Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Trump and Bobby Jr. continue relentless attack on life-saving vaccines.
Trump signs executive order to break up measles, mumps, rubella vaccine
Sarah
Boden and Chris
Dall, MA
Separating out
the MMR vaccine is among the recommendations in an executive order signed by the president today that urges all
childhood vaccines be administered at separate visits.
“For example, at
one year, you should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than getting
them all in the same day," President Trump said at the signing.
There are no data to show that spacing out the MMR
immunizations—or other childhood immunizations—is beneficial, but doing so
could increase the risk of infection or lead to kids missing doses. And it adds
to vaccination costs.
Also, breaking up
the MMR vaccine could be difficult, at least in the short term, as this would
require buy-in from pharmaceutical manufacturers to make three separate
vaccines. And the proposed three separate vaccines are not currently licensed
in the United States nor approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which
would take some time.
‘None of this
is reality-based’
The executive order will do nothing to support families of children with autism or advance understanding of it, said a statement from Andrew D. Racine, MD, PhD, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).*
Racine added that pediatricians recommend that children receive certain vaccines at specific ages based on when children's immune systems will respond best and when they are most vulnerable to certain diseases.
Tonight, Charlestown Town Council Considers Banning Data Centers, Battery Storage Facilities
Prevention is better than damage control
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
On Aug. 11 the Town Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing and potential vote
on an ordinance that would prohibit both types of projects from being proposed
and built in Charlestown. The ordinance was unanimously recommended for
adoption by the town planning commission in July.
Data centers, even in little Rhode Island, have made waves
and stirred controversy. Smithfield made headlines earlier this year when
Revity Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Warwick, showed interest
in potentially building a data center on the site of Hanton City, an abandoned Colonial-era village that to this
day is still relatively untouched forestland.
Smithfield banned data center developments in early May, but
the Hanton City development could still squeak through, since Revity Energy
filed its application for it the day before the Town Council approved the ban.
“We have a lot of concerns about what’s going on in other
towns,” said Deborah Carney, Charlestown’s council president, in a phone
interview with ecoRI News. “We’d rather, and I’ll be blunt, nip it in the bud.”
Carney said the town is a poor choice for a data center. The
massive computer facilities require huge amounts of electricity and large
amounts of water to cool the systems. Charlestown, said Carney, relies mostly
on septic systems and private wells.
“We have no public water, no public sewer, it would be a
massive drain on local resources, the environment, the noise, the increase in
utility bills, all the stuff that comes along with these data centers,” Carney
said.
Included in the ordinance scheduled for consideration
Tuesday is an additional prohibition on utility-scale battery storage systems.
Battery storage, to date, is a little-used technology at utility scale in Rhode
Island. The state only has a single 3-megawatt (MW) facility operating in
Johnston, and state regulators have only recently begun drawing up regulations
and tariffs to make the projects economical.
Like data centers, battery storage has found itself at the
center of public controversy. It works by drawing power from the grid when
people use less electricity, like at night, and discharges power back into the
grid at peak times, like in the afternoon and early evening.
Earlier this year, Green Development LLC, a Cranston-based
developer of ground-mounted solar arrays, proposed building a lithium-ion
phosphate battery facility that could store up to 208 MW of power in North
Kingstown.
The project was proposed on 10 acres on Callahan Road in the
Quonset Business Park, a commercial and industrial development area operated by
the Quonset Development Corporation (QDC), where state officials often exercise
more control and authority than local officials.
Residents of North Kingstown have expressed repeated
concerns over developments in Quonset, including an active asphalt plant that
began operations last year. Residents also expressed concerns about the
battery-storage facility and the possibility of fires from the lithium-ion batteries themselves.
Carney had originally floated the idea of banning battery
storage systems back in May, after a resident sent her some information on the
systems, and after another council member suggested the data center ban, the
town solicitor merged the two bans into a single ordinance.
“After reading it, I said yeah this is something we should
look at prohibiting in Charlestown,” Carney said.
The ordinance excludes batteries used by consumer products,
electric vehicle batteries, and the battery packs that often come along with
rooftop solar panel installations. If passed, it would be the first-of-its-kind
ban for battery storage in Rhode Island.
The Town Council is scheduled to meet Tuesday at 7 p.m. at
Town Hall.
