Oh no, science to get the Trump “gold” treatment

This is not good news. The Trump administration wants to radically change how science is done in this country.

On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”

“Gold standard”? So he wants to buy some cheap crap from Home Depot, spray paint it gold, and call it science?

Jesus, but he made the oval office kitschy and cheap, and now he’s going to give science the same treatment.

I’m sorry, Canada

The personal apology of a powerless person in the United States doesn’t matter much, but I sincerely am sorry for what our country is doing to you. Actually, we should be apologizing to the whole world, but Canada is our neighbor and our “silly old deranged grandpa president” is lashing out at them again.

Donald Trump is imposing 50% tariffs on most Canadian goods in response to the country retaliating against previous US tariffs, the White House announced Monday, declaring Canada has unfairly discriminated against American cars, alcohol and dairy products.

Sorry.

Sometimes senile old people get institutionalized, and they are cranky and resentful, and they kick and pinch and slap at the people who are hired to help them, and the relatives (unless they are terribly entitled) feel horrible about it. At least, though, their deranged elder loved one is being confined for their own safety, and is typically too old and feeble to do serious harm. Unfortunately, our foul-tempered nasty old geezer is running free, and has the vast power of the USA at his fingertips, and all the hired help seem to be more interested in enabling him than in being responsible guardians.

Jamelle Bouie knows what he’s talking about.

The responsible thing to do here would be to take all his dangerous toys away from him and put him in a luxurious retirement home with lots of gold geegaws glued to the walls and let him rot away. Unfortunately, too many other people are profiting off their proximity to the demented old fart.

A beautiful response by Talarico

The Texas GOP must have a “T problem”

Talarico takes the right tone in responding to accusations by Texas Republicans.

“He says you’re not manly enough to actually — this guy says you’re not manly enough to represent the people of Texas,” Scarborough said. “And he’s concerned about your Low T levels! Your manliness. Oh, yeah. Is this, is this a parody?”

As all three laughed, Scarborough asked his guest if he understood “their obsession with low-T.”

“I had to look it up,” the smiling Texas Democrat replied.

He then got his own dig in, adding, “Guys my age aren’t really worried about that kind of thing.”

Talarico then spoke seriously.

“People are really tired of this kind of professional wrestling in our politics,” he said. “These old guys who are lathered up in their fake tans, throwing these corny nicknames at each other. People are wanting serious leaders who are going to get this economy back on track, who are going to start to lower costs, who are going to start to raise pay. And people are catching on to the fact that these corny nicknames don’t lower the cost of groceries, don’t lower the cost of of prescription drugs, don’t lower the price of gas.”

I have to add that guys my (69) age don’t really worry about “T-levels,” unless a doctor recommends supplements in response to specific symptoms.

This is reminding me of a certain politician who keeps taking and reminding us all of his ability to take cognitive tests. We old people don’t generally worry about taking these tests, and we definitely don’t brag about passing these minimal evaluations of basic functions. We’re similarly not going to race in to our doctors to ask for extra testosterone, unless we’re experiencing difficulties. Are Ken Paxton and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick confessing to something?

I do believe in foreign interference in our elections

Donald Trump gave a speech last night in which he he claimed that he only lost the 2020 election because foreigners interfered. He is obsessed with that ignominious defeat, because his ego is so huge that he can’t tolerate any contradiction of his self-regard.

Donald Trump accused China of interfering with the 2020 election in a primetime televised address that laid bare his continuing obsession with his defeat to Joe Biden, but which opponents warned was a smokescreen for him to meddle in the forthcoming congressional midterms.

In a 25-minute speech on Thursday that had been hyped by Trump himself, the US president cast extraordinary doubts on the integrity of the US electoral process, saying it was “catastrophically” short of standards of fairness and trust, and vulnerable to trespassing by foreign powers.

I don’t believe China had anything to do with it — that country is happy to sell us crap, and no doubt is savoring our ongoing collapse, but they don’t have to do anything to trigger our self-destruction. Republicans are pleased to do that to ourselves, because they are busy pursuing an illusory and contradictory fantasy of American greatness that is centered on racial purity and coddling of capitalists. There is no evidence of election fraud anywhere. Every time those accusations are tracked down they find at best a handful of fraudulent votes, never enough to have any kind of significant effect, but every time a Republican loses an election they start shrieking about Democrats cheating.

They are overlooking the insidious and entirely legal interference that has been going on for decades: the lies and propaganda of Fox News, masterminded by Rupert Murdoch, and how it has corrupted the brains of an entire generation of Americans. This is the seed that has grown into the idiocy that fuels our descent, which is now self-perpetuating. Barking at the Chinese is futile and irrelevant. Look into our systemic failures to regulate our own media.

I don’t ask much of the Democrats

So why do they always disappoint me?

Top of the list: demand an end to the war in Iran, and stop giving Israel support for genocide. Is this too much to ask? It’s the bare minimum exercise of human decency. Stop killing people. But too many Democrats are in the pocket of AIPAC to take a forthright position on something so simple.

Next on the list, but still pretty important: disband ICE. I know it was pushing it too far to ask to defund the police in general, but ICE is nothing but a right-wing murder squad. They killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine yesterday, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas last week. Their new excuse: they were fearing for public safety, so they were justified in gunning down a member of the public who was not threatening the public safety. That’s a damned fine excuse, one they could use to justify shooting me, because it’s so vague.

