- Defunding weather science and disaster response to save money is like cancelling all your insurance policies to manage your household budget;
- LAT: Robin Abcarian on the implausibilities of expecting Medicaid recipients to replace deported farmworkers;
- NYT: Peter Baker on how Trump wants to reverse history by a century, and how this reflects conservative values;
- And Salon: a psych prof on how certainty is toxic, and ambiguity should be embraced.
This is like trimming the household budget by cancelling all your insurance policies. It’s irresponsible.
NY Times, 13 Jul 2025: Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response
Subtitled: “As a warming planet delivers more extreme weather, experts warn that the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s disaster capabilities.”
In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.
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The White House and agency leaders say they are making much-needed changes to bloated bureaucracies that no longer serve the American public well.
How do they know these bureaucracies are bloated? Define the term, show us the evidence. The fact that they detect bloat wherever they turn suggests something pathological on their part, instead. (Are they searching for bloat in the Department of Defense [which they now want to rename the Department of War]? No, they’re increasing its budget.) They’re actually only looking in departments that conservatives wouldn’t have funded in the first place, for ideological, not economic, reasons.
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Or is it another manifestation of how conservatives think the worst of other people?
LA Times, Robin Abcarian, 13 Jul 2025: Do you believe that deported farmworkers will be replaced by Medicaid recipients?
You know, it’s not just the large language models of AI that are hallucinating.
The Trump administration is promoting the idea that if it deports all the undocumented farmworkers who plant and pick our crops, the labor gaps will be filled by able-bodied adults currently sitting around the house playing video games and mooching off taxpayers for their publicly funded healthcare.
This is absurdity masquerading as arithmetic.
Once again, conservatives — ironically, especially the wealthy ones in the administration who are beneficiaries of inheritances or corporate welfare (including tax breaks) or both — think recipients of government programs are moochers.
Or perhaps simply spiritually in need of redemption. (Said the snake oil salesman: I see you suffer a terrible disease, but fortunately I have the cure!) I’ve expanded on this before. This goes back to Reagan’s Cadillac welfare queen.
34 million people, they say.
That figure is grossly misleading, and a thinly veiled effort to vilify Medicaid — Medi-Cal in California — recipients as idle, which, overwhelmingly, they are not. The number of able-bodied Americans on Medicaid who might be able to pick our lettuce and apricots or who might be able to harvest our watermelons and strawberries is closer to 5 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But whether the number is 34 million or 5 million, it’s a fantasy to believe that Americans will do the jobs currently filled by migrant farmworkers.
With an example of how this was tried in California, in the 1990s, and failed miserably. And how in 2013 a fellow reporter tried picking strawberries, and barely lasted a single full day. How long would the average Medicaid recipient last?
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Stepping out to the bigger picture.
NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 13 Jul 2025: From Science to Diversity, Trump Hits the Reverse Button on Decades of Change, subtitled “President Trump has moved aggressively to reopen long-settled issues and to dismantle long-established institutions as he tries to return to what he considers better times.” [gift link]
Fluoride, vaccines, fuel efficiency standards, and other innovations that have become largely “stitched into the fabric of American life.”
On matters big and small, Mr. Trump has hit the rewind button. At the broadest level, he has endeavored to reverse the globalization and internationalism that have defined U.S. leadership around the globe since World War II, under presidents of both parties. But even at a more prosaic level, it has become evident that Mr. Trump, 79, the oldest president ever inaugurated, simply prefers things the way he remembers them from his youth, or even before that.
He has made clear that he wants to return to an era when “Cats” was the big hit on Broadway, not “Hamilton”; when military facilities were named after Confederate generals, not gay rights leaders; when coal was king and there were no windmills; when straws were plastic, not paper; when toilets flushed more powerfully; when there weren’t so many immigrants; when police officers weren’t discouraged from being rough on suspects; when diversity was not a goal in hiring or college admissions or much of anything else.
This aligns with a core truth about human nature: selective remembrance — we remember the good parts and forget the bad parts — in support of the idea that the past was better than the present. This has happened throughout history. In the 1950s, the 1920s were the ideal past. For centuries, and Roman era was the ideal past. In 2050, when the effect of climate change might well wreak havoc (see Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future), 2025 might well be regarded as the ideal past, because it was a time when most people could ignore or deny those imminent changes.
On the one hand, this is vaguely understandable as how human nature regards change. If one has lived a stable, predictable life (as the vast majority of people, throughout history, have), one might and perhaps should be suspicious about any change, which might represent a threat. What’s up with this “steel” for swords? Aren’t the iron ones grandpappy used good enough? And so on. On the other hand, this attitude disregards the notion of education, of learning something new, of discovering that there are possibilities in the world beyond what you and your family have always known. Those who don’t understand this are conservatives; those who are able to learn and use that knowledge to improve the human condition are the progressives.
This piece includes the classic phrase from the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. — the one who wanted Enlightenment values of inquiry and rationality replaced with the religion he grew up with, at Yale:
The influential writer William F. Buckley Jr. once defined a conservative as someone standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!” Mr. Trump seems to be standing athwart history yelling, “Go back!”
The piece goes on with many more examples.
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And stepping even further out, to second-guess, in light of our modern society, the reflexive attitudes of human nature. Doubt yourself. Don’t be tribal.
Salon, Frenk Van Harrevelt (Professor of Psychology, University of Amsterdam), 13 Jul 2025: In defense of doubt: Act of resistance in an age of bogus certainty, subtitled “Uncertainty is not defeat or paralysis. Acknowledging what we don’t know is our best defense against toxic lies”
This addresses one of the central themes of this blog, that many social and political commentators — ignorant of the basics of the sciences, including evolution — do not acknowledge.
In an age where certainty is weaponized and ambiguity is treated as weakness, defending doubt may be one of the most democratic acts we have left.
When Donald Trump called Harvard a “radical recruitment center” and vowed to slash its research funding, I was alarmed — not just as a professor, but as someone who believes democracy depends on doubt.
As a professor of social psychology, I’ve spent two decades studying how people respond to uncertainty — and how those responses shape moral and political life. What I heard in Trump’s rhetoric — and in broader attacks on elite universities — wasn’t just hostility toward higher education. It was hostility toward ambiguity itself.
That may sound abstract, but it has real consequences. Climate change, artificial intelligence, migration, war — these are deeply complex challenges with no easy answers. Yet public discourse increasingly punishes hesitation and rewards certainty. Doubt is framed as weakness. Complexity, as betrayal.
Certainty is allegiance to the tribe. Doubt and uncertainty are functions of being intellectually honest about the world. (Many more examples in the essay.)
