The global energy transition is one of the most significant structural shifts in recent economic history, fundamentally altering how the energy markets function and posing new challenges for oil and gas trading. While the world moves towards cleaner energy, traditional fossil fuel markets are experiencing record volatility and transformation.
The Changing Energy Landscape
The cost of renewable energy has decreased over the past decade, and wind and solar power are increasingly price-competitive with conventional fuel sources. Falling costs influence long-run projections for demand in oil and gas, forcing traders to reassess underlying assumptions on future market direction. The transition also introduces policy-driven market distortions as governments implement carbon pricing, renewable portfolio standards, and fossil fuel phase-outs.
Market Volatility and Trading Implications
Oil prices respond not only to traditional supply and demand but also to levels of renewable energy deployment, electric vehicle adoption, and climate policy developments. This longer list of determinants of prices makes price forecasting more complex and requires traders to develop new analytical models.
Short-term trading techniques must now account for rapidly shifting sentiment on energy news. Breakthroughs in battery technology or a dramatic climate commitment by a rising economy can trigger large price swings that are outside the scope of traditional supply-side analysis. Environment, social, and governance (ESG) considerations are now being viewed more and more by traders when making investment decisions.
Supply Chain Restructuring
The energy transition is forcing fundamental changes in oil and gas supply chains. Companies are investing heavily in carbon capture technologies, renewable energy projects, and low-carbon fuel production. These investments affect cash flows and operational priorities, influencing supply decisions and market positioning.
Trading firms are adapting by diversifying their portfolios to include renewable energy commodities, carbon credits, and clean technology investments. This diversification helps hedge against long-term fossil fuel demand decline while capturing opportunities in emerging energy markets. The rise of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a “bridge fuel” has also created new trading opportunities, as natural gas is viewed as cleaner than coal for power generation.
Regulatory and Policy Impacts
Climate policies significantly influence oil and gas trading strategies. Carbon border adjustments, fuel quality standards, and emissions regulations create regulatory arbitrage opportunities while adding compliance costs. Traders must navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape where environmental policies can rapidly alter market fundamentals.
The implementation of carbon pricing mechanisms in various jurisdictions adds another layer of complexity to trading decisions. These policies effectively create shadow prices for carbon emissions, influencing the relative competitiveness of different energy sources and trading routes.
Future Outlook for Traders
The transition away from oil and gas will continue reshaping commodities trading for decades to come. Successful traders will need to develop expertise in renewable energy markets, carbon trading, and clean technology trends. While fossil fuels will remain important during the transition period, their role in the global energy mix will steadily diminish.
Adaptation strategies include building capabilities in new energy commodities, developing sophisticated scenario analysis tools, and maintaining flexibility to pivot as market conditions evolve. The energy transition presents both challenges and opportunities for traders willing to evolve their strategies and embrace the changing energy landscape.
Once again, the Donald Trump steamroller has run off the road, this time over Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s obsession with anti-vaccine policies.
Essentially, infection disease doctor Susan Monarez was fired by RFK and then by the White House as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for — as her lawyers put it — standing up for science.
Even as the dismissal took on comic elements of trying to carry out an actual dismissal, the seriousness of the underlying dispute was evident in the immediate resignations of four other senior CDC leaders who basically accuse Team Trump of bad vaccine science, bad agency fund-cutting, bad health decisions for the nation.
The four included Debra Houry, the agency’s deputy director, Daniel Jernigan, head of infection disease work, Demetre Daskalakis, head of immunization and respiratory medicine and Jennifer Layden, who heads public health data and surveillance. As a group, they even connect their departures to what led a guy apparently upset over Covid vaccine hesitancy to shoot up the CDC headquarters last month, killing a police officer.
While Monarez refused to leave, claiming that no one but Trump himself could fire a Senate-approved appointee — prompting a late-night White House dismissal notice — there was no misunderstanding of the basic disagreement. Monarez was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” and rubber-stamping Kennedy’s announced limitations on Covid vaccines — and vaccines against infectious diseases generally.
