Sorting The Catastrophic From The Apocalyptic
Plus music
Last Wednesday’s procedure went well but my brain seems still to be kind of scrambled from having been shat out prior to the event, and this is quite a long piece,so caveat lector.
Sorting The Catastrophic From The Apocalyptic
STAT, the absolutely excellent magazine covering health sciences and health care, to which I dearly wish a subscription, has a new series addressing the regime’s catastrophic and chaos-inducing cuts and reversals and idiot new regulations surrounding federal research and development grants to universities and other institutions.
“American Science, Shattered” is, like most of the magazine’s work, paywalled, but they give a pretty generous preview before the paywall kicks in so you get the gist.
The subject of medical research and medical device development was brought up in connection with the government-funded universal health care discussions from last week. Concerns were raised about whether private-sector research and development would be hamstrung by private-sector greed, to the extent that companies wouldn’t want to invent or discover stuff for the presumed penurious prices the government would be willing to pay for whatever, thereby plunging the country into a dark age of scientific stagnation.
My position was and is that most scientific developments across the medical field were and are initially funded by the government and then turned over to private sector companies which refine, and richly profit from, what federally-funded researchers started. The STAT series reinforces that view.
Since the inception of the modern research ecosystem after World War II, NIH budgets have largely gone up and up, supporting a steady expansion of biomedical research at American universities. But that began to reverse this year, according to a STAT analysis of almost 750,000 grants from the past 10 years in the NIH RePORTER database. While the agency distributed a similar amount of grant money as in recent years, the number of awards made from January through the end of the fiscal year in September (right before the government shutdown) dropped 11.6% in comparison to the same period last year, and 8.2% compared to the average for the same months in the previous nine years.
The shift cut across the agency’s $37 billion extramural portfolio, largely driven by a switch to paying for many multiyear grants entirely up front — which left money for fewer projects. The change affected vaccine research and work investigating health disparities — both targets of ire from the current administration. But it also has reduced the number of new studies looking into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and HIV/AIDS, all areas that generally have bipartisan support, according to STAT’s analysis of grants approved by scientific review panels for those disease areas.
. . .
Arguably the most insidious fallout is that many scientists who work at universities no longer feel they can count on the U.S. government as a reliable partner in the pursuit of research for the public good. “That’s the most devastating part of all this,” one NIH official told STAT. “Why would anyone trust the NIH ever again?”“That social compact is being systematically undermined at the moment by a group of ideologues whose real target is not science; its real target is what they perceive to be the power and the arrogance of elite institutions, starting with the great research universities of this country,” said Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton — one of those universities. To onlookers like Tilghman, what has happened since January seems to be a tragedy of unintended consequences. “The intention was to punish elite universities, it was not to destroy the scientific capacity of the United States, but that’s what they’re doing,” she said. “It’s one thing to destroy something. It is quite another to destroy it and have nothing to replace it with. I think that’s the moment we’re in.”
That’s from part one of the series; I’d argue that science is in fact at least a target of the regime, if not the target, under RFK Jr—who controls most of the money the series discusses, and who is at present cheering on a measles outbreak in South Carolina—and other articles in the series make that clear. What’s also made clear is the degree to which federal funding underpins every aspect of research and development in every medical-related field of study and enterprise. Far from stifling scientific innovation, the government is the crucial engine of it. Or was.
One issue the series doesn’t address is the tension between religious fundamentalists and science. The regime is riddled with fundamentalists who are on the same page as the Catholic church’s Medieval Inquisition offices were with regard to science.
The funding cuts and the intimidation of researchers and institutions are bad enough, but they’re only part of the wholesale assault on Americans which includes the anti-science campaigns against vaccines and other preventive health measures, and the looming carnage on the Obamacare and Medicaid fronts. It’s a synergy of catastrophic medicine-related policies in which the whole will prove much greater than the sum of the parts, and lots of people will die from it.
And that doesn’t even include the inevitable next pandemic and the people who will die from that when it is inevitably mishandled either by a hyper-politicized response from a much diminished CDC and sister agencies, or an earnest but ineffective one from a crippled CDC under a well-meaning Trump successor.
In addition to sheer malice, all of the cuts to all of the agencies which one could categorize as humanistic are aimed at offsetting the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations at the expense of mere mortals and particularly ones in the lower half of the income distribution. If that’s where you dwell, the regime clearly either want you dead or don’t care if you live or die, depending on how much serial killer they have in them. You’re just sucking up resources that belong to your betters.
So that’s a bunch
of major catastrophes all rolled into an even larger one. On the apocalypse front, it’s fair to look at what the crackhead high court majority are poised to do for the regime and what that will do to what was already a Potemkin-adjacent democracy before Trump was even on the radar. Having immunized the president and by osmosis his factotums and minions from at least any domestic consequences for their crimes, they’re now ready to destroy the concept of independent executive branch agencies (excepting maybe the Fed, which will be toast anyway under whoever Jerome Powell’s successor is).
