Assessing Trump/MAGA damage: Gutting American science

Broad damage overview

So far, Trump and MAGA elites and their policies (TM) has caused massive damage to all or nearly all major aspects of American government, democracy, civil liberties, rule of law (especially federal courts, and the FBI and DoJ), economy, education, finance, religion, society, the public interest including public health, and science. Multiple independent lines of evidence, including impeachment records, legal scholarship, civil‑rights reporting, and institutional analyses, all show Trump repeatedly choosing actions that attack democracy, undermine honest, competent the civil service, centralize power, and sacrifice American interests for personal or factional gain. Based on available evidence it is reasonable to firmly believe TM are intentionally working to cripple America and its capacity to sustain its power and position in the world. Link, link, link, link, link, link

TM really do act as if they work for Putin and whoever pays to play, e.g., convicted criminal who buy pardons from Trump. Link, link, link, link

Gutting American science: The connection with the profit motive

A constant target of TM and their predecessors has been inconvenient science. In the early decades, prominent targets for neutering included climate and public health science. Research in both of those areas threatened big corporations and their profits. In response, the corporations struck back with decades of massive, highly successful misinformation propaganda campaigns to block regulations and accountability for the deaths and damages they caused. Examples include:

• For decades, the American cigarette industry successfully staved off science-based regulations, restrictions and social responsibility using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. Millions of people were conned into the false belief that cigarettes did not cause cancer. Link, link

• For decades, the American oil industry staved off science-based environmental regulations using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. By the early 1960s, the US oil industry knew about global warming their role in creating greenhouse gas and other pollution problems. Under TM, essentially all federal environmental laws are either gone or no longer enforced. Big oil has convincingly won its propaganda war against us and the public interest. Link, link, link, link, link

Corporate oil's propaganda & lies

to deceive and confuse the public  

Source

• For decades, the American chemical and plastics industry staved off science-based environmental regulations using lies, propaganda, and state and federal politicians they purchased. The industry invented the plastics "recycling" and other myths in the 1970s. Those propaganda fantasies conned tens of millions of people into falsely believing that (1) plastics were going to be recycled and thus not a significant source of pollution, and (2) it was all on the consumer to not pollute their waste plastic. Link, link, link

Recycling is and always has been a lie 

~95% of plastic waste is not recycled

it's in our bodies, landfills, oceans, lakes and 

rivers, & most everywhere else

Gutting American science: What TM have done to us

A current Scientific American article, U.S. science is in chaos How did we get here?, summarizes the gutting of American science, the repairable damage will take years, maybe a decade or two. The main point is simple. The decades-long government funding of independent science has ended. In the past, policymakers and politicians relied on that science to make policy. That has ended. US science is in full-blown chaos. We can no  longer rely on new research findings to help solve critical problems and guide new policy.

Before TM's corrupt wrecking ball smashed it all to smithereens, ~40% of U.S. research and development funding supported scientific research. Before TM poisoned and corrupted the process, politicians generally accepted the concept that evidence should guide policy, even when inconvenient. Of course, when the science was too inconvenient affected industries would buy politicians copious amounts of "free speech", also called things like "campaign contributions", "gratuities", payoffs, bribes, etc. 

Now under the ghastly corruption and colossal stupidity of TM politics, corrupt MAGA politics overrides evidence‑based policy. The public interest and most average people lose. America can no longer even try to deal with climate risks, pandemics, and technological change that require competent, honest policy to deal with. American scientists are demoralized. Some are leaving for countries that still value independent research.

Thanks to Trump and his MAGA elites, we're royally fucked. But, Putin loves it. So do TM.

