I don’t know what the Trump administration is up to by cancelling NIH grants but this interview with JD Vance is leading me in a couple different directions:
First, direction of US science in the foreseeable future will be space. This is what Elon paid for. I think that’s pretty clear. Vance keeps coming back to this over and over again. Yep, he won’t come right out and say it but the USA is funding Elon’s Mars terraforming project. Why? Because Germans weren’t stupid enough to fall for it when they rejected the AFD in the recent elections
Second, Trump has been convinced to let our primacy in biological research go, probably to fund his space project, but also because the NIH grants funded papers are irreproducible. And that’s true. But not for the reason Vance is suggesting here.
It’s because the NIH grants that power university labs are for EARLY research. That’s like stuff no one has ever studied in a lab and with early research with limited funds and a bunch of graduate students in training, there is only so much fleshing out the problem that can be done.
Research projects in the early stages involve a lot of specialities and it’s kind of like a bunch of blind people trying to figure out what an elephant is by touching it. It’s not a matter of accountability. It’s about money and time. Plus, the NIH funds a LOT of early research projects. Then extensive research gets done in corporate labs like the ones I used to work in. We took the early research papers and validated them. Some of them need a lot of work. See above about money, time and inexperienced grad students. But that doesn’t mean they had no value. They are seeds that need to be fed and watered.
But I think the fundamental problem here, and the way Vance is playing off of it in a treacherous way, is that many people who have never worked in a lab don’t realize that science works by trial and error, not trial and success. If you’ve got no stomach for failure, don’t work in research. The brightest minds in the world cut their teeth in problem solving by failure. Failure is not a bug in research. It’s a feature. You learn a lot from failure. If every project was trial and success, it wouldn’t be research. In a way, it’s built into the word. RE SEARCH. Like, do it again. And again. And again.
Elon knows what it’s like to fail, right, Elon? How many extremely expensive rapid unscheduled disassemblies have you had recently? Shouldn’t Vance hold Elon accountable for that? How much of our taxpayers dollars do we spend on each failure of Elon’s deep space vehicles?
I don’t know why Vance et al don’t come right out and say what they’re really up to. They just don’t want to pay for biological research. And yes, there is already a brain drain to Europe and goddess bless our young American research braintrusts in their new homes. Europe is probably giddy that they’ve hit the jackpot while our collective IQ in the US is going to drop significantly.
But don’t tell me that you’re getting rid of all our biological scientists because they’re not accountable. Just say that Elon has flattered Trump into funding his space projects and MAGA voters had no idea what they were going to be saddled with or throwing away.
Blame the treachery of the Trump-Vance administration and their complacent allies in Congress for our future losses in medicine and agriculture.
Ugh, the more I think about how we may have stopped research on cancer in order to fund Elon’s vanity project, the more angrily nauseated I get.
Filed under: General | Comments Off on It’s just one treacherous act after another.
I was very disturbed to hear the senator from Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, speaking words with his mouth the other day and being recorded so we could all see it later, justifying cuts to Medicaid by saying that it’s only going to affect people who don’t deserve it or don’t work hard enough for it.
Like guys living in their parents’ basement playing video games.
Now, that’s interesting that he picked that demographic. Because who is going to feel sorry for them? We don’t actually know anything about those mythical freeloaders in the basement. We don’t know if they spent hours that day sending 200 résumé’s for every position that Indeed.com or LinkedIn have sent them. We don’t know if they have a job but it’s not enough to pay for a health insurance policy because it turns out that a lot of people on Medicaid work. We don’t know if they have a job working with a contractor and they’re waiting for a customer to schedule something.
What we do know is those people Dave is referring to, if they exist in the great numbers that will justify the $800M cuts to Medicaid, is that they are human beings. They have families and friends.
And anyone can get cancer or pneumonia or allergic reactions or asthma or fall down the basement stairs and break a leg. Things happen because we are all human and we are mortal with a thin shrink wrap of porous skin over our vital organs.
Dave makes it sound like only working people get sick. If you’re not working, you have nothing to worry about?
It’s more insanely crazy than that. If that guy in the basement gets hurt or has to be hospitalized in a behavioral health unit due to some organic problem with his brain, who’s going to pay for his treatment? Are we going to let him drag himself around with a broken ankle? And that’s supposed to solve his unemployment problem?
