Science. Trump don’t want no stinkin science. Trump wants JOBS, not science. Science never created any jobs for anybody. Hell no, it’s selling overpriced condos that creates jobs. Somebody has to paint all those faucets gold-color.
The scientists of course are having a big hissy fit. They’re such prima donnas.
[T]he extent of the cuts in the proposed budget unveiled early Thursday shocked scientists, researchers and program administrators. The reductions include $5.8 billion, or 18 percent, from the National Institutes of Health, which funds thousands of researchers working on cancer and other diseases, and $900 million, or a little less than 20 percent, from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds the national laboratories, considered among the crown jewels of basic research in the world.
Yes but what good is it? We can see how useful overpriced condos are, but we can’t see what good scientific research is.
The White House is also proposing to eliminate climate science programs throughout the federal government, including at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“As to climate change, I think the president was fairly straightforward: We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
Right. It’s way less wasteful to just let climate change go ahead.
While the budget is only a blueprint and is sure to face strong opposition from members of both parties in Congress — many lawmakers have already said that certain cuts, like those to the N.I.H., are nonstarters — policy makers expressed concern about what the proposal says about the administration’s commitment to science.
“Do they not think that there are advances to be made, improvements to be made, in the human condition?” said Rush D. Holt, a physicist and the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The record of scientific research is so good, for so many years — who would want to sell it short? What are they thinking?”
They work for Trump, so they’re probably not thinking at all.
Eliminating laboratory research on climate change, as the budget proposes, can have real-world effects, experts said, by making it harder to predict storms or other weather events that cause devastation and loss of life.
“Cutting scientific research in E.P.A. and NASA and NOAA and other science agencies is not going to help us have more information on the causes and, more important, the effects of climate change,” said Vicki Arroyo, the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center and a former E.P.A. official.
The budget also calls for eliminating some programs that help bridge the divide between basic research and commercialization. Among the most prominent of these is the Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy, known as ARPA-E, the Energy Department office that funds research in innovative energy technologies with a goal of getting products to market. Its annual appropriation of about $300 million would be eliminated.
James J. Greenberger, the executive director of NAATBatt International, a trade group for the advanced battery industry, said ARPA-E had been of enormous benefit to the industry.
“We’re absolutely stunned by it,” Mr. Greenberger said of the agency’s potential elimination, which he announced to industry leaders gathered at his group’s annual conference in Arizona. “I don’t know what’s going through the administration’s head. It’s almost surreal.”
See above. They work for Trump, so these are not thoughtful or scrupulous people.
Comments
11 responses to “Taking a blowtorch to science”
This is beyond sticking it to the bleeding-heart hippy liberal causes, which you might expect. This is chopping down some of the things that actually *have* made America great, in real ways, by standards acceptable to liberals and conservatives alike. It’s deeply, deeply stupid.
Yep. And I really think he’s ignorant and stupid enough to think what my sarcastic remarks indicate – that selling hyped-up real estate is Good for the Economy and Creates Jobs while science is just some weird luxury.
I think that deep inside the Lizard brains of these people they truly believe (most of them anyway), that if they legislate to protect the Carbon industry and defund climate change related research it will all just go away. The remainder of them know it will not, but don’t care as long as they get their wealth and riches because they know they’ll be dead before it becomes really nasty. besides, science will figure out an answer if it’s real.
Oh, wait…
When does someone get to declare that Trump has become a clear and present danger to the future existence of the USA (and the rest of us)?
Of course Trump wants to destroy science. Can’t have all those people who might think they are cleverer than he is, getting paid by government money which ought to be going to him, can we?
Besides, they talk funny.
This is how the cleverest people talk. The cleverest man in the country knows that you can’t get Democrats, ever, until you might; and knows when phase two isn’t really a phase at all…
The rambling; the paucity of vocabulary; the repetitions…
I’ve seen these behaviours before, in three kinds of cases. People with traumatic brain injury, people heavily drugged for pain, and people with dementia.
tiggerthewing, have you ever been backed into a corner at a party by somebody with traces of white powder around their nostrils?
