Santa Ono was hoping to be appointed to the presidency of the University of Florida. I have sad news.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ono’s presidency was shot down in a 6-10 vote by the Florida Board of Governors, the governing board for the state’s university system. The move was made after prominent Florida conservatives questioned Ono’s past support of DEI and alleged inaction on combating antisemitism.

He was formerly the president of the University of Michigan. He wasn’t well liked there, either.

University leaders, faculty and alumni took aim at Ono for various reasons, from his decisions to curb DEI efforts on the Ann Arbor campus to his crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters to alleging he too easily changes his views on issues.

He seems to have been a wishy-washy Trumpian.

Ono oversaw cuts to the university’s long-standing diversity, equity and inclusion programs. This includes March moves to discontinue UM’s DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan and close its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Office for Health Equity and Inclusion.
…
Ono also saw criticism from both sides on his handling of pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitism on the Ann Arbor campus. At least 50 people have been arrested in connection with pro-Palestine protesting at the Ann Arbor university since October 2023.

I’m a bit exasperated with this predictable rhetorical trick of claiming that protesting a genocide is “anti-semitic”. I don’t think murdering civilians is a standard Jewish value.

This is the family of Kasper Eriksen. He was a Danish citizen who emigrated to the US and started a family in Mississippi.

Look at them! They’re perfect! Blonde and probably blue-eyed, coming from one of the “good” countries, and Kasper even made Xitter posts praising Trump. It’s not like he’s from one of the 12 countries that were just fully excluded from sending people to the US (curiously, those banned countries just happen to be full of brown people.)

And Kasper was a model alien, he was even close to achieving US citizenship!

Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime. He has not been accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document. Form I-751, appropriately clinical, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence,” was just one of the endless documents he needed on his decade-plus journey to American citizenship.

Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of.

Oh, right, he neglected to fill out one form, missed a deadline, and when he went in to an immigration center to dot that final ‘i’ and cross that last ‘t’, ICE put him in chains and shipped him off to a detention center in Louisiana, where…

He spends most of his day in a wide cell, housing upwards of 90 other detained immigrants at a time. He gets a couple of hours of yard time each day, a routine pleasure he says is critical to his sanity. Even so, Kasper has already lost about 25 pounds during his detention.

This shouldn’t be a plea for special treatment for a white man. The ICE administrators were apparently dismayed that they had to lock up someone who was “obviously” an acceptable member of society — I wonder if they ever feel the same way about detainees with a less Danish accent — but nobody should be treated this way.

Nathalia Rocha Dickson, an immigration attorney in Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 6 interview that violent, criminal narratives are increasingly employed to justify a crackdown on all immigrants, the majority of whom have done nothing wrong.

“The government is more interested in feeding into rhetoric—these ugly stories about immigration. We’re feeding a monster for an administration that is not really concerned about the rule of law,” she said.

Dickson has represented clients in detention and deportation for eight years now. What strikes her most about the new deportation regime is how arbitrarily it operates. “It’s totally random. This is the stupidity of it,” she said. “There’s no way for you to determine who’s gonna be picked up and who’s not. You may show up for a scheduled hearing and get picked up. You may be driving and get pulled over. It’s really, really crazy right now.”

The lesson here should be that ICE must be disbanded and immigration should be welcoming immigrants. They’re a rogue, criminal organization — America’s new SS.

By the way, there was a massive raid on a Minneapolis taqueria the other day, with police claiming it was drug-related. So why were ICE agents involved? Why were they dressed and armed like this, with masks covering their faces?

I’m happy to report that the people of Minneapolis swarmed these thugs and no arrests were made. Seriously, when someone in a military-style uniform, masked and carrying a rifle is spotted, it is a citizen’s duty to make their job more difficult.

I also like the cleverness of Ukraine’s recent attack: smuggling over a hundred drones on trucks to military airports deep into Russia, then suddenly launching them to blow up billions of dollars worth of bombers on the runway. Brilliant! And terrifying!

I imagine that military planners in countries all around the world are panicking right now at the idea that a poorer country can build $600 devices and sneakily destroy their pretty fancy mega-million dollar toys before they can be used to reduce a village to rubble. They’ve introduced so much uncertainty into the Great Game!

I also appreciate the beauty of the drone launches. Those trucks were like egg sacs, they opened up, and a swarm of little multi-limbed creatures emerged to float into the air and disperse. I’ve seen phenomena like that so many times, it’s no wonder they called it Operation Spiderweb.