You can’t work if you’re hurt or sick. So the cost of that treatment will be passed on to us anyway.
Are we just supposed to leave him in the basement go die of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?
The problem is not with the guy in the basement. It’s with Senator Dave and Joni Ernst and any other MAGA Republican using immigrants and unemployed people as scapegoats to get the rest of us hardened to the idea that they don’t deserve healthcare.
Here’s what I want to know from them. I want them to answer this question without making any references to a scapegoat du jour.
Why is it that every other developed country in the world has figured out how to provide truly affordable, universal healthcare for their citizens?
And don’t go off on socialism. There are many countries around the world that have figured this out and they all have different systems of government.
Even the U.K. that stupidly cut themselves off from their largest trading partners with Brexit and whose citizens now make less than people in Mississippi per capita, THEY have the NHS. They can get treatment without going bankrupt. And no one asks them if they work.
Explain that. How is it that the Tories ran the UK into the ground, shifted wealth from the poor to the wealthy, ruined the country’s GDP for decades to come and caused the malnutrition of so many young children who are now shorter than their global peers, how is it that the one thing they haven’t totally destroyed is the NHS? How is it you can still have babies, get treated for cancer and have surgeries to repair broken bones by going to the NHS?
Why is it that in America, the wealthiest country in the world do we give a rat’s ass what people do all day with their time? How is that important to a health emegency?
It’s not like healthcare is not available. And for what it’s worth, Canadians don’t spend substantially more time in the ER than we do.
The problem is we are complicit in allowing healthcare to be profitable for people other than the professionals and hospitals who actually deliver it.
We make money off of the human condition.
At least admit it, Dave, Joni, Valerie. Just say it. Don’t lie about it. Out here, we’re all thinking the same thing. We don’t have universal healthcare because the health insurance industry and their shareholders don’t want that.
All the other excuses and blame shifting for cutting government health care programs for people who can’t pay the steep prices of the private insurance healthcare market are falling on deaf ears. No one believes it anymore. And even those of us who had very good careers at one point know that they’re only a beancounter’s bonus away from losing it all in the next big financial collapse.
Just say it. You’d rather cut people off and cause misery and debt than reform the healthcare system to ensure that others won’t be profiting off that misery.
You can’t because your worldview is so entrenched in the idea that it is virtuous to extract as much money as possible from people who don’t have millions of dollars because you don’t think they are deserving of your consideration and respect. That’s what it comes down to. You have no respect for people who aren’t rich.
They’re human beings, Dave. That’s all that matters. Respect their fragile humanity.
And as for people who you are cutting off because you are convinced they are committing fraud, “the treacherous are ever distrustful”.
Treachery is a word we don’t use enough to describe the Republican “party” right now. But it sure does feel right.
And now a word from someone who recognizes what the problem is:
I’m delighted that Belle has found the perfect example of bad boyfriends when it comes to Putin and Trump:
I’ve seen the bad boyfriend analogy pop up with more frequency lately. I might have been one of the first to use it but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and, anyway, it’s an analogy that just about everyone understands. If you’ve had one and you looked into the mirror one morning and said, nope, not doing this anymore, you recognize them from a mile away. And if you’ve see other people pushed around by them and still sing “but he’s my man”, you know that they’ll hang on for a long time before the jerk finally pulls that sh^* one last time.
Some people just like to be used. And some of us know the devil when we see one.
Filed under: General | Comments Off on The world is run by bad boyfriends
Not sure what to call this post. I am listening to a Bulwark podcast with Michael Steel and his guest David French. French writes for the Atlantic, I think, on religion in America. The topics they are covering today are mostly about evangelical Christians and how pope Leo is riling them up. But there’s more. So I want to respond to some other issues they’re talking about.
1.) Democrats need to take a look at how baaaaad they were to let Biden run again in light of what we know now.
