Category: politics

The Atlantic on the government’s attacks on science

February 17, 2025 • 11:15 am

A lot of what the Trump administration is doing is aimed at health and science, and not necessarily in a good way.  The most obvious blunder is the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a palpably unqualified man with some bizarre views, as Secretary of Health and Human Services,  the person who advises the President on all health matters. Given Trump’s abysmal ignorance of science, having someone like RFK Jr. guiding government policy is scary.

There’s a lot of beefing as well about the government cutting the “overhead” (money given to universities, supposedly to support the infrastructure of grants) uniformly to 15%, down from over 60% in some cases (each university negotiates it rate with the government). This slashing will reduce university budgets substantially. But in some cases in which a university has huge endowments, like Harvard ($53 billion),  I can’t shed many tears over that. Given that in many cases we simply don’t know where overhead goes, the assumption has been that many schools simply use it as a source of money for almost anything, and that means that the taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing not just scientific research, but universities in general.

At any rate, the potential damage that the Trump administration will do to American science is outlined in this new Atlantic article by Katherine Wu.  It doesn’t cohere like a good science piece should, but at least lays out some scary things in store for American science. To me, the scariest is the hiding of already-obtained scientific results, financed by taxpayers, that were publicly available but are no long so.

Click below to see the article, or find it archived here.

First, the payoff for funding science. I hope this is accurate as it’s characterizing science as “research and development”:

Every dollar invested in research and development has been estimated to return at least $5 on average—billions annually.

It also looks as if the National Science Foundation is on the chopping block:

The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research. The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation. Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)

It’s not clear whether the DEIrestrictions described in the previous post will severely impede science. Wu says this:

Many also expect that the moratorium on DEI-focused programming will have severe impacts on who is able to do the work of science—further impeding women, people of color, and other groups underrepresented in the field from entering and staying in it.

But it’s not clear the restrictions will have that effect, nor that making science more “diverse” (not just via race, but in other traits) will improve our understanding of nature.

There are restrictions on Social-Justice-aimed projects, but again, many of these have been a waste of money and effort, performative efforts not aimed at understandind science, and will we simply have to see how this shakes. But those who do such work are beefing about what the government did. Here’s an example of a peeved but woke scientist whose work I’ve often criticized (click screenshot to go to thread). Most of the commenters don’t support Fuentes’s griping:

 

One problem is that the government is looking for suspicious grants by doing word searches, and those searches include terms like “environment,” “climate”, and “race”.  It’s a quick way to find suspicious grants, but you have to evaluate their quality, not simply defund them because they come up in a keyword search.

Here’s what I find most distressing about what the government did (besides appointing RFK Jr.):

In yesterday’s executive order, Trump highlighted the importance of “protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data.” But that is exactly what the administration’s critics have said it is already failing to do. At the end of last month, the CDC purged its website of several decades’ worth of data and content, including an infectious-disease-surveillance tool as well as surveys tracking health-risk behaviors among youths. (On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the government to restore, for now, these and other missing data and webpages to their pre-purge state.) And as soon as the Trump administration started pulling data sets from public view, scientists started worrying that those data would reappear in an altered form, or that future scientific publications would have to be modified.

I’m not as worried about the reappearance of data in altered form as I am about the simple removal of data—data funded by us, the American taxpayers—from public view. Fortunately, a judge stopped the data removal, but that may be temporary.

What will be the outcome? While Wu thinks this will reduce trust in science, I’m not so sure about that, especially given that trust in science fell strongly during the Biden administration, and trust is reduced simply because science is getting mixed up with politics in every administration. What worries me more is the vulnerability of science to the whims of the administration—an administration that seems to care more about key words than about research itself.  My view is that the government is entitled to vet science funding and cut waste if it wants, but that governments are poorly equipped to judge scientific merit. A grant that looks wasteful may come up with useful results, though of course there are some that simply look like government funded-virtue flaunting. It’s best if a generous dollop of money is allocated to science, and then scientists themselves decide how to dole it out, for they are the best equipped people to do so. In this I agree with Wu’s conclusion:

There will undoubtedly be periods, in the coming weeks and months, when the practice of science feels normal. Many scientists are operating as they usually do until they are told otherwise. But that normalcy is flimsy at best, in part because the Trump administration has shown that it may not care what data, well collected or not, have to say. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy repeatedly refused to acknowledge that vaccines don’t cause autism, insisting that he would do so only “if the data is there.” Confronted by Senator Bill Cassidy with decades of data that were, in fact, there, he continued to equivocate, at one point attempting to counter with a discredited paper funded by an anti-vaccine group.

