- Stephen Greenblatt on how a scientific superpower is destroying itself;
- Scientists demolish Trump’s DOE report;
- Short items about the search for anti-Christian bias that’s turned up only petty grievances; Jim Wright asks what does Trump or MAGA actually *like* about America; another note about how they certainly don’t like Tom Hanks; Paul Krugman on “sleazy smearer” Scott Bessent; and a final item about an energy moron.
Living in history.
NY Times, guest opinion essay by Stephen Greenblatt, 8 Sept 2025: We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself [gift link]
The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” …
The writer recalls the 1950s drills among American schoolchildren to practice protecting themselves in the event of a nuclear attack. I remember those! (These days, I gather, schoolchildren practice “active shooter” drills.)
In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.
Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril.
According to one poll, only one American university, Harvard, is the among the top research institutions in the world that contribute to scientific journals — eight of the others being in China, one in Germany.
But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.
Then follow several paragraphs reviewing history since then.
And now, notwithstanding its triumphs, the whole enterprise is in serious trouble. The Trump administration began its assault by using the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on many campuses to charge elite universities with antisemitism. The rationale has largely shifted to complaints about affirmative action, diversity initiatives, liberal bias and the like. Scientific research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a kind of Lysenko lite — or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.
But *why*?
Why on earth would we abandon institutions that have genuinely made America great? Why would we squander the world’s admiration for this magnificent achievement of ours? Why would we put at risk laboratories that are working to cure cancers or perfecting artificial limbs or exploring deep space or testing the limits of artificial intelligence?
He doesn’t really have an answer. Last para:
For the moment, American universities still have the enormous advantage of their resources and their autonomy, and their joyous imaginative freedom. I walk through Harvard Yard on my way to teach a freshman course on great books from Homer to Joyce, and I am continually astonished by what I see and whom I meet. There are students from all over the world — from Mongolia as well as my hometown, Newton, Mass., from Athens in Ohio and Athens in Greece — and there are colleagues who have been immersed in a wide range of pursuits, from creating the first image of a black hole in space to deciphering the words on a scrap of ancient papyrus. We need to get up from under our desks and persuade our fellow citizens that the institutions that they have helped create with their tax dollars are incredibly precious and important.
My tentative answer for some time has been a sort of reversion to the mean. The US has been an outlier for decades, and it attracted the best researchers from around the world during an era when Americans were focused on the commies in Russia above all else. Now, it a weird twist, conservatives, especially the religious ones, are rebelling against science and facts in preference to their myths and ideologies, and allowing their essential xenophobia to rise up above what they perceive are *commonalities* with Russia — like its putative Christian values. They are not too bright.
There are indeed cycles of history, it seems, predictable trends with the players changing places. The rest of the world is moving beyond America. It’s like a game of musical chairs. China is taking America’s seat.
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And so the Trump administration twists scientific conclusions to match its ideology.
New Yorker, (the famous) Bill McKibben, 3 Sept 2025: Trump’s Department of Energy Gets Scienced, subtitled “International climate experts have extensively debunked the D.O.E.’s recent report, but will science win out?”
As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy report from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal. That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
Because that’s what they want to be true, for the sake of big business. Why isn’t this obvious to everyone?
The piece goes on with some of the scientific responses.
The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler, used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read.
With examples. Cherry-picked nonsense. Limiting statistics to the continental US. And so on.
The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E. report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story.
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On a similar note. Ideology vs the real world.
Friendly Atheist, 8 Sept 2025: The initial report from Trump’s “Anti-Christian Bias” task force reveals… nothing, subtitled “From deleted Easter posts to phantom candle bans, their evidence of Christian persecution is nothing but a pile of petty grievances”
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Looking to give them the benefit of the doubt. From Jim Wright on Facebook today.
What does Trump actually LIKE about America?
What do MAGAs actually like about America? What do Republicans like about America?
Because they seem to HATE pretty much all of it. They are perpetually disgusted by the people and endlessly disapproving of the places and the nation itself. They do seem to think America could be okay for them, if only they could just get rid of everyone else and pave it over — like the White House Rose Garden.
What do these people actually like about America? Other than the guns, I mean. They do like that part. But what else? What do MAGAs really love about America?
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On this note:
JMG, 8 Sept 2025: Trump: “We Don’t Need Woke Destructive Tom Hanks”
Key passage:
We don’t need destructive, WOKE recipients getting our cherished American Awards!!!
“Our” American Awards? Who does he think Americans are? Since at least half of us did not vote for him.
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Only the best people dept.
Paul Krugman, 8 Sept 2025: Scott Bessent, Sleazy Smearer
About the Treasury secretary’s vile, dishonest slander of the Fed
Donald Trump did learn something during his 1st term. He learned never to hire anyone who shows the least shred of integrity. You won’t find anyone like Gary Cohn or General Milley in Trump’s 2nd administration. Now he knows to only hire people who are corrupt, bigoted, dishonest, or all three.
And Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, clearly satisfies Trump II’s requirements. His recent attacks on the Federal Reserve, part of Trump’s campaign to destroy the Fed’s independence, are vile, underhanded and sleazy. In a better world they would lead to his immediate removal as Treasury secretary.
I’ll leave it at that. A tired, tiresome, if true, theme.
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Moron.
JMG, 8 Sept 2025: Energy Dept: “Wind And Solar Energy Are Useless When It’s Dark Outside And When The Wind Is Not Blowing”
Batteries.