I don’t know if DEMOCRATS need to do that. Probably most Democratic voters would have been just peachy if Biden had decided not to run for president again. We could have had an open primary where all the Democratic voters could have picked their candidate by identity, completely ignoring whether or not the candidate was the best one for the time we’re in. I’m assuming we would have all settled on the perfect chimera, again, centered around identities and intersectionality and not the two income problem we have in America. Then half the country would have rejected that person because they don’t effing identify with the black, lesbian, Sioux quadriplegic. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things. But there should be more to a candidate than they’re gay and have developed presentation skills so they can talk and chew gum on Fox News. Can we PLEASE stop with the Buttigieg talk?? And can AOC STOP with the intersectionality talk? The voters you need want to hear about your economic policies and how you will improve their quality of life. The vast majority of voters are not gay or intersectional unicorns and don’t want it to be the primary thing they’re voting for.
Anyway. Back to Biden running again. No, we didn’t necessarily want him to run again. I didn’t. I thought he exceeded expectations in most categories for a president but it was clear that he was losing steam and Trump made 2020 all about stamina.
If Michael Steel and David French had asked us back in the fall of 2023 whether we wanted Biden to run again, we probably would have politely said, “let’s have an open primary”. That’s before we knew about his cancer diagnosis. Given the fanatical devotion to Trump in the lead up to 2024, he should have dropped out as soon as his doctors knew there was a cognitive or physical decline. He could have announced he wasn’t running in the primaries and we would have all expressed our gratitude to him for all he did and made him the emeritus of the party and moved on, reinvigorated to take Trump on.
But you know what Michael and David? NOBODY ASKED US. Nobody told us the truth even though many of us could see he wasn’t up to it. If we had known definitively that his health was a serious problem, we would have demanded he step aside. So, maybe there is a problem at the top of the food chain but it’s not like the rest of us would have been onboard. In the end, there were not enough forceful people telling Biden to step down. Now, you can question what the consultants and advisors had to gain by that but that’s not the fault of the Democrats who voted in the primaries when there were no other credible options on the primary ballots.
We aren’t MAGA type voters. We *like* options. We are open to new ideas. The problem is that whoever is running the Democratic Party are probably left over Wall Street plutocrats and their PR team from the Obama era and they will have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the room so that the rest of us can hear ourselves think. Do Steel and French really think Democrats aren’t angry about that? That we won’t hold our politicians accountable? Now that I think about it, we’re the only party right now holding politicians accountable, including our own.
Yes, Fetterman should resign and I was one of his biggest fans. He’s just not the same guy and if he’s got health issues that are serious enough to affect his work, he should step aside. *I’ll* run for his senate seat. Or my daughter can do it. Or any of a number of Pennsylvanians. We have a deep bench.
What Democrats need to think about right now is what our values are. Do we have a credo. Can we improve Americans quality of life. If the people at the top aren’t willing to talk about that, then good luck winning another election. You can’t get voters motivated about a SALT deductible. It’s got to be much bigger than that.
2.) French says that many young people in college now don’t know a period of time when presidents didn’t act like lying fat orange buffoons and the toothless opponents who don’t want to rock the boat. He thinks they’re probably used to authoritarianism and think that this is the way politics goes here in the US.
But here’s the thing about Republicans thinking they can keep younger voters down on the farm. It’s the same reason why many younger voters consider themselves “nones” when it comes to religion. The internet has blown a hole in faith. No matter what religion you’re in, whether voluntarily or as a former child hostage, there is a YouTube channel by a former member who found documents, or exposed hypocrisy or showed what it means to people’s lives if the dogma is followed to its logical conclusions.
Plus, there are a plethora of alternative faiths and practices that make more sense. For example, there are a lot of women attracted to Celtic religions, neopaganism, and witchcraft. why? Because they are more nature based and don’t treat women like lesser beings. Nature is Super. They still have an ethical code, reciprocity and all that. After awhile, you do start to wonder why it is that any woman would deliberately choose to belong to a religion that takes away their ability to live their best lives.
There are others who are agnostic or atheistic who appreciate the teachings of Jesus. Yeah, wrap your head around that. When you strip away all the end time theology and paradise and living forever, you start to really like the dude. But there is more to it than that.
On the internet, you can see how people live in other countries. You can see the biking culture of the Netherlands, the train system throughout Europe and bullet trains in japan, the way cancer patients are treated in other countries. Here’s a heads up: it’s pretty much the same in every country. You get the same chemo, radiation and surgery options. What you don’t get is a huge bill that will bankrupt you and make you lose your family home. Only in America is that a thing.
