicans, as well as most sensible Americans for that matter) advocate for meritocracy, judging people by their character and capabilities without regard to race or other immutable traits because All Men Are Created Equal.
* Advocate for cruel and unusual punishment. The Nazis used gas chambers and other torturous and humiliating methods of maiming and killing.
Literally noone here in America wants that shit, and those who do are rightfully shamed into oblivion (see: Guantanamo, et al.)
* Advocate for and engage in regulation of speech and thought. The Nazis are a textbook on how to control a population to their bidding, even the Soviets drew lessons from them.
Musk has his share of hypocrisy (why aren't you picking those to criticize him over?), but fundamentally he argues and acts for free speech. Likewise Trump and most Republicans, and certainly any American who understands and respects the Constitution. Some Nazis they/we are.
* Gathering and centralizing absolute power.
Musk's job in Federal government is on a strict and temporary schedule set to expire in July 2026, and he doesn't even have any actual authority. That's not a Nazi, let alone a Fuhrer. Likewise Trump who has consistently advocated for States' rights and reducing the Federal government especially the Executive Branch, and Republicans who have always spoken as the party of small government (whether they are is a different matter).
Citing Nazi ideology without invoking Godwin's Law requires actual, real Nazis to be the subject of debate. Please stop calling everyone and everything you don't like Nazis at the first opportunity, you don't realize how hard you are shooting yourself in the foot by doing so.
Because I'm not trying to criticize Elon Musk here, I'm trying to understand the cognitive dissonance between seeing two picture perfect sieg heils back to back and denying that that's what happened.
It seems like you agree that the motion is identical, but you are saying that it is a sieg heil but not a 'nazi salute' because elon musk "does not" support racism, advocate for cruelty, regulate speech, or centralize power.
But you (and others like-minded) are. You're latching on to a Nazi salute you've projected onto him and trying to use it as the point of criticism. You yourself just admitted you "see [a] perfect sieg heil", even.
>It seems like you agree that the motion is identical, but you are saying that it is a sieg heil but not a 'nazi salute'
He did it while shouting "My heart goes out to you!" to the crowd, so it's not a "sieg heil" either. If he's saluting anyone/thing at all, he's saluting the people and the spirit of America.
I couldn't care less if it's identical, though if you really want my honest opinion on judging that: I wouldn't think of Adolf Hitler as the first thing; then again I don't have my mind in the proverbial Progressive gutter either.
>elon musk "does not" support racism, advocate for cruelty, regulate speech, or centralize power.
Yeah, or to rephrase: In what ways is Elon Musk a Nazi? In the true, real, proper sense of the term "Nazi". Not the dirty word "Nazi" that gets thrown around like candy on disagreeables.
What I think you need to ask yourself is: Why is "Nazi!" the first thing that comes to your mind and is that really justifiable?
You're quite welcome to hate Musk if you want to, I have no problem with that and Musk can defend himself if he feels the need. I couldn't care less. But I am concerned for your mental health if you need to scream Nazi allegations to justify it.
Now, why do I say in part? Because I am also appreciative of the sad reality that peace in the Holy Land simply is not possible with more than one sovereign state in it. It simply isn't, there are so many peoples who would kill and die over that piece of land that any multi-state arrangement is practically impossible. I don't care if it ends up being Israel or Palestine or some other country or entity ultimately in charge of the Holy Land, but it's inevitably going to be one and the path to get there will not be pretty.
I also find Trump's executive order on delaying the banning of TikTok legally (IANAL) dubious. His reasoning is that his administration hasn't had enough time to understand it and thus sufficiently execute the law as written, but the law doesn't provide for such an out. The courts can have their say if it comes to that.
As a Japanese(-American), Trump's seemingly apathetic position on Japan is somewhat concerning. However, the Japanese government also has its share of blame to take. Consolation is that Trump has been very cordial with the wife of the late Shinzo Abe and also Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, which means he at least has some level of care for Japan, and it's not like US-Japan relations would go completely sour anyway.
By and large though, I am satisfied and happy with what Trump has done and accomplished so far. I voted for this and I still stand by my vote. Let's Make America Great Again, any friends and allies who want to tag along are very welcome.