Naturally, we heard from the Monarez lawyers that RFK was “weaponizing public health for political gain.” Of course, it irked the White House that Monarez reached out to Sen Bill Cassidy, R-La., a medical doctor who has pressured Kennedy over keeping his hands off vaccine policies.
Monarez was the CDC’s second director since January, after Trump appointee David Weldon could not win Senate confirmation — over his anti-vaccine views.
One must wonder what the hiring conversation between Kennedy and Monarez was. How did Kennedy not know that Dr. Monarez would stand up for actual science when RFK was going to appoint a vaccine-review board stocked with anti-vaccine advocates?
Fighting Disease with Politics
As with the firing of Lisa Cook from the Fed board of governors, this CDC decapitation has nothing to do with skill or experience, and everything to do with obedience and loyalty to an agenda that may have nothing to do with reality.
As things stand, the CDC is leaderless, just at the outset of another season for flu and Covid, a growing measles proliferation just as schools are opening, and as tariffs and trade issues are complicating pharmaceutical production worldwide. In an Aug. 19 statement, the CDC estimated that Covid infections “are growing or likely growing in 36 states, declining or likely declining in 0 states.”
The irony here is that it is the same Trump who claims full credit for giving Big Pharma a billion dollars to jump start quick creation of a Covid vaccine in his first term, only to have appointed the nation’s most outspoken anti-vax as head of America’s health agencies — because Kennedy joined his presidential campaign.
Kennedy and his allies have long criticized the CDC as too deferential to the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine makers. Kennedy has taken steps to narrowing approval of Covid vaccines to high-risk groups, ended research funds for mRNA vaccines, has replaced health reviewers with anti-vaxxers whose medical research is seen by peers as spotty, has said we are doing well with measles because there are only a thousand cases so far. RFK has revived a task force to scrutinize the childhood immunization schedule, and promised to unveil environmental risks, including vaccines, that boost childhood autism.
From news reports, Kennedy pushed Monarez to fire her senior staff by the end of this week, which she refused to do. Monarez said she would not support changing coronavirus vaccine policy without consulting her advisers, and the resign-or-be-fired sequence followed.
In emails reviewed by news organizations and various public remarks, the CDC leaders basically say Kennedy is not heeding either science and medicine or the available information about communicable diseases to rely instead on those who tell him what he wants to hear about alternative, unproved theories that make Americans less safe.
That sounds similar to complaints from dismissed employees in Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the shuttered consumer protection bureau, the Education Department and across the Trump government.
In recent weeks, the CDC has been under pressure from Kennedy’s allies to grant access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink that is managed in part by large health systems towards finding purported links between vaccines and autism. This effort is led by Davie Geier, a discredited researcher. Kennedy told a Cabinet meeting this week that his staff was likely to have a preliminary answer to the cause of autism in September.
The war between expertise and a Trump agenda with loose ties to reality rolls on.
TAKE ACTION
Contact Key Federal Agencies & Officials
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
General Public Inquiries: Call 1‑800‑CDC‑INFO (800‑232‑4636) or TTY 1‑888‑232‑6348CDC+5CDC+5Restored CDC+5.
You may also consider contacting your own representatives—Senators and House members—especially those on health-related subcommittees, public health advocates, or local media. You can find them using tools like Congress.gov Find Your Member pageCongress.gov.
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We are in the middle of one of the largest bubbles in history, and it’s getting ready to pop. Maybe. All economic bubbles are irrational, but there’s something different about the AI bubble that may allow it to defy economic reality (temporarily), and it’s not clear how dangerous this will be. What happens if a bubble bursts but then keeps inflating anyway? Presumably nothing good.
Let me set the stage for you here, and please bear in mind I am no Paul Krugman. I’ll do my best to be a huge nerd, though. :)
OK, the tech giants are betting big on AI. This, we all know because they won’t shut the fuck up about it. What you might not be aware of is that they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, many many hundreds of billions, in a race to develop and deploy artificial intelligence. Whoever wins the race wins…everything. That’s the idea here.