The food looks fresher, there are more farmers markets, and it’s generally cheaper or about the same as here (except in places like Norway). Why is it cheaper in the rest of the world but so insanely expensive here in the US?? I don’t know but I’ll bet that younger Americans are asking themselves that.
And then there are countries like China that are making it look like a workers’ paradise. It’s not entirely true but it’s not entirely false either. In China, people usually retire in their 50s. Yeah, wrap your head around that. Sure there’s a lot of control but imagine spending your 50s hanging out in your pajamas in the park playing maj jong and doing an hour of tai chi, following it up with a variety of dim sum at ridiculously low prices. That’s bliss for some people. I’d be happy with a couple of weeks of that.
But no. In America, you’re the coal that gets strip mined by a bunch of wealthy billionaires who also are control freaks who demand that you commute to work for a couple of hours to an office when it’s perfectly reasonable to work from home. (I like a bit of both and now that my contractors are finished with my house, I’ll be back in the office more, I promise).
Yeah, these wealthy people are convinced that people don’t work and aren’t productive. And that’s pretty strange since they seem to be getting wealthier and wealthier all the time. You’d think that wouldn’t be possible if everyone is slacking.
They want you to think that healthcare is a privilege, that you should be pumping out more babies but don’t want to make it easy for the child bearers to take care of them, and that retiring is aspirational as you risk your savings on a global casino where the house always wins and your social security is held hostage.
Do you think young people want that when they know there are alternatives? I think French and Steel may be shocked by that young people are thinking. Maybe a less Republican or party mindset is really scary to them. But I say bring it on. You want to shake up America? Put people under 50 in charge. They know what they’re missing and they’re pissed.
3.) Pope Leo is now one of the two most important Americans in the world. Well, I can’t argue with that. I haven’t always agreed with the Catholic Church but I do know that occasionally, it gets it right. The conclave definitely read the room this year. They are focusing on living with peace inside and out and that comes from a commitment to loving the “least of these”.
It’s time to put the cheap grace “Christians” on notice that they are not following the gospels if they look down on the poor and unlucky. Those of us who do not expect to go to a heaven or paradise know that we don’t have a choice of the time we live in. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us”.
Those who think that all they have to do is believe in Jesus to be saved are not using their time wisely.
Just sayin.
Pope Leo is gunna learn you good.
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A little bit of spring walk magick from the tail end of Appalachia:
The House Monstrously Ugly Bill passed by 1 vote. Turns out we lost a Democratic representative to esophageal cancer just days before the vote or it would have gone the other way.
Then the stock market tanked. But I think the bond market is the culprit here. Moodys downgraded the US Credit rating. This is a bad thing. Like snakes in the toilet. Because the world invests in US Treasury Bonds and the credit rating agencies say we’re not worthy. So, right out of the gate, Richard II’s, er, Donald Trump’s recklessly selfish and ignorant economic policies are damaging the full faith and credit of the United States by insisting on a massive tax break for gazillionaires that is going to heavily burden the US with more debt.
What to do, what to do…
Well, he’s got to make up that lost revenue somehow. Wait! He can get that missing tax revenue from tarriffs! Sure, why not? Slap a 30% tariff on Italian goods! (Note to self, buy another case of premium olive oil from #1 child while you can).
Does Trump have a strategy? No. There is no strategy to make us all rich. There’s just greedy rich people reaching for everything they can get their hands on like gold miners stripping everything that’s left before it’s a dead mine.
That’s the plan.
Oh, they’ll leave us with a bunch of cranky, mean, bitter Fox News fanatics who are one brain cell away from believing the earth is flat and that we all deserve to be punished because that’s the way god likes it. We’ll be a colony of Russia with bad roads, unverifiable science, yes men and general poverty.
The question is, what will the Senate do about the bill? I don’t think Thune has the votes to pass it even with JD casting a tie breaker, unless Trump can make the Tariffs palatable.
Right. Everyone in the US wants a 30% sales tax increase on spaghetti.
Good luck with that.
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One more thing: I don’t know if this is a good thing or not but Trump is acting like he’s desperate. And Harvard is sending him into a narcissistic rage on steroids. He’s going to overreach. Yeah, he’s already overreaching but now he’s going to take it to the next level. It looks like the bond market, China, the courts and world class universities are not crumbling like he expected them to.
