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Posted
9 minutes ago, HOOKEM4 said:

Obama didn't have total control of both the house and the senate correct?

I think he did for the 1st 2 years.  That's how the ACA was passed IIRC

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Posted
4 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

I think he did for the 1st 2 years.  That's how the ACA was passed IIRC

Well I stand corrected. I had it twisted. Thought he gained it 2 years in for some reason. @Gourmand I get the sentiment then. I just think he was trying to play the game without knowing what the game was. Either way, the impact of funding and propaganda overtakes everything. 

Posted
9 minutes ago, Satchel said:

The “girlfriend” referred to in the chat, reportedly is an Israeli spy the Houthis  now know about: 

On a side note, talk about a shit spy gig.  

"Ok, so, we'd like you to move to Yemen and start having sex with a guy who's been living in the desert without running water for the past few years.  How does that sound?"

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Posted
1 hour ago, DixonHur said:

On a side note, talk about a shit spy gig.  

"Ok, so, we'd like you to move to Yemen and start having sex with a guy who's been living in the desert without running water for the past few years.  How does that sound?"

The source was almost certainly local, meaning it probably took many years to develop the relationship. 

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Posted
15 hours ago, Satchel said:

At some point, Israeli intelligence will tire of having their secrets and assets exposed by these bumblefucks. The “girlfriend” referred to in the chat, reportedly is an Israeli spy the Houthis  now know about: 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/wsj-israel-provided-intel-for-us-strike-on-houthi-official-mentioned-in-signal-chat/

 

Information on US airstrikes leaked by senior US officials in a group chat that accidentally included a journalist was reportedly based on Israeli intelligence drawn from a human source in Yemen, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The report, citing two US officials, said that Israel provided intelligence from an individual in Yemen about a senior Houthi figure who was targeted in the March 15 US airstrike discussed in the group chat on the Signal messaging app.

 

The Atlantic published a number of the messages sent in the conversation, including one from Waltz writing on March 15 that “the first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

According to the newspaper, Israeli intelligence assisted the US in identifying and eliminating the suspect in question.

A US official quoted by the WSJ said that Israeli officials have privately complained to their US counterparts over the security breach and the now-public nature of Waltz’s messages.

 

 

15 hours ago, DixonHur said:

On a side note, talk about a shit spy gig.  

"Ok, so, we'd like you to move to Yemen and start having sex with a guy who's been living in the desert without running water for the past few years.  How does that sound?"

Isn't she likely among the dead?

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Posted (edited)
16 hours ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

All of this WOULD be true if the standard was applied equally and not selectively as a cover for an absence of any GOP policies that were put forth in good faith to promote the general welfare.

Hillary was a first person witness to an investigation into a supposedly shady real estate deal for which her husband was ultimately absolved that was parlayed into a fishing expedition that culminated into an impeachment over a consensual extramarital affair overseen by adulterer Newt Gingrich and pedo Dennis Hastert pushing a carnival revival of "moral absolutism". I think it would be silly (especially considering Comey's selective announcement 11 days before the the election they were reopening the Hillary  investigation while remaining quiet about the FBI's Trump investigation AND McCarthy proclaiming multiple failed investigations were a success in hurting Hillary's polling) was not simply another fishing expedition that the GOP virtually admitted to. 

Hunter Biden wasn't just investigated. He was charged with lying about his drug use on a federal form for a gun purchase, something I'm sure no freedom-loving, 2A-loving friends of mine have ever done or ever been charged with, much less having a plea deal yanked to insist on prosecution.

It's not a both sides issue, it a LUDICROUS false equivalency issue.

All of that is true.

The point I was making is that Democrats are willing (maybe even eager) to see their side investigated and punished when appropriate, and Republicans are absolutely not.  I wasn't comparing the magnitude of the alleged bullshit on each side.

 

Edited by TexArcher
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Posted
On 3/24/2025 at 7:41 PM, Ted Lange said:

So what made up emergency or bs stunt will this band of deceitful fuck stains come up with in attempt to get this off the front page?
 

the good old migrant caravan?   Maybe rename the Gulf of California?  Make an announcement that we will be restoring all confederate general statues (honestly surprised that hasn’t happened yet)?  

 

 

andy-bernard.gif

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Satchel said:

Again, why was he holding court in a Greenland airplane hanger?

Passive aggressive bullying of a gigantic frozen island that they want to steal. The entourage wasn't welcome, so he never left the US base that's located almost 1,000 miles north of Greenland's capital.