Corrupt, irrational MAGA politics protects polluters at public interest expense

 Some MAGA states are passing laws that ban lawsuits against major polluters. As usual for MAGA politics, the reasoning is based completely on lies and crackpottery. For example, in Louisiana the MAGA legislature passed a bill and LA’s MAGA governor signed it. The new law, the “Louisiana Energy Protection Act”, closes state courts to future nearly all climate‑related damages suits against oil and gas companies. The statute bars civil lawsuits in Louisiana state courts seeking personal injury, property loss, or economic damages linked to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. As is usual for irrational MAGA policy, the law protects lawsuits for environmental permit violations, emission caps violations, and pending coastal‑erosion lawsuits brought by parishes that are slowly becoming uninhabitable due to sea level rise. MAGA politicians considers lawsuits for those damages to not be “frivolous”.

Pro-pollution laws like this ban lawsuits for whole or in part outside a state that caused global warming with impacts that result in injury, death, property damage, or economic loss. In LA, the new law blocks claims for damages based on Louisiana emissions.

Top recover damages, the LA law requires the injured party to prove in court that in‑state pollution caused damages by clear and convincing evidence. For pollution damage lawsuits, that is a very hard standard to meet, usually impossible. That insurmountable evidence burden requires plaintiffs to (1) prove a violation of an enforceable state or federal emissions limit or permit, (2) prove the defendant’s emissions caused more than 50% of the alleged damages, (3) identify the specific greenhouse gas causing the harm, and (4) prove the plaintiff did not directly or indirectly contribute to any emissions that caused the damage. On essence, MAGA pro-pollution corruption has banned civil lawsuits.

Think about item #4, plaintiff didn’t contribute to any damaging emissions. Isn’t that impossible to prove? People claiming pollution damages do things like (a) breathing air and exhaling CO2 (CO2 is a major greenhouse gas that causes damages, (b) driving a gas powered car that emits CO2, or (3) getting on a airplane that emits CO2 when it flies. Presumably, the law does not extend to that absurd level. MAGA politicians and judges are free to treat the #4 evidence requirement as a feature, not a bug. They can just read the evidence requirement aggressively to choke off climate damages suits while not pushing the #4 evidence requirement into total absurdity. That is the beauty, or horror, of ambiguity in laws.

In other words, the LA law means whatever MAGA elites, including contributors to MAGA politicians, say it means. What does that translate into in practice? Obviously, it means that plaintiffs in LA suing for global warming damages will never be able to win in court because the court is free to say the plaintiff hasn’t met the required evidence standards.

And do not look to the MAGA federal government to step in and protect damaged people. Trump and his MAGA elites in power have completely gutted and neutered all federal environmental laws and protections. There is no protection for the public interest left in our corrupted federal government.

Sources: Link, link, link

Christian nationalism's vision of theocracy comes into focus

Theocratic Christian nationalist (CN) elites and their dogma are generally bigoted, racist, intolerant, cruel and pro-fascism. Evidence of that is clear in the public record. Christian nationalism is historically linked to antisemitism, white supremacy, and a goal of building and maintaining a white Christian theocracy. Poll data indicates that most rank and file CN supporters either are unaware of it, or they do not understand what the CN political movement and ideology are or stand for. There is a major gap between CN elites’ articulated ideology and the lay public’s understanding. Many CN supporters are participating in the project without understanding the implications of what they support.

There's a lot of ignorance going on in American politics, to say the least.

Making the US military Christian nationalist

The loyal idiot Pete Hegseth that Trump installed and Senate Republicans confirmed to run the pentagon is an outspoken CN theocrat. A Salon article discusses new pentagon policy to instill CN dogma as the dominant religious mindset for religious indoctrination in the US military. What Trump and Hegseth did was reduce the number of recognized religious groups from 211 to 31. 

As is usual for morally rotted MAGA politics, we are lied to about why this is being done. The lie is that CN elites want to “streamline” military chaplaincy and related services. The truth is that CN dogma is highly intolerant of all kinds of things. That includes extreme intolerance of other religions (and no religion). That includes some groups that see themselves as "Christian". With its increasing power, CN theocracy is increasingly able to push aside other religions and subordinate them to CN elites' definition of what groups of Christians are Christian and what aren't.

