Time to Switch from Fretting About the Dems to Fretting about Trump

I knew it would happen of course. Electing Trump is kind of like jumping off a cliff into a raging river in order to escape a horde of...I dunno...wolves or zombies or DEI apparatchiks or something... 

Best-case scenario, you've jumped out of the fire into the frying pan.

   I hoped we'd have a little more time to lounge around being relieved and watching progressive women melting down into their phones.

   But noooo...

   Trump had to start announcing planned appointments to his cabinet and suchlike.

   Look, I don't know anything about Gaetz. He sounds like a walking train wreck--but, then, there are apparently no limits to how far the MSM will go to smear someone. Some of the stuff I've heard about him...it sounds like the sort of stuff people wouldn't make up... But, as I've said before, post-Russiagate, I don't put anything past the blue team. OTOH, some Pubs have also said some stuff. My hope is that Senate Republicans won't just roll over, but will actually give advice and only prudent consent. Maybe that's hoping for too much.

   Anyway: hearsay has never been very strong evidence, and it seems weaker than ever now. There's a House report on him. I'll wait for that.

   RFKj...well...he concerns me. 

   OTOH, basically as soon as I peeked into stuff about fluoride in the water, I was astonished at how non-obvious the issue seemed. I thought this was an open-and-shut, no controversy, Dr. Strangelove-level, lead-pipe cinch.

   But...that does not actually seem to be the case.

   (He says, knowing nothing about it, and having spent like a half-hour on Bing...)

   We now know we can have only rather limited trust in the pronouncements of the "public health" "community." We're aware, in a way we--or at least I--didn't used to be that they have important biases and blind spots. Profound progressive-left bias being among them. RFKj doesn't seem to be optimal as the tip of the spear on this. But we left optimality behind long ago. You go to war with the generals you've got, not with the ones you wish you had.

   My experience with the fluoride thing reminds me of my experience with the issue of pet neutering. I always just assumed it was an open-and-shut case. But when I got the Bear about five years ago, I started looking into it just to figure out the optimal age at which to do it--not intending to question the wisdom of it. But I was really surprised at how strong the evidence on the other side is. I changed my mind only reluctantly, but ultimately--and provisionally--did so. I decided not to do it. This complicates your life somewhat--e.g. no doggie daycare. And some vets won't see your pooch unless you sign a contract to get him "fixed" (as if he were broken) afterward. I know this b/c the Bear seemed to have cut his foot not all that long ago, and my vet was booked. I contacted another vet, and that's what they told me. I just said "Nope" and that was that. (Turns out that the "blood" he was leaving everywhere was really walnut stains. He was running around in the yard on the walnut husks and tracking that into the bed etc. The brownish stains looked like dried blood. LOL.)

   ...Anyhoo...as with the issue of spaying/neutering, I just assumed that the fluoride case was open-and-shut. And look--I'm sure that FDA has spent tens of thousands of nerd-hours crunching the numbers on this stuff. All I'm saying is what I said: I was surprised that there seemed to be as much room for doubt as there prima facie seems to be.

   As for vaccines: well, we were blatantly lied to about the Deadly Batflu vaccine. Turns out--as I understand it--there was never much reason to believe their flagship claim, that it stopped transmission. And I went to red alert when the irrational pro-vax propaganda was cranked up to eleven...

And I know some very smart and normal people who came to have concerns about vaccines when they had to actually face questions about their own kids and grandkids. One very smart and reasonable friend of mine, when he actually looked into it when it was vaccine time for his own daughter, said to me "it's not as clear as one would like it to be." At the time, I was appalled. Other also smart and reasonable friends had a grandson who had seizures after getting a round of vaccines, and they have tentatively concluded--understanding full well that correlation is only weak evidence of causation--that there's a problem with giving kids so many vaccines at once. Another set of friends--also very smart, though rather peculiar/unorthodox--looked into it hard and ended up changing their minds a couple of times, resulting in some but not all of their kids being vaxxed.

   Me, I don't know.

   My default is still: FDA's conclusions get presumption.

   But I'm not as condescendingly certain about that as I used to be.

   What about Tulsi? I don't know as much about her as I thought. She has said some questionable things--though who hasn't? Twixxer is full of lefties screaming that she's TEH RUZZIANZ AZZETZ!!1111 Now, I try not to let such lunacy push me in the other direction. I do find e.g. her recent comments urging skepticism about the remilitarization of Japan to be...kinda out there...

That's it.

No firm conclusions in any case, really.