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Posted

A Bluesky post from one of the Yale professors who bailed to Canada, echoing the prevalent belief on this board. He specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Holocaust. 
 

image.thumb.png.128961e99cb4124cc29f0f270a614e91.png

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Posted

the magats are imbeciles - the sane pubs are the ultimate criminals here

to hold on to their jobs these cowards are silent while the magats claim denmark hasn't kept greenland safe when mother nature keeps greenland safe - denmark doesn't have to do anything because 90% of the island is frozen solid and 80% of the island is above the arctic circle with very short days and much of the island experiences polar night - thule/pituffik polar night is TWO MONTHS

it is incredibly expensive to maintain thule/pituffik - 3x or 4x diego garcia as a similar comparison

every attempt to maintain a permanent presence on the interior ice sheet has failed

but have no fear, the magats will lead the charge to ensure a global temperature rise of 4 degrees which will melt that sheet!

and that way we can get at those unprotected rare earths!  just like that asteroid in don't look up!

except it will take hundreds or thousands of years for the greenland ice sheet to melt naturally

what's that you say?  why not roast it!  we have the tools and the technology!  we can melt that ice sheet!

nukes?  we don't need to stinkin' nukes

hotter, meltier, faster

image.thumb.jpeg.0e15509897f9f544a3e8f92d2fcbc019.jpeg

C4zhVU2ffZJzHTku2IdN-FU5hX-adjusted_1.5x-clty-upscale-5ux0f.thumb.webp.13c2d961e56a816078b38ed2d574e200.webp

why not melt antarctica too!  there's go to be rare earths under that ice?  right?

just like that asteroid in don't look up!

image.thumb.png.0158306f58bd22cd7c63f86aefe4b5f3.png

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Posted

Almost anything security related we might want to do in Greenland we could by just asking the Danes.  They (were) among the most pragmatic and cooperative, pro-American nations in the world.

This is about Trump wanting to be a president that expanded the United States.  Nothing more 

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Posted
On 3/28/2025 at 10:28 AM, Schulz2.0 said:

For decades the US disarmed Europe and most of the world with diplomacy, but then the dumbing of the American people combined with unregulated social media to cause those countries to kick off an arms race that will only end in disaster. 

Move over climate change, this has now become the most dangerous threat to world wide near extinction. 

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Posted
20 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

In shit going on in the world news, apparently one of Putin’s limousines was targeted.

 

 

A Tesla?   Trump is on the case.

Posted

Once upon a time, the US would respond to a natural disaster in a foreign country.   Those days are over.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/world/asia/myanmar-earthquake-usaid-cuts.html

Quote

China, Russia and India have dispatched emergency teams and supplies to earthquake-ravaged Myanmar. So have Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The United States, the richest country in the world and once its most generous provider of foreign aid, has sent nothing.

 

Quote

Even as President Trump was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, he said that American help was on its way to Myanmar, where a 7.7-magnitude earthquake ripped through the country’s heavily populated center on Friday. More than 1,700 people were killed, according to Myanmar’s military government, with the death toll expected to climb steeply as more bodies are uncovered in the rubble and rescue teams reach remote villages.

 

 

Quote

But a three-person U.S.A.I.D. assessment team is not expected to arrive until Wednesday, people with knowledge of the deployment efforts said. The overall American response has been slower than under normal circumstances, people who have worked on earlier disaster relief efforts as well as on aid to Myanmar said.

 

 

Spoiler

Chinese search-and-rescue teams, complete with dogs trained to sniff out trapped people, are already on the ground in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city and one of the places most deeply affected by the quake. China has pledged $14 million for Myanmar quake relief, sending 126 rescue workers and six dogs, along with medical kits, drones and earthquake detectors.

“Being charitable and being seen as charitable serves American foreign policy,” said Michael Schiffer, the assistant administrator of the U.S.A.I.D. bureau for Asia from 2022 until earlier this year. “If we don’t show up and China shows up, that sends a pretty strong message.”

On Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar announced on its website that the United States would provide up to $2 million in aid, dispersed through humanitarian groups based in Myanmar. But many of the systems needed to funnel American aid to Myanmar have been shattered.

On Friday, as some employees in Washington in U.S.A.I.D.’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance were preparing a response to the earthquake, they received agencywide layoff emails. Career diplomats working for U.S.A.I.D. and other employees had been bracing for layoffs for weeks; Trump political appointees in Washington had already fired most of the contractors working for the agency.

