RFK is trying to get the FDA to revoke it's approval of the polio vaccine?! I mean, I know he's an anti-vaxxer. It's just that we're back in another era of Trump-blogging, where you're not exactly surprised but the horror manifests as surprised.

How about a cabinet thread: who is too incompetent to achieve much, who are you most worried about, etc?

NickS writes: Worth reading the whole thing:

The last few months has provided two moments that emphasize how central McDonald's is to American life, both physically and culturally. First there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop where he "worked" for an hour, and now the news that Luigi Mangione, the charged and alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught in an Altoona franchise because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.

Those who have followed me for the last decade know that McDonald's is also central to who I now am. My first viral piece, that effectively launched my writing career, was about how McDonald's has become America's community centers, especially for communities where so much else has fallen apart, or disappointed people. Over half of my book Dignity takes place in McDonald's, and while writing it, in a McDonald's, my working title was, "Everything you want to know about America can be learned in a McDonald's" because I sincerely believe that. Which is why, when I do a brief turn as a political reporter, I spend my months interviewing people in McDonald's, not at campaign events, or non-profits, or even in diners, because all of those are self-selecting for highly engaged voters and elections are not determined by only the highly engaged voters but by the far larger "normies" who only tune in and turn out every few years.

I thought it was really well written and I haven't been in a McDonald's in years. I suspect that will be the case for many of the commentariat, but I'm hoping some people have spent more time in McDonald's and have their own perspective.

Heebie's take: First, we know this guy. His main shtick is writing about the heartland and middle America in ways that don't insult the people on the coasts, and he's pretty good at it. He wrote the piece about walking in Phoenix a while back. He also wrote a bunch of post-2016 election stuff and stuff about people dealing with addiction that we've posted. (In other words, I found guest submissions in my inbox but it was a pain to find the actual posts on Unfogged.)

Second. I have no problem with McDonalds! I kind of suspect most of us are over hating on McDonalds, and have moved on to benign indifference. In other words, I think this falls flat:

McDonald's is wildly popular with every group of Americans, uniting every demographic in the US -- it crosses economic class, race, gender, urban versus rural -- with the single exception of the highly educated, especially academics. They alone as a group have moral issues with it, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.

First off, it kind of insults the highly educated in a way that he's usually careful not to do. Second, I don't think average wealthy people in general are going to McDonald's, either. There don't tend to be many McDonald's in the wealthy suburbs anyway.

At any rate: being at a McDonald's is not qualitatively different than being at any other store on the poor side of town. It's the same clientele as the gas station, or the Walmart, or the Denny's, or the IHOP, or the Waffle House, etc. This is just hanging out around low-income people.

I've been assuming that Trump's xenophobia resonated because people like an easy scapegoat, and other cheap scapegoats might have worked equally well.

Apparently the past few years* have been the biggest surge of immigration in US history:

The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data...That's a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today's larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850

First off, I'm shocked because this has felt totally invisible in my daily life. I knew there was a surge, but it happened "on the news" as far as I was concerned.

Mayors and governors, both Democratic and Republican, have complained about the strain on local government. In Chicago and elsewhere, residents have filled public meetings to make similar criticisms. In Denver, where tens of thousands of migrants have arrived, homeless people say that shelter spots are harder to find. In Queens, residents say that an influx of street vendors has created chaos in some neighborhoods.

(There are a bunch of links in that paragraph that I was too lazy to preserve.)

I have mixed feelings about this:

Some of the biggest effects have occurred in South Texas, and Mr. Trump made big electoral gains there. Eight years ago, he won less than 30 percent of the vote in a strip of six counties along the Rio Grande. This year, he won all six counties.

I have heard that this is a big thing, yes - (some) Latinos who have been in Texas forever (we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us!) do not feel any kinship or allegiance to recent immigrants. That said, I don't think it accounts for the full rightward tack. I'd blame a lot of that on misogyny and the economy.

*Gifted link

Apparently in Europe, it's all the rage to have a $1500+ kitchen gadget called a Thermomix. This is a more informative blurb than I was able to find on the actual website:

The Thermomix does it all. It's a portable cooker, blender, food processor, and mixer all in one. It handles every step until your meal is done, including chopping, blending, steaming, cooking, stirring, whisking, weighing, mincing, and sautéing....You don't have to pre-measure ingredients; the Thermomix has an integrated scale, so you can add directly into the bowl and see the weight change as you go.

Reddit seems to mostly like it.

Europeans: you know of this?

Mossy Character writes: Don't miss it Heebie!

Heebie's take: First off, I didn't recall anything about this differently-eclectic webzine before clicking through. (By now, I think I remember it.)

It's clearly discussing an actual conference that is happening, so I didn't think it was satire. But what's the phenomenon where you can no longer distinguish mocking from the actual endorsement, because the actual premise is so far gone and yet people keep going further? This is that.

To save you the trouble, here's what The Mercator says on its About page:

We place the person at the centre of media debates about popular culture, the family, sexuality, bioethics, religion and law. Mercator isn't liberal. It isn't conservative. We don't want to be trapped on one or the other side of the culture wars. If you want a label, try "dignitarian".

There's that phenomenon again!