RFK Jr.’s Cooking Show Continues Long Line of Trump’s Obsession With Reality TV
Here's an idea: let Bobby do this full-time and pick a new HHS director who isn't crazy
By Chris Walker
This article was originally published by Truthout
“The Real Food Show,” which can be watched on the HHS website, debuted last week. The meals presented on the program fall in line with Kennedy’s so-called “upside-down” food pyramid, which emphasizes eating meats, dairy products, and fatty foods.
When that dietary guideline was launched in January, many critics noted that its focus on those foods could be harmful to many groups of people, as they are drivers of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and other health issues.
Despite these concerns, Kennedy — who has neither a medical nor professional dietary-related background — stood by his version of the food pyramid.
“When we published the dietary guidelines, there was immediately sort of a good reaction, but also a little trepidation from the public and from critics saying that this food is a lot more expensive than the ultra-processed food that we’ve been eating. And that’s not true,” Kennedy said ahead of his first show.
Yet another example of the comeback of an
ancient disease on Bobby Jr.'s watch
Notably, food prices overall have increased under the Trump administration over the past year, with the most recent Consumer Price Index Report (CPI) indicating that costs overall have gone up by 3 percent — including an increase in milk by 6.6 percent and ground beef by 12.4 percent, two staples that are featured in Kennedy’s upside-down pyramid.
Kennedy’s focus on an HHS-based reality TV show comes as the U.S. is dealing with a nationwide cyclospora outbreak, which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stopped monitoring last year under his watch (the diarrhea-inducing parasitic endemic has spread to 45 states).
It also comes as Kennedy has failed to address the rapid increase in measles cases over the past two years — after being deemed virtually eliminated since 2000 (with only 285 cases being identified in 2024), last year, there were 2,286 measles cases identified. So far, as of July this year, the U.S. has already surpassed the total number of cases seen in 2025.
Monday, August 10, 2026
Six Supremes Put Elections up for Bid
They put their thumb on the scale for the 2026 election
By Gerald E. Scorse
The deciding six were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito,
Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas. Definitely and positively, all six
realized the message they were sending to candidates and their big-money
organizational contributors: You can do whatever you want; the campaign
spending limits of the past 55 years have become past history.
“As a result,” she wrote, “a donor will be able to give
a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can
give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills. And the
candidate can seek just such a donation.”
The public was all in for Kagan. By huge margins, Democrats and Republicans alike opposed the
decision. Only 25 percent of GOPers approved, compared to 22 percent of
Democrats. On every other decision this term, the approval difference between
the major parties was over 30 percent.
An ecstatic Donald Trump responded in his
over-the-top Truth Social style: “The Supreme Court just took
restrictions off political spending! A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and…the First
Amendment!”
It absolutely was a major win for Republicans. While
individual Democrats are out-raising their GOP rivals heading into the
midterms, the Republicans have a $600 million advantage for the kind of campaign
financing just greenlighted by the Court.
As for Trump’s First Amendment “WIN,” here’s a sharply
different view from Michael Waldman, president and CEO at the
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law: “[The] campaign finance ruling is part
of the Roberts Court’s 16-year drive to destroy anti-corruption laws.
From Citizens United forward, these justices have ushered in
an era of massive money in politics.” The court not only overrode Congress, it
went “against the wishes of the vast majority.”
Lawyer and former Congressman Colin Allred was even more
scornful: “The Supreme Court term that just ended was, in my
considered legal opinion, one of the worst in modern history.”
Let’s finish up by circling back to the beginning, when six
injudicious justices ignored an eternal political truth. That truth was
glaringly obvious to two major figures from America’s past, Thomas Paine and
George Washington.
Paine made tax proposals that would have limited
income to the equivalent of about $27 million in today’s dollars. He saw the
limit as a necessary guardrail; for him, extreme wealth gave the rich an
“overgrown influence” and was “one of the principal sources of corruption at
elections.” For Paine, money and politics made for a toxic mix.
It wasn’t big money that worried George Washington, it was
anything at all. Washington “was always very reluctant to accept any
kind of gift because he was afraid people might interpret it as a bribe.”
Conclusion: Six smart Supremes made a supremely stupid decision.