The employees who received layoff notices were told they should go home that afternoon. Some had been coordinating with aid missions in Bangkok and Manila, which handle disaster response in Asia.

Two of the employees in Washington had expected to move this winter to Yangon, in Myanmar, and to Bangkok to work as humanitarian assistance advisers out of the U.S. missions there. But those positions were cut. Had they not been, the two employees would have been on the ground to organize urgent responses to the earthquake.

After the disaster hit on Friday, the U.S. Embassy in Yangon sent a cable to U.S.A.I.D. headquarters in Washington to start the process of evaluating aid needs and getting help out the door. And the next day, a Trump administration political appointee in U.S.A.I.D., Tim Meisburger, held a call with officials from national security agencies to discuss a plan.

But Mr. Meisburger said that although there would be a response, no one should expect the agency’s capabilities to be what they were in the past, said a person with direct knowledge of the call.

A U.S.A.I.D. spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.

 

The agency typically has access to food and emergency supplies in warehouses in Dubai and Subang Jaya, Malaysia. But the big question now is how quickly, after being almost fully dismantled, it can get goods from those places into Myanmar. The goods include medical kits that can each serve the health care needs of 30,000 people for over three months.

Apart from career diplomats, the ranks of the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance have included crisis specialist contractors who live around the globe and can deploy quickly in what are called Disaster Assistance Response Teams. Many of those contractors have been fired, and the infrastructure to support them in Washington and other offices — people who can book flights and manage payments, for instance — was crippled by cuts over the last two months.

The agency would also usually put certified search-and-rescue teams in Virginia and Southern California on alert for possible deployment to the disaster zone, but transportation contracts for those teams have been cut, said one former aid agency employee. 

U.S.A.I.D.’s annual allocations for Myanmar were about $320 million last year. About $170 million of that was for humanitarian work, and the rest was for development initiatives, like democracy building and health. Only a few million dollars’ worth of projects remain operational, though some of those programs, like one for maternal and child health, have not received funding despite being told the initiatives are not being closed down.

Before the cuts, the annual costs of total U.S. foreign aid were less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

At a news conference in Jamaica last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would continue foreign aid work, though in drastically reduced form. He said the aim was to provide aid “that is strategically aligned with our foreign policy priorities and the priorities of our host countries and our nation states that we’re partners with.”

On Friday, Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, said that crisis teams stood ready to deploy to Myanmar.

The United States’ ability to provide lifesaving aid has been hampered not just by budget cuts but by obstacles in Myanmar itself. Since grabbing power in 2021, Myanmar’s military junta has closed off the country from Western influences. Myanmar is now embroiled in civil war, with a loose coalition of opposition forces having wrested control of more than half of the country’s territory. 

The United States and other Western nations have responded to the junta’s brutal human rights record with sanctions, and the military chief who orchestrated the coup, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, has railed against the West, thanking China and Russia for ideological and economic support.

Nevertheless, in the hours after the earthquake struck, General Min Aung Hlaing said he welcomed outside disaster relief aid — and not just from countries with friendly relations with the military regime.

Myanmar experts say they are concerned that some of the aid that goes through the junta could be diverted to the armed forces. The Myanmar military is underfunded and short on morale as it fights resistance forces on many fronts.

In Mandalay, residents said they were upset to see soldiers lounging around the sites of collapsed buildings. Some played video games on their phones, while locals used their hands to pry bricks from the rubble.

Still, Chinese and Russian search-and-rescue teams, outfitted in orange and blue uniforms, were digging through the wreckage in Mandalay on Sunday, and a Belgian squad was making its way north.

A good chunk of U.S.A.I.D. funding had been dedicated to areas of the country not under junta control. American assistance has gone to health care and schooling for internally displaced people. It has supported local administrations that are trying to form mini-governments in conflict areas. And it has tried to provide emergency relief to civilians battered by junta airstrikes.

In the region of Sagaing, a stronghold of resistance against the junta, Myanmar military jets carried out two rounds of airstrikes on Nwel Khwe village hours after the earthquake destroyed buildings there, adding more terror to residents’ lives.

“It’s as if Min Aung Hlaing wants to make sure we die, if not from the earthquake, then from his attacks,” said one villager, Ko Aung Kyaw.

But Mr. Aung Kyaw said he did not expect foreigners, American or otherwise, to be able to alleviate the situation. Sagaing has suffered for four years, and its people have died by the thousands in fighting the junta. Foreign aid, he said, would most likely end up benefiting the military regime, not those who most need it.

