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Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
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Callatoroy said:
I’m saying world leaders are “respected or feared” such that you don’t have 2 allies invaded by enemies unless they don’t respect and fear that leadership and sense weakness. I don’t think the Biden / Harris team projected strength, do you? I also think China’s role as a world leader and influencer grew while ours shrunk.
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Biden/Harris strengthened NATO, whereas Trump has massively undermined it. Biden/Harris opposed Putin’s expansionism, whereas Trump is encouraging it. Biden/Harris have made us less reliant on China for key parts of our economy, whereas Trump’s tariffs and foreign policy bullying and unpredictability is driving much of the world into China’s arms. Biden maintained strong relations with our most important allies — Canada and Mexico — whereas Trump is picking completely idiotic fights with them just to look “tough.”

So you may be right that the status quo is not sufficient. But holy shit, if you’re going to change the status quo, change it by strengthening our ties with our ideological allies, not by alienating them and cuddling up to the Kremlin instead. What Trump is doing is mindblowingly stupid. And anyone who’s not an apologist for authoritarianism sees that clearly.
 


“…
The moves reflect the swift change in the balance of power after Israel, which struggled for months to contain militia attacks around its borders, has scored a string of military victories against Iran-backed forces that has given its troops much greater freedom of action.

Israel has already delayed its withdrawal from Lebanon by nearly a month, citing the need to dismantle Hezbollah’s positions in the south. It is now seeking to delay it by another 10 days, to Feb. 28.

The deputy U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, said last week the U.S. remained committed to the withdrawal date of Feb. 18. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut declined to comment Friday on the recent requests by Israel and the negotiations.…”
 
Clock ticking on Trump’s Noon deadline today for Hamas to release all hostages or else.



 

German Chancellor Rebukes Vance for Supporting Party That Downplays Nazis​

At the Munich Security Conference, Olaf Scholz accused the U.S. vice president of unacceptable interference in Germany’s coming elections.

“…
A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day.

Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday. The chancellor said Germany “would not accept” directives from outsiders about how to run its democracy — and certainly not to work with such a party.

“That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,” Mr. Scholz said. “Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.”

Mr. Scholz was joined in his criticism later Saturday by Friedrich Merz, his rival as the chancellor candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, whom polls suggest is the favorite to be Germany’s next leader.

…
No party in the German Parliament will join with the AfD to form a government. Parts of the AfD have been classified as extremist by German intelligence. Some of its members have been convicted of violating German law against the use of Nazi slogans. Others have been arrested for trying to overthrow the federal government.

That collective shunning of the AfD and other extremist parties is known as the firewall. Mr. Vance took aim at it on Friday, saying the AfD and other hard-right parties across Europe represented legitimate voter concerns about high levels of migration into European countries from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said.

Attendees at Mr. Vance’s speech on Friday had been expecting to hear details of the Trump administration’s plans for Ukraine peace talks and NATO defense policies. Instead, they heard the vice president call restrictions on free speech a greater threat to Europe than military aggression from Russia or China. …”
 

The Erasing of American Science​

How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?

www.theatlantic.com

The Erasing of American Science

How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

“… The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research.

The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation.

Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)

The mood among scientists is, naturally, grim.

… The new administration seems unlikely to abandon science in its entirety—research into space exploration or artificial intelligence may well continue without friction and even flourish under Trump’s leadership. In an executive order released yesterday, the White House reaffirmed its commitment to tackling chronic disease, a priority of Kennedy’s. But the new administration can pursue certain sectors of science, and talk up scientific values, while still diminishing the research enterprise as a whole. Science and government are now weeks into what will likely be a prolonged battle over how research can and will be done in the United States. …”
 
nycfan said:

The Erasing of American Science​

How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?

www.theatlantic.com

The Erasing of American Science

How far can the Trump administration bend U.S. research before it breaks?
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

“… The administration’s actions have also affected scientific pursuits in ways that go beyond those orders. The dismantling of USAID has halted clinical trials abroad, leaving participants with experimental drugs and devices still in their bodies. Last week, NIH announced that it would slash the amount its grants would pay for administrative costs—a move that has since been blocked by a federal judge but that would substantially hamper entire institutions from carrying out the day-to-day activities of research.