In all likelihood, more changes are to come—including, potentially, major budgetary cuts to research, as Congress weighs this year’s funding for the nation’s major research agencies. Trump and his administration are now deciding how deep a rift to make in America’s scientific firmament. How long it takes to repair the damage, or whether that will be possible at all, depends on the extent of the damage they inflict now.

I’m just glad that I don’t have to apply for science grants any more.

Hagan Scotten: a person with integrity

February 16, 2025 • 11:10 am

As you probably know, Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney, was asked to dismiss the corruption indictment against NYC mayor Eric Adams after U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon (a Republican) resigned from the Department of Justice rather than be involved in dismissing a criminal indictment on political tit-for-tat grounds.  Here’s Scotten’s own letter of resignation to Trump’s goon Emil Bove, who ordered Sassoon to get Scotten to do the dirty work.

You can download the letter here from the NYT.

The last sentence of the second paragraph will live on as a defense of our Republic, which I fully believe will stand over the next four years.

h/t: David

Helen Pluckrose on Elon Musk and the faux Hitler Salute

January 24, 2025 • 9:30 am

I was quite surprised three days ago when I argued that Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute”  at the post-Inaugural rally simply seemed to be a gesture of exuberance made by an overexcited and awkward man and was not a Hitler or Mussolini salute. He said, when he made the “Sieg Heil”, that “My heart goes out to you,” and, indeed, touched his heart three times while extending his arm twice. See the video below, noting also his awkward dance moves when he also pumps and extends his arms:

It amazed me that this caused a fracas not only in the media, but on my own website, with a lot of people asserting unequivocally that it was Musk’s tribute to Hitler/white supremacy or that he was trolling the Left by doing something that would anger them. Musk himself has denied the allegations. From the BBC:

Some on X, the social medial platform he owns, likened the gesture to a Nazi salute, though others disagreed.

In response, the SpaceX and Tesla chief posted on X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”

But of course to enraged “progressives” on the Left (and do I need to explain again that when I put that word in quotes, it’s perjorative?), Musk’s denial means absolutely nothing. He was lauding Nazis!

My interpretation of the “Hitler salute” explanation is that it is made by people who feel they must demonize their political opponents in the worst way possible, even though there’s a more charitable explanation. And we have to be more charitable in the future, including admitting when our opponents do things that are actually good.

Further, as the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats anti-Semitism) explains, people are touchy after Trump’s inauguration, and this explains why some could mistakenly interpret an “awkward gesture” as a Hitler salute. One would think that the ADL’s take would give people pause, but not wokesters like AOC, who, in what some called “Jewsplaining”, tells the ADL that they were actually defending a Hitler salute:

This leads to the second issue with the Hitler take: it makes Leftists look loony, ready to demonize their opponents and lose their heads over something that at worst is dubious and at best (and most likely) is simply an “awkward gesture.”  Even the ADL realizes that the Hitler take is not going to reduce antisemitism and, in my view, it simply reduces the credibility of the Left in general.  Surely ludicrous interpretations of gestures as Hitleresque bespeaks a mindset that helped cost us the last election.  So, like Helen Pluckrose in her website post below, I agree that people have to stop this nonsense.  Even if you don’t like Musk, he was not giving fealty to Hitler.  If Democrats don’t regroup and get sensible, we’ll keep on losing elections.

