- Will scientific advances by the US continue? Do most Americans care?
- My take on the big picture of the cultural change in the US, and other societies;
- Heather Cox Richardson, and Nitish Pahwa at Slate, summarize what’s to blame for the Texas floods: the denial of climate change, and the appeal of absurd conspiracy theories;
- The problem of original intent, as demonstrated by that law school paper about white supremacy that won an award.
Washington Post, Bruce Partridge, 6 Jul 2025: These scientific advances were ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ Will they continue?, subtitled “America has long led in research. Budget cuts could jeopardize that dominance.”
The writer is emeritus professor of astronomy at Haverford College.
I’ve spent much of my long life studying — and trying to understand — the history of the universe. Along the way, I have been constantly reminded that science is essentially international: Science knows no borders. The next great discovery could be made in Kansas or Kosovo or Kyoto.
And yet, as an American patriot, I take pride that so much scientific research bears the imprint “Made in the U.S.A.” By so many measures, this country — my country — has dominated all branches of the scientific enterprise since World War II: the number of Nobel Prizes in the sciences (nearly 300, with second-place Britain having about one-third of that amount), the number of patents in the sciences (with China rapidly catching up), the sheer number of Big Discoveries. We Americans have walked on the moon and brought back chunks of it for further study. We’ve whipped polio and fenced in HIV.
Followed by some things we’ve learned about our solar system and the cosmos over the six decades of his career, with some spectacular pics.
All this knowledge can be labeled “Made in the U.S.A.” All this is our legacy, enabled by federal funding.
In just a few months, the Trump administration has undermined U.S. dominance in science, built up over many decades. The federal funding that made America the world’s science leader is threatened with crippling reductions, not just for astronomy and space science but also for fundamental research in energy, chemistry, computer science and preventive medicine.
Then the impact of current budget cuts. Then:
Does science cost too much? I’ve been involved in some of the discoveries listed above. The total cost to the average American taxpayer for all of my research, from my first article in 1961 to now, is less than a penny. The entire National Science Foundation budget for all research in astronomy costs each American about $1 a year.
Is the scientific enterprise riddled with waste and fraud, as some in Washington insistently allege? Some experiments don’t work — I’ve had some duds. But we learn from our mistakes; failure is not always a waste. And allegations of widespread fraud in the scientific enterprise are not just entirely unproven; they make no sense. If I receive funds from NASA, I have to account for them, and officials at both my college and NASA review my accounts. Carefully.
There’s a bigger issue here, about why a nation that considered itself the leader of the world, in *everything*, should suddenly abdicate that role, and prioritize instead expelling non-whites from the country, and giving tax cuts to billionaires so they can buy bigger yachts.
My best take on all this is that there’s always been a delicate balance in any society between the range of human nature and how it interacts with a changing society. It’s like the traditional back and forth between political parties: to try to win a majority, they need to keep adjusting their positions; conservatives, most of them anyway, don’t advocate slavery, and most of them don’t even complain about gay marriage anymore. For a few centuries now, human society has advanced because the positions of both conservatives and progressives keep “advancing” to accommodate changing circumstances, both in the discoveries of science and the necessity of getting along with people outside their tribes. But there is always a minority of hard-liners. The religious MAGAites, largely uneducated and unaware of the world, don’t actually care about the actual things that has made America great. All they need is their Bible. And their belief, or faith, that despite everything, America remains the bestest nation every.
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Two pieces on the Texas floods. If there’s anyone we can count on to consolidate multiple strands of information into some kind of coherent story, it’s Richardson.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: July 6, 2025
At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in Central Texas after almost a foot (30 centimeters) of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (8 meters) in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls’ camp.
Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration’s cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods.
With many details and examples. And provisionally concludes:
The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.
Followed by examples about FEMA, USAID, and others.
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Another summary that’s a little more pointed about who the villains are.
Slate, Nitish Pahwa, 7 Jul 2025: What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About the Horrific Texas Floods
By “what everyone is getting wrong” she means both the rote demonization by Democrats of Republican cuts to government agencies, without any necessary causal links, and the conservative accusations that the Texas floods were fake news or due to government weather control. I’ve mentioned items about these recently.
The villains are climate change, which Republicans don’t believe in, and the promotion of baseless conspiracy theories.
Someone of Facebook today said that Republicans/conservatives are more willing to believe in government climate control, than actual climate change.
And I see this as a core element of primitive human nature, and conservative thinking: that everything that happens must be due to some conscious agency.
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The problem with original intent.
NY Times, 21 Jun 2025: A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award., subtitle “The University of Florida student won an academic honor after he argued in a paper that the Constitution applies only to white people. From there, the situation spiraled.” (gift link)
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
I’m not inclined to challenge either the essay or the decision to give it an award. I’m just surprised that so many people are shocked, shocked, that the wording of the Constitution implies that it applies only to white people. We know that the founders did not allow women the vote, and (belatedly) considered black people to be only 3/5 of a person (a position I just recently saw some conservative defend!). I’m just surprised the essay writer didn’t conclude that “We the People” applied only to white *men*. (Of course, just as with Biblical exegesis, interpreters tend to find what they want to find, and in this case the essay writer was a white nationalist to begin with.)
But the core point is that this example is precisely why you can’t take the Constitution at its literal word, when circumstances and even morality have changed in 250 years. The *words* have changed meaning. Tying current law to the words and implications of a document representing the attitudes of men 250 years ago is like — as religious conservatives do, actually — insisting that only things in the Bible can be true, and anything “learned” since then must be false, if not demonic.
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