I might be slightly optimistic about possibilities in the future

That’s about as enthusiastic as I can get right now, but we do have some Democrats who actually get it. JB Pritzker is setting the tone.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) on Sunday called for mass protests against the Trump administration and blasted “do-nothing Democrats” who have failed to mount a stronger opposition to the Republicans in control of the federal government.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said in his keynote address at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” he continued. “They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.”

“We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box,” he added.

Oh my gosh! He’ll never get invited on CNN with that kind of rhetoric, and Watters will say snide things about him on Fox! Good. Set their hair on fire.

Also, he has a few words for his fellow Democrats.

But he also criticized some members of his own party for listening to political pundits instead of everyday Americans, saying they are “flocking to podcasts and cable news shows to admonish fellow Democrats for not caring enough about the struggles of working families.”

“Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,” Pritzker said.

Wow. The DNC is going to try to kill his chances in the next election, because they like their candidates to be gutless, hollow old farts.

JB Pritzker will be one to watch. Our governor, Tim Walz, has not let up on his criticisms of weird Republicans, and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been stirring enthusiastic crowds all around the country. Sanders is too old, I’m sorry to say — we should have elected him to the presidency 20 years ago — but I’d vote for AOC in a heartbeat. We’ve been saddled with Schumers and Pelosis for way too long.

(Oh, hey, Buttigeg works for me, too.)

Pritzker said more that I like:

So, you’re telling me I shouldn’t expect my tax refund check any time soon?

The IRS does not cope well with chaos.

At the Internal Revenue Service, the internet has become so patchy since President Donald Trump ordered remote workers back to overcrowded offices that staff are resorting to personal hotspots, crashing their computers at the height of tax processing season, two IRS officials told Reuters. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.

No wonder we have to fill out all those forms to file our taxes. The IRS lacks the computing capacity to calculate the amount I have to pay…except, wait a minute, then how do they know what I owe? The Social Security administration is also struggling.

At the Social Security Administration, lawyers, statisticians and other high-ranking agency officials are being sent from the Baltimore headquarters to regional offices to replace veteran claims processors who have been fired or taken buyouts from the Trump administration.
But most of the new arrivals don’t know how to do the job, leading to longer wait times for disabled and elderly Americans who depend on these benefits, according to two people familiar with the situation. Asked about the changes, an SSA official said in an email that reassigned employees “have vast knowledge about our programs and services.”

I’m trying to imagine what that is like — the few times I’ve had to work with the university’s bureaucracy, I’ve been completely lost. I have vast knowledge about biology and our curriculum, but please don’t ask me to process tuition payments. Those are highly skilled jobs! OSHA is also feeling the pain.

In its drive to cut costs, DOGE says it has canceled almost 500,000 government credit cards. It has placed a $1 limit on many others, and centralized decision making within some agency headquarters. That means managers in some regional offices can’t buy basic supplies.
At one center at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, it took a scientist a month to get authorization to buy $200 of dry ice to preserve urine samples, a purchase usually made at a local supermarket. Because the administration has barred many employees from making purchases, a colleague in another regional office who still has a government credit card paid for the dry ice, but it had to be shipped to the lab – at an additional cost of $100, according to a source familiar with the matter.

What can you buy on a credit card with a $1 limit?

They keep saying they’re saving us billions with increased efficiency, but all I see is greater inefficiency. I don’t see how that can save us any money at all. They’re just lying to us.

I’ll be curious to see if, at the end of this fiscal year, we’re deeper in the hole than last year. I predict that we will be.

Science is being murdered in the USA, and we know who is doing it

You should know that the National Institutes of Health was the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. It was huge. It wasn’t just a gigantic research complex located in Bethesda, it administered the funding for most of the biological research in the country.

The NIH is headquartered on this sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s home to the largest clinical research hospital in the world, and 27 research institutes and centers.

The “leaked” budget draft includes a plan to consolidate those 27 institutes and centers into eight and eliminate four, including the Institutes on Nursing Research and Minority Health.
…
But Collins says the bulk of that budget, more than 80%, goes to researchers off campus.

Dr. Francis Collins: Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.

Some of those researchers’ work lines America’s medicine cabinets, such as statins, antidepressants, and new forms of insulin.

A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.

Dr. Francis Collins: Every dollar that NIH gave out in 2024 to a grant is estimated to have returned $2.46 just in a year. That’s a pretty darn good return on investment.