So I’ll quote Pluckrose in extenso, and if you don’t like what she says, take it up with her.  I’m not arguing any more about this issue; I’ve pondered the Hitler argument, dismissed it as a misguided and kneejerk overreaction (Pluckrose calls it “deranged”) and I’ll move on.  But click below to read.

Pluckrose is no fan of Musk, but calls for a thoughtful rather than a reactive rebuttal of his views. Quotes from her piece are indented.

This makes it especially important that those who are concerned about his influence over the policies of the most powerful country in the world and the largest forum for public political discourse, and the impact the combination of these factors can have on the rest of the world conduct themselves as serious and responsible adults in their critiques of him.

Admirers and supporters of Mr. Musk who believe these concerns to be unfounded range from thoughtful, well-informed politically engaged people who support his general views and overall aims and believe that the benefits his expertise, his stances and his influence bring outweigh any personal foibles to utter lunatics, wedded to ideological narratives divorced from reality and engaging in tactics common to both the woke left and the woke right. It is important that his thoughtful and serious critics engage in good faith with his thoughtful and serious supporters and address the reality of his influence in ways that focus on what is true, what is significant and what has real impact on the world.

It is already the case that Musk’s least thoughtful and serious supporters on the woke right typically shut down any criticism of him by claiming it to be a symptom of “Musk Derangement Syndrome” (MDS). This accusation, when made spuriously, functions in a very similar way to the woke left’s use of the DiAngelo style concept of ‘whiteness’ (an unconscious drive to uphold the systems of white supremacy for one’s own political benefit). That is, it functions as a Kafka Trap in which any attempts to deny that one’s motivations in criticising Musk’s or DiAngelo’s ideas are caused by either of these pathologies are evidence of the pathologies. By formulating concepts of MDS or whiteness which contain within them the premise that any denial of them are evidence of the derangement or unconscious bias skewing the speaker’s judgement, it preemptively shuts down the possibility of any critique being legitimate. This kind of circular reasoning is not persuasive to reasonable, ethical people who care about what is true and share the stated aims of Musk to oppose censorship and dismantle governmental corruption or of DiAngelo to oppose racism and dismantle racial prejudice (my readers are likely to support both) but think that doing so in an evidence-based and consistently principled way is essential

Nevertheless, if one wishes to counter claims that any criticism of Musk is a manifestation of Musk Derangement Syndrome, it is important not to be deranged.

She gives a number of social-media examples of this “derangement”, and then analyzes interpretations of the gesture, all three of which followed my post:

. . . . even if there is a possibility that [Musk] was deliberately making a Nazi salute, mindreading him as doing so and responding in a hyperbolic and overwrought way is not remotely helpful whatever the motivations were. Consider the reasonable responses people are likely to make to such interpretations in any scenario.

  1. Musk was simply illustrating his heart going out to the people he was speaking to.

People will see the woke left doing its “Everybody who disagrees with me is a Nazi” thing again and the perception that it should not be taken seriously is strengthened.

  1. Musk was trolling with the gesture and trying to provoke this response in order to illustrate how deranged ‘the left’ is.

Well done. You played right into that and consequently reduced the credibility of left-wing critiques of Musk including from those of us who are not deranged.

  1. Musk really does have sympathies with Nazi ideology and intended to convey that he will influence the Trump administration in that direction.

This would be highly alarming and indicate a need to seriously and carefully scrutinise his policy recommendations and shore up your credibility so that you are taken seriously should you find indications of it. The worst thing to do is shriek “Nazi” spuriously and increase the tendency of reasonable people to assume that somebody being accused of being a Nazi has simply said something considered problematic using the tortuous reasoning of the Critical Social Justice Left and ignore it rather than have a look to see if they have, in fact, expressed views compatible with a genocidal antisemitic and/or ethnonational ideology.

Stop it.