The administration is reportedly planning to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation.

Mass layoffs of federal workers have also begun, and two NIH scientists (who asked not to be identified for fear of professional repercussions) told me they participated in a meeting this morning in which it was announced that thousands of staff across the Department of Health and Human Services would be let go starting today. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has now become the head of that department, after two confirmation hearings in which he showed a lack of basic understanding of the U.S. health system and a flagrant disregard for data that support the safety and effectiveness of various lifesaving vaccines. (The White House did not return repeated requests for comment.)

The mood among scientists is, naturally, grim.

… The new administration seems unlikely to abandon science in its entirety—research into space exploration or artificial intelligence may well continue without friction and even flourish under Trump’s leadership. In an executive order released yesterday, the White House reaffirmed its commitment to tackling chronic disease, a priority of Kennedy’s. But the new administration can pursue certain sectors of science, and talk up scientific values, while still diminishing the research enterprise as a whole. Science and government are now weeks into what will likely be a prolonged battle over how research can and will be done in the United States. …”
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“… Already, the administration has issued guidance limiting PEPFAR-funded pre-exposure prophylaxis to only “pregnant and breastfeeding women,” excluding by omission other populations extremely vulnerable to infection, including both men who have sex with men as well as transgender people. And several sexual-health researchers told me that the Trump administration recently issued a termination order for their large, CDC-funded study that focused on reducing health disparities among populations affected by multiple STIs. (A judge has since issued a temporary restraining order allowing the study to resume.)

… But the new administration’s approach to science bleeds past the bounds of any single field.

One cancer researcher at George Washington University, for instance, had to halt a projectinvestigating the best ways to collect information about gender and sexual orientation from patients.

The terms the Trump administration has flagged as “gender ideology”—a list that includes pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, assigned at birth, cisgender, and queer—have already been politicized. But by targeting gender as a category as well as the entire concept of DEI, the government has now granted itself a way to directly affect just about any scientific discipline in which human identity and behavior are relevant, or in which people of diverse backgrounds are involved in the work—which is to say, any scientific discipline.

The National Science Foundation, for instance, has been hunting for hundreds of DEI-related terms in grants, leaving researchers fearful that merely attempting to include diverse populations in their work will tank their chances of success.

Many scientists told me that they expect the list of terms the government is flagging or excising to expand.

The National Institutes of Health is reportedly scouring existing grants that mention COVID, and the Commerce Department has asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to scan grants for climate-related words, though the upshot of those searches isn’t yet clear.

Kate Brown, a science historian at MIT, told me that some of her colleagues have been passing around lists of words that they think “should not appear in grant applications,” including environment, climate, and race. David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, told me that a dean at his school recommended removing even the term biodiversity from public-facing documents, out of concern that it would be flagged by searches for DEI-related terminology. (A spokesperson at the university told me that they couldn’t find any official message from the school or the university.)

Navigating these new restrictions isn’t as simple as “find and replace.” Deshira Wallace, a health-behavior researcher at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, has been modifying her grant proposals to, for instance, describe the impacts of heat exposure on certain groups overrepresented among farmworkers, rather than referring directly to climate change or Black and Latino people. But she cannot hide that diversity and health equity are core to her work.

Other researchers are concluding that the simpler solution may be to step away from projects that, for instance, examine the impacts of air pollution on racially segregated communities (impossible to study without acknowledging diversity) or firearm deaths among American kids (which vary by gender and other demographics). …”
 
Great, so now more classified info can be published and PII for student loan borrowers and other US citizens can be scraped for future use. All this so we can enter a bitcoin-fueled era of anarcho-capitalism where Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and other billionaires don't pay taxes and we have a medieval lord serf system again. No wonder Thiel has bought land and bunkers in NZ to escape to when the fettucine hits the fan with massive social unrest and protests
 
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