Now, I’m not suggesting that Trump enjoys a little stimulant now and then, but he is every party bore with a little too much coke in their system I’ve ever met.
Republicans have long had a difficult relationship with science. They want to claim the mantle of science for everything they do, but at the same time, they have a very strong distrust of the science that scientists do. Remember Bachmann mocking fruit fly research? My mother did that for years. She said it was just a waste of money to study “fruit fly sex”, which she said with a sneer of repugnance, and not a little bit of shock in her voice that she actually said the word “sex”.
Trump clearly doesn’t believe that America being great has anything to do with intellectually great…or even competent. The brain drain that will ensue will suck the modern world right out of the US. And we won’t be able to attract quality scientists from other countries, either, which may be his plan. He may think that all science being done in the US is being done by “foreigners”. And “foreigners” are all bad. Neither of those last two statements are true in the real world, but in the world of alternative facts, they would pass any fact checker.
The US is poised to thrust itself at the speed of light straight backwards into medieval times.
I hope everyone can work out where the blockquote should have ended, despite my incompetence (everything after “prescription drugs and drugs” is my commentary).
Acolyte of Sagan, I am fortunate indeed that I’ve never had that dubious pleasure. But I have attempted to have conversations with people zonked on morphine in hospital, and not just fellow patients on one of my own far-to-frequent visits. My husband, in hospital in 1982 with internal injuries after a head-on car crash, appeared to be answering questions reasonably lucidly, but every so often would interrupt himself to ask if I’d remembered to bring his slippers. Why on Earth he was fixated on those in particular, when he wouldn’t be getting out of bed for at least a week, was anyone’s guess. He still doesn’t remember the entire conversation, indeed, he never had any recollection of any of my visits, either while he was in hospital or after he came out.
Trump strikes me as someone with severely impaired short-term memory who has been (self-?) coached with certain phrases before any public appearance. Those phrases then keep bouncing around the conversation at inappropriate moments, like the echolalic utterances of a small autistic child. Indeed, he often seems to be suffering from palilalia (a known side-effect of Alzheimer’s and stroke).
He has zero understanding of how other people cannot read his thoughts – look at the way he behaves even with autocue. The whole point of autocue is that you can read the script as if you are talking to the audience off the top of your head – he keeps ad-libbing stuff like “You aren’t going to believe this, folks!” just before going back on-script to read some statistics off the autocue which he evidently finds astonishing, even if it is something most of us probably know already, like how complicated government is.
He’s shedding vital government departments as fast as he can, because he is incapable of understanding how vital they are to the economy. He seems to be convinced that the government only really needs to consist of himself, an enormous army (to protect him) and strong border protections (to keep out foreigners). The army and borders can look after themselves, so all he then has to do is wander around the country getting praised at rallies.
The rest of the world is watching the USA in disbelief. How can your famous system of checks and balances be so completely impotent in the face of having elected such an incompetent individual to the highest office in the land?
Can someone please move him to Alcatraz? He’d have the strong protections he adores, and it’d be way cheaper to paint the entire inside with gold paint, create a pastiche of the oval office, and hire actors to stand around and cheer him every time he says anything for the rest of his life, even if he lives to 100, than it is to have him in office for one more day.
Sigh. I should probably avoid typing today.
When tobacco executives were pretending not to be merchants of death, they could be asked, on the record, whether they themselves smoked…not one did.
Do the climate deniers actually believe what they say? Are they so blinded by greed that they don’t actually care?
Yes.
There is no objective to any Trump or broader alt-right policy other than “making SJW heads asplode”. That is what the Trump Chumps voted for, and is basically acknowledged every time a Trump apologist takes to the editorial pages to blame the Trump election win on holier-than-thou leftist finger-wagging. They themselves have no agency, apparently.
If it happens to make the heads of conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals to also asplode in the process, well that’s just collateral damage. After all, you have to be willing to break a few eggs if you want to make a gooey mess on the countertop.