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.

Comments

  1. nomaduk says

    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?

    Yup.

  2. StevoR says

    Trump regime or Musk regime? Musk-Trump regime?

    How are the US military generals and Intelligence community feeling and what are they thinking knowing their country has had a quiet but very real coup by an unelected billionaire neo-nazi – and actual illegal immigrant to boot!

    Wish they would boot him too alright, metaphorically speaking.

  3. billseymour says

    This is just goofy.

    I’m currently part of a study of the effectiveness of prophylactic radiation to keep small cell lung cancer out of the brain.  The current standard practice is based on a study from, IIRC, the 1970s where n was small.  I got randomized into the group that gets everything except the radiation.

    An important part of it is a cognitive assessment every three months that’s probably similar to the test that Trump misremembered.  It’s not hard to imagine that they’d want to control for things like socioeconomic status.

  4. numerobis says

    The basic concept of the censorship is offensively stupid, and then they implement it by keyword searches. It’s idiocy all the way down.

  5. Russell Glasser says

    I am personally offended by the flowchart as a software engineer. There are three different blocks that have the exact same text followed by an End. There should be only one block, and all three conditionals should point to it. Have none of these people ever heard of normalizing their data?

  6. Russell Glasser says

    I am personally offended by the flowchart as a software engineer. There are three different blocks that have the exact same text followed by an End. There should be only one block, and all three conditionals should point to it. Have none of these people ever heard of normalizing their data?

  7. Russell Glasser says

    I am personally offended by the flowchart as a software engineer. There are three different blocks that have the exact same text followed by an End. There should be only one block, and all three conditionals should point to it. Have none of these people ever heard of normalizing their data?

  8. Russell Glasser says

    I am personally offended by the flowchart as a software engineer. There are three different blocks that have the exact same text followed by an End. There should be only one block, and all three conditionals should point to it. Have none of these people ever heard of normalizing their data?

  9. Russell Glasser says

    Story for the multiple posts! I hit the submit button more than once, would appreciate it if the excess comments could be deleted.

  10. raven says

    Yeah, the USA is over with. Gone.
    We aren’t a democracy any more.

    .1. The current regime has destroyed the Rule of Law.
    It’s illegal to destroy congress mandated programs.
    Congress sets up the spending priorities according to the US Constitution.
    If the president can arbitrarily pick and choose where to spend our $6.75 trillion budget, that makes him a dictator.

    .2. Due Process is also dead.
    The Federal courts have already ruled against them.
    And, they just ignored them.

    So what are the courts going to do?
    Call the FBI? Which is also controlled by Trump and the GOP.

    So the Rule of Law is dead. The president is a dictator.
    Due Process is also dead.
    The courts don’t have their own enforcement powers.
    They can be ignored.

  11. raven says

    The USA is also now on the road to failure.
    Just getting started.
    With 346 million people and the world’s largest economy, we have a lot of momentum. It will take years and decades to show up.
    It took Bush 8 years to wreck the US economy and it took Obama 4 years to fix it.

    And here is why.
    In 2012, this book, Why Nations Fail, came out.
    It 2014 the authors won the Nobel prize in economics.

    You need three conditions to succeed rather than fail.
    .1. A strong central government.
    .2. Taxes at least 10% of GDP.
    .3. Rule of Law. A level playing field.

    We in the USA have lost Rule of Law and Due Process.

    Without that, societies end up being ruled by monopolies and oligarchies.
    They get stagnant and go nowhere because the ruling class is more interested in keeping their power and money than the well being of the masses.
    This is a key reason why the Third World is…The Third World.

    Wikipedia: Why Nations Fail

    Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, first published in 2012, is a book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who jointly received the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize (alongside Simon Johnson) for their contribution in comparative studies of prosperity between nations.[1][2] The book applies insights from institutional economics, development economics, and economic history to understand why nations develop differently, with some succeeding in the accumulation of power and prosperity and others failing, according to a wide range of historical case studies.

  12. John Watts says

    I wonder if the day will ever come when a state, or group of states, decides they’ve had enough of MAGA magical thinking? What would that sort of pushback look like?

  13. raven says

    I wonder if the day will ever come when a state, or group of states, decides they’ve had enough of MAGA magical thinking?

    Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this exact scenario for days.

    .1. The USA is over with. Done. Dead.