There is never a good time for hyperbolic, overwrought and, yes, deranged accusations of Nazism, fascism or far-right beliefs and intentions based on little to no evidence, but of all the times when this is a terrible idea, this is probably the worst. The Trump administration is in power, Elon Musk has significant influence on it, the power and influence of X as a platform for news has never been higher and policies that impact not only Americans but the rest of the world are already underway. This is a time to be serious grown ups and carefully, thoughtfully and honestly scrutinise both policy decisions influenced by Elon Musk and the impact of his social media platform on the state of political discourse and what everyday people who vote and influence culture believe to be true and ethical. It is a time to be particularly conscientious when evaluating the views and actions of Musk, give him credit for anything positive and beneficial he achieves in an ethical way, and present any concerns that arise in a serious, well-evidenced and well-reasoned way.

If there is reason to be concerned about the power, influence and character of Elon Musk (and I suspect there is), the people who will need to be convinced of this will be serious, ethical, thoughtful, American conservatives who care about what is true and what is morally right, who are currently of the view that Musk is beneficial to their great nation (and hopefully the world) and are absolutely sick of the authoritarian irrationality and spurious name-calling of the Critical Social Justice left.

I beg you, please stop being deranged.

Helen Pluckrose knows whereof she speaks, as she’s been a critic of “Critical Social Justice” for a long time, including her book with Lindsay, Cynical Theories (yes, Lindsay has gone a bit off the rails after the publication).  Her take on this whole kerfuffle is sensible and, I think, correct.

The best criticism is often satire, and here’s some: first a take from the Babylon Bee, and then a Musk interpretation of the often-used “Hitler goes nuts” scene from the 2004 movie Downfall:

Trump’s new sex and gender policy

January 23, 2025 • 11:00 am

If you want to see a compilation of all of Trump’s executive orders, you can find links here that will take you to the contents of the official orders.

I’ve talked about the new rules on sex and gender before, but wanted to discuss them again, briefly. Click the screenshot below to see Trump’s EO on those issues:

It’s a long document (four pages when printed out single-space in 9-point Times type, but the upshot is an official recognition of two sexes (male and female, of course), which are seen as immutable. Coupled with that is a refusal to use, on government documents or in government work, any concept of gender.

One excerpt:

It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.  Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, and the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy:

(a)  “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.  “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

(b)  “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

(c)  “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.

(d)  “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

(e)  “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

(f)  “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.  Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.  Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.

(g)  “Gender identity” reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.

While most of this seems okay to me, I’d make two changes. First, sex is not recognizable, at least via the apparatus to produce gametes, at conception, when we have only a single cell. With high probability you could identify its sex via DNA testing, but the reproductive apparatus develops only later. Ergo I would substitute “at birth” for “at conception”.

Second, it makes no provision for true intersex people, who cannot be identified as either male or female (hermaphrodites are one example). Though such people are vanishingly rare, so that sex is about as close to binary as you can get, they are not nonexistent, and constitute somewhere between 1 person in 5600 to 1 in 20,000.  There has to be some provision for identifying the sex of these people, perhaps with an “I” for intersex.

It also deals with women’s spaces:

Sec. 4.  Privacy in Intimate Spaces.  (a)  The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers, including through amendment, as necessary, of Part 115.41 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations and interpretation guidance regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act.

(b)  The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development shall prepare and submit for notice and comment rulemaking a policy to rescind the final rule entitled “Equal Access in Accordance with an Individual’s Gender Identity in Community Planning and Development Programs” of September 21, 2016, 81 FR 64763, and shall submit for public comment a policy protecting women seeking single-sex rape shelters.

Sec. 5.  Protecting Rights.  The Attorney General shall issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex and the right to single-sex spaces in workplaces and federally funded entities covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  In accordance with that guidance, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Labor, the General Counsel and Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and each other agency head with enforcement responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act shall prioritize investigations and litigation to enforce the rights and freedoms identified.

In general I agree, but there may be specific cases, for example a trans woman in jail for embezzlement and not sexual aggression, might be placed in a woman’s prison. Even so, a trans woman is a biological male and on average men are more aggressive than women, but on the other hand a trans women in a male prison may be at risk of becoming sexually assaulted.