It’s all so nebulous that the goons who murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti are still running free, the FBI has been stonewalling Minnesota authorities (sub-goal: fire Kash Patel and have him arrested), and they only recently allowed prosecutors to examine the evidence, more than 7 months after the murder of Good. ICE is basically an interstate assassination cartel operating on behalf of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, specifically looking for an excuse to kill brown people and antifa.

If a candidate for office can’t pass those two easy hurdles, they will not be getting my vote. I’m fed up with politicians who refuse to address those two simple issues.

Weird little warmonger & Trump bootlicker dies, suddenly

Lay down your bubble wand, faithful servant

Well, damn. We were so busy waiting for ghoulish news about Mitch McConnell that we’ve been completely surprised by the abrupt demise of Lindsey Graham.

He will be greatly missed by one man, and no one else.

His death is a personal blow to Trump, for whom he was a political cheerleader and frequent golf partner. The president posted on his Truth Social platform: Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!! DETAILS AND ARRANGEMENTS TO FOLLOW. So sad!

No, I shouldn’t say just one. Every Zionist in Israel will be mourning him.

I can’t honestly say that I regret his death, except to note that he was just two years older than I am. We’re all living in the death zone, and it gets more acute every year.

Are they unable to find candidates without misogynistic traits?

I’ve avoided discussing Graham Platner here all this time. I could tell early in his rise that his campaign was going to be an ugly mess that was going to tempt a lot of good people to support him. Bernie Sanders endorsed him!

Right away, I thought “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t sport a Nazi tattoo?”

Then there were the old internet posts, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t have a history of internet bigotry?”

Then we got the accounts of crude drunken behavior on dates, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t treat women with disrespect?”

Now the latest damning accusation has emerged, prompting Platner to finally drop out, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who haven’t raped someone?”

So I was useless on this issue, because I was too busy backing away from this growing clusterfuck. Rebecca Watson has a more forthright response.

Let’s learn to more quickly recognize disqualifying characteristics in our candidates, OK? How about if we don’t make excuses for them anymore?

Schrodinger’s McConnell

Mitch McConnell has been MIA for a few weeks. Credible sources say he’s been in the hospital since 14 June, “recovering”.

Laura Loomer says he is “brain dead” and never coming back.

Who are you going to believe? I think we’ve caught Loomer in a lie. McConnell is a Republican, if you’re going to say he’s brain dead, I’m going to ask, “how can you tell?”

I refuse to celebrate Christian Nationalist holidays

These gomers make it so hard to celebrate Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, which means most Americans are thinking about hot dogs and fireworks, neither of which interest me, and the Christian Nationalists are all reading that one line in the Declaration of Independence that represents the totality of their perspective: “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Forget the Constitution and forget that the bulk of the Declaration was an enumeration of the offenses of the British king, which the current American president is trying to repeat. The Discovery Institute is going all out on that line, with John West writing a whole book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul on their obsession. Wait…the Bible? I thought the Discovery Institute was scientific and secular!

Anyway Charles Thaxton and Stephen Meyer have written an op-ed plugging that theme. It’s terrible, muddled and sloppy, exactly what I expect for the DI.

It’s trying to argue that there are two perspectives, one God-centered that enables human dignity, and the other is scientific, which…they avoid specifying. It’s just not giving God credit, and therefore it’s implied that respect for human dignity will be somehow diminished. It’s an argument based on potential consequences which they don’t support with evidence.

Yet we in the U.S. and other Western countries, with our own familiar materialist scientific view of man, have created a curious situation. The orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity contend that man has dignity because he has been created in the image and glory of God. If the orthodox view is false, as is widely assumed in the academic and legal professions, then one must wonder how long it will be until we in the West reason correctly from a strictly scientific perception of human nature.

The religious perspective has done a poor job of supporting the value of human lives — Christian orthodoxies are all about an afterlife, and has been used to justify slavery. That half of their argument is unsupported, and they don’t bother to support it — just assume that religious beliefs are good. The other half, that science is going to diminish us, is even weaker: they don’t have evidence, we are expected to wonder how long it will be until a strictly scientific perception of human nature leads to some inevitable outcome, which we should assume will be dire.

I’m amazed at how frothy and vague their argument is. It’s the Discovery Institute, though, so they think handwaving at Darwin and Marx is sufficient to prove their thesis.

We might well remember that neither the edifice of Western technical sophistication nor the “science” of Marx, or of Darwin, can provide any firm ground for asserting these rights. Instead, productive proclamations of human rights depend upon a shared conviction that man’s dignity is inherent — safe from any political expedient — as our Western religious heritage once asserted, and as the Declaration of Independence still does

The Declaration of Independence is a 250 year old document that tried, successfully, to justify a separation from a colonial power. I don’t care if it “asserts” an 18th century view on the relationship between humanity and an imaginary god. I have a belief in man’s dignity based on an evolving humanism, not the words of a slave-holder.

Public, and especially political, references to this heritage doubtless offend the sensibilities of a secular age. Nevertheless, if the traditional understanding of man is correct, if it is not only doctrinal but factual, then governments can derive human rights from a dignity that actually exists. But if the traditional view is false and the modern scientific view prevails, then there is no dignity and human rights are a delusion, around the world and in the West as well.

Weird. So if you derive human rights from your fantasies about an invisible superman, then that actually exists. But if don’t believe in this god (and don’t forget, it has to be their specific Christian god), then human rights are a delusion. You know, humanists aren’t the ones arguing for the violation of human rights, that seems to be the domain of sectarian and racist ideologies. Thaxton and Meyer can try to wrap themselves in the thin thread of a single line in an old document, but it still leaves them naked.