“In the end, we have only ourselves,” he said. “We’ve been resisting for four years now, and it’s clear that we’ll have to find our own way forward, no matter what.”

 

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Posted
On 3/26/2025 at 2:56 PM, Dr. Teeth said:

I could see Trump Venmo-ing people for rides on AF1. 

This is why they’re cutting personnel at the IRS!

Posted

France understands the assignment: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/frances-marine-le-pen-found-guilty-of-embezzlement-b8c42dac

Marine Le Pen Found Guilty of Embezzlement, Banned From Next Elections

Judges convict the far-right leader of misusing EU funds and bar her from running in the 2027 presidential elections

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PARIS—A French court convicted Marine Le Pen of misusing European Union funds, banning her from the next presidential election in a ruling that shakes the country’s political landscape.

Judges handed down a sentence Monday that bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years, upending France’s political order and thrusting her far-right party into limbo. Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence. Half of that term was suspended, judges said, adding that she could serve the remaining two years by using an electronic bracelet or other alternatives to jail time.

The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race, when President Emmanuel Macron finishes his second and final term and she was expected to be the front-runner.

The court ruled that Le Pen and other members of her party illegally used 4.4 million euros, equivalent to $4.8 million, in EU funding that was earmarked for assistants helping lawmakers in the European Parliament with their work. Instead, judges said, Le Pen and her lawmakers used the money to pay party staffers who weren’t involved in work for the parliament.

Judges applied “provisional execution” to Le Pen’s ban, which means that it takes effect immediately, even if she appeals Monday’s ruling. Her prison sentence, meanwhile, remains suspended while any appeals are under way. The appeals process in France can be lengthy, making it unclear if Le Pen can overturn the ruling before the 2027 election.

An election poster in 2017 for Marine Le Pen that reads ‘Choose France.’ Photo: Claude Paris/Associated Press

Le Pen, clad in a white blouse and blue jacket, struck a note of defiance toward the end of the proceeding, leaving the courtroom before Judge Bénédicte de Perthuis finished reading the ruling.

Le Pen had sat impassively in the courtroom for most of the verdict, occasionally shaking her head. But once it became clear the court was banning her from running for office with immediate effect, she stood up and walked out of the tribunal without speaking to reporters outside.

Earlier in the trial, Le Pen denied the charges, testifying in court that it was appropriate for the assistants to perform other party-related work because they were political aides, not direct employees of the European Parliament.

Monday’s ruling triggered a political earthquake in France and beyond. Le Pen has been a mainstay of presidential elections for more than a decade. Her anti-immigration rhetoric has resonated with millions of voters, pushing establishment parties to toughen their own stances on immigration. Le Pen has zeroed in on the religious practices of French Muslims—such as wearing headscarves in public spaces—that she says violate France’s strict separation of state and religion.

“Today it’s not only Marine Le Pen that has been unjustly condemned. It’s French democracy that’s being executed,” said Jordan Bardella, a protégé of Le Pen and president of her National Rally party.

“Je suis Marine!” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Le Pen ally, wrote on X, riffing on the “Je suis Charlie” meme that spread across the internet in solidarity with the newsroom of Charlie Hebdo magazine after it was hit by a terrorist attack in 2015.

Judges said Le Pen played a central role in organizing a system that facilitated the illegal payments system, following in the footsteps of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who initially set up the system. The payment system, judges said, allowed a circle of senior party members to enrich themselves, though Le Pen herself didn’t personally benefit.

 

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Posted

Nothing really new except what's said about Asia. Taken in totality, everything we've lost is so depressing.

How Trump Supercharged Distrust, Driving U.S. Allies Away
Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy. America and its partners are caught in a spiral of distrust.

The F-35, a fifth-generation fighter, was developed in partnership with eight countries, making it a model of international cooperation. When President Trump introduced its successor, the F-47, he praised its strengths — and said the version sold to allies would be deliberately downgraded.

That made sense, Mr. Trump said last week, “because someday, maybe they’re not our allies.”

For many countries wedded to the United States, his remark confirmed a related conclusion: that America can no longer be trusted. Even nations not yet directly affected can see where things are heading, as Mr. Trump threatens allies’ economies, their defense partnerships and even their sovereignty.

For now, they are negotiating to minimize the pain from blow after blow, including a broad round of tariffs expected in April. But at the same time, they are pulling back. Preparing for intimidation to be a lasting feature of U.S. relations, they are trying to go their own way.