The chart below shows the changes between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of 2025 in real GDP and some of its components. Investment in information processing equipment — which at this point basically means data centers — accounted for more than half of overall growth, more than consumer spending, which makes up 70 percent of the economy:
That’s over $80 billion just in Q2 of this year. So far, the tech fucks have dropped $155 billion this year, and they’re INCREASING the amount of money being spent. By 2028, they’ll be blowing well over half a trillion a year on AI.
So all of the money you and I spend on movies and groceries and toys and clothes and books and eating out and and and? All of that money is being dwarfed by the tech fucks on data centers to create their alleged all-powerful AIs.
Even as our spending drops because Trump and his party of imbeciles have killed the strongest economy in half a century, the techbros are ramping up their spending. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money.
And it’s not working.
You may have noticed that Google search today, compared to just three years ago, is trash. It’s about as trustworthy as Donald Trump around a 14-year-old girl and a bottle of Viagra. But, hey, those are just vibes, right? What do we stupid civilians know? AI is obviously a game-changer for Corporate America and they’re making bank on it!
Wall Street's biggest fear was validated by a recent MIT study indicating that 95% of organizations studied get zero return on their AI investment.
Why it matters: Investors have put up with record AI spend from tech companies because they expect record returns, eventually. This study calls those returns into question, which could be an existential risk for a market that's overly tied to the AI narrative.
Driving the news: MIT researchers studied 300 public AI initiatives to try and suss out the "no hype reality" of AI's impact on business, Aditya Challapally, research contributor to project NANDA at MIT, tells Axios.
95% of organizations found zero return despite enterprise investment of $30 billion to $40 billion into GenAI, the study says.
So AI doesn’t work on the user level and…it doesn’t work on the corporate level. That doesn’t seem to be a good reason to set half a trillion dollars on fire per year.
Then there are big picture issues of energy and resources. AI requires massive amounts of electricity to run, and the systems the tech fucks are planning far exceed what the grid can handle. Even as they race to build nuclear power plants to power their bloated data centers, AI will chew up an increasingly larger amount of what IS available, increasing the cost of electricity for everyone else:1
Individuals may end up footing some of the bill for this AI revolution, according to new research published in March. The researchers, from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative, analyzed agreements between utility companies and tech giants like Meta that govern how much those companies will pay for power in massive new data centers. They found that discounts utility companies give to Big Tech can raise the electricity rates paid by consumers. In some cases, if certain data centers fail to attract the promised AI business or need less power than expected, ratepayers could still be on the hook for subsidizing them. A 2024 report from the Virginia legislature estimated that average residential ratepayers in the state could pay an additional $37.50 every month in data center energy costs.
“The recipe for chocolate pudding is milk and four pounds of mud.”
Oh, and don’t forget the fresh water data centers guzzle. They’re draining it faster than Fox News drains the IQ points of its audience. That’s going to be unsustainable in the long run as fresh water becomes scarcer due to the climate change the tech pricks are making worse.
Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:
Alright, so the tech doesn’t work right, it requires too many resources to be practical, and the return on investment is all but non-existent. Also, it’s possibly the most expensive technology ever developed, and it is almost single-handedly propping up the economy.
This is the definition of a bubble and the press and the market are starting to sour on it:
What happens next? Normally, the bubble pops, the economy crashes and we all get very mad at immigrants. Just kidding. Sort of.2
But these are not normal times.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably have some idea that the tech fucks are, quite literally, insane. They believe, REALLY believe, that they will become immortal digital gods and the rest of humanity can fuck off and die as long as they achieve their goal of silicon life eternal.
Émile P. Torres and Kate Willett do a far better job of digging into the religion/cult of Silicon Valley, but for the purposes of this article, it’s important to understand that this religion/cult is very widespread in the tech world and has a very tight grip on a lot of very powerful people.
The key to all of their beliefs is the birth of true AI. It’s literally their messiah. True AI, a program that is truly intelligent, not just programmed to carry out tasks faster than humans, will, the theory goes, be able to create more advanced AI. That more advanced AI will create an even more advanced AI, and so on until we have a super-intelligent AI beyond anything humans can possibly comprehend. This event is called “The Singularity,” and it’s what the techbros are feverishly working towards.