CN dogma is very theocratic and theological. It is Old Testament intolerant, vengeful, aggressive and angry.

Anyway, the new Trump/Hegseth scheme says there are 21 different groups of Christians and 10 groups of whatever else. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other major religions are all stuffed into single undifferentiated big wads. Other groups like atheists, humanists, pagans, Wiccans, and etc., are simply gone and no longer recognized to even exist.  The Trump/Hegseth CN theocratic agenda clearly signals Christian superiority by openly marginalizing non‑Christians as less than fully American, including in the military. 

The Mormons are unhappy -- they  don't even have a religion

How CN dogma treats the Mormons is weird. In the CN's vision, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints (Mormonism) is not counted under any of the CN's “Christian” labels. That accords with Hegseth’s rigid belief in evangelical claims that Mormons are not Christians. Mormons are excluded from the “Christian” umbrella, and they do not get recognition as a distinct non‑Christian faith on equal footing with, Judaism or Islam. In other words, CN dogma seems to see Mormonism as a cult. Calling it a cult is common among evangelical Christian elites. That is how they believe their God sees it, or tells them to see it. 

This points out the incoherence of CN's intolerant religious dogma. Intolerance does lead to various stupidities like this. 

Whaddabout the Catholics? 

This is not going to end with CN elites treating Mormonism like crap. The important, juicy target is Catholics. At present, there is an uneasy ceasefire between elite CN evangelicals and the Catholic church. For now, the Catholics are too powerful for the evangelicals to go to war with. 

But once evangelical CN elites like Russell Vought believe they have sufficient staying power in government after Trump is gone, they will go after the Catholics too. Assuming evangelical elites can build a persistent American theocracy, the question is when will the split with the Catholics come, not if.

A bit of CN history

The Salon article mentions a little CN history worth considering. The article says that Gerald L K Smith, a pro‑Huey Long organizer, founded explicitly “Christian Nationalist” organizations like the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the Christian Nationalist Party, and The Cross and the Flag in the 1940s. He and those groups promoting a white Christian America built on antisemitism and anti‑Black racism. Smith’s dogma sees communism as a “Jewish plot” that uses Black Americans to overthrow white Christian civilization. His definition of “Christian” excluded many Catholics and Mormons.

The CN elite R.J. Rushdoony, a foundational figure in Christian Reconstructionism, is frequently quoted in CN literature as saying that Christians have a “mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ, to have dominion in civil affairs” and that “civil government must be brought under the law of God”. As we all know, that God opposes abortions, birth control, same-sex marriage, voting rights, minority protections, and some other civil liberties.

None of that has changed much or at all. CN elites are corrupt authoritarian monsters. In some ways, they are different from the monstrous Trump himself. And since God is on their theocratic side, if they get power, they very well could wind up being even worse than Trump's criminality, deep moral rot, intolerance and hateful vengeance. 

An American Taliban?

A comparison of American CN elites with the Afghan Taliban elites starts to come into focus. If one thinks through some plausible implications of an intolerant, vengeful God's law-driven Old Testament theocracy, visions of an American Bible version of the Taliban can come to mind. It ought to come to mind.

Fortunately, we're not there yet. With some luck, we'll never get there. But the American CN theocratic threat is real, powerful, and right now. Hegseth is just God's bad breath that powerful CN theocrats want everyone to smell, fear and live with. 

Q: Are most rank and file CN supporters really so ignorant they don't understand what they support, or is the CN movement nothing like how the Salon article portrays it, or is there something else different going on here?  

American AI insanity is an infectious epidemic

Ah, the beauty of naïvety!  /s

Something feels terribly wrong and broken with American political and business leadership. Many or most of them seem to have gone insane. On the politics side, insanity has been painfully obvious ever since 2016. 