Also, re rape counseling and running women’s shelters, I do not think that there should be legal prohibitions against hiring trans women to do the job, I can’t imagine, in a private organization, of favoring their hiring. I said as much in two previous posts (one of which is here) in which I agreed with Ed Buckner. Buckner’s words are indented, mine doubly indented (bolding is his):

Coyne does offer some opinions that are related to ethics, of course.

For example,

Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.

My own “ethical” opinion is close to Coyne’s. I would probably—but only after I studied the matter more carefully, including discussions with rape counselors and probably even with women who’ve been victims of rape or of women-batterers, modify some of what Coyne wrote slightly to say:

Neither men or women, cis- or trans-gendered, should serve as rape counselors and as workers in battered women’s shelters, unless the counselors or others working there pass a background check; even then, no one should so serve unless the clients are aware of and accept the status of the counselors/workers.

I can imagine circumstances where there might be an advantage to victims of having a man or a trans woman on hand, but the rights, needs, and wants of the victims, even if sometimes irrational, should be paramount.

In response, I agreed:

I think the second version, expressing Buckner’s views, is better than what I wrote, and it does summarize views I already held (but failed to express). While I still think that at present tranwomen should not compete against biological women in sports, and shouldn’t really be running battered women’s shelters, they should not be completely barred from that job nor from acting as rape counselors—so long as (as Buckner writes), they undergo a background check and the women residents of shelters or women being counseled for rape or sexual assault are made aware that the counselor is a trans woman (a biological man) and are okay with that. This view will, of course still be seen as “transphobic” by some extremists, but there’s a very good case for holding this view in light of the rights of biological women. This involves a conflict between two groups’ “rights”, and in the interests of fairness and the needs of biological women, I come down against sports participation of transwomen and cast a very cold eye on the other two issues.

In other words, I’d make the rule: “Any woman seeking counseling for rape or sexual assault, or seeking entry into a woman’s shelter, should have the right to have a woman counseling and dealing with her psychological or medical needs.”

In that sense I’d modify Trump’s rules.

h/t: Jay

Senator Dick Durbin responds to my critique about his views on the Gaza war, but is taken apart by Malgorzata

December 5, 2024 • 8:30 am

As I reported on November 22, I was shocked to find that, on a list of 18 U.S. Senators who voted to move forward with Bernie Sanders’s bill to block a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, was one of my own Senators, Democrat Dick Durbin. Here’s the whole list:

The measure failed miserably on the Senate floor, with none of its three provisions garnering more than 19 votes. But of course I wrote to Senator Durbin, expressing my dissatisfaction as a constituent, and chastising him for giving succor to Israel’s enemies and impeding the self-defense of Jewish state in its attempt to root out Hamas.

Yesterday I got this weaselly response from Durbin:

December 4, 2024
MY ADDRESS REDACTED

Dear Dr. Coyne:

Thank you for contacting me about measures to block weapons shipments to Israel.  I appreciate hearing from you.

On September 25, 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced six measures that would block a proposed $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.  These sales include joint direct attack munitions and launchers, mortar and tank cartridges, F-15s, and other defense articles.  Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-195) and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-329), the president must notify Congress of a pending arms sale.  These statutes also give Congress the authority to suspend such a sale by passing a joint resolution of disapproval through both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  All six of these measures were referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

On November 20, 2024, the Senate considered whether to discharge three of Senator Sanders’ joint resolutions of disapproval, S.J. Res. 111, S.J. Res. 113, and S.J. Res. 115, from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  While I voted in favor of discharging these three measures from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, all three of these measures were rejected by the Senate.  S.J. Res. 111 was rejected by a vote of 18-79, S.J. Res. 113 was rejected by a vote of 19-78, and S.J. Res. 115 was rejected by a vote of 17-80.

My reason for supporting these measures is straightforward.  More than 43,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and 60 percent of them have been women, children, and elderly.  The denial of humanitarian aid to Gaza threatens the lives of so many more.

I believe that Israel has not only the right to exist, but the right to defend itself in the face of threats such as from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.  I consistently have voted for security assistance to Israel throughout my career to protect it from these threats.  But this war must end.  I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

For too long, this protracted conflict has inflicted untold suffering on innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike.  I hope out of the ashes and pain of this current crisis that there can be a renewed focus on a two-state solution.