I was careful to use the past tense up there, because right now it’s being rapidly dismembered, dismantled, and disemboweled, in a savage act of intentional vandalism. This is like Egypt blowing up the pyramids, or Italy bulldozing the Vatican, or France deciding the Louvre would be a great storage facility for outflow from a sewage treatment plant. If America were to be remembered by history for one great accomplishment, it would be the scientific productivity established here, and an institution modeled by other countries around the world. And it’s being willfully destroyed by a gang of incompetent know-nothings.

NIH insider: I’ve never seen the morale of an institution or any place change so abruptly to where we feel fear.

It began, he says, in February, when more than a thousand probationary employees were placed on leave.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When that happened, that first hit, what was the reaction, like immediately and in the office the next Monday?

NIH insider: Tears. Everybody trying to assess damage, who’s been fired, who hasn’t been fired, what do we do? And then an immediate sort of assessment– in the clinical center: “Okay, can we still take care of patients and our research participants? Is it still safe?”

Sharyn Alfonsi: No one thought before they fired the people that dealt with the patients that maybe they shouldn’t be fired?

NIH insider: This didn’t come from within NIH, it came from outside, they don’t know what these people do.

As DOGE dismantled parts of the agency, employees told us work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.

Imagine the burning of the library of Alexandria — we will look back on this moment as something entirely equivalent. This is not something you can rebuild in a few years with a supportive congress and a bunch of money. Those people are leaving. They’re emigrating or looking for career alternatives. They’re knee-capping universities.

NIH insider: This doesn’t feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when a company has layoffs they talk about restructuring. There’ll be a new structure and this is how it’s gonna work. Is there a structure in place right now for the NIH?

NIH insider: Not that anybody’s shared. We have no idea. You know making the organization better, everybody is for that . There is no question. But again– this is not more efficient. It is infinitely less efficient right now because you can’t get anything done.

The confusion in Bethesda has also paralyzed many of the 2,500 universities and institutes that rely on the NIH to help fund their research.

So far, nearly 800 grants have been terminated- some on HIV and AIDS, trans health and COVID-19 after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority.

And last week, the NIH signaled that more cuts could be coming. It announced that any university with a DEI program or that boycotts an Israeli company might not be awarded new NIH grants for medical research and that existing grants could be terminated.

It’s catastrophic. And what’s amazing is that we can pin it directly on one man, Donald Trump, who has put vandals and morons in charge of what should be America’s pride. In particular, he’s put Rat FucKer jr in charge of HHS, which oversees the NIH. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and what he thinks he knows is all wrong.

If you need a little humor (I don’t, I think it’s time to seriously charge forward and battle these assholes) to stomach the bad news, here’s John Oliver. The best bit in this segment where RatFucker jr just confidently and stupidly makes up figures, claiming, for instance, that 50% of the people in China are diabetic. Nothing the RatFucker says can be trusted — he’s a liar, a con man, and a snake oil salesman.

The conclusion is also good.

Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.
…
RFK needs to go and by impeachment if necessary.
…
This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.

Yeah. But by impeachment? Congress approved RFK jr’s appointment, despite knowing everything that Oliver pointed out, so who believes we can trust them to act responsibly now?

The fascists are already here, and they’re in control

Mona Eltahawy has witnessed the dictatorship in Egypt, so she has some expertise in diagnosing what’s happening in the US. She says that the US has become a fascist state. She’s right.

I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.

After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”

And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.

Me, too. I was deluded, as were so many of my peers, into thinking it couldn’t get this bad, that the rule of law and our revered state institutions would put the brakes on the excesses of a tyrant. Boy, was I wrong. The Republicans undermined the judiciary, wrapped themselves in flags and waved a Bible, and took over congress. They just needed a president who would ride that power straight into hell, and they got one. Aided by the quislings who thought students shouldn’t allowed to protest and that DEI was a conspiracy to take away their privilege, academia and the education system as a whole are being trashed by a president who loves the uneducated and believes in a mythical genetic superiority of the white race.

The DEI-hatred was the hint to what this whole fascist movement was rooted in — it’s racism. It’s an inescapable observation. The Republicans have come to power by harnessing the resentment of millions of bigots, and they’re having a grand time using that power to do great harm to everyone who isn’t a white man. That’s all it is. That’s the key to understanding what they are doing. They’ve got God’s permission to oppress everyone who doesn’t look like them, think like them.

