Ruling over ashes

"Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man."

This quote -- often credited to Fran Leibowitz, although I can't find certain attribution -- is spot-on.  He flaunts his wealth in a way that ought to be embarrassing, engages in flexes that crumble whenever someone stands up to him (witness his ongoing war of words with the leaders of Canada), and trots out just enough fancy-sounding verbiage to give the impression, at least if you don't dig very deep, that he knows what he's talking about.  But even a half-assed effort at a close look, and the whole house of cards collapses.  To give just one of countless examples, two days ago he announced a long litany of tariffs that are supposed to somehow fix the American economy despite just about every economist in the country saying, "No no no please merciful heavens no please don't do this it's a terrible idea," and lo and behold, the stock market had its worst day since 2020 (when, not coincidentally, he was also president).  At least there was a grimly humorous note, because on the list was a ten percent tariff on imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.

If you can't think of any American imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, there's a good reason for that.  There aren't any.  

The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.

Well, they're inhabited by elephant seals and penguins.  But lemme tell you, if the seals and penguins start exporting goods, the Stable Genius here in the United States is ready for 'em.

So what's happening is that people who (1) are dramatically uninformed and fact-resistant, and (2) get all their information from Fox News and OANN, are all in on policies that have most of the rest of us repeating "What the fuck?" over and over.  Consider, for example, the effect that "DOGE" has had on scientific research, only two months into the second Trump presidency.

Elon Musk's clearcut-the-government approach -- I was going to call it a strategy, but it's closer to arson -- has already gutted science across the board.  Some examples:

• Officials at the National Institute of Health have been told to scrub all mention of mRNA from grants, presumably because the COVID-19 vaccine, long a bête noire of the right, is mRNA-based.  This comes at the same time as an announcement that an mRNA-based vaccine was shown to have the potential to cure pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat types of cancer known.  Not halt its progress; cure it.  But no, can't have that, not with RFK Jr., Mr. Treat-Measles-With-Cod-Liver-Oil, running health policy.
• Speaking of RFK, he just announced that he's laying off the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.  All of them.
• Because one loony alt-med type running stuff evidently isn't enough, Dr. Mehmet Oz was just confirmed as the director for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
• Work at many medical research institutions has ground to a halt, because seemingly random cuts, firings, and layoffs have taken out not only the researchers themselves, but critical support staff, supplies, and equipment.  "Warehouse staff are also gone, and incoming shipments of reagents and biological samples are now being turned away," said one staff member, who only spoke on condition of anonymity.  "We have orders in mid-process with no idea how to move forward."  This, apparently, constitutes "governmental efficiency."
• The journal Nature conducted a poll of over 1,600 scientists working in the United States, and found that three-quarters of them are now actively looking for jobs elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Canada.  One, who works in agricultural genomics, said, "This is my home -- I really love my country.  But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."
• Responding to firings at NASA and NOAA, and bogus and partisan "investigations" of colleges and research institutions, 1,900 scientists signed a letter warning the American public of the damage Trump and his cronies are causing to our standing as a leader in scientific research.  "We see real danger in this moment," the letter says, in part.  "We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry.  We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated."

The problem is -- to be completely frank -- Trump doesn't give a flying rat's ass about any of this, because he lacks even the smallest shred of empathy, and also because he's too catastrophically stupid to understand science.  Recall that he's the guy who wanted to nuke a hurricane, and when that got nixed, thought he could change its path by drawing on a map with a sharpie.  

Apparently, "Making America Great Again" somehow involves tanking the stock market, killing vital medical research, slicing other scientific programs to the bone, wiping out weather forecasting and climate modeling agencies just as we're heading into tornado and hurricane season, intimidating and censoring researchers, and forcing a mass exodus of the smartest people we've got to other countries where they'll actually have a chance at a stable career.

It'd be different if Trump and his cadre had an actual plan, but at this point I honestly don't believe they do -- beyond (1) stay in power and (2) get as rich as possible.  The rest is just window-dressing, and any damage they do along the way falls into the "Oh, Well!" Department.

Even if a miracle happens and the Republicans grow a spine and start standing up to him and saying "Enough," there's already been so much vandalism done to our reputation worldwide that it's hard to see how it'll be reversible, at least in the short-term.  If I were an investor in another country, no way in hell would I risk aligning myself with the United States right now, not with a capricious, thin-skinned, low-IQ egomaniac running the place.

What I'd be doing is trying to lure qualified Americans to relocate elsewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of another quote.  Like the one I started with, it's of uncertain provenance, and has been misattributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War.  Wherever it originated, it's still apt here. 

"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground, as long as he is allowed to rule over the ashes."

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The return of Lieutenant Kijé

Ever heard the story of Lieutenant Kijé?

He's the subject of a 1927 comic film made in the Soviet Union.  Set in the time of Tsar Paul I, it's the tale of a visit by the Tsar to a military outpost.  One night, the Tsar is awakened by a noise -- it's the sound of one of the officers getting a little too frisky with a young woman in an adjoining room -- and when the regiment commander is confronted about the outrage the next morning, he blames it on a (nonexistent) "Lieutenant Kijé."  ("Kijé" is a slang word meaning approximately the same thing as "whatchamacallit.")  The indignant Tsar demands to meet with this errant officer -- so the panicked commander says he can't, the matter is already settled, Kijé is in the brig and will be shipped off to Siberia.

