- Adam-Troy Castro on people who “do their own research”;
- And how RFK Jr. is ignoring decades of research into autism that have already answered his questions;
- Debates about whether Trump/MAGA’s cuts to weather agencies had a role to play in the Texas floods;
- And standard Republican reactions: “All we know how to do is pray”; This isn’t the time to talk about weather agencies; and somehow or another, the Democrats must be to blame.
- Yes, MAGA is reveling in the abuse of migrants;
- And a history of US immigration, on CBS Sunday Morning today.
Just sayin’.
An insight from Adam-Troy Castro, on Facebook, about people who “do their own research”: Sunday, July 6, 2025 at 8:58
The main problem with people who “prefer to do (their) own research” is that they go straight to prior people who didn’t care for the knowledge of experts, and preferred to do their own research.
The same idiocy is passed down from generation to generation, like an unholy game of telephone, which is how it came to be that people who think, for instance, that rape cannot result in pregnancy. They’re quoting people who quoted people who quoted people who quoted people who quoted people who, it eventually turns out, are quoting Nazi experiments on starving women in concentration camps.
Bill O’Reilly once reported as fact that American soldiers slaughtered Nazi soldiers at Malmedy, which is the opposite of what actually happened, and rather than consult a reputable historian he consulted people who had gotten their facts from the John Birch Society, which itself got its telling from a Neo-Nazi group in the late forties. Again: he did “his own research,” and again it originated, decades earlier, from Nazis.
Most people who “prefer to do their own research” google terms that reflect what they already believe and find the websites of prior ignoramuses who came to the same conclusions and in their five minutes of research think they have disproven what the experts spent years of peer-reviewed study to uncover. People who only “do their own research” and emerge with the counter-factual fail to take into account their refusal to first install a bullshit filter.
This is one reason why we are where we are.
Second from last paragraph is the key.
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Something similar is going on here.
The Atlantic, John Donvan and Caren Zucker, 6 Jul 2025: RFK Jr.’s Autism Time Machine, subtitled “The health secretary’s approach to the condition gives the impression that two decades of research simply never happened.”
RFK Jr. pledged, in a speech in April, to discover the cause of autism real soon now, and would employ “the most credible scientists from all over the world.” But none of the 2200 experts from 50 countries who recently gathered for the International Society for Autism Research in Seattle have been contacted. Because RFK Jr. apparently wants to “do his own research.”
In speeches and interviews as health secretary, Kennedy has made clear his disdain for mainstream autism research, brushing aside the insights gained for this tremendously complex condition through years of research. Instead, backed by the enormous power of his federal office, Kennedy now appears determined to pursue his own long-held set of theories about autism: first, that we are in the midst of an autism epidemic (which is, in fact, highly debatable); second, that autism is caused by one or more “environmental toxins” (which incorrectly suggests that environmental factors have not been explored); and third, that powerful interests want this information covered up (a conspiracy-esque viewpoint that lacks evidence).
With examples of RFK’s upside-down understanding of science. “When Kennedy speaks today about autism, it’s as though the past 20 years never happened.”
Conservatives know what they know.
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Now about those storms and floods in Texas.
Wired, Molly Taft, 5 Jul 2025: Meteorologists Say the National Weather Service Did Its Job in Texas, subtitled “DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the NWS, but experts who spoke to WIRED say the agency accurately predicted the state’s weekend flood risk.”
There’s an easy narrative connection between Trump and DOGE’s cuts of various government services and the surprise floods in Texas, but that doesn’t make it true.
At least 27 people, including nine children, are dead in central Texas after flash floods struck suddenly on the morning of the Fourth of July holiday. After a storm in which a month’s worth of rain fell in some regions in just a few hours, officials say they rescued more than 850 people from the floods over Friday and Saturday. A number of people were still missing as of Saturday afternoon, including 27 young campers from a Christian girls’ camp on the banks of the Guadalupe River.
Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.
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Though there are quite a few articles that imply it, e.g.
NY Times, 5 July 2025: As Floods Hit, Key Roles Were Vacant at Weather Service Offices in Texas, subtitled “Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.”
Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.
Texas officials appeared to blame the Weather Service for issuing forecasts on Wednesday that underestimated how much rain was coming. But former Weather Service officials said the forecasts were as good as could be expected, given the enormous levels of rainfall and the storm’s unusually abrupt escalation.
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What isn’t debatable are the predictable reactions, on the right.
JMG, 6 Jul 2025, from Washington Examiner: Johnson On Texas: “All We Know How To Do Is Pray”
What was that classic definition of insanity again? Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.
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RawStory, 6 Jul 2025: ‘Not the day’: GOP senator warns Dems complaining about cuts to weather agencies
Typically said of gun regulations following mass shootings. As in those cases, this is *precisely the right time* to talk about the effects of cuts to weather agencies.
Because Republicans refuse to recognize problems exist, and have no interest in solving them. Just cut taxes and permit more guns, and when bad things happen, change the subject.
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Another standard Republican tactic: blame the Democrats. For anything, everything, never mind any kind of rationale. There are plenty of MAGA dolts out there who will believe it.
AlterNet, Ailia Zehra, 6 Jul 2025: ‘Trying to rewrite history’: Official ripped for blaming Dems for Trump deficit
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is facing backlash after accusing Democrats of “blowing out the deficit in 2020” — a year when Donald Trump was president.
In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday morning, Bessent blamed the Democratic Party for the 2020 deficit crisis, despite the fact that the Republican Party controlled the White House at the time.
(Fun fact: Scott Bessent is gay, and married, with two children born through surrogacy. Which apparently doesn’t bother the MAGA crowd, since they don’t seem to be complaining.)
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This reminds me of a Facebook video I’ve seen a couple times now, in which a man complains that Obama was negligent and to blame for 9/11. Why wasn’t he in the office that morning?, the man complains. (Because he wasn’t president at the time, the interviewer politely does not mention.)
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What I’ve gathered.
JMG, 6 Jul 2025: Axios: MAGA Is “Reveling” In The Abuse Of Migrants
The MAGA movement is reveling in the creativity, severity and accelerating force of President Trump’s historic immigration crackdown. Once-fringe tactics — an alligator-moated detention camp, deportations to war zones, denaturalization of immigrant citizens — are now being proudly embraced at the highest levels of the U.S. government. It’s an extraordinary shift from Trump’s first term, when nationwide backlash and the appearance of cruelty forced the administration to abandon its family separation policy for unauthorized immigrants.
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Meanwhile, this piece on this morning’s CBS Sunday Morning show traces the on-again, off-again history of immigration into the United States. Once welcomed, then dormant; then JFK welcomed “A Nation of Immigrants”; at one time the US was very pro-immigration, no standards required. Animosity toward Mexicans is recent. MAGA doesn’t know history. It’s retreated to base hatred of “the other.”
CBS News, 6 Jul 2025: How Lady Liberty became a beacon for immigrants
It’s all video; there’s no transcript.
