How to kill American science

Trump, Musk, and RFK jr are a horrific combo that has discovered how fragile the institution of science can be — all it takes is handing the keys to funding to a small number of incompetents and ideologs. It’s such a simple thing: decree that a few words are verboten and will get your grant application pulled. Take a look at the complete list of words that will flag a grant for being held. They include “gender,” “disability,” and “race”. They include “female” and “women,” but not “male” or “man”. They include “socioeconomic,” “socio economic,” and “sociocultural”…they really wanted to make sure that they got that one covered.

The NSF has sent out this ridiculous decision tree:

Seriously. You want to know how these bad decisions are sailing through? It’s because there is a petty bureaucracy running the NSF that designs redundant, pointless, stupid diagrams like that. It’s Kafkaesque.

The USC professor who is reporting this says:

These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you’re going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you’re going to control for socioeconomic status – totally standard practice – you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.

The word “systemic” is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran’s Administration, but we can’t study trauma now?

If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word “biased” gets me flagged. You can’t design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA

And then, all the Republicans in congress have predictably caved and are going to approve a manifest madman, “Bobby” as they call him, to control health and human services, while a narcissistic boob, Elon Musk, is running rampant through the country’s finances.

So what next? All political norms have been shredded. Democracy doesn’t matter. Anarchy reigns. The law is irrelevant — do you think the Supreme Court can bring reason back? We’re all helpless, and are reduced to spectators to our rapid, catastrophic destruction. It’s going to get much worse.

Is the only solution a violent overthrow of the Trump regime, a complete dissolution of all of the Trump precedents, and a rewriting of the US Constitution? We have to recognize that the US is broken.

Scientific censorship is here

It has long been a desire by the Republicans to meddle in science — let’s filter out the results we don’t like. Nature reports that their desire has been made manifest: US health agency seeks to cut gender-related terms from scientific papers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has mandated that all scientific manuscripts produced by its researchers that are under review at a journal be withdrawn so that certain language relating to gender can be stripped from them.

The directive, sent by the agency’s chief science officer to some staff members on 31 January, is meant to bring the CDC into compliance with an executive order issued last month by US President Donald Trump seeking to restore “biological truth” to the federal government by recognizing only two sexes: male and female. Executive orders can direct agencies inside the federal government but cannot change existing laws.

According to a copy of the e-mail, shared in the newsletter Inside Medicine, manuscripts must not include any mention of terms including ‘gender’, ‘transgender’, ‘pregnant person’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘non-binary’, among others. CDC scientists who co-author papers originating from outside the agency that include these terms are also expected to rescind their authorship.

It’s all very Orwellian. They will dictate what words we’re allowed to use, because they believe that they can bend reality to conform. It doesn’t work that way, though. They’re just going to silence scientists who know better.

The CDC mandate, however, erases mention of queer, intersex and transgender individuals from future literature and seems to legitimize “scientific sexism”, says James Mungin, a biomedical scientist at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who identifies as transgender. Under the new rules, CDC researchers would be unable to share basic demographic data, such as gender identity or sexual orientation, about study participants — omissions that could lead to inaccuracies or ethical breaches if scientists are barred from disclosing why certain participants were removed from a study, Mungin says. Furthermore, gender identity and sexual orientation are nearly impossible to exclude when it comes to the study and treatment of conditions such as HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, potentially causing harm to patients.

“If you’re working in basic science, you might get away with just references to sex, but gender is everywhere in public health,” says Ayden Scheim, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who identifies as trans and studies the health care of marginalized communities. “Unfortunately, I see two things happening: a lot of these withdrawn papers will never be published” because collaborators outside the CDC aren’t going to agree to omit data, Scheim says, “and in the long term, a lot of research that focuses on health inequities for women or LGBTQ+ people will disappear”.

There were a lot of scientists and lay people who threw around terms like “cancel culture” and “censorship” before Trump took office. Where are they now? They were so touchy about criticism or a refusal to platform bad ideas, but I don’t see them even acknowledging that these are actions well beyond anything that has gone before.

If we let them get away with censoring “gay” and “transgender,” what will we do when “climate change” is forbidden, or “evolution”?

Or “Jew”?

This fuckin’ guy

Here’s one way to convert America to a tyranny: give up on all those ineffective checks and balances in the Constitution by giving immense power to an unelected person with a novel title and no oversight at all. I’m talking about this fucking guy.

Elon Musk has gleefully accepted the job of wrecking the country.

We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.

In an obscenely capitalist country like ours, the power of the purse is absolute. He’s already trampling over privacy concerns to steal everything else.

An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.

I wouldn’t expect Trump to care, or even be aware of the problem, but where is AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Ford, Boeing, Bank of America, etc., all those giant companies whose data is being stolen by a jumped-up South African immigrant and competitor? I don’t want my data handed over to Musk, but I’m small potatoes. Some billionaires ought to get on his case.

Unless, of course, they like this part, which involves diminishing the power of the government.