Thank you again for contacting me.  Please feel free to keep in touch.

Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator

I sent this response to Malgorzata, and when I woke up this morning she had written a response, one that I reproduce here with permission. Durbin is apparently as dumb and uninformed about the Gaza conflict as many Americans.

Malgorzata’s response is indented.

Durbin’s figures are taken directly from Hamas, figures that have been debunked many times.

Hamas doesn’t count combatants and civilians separately. In this fictitious number of dead are the non-existent 500 people allegedly killed in a strike on the hospital Al-Ahli. As was discovered and confirmed by independent authorities (and admitted by the real perpetrator: Palestinian Islamic Jihad), it was a misfired PIJ rocket that fell short, creating the strike. Instead of killing Israeli civilians, the rocket fell on the hospital’s parking lot (NOT THE HOSPITAL). It killed several people, but far less than 100—not to mention 500.

How many other Palestinian civilians killed by rockets from PIJ and Hamas rockets have been counted by Hamas’s Ministry of Health as having been killed by Israel? After previous wars between Gaza and Israel, when there was really time to count the dead and ascertain their identities, it always turned out that Hamas had counted everybody (including combatants killed in war as well as people who died in Gaza of natural causes) in their earlier communicates about people “killed by Israel”.

The percentages of women, children, and elderly given by Durbin (and Hamas) are also false. According to the IDF, up to 19,000 Hamas combatants were killed. Moreover, both Hamas and PIJ use teenagers as fighters. Everybody killed when he/she is under 18 is counted as a child. A 17-year-old fighter killed when shooting a rocket at Israelis is counted as a child. Even if you accept the false numbers given by Hamas, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is the lowest ever achieved in urban warfare by any army.

Further, not one person in Gaza would have been killed by the IDF if Hamas and PIJ didn’t invade Israel on October 7, 2023, didn’t kill, rape, torture, and burn 1200 Israeli women, men, children and the elderly, and didn’t take 252 hostages, including women, children and the elderly. There are still 101 hostages somewhere in the dungeons of Hamas, among them baby Kfir (9 months old at the moment of kidnapping) and his older brother Ariel (4 years at the moment of kidnapping).

From Jerry. I would add this.  Besides credulously adopting Hamas’s misleading figures that count dead combatants as “innocent Palestinians”, Durbin implicitly calls for a cease-fire and explicitly for a “two-state solution,” something that, if implemented now, would be a disaster for Israel.

We already know that the ratio of civilians killed to combatants killed is far lower than seen in other conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged, including World War II and the more recent battles in the Middle East. Durbin of course ignores that, just as he ignores what happened on October 7 of last year.  In his attempt to look evenhanded, Durbin has proven himself a useful asset for Hamas. And I will communicate this to the misguided Senator.

DEI “studies” displace scientific research at the National Science Foundation

December 3, 2024 • 9:00 am

Yes, this analysis and report are from Texas’s Republican Senator Ted Cruz, but let’s not use that to dismiss his press release and report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. If you won’t read something simply because it’s from Ted Cruz’s office, you are at the wrong site.

At any rate, the press release”reveals how Biden-Harris diverted billions from science to DEI activists.”  I have no reason to doubt this claim given the increasing tendency of federal funding agencies (the NSF in this case) to divert money from real science into ideological project furthering the “progressive” agenda. But if you want to undercut this claim, simply look at the projects that are classified as “DEI activism”. Only a few are offered, and they support the claim, which is not surprising.

Although I finished my last grant about eight years ago, I am told by active researchers, scientists I know personally, that the entire system has changed in the last decade, exactly in the way this report describes. And the pressure to change from pure science to Social Justice must have come from the top. I don’t know who applied it, but the buck stops at the President’s desk, and it was clearly the Biden Administration that approved the change in direction.

Click the headline below to read, and you can find the committee’s 43-page report here.

