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Belgium Ousts USA From World Cup In 4-1 Rout

Everything the Felon touches or tries to influence ends up degraded, including the world's view of American and frequently Americans themselves.  Be it the Felon's supposed renovations to the Reflecting Pool, the garish decorations added to the Oval Office and other Washington structures, or the Felon's horrid treatment of long time allies and trading partners, the end result is America is reduced. His inappropriate intervention in the suspension of U.S. forward Folarin Balogun is yet another example of the Felon's inability to realize that his efforts often result in the opposite of what he intends. While FIFA boss, Gianni Infantino, at the Felon's bidding reversed the suspension and allowed Balogun to play in yesterday's game, the result was a large portion of the world rooting for Belgium and seemingly a supercharged Belgian team that soundly beat the American team 4 to 1. Had the American team won, its victory would have been tainted, not that the Felon would care given his obsession with "winning" at any costs, including jettisoning sportsmanship, honor and integrity. I suspect much of the world is thrilled by the Belgian victory and I feel sorry for the American team members who win or lose were merely the collateral damage of the Felon's sick ambition and ego. A column in the New York Times looks at the Felon's intervention:

According to soccer’s rules, as interpreted by most people who actually understand them, the red card decision against Mr. Balogun might have been wrong, but it should not have been reversible.

That’s until Mr. Trump called Mr. Infantino and suggested that the rule of law in soccer, just like the rule of law in the United States, doesn’t apply to him. According to the rarely used Article 27, which allows FIFA to suspend a disciplinary measure, the incorrect ruling that could not be corrected was in fact correctable.

Mr. Trump, of course, bragged about beating the charges and getting Mr. Balogun back for the critical knockout match against Belgium in Seattle. Mr. Balogun, it should be noted, is a Brooklyn-born player who was raised in England and plays in France for A.C. Monaco. He’s an American citizen by birthright, the kind of person targeted by the case the president lost last week in the Supreme Court.

We’re the fools to think that Mr. Infantino, a supposed reformer after the scandal-filled regime of his predecessor Sepp Blatter, would make FIFA more aboveboard. His organization has handed soccer’s biggest tournament to both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the petro-potentates of Qatar, and Mr. Infantino has turned the whole thing into an ever more gigantic money machine. He presented Mr. Trump with the first FIFA Peace Prize, after all; nearly three months later, of course, the peace prize winner would start a war with Iran by bombing schoolchildren. A friend noted that he has now won the FIFA Appease Prize, too.

This is a very good American team playing in what has been, to this point, a wildly successful, fairly played tournament. We can compete with just about anyone, although it’s also fair to say we are still not part of the elite, the way Belgium is.

A victory over Belgium would indeed be a measure of achievement, another mile marker passed on the journey of progress the sport has made in the United States. And perhaps one forever tarnished by our commander in cheat.

A piece at NBC Sports continues the theme:

Some will dance around it. I’ll say it. The intervention of the president in the suspension of U.S. striker Flo Balogun’s suspension for the game killed the vibe. It removed the justifiable chip on the U.S. team’s shoulder arising from an unwarranted red card on Balogun and shifted it to Belgium’s squad. The Belgian players had something extra. The U.S. team simply couldn’t match it.

Would it have been any different if the Commander-in-Chief hadn’t tried to twist the arm of FIFA president Gianni Infantino? There’s no way to know. But it couldn’t have been any worse than it was tonight for the U.S. team.

And so the man who would have claimed full credit if the U.S. had won deserves at least some of the blame for the loss. He lit a fire for the Belgian team that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

There’s no way to prove it objectively. But if you followed the story and watched all of the game, it’s a conclusion that is hard not to reach.