A super-intelligent AI would be able to solve just about any problem, specifically, how to make humans immortal digital gods, blablabla.
Do you see the problem here?
The billionaires who own the companies pouring hundreds of millions into a broken technology do not care about the money they are losing. They don’t care about profits. They don’t care about the economy or the environment or how many people they will harm or kill in the process.
They literally believe they are building God, and when they do, they will be rewarded with eternal life.
So, how does a bubble collapse if the people inflating it won’t allow it to collapse? This is what is freaking me out, and something I have not seen anyone discussing. The people who discuss the cult of Silicon Valley have not been discussing the economic ramifications of their bubble. The people who discuss the bubble do not appear aware of the Silicon Valley cult. I really REALLY need these two circles on the Venn diagram to overlap and figure out what happens next because I feel like the results are going to be catastrophic beyond anything I can imagine.
No bubble can stay inflated forever, and the longer the tech shits keep it going artificially, the worse the crash is going to be when they finally hit the wall of reality. Worse, when they finally run out of other people’s money to spend on their dream of immortality (God forbid they bankrupt themselves!), they’re going to face the awful truth: They will not become immortal digital gods.
What is the one thing we know about rich white men when they don’t get what they want? They lash out and destroy everything around them. So how do you think these entitled, insane, and deeply fascist billionaire assholes are going to respond when they realize that the cold, icy hand of death is going to claim them just like all of the pathetic little “NPCs” they’ve spent their lives sneering at?
Yeah, not well.
I’d rather not wait to find out what the next temper tantrum of the Silicon Valley death cult looks like. The pro-fascist human extinction tantrum we’re living through right now is more than enough, thank you very much.
When we topple the regime, and we will, one of our top priorities has to be kicking down the doors of the doomsday bunkers of all the tech fucks and putting them in prison for the rest of their lives. They need to be kept far away from their money and power, ensuring they can never inflict their diseased worldview on us again.
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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!
The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 66 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.
That’s on top of the Trump regime gutting the very renewables that could have mitigated this strain because climate change is a hoax and windmills make Orange King sad.
I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?
Yes, I’m going there.
As we all know, the continental United States has four time zones:
— so when the sun sets in Seattle today, at 7:54 PM, it will be nearly midnight in New York or Miami.
However! There’s much, much more to the US than just the 48 contiguous or “continental” states. Let’s zoom out a little:
You’ll notice there’s a pale green band to the east of the US, covering Canada’s Maritime Provinces and a lot of the Caribbean. This is “Atlantic Time”, and it’s one hour ahead of the US East Coast. And if you enlarge or peer closely, you’ll see that there are two United States possessions — Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands — down in the lower right-hand corner. So that’s a fifth time zone.
Meanwhile, to the /west/ of the continental USA is Alaska. And Alaska is so huge that it covers two time zones. “Mainland” Alaska is an hour behind California and the US West Coast, while the Aleutian Islands are two hours behind.
[Adak National Forest, Aleutian Islands. If you know, you know.]
Most of the state of Hawaii is also in this time zone, which is cleverly named the “Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone”. So when the sun sets in Honolulu at 6:50 PM tonight, it will already be nearly 2 AM in Puerto Rico.
But we’re not done yet. Continuing west, in the central Pacific we find Midway Atoll and, a couple of thousand kilometers to the south, the lovely islands of American Samoa (or AmSam, as the cool kids say). Both are United States possessions — American Samoans are US nationals, thank you very much — and both are an hour behind Hawaii.
And we’re still not quite done. Because far out in the empty wastes of the blue Pacific are Howland Island and Baker Island. Located about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, these small uninhabited islands are US possessions — formally, they’re “United States Minor Outlying Islands”. Baker Island is a US National Wildlife Refuge.
And they’re another hour further west — two hours behind Hawaii.
Wow, nine time zones! Are we done?