The upshot is that over the four years that Biden was President, over two billion dollars were allocated to projects that Cruz’s committee classified as “DEI grants”. Over 3,400 such grants were given.  Disturbingly, such grants used up only 0.29% of the funding in 2021, but their number swelled each year until, in 2024, they used up over 27% of NSF funding.

The three paragraphs below are taken from the press release. Yes, the language is from the Right (i.e., “neo-Marxist” and “radical perspectives”), but who can deny that the DEI agenda has damaged universities, making them more divisive and imposing an orthodoxy on thought and research that’s inimical to free thinking and academic freedom?

In its first week, the Biden-Harris administration mandated that all taxpayer-funded scientific research and development (R&D) must incorporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) values. Sen. Cruz’s investigation found that in response to this directive, NSF allocated over $2.05 billion to thousands of research projects that promoted neo-Marxist perspectives or DEI tenets. Taxpayer dollars supported projects of questionable scientific merit, often led by researchers who used federal R&D dollars to drive divisive, extremist ideologies in their classrooms and on their campuses.

The Committee’s analysis identified 3,483 grants—over 10% of all NSF grants awarded during the Biden-Harris administration—totaling more than $2.05 billion went to questionable projects that promoted DEI or pushed neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice.

The report reveals, through examples across categories, that many of the most extreme research proposals were led by principal investigators who are also promoting radical perspectives through on-campus activism and in their classrooms.

Here are two figures from the report itself (click pictures to enlarge) showing the number of grants and total funding in each of five “DEI” categories:

And the NSF obeyed the Biden administration’s directive. This shows the total NSF funding per year, and the amount and proportion of funding directed towards what are classified as DEI initiatives:

The report also gives examples of grants that sound ludicrous. These of course are cherry-picked and remind me of Senator William Proxmire’s old “Golden Fleece Awards,” (Proxmire was a Democrat), given to agencies who squandered public money. Below are two examples cited, and I urge those who want to examine the Cruz Committee’s contentions to examine them further. Others are given in the report. Bolding is from the press release:

  • Shirin Vossoughi is an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University and the co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 NSF grant awarded in 2023 for a project titled, “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” Vossoughi credits Marxist traditions for her decision to teach children “the meaning of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’” after Hamas’s attack against Israel.

 

  • In 2023, NSF awarded Georgia Institute of Technology’s (Georgia Tech) Kelly Cross $99,791 to “disrupt[] racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy” are “deeply ingrained in the past, present and future of U.S. Higher education.” Cross sought to “subvert[] these toxic systems… to creat[e] a more equitable educational system” and “initiate a national conversation about addressing racial inequity and White Supremacy in the STEM profession and classroom” with the support of the grant.

There are further examples given in the report, but you can look at them yourself. Here are the conclusions taken from the paper, not the press release:

The Biden-Harris administration has methodically weaponized federal agencies to drive a partisan, divisive agenda. President Biden and Vice President Harris tasked federal science agencies to restructure scientific investigation into an exercise in categorizing individuals by their background, not by their talent and capabilities.

This year, almost 30 percent of NSF grant projects will seek to promote these divisions. Already, billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted. These grants both crowd out other kinds of research that could advance understanding of the physical world and advance a deeply divisive philosophy antithetical to the tenets of empirical scientific research. The NSF must return to a merit-based focus on legitimate science of the kind that resulted in landing Americans on the moon and making the U.S. technology industry the engine of the global economy.

If this analysis is correct, then I have no quarrel with the last paragraph, particularly the insistence that the NSF go back to “a merit-based focus on legitimate science”. America has long been a Mecca for scientists from foreign countries, many coming here to study, do research, or take faculty positions. This kind of funding, if continued, would seriously erode the nation’s scientific reputation. It’s already happened to New Zealand, but the “social justice” there involves incorporating “indigenous knowledge”, like Polynesian navigational astronomy, into modern science.

It is too late to stop the awokening of New Zealand’s science, but I’m pretty sure that the new Trump administration—if it doesn’t cut real science—will ameliorate the current trend. (Note: this is NOT an endorsement of Trump as President, but a hope that his admiinistration will fix the wrongly skewed direction of science funding.)