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The Rising Price of the Felon's Anti-Science Agenda

The architects of Project 2025 which the Felon has been steadily seeking to implement are white "Christian" nationalists who have both a racist and anti-science agenda.  The racist part is all about restoring white supremacy.  The anti-science part stems from the reality that the falsely named "Christian Right" has long been against science and knowledge because both undercut their mythical beliefs, many of which trace back to Bronze Age goat and sheep herders in Palestine. To these people, anything - and anyone - that opposes or undermines their house of cards belief system is to be condemned and marginalized - or worse.  All of this is made worse by the Felon's desire to keep this large element of his shrinking base happy and the Felon's own lack of curiosity and failure to fully focus on anything besides enriching himself and further inflating his own delicate ego (despite poor crowd turnout yesterday for his failed celebration, the Felon claimed there were incredible crowds). All of this hostility to science is taking a literal toll on the lives of Americans who already have seen their life expectancies fall compared to their European counterparts. We now see measles, once eradicated, returning as a threat to public health and huge funding cuts combined with RFK,JR.'s anti-vaccine fixation do not bode well for the future.   A piece at Salon looks at the severe damage being done:

There’s a well-known scene from a 2001 episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants” in which a mob of fish mistakes a feeble old man for a bully and attacks him. The gag happens again, leading a blue fish to famously quip, “How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?” As far as metaphors go, it’s a pretty apt one for how pathogens, parasites and other infectious organisms serve as lessons for [the Felon] President Donald Trump on basic principles of public health. The problem is he’s seemingly incapable of learning — and Americans are paying the price.

The reason I’m referencing a children’s cartoon is that this is the level of intellectual discourse that science has been reduced to under the MAGA and MAHA movements spurred by Trump and lackeys like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most of this anti-science policy amounts to plugging their ears and going “nah nah nah” whenever something about climate change, vaccines or racial injustice is mentioned.

The rest is standard schoolyard bullying, which, as a new tracker from the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates, has resulted in 574 attacks on science and 187 potential scientific integrity violations since Trump began his second term. These attacks include censorship, appointing cronies to key agency positions, gutting regulations and funding and targeting scientists based on identity. Consequently, the last year and a half has been a disaster in almost all realms of scientific progress and public health in the U.S.

The examples of this administration flouting science and reaping the painful consequences are nearly endless and date back to Trump’s first term, when he flouted virus surveillance programs, essentially inviting COVID-19 in, then did little to stop it and let it flourish into a pandemic that has killed at least 1.1 million Americans and counting. But for more recent cases, we need only look at the last few weeks and boy, have the consequences of an anti-science agenda piled on recently.

To take an easy example, there’s the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool scandal, in which “renovations” ordered by Trump resulted in a nauseating algae bloom, because whoever the president hired to paint the pool bottom didn’t seem to grasp how this would trap heat and provide the perfect conditions for algae to thrive. This science experiment is far less consequential than the record-breaking Ebola crisis that has been worsened by cuts to foreign aid, for example, but it’s no less anti-science. Rather than admit he doesn’t understand basic pool science, Trump’s response has been to arrest at least six people and float accusations against rogue vandals, a “painfully stupid” conspiracy theory, . . .

This is far from the only rake the Trump admin has stepped on in recent days. There’s also the Pentagon announcement last week that it is reversing course on flu vaccines, making them mandatory yet again. This comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the shots optional in late April. It only took about two months for a serious outbreak to occur: this month, nearly 300 people have been sickened at Lackland Air Force Base in Bexar County, Texas, which has so far hospitalized four people and may have resulted in one death (the case is still being investigated).

But Hegseth seems to think you can deflect viruses with creatine powder and tanning lotion. Vaccines are “woke” — until you have hundreds of people sickened for no reason when there is a safe and effective vaccine that millions of people take each year. If more people got vaccinated, flu season wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is every year in America. We collectively and effectively choose to get sick, slowing down the economy and killing vulnerable people, because some of us don’t like getting shots. I’ve argued before that the lack of flu vaccine uptake is one of many aspects of the American death cult, but for this shot in particular, mandates are unlikely to work on the broader public.