So brace yourself. Whatever he’s going to do next is going to be awesome.
This is another nerdy segue about Helen Castor’s book, The Eagle and the Hart. The subject of the book is King Richard II and his cousin and eventual usurper Henry IV. Or is Castor really writing about Donald Trump? The similarities are too on the nose to ignore. They have SO much in common it’s spooky.
Henry Bolingbroke, the Usurper King Henry IV
Take this example: In 1391 after a year of bad harvests and people in the countryside facing starvation, the mayor of London and other concerned citizens and merchants got together to purchase food for poorer citizens in the city. They were able to buy food and sell it at reduced prices so londoners wouldn’t go hungry and for people who couldn’t afford to buy even at reduced prices, they gave it away, accepting promises to pay in the next year. It was the equivalent of a SNAP benefit. You know, so grocers didn’t price gouge. It was wildly successful.
Well, Richard didn’t like that because he got no credit for it. So he ordered London to stop doing it, stop treating him as an unserious person, fund his escapades, you know the drill. When they weren’t obedient enough, he replaced the mayor and sheriff with his own loyal retainer and fined the city £100,000. That is a sum fit for a princess’s dowry. I mean, it’s really an insane amount of money. London managed to talk him down to £40,000 which was still crazy but they thought maybe they could get him to forget the whole thing if they tricked out the city like a coronation vow renewal complete with rich decorations, mechanical singing angels, and fountains flowing with wine. All to make Richard feel wanted and appreciated by a grateful city. You may roll your eyes now.
Imagine a medieval version of a Trump cabinet meeting where the secretaries praise his bold leadership and godliness.
I’m halfway through the book and am now convinced that Trump is a reincarnation of Richard II, who even brings his felonious advisors back to court after they were locked up in prison for robbing the state coffers.
Given the playbook, I’m guessing that there are Trump cabinet members and treasury secretaries that are embezzling the US government silly. We focus so much attention on Trump and Musk that we are not watching what Scott Bessant and Pete Hegseth are doing.
This book is long but it is definitely not dry. It will leave you gobsmacked wondering who will depose Trump. If history is any guide, it’s not going to be JD Vance. It’s going to be someone who has integrity, intelligence, experience with war and/or foreign diplomacy, and is very, very bold.
I could stop right there but there’s a lot of immoral detail in the Big Ugly Bill that the Republicans passed in the House last night by ONE vote. ONE.
And let’s be clear here. If Rep. Gerald Connolly hadn’t died this week, it might not have passed at all. There is no majority. No mandate. No one is screaming for this bill except the billionaire class and their paid representatives.
“What this is really about is producing budget savings,” said Benjamin Sommers, a professor of health policy at Harvard who has studied Medicaid work requirements. “This is not savings through improved efficiency, or more people going to work. It’s savings by kicking people out of the program who are mostly eligible.”
The current proposal would require childless adults without disabilities who want Medicaid coverage to prove that they had worked, volunteered or attended school for 80 hours in the month before enrollment. But states could require that people work six months or even a year before becoming eligible for public benefits.
Those who fail to meet the work requirement would also be blocked from receiving subsidies for private plans sold on the Obamacare marketplace, another new restriction in this version of the Republican plan. The legislation is unclear on how long the prohibition would last.
The law includes a series of possible exceptions — such as having a substance abuse disorder or caring for a sick family member — but does not detail how people will qualify or how frequently they will need to do so to remain covered. States could lose Medicaid funding if they fail to stop covering people who do not document their eligibility.
…
Older versions of Medicaid work requirements were somewhat more flexible, although they still came under intense opposition from Democrats. The plan that congressional Republicans came up with in 2023, for example, allowed poor people to prove they were working after they signed up for Medicaid, and exempted those older than 55.
Those who support Medicaid work requirements say the policy is about more than money. Some, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, say the requirement will encourage more poor Americans tocontribute to society.
“You return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he told reporters last month. The budget office, however, has said that these policies do not increase employment.
Let’s put aside the fact that in most developed countries in the world that have universal health care, health care is a right, not a privilege or an extra or anything tied to work. But we’re not moving in the direction of Spain or Germany or Switzerland or even CHINA, for Petessakes. We’re moving in the direction of Mozambique.