Not quite. Because if we now skip over a time zone and jump back /two/ hours, we will find ourselves in the western Pacific — the same time zone as most of Australia and the Russian Far East. And here we will find more American territory: Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI). Despite being way the heck over on the far side of the Pacific, much closer to Shanghai or Manila than to California or even Hawaii, these are all US islands inhabited by US citizens.
So in total, from the Caribbean to the CNMI, the USA stretches across an eye-watering 11 time zones.
The capital and largest island of the CNMI is Saipan. And when the sun sets on Saipan at 7:17 PM tonight, it will be 5:17 AM in the US Virgin Islands. The sun will rise there at 6:04 AM. So — it seems — there will be about 45 minutes of night on America. 11 time zones is a lot, but it’s not quite enough. Maybe the Sun never set on the British Empire, but it does set on the USA, at least sometimes.
(I actually checked to see if adding territorial waters would make a difference. That gives us an extra 12 miles each way. Nope — it only adds another couple of minutes of sunshine. Adding the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone would nearly do it, but that would be, in my opinion, cheating.)
[actual Saipan sunset, yes it really looks like that]
But wait! The United States also extends quite far /north/. Its northernmost point is at Point Barrow, on the northernmost coast of Alaska. Point Barrow is about nine miles / 15 km north of the surprisingly large and busy town of Utqiagvik, which is pronounced like it’s spelled. If you fly into Utqiagvik — you can’t drive there, no road reaches it — it’s easy to get a ride up to Point Barrow, weather permitting.
At over 71 degrees north, Point Barrow is well above the Arctic Circle. This means it is in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Specifically, it means that the Sun stays above the horizon for months at a time, from April through August.
Right now, the Sun is spiraling lower and lower. It’s grazing the horizon for several hours per day. But it hasn’t actually set, not quite yet. It won’t formally, officially go down for a few more days: September 5, 2025.
And so at last we have our answer. When will the sun set on the United States of America?
Trump’s Orwellian Propaganda Is Now In Full Bloom, and It Is Delusional
Donald Trump’s takeover and takedown of rules, law and culture are only widening, furthering deep divisions and putting U.S. intelligence capabilities, democratic principles and independence, the supremacy of law and even elections at risk of irrelevance to his unending demand for power.
For those who have feared autocracy and abuse of power, the era has already arrived. For those who see cruelty in this administration’s actions, and elements of “fascism” that parallel other autocracies and Naziism in the 1930s, Trump is delivering on a near-daily basis now — including public acknowledgement that Americans want a dictator, which he says he isn’t, to lower street crime.
The redistricting madness combined with attacks on voting laws, mail-in ballots, and state conduct of elections is not only supposed to be beyond Trump’s authority but attack the republic itself.
Trump’s attacks on businesses, colleges, museums, the constant need to rewrite history, the widening of immigrant deportations and the presence or promise of military in the streets now being honed to stop civil protest all are setting off screams of dissent.
Even Trump fans are starting to react as they recognize ill effects of policies that are cutting public health care benefits while consumer prices rise, and Trump oversteps protected First Amendment rights, extorts ownership positions in private companies and covers up whatever ill information is being hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
If you were writing to a faraway friend, you would be describing a nation caught in constant tension, of fraught effects and feelings as embers of ethnic hate are enflamed and identity populations are turned against one another. The message: In a time of growing chaos, there is one Dear Leader to heed, and that’s why we should recognize huge Trump portraits being unfurled on the sides of federal buildings and the constant turn to Trump Social posts for daily announcements as signs of growing dictatorship.
Daily Challenges
The daily specifics hardly seem to matter — to Trump and, increasingly to a numbed public. Each bleeds into the next, along with the inevitable court challenges that start strong and get watered down through appeals months later.
Using a public White House meeting with the president of ally South Korea to praise the dictator of North Korea only makes sense in a Trump-ordered world. Declaring flag burning a crime as desecration but putting Trump campaigns on flags would be hypocrisy writ-large outside of this White House.
Of course, Trump crossed the law by firing Lisa Cook from the Fed board; it’s beyond his legal power to do so, even if Trump sees the move as pressuring for lower interest rates. But as with tariffs, immigration orders, federalizing National Guard troops, Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him. There are enough justices on the Supreme Court to let him do most whatever he wants in his count.