>What we are seeing now with January pardons
Why do you expect and want to see this? What about that event resonated with you that you'd excuse those people? I expected this to be a bi+partisan shame on the country, so I just do not see the angle here.
There are a few different reasons:
1. The presentation of January 6 by the Left and especially the media were completely overblown and exaggerated, even taking artistic license into account. Live or close-to-live videos and images of what all happened were readily available and it was nothing like how the Left and media presented it.
2. The Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy and public trial.[1][2] Many of the accused were still waiting literally four years after the fact for their trials to begin while incarcerated when the pardon went into effect. This is completely ridiculous regardless of how the accused should be regarded; waiting four years and likely many more had Trump not pardoned them is patently not a "speedy" trial and a gross violation of Constitutionally guaranteed human rights.
3. With the above, the whole process was practically a political persecution for daring to think and speak the wrong things. That is not how we operate here in the United States of America, land of the free and the home of the brave.
4. The founding of the United States of America stems from a violent uprising against the incumbent government. Rebellion is in our blood and DNA, without it there is no USA; rejecting the concept of rebellion wholesale is tantamount to denying the very essence of our country and the Founding Fathers.[3]
Trump during his campaign promised pardons to correct this significant, and as far as I'm aware unprecedented, abuse of the judiciary and he delivered on that promise. I voted with and for that promise, among many others, so I am satisfied. Promises made, promises kept should be mundane, but surprisingly Trump is one of the few politicians if any who exhibit this common sense.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Trial_Clause
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Trial_Act
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
Your number 2 is also completely misleading. From the article [1],
By the end of the year, 725 people had been charged with federal crimes.[2][3] That number rose to 1,000 by the second anniversary of the attack,[2] to 1,200 by the third anniversary (three-quarters of whom had by then been found guilty)[4][5] and to 1,500 before the fourth anniversary.[6]
It's not political persecution to charge people with crimes they committed while storming a government building. I almost didn't respond because you're living in some fantasy land, but since Trump has already removed what happened from government websites, I think it's important we don't forget what really happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_the_January_6...
From an archived DoJ page[1] at the year 3 (January 2024) mark, ~1200 defendants were charged and 171 were convicted (32 without a trial). 749 were sentenced in total.
So that's presumably still more than several hundred defendants waiting for what should be a speedy trial.
Again, that is not how we should operate in this country. If you accuse (charge) someone of a crime their trial should be brought as swiftly as possible as mandated by the Constitution. That this was not done is by itself enough cause to pardon them, let alone the exaggeration of the charges presented.
Also, to close things out:
>The 'back the blue' and 'tough on crime' party is a total farce.
Trump and Republicans enjoyed and continue to enjoy the approval and cooperation of law enforcement agencies across the country both before and after the pardons were issued.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240108135705/https://www.justi...
The number sentenced cannot be higher than the number convicted (and the source document, unlike your summary, does not make that impossible claim), since sentencing requires conviction.
> So that's presumably more than several hundred defendants waiting for what should be a speedy trial.
Many of them were charged substantially after the event, “Speedy trial” refers to the time from charging to trial (the time from event to charges is governed by statute of limitations, not speedy trial rights.)
I'll just say this:
>correct this significant, and as far as I'm aware unprecedented, abuse of the judiciary and he delivered on that promise.
This is extremely common because "speedy" was simply never defined. Taking months over minor non-violent crimes like drug usage as an example. Given the chaos in identifying all suspects (IIRC they were never all fully discovered, an atrocity in and of itself in our police system), I'm not too surprised it took years to try everyone caught.
No one's probably chomping at the bit to re-define "speedy" better:
>a trial conducted according to prevailing rules and procedures that takes place without unreasonable or undue delay or within a statutory period.
but I think we both agree this is a very vauge, insufficient definition.
I also appreciate that we can have a peaceful, friendly, normal conversation about this unlike how these things would usually transpire up until just recently, so thanks.
That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.
(It's like NULL values in SQL, only much worse because it's in real life.)
If nothing else, I do hope this 2nd trump administration wakes those indifferent up. Yes your choice matters. And yes, choosing nothing is a choice.
The majority of people wanted this.
TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.
> In a critical commentary, the co-editors-in-chief of the journal BMJ Quality & Safety wrote that the paper’s “headline-friendly” mortality rate — which was 10 times the rate suggested by prior studies — was so implausible that it risked undermining confidence in the entire field of patient safety research.