And here’s a simple example for why this is an immoral bill:
When I was going through cancer treatment, it was a year when I gave up my vacation for surgery and carefully structured my chemo so I didn’t have to take off too many hours. Why is that? It’s because if I slipped below a certain threshold of hours working from Full Time to Part Time, I could be obligated to pick up not just my portion of my healthcare policy but also my employer’s portion. Don’t tell me that doesn’t happen. I read the fine print and I also knew people who were out of the country, extended their vacations or took leave of absences due to family emergencies, and ended up having that happen to them.
So, imagine you’re too sick to work, slipping into part time status AND having to pay a lot more of your shrinking paycheck in healthcare insurance coverage plus all the deductibles.
Applying for short term disability means taking roughly a 30% cut in pay.
No matter how you slice it, unless you have secondary insurance or are independently wealthy, you absolutely NEED to work through treatment in order to pay for it. This is probably why people go bankrupt.
But what if you absolutely can’t work? What if your blood count is so low that you feel faint walking to work (✅) or you have a reaction that causes the skin on your feet to blister and peel off so every step is painful and chances of infection go up ✅, or your doctor tells you that your white blood cell count is so low you can’t be around anyone but you can’t work remotely ✅ or the steroids wear off and you are too fatigued to move ✅✅✅. Having to work to get healthcare benefits is like having the sword of Damacles over the head. The stress is unreal.
There were times I lost it in the doctors’ offices.
There were times I really wanted to take off a few weeks to get through the Red Devil. (Yeah, go look THAT up.) But I didn’t have the money to make up my lost salary.
So now Holy Mike Johnson and Donald Trump and Billionaires are telling someone with a cancer diagnosis that no matter how sick they feel, they aren’t worthy of treatment because they aren’t working hard enough. Let’s be clear here: there are poor people who work extremely hard, have one, two, three jobs and barely make ends meet and can’t afford health insurance. How is it that holy roller Mike Johnson gets to tell them to work harder as if they aren’t trying hard enough already?? Has he even read Matthew 25??
They are telling people in the last stages of life that they aren’t entitled to hospice or pain medication. They are telling them that they’re going to have to wait up to one year if they lose Medicaid coverage before they can even apply for an Obamacare coverage. If you have to wait up to a year for chemo, you will die. Sorry, those are the cold, hard facts.
Forget the Dignity of Work. What about the Dignity of Death?
There’s more to it of course. We don’t have work requirements for healthcare for everyone. Very wealthy people aren’t required to work. You could be a magnate’s daughter and do nothing all day but plan your next clubbing event. Or you could be the son of a billionaire and sit in a tricked out home theater where you play video games all day long. Or you could be a trad wife with 5 kids who doesn’t work outside the home. Oh that’s work? Well how about the mom who has 5 kids and still has to work to pay the bills?
Here’s the thing. We are all human beings. We are all children of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, we all have a right to be here. And if we’re not forcing EVERYONE to work for healthcare, no matter how wealthy they are, then we are depriving them of the “Dignity of Work” where they will learn to “value” healthcare. Either we all have the same rights and responsibilities or we will become slaves to our new masters who will act like treating us with the respect we are entitled to is a special treat that can be conferred upon us or withdrawn whenever the masters like.
What they’re after is not trimming waste, fraud and abuse. It’s control.
In short, they want to turn us into Bangladesh.
Yep. If you Trump voters haven’t figured that out yet, welcome to your “great” America.
Two Israeli embassy staff were murdered by a person upset with the situation in Gaza:
A couple of things stand out to me here. It’s no surprise to me that shooting murders happen in the US. We’re armed to the teeth. It’s surprising that it hasn’t happened already.
The event happened right next door to the FBI. THAT’S interesting. You’d think there would be extra security or surveillance, especially since Trump is using the reaction to the decimation of Gaza as an excuse to shut people up and defund universities.
I have to wonder if the shooter protest voted against the Democrats as a “that’ll show them” strategy. It’s only going to give Trump an incentive to triple down on squashing free speech. Not that shooting people is free speech. It’s not.
Are any of us surprised this happened? We are like scorpions in a jar and Trump is shaking us up, his foreign policy on the matter makes no sense except as an excuse to grab land, and we have too many cheap guns.
The Confluence 