The Plagues of Trump: Charlie Angus

 

The Time of Plagues CHARLIE ANGUS / THE RESISTANCE JUN 15   READ IN APP   Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. The amount of money that he controls is beyond imagination. The news of his new wealth came out as we learned more about his disastrous reign as the king of DOGE. Musk promised to take a chainsaw to government programs. He was cheered on by Trump and the MAGA faithful. Now, just over a year later, the bill is coming due. And it’s Texas cattle farmers who are paying the price. For the first time in decades, the American beef industry is scrambling to contain an outbreak of the screwworm parasite. It is expected to cost the US cattle industry two billion dollars in losses this year. Canada has shut its border to prevent the spread. The move has enraged MAGA governor Greg Abbott, who says we are overreacting. This is after Abbott closed his border to Mexican cattle, but the damage has already been done. The screwworm is a larva carried by a particular form of fly. It burrows into warm-blooded animals like cattle, horses, and deer. The impacts are devastating. In the 1970s, the US government set up programs to monitor and eradicate screwworm. One tactic was to breed sterile male flies to kill off infestations. The program was relatively cheap ($15 million a year) and eradicated the parasite that had been costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollars. But, as with vaccine programs, once the predator had been erased, it became easy to forget why the programs were established in the first place. Right-wing podcasters loved to crank out the story of government “eggheads” spending taxpayers’ money to study the “sex lives” of flies. It filled the rage bile of the MAGA airwaves, to crank the rage bile of the right-wing podcasters. Never mind that this program was monitoring 180 outbreaks in 22 countries and had the capacity to utilize 160 laboratories to stay on top of any threat.  Trump rode the dumbed-down rage bile into the White House, and Elon Musk was his enthusiastic wrecking ball. Musk ridiculed the program as a “crazy waste of money” and a “radical-left psy ops.” The screwworm prevention program is just one of 5,300 monitoring programs that were slashed by DOGE in a single month. Now, less than a year later, the screwworm has returned with a vengeance. It is the latest warning sign of what happens when medical science is trashed for the sake of ideology. I have written about the outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise ship the HV Holdius. Normally, such an outbreak would be a red flag concern for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but the CDC wasn’t ready to deal with the outbreak because it had been devastated by the so-called Friday Night massacre, where Robert Kennedy Jr. fired thousands of researchers and scientists in a single shot. Among those who were fired were the inspectors who monitor health on cruise ships. In trying to contain the damage, President Trump appointed MAGA loyalist Admiral Brian Christine to oversee the crisis. Christine has no real public health experience. He runs a podcast called the “erection connection” for men suffering from erectile dysfunction. The hantavirus outbreak hit as a deadly Ebola outbreak began to spread. The United States had trashed the CDC and was locked in an ideological fight with the other frontline of defence — the World Health Organization. Screwworm, Hantavirus, and Ebola are just warning signs that worse threats are on the horizon. RFK Jr.’s attacks on vaccines, monitoring and research have set the stage for what could be a cascading crisis in public health. His own cousin Caroline Kennedy warned that it was a dangerous mistake to put RFK Jr in any position of power because he was, in her words, “a predator.” His anti-vaxx positions are so extreme that when pushed to state what he thought of the polio vaccine, RFK Jr falsely claimed the vaccine “killed many, many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” It is a fabrication. A lie. A dangerous disregard from the man in charge of keeping Americans safe. Polio was completely eradicated in 1998. Now there are reports that this nightmare disease has begun to prowl again. A medical doctor writing on X said that the real plague we are facing is the “stupidity nightmare.” It brings us back to Albert Camus, who wrote about the disregard people in his time had for the reality of the return of dangerous outbreaks. His words could have been written for today: “We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.” Support The Resistance AUGUST 13, 2025 Read full story If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting. Charlie Angus / The Resistance is a reader-supported publication — please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid This post is public — feel free to share it. Share Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription your support will help keep this project independent and sustainable. I’m grateful to have you here - thank you for your support. Upgrade to paid   LIKE COMMENT RESTACK   © 2026 Charlie Angus PO Box 74173, Ottawa RPO Beechwood, Ontario K1M 2H9  Unsubscribe