Soon after, however, the real culprit's identity comes out, and the Tsar demands that the commander not only release and apologize to the wronged Lieutenant Kijé, but promote him to the rank of colonel.  Repeated requests by the Tsar to meet Kijé result in more and more elaborate stories made up about him explaining why this can't happen -- first that Kijé was on leave because he was getting married to the lovely Princess Gagarina, then because he's away at battle (which, of course, results in a brilliant triumph).  Finally, though, the whole house of cards can't be sustained any longer.  The Tsar demands to meet this valiant pinnacle of an officer so he can personally promote him to general.

The commander and the others who are in on the lie have no choice.  They invent one final story -- that the brave Colonel Kijé has tragically died a heroic death in battle.  Sad as it is to have to tell His Majesty the Tsar, there will never be an opportunity to meet this exemplary soldier in person.

The story only became known outside of Russia because of the absolutely delightful score for the film written by the brilliant Sergei Prokofiev -- the Lieutenant Kijé Suite is still a staple of the classical orchestral repertoire today.

I started thinking about the story Lieutenant Kijé this morning because of our own Tsar, Donald Trump.

If you watched the State of the Union address -- or, if (like me) you read excerpts because you can only listen to Trump's voice for about fifteen seconds without wanting to remove your ears, with a cheese grater if it's the only thing handy -- you probably know that he babbled on (and on and on) about government waste, citing eight million dollars that had been spent to "create transgender mice."  I probably don't need to tell you that this was an idiotic error.  The mice weren't transgender, they were transgenic.  Transgenic organisms are ones that have been genetically modified, in this case to engineer their immune systems to respond more like a human's would.  Transgenic organisms are a staple of medical research, especially into cancer, asthma, and autoimmune diseases.

Transgender mice, on the other hand, do not exist.

Naturally, anyone with an IQ higher than their hat size laughed directly into Trump's face for making such a moronic pronouncement (and in the State of the Union address, no less, in front of literally millions of watchers).  So what do you think his advisors did in response?  Issue some kind of "the President misspoke, and we'd like to correct it" statement?

Ha.  Of course not.  They started frantically going through every scrap of research involving mice they could find to see if they could come up with one that had anything to do with gender.  There's no way they could tell Tsar Donald he'd fucked up.

All they found was an obscure 2019 study that had to do with the role of stress in sexual development in mice, and said, basically, "Here it is!  This is what he was talking about!"  Never mind that (1) it was definitely not what he was talking about, (2) the 2019 study itself was published during Trump's first term, so hardly can be used as an example of wasteful spending today, (3) it still has nothing to do with mice (or anyone else) being transgender, and (4) Trump is so catastrophically stupid there's no way he's even capable of reading and understanding a scientific abstract, much less an academic paper in its entirety.

Then, when people pointed out the above, they doubled down again.  (Tripled down?)  They put out an official statement that yes, Biden did so waste money on transgender mice.  You ready for the studies they cited?

• a study to find out if hormone therapy affects the immune response in patients with HIV
• a study looking at how steroid hormone administration affects fertility
• a study of the effects of testosterone on breast cancer susceptibility
• a study of how hormone administration affects the microbiome
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect neurological development in embryos
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect asthma

All of that justifiable medical research.  None of it having anything to do with "making mice transgender."  The only connection with being transgender is that some of the hormones under study are the ones used in gender transition in humans.

So it's another reprehensible attack using the current furor over LGBTQ+ people to whip up the base, and has only a glancing connection to the truth.  But Trump's cronies had to keep defending it, because how else were they to keep up the appearance that the Tsar knows what he's talking about, and appease the "Trump Was Right About Everything!" crowd?

It's the same colossally ignorant approach that "DOGE" has used -- purging projects involving keywords (or syllables) like "diversity" and "trans" and accidentally trashing projects studying things like biodiversity and transnational terrorism.  There have now been at least three instances of mass firings that have led to the people in charge going "Oopsie" and trying to rehire the fired workers with only partial success -- at the FAA, the nuclear weapons oversight team at the Department of Energy, and the Center for Disease Control.

The bottom line is that the people now running the government aren't just greedy and amoral, they're fundamentally, deeply, and irrevocably stupid.  And -- like the Tsar in Lieutenant Kijé -- they have surrounded themselves by sycophantic toadies who are afraid to stand up and say, "Wait a moment.  You can't make that claim, it's false."  Or, in the case of "DOGE," that maybe hiring a bunch of hackers and then running around the place with a chainsaw is not the way to approach pulling back the reins on wasteful spending.

But I fear that the farce will continue.  When you're dealing with a man who has a bloated ego, has never been given a single meaningful consequence for wrongdoing in his entire life, has a whipcrack temper, and is in one of the most powerful elected positions in the world, we're going to see more of this kind of behavior.  All we can do is to continue to use our voices as strongly as we are able, and call out this sort of nonsense whenever we see it or hear it.

And keep in mind that even the tsars, as powerful as they were, did not last forever.

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