But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government’s own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they’re used. Congress’s authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.

In case you’re wondering how Musk is going to disembowel government, he’s just blatantly firing people and confiscating rights, even when he has no recognized authority to do so. People are just accepting it.

Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications that they’re receiving, as well as the unusual dictats transforming their workplaces in the name of DOGE, are happening late at night and on weekends.

On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” option where they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent out on January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)

Before Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”

Who needs knives in the night when you’re armed with authoritarian memos? He’s just doing it. No one is stopping him. We need more people to rise up and resist.

So much of what he is doing is ridiculously petty.

Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says that unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to DEI, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, which read, “Be kind to everyone.”

OK. No more kindness. These monsters, and the people who appointed them, and the citizens who voted those people in, need to be treated in kind. Do not accept their officious nonsense. Like this one, from the new secretary of transportation:

Rosa Parks might have a few words to say about that. Shut up and sit in the back of the bus, says Secretary Duffy. You’re a distraction. He’s got air traffic controllers to fire.

Ignore that amateur prognosticator

I was watching this video — it’s very good, debunking all the nonsense anti-trans bigots regurgitate to justify their bias — when a face popped up at about 12 minutes that I recognized. Hey! That’s Jay Richards!

Jay Richards was predicting that in about 5 years there’s going to be a massive wave of kids who were duped into sex-change operations coming back to sue the public school system.

In case you don’t know about Jay Richards, he was formerly one of the leaders of the Discovery Institute (he’s now at the Heritage Foundation) who was predicting over 25 years ago that Darwinism was going to be dead and replaced with Intelligent Design creationism in about 5 years.

Proud to support DEI

Our university president has spoken on the anti-DEI pronouncements coming from the president and his racist minions.

Dear students, faculty and staff,

As the federal government continues to propose new policy changes on issues ranging from diversity, equity and inclusion to immigration, I fully recognize that these developments have exacerbated uncertainty, concern and fear among some members of our University of Minnesota community. That is understandable given the rapid and regularly evolving changes emanating from Washington, D.C.

As President, I am writing to address any confusion and reaffirm my—and the University’s—longstanding commitment to fostering a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment that best supports the needs of each and every individual across our five campuses, regardless of their citizenship status.

Public research universities like ours play an essential role in supporting and advancing a society that is humane and just. Here at the University of Minnesota, diversity, equity and inclusion is ingrained in our values, and it advances and elevates our mission.

I want to assure all students, faculty and staff that my leadership team and I truly value the activities that support diversity of thought and inclusion, which enhance our teaching and strengthen our research.

To further clarify, we have not rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Minnesota, and we are not making any preemptive changes to our existing programs.

Instead, we are focusing on our commitment to current employees and programs that contribute to this important work. My leadership team and I felt it was the responsible decision to pause expanding our current activities and hiring new personnel until federal policies are further clarified.

I also want to clarify the University’s position when it comes to international students and scholars.

First and foremost, I care deeply about our international community. We are a global university, and our international students, faculty and staff are a core component of our identity and our excellence.

International students and scholars have been—and always will be—an essential part of our University community. They, along with other employees and students who may be affected by newly proposed immigration policies, will continue to play a vital role in the success of Minnesota and our University well into the future. I am fully committed to their ongoing safety and success.

Personnel and resources are in place to support international students, faculty and staff who may be affected by these federal policy changes. I understand some members of our community have questions that are specific to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This webpage is a great resource for answers to frequently asked questions on this topic. Because this situation is rapidly evolving, our teams will continue to update the webpage to provide updated information and guidance.

I want to reinforce that campus departments of public safety, including UMPD on the Twin Cities campus, do not have a role in enforcing federal civil immigration laws. Accordingly, our officers do not view it as their role to inquire about an individual’s immigration status. Their focus remains on public safety, fostering trust and maintaining strong relationships across the University community.

All of us recognize that colleges and universities nationwide are under heightened pressure and greater scrutiny. That said, the University of Minnesota will not waver in its commitment to fostering a welcoming environment for students, faculty and staff from all over the world. We will stay true to our strong public service mission to ensure we remain one of America’s leading public research universities.

I have tasked a group of University leaders to monitor ongoing developments in Washington, D.C., and they are assessing how these decisions affect our community and operations. As has been our longstanding pledge, the University is fully committed to keeping all members of our community well informed so they can navigate this evolving, complex landscape.

Thank you for your support, your leadership and your collaboration as we move forward together as one University community.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Cunningham
President

That’s a lot of words. It would be more effective and clear if she just wrote, “Fuck you, Donald Trump.”