But people running some big companies are just plain nuts. For example Teradata is planning to “win in the market with AI”, primarily by diverting money from annual salary increases into AI-related headcount, tooling, and product development. However, the company has not disclosed a concrete, detailed AI roadmap or plan. All that is clear is that they are reallocating money into a fairly generic “AI transformation” focused on AI talent, AI tooling, and AI-infused versions of their existing data/analytics products. Whether that will make economic sense or not is unknowable. The CEO sure doesn't know.

Some people are wary, especially young workers just entering the workforce. A FT headline captures the unease: ‘More harmful than helpful’: young people sour on AI.

Other companies are joining in the AI irrational exuberance freight train. One article comments: Google lays off Cloud, cybersecurity staff as Big Tech doubles down on AI investments; Google has reportedly laid off employees across parts of its Google Cloud and cybersecurity businesses, including teams within Mandiant and its Threat Intelligence Group; so far this year, 164 companies have laid off 116,379 employees, according to Layoffs.fyi, a platform that tracks job cuts across industries in real time.

Groovy! We're further letting down our defenses against cyberwar. Outstanding!  /s

Also, one has just gotta wonder if MAGA's recently released unexpectedly good job number is real or just faked MAGAware. Given the stunning mendacity of Trump, and his elite MAGA thugs in power, one can reasonably believe the jobs data is faked and inflated.

Others see major issues that the mindless US stampede to AI-ify everything is causing. This headline is blunt about the water problem: AI Data Centers’ Water Consumption Breaks 264 Billion Gallons in 2025 as Devastating Drought Hits Nearly 63% of U.S. As one can expect from our now corrupt and incompetent MAGA-fied federal government, nothing will be done until crisis hits. Of course, MAGA's demagoguery will blame Obama, Hillary, Joe Biden, Hunter & his laptop, etc., for all the shit hitting the fan. 

Good old UNU (United Nations University) puts the environmental issue like this: Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land—UN Scientists: AI Is Threatening Natural Resources for Billions; by 2030, AI water use will match the needs of 1.3 billion people while power consumption will match the needs of ~2 billion. Yikes!!

Hm, there is a UNU? Well, at least Trump and his elite MAGA goons haven't polluted that school yet by turning it into an institution dedicated to pro-pollution, fake science propaganda and lies.  /not-s

Regardless of how AI plays out for businesses and the economy, it really is coming with an unregulated vengeance to almost all major areas of human endeavor. An article that Science published says it all: The last astronomers -- Amid a flood of AI advances, astrophysicists are questioning the soul of their field:

One afternoon in April, Cecilia Garraffo settled down at the head of a conference room table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gazed out at what might be the last astrophysicists of their kind.

The walls of this room had, in the past, reverberated with the din of thousands of other groups of scientists. Now, as streaks of sunlight poured in, the discussions turned to nonhuman collaborators. One by one, the gathered researchers discussed how they planned to apply machine learning to problems in astronomy. 

Afterward, as everyone filed out, black hole researcher Daniel Palumbo made a brief announcement. Representatives from AI chipmaker NVIDIA were on campus in search of scientists who wanted to solve problems using their hardware. To anyone who might need extra processing power, “today’s the day,” he said.  

Representatives of the AI companies, who seem to view astrophysics problems as public relations boons that offer compelling showcases of their models, boast that their technologies will soon achieve supremacy over actual theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists. Some even make mechanizing the study of the night sky a selling point.

Yup, today’s the day. We surely are going to find out good and hard just how wonderful AI is going to be for all of us. We will soon see AI supremacy over actual theoretical physicists. Dog only knows what AI has planned for us village idiots.

Q: Is Trump and his incompetent, corrupt MAGAfied federal government more likely going to (1) intelligently but effectively guide us into a dawning AI golden age for all of us, or (2) will they shamelessly cash in as much as they can, while not giving a rip about public needs or the public interest?

🤔

Hm, I wonder . . . a new golden age for us or them? 

Probably them