A few examples:

  • Canada made a $4.2 billion deal with Australia this month to develop cutting-edge radar and announced that it was in talks to take part in the European Union’s military buildup.
  • Portugal and other NATO nations are reconsidering plans to buy F-35s, fearing American control over parts and software.
  • Negotiations over a free trade and technology deal between the European Union and India have suddenly accelerated after years of delays.
  • Brazil is not only increasing trade with China, it’s doing it in China’s currency, sidelining the dollar.
  • In several countries, including Poland, South Korea and Australia, discussions about whether to build or secure access to nuclear weapons are now commonplace.

Some degree of distancing from the United States had already been in motion as other countries became wealthier, more capable and less convinced that American centrality would be permanent. But the past few months of Trump 2.0 have supercharged the process.

Spoiler

History and psychology help explain why. Few forces have such a powerful, long-lasting impact on geopolitics as distrust, according to social scientists who study international relations. It has repeatedly poisoned negotiations in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It kept Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union burning for decades.

So-called realists — who see international relations as an amoral contest between self-interested states — argue that trust should always be assessed with skepticism, because believing in good intentions is risky.

But Mr. Trump has sparked more than cautious suspicion. His own distrust of allies, evident in his zero-sum belief that gains for others are losses for America, has been reciprocated. What it’s created is familiar — a distrust spiral. If you think the other person (or country) is not trustworthy, you’re more likely to break rules and contracts without shame, studies show, reinforcing a partner’s own distrust, leading to more aggression or reduced interaction.

“Trust is fragile,” Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, wrote in a seminal 1993 study on risk, trust and democracy. “It is typically created rather slowly, but it can be destroyed in an instant — by a single mishap or mistake.”

In Mr. Trump’s case, allies point to a sustained assault.

His tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, which ignored the North American free trade deal that he signed during his first term, stunned America’s neighbors.

His threats to make Canada an American state and send the U.S. military into Mexico to go after drug cartels were brash intrusions on sovereignty, not unlike his demands for Greenland and the Panama Canal. His blaming of Ukraine for the war that Russia started further alienated allies, forcing them to ask: Is the United States a defender of dictators or democracy?

Relatively quickly, they have determined that even if Mr. Trump’s boldest proposals — like turning Gaza into a Mideast Riviera — are fantasies, the trend lines point in the same direction: toward a world order less like the Olympics and more like Ultimate Fighting.

Perhaps no country is more shocked than Canada. It shares the world’s largest undefended border with the United States, despite their wide disparity in military strength. Why? Because Canadians trusted America. Now, in large part, they do not.

Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said on Thursday that his country’s traditional relationship with the United States was “over.”

“Trump has violated the deep assumption in Canadian foreign policy that the U.S. is an inherently trustworthy nation,” said Brian Rathbun, a global affairs professor at the University of Toronto. “That is very threatening to basic Canadian interests in trade and security, leading it to cast around for alternatives.”

Economic patriotism is somewhat new for Canada, but it has given rise to a Buy Canadian movement that urges consumers to shun American products and stocks. Canadians are also canceling U.S. holidays in large numbers.

More significant in the longer term, Mr. Trump’s threats have forged a surprising consensus around a policy that had been contentious or ignored: that Canada should be building pipelines, ports and other infrastructure east to west, not north to south, to reduce its reliance on the United States and push its resources outward to Asia and Europe.

Europe is further ahead in this process. After the U.S. election, the European Union finalized a trade deal with South American countries to create one of the world’s largest trade zones, and it has worked toward closer trade ties with India, South Africa, South Korea and Mexico.

Japan, America’s largest ally in Asia, has also been prioritizing new markets in the global south, where fast-growing economies like Vietnam’s offer new customers.

“There has been the emerging perception in Japan that we definitely have to change the portfolio of our investments,” said Ken Jimbo, a professor of international politics and security at Keio University in Tokyo. For the current administration and those that follow, he added, “we have to adjust our expectations of the American alliance.”

On the defense front, what some call “de-Americanization” is more challenging. This is especially true in Asia, where there is no NATO equivalent, and reliance on American support has somewhat stunted the militaries of countries that the United States has promised to defend (Japan, South Korea and the Philippines).

On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in Manila, promising to “truly prioritize and shift to this region.” But many of America’s partners are now working together without the United States, signing reciprocal access agreements for each other’s troops and building new coalitions to deter China as much as they can.

Europe, too, is years away from being able to fully defend itself without the help of U.S. weaponry and technology. Yet in response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, threats and general disdain — as in the leaked Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth called Europe “pathetic” — the European Union recently announced plans to ramp up military spending. That includes a 150 billion euro loan program to finance defense investment.