On the topic of vaccines that probably should be mandatory, measles continues to wreak havoc across the U.S., with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting 2,134 confirmed cases this year. In 2025, there were just shy of 2,300 cases, which means 2026 is almost certainly going to outpace that record. Approximately 93% of these measles patients are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccine status. The disease, which was once eliminated from the U.S., is now so embedded in our society that we have essentially lost that measles elimination status, whether anti-vaccine health officials like Kennedy acknowledge it or not, as Dr. Jess Steier argued in a recent op-ed for CIDRAP.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is working overtime to further restrict access to vaccines by rewriting the charter of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a federal committee that provides guidance on vaccines. If the ACIP votes to remove vaccines from a free vaccination program — unfortunately, a real possibility — more than half of US kids would lose access to that immunization, experts warn. Once again, it’s the American people who pay the price of the Trump admin’s anti-science agenda.

Yet another example of Trump’s anti-science policies coming back to bite him — this time, somewhat literally — is the return of New World Screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that bore into the open flesh wounds of its victims. For decades, the U.S. has maintained a program in which these flies are bred in a lab, bathed in sterilizing radiation and released around Panama, which prevents the insect from creeping northward.

[C]uts to these programs and Trump’s antagonism toward Mexico, Panama and other Latin American countries threatened to bring the parasite back to the United States. Now it’s happening, with the latest update from the Department of Agriculture reporting 27 cases in the last 30 days. It may not sound like much, but it will be a multi-billion-dollar effort to contain. The response from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been, predictably, to blame immigration and former President Joe Biden.

When cases of screwworm began popping up in Mexico in 2024, Biden’s USDA shuttered southern ports of entry to live cattle imports to prevent the spread. Trump reopened those ports in Feb. 2025 to appease the cattle industry, while staffing cuts at the USDA and sluggish funding reviews have arguably contributed to screwworm’s return.

Screwworm is mostly a concern for cattle ranchers — and given the outsized climate impacts of factory farms, it would be a good thing if people eat less meat — but it still stands as yet another embarrassing neglect of science and public health that is egg on Trump’s face. It’s certainly bad news for the ranchers and farmers that President Screwworm has consistently screwed over.

How many times must he learn his lesson? Trump’s hostility to science isn’t just ignorant; it’s destructive. But it seems like no matter how many times a totally predictable result blows up in his face, he won’t stop the rancor toward science. He won’t stop attacking scientific leaders, cutting their funding or hampering their ability to do their job. He allows his flunkies to attack proven technologies like vaccines or deny the catastrophic decay of our environment due to burning fossil fuels, and on and on.

Trump is only tightening his grip on science, recently proposing rule changes to how federal research is funded under the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently overseen by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. The rule changes would not only weaken the peer review process and forbid international scientific collaboration, but they would also ban research on gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. The blowback is impossible to predict, but if the last 18 months have indicated anything, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

These are far from the only enterprises that seek to rebuild what the Trump admin has demolished, and they all need our support. Unfortunately, it won’t be nearly enough to undo the damage — some of which could take decades to repair, with a staggering death toll in its wake — unless we finally rein in this out-of-control, anti-science crusade once and for all.

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Trump’s 250th Is a Festival of Slop History

Watching the Sail 250 parade of sail into New York harbor on the Today show, it is nice to see a moving, non-partisan celebration of America's 250th anniversary that is not promoting the false, revisionist history pushed by the Felon and his hypocrisy-filled followers among the wrongly named "Christian Right". Besides the lie that America was founded as a "Christian nation" - it was not - these people want to erase the contributions made to both the nation's revolution and history and growth by non-whites and foreigner. As the American Revolution Museum in nearby Yorktown makes clear, but for French troops on the ground and more importantly, the French battle fleet that barred British ship seeking to relieve Cornwallis, Yorktown might have had a different ending. But for the Marquis de Lafayette, gay Prussian general, Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Freiherr von Steuben, often referred to in English as Baron von Steuben, who reorganized the Continental Army into a fighting force, and Spanish general Bernardo de Gálvez (for whom Galveston, Texas, is named) who defeated the British in Florida, and a host of others (including Blacks), America's history might have been very different. Not that any of this true history matters to those generating the "slop history" so loved by the Felon.  A piece at The New Republic looks at the garbage being peddled by the Felon and the white Christian nationalists:

As part of its attempt to pervert America’s semiquincentennial into a partisan celebration of the most corrupt president in American history, the White House has put out, in partnership with Hillsdale College, a series of propaganda videos masquerading as history. A 13-minute piece titled “The Story of America: The Faith of Our Founders” is a paragon of the genre. The video features narration from Mark David Hall, a professor at Regent University and a member of Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission. I watched it so that you don’t have to.  

Hall opens by dismissing the “popular writers who claim that America’s Founders owed something to the Enlightenment.” Historians going all the way back to the founding itself have maintained that the Founders drew heavily from the Enlightenment—but Hall, like so many in the MAGA movement, isn’t interested in serious historians and cites none during this video. . . . . he’d prefer to convince viewers that the Founders were super-holy men, not learned ones. And these Founders definitely never intended to separate church and state in the first place. Apparently, the Founders inserted that pesky First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion in the Constitution just to ensure that conservative Christians would assume their natural right to rule the country.

Hall starts with the claim that America’s Founders cited the Bible more than any other text. By this logic, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—which cites scripture repeatedly in order to make the point that, as he wrote, “it is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder”—must count as an exercise in religious devotion and Christian nationalism.

Hall then dwells on comparatively minor figures such as Elias Boudinot, the director of the U.S. Mint, who resigned from that post in 1805 to found the American Bible Society, which he led for five years. Hall neglects to mention that Boudinot’s boss, President Thomas Jefferson, was in those very same years taking a razor to the Bible to separate the morsels of moral wisdom from any reference to the supernatural, miracles, and other references to the divinity of Jesus. It was like locating “diamonds in a dunghill,” Jefferson wrote in an 1813 letter to John Adams.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Founders were also known in their time as “infidels,” “deists,” and otherwise unorthodox in their religious views. Yet, as Hall tells us dismissively, in this video about the faith of our Founders, “that label [deism] may only be applied to only a handful of individuals.”

The narrative reaches a climactic absurdity in the treatment of the debates concerning religious freedom in Virginia. As Hall notes, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored principally by George Mason, . . . . Mason himself was a classic Enlightenment rationalist who valued empirical inquiry and universal natural rights over blind obedience to religious dogma and clerical leaders. That’s why he put in the bit about religion being grounded on “reason and conviction”—and not revelation. Hall manages to twist this declaration of religious freedom and the values of reason and equality into pro-religious nationalist messaging.

[O]ther action items include expanding opportunities for faith-based organizations to receive public money and for conservative religious people to practice discrimination themselves if they have a faith-based excuse.

Like the rest of the MAGA movement, Hall pretends to be standing on the side of the people against the tyranny of those liberal educational institutions that dare to report the truth about America’s Enlightenment Founders. But Hall is a professor at Regent University, itself an educational institution aligned with a partisan movement that is bankrolled by a sector of the ultrawealthy.

Maybe the defining feature of the video—as well as the commission, and the MAGA movement in general—is its divisiveness. America’s 250th anniversary might have been an opportunity to celebrate the unity that, in spite of our many setbacks and challenges, Americans have managed to achieve over the centuries in the face of so much natural diversity. The animating spirit of “e pluribus unum” might have been nice to hear at a time like this. Even at the time of America’s founding, as serious historians have long noted, America was exceptionally diverse in its forms of religious expression. What the White House has offered now, in propaganda videos just as in its daily cycle of corruption and self-dealing, is the opportunity for an aggrieved minority to hate those people it imagines to have strayed from a supposedly pure, original version of an America that has never in fact existed.

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