Now…please don’t terrorize my country or me with your flying weapons, no matter how adorkably comparable to spiders they are.

He does it by being petty and vindictive, which will no doubt curry favor with the pig running the government.

The U.S. Navy plans to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a fleet replenishment oiler named after the slain gay rights leader and Navy veteran, and is considering renaming multiple naval ships named after civil rights leaders and prominent American voices, CBS News has learned.
…
The documents obtained by CBS News also show other vessels named after prominent leaders are also on the Navy’s renaming “recommended list.”

Among them are the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers.

I have mixed feelings about the principle of naming warships after civil rights leaders, but I don’t think this is about morality. It’s all about spite.

Following his confirmation in January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a directive instructing the Pentagon and U.S. military services to cease hosting events tied to heritage or awareness months, citing concerns that such programs could undermine unity within the ranks. The “Identity Months Dead at DoD” guidance banned official manpower and resources from being used on such events — among them, Pride Month, Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

It might undermine unity to pander to Nazis, too.

And this is just stupid.

The memo said the renaming of naval ships was to realign the U.S. military with Trump administration priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture.

Warrior culture. I don’t want to live in a warrior culture, especially since that seems to be a synonym for “insecure bullying lickspittle culture”.

I used to see this fake graph all over the place in my New Atheist days. It’s troubling because…well, look at the Y axis. No units? How do you quantify “scientific advancement” to a single dimension, anyway? Also that dashed line extrapolation implies that science naturally rises ‘upwards’. “Christian” Dark Ages implies that there was one single unitary factor to the social, economic, and military changes that occurred after the fall of Rome, and that there was no technological progress between 300CE and 1300CE. It’s a bad graph.

How about this one?

Now that’s a quantitative historical trauma! And we get to live through it (I hope we live through it.)

Trump is going to cut NASA’s budget in half, while making some contradictory plans.

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to throttle the scientific ambitions of NASA, prematurely ending a host of active missions in orbit studying Earth and other planets, while also ending the agency’s work to develop their successors. The plans, released today, call for a “leaner” agency that will land “the first human ever, an American, on Mars.” But they would effectively end NASA’s long-standing role as the world leader in space science, researchers say—if the U.S. Congress follows through on them.

Putting an American on Mars is the dumbest goal ever. It’s not going to happen without a solid foundation in space science, which he is destroying. This sounds like a Musk plan: stupid, ill-founded, and doomed to failure.

Trump is demolishing biomedical research.

The Trump administration and Congress are eliminating billions of dollars of funding for medical research while also gutting the scientific workforce. Specifically, they are:

• Terminating more than $2.4 billion in active grants and obstructing new awards.
• Radically altering budget structures and reducing future funding.
• Eroding expertise and ending training programs.

Our best working estimates calculate that the NIH alone has cancelled more than 1,500 grants so far, representing a loss of more than $2.4 billion (PDF) in previously-committed medical research funding, with more expected. When delays (an additional $2.3 billion) are factored in, the total value of lost research funding approaches $5 billion.

The changes to grants management have been rapid, large-scale, and chaotic. In the past, grant terminations have typically been associated with misconduct and extraordinarily rare: from 2012 to 2024, there were fewer than five such terminations. Since February, however, hundreds of researchers across the country have received termination letters telling them that their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This specific phrase references an obscure update to the Office of Management and Budget rules from the first Trump administration that allows them to unilaterally sever grants in service of the president’s political agenda. This executive branch maneuver is called “impoundment” and it functionally overrides Congressional authorization and appropriation.

Some of the terminations are blatantly ideological; a result of DOGE-directed screening and searches for flagged keywords like “women,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” “diversity,” or “COVID.” The attack on “woke DEI ideology” targets research focused on HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, addiction and mental health, health equity and systemic racial disparities, and more. Other terminations have nothing to do with the subject of the research, and instead must be understood as part of the administration’s attempt to strip universities of their independence.

Here’s a tally of many of the scientific budget cuts.