Mona Eltahawy sees it clearly.

White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.

White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.

No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.

As a white American man, I have finally moved into a state of rage. It took me a while, I tried to be complacent, and dream that this too shall pass, that we’d wake up and restore normality in the next election…always we’ll get it right next time.

I no longer believe there will be a next election. There will be martial law, and a state of emergency, and the appointment of MAGA party masters to guarantee total control of the state. Before that, there will be rising protests at the incompetence of the MAGA government, but those will just be used as the pretext for cracking down on the citizenry.

WAKE UP.

Police state confronts students at UCLA

America!!!

This house a few blocks away from my home is so perfectly emblematic of what MAGA has done to the United States of America: the flagpole with a Betsy Ross flag, faded and tattered and disintegrating, flying in front of a house with “JESUS” crudely painted on the roof, with the walls decorated with garish Trump signs.

Not shown is the giant gas-guzzling RV parked in their driveway.

I do despise these shabby, tacky MAGA idiots, but that’s what this country has become.

I get email

I intensely dislike accusations of ad hominem from people who don’t understand what ad hominem is.

Hello professor, I read your blogs from time to time getting different perspectives on important issues. The recent article about Krauss, there is allot of ad hominem, is that a good strategy to sway people towards a viewpoint, instead of arguing the specific points ?

He is referring to this post. It would be ad hominem to say “Krauss is a harasser, because he was a physic professor.” It is not ad hominem to compile a collection of observations and assessments by his peers that directly corroborate the accusation.

The idea that presenting evidence is an ad hominem fallacy is a defense used by people who want to suppress the evidence.

The most discouraging xkcd ever yet

I had to change the title because there is no reason to think we’ve reached the bottom yet.

Commencement is coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ve been encouraging all these students to go into science careers, and now I feel like I’ve been throwing them into a shark tank.

Rise up, America. I’ve been to Bucharest, and strolled through the Palace of Parliament — there are ways for a country to rid itself of a tyrant like Nicolae Ceaușescu. Donald Trump and his sycophants next?

“Anatomically fulsome”

A couple of medieval scholars are arguing over a dick pic. Apparently, the Bayeux tapestry depicts more than just a battle — it has numerous images of penises.

The Oxford professor George Garnett drew worldwide interest six years ago when he announced he had totted up 93 penises stitched into the embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England.

According to Garnett, 88 of the male appendages are attached to horses and the remainder to human figures.

OK, so a handful of warriors were flopping out of their gear, and the tapestry artists were careful to include that detail. The debate is over how many people had a wardrobe malfunction.

Now, the historian and Bayeux tapestry scholar Dr Christopher Monk – known as the Medieval Monk – believes he has found a 94th.

A running man, depicted in the tapestry border, has something dangling beneath his tunic. Garnett says it is the scabbard of a sword or dagger. Monk insists it is a male member.

I’ll let you decide. Here’s the figure in contention. Penis or dagger?

“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say. The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome,” Monk said.

Heh. “Anatomically fulsome” — I’ll say. That thing is hanging down to his knees and is so massive that he’s got to run with his legs spread wide. I wonder if it was stitched by his girlfriend.

Visited by an alien

I got a new toy! It’s a $30 trail cam that will probably cost $300 once the tariffs take effect, but I got it because I was curious about what has been going on in my back yard. There is a burrow under my deck, and every year we’re surprised by who takes up residence. Groundhogs are common, but one year we had a skunk under there.

I set the camera up to point directly at the hole, but you can’t see the burrow itself because of all the grass in the way. As expected, I knew there’d be squirrels and maybe rabbits hopping around, although the rabbits are currently in their shy phase, hiding with their litters of kits somewhere. We did spot a squirrel in the early evening (time stamp is correct, but I failed to set the date on the camera.)

All was quiet for most of the night, but then around 3AM something was popping it’s head up, multiple times, like they were repeatedly trying to figure out what that thing outside their front door was.

I’m not sure what that is. Maybe a skunk? Maybe an alien. I’d rather it were an alien visitor, because if it is a skunk I’ll need to set up a trap (a humane one, of course!) and relocate it later this summer.

Hmmm, I suppose if it is a small alien, I could also trap it. What kind of bait should I use? I think the last time we had a skunk, they were partial to cantaloupe.