- The National Science Foundation abolishes its 37 divisions;
- Yet another Trump sycophant from Fox gains a top position, as DC’s top prosecutor;
- Loonies: Loomer on witchcraft, Hegseth on homosexuality;
- How wacko conspiracy theories are now affecting the highest levels of the US government;
- And recalling Sagan’s THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD, and Asimov’s “cult of ignorance” quote. And how all this is an inescapable part of human nature.
Once again, the United States is ceding leadership in science to the rest of the world.
Science, Jeffrey Mervis, 8 May 2025: Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions, subtitled “Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund”
The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. The current directors and deputy directors will lose their titles and might be reassigned to other positions at the agency or elsewhere in the federal government.
The consolidation appears to be driven in part by President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the agency’s $4 billion budget by 55% for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions could also be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that involves adding a new layer of review. NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.
Again, this sounds like bureaucrats presuming to tell the experts how to do their work.
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More loonies.
Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 8 May 2025: Jeanine Pirro’s Fox producer thought she was “nuts.” Trump just named her DC’s top prosecutor., subtitled “Pirro is a diehard Trump sycophant who thinks the DOJ should serve his interests and punish his enemies”
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro is so unhinged that the network took her show off the air following the 2020 election out of (subsequently confirmed) fear that she’d use it to launder deranged conspiracy theories about the results. But she’s a fanatical supporter of President Donald Trump, and that is apparently enough to get her tapped as the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C.
Trump announced Thursday night that he was appointing Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, specifically praising her Fox News career. Earlier in the day, Trump indicated that he planned to move on from acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, another right-wing media figure, who appeared unable to muster sufficient votes for Senate confirmation. Pirro is the 23rd person with Fox on their resume whom Trump has selected to join his second administration.
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JMH, 9 May 2025: Loomer: Surgeon General Pick Practices Witchcraft
I love that this is one crazy complaining a different flavor of crazy.
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LGBTQNation, Daniel Villareal, 9 May 2025: Pete Hegseth’s pastor says homosexuality is caused by abuse & can be cured by Jesus, subtitled “The pastor called gay people ‘sodomites’ that are “perverting” God’s beautiful design.”
No it isn’t and no it can’t. These people are so aggressively simple-minded, and deeply superstitious.
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This isn’t news, is it? Wacko conspiracy theories have been around for decades, right? Well, it is news. The US, as represented by its government, is losing its collective mind.
NY Times, Tiffany Hsu, 6 May 2025: Trump’s Return to Power Elevates Ever Fringier Conspiracy Theories, subtitled “At every level of government, authority figures are embracing once-extreme ideas, including that the Earth is flat or that the state controls the weather.”
People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.
A prominent far-right activist who has said, despite years of research and intelligence establishing otherwise, that the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were an inside job by the U.S. government commemorated the 9/11 anniversary last year alongside President Trump.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, pledged the agency’s support last month for a fight involving so-called chemtrails, a debunked theory that the white condensation lines streaming behind airplanes are toxic, or could even be used for nefarious purposes.
Conspiracy theories that were relegated to random and often anonymous online forums are now being championed or publicly debated by increasingly powerful people. Mr. Trump in particular has embraced, elevated and even appointed to his cabinet people promoting these theories — giving the ideas a persuasive authority and a dangerous proximity to policy.
With examples. And ending:
Mr. Trump referred to “demonic forces” on the campaign trail and called Democrats a “very demonic party.” Days before interviewing both Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago on Election Day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, posted a YouTube video claiming he had been attacked in the night “by a demon or by something unseen.” Dan Bongino, a right-wing pundit and podcaster who is now the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on his show that “demon energy is real.”
“It’s no longer an abstraction — it’s about straight-up demons,” Mr. Carusone said. “The fever swamps are all of our reality right now.”
Way back in the 1990s Carl Sagan published THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD? (My review here.) Americans were settling into irrationalism even then. And before that, in 1980, was Isaac Asimov’s famous cult of ignorance quote. Is this something peculiarly American? I suspect not, just that it’s more visible in the US because it contrasts with our dominance and performance in scientific achievement, especially the big successful projects that NASA has pulled off, and technological achievements Americans have produced like the internet and the iPhone. Rather, as I’ve come to conclude over the past couple decades, it’s due to the inescapable lingering of primitive human nature, which sees agency in everything and prefers tribal allegiance to abstract expertise.