    .2. The Red states have won and taken over.
    Out and loud white racists and misogynists now rule over us as dictators.

    .3. So why should the Blue states remain part of the USA?
    I can’t see any reason to.

    .4. The Blue states could just get together and say, we are leaving, bye now.
    We will keep our tax money for ourselves.
    We won’t join you in reversing history and living in the 1800s before the first Civil War.

    This is a win-win situation.
    The Red states hate us anyway, so they get rid of a bunch of democracy loving, over educated white and nonwhite people.
    The Blue states get to skip the Fascist stage and whatever dark places they are going to.

    If the USA is over with, why should we remain a part of a Fascist dictatorship that doesn’t like us and we don’t want them either?

  14. says

    Anarchy reigns.

    Oh how I wish Anarchy were reigning. Then we might actually have some justice in this country. What is reigning right now is chaos, and that chaos is being inflicted on us from those our society has allowed to be considered the top of our social and economic hierarchy.

    I expect anarchy, in the form of grassroots movements focusing on mutual aid and community building, will eventually be part of the solution.

  15. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Is the only solution a violent overthrow

    Apparently you can simply send a half-dozen twenty-somethings outta highschool to walk in shouting “Elon sent me! Make me an admin!” and refusing to give their names. The employees will even HELP you take over to prevent your saboteurs’ incompetence from making a bigger mess.

  16. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: Russell Glasser:

    Story for the multiple posts!

    I’d like to think you were really, really offended. =)

    /Good to see you again!

  17. pwdm says

    It would be nice if every researcher applying for a grant included at least one of the banned words in their application, even if it just put in randomly. Then every paper gets flagged and all have to be examined.. Overwhelm the censors.

  18. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: pwdm:

    Overwhelm the censors.

    Overwhelm implies they’d want anything to get through. The bottlenecks are designed to sabotage the institutions. False positives are a feature to them, not a bug. They do not want functioning institutions.

    From the Infinite Thread:

    What can and cannot go forward appears to require approval by a Trump political appointee […] That’s slowing many things down. At present, there is only one political appointee in the entire CDC, acting Director Susan Monarez (plus her personal assistant, who is not a scientist).

  19. gijoel says

    @15 No, they’ll declare the break away states as a hard line leftist plot to destroy America and send in the troops to affect a regime change. They’ll threaten to do the same to Canada and Mexico,whether they do or not is entirely in the hands of chance.

  20. raven says

    @15 No, they’ll declare the break away states as a hard line leftist plot to destroy America and send in the troops to affect a regime change.

    Maybe, maybe not.

    We can’t destroy the USA. The Red states have already done that. It died a week ago.
    At this point, all that is left is how to dispose of the body.

    Who is they?
    The army is us.
    “In 2022, 31.2% of active-duty US Army members identified as a racial minority, and 15.7% identified as female.” The majority of the army is either nonwhite or female.
    A lot of those soldiers aren’t going to be too happy killing their relatives, friends, and neighbors in the service of 10 or 20 white billionaires.

    The Blue states have roughly half the US population at around 173 million. We are never going to cooperate with a Red State dictatorship any more than they can force us to. We are the only thing in the way of their new confederacy or Fourth Reich or whatever they are heading towards. They might just well think it is easier to just wave bye bye. They hate us anyway, no big loss.

    gijoel, you got a better idea than living under a Red state christofascist dictatorship?
    Let’s hear it or you’ve got nothing helpful to add.

    They’ll threaten to do the same to Canada and Mexico,whether they do or not is entirely in the hands of chance.

    We could conquer Canada and Mexico but we probably can’t occupy them.
    We couldn’t even occupy Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. .
    Occupying a captive nation for years and years costs too much for what it is worth.

  21. raven says

    This seems to be a good place to post the 5 stages of grief.

    The five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — are a commonly accepted and comforting road map to overcoming grief.

    Those of us that miss the old USA are in one of these 5 stages.

    Of course, most of the Trump voters are thrilled, ecstatic, and as happy as they can be.

    A huge number of people are still in the denial stage.
    I skipped the bargaining stage. Bargaining with people who wouldn’t care if I was dead? No point.
    I’m moving out of a depression stage that lasted two weeks to something like acceptance. It will never be acceptance of a Red state dictatorship, just acceptance that sometimes reality is horrible and you have to live in it anyway.

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