You learn something new every day (though with the Republican crack-down on education and villainizing of scientists, who knows how much longer that will be legal). Today I learned that Bitcoins make noise. Or, more specifically, that the mining of Bitcoins makes noise. I’m not talking about a bunch of guys underground with pick axes. I’m talking about “the powerful computers that create and protect the cryptocurrency [that] need fans on the go constantly to cool them down.” According to The Week, these facilities are located “across rural, mostly Republican towns” and the constant noise is not only annoying residents, it may also be making them sick.
Sounds bad! Apocalyptic, even. Should I be second-guessing my decision to use my life savings to buy Donald Trump meme coins?
Anyway, recently Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has a long history of fighting against LGBTQ+ rights, held a town hall where attendees also learned something new and were made sick.
Ernst was talking about her support of the Republican-backed budget bill that, if passed as-is by the Senate, would make drastic cuts to Medicaid in order to give bigger tax breaks to the richest Americans.
About 80 million people in the U.S. are on Medicaid, including those with low income, children and people with disabilities. Their lives literally depend on Medicaid in a myriad of ways. Medicaid pays for hospital visits, insulin, home health services and more. People are, quite understandably, very scared about what cuts to Medicaid might mean for themselves and their loved ones.
When someone at Ernst’s town hall yelled “People are going to die” regarding Medicaid cuts Ernst replied, “Well, we all are going to die, so, for heaven’s sake, folks.”
For some reason, people took issue with this callous and flippant response. But don’t worry. Ernst apologized. “I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement that I made yesterday at my town hall,” she said the day after in an Instagram video.
She continued, “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. I’m really, really glad I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”
Get it? Because only idiots believe in the tooth fairy and she thinks her constituents, especially the ones with their fucking lives at the mercy of Republicans who could not give less of a shit about them, are idiots.
Because she is a Good Christian Woman™️ she added, “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”
Remember, folks, everyone has the right to life. Unless you’re on Medicaid. Then you’d better stop sucking at the government teat and start praying that you never get in a car accident, that your cancer doesn’t come back, and that God will give you lots and lots of money so that you, too, can look down on the most vulnerable people in the country and hope they just die already.
Meanwhile in the Trump Death Cult, HIV/AIDS research is being gutted in the U.S. Apparently Republicans want to make sure it isn’t just people in other countries who suffer due to HIV/AIDS funding cuts.
According to The Daily Beast, “Research programs at Duke University and the Scripps Research Institute that are working to deliver an HIV vaccine were told by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that their $258 million funding would be stopped. The vaccine manufacturer Moderna said that its clinical trials, funded by the NIH, have also been paused.”
“This is a terrible time to cut it off. We’re beginning to get close,” Dennis Burton, an immunology professor at Scripps Research, told CBS News. “This is a setback of probably a decade for HIV vaccine research.”
That’s a lot of time and a lot of money down the toilet.
“The cancellation of the funds comes weeks ahead of the Food and Drug Administration’s June 19 deadline for deciding on approval of lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injectable drug to prevent HIV,” CBS reports. “The drug’s availability could lead to a significant drop in HIV cases worldwide, since a study found it was 100% effective in preventing transmission.”
In other words, right as scientists are on the cusp of an HIV vaccine, their funding gets yanked.
Could this be related to the fact that Health and Human Services and Dead Brain Worm Host Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an anti-vaxxer and AIDS denialist?
Yes. Of course it’s related.
It’s almost like the meanest and dumbest people are in charge of this country right now, and your death would mean absolutely nothing to them.
Haha. I don’t really mean it. The “almost” part.
