RFK Jr. Told Congress That Americans Shouldn't Take His Medical Advice. So Believe Him!

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian.)

It was great week for public health—if by "great" you mean "tickling death under its chin." First, the EPA announced it was going easy on the implementation of regulations regarding PFAS, so-called "forever chemicals, in the country's drinking water. From The New York Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that it would uphold drinking water standards for two harmful “forever chemicals,” present in the tap water of millions of Americans. But it said it would delay deadlines to meet those standards and roll back limits on four other related chemicals...

Exposure to PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the E.P.A.

When people talk about the "plasticity" of the brain, I don't think filling it full of PFAS is what they have in mind.

Next, the Secretary of Health and Human Services organizes a family swim in a creek in which the kids could gambol freely with E.coli and what The New York Times decorously called "fecal contamination." Mr. Secretary was so proud he posted pictures of the grandkids' swimming in this toxic stew. Then he went before Congress and wouldn't say definitively if he would advise vaccination against chicken pox and the measles. And astonishing his audience with this answer to Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin:

“My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.” said the HHS Secretary. “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” Kennedy said.

Or letting him pick swimming holes, either, I reckon.

Meanwhile, out in the world, there's a measles outbreak now in Kansas. From the Kansas City Star:

The state saw eight new cases, bringing to the total number to 56 cases as of Wednesday, up from 48 cases a week ago, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s 2025 Kansas Measles Case Data dashboard. The number of hospitalizations now stands at two. There have been no deaths so far. The vast majority of cases, 54, are related to the outbreak that is concentrated in the southwestern part of Kansas. Measles cases have been reported in eight counties in that area: Finney, Ford, Grant, Gray, Haskell, Kiowa, Morton and Stevens counties. Two cases, however, have been reported in the past week in the Wichita and Hutchinson areas, raising the number of counties where measles has been reported to 10. Reno and Sedgwick counties were added to the list this past week.

There have been 14 outbreaks reported this year, with 93% of confirmed cases, 928, being outbreak-associated. About 30% of the cases involve children under the age of 5, 38% involve patients 5 to 19, and 31% include adults 20 and older, according to the CDC. About 96% of the cases include unvaccinated patients or those whose vaccination status was unknown. Another 2% involved patients who had received only one dose of the MMR vaccination.

It would be uncivil of me to tell Mr. Secretary to go jump in the creek.

One of the enduring questions involving Hell's Encore has been how in the hell the United States could drop the gloves against Canada, our closest and most accommodating neighbo(u)r. (It's always inviting us over to watch hockey and eat poutine. Mmmmmm, poutine!) However, in its infinite capacity to fck things up from hell to breakfast, the administration has managed to wrangle with—and, to this point, lose to—wait for it... the Library Of Congress. From the AP:

President Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of top officials at the Library of Congress and equally sudden attempt to appoint a slate of loyalists as replacements has instead morphed into an enormous fight over the separation of powers, as the White House tries to wrest control of what has for centuries been a legislative institution. It’s a power struggle with potentially vast consequences. The Library of Congress not only stores the world’s largest collection of books but also an office overseeing reams of copyrighted material of untold value.

There is a research institute that has long been protected from outside influence. Its servers house extremely sensitive information regarding claims of workplace violations on Capitol Hill, as well as payments and other financial data for the legislative branch’s more than 30,000 employees. There’s even speculation that the whole affair is tied to an ongoing debate over whether big tech companies can use copyrighted material for artificial intelligence systems.

I have no doubt that the issue is a serious one. But, Christamighty, what president ever would have wasted time fighting with the Library of Congress? The dust-up already has helped make a fool of White House spokesdrone Karoline Leavitt, who apparently confused the Library with a branch library in Laconia. When the president fired the highly respected director of the LOC, Carla Hayden, the administration-installed microchip clicked in.

“There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI, and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Karoline, no. There is no children's section in the Library of Congress. What in the name of Melvil Dewey are you talking about, lady?