Why so many of us can’t let go of our old electronics, and what we can do about it
Lost in your junk drawer
.webp)
From our survey of 4,000 American consumers, we found the single most common thing people did with a device they were finished with was nothing at all: 39% simply stored it. Recycling and reselling, outcomes better for the environment, each accounted for only about 1 in 10 devices. Throwing devices in the trash claimed another 9%.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, our multidisciplinary team blended our expertise in causal inference, sustainability and cybersecurity, to work on the tangled question of what people do with their consumer electronics when they’re done using them. We used statistical models to connect what people say – that is, their stated knowledge and attitudes – to what they actually did.
Why the drawer wins
Two main forces keep devices in the drawer. The first is anxiety about data. People who worried that recycling or reselling a device would compromise their data were 14% and 9% more likely to store it instead.
The second force is simply not knowing how to. People who did not know where to recycle were 10% more likely to hold onto a device, and many also kept old gadgets as a perceived data backup.
Recycling and reselling electronics are a lot easier than a lot of people think. In the U.S., the national chain Best Buy accepts devices for recycling; reselling online is convenient with vendors such as Back Market and Gazelle.
The Cyclospora outbreak was, and still is, a communications failure
Not to mention corruption
Jess Steier, DrPh
A few characteristics of Cyclospora make it
tricky to chase down. Because it will
not grow in culture, the standard playbook doesn't apply. With most
foodborne bacteria, a lab grows the organism, sequences it, and uploads the
genetic fingerprint to PulseNet, the national network
that flags when a case in one state matches a case in another.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has instead been working from partial genotyping, because Cyclospora's genome is complicated enough to defeat the sequencing methods that work for bacteria.
Cyclospora contamination on produce is often sparse
and unevenly distributed, and it tends to sit close to the limit of what a test
can detect, which is how contaminated lettuce ends up testing clean.
Investigators were left with the oldest tools in the kit: interviews and
shipping records.
Important early clues widely missed
These cases skewed heavily toward adults, with the CDC putting the median
age at 44 across a range from 1 to 89 years, and the relative
absence of young children pointed toward something green rather than something
fruit.
If you have young kids you know exactly why. They are
devoted fruit eaters. (I used to joke that my daughter was going to turn into a
strawberry.) But more spotty toward veggies.
That narrows things, but the hunt continues. There are other
important factors, too, like understanding how a growing region is organized
into blocks, when each produce item was cut and by whom, how product from
different fields gets combined at a processor, how long it takes to move from a
field in central Mexico to a restaurant in Michigan, and how fast a perishable
product cycles off the shelf.
Pediatricians and Health Departments (including Rhode Island) Sidestep Trump’s CDC on Vaccine Guidance
Rational response to the breach of trust
 |
| His brainworm ate his memory |
If he wanted to learn more about an outbreak of measles or hantavirus, he would pore over the weekly CDC report that came by email. If a patient’s family was traveling to Africa or Asia, he would check the latest CDC vaccine recommendations for overseas travel.
And if a family was worried about potential side effects from a shot, he could always send them to the CDC’s website to bolster his argument to get the immunization.
Public trust in the CDC has hit bumps in the road during infectious disease outbreaks, but for medical professionals, Snyder said, “the CDC used to be, worldwide, the most trusted source of information pertaining to public health and infectious disease.”
Yet even doctors began losing trust, Snyder said, after Donald Trump was elected president again. Trump quickly tapped longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC.
Within months of his confirmation as secretary, Kennedy had dismissed every member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory board and replaced them with new appointees, some of them prominent vaccine skeptics.
“It turned into a completely unreputable source of information,” Snyder said.
This rupture of scientific trust in the CDC has put many pediatricians like Snyder in a bind, as they no longer turn to the country’s preeminent public health agency and instead search for ways to fill the information gap. Some doctors are launching their own vaccine education efforts, sometimes in collaboration with local public health departments.
On Jan. 5, the CDC removed some vaccines from the recommended vaccine schedule for all children — against the advice of major medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics. The number of recommended vaccines shrank as the agency dropped rotavirus, covid-19, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease from the list. The agency did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Rhode Island marks VJ Day as a state holiday tomorrow, the only state to do it. Here are some inconvenient truths
The Nuclear Age Began 81 Years Ago—With Lies; It Could End the Same Way
Mitchell
Zimmerman for Common Dreams
Eighty-one years ago this week, a single American airplane,
flying almost unnoticed over a Japanese city, dropped a single bomb that
destroyed the entire city. Three days later another American plane destroyed a
second city.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August
6, 1945 and Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945 killed 100,000 people outright. By the end of the year another
100,000 succumbed to radiation sickness, burns, and other injuries from the
blasts. Over 90% were civilians.