> Yet the notion that medical errors are the third leading cause of death persists. It’s trumpeted by patient safety advocates and trial attorneys, and became a line on a TV show. News stories continue to cite it.
Also the academic article here is simply a response to another academic article supporting the 3rd leading cause of death:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?author=MA+Makary&a...
Which academic has it right? The study you shared is critical of the sources used in the first, but also provides no new data sources. It’s simply skeptical about the rates.
That’s why death reportings tend to use “died with X”. I understand that there is a sensitivity to ascribe liability or fault. But if someone dies in recovery from a surgery, or worse under anesthesia, that seems like something that could be identified and reported.
We do (for example: https://www.cdc.gov/healthcare-associated-infections/index.h...), but there's significant difference between "malpractice" and "died due to surgical/anesthesia complications". Perfectly administered anesthesia is still risky, which is why we don't give it for, say, mole removal.
To butcher a Rick & Morty quote, "that just sounds like malpractice with extra steps".
What im wondering is why the general public doesn’t know that surgery isn’t an absolute good.
If the ideology was what you're saying, then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?
pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.
Supply side Jesus is just alright.
We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years
Ofc, one may conclude anything one wants,
You keep quoting that part and ignoring the rest of the article and the live data sources linked to it. The text of the article likely wasn’t from yesterday, as the reporter likely went around a week or two, gathered quotes, interviews, then spent some time in editorial revisions.
It's not a "rough start for HN", it's the current climate of the world through the lens of the US.
I'm an old person. I have a leftist bent. I used to get along with many conservatives, I just had different policy viewpoints than they did. What we are seeing now is a completely different political landscape where one of the parties is actively setting up a dynastic plutocracy in the open.
FWIW I have a ton of criticism for the "other" party too as an ineffective mess sucking the corporate teet almost as hard, just without the actual proto fascism.
Some of us are just here as technology professionals looking to learn and keep current on the latest trends. There's nothing wrong with that.
"Only a few short months ago, I was under constant attack from various public members of the Democratic party for being a white male with center-right views. The vitriol was quite unhinged, really." when asked for specifics you went to '...on CNN for example'.
My comment history, which it seems you only partially perused, demonstrates this to be true. Especially if you go back a year ago before things became politically charged around here.
I also don't see what relevance my example has to this conversation. It sounds like you're trying to corner me into a specific label (Republican, maybe?). I guess thanks for proving my point about discussions around here?
FYI if you read my post history you will see I am a libertarian leaning (Santa Cruz hippie libertarian not Rand Paul 'my dad got me the job but I believe in everyone earning their way' libertarian) refugee from the Bay Area to a small town in a very red state. I don't have the agenda you think other than calling out hypocrisy and a desire for a functioning health system.
It's just not in the intended spirit of HN to track down contradictions and use them as gotchas in arguments. That's a narrower point. I've added an edit to the GP comment to clarify that.
Unfortunately politics has infected areas of our lives we took for granted. The stopping of reporting coming out of the CDC/NIH/HHS makes discussing health science articles more challenging. And this is a direct result of the new administration. While this article may not be vaccine related, the new administration wants a known anti-vaxxer to lead the HHS.
The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.
Globally:
> The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19.
https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...
As well as in the US:
> After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/us-tuberc...
It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.
Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.
A common bacteria with airborne spread and extremely drug resistant variants in the wild can hardly be characterized this way.
However, it's extremely fair to say that this is not a new issue that has only become apparent over the past week.
My point isn't that agencies don't report incidence; my point is about when the discussion surfaces how it's discussed in the popular press, including editorializations in professional outlet. Were incidence rate flat or down between convenient points of comparison, but absolute numbers up, and an outbreak like Kansas happen, we'd be discussion absolute numbers. And even when incidence is up, the absolute numbers always headline. It's a subtle criticism I'm making, but I think an important one.
Nonetheless, while for 40 years TB has been discussed as a grace looming threat, note how absolute cases and incidence dropped steeply over most of that time. And while the drop has largely stopped, the US now has one of the lowest incidence rates in the world. But my takeaway is supposed to be that the US' TB measures are woefully broken because the drop has stopped?
> But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.
But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/