There are none of these mythical “DEI hires” employed on our campus — just the term “DEI hire” is a dog-whistle for racists, like “welfare queen” and a dozen other slurs. Every employee was hired for their job because they demonstrated an ability to do the work, whether they’re groundskeepers or electricians or professors. There have not and never have been “quotas”. DEI is part of a process to make sure we don’t overlook good people because of thoughtless bias, and to make sure that any employment opportunity is announced to every community, and to assure that we don’t create obstacles to participation. It is a universally good thing. If there’s a flaw in our current policy, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough — there sure are a lot of white people in the loftier levels of the faculty and administration, so DEI hasn’t done much leveling.

The kinds of people who complain about DEI tend to be closet racists who don’t understand DEI and imagine that it’s all about promoting people they don’t like to work alongside them. They’re partially right, but only because there are a lot of people they don’t like on arbitrary grounds. It’s impressive how often, when they complain about DEI, their eyes flick to any brown people or women or gay or trans people, who they’ll then blame for bringing down the quality of the work being done. They avoid specifics to simply blow their dogwhistle as loud as they can.

I think Henry Farrell gets it right.

The main glue that holds the anti-democratic right and libertarians together is a shared detestation for DEI. There is a stark choice ahead for those who value actual diversity of identities, cultures and beliefs, but who believe that DEI is being imposed on them. Do they think that the kind of culture that the Trump administration wants to impose – through far more sweeping and totalizing uses of state power – is going to be better or worse? If they have principled objections to the imposition of ideology by power, they cannot, actually, celebrate the likes of Chris Rufo, who have made it emphatically clear that government imposition of ideology, and the treading down into the dust of those who disagree with them is what they are all about.

Read the rest. There’s also more about the rise of the new Silicon Valley cults and the growth of libertarianism.

The old – sometimes uneasy but often productive – detente between libertarianism and left-liberalism has broken. Instead, people who used to be libertarians or classical liberals are more and more enmeshed with the illiberal right. Democracy is out. Founder-worship and admiration for Donald Trump are in. Elon Musk seems to be copying Shockley’s degeneration at speed-run mode, but he is also in an extraordinarily powerful position. Hundreds of people (I am pretty sure they are mostly in the previously mentioned category of young men looking for attention and advancement) have volunteered to work for Elon Musk’s DOGE, where they are about to start trying to rip the guts out of the U.S. state.

Sorry, lady scientists, you don’t count

Vera Rubin was a famous astronomer who did research on dark matter, and has an observatory named after her. Sadly, though, she was obviously a DEI hire, what with her lady bits and all, and her observatory has been forced to edit their web page describing her contributions.

DELETED: “Science is still a male-dominated field, but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science, and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege.”

Did I say “forced”? Not so…someone in the administrative chain of command at the observatory chose to willingly comply with Donald Trump’s crusade against non-white non-men and decided to curry favor by deleting a woman’s role from their web page.

It makes me sick. Do not comply. Resist. Fight back with, at the very least, non-action on these discriminatory rules. Anything else makes you a chickenshit.

Worse than the New Atheists?

We were always in favor of separation of church and state — I still am — and I never cared for these phony Christian charities that were providing evangelical nonsense and calling it genuine aid. But I am compelled to admit that some Christian charities were mostly sincere and were really supplying relief to communities in trouble, especially after disasters struck (some saw it as an opportunity to do nothing but PR, but let’s not tar every charity with the same ugly brush). Keep religion out of government, but if a church is actually providing helpful social services, they deserve compensation from the state…for that, but not for preaching or prayer.

Unfortunately, there are some who want to use secularism selectively applied to punish Christian charity and liberalism. Mike Flynn clearly did a search, not for corruption or abuse of funds, but for a Christian denomination he doesn’t like, to declare that they shouldn’t get government support. Lutheran Family Services must be very bad, because they assist refugees and immigrants. Of course Elon Musk agrees.

(Disclaimer: I was brought up Lutheran, but got out of there as fast as I could, and do not have a special place in my heart for Lutheran anything.)

I might be willing to go along with calling supporting Christian charities illegal payments, but only if the term was applied to all religious sects, all missionary efforts, and all religious outreach, as a way to close the loopholes that allow some churches to buy private jets so they can deliver Bibles to starving people. But I don’t know, “Lutheran immigration and refugee service” and “Lutheran social services” sound pretty benign. I’d want more evidence that they were abusing the system than that a notorious kook and fanatic searched for the religion in a table of funding payments. This is just naked sectarianism, a little sabre-rattling to start a holy war.

And DOGE is an even worse criminal enterprise, trying to benefit billionaires by ripping apart the social safety net.

Less than two weeks in, and already the creationists are stirring

The regressive politicians are still playing this same stupid game: they hate evolution, but they can’t just switch to stuffing creationism into science curricula (yet), so they instead water down and weaken the science, replacing “evolution” with fuzzy pseudonyms. Gutsick Gibbon explains what’s going on in Iowa right now.

They tried this same stunt in Minnesota almost 20 years ago. Science educators in this state got mad and confronted them at every turn. It worked then, and their efforts were foiled, and that’s what Iowans need to do now.

Also relevant: Milo Rossi dissects pseudoscience. We all need to get fired up.