The stated reason for killing all these people was a lie.
The claim that we had to drop atomic bombs to avoid the horrific losses US
troops would have been suffered in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was
false—and American decision-makers knew it when they decided to drop the bombs.
Because the United States had
broken Japanese military codes, American intelligence learned in July 1945 that
the Japanese government had already contacted the Soviet Union, America’s World
War II ally, to discuss surrender. The Japanese hoped, above all, to ensure
that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender did not require the
Japanese Emperor to abdicate—a condition that US readily agreed to in the end.
As Gar Alperovitz convincingly
explains in his book, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the
destruction of the two Japanese cities had to do with emerging Cold War politics,
not with avoiding an invasion of the Japanese islands.
Those who made the decision knew that Japan was seeking to
end the war and believed that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, after
the Allies’ victory in Europe, would likely be enough to precipitate Japan’s
capitulation.
A long-hidden, top-secret US intelligence study in 1946 confirmed
that the atomic blasts were not what ended the war—it was Russia’s August 8,
1945 declaration of war against Japan and Soviet troop movements.
Because Russia was preoccupied with the life-and-death
struggle against Nazi Germany, they had not participated in the war against
Japan until then. But in July 1945, at a conference in occupied Potsdam,
Germany, President Harry Truman secured Joseph Stalin’s promise to join the war
against Imperial Japan.
“Fini Japs when that occurs,” Truman observed in his
war-time, hand-written journal in July 1945. “We’ll end the war a year sooner
now,” Truman wrote in a letter around the same time. “Think of all the kids who
won’t be killed.”
US war leaders confirmed the atomic bombing was not needed.
The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later
President Eisenhower) concluded that “Japan was already defeated and that
dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... no longer mandatory as a
measure to save American lives.”
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, then Truman’s chief of staff,
agreed: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... The use
of this this barbarous weapon... was of no material assistance in our war
against Japan.”
Truman did not hesitate to drop the bombs anyway. “The atom
bomb was no ‘great decision,’” he said 15 years later.
The World War II era was an age of atrocity. The Second
Sino-Japanese War—Japan’s war of conquest against China from 1937 to
1945—caused an estimated 10-20 million deaths. Nazi Germany murdered 6 million
European Jews. The Germans also murdered 2 million captured Russian soldiers
through starvation.
And there was the rape of Nanking, the destruction of Dresden, the 1943 famine of Bengal, and
the firebombing of Tokyo and 60 other Japanese cities.
In the face of these unspeakable horrors, the atomic death
of 200,000 Japanese civilians stands out because they were the world’s first
victims of nuclear warfare—and their unnecessary deaths, excused by a set of
lies, ushered in an era of peril for all humanity.
The lies and the dangers did not stop with the end of World
War II. As we should have learned, nuclear weapons have
a way of spawning lies.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, in 2003 the Bush regime
constructed the fiction that Iraq had nuclear weapons, as an excuse for
invading and occupying the oil-rich nation. But Iraq had neither nukes nor
other weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives who promoted the
invasion of Iraq (and urged President George W. Bush to
proceed to invade Iran as well) had manipulated dubious intelligence to promote
fears of an imaginary threat.
The price of those lies was high. In the end, the US
occupation of Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of
US service members’ lives—and caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian
deaths.
This year Donald Trump returned
to the right-wing dream
of overthrowing the Iranian government, again lying about nuclear weapons to
support a completely unnecessary war. Trump and his aides claimed that Iran was
on the verge of building a nuclear bomb and was developing long-range missiles
that could soon strike the United States. US intelligence agencies confirmed that these claims
were both lies.
The persistence of presidential lies about fictional nuclear
threats should not obscure the all-too-real dangers of nuclear proliferation.
Citizens who are concerned about threats to our existence on
this planet have rightly focused on climate change. But
a world increasingly subjected to the stresses of climate change and its
impacts—extreme temperatures, sea-level rise, mega storms, uncontrollable
fires, crop destruction, drought,
famine, refugee flows, and xenophobic politics—is a world in which desperate
and megalomaniacal rulers may feel tempted to use thermonuclear weapons. And
the nuclear age could end, as it began, with lies.
Mitchell
Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the
anti-racism thriller "Mississippi Reckoning" (2019).
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