An unfettered interview with John Fetterman

November 28, 2024 • 9:30 am

I like John Fetterman (a Senator from Pennsylvania) because he’s quirky, speaks his mind, and because he wears shorts on the Senate floor. (at 6 foot eight inches, he’s also the tallest Senator). Some of his quirkiness may be due to his seious stroke, but this article shows his straight talk—rare in today’s prominent Democrats. You can read about his political positions here.

You can read his interview with Jess Bidgood by clicking on the headline below, or find the story archived here.

There aren’t any revelations, just Fetter being himself and chilling, as well as telling the Democrats to chill the f out instead of pulling a Laura Helmuth or threatening to leave America. It’s a short interview and I’ve put a few excerpts below. This is pure Fetterman (I’d love to see him have a postmortem discussion of the election with James Carville).

BTW, he’s 55 years old.

Some excerpts:

Senator John Fetterman wasn’t in Washington for the first Trump administration. But he has a few ideas about how Democrats should handle the second.

He wants his party to accept its losses. He wants his party to chill out a little. And he wants his party to please stop with all the hot takes about what went wrong in November, since Democrats have four long years to figure it out.

Fetterman has some experience taking on President-elect Donald Trump’s G.O.P. He won his seat in 2022 after overcoming a near-fatal stroke and beating the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has since become the president-elect’s pick to run Medicare. As the Democratic Party reckons with its losses in places like Pennsylvania — where Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.7 percentage points and Bob Casey, a third-term Democratic senator, lost his seat — I called Fetterman.

Our conversation was the first in a series of interviews I’ll do in this newsletter about the path forward for the Democratic Party.

And the Q&A:

How do you think Democrats should be talking to bros, and should be talking to men, and should be talking to working-class voters?

Have a conversation. Have a conversation with anyone that’s willing to have an honest conversation. That’s always been the rule, and that’s what I’m going to continue. I’ve had conversations on Fox News, and they’ve played me straight. I’ve shown up on Newsmax, and they’ve played it straight. And Rogan. Rogan was great. He was cordial and open and warm.

Why was it important to you to go on Joe Rogan?

I’m a fan. I’m a huge fan of Bill Maher, a huge fan of Colbert.

. . . Do Democrats need to do an analysis of what went wrong? And, if so, who should do it?

We’re not even at Thanksgiving, and Democrats just can’t stop losing our minds every fifteen minutes. We really need to pace ourselves, or, you know, for FFS, just grab a grip. Realize that this is how elections go. At least for the next two years, they’re going to have the opportunity to write the narrative and to drive the narrative.

Trump is assembling a cabinet of people many Democrats find deeply objectionable. How do you think Democrats should respond?

I’m just saying, buckle up and pack a lunch, because it’s going to be four years of this. And if you have a choice to freak out, you know, on the hour, then that’s your right. But I will not. I’m not that dude, and I’m not that Democrat. I’m going to pick my fights. If you freak out on everything, you lose any kind of relevance.

. . . One analysis of the election that we’ve heard from your colleague Senator Bernie Sanders is that Democrats failed to recognize how bad people were feeling about the economy, about the country generally, and failed to name a villain. Do you agree with that analysis?

I do not.

Why?

I think there was a lot of other issues. I would even describe them as cultural. Walk around in Scranton, tell me what an oligarch is. I think it’s like, “Whose argument is the closest match to the kinds of things that are important to me?” And I think some of them are rooted in gender and worldviews, and even backlash of things like cancel culture.

I witness people, now there’s specific kinds of clothing. They call it Blue Collar Patriots. I’m willing to bet you know who they’re voting for.

And why is that? I don’t think it’s because we haven’t talked enough about oligarchs, and how it’s rigged.

Here’s the giant Fetterman with Israeli President Isaac Herzog:

Maayan Toaf, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s Fetterman on the Joe Rogan show if you have two hours to spare after dinner. This has to be better than football!