The administration then tried to install some lackeys at the LOC, including Todd Blanche, one of his many unuccessful criminal defense attorneys. However, the LOC isn't kidding around. Two of the sub-lackeys showed up to take over their new positions, they were greeted by LOC officials who told them their appointments were invalid and to take a hike. Now, according to Politico, even the Republicans in Congress have shaken off their customary torpor and are pushing back, albeit gently, against the president's obvious power grab. But, honest to god, this is not the way an advanced democracy is supposed to work.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Straight To It" (Big Sam's Funky Nation): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1934, is the story of the airplane carrying rush film of the asssasination of King Alexander I. The plane went down in the Atlantic. The stiff uppah lip narration is wonderful. However, some actual footage of the crime has survived. The original Zapruder film. History is so cool.

The Supreme Court took up the question of birthright citizenship this week by not taking it up. Instead, the Court actually debated the limits of federal district judges to issue nationwide injunctions, something that was considerably less explosive. But birthright citizenship was the land mine under the administration's case, and Justice Elena Kagan detonated it beneath hapless Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

“Does every single person that is affected by this E.O. have to bring their own suit? How do we get to the result that there is a single rule of citizenship that is the rule we have historically applied rather than the rule that the E.O. would have us do?… How else are we going to get to the right result here, which is on my assumption that the E.O. is illegal?

“You’re losing a bunch of cases: This guy over here, this woman over here—they’ll have to be treated as citizens, but nobody else will. Why would you ever take this case to us (on the merits)? I’m suggesting that, in a case where the government is losing constantly, there’s nobody else who is going to appeal, they’re winning—it’s up to (the government) to decide to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there’s no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case. So you just keep on losing in the lower courts, and what’s supposed to happen to prevent that?”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tagged in.

“Your arguments seem to turn our justice system—in my view, at least—into a ‘catch me if you can’ regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights. Let’s assume for the purpose of this that you are wrong about the merits, that the government is not allowed to do this under the Constitution. Yet, it seems to me that your argument is, ‘We get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit and hire a lawyer.’ I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

The case against nationwide injunctions was built to defend the president's clearly unconstitutional executive order ending birthright citizenship against the injunction presently being held against it. Jackson and Kagan were telling the administration, essentially, we think you're trying to do something really bad and we're here to stop you.

And, late in the day on Friday, the Supreme Court continued the administration's impressive losing streak. From the AP:

Over two dissenting votes, the justices acted on an emergency appeal from lawyers for Venezuelan men who have been accused of being gang members, a designation that the administration says makes them eligible for rapid removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The high court had already called a temporary halt to the deportations from a north Texas detention facility in a middle-of-the-night order issued last month. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Of course, they did.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Popular Mechanics:

Archaeologists recently found the lost ruins of a ceremonial temple—covered in sand and 4,000 to 5,000 years old—in northwestern Peru. The excavation team first discovered the walls, and subsequently unearthed a mix of features indicating that the structure was once a temple. And then came the skeletal remains of three adults tucked between walls.

“We may be facing a 5,000-year-old religious site that constitutes an architectural space defined by walls built by rammed earth,” Luis Armando Muro Ynoñán, director of the Cultural Landscapes Archaeological Project of Ucupe — Valle de Zaña, said in a translated statement from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. The oldest portion of the site features not only the up-to-5,000-year-old walls, but also various architectural features that help define the site as a ceremonial temple. “We have what would have been a central staircase from which one would ascend to a kind of stage in the central part,” Muro Ynoñán said, noting that the stage could have hosted ritual performances in front of an audience.

I'm withholding wonder until I learn more about the three folks stashed in the walls.

Hey, The New York Times, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

While the lack of a breastbone still means that the bird was likely to have been a relatively poor flyer, toe pads preserved in the Chicago Archaeopteryx’s feet add evidence to the assumption that the species was adept at life on the ground, Dr. O’Connor said. The species would therefore have lived like a Jurassic chicken or roadrunner: capable of flying in short bursts when necessary, but otherwise preferring to sprint.

The newly reported features are a nice addition to existing understandings of Archaeopteryx, and they offer direct support for current hypotheses about the species’ abilities and its relationship to the origins of flight, said Michael Pittman, a paleontologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who was not involved with the study.

Fly like a chicken, dude! Make us happy now that you lived -- and flew, like a chicken -- then.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One.

In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska. And the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. (Hang in there, Pedro.) And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.

And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.