For sure, putting masked federal agents on the streets of Washington and placing 2,200 armed National Guardsmen and their equipment is a public relations show and not an effective crime stopper. But Trump is telling us what is happening and threatening the licenses or economics of any news organization that says different.
Threats, fear, extortion, pressure are prime tools for Trump. It turns out he needs the world’s most lethal military not because we have actual enemies overseas, but because he wants to aim those weapons at Black mayors and Democratic mayors. In Trump World, optics are everything, and the resulting absurdity of (illegally) renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War makes perfect sense to ensure that his political foes recognize that they are targeted enemies. Unable to win his own Kennedy Center honors for being a reality show figure, he has needed to take over the whole complex and show, pick loyalists as winners, and name himself the host.
Scrambling Aftermath
What we do get from news reports is the sense of scramble among states, agencies, and localities to clean up the aftermath of Trump executive order bombardments that may be based on little relevant information. So we’re smashing FEMA emergency responders and National Weather Service capabilities just as we enter hurricane season in a climate-changing environment. We are canceling wind and solar energy production just as we are hearing of huge gaps coming for electric grids to meet the needs of Artificial Intelligence and Trump’s newly converted love and personal investment in cyber trading. Moving against vaccines as a new Covid outbreak lurks seems nuts.
Trump is so busy telling us about the wars he has settled that he misses the point that almost none of the claimed settlements is working. Worse, he refuses to face down Russia in Europe, or to either force Hamas to release hostages or for the Israeli government to deal with the starvation it is causing in Gaza or the land-grabbing in the West Bank.
Trump may aspire for greatness but only offers solutions that fit on hats. He solves nothing.
Lest the day pass without Trump declarations, he is telling us that slavery is less important and less distressing for our history than our museums tell us, and that it somehow is the job for all Americans to look past job numbers or prices to recognize the bright new day on the horizon.
Trump’s Orwellian propaganda is now in full bloom, and it is delusional.
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Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.
All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”
It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.
We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.
That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question – by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.
You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis – whooping cough – 35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease – six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.
And pertussis is only one disease easily preventable by vaccination.
You must use numbers to catalog the statistics for pertussis, for measles, for COVID. But numbers are not enough. An infant with whooping cough frequently comes down with pneumonia. The baby’s coughing is so severe, it makes putting them on a ventilator more difficult. “They just never stop coughing,” Dr. John Schieffelin, associate professor of pediatrics at Tulane University told CNN. “They’re just coughing so much, they can’t eat, they can’t drink.”
Try to think of that for a moment. He’s talking about a baby less than a year old, a little thing you could hold with one hand. The baby is coughing and coughing so hard that it can’t breathe. The hospital throws every machine they’ve got at the little baby. Nothing works. The baby’s parents are standing in the hall on the other side of a glass window, watching as the baby’s body stops convulsing and dies.
You look at the perpetually angry face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You are not hallucinating. He went on Fox News after the firing of the CDC director and the resignations yesterday of four top CDC officials in protest. This is what Kennedy told the salivating hosts of Fox News about the CDC this morning. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it. It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”
According to Kennedy and Donald Trump, it may be that a pill used to treat roundworm in large animals like horses and cows will cure measles and COVID. It may be that changing your diet and eating healthy food and exercising more will cure your infertility, as we learned the Department of Health and Human Services is considering as an alternative to IVF this week. It may be that measles can be cured with cod liver oil and hot compresses on the forehead.
It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.
The patient is running a fever. The patient may live, or the patient may die. We may know “in a matter of two weeks,” as Donald Trump is fond of telling us. Or we may be arrested and spirited off to a cage in a concentration camp somewhere, and no one – not our family, not our friends, not even our lawyer – will know where we are or what is being done to us.
You are not hallucinating. This is real.
I got up the morning and Kenney’s enraged face was in half the stories in my newsfeed. I had to write about this bizarre moment. To support my work trying to keep up with these monstrosities, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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