The 27-nation European Union is also increasingly collaborating with two nonmembers, Britain and Norway, on defending Ukraine and on other strategic defense priorities.

For some countries, none of this is quite enough. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, told Parliament in early March that Poland would explore gaining access to nuclear weapons, fearing that Mr. Trump could not be trusted to defend a fellow NATO nation fully.

“This is a race for security,” Mr. Tusk said.

In February, South Korea’s foreign minister, Cho Tae-yul, told the National Assembly that building nuclear weapons was “not on the table, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is off the table either.” By some estimates, both South Korea and Japan have the technical know-how to develop nuclear weapons in less than two months.

Bilihari Kausikan, a former Singaporean diplomat, said that a little mistrust can lead to healthy caution, noting that Asia has been skeptical of America since the Vietnam War. He said the end result of the Trump era could be “a more diversified world, with more maneuvering space” and a less dominant United States.

But for now, distrust is spreading. Experts said it would take years and a slew of costly trust-building efforts to bring America together with allies, new or old, for anything long-term.

“Trust is difficult to create and easy to lose,” said Deborah Welch Larson, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who wrote a book about mistrust’s Cold War role. She added, “Mistrust of the United States’ intentions and motives is growing day by day.”

 

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Posted

Add it to the pile of Republican "wars on ______."

image.thumb.png.0fe68a1dfd383df032f935e30dd7ba38.png
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/science/trump-science-nas-letter.html

Quote

 

Some 1,900 leading researchers accused the Trump administration in an open letter on Monday of conducting a “wholesale assault on U.S. science” that could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans.

The letter’s signatories, all of them elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, warned of the damage being done by layoffs at health and science agencies and cuts and delays to funding that has historically supported research inside the government and across American universities.

“For over 80 years, wise investments by the U.S. government have built up the nation’s research enterprise, making it the envy of the world,” the letter said. “Astoundingly, the Trump administration is destabilizing this enterprise by gutting funding for research, firing thousands of scientists, removing public access to scientific data and pressuring researchers to alter or abandon their work on ideological grounds.”

The letter said that many universities and research institutions had so far “kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.” But, it said, “the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”

The signatories called on Americans to appeal to Congress to protect scientific funding.

With Elon Musk’s efforts to cut spending and President Trump’s crackdown on institutions he sees as ideological enemies, the administration has sought to dismantle parts of the federal government’s scientific funding apparatus.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, which supports work by more than 300,000 scientists across the country, has fallen billions of dollars short of typical levels during the early months of the Trump administration.

The White House has also moved to cancel research in specific areas, like transgender health and climate science.

The Trump administration announced last week that it was laying off 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department as part of a broad reorganization that reflected the priorities of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The department has hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to research a link, long debunked by scientists, between vaccines and autism. On Friday, the nation’s top vaccine regulator resigned, citing Mr. Kennedy’s “misinformation and lies.”

In recent weeks, members of the National Academy of Medicine, a nonprofit organization that provides independent health policy advice, began discussing their concerns with members of the national academies of sciences and engineering.

Those conversations gave rise to the open letter, said Dr. Steven Woolf, an organizer of the letter who studies health policy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The letter was drafted by a group of 13 scientists representing fields like medicine, climate science, sociology and economics.

“I know what this is going to do to life expectancy in the United States, to mortality rates, to the mental health crisis we’re having,” Dr. Woolf said. “These changes in the research enterprise are going to translate into harms to everyday Americans.”

Dr. Woolf cited, for example, the planned restructuring of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a small agency charged with protecting patient safety and guaranteeing Americans access to free preventive services like mammograms.

“The agency responsible for protecting the quality of health care in the United States just got demolished,” Dr. Woolf said.

The letter outlines the consequences of funding cuts, including pauses on research studies, faculty layoffs and reduced graduate student enrollments.

It also accuses the administration of “engaging in censorship” by, among other things, “blocking research on topics it finds objectionable, such as climate change, or that yields results it does not like, on topics ranging from vaccine safety to economic trends.”

 

 

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Posted
2 hours ago, C-Man said:

France understands the assignment: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/frances-marine-le-pen-found-guilty-of-embezzlement-b8c42dac

Marine Le Pen Found Guilty of Embezzlement, Banned From Next Elections

Judges convict the far-right leader of misusing EU funds and bar her from running in the 2027 presidential elections

 

I know a better way to keep her from running

Bandit Heavy Equipment GIF by JC Property Professionals

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