- The Atlantic’s Ross Andersen on how every scientific empire comes to end, with historical precedents;
- E.J. Dionne Jr. about the drop in murder rate, speculating why;
- Quick bits about religion as a mental disorder, how praying for the intervention of angels never works, and the amorality of ICE, who abduct people while leaving all their property, trucks and even dogs and cats, on the road, for anyone to take.
America too is passing. And not due to some historical tide. America is abdicating. But in the long run, humanity will prevail, and America’s abdication will not matter.
The Atlantic, Ross Andersen, 31 Jul 2025: Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End, subtitled “America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.”
The writer begins by recalling history.
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.
As currently in the US, ideology was more important than truth.
The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.’s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism.
Again: they insisted science must conform to ideology. That’s the premise of Conservapedia and its ideology of Christianity; thus it denies evolution and quantum mechanics and attributes homosexuality to “sin”.
And the bit about how the Soviets were credited with every technological invention was, now that I think of it, parodied in Star Trek (The Original Series) in the character of Chekhov, who would occasionally claim about this or that (in his broad accent) “It was inwented in Russia.”
Moving on.
I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump’s second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she’s not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.)
The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.
With a summary of how the current administration is removing support from scientific institutions, and how scientists in America are being recruited by other countries. And then a section beginning:
Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king’s war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard.
Then Egypt, Greece, Spain and the Inquisition (religion!), the Soviets and Lysenko, Germany and Hitler, which sent Jewish scientists like Einstein to America. After the war, it became America that led the scientific world. Until now. Still, in a way it doesn’t matter which nation leads.
Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature’s secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren’t the ones who see them first.
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Once again.
Washington Post, E.J. Dionne Jr., 31 Jul 2025: The good news about murder, subtitled “Homicides are way down. What happened, what we can learn and how progressives became crime fighters.”
In politics, good news is often harder to accept than bad news. There is a habit, perhaps especially now, of seeing government as doomed to failure, social policy as futile and debates over hard problems — including, prominently, crime — as destined to break down into pointless ideological clashes.
(This is the cynicism of conservative populists.)
But sometimes the facts are so obvious that everyone has to accept them. That’s what should be happening now with the truly remarkable decline in the number of murders and shootings across the United States, especially in big cities that were wracked by a spike in violence during the covid pandemic. The numbers are compelling enough to force even Eeyores to take notice.
(Do kids these days know who Eeyore is?)
Of course, there is no simple answer.
No crime analyst pretends that there is a single reason for the good news. The best analysts preach intellectual humility. “The louder someone says they know why,” Asher told me of the rise and fall of murder rates, “the less likely I tend to be to believe them.”
The best news may be that the recent decline in violence is likely a restoration of pre-pandemic trends. The pandemic appears to have been a nasty blip. Using FBI data, John Gramlich of the Pew Research Center reported that violent crime fell by 49 percent in the nearly 30 years between 1993 and 2022 — meaning that even near the height of the pandemic crime surge, the nation’s streets and neighborhoods were still far safer than they had been three decades earlier.
Because it’s not just about the past few years; in the big picture, crime in the US was *much* higher in the 1990s. Another very long article that I haven’t read in full. The point is: no matter what happens in reality, conservatives always think crime is a problem and the government needs to double-down, and so vote Republican.
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Quick bits
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Why isn’t this kind of behavior diagnosed as mental illness? People suffering fantasies and delusions?
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 28 Jul 2025: God Is Spreading QAnon Conspiracy Theories Via ‘Prophet’ Hank Kunneman
I’m not going to comment or quote.
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Remember that definition of insanity? (Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.) Because this kind of thing *never* works.
Right Wang Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 29 Jul 2025: Kenneth Copeland Calls On Angels To ‘Pull Those Devils Down That Are Attacking Our President’
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More evidence of the amorality of the current administration, and those who support it.
JMG, 31 Jul 2025 (from a pay-walled Axios article): ICE Leaves Cars, Phones, And Property For The Taking
I will quote:
Federal immigration raids across the U.S. are leaving many immigrants no choice but to abandon their vehicles, work tools and even cherished family dogs and cats. Unlike local law enforcement agencies, ICE agents don’t appear to be impounding property after arrests, leaving work trucks, food carts and lawnmowers for the taking.
At least the police impound vehicles and whatnot when someone is arrested and hauled away.
How did America become this?