Ways Forward from this Polycrisis: David Suzuki/Ian Hanington

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Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr Connected crises contain opportunities  for a better world The climate crisis is not simply an isolated technological challenge. It’s part  of a much larger “polycrisis.” After all, everything is interconnected. The magnitude of this “system disequilibrium,” as Canadian author, social  scientist and Cascade Institute executive director Thomas Homer-Dixon  calls it, can cause a sense of hopelessness, but it is resolvable —  with major changes in the ways we conduct ourselves on this small planet. That’s the message of a comprehensive new study. The World  Inequality Lab’s “Global Justice Report: A Plan for Equality &  Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries” — by 45 authors using  databases compiled by more than 200 researchers from around  the world — states that “it is possible to reconcile planetary  habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation  rests on three pillars simultaneously.” This will require significantly altering the power structures  that now govern our world and that are driving us toward calamity. The pillars are rapid decarbonization of energy systems, a shift from  overconsumption toward “sufficiency” (including reduced labour hours  and raw materials use and large changes in food habits, land use and  forest cover) and a “drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth  and power” between and within countries. This will require significantly altering the power structures that now govern  our world and that are driving us toward calamity. It would include “hefty  wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change  in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors, such  as industry and mining, to education and health,” the Guardian reports. The majority of humans would benefit, as it would double the incomes  of 89 per cent of the world’s population by 2100 and keep global heating  below 2 C above the preindustrial average. It would also reduce the  average workweek to about 2.5 days, increasing leisure time. Wealth inequality would be sharply reduced, with the poorest half of  humanity increasing its portion from two to 30 per cent, while the  billionaire class would see its share fall from six to 0.05 per cent. “Close to 90% of the world’s population would double their income  between 2026 and 2100, and once leisure and a habitable planet  are counted, more than 99% come out ahead,” WIL co-director and  Paris School of Economics professor Thomas Piketty and others wrote in a Guardian article. As people feel less economically secure, they support authoritarian leaders, but that then leads to a backlash against green policies, undermining efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Piketty says the ideology of people currently in power or rising in the  United States and many other countries can’t deliver what most of humanity needs. “At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative  redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will  simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the  climate, but also on social grounds,” he told the Guardian. Homer-Dixon argues that, although the interrelated crises may  seem dire, they also present opportunities. That requires  understanding how they connect, and how feedback loops  exacerbate the problems. For example, fossil fuel consumption  leads to climate change, which produces economic costs. “As  people feel less economically secure, they support authoritarian  leaders, but that then leads to a backlash against green  policies, undermining efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption.” The opportunity, he says, is that this “delegitimizes the existing way  of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are hunkered  down and don’t want anything to change.” What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it. The Cascade Institute and the WIL report attempt to understand the holistic  nature of the polycrisis to find solutions. Given that one underlying cause  is wealth hoarding and inequality, the backlash from the ultra-wealthy and  their political backers will likely heat up. The “Global Justice Report” notes  that average per capita gross national income worldwide would increase  for almost everyone but, “The exception would be the mega-rich, who  would be highly taxed because they are most responsible for the climate crisis.” As well as taxing the overly affluent, the report recommends measures such  as “a global justice fund to finance the energy transition and oversee an  increase in education and healthcare spending” and “a world sovereign  fund, which would rebalance global holdings of public and private wealth closer  to proportions last seen in 1970.” It concludes that a better, more equal world is materially possible. “What stands  in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but  crucial work of building a coalition behind it.” It’s a coalition we should all get behind. By David Suzuki, with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor and Writer Ian Hanington Read Online Share this story! Support the David Suzuki Foundation Your gift will help push for bold climate action, protect nature so it can sustain all life and create resilient communities that benefit everyone. Donate Today . To configure which emails we send you, please manage your content preferences here. If you no longer wish to receive any email from the David Suzuki Foundation, you can unsubscribe at any time. The David Suzuki Foundation is a registered charity in both Canada (BN 127756716RR0001) and the United States (94-3204049). We are located at 340-1122 Mainland Street, Vancouver, B.C., V6B 5L1, and we also have offices in Montreal and Toronto. Please visit our website for more information on how to contact us.

 

Doe and fawn playing in an alvar

mother and fawn whitetail deer playing in an alvar

they gambol

here's the YouTube clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-Rvq_56BMI

she sees the camera and junior performs

What the heck's an Alvar?

 Alvar

Almost all of North America’s alvars

are found within the Great Lakes

basin. There are several types of

alvar, most of which are globally

imperiled and under stress.

Alvar Pavement and Grassland

 Less than 10% tree cover and less

than 25% shrub cover

 High abundance of herbaceous

plants or exposed bedrock (may be

covered with lichens and mosses)

Alvar Shrubland

 Less than 10% tree cover with

moderate to high cover of shrubs

 Variable amounts of herbaceous,

moss, and lichen cover

Alvar Woodland and Savanna

 Partial canopy of trees;

savannas: 10 - 25% cover and

woodlands: 25 - 60%

 High cover of shrubs, with some

trees, and some herbaceous, moss

and lichen cover