• National Science Foundation (NSF):
o The budget proposes $3.9 billion for NSF, which is $4.9 billion below (55%
decrease) FY 2025 enacted. The budget request proposes cuts for climate, clean
energy, “woke social, behavioral and economic sciences” and “programs in low
priority areas of science.”
• National Institutes of Health (NIH):
o The budget proposes $29.116 billion for the NIH, a $17.97 billion reduction (38%
decrease) from FY 2025 enacted. It also proposes reforms to the NIH, including
consolidating programs into five new focus areas:
▪ National Institute on Body Systems Research;
▪ National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research;
▪ National Institute of General Medical Sciences;
▪ National Institute of Disability Related Research; and
▪ National Institute on Behavioral Health.
o NIH research would align with the president’s priorities to address chronic
disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating
research on climate change, radical gender ideology and divisive “racialism”.
This new structure retains the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health
(ARPA-H).
o The budget provides $27 billion for NIH research.
• Department of Energy (DOE):
o The budget proposes $7.092 billion for the Office of Science, which is $1.148
billion below (13.9% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $888 million for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
(EERE), which is $2.572 billion below (74% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $200 million for Advanced Research Projects Agency–
Energy (ARPA-E), which is $260 million below (56% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
o The budget proposes a $1.311 billion decrease for the NOAA Operations,
Research and Grants program. Since the final FY 2025 continuing resolution did
not provide the specific funding level, the base level is unknown. The budget
cites a termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant
programs, which are not aligned with the Administration’s policy-ending ‘Green
New Deal’ initiatives.”
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):
o The budget proposes $5.069 billion for NASA Science Mission Directorate, which
is $2.265 billion below (30.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $1.034 billion for Earth Science, which is $1.161 billion
below (52.8% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.
o The budget proposes $569 million for the Space Technology Directorate, which
is $531 million below (48.2% decrease) FY 2025 enacted.

Don’t forget: 47% decrease in the budget of the department of agriculture, and a 30% cut to the department of the interior, and eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Science! On the bright side, the defense department gets a 13% increase. Also keep in mind that these are the quantitative changes — we haven’t even started examining the qualitative changes in where the money that is left is going, thanks to agents of chaos like RFK jr and Bhattacharya.

There’s no hiding the fact that these cuts are ideologically driven.

In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — began an ideological purge of its grants. Without warning, hundreds of research projects — many of which had been underway for years, representing thousands of hours of work and billions of dollars in investment — were abruptly cancelled without a scientifically valid explanation. The NIH cited only vague connections to “gender identity” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), or other now-forbidden topics such as vaccine hesitancy and COVID, as justification, claiming these projects no longer aligned with “agency priorities.”

These funding cuts raise serious ethical concerns for study participants and risk many life-saving findings going unpublished. The NIH has undermined research on life-threatening diseases that affect us all like cancer, HIV, and Alzheimer’s — and dangerously implies that some patients are more worthy of care than others. These actions stifle scientific progress and put lives at risk.

It’s amazing how electing one man can so profoundly change the course of history…and not in a good way. Here’s the real march of progress:

The only BBB I might appreciate is the Better Business Bureau. This new bill the Republicans are foisting off on us is a blatant grift, and we’re just sitting here watching it pass.

What the Big Beautiful Bill contains is a give-away for the rich, while taking away any benefit to the poor and removing any limits on Trump’s power.

It’s going up before the Senate next, the sanctuary for privilege, so I don’t have a lot of hope that it will be shot down. We are so screwed.

Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful” budget squeaked through the US House of Representatives last Thursday – a shiny populist package hiding a brutal class agenda. No taxes on tips! Bigger child tax credits! But look closer and the bill is a sleight of hand. The middle-class perks expire in 2028 – just as Mr Trump’s second term would end – while permanent tax cuts for the rich, and delayed cuts to means-tested welfare, entrench inequality. It’s not a budget. It’s a bait-and-switch. It turns Democrats’ fiscal caution into a liability – one that punishes their own base. Republicans understand what Democrats still don’t: deficits aren’t the danger. It’s what you do with them that matters.

This bill supercharges inequality: a $1.1tn giveaway to Americans earning more than $500,000 a year – funded by pushing poorer families off Medicaid and food assistance. It slashes green energy subsidies. Experts say it could add $3.1tn to the debt – but it’s more than millionaire tax breaks. It raises Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding by 365% for detention, 500% for deportations – fuel for Mr Trump’s crackdown.

It’s breathtaking how quickly the USA flushed itself down the crapper.

One of my responsibilities is academic advising — I help students complete their degree and give them career advice. It’s feeling a bit awkward nowadays.

But that’s OK, I can just focus on the science instead.

Unfortunately, it’s become clear that my job is extremely political.