This means that what were previously independent regulatory agencies at least in theory and as a matter of settled law will now be purely instruments of the regime, and presumably of future ones too unless they voluntarily surrender their expanded powers. The president can treat the heads of these agencies as at-will employees and replace them with the kinds of toadies he installed, with congressional approval, in pretty much all of his cabinet agencies.
We’ve already seen what happens when people like Whisky Pete, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr, Marco Polio, Kristi Noem and others are handed the reins of the executive branch—the law becomes immaterial, and so does the mere concept of the common good. And we’ve seen what happens when a similarly bent factotum is running the FCC, which resulted at least for a little while in the government taking over a network programming decision.
Now imagine the entire regulatory structure, from the FCC to the trade commission to the securities and exchange commission to whatever agency or commission you can imagine, working as a whole to wield every bit of the executive branch’s regulatory power, which is immense, solely to enrich regime figures, punish their enemies, and reward their friends.
All of our corporations, including the ones that own our sort-of free press, will be operating at the pleasure of the president. The regime have imposed financial sanctions on individuals abroad, including members of the International Criminal Court, for nothing more than aggravating Trump; now they’ll be able to do the same against their domestic enemies. Imagine life with your assets frozen and no access to the financial system because you said mean things about the regime, or because somebody paid them to sanction you.
Now imagine relying on the Roberts court for succor, either as a corporation or an individual. And imagine all that power added to what the regime are already setting you up for, including the new Pam Bondi initiative instructing federal, state and local authorities on how to target Americans who fall into the extremely broad categories previously established as enemies of the state. These include, but aren’t limited to,
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
[Bondi’s memo] echoes the so-called indicators of terrorism identified by President Trump’s directive National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, which the memo says it’s intended to implement. Where NSPM-7 was a declaration of war on just about anyone who isn’t MAGA, this is the war plan for how the government will wage it on a tactical level.
In addition to compiling a list of undesirables, Bondi directs the FBI to enhance the capabilities (and publicity) of its tipline in order to more aggressively solicit tips from the American public on, well, other Americans. To that end, Bondi also directs the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information leading to identification and arrest of leadership figures within these purported domestic terrorist organizations. (The memo later instructs the FBI to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members” of the groups.)
. . .
In a section titled “Defining the domestic terrorism threat,” the memo cites “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” — indicators that federal law enforcement are instructed to refer to FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). Those JTTFs are then instructed to “use all available investigative tools” in order to “map the full network of culpable actors involved” in both “inside and outside the United States.”The memo also directs the FBI and JTTFs to retroactively investigate incidents going back five years, authorizing the JTTFs in particular to use everything at their disposal to do so.
You may recall that visitors to the US are now required to hand over five years of their social media and other communications history; well, now that applies to U.S. citizens too, so long as investigators can plausibly (in their views) claim a basis for it.
That time you said “why isn’t he dead yet?” That’s an incident. That time you sort of quoted Diderot? That’s an incident. The time you said “this country fucking sucks?” That’s an incident. Any of them could expose you to the power of the state in all its myriad guises; so could, the regime hope, possessing literature espousing any of the views iterated in the national security memo. And courts are notoriously deferential to the executive on matters of national security—especially that court with such an expansive view of presidential powers.
FEDERAL PROSECUTORS HAVE filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.
There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.
But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech.
(A probably unnecessary note: Extremism on race, gender and immigration doesn’t mean racists, transphobes and xenophobes—rather, it means people who oppose those behaviors and ideologies. Anti-Americanism is a catchall which includes, among others, anti-fascists.)
This regime is far from original in its pursuit of domestic enemies—the Bush fils administration rivaled Nixon’s for both spite and overreach, and one of their more stalwart authoritarians, the preening James Comey, was tapped by Obama to run his FBI, with all that that entailed—but they are extreme. One can imagine, in light of how the regime has taken the concept of the “war on terror” to new heights with the mass murders of people whose identities they don’t know and who may or may not be drug smugglers—and who if they are, aren’t smuggling drugs into the U.S.—that they could take equally extreme measures against U.S. residents.
The Intercept’s Nick Turse has been pursuing that possibility.
Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.
Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.
In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.
Extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens within the U.S. are not unknown—witness, for instance, the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago by agents of the Cook County attorney’s office with assists from the Chicago PD and the FBI. Despite a hostile court, the civil suit against those three organizations filed by survivors of the raid and relatives of the two men murdered in it was resolved in favor of the plaintiffs, with the three co-conspiring agencies splitting the cost of the at-the-time substantial award.
One would like to think that the Hampton murder is an aberration, but given the history of criming by the FBI and our intelligence agencies, that is ever so unlikely. And while the current regime might try to conceal any domestic extrajudicial killings, as Hoover’s FBI did, one can’t imagine they’ll scruple against them.
Organizations which rank various indications of freedom already have the U.S. in free-fall. Even prior to the ascension of the regime, the Economist’s economic intelligence unit characterized the U.S. as a flawed democracy, trailing the 25 countries listed as full democracies and a few others besides; imagine where we’ll rank when the 2025 report comes out in a few months.
In the same vein, the index of internet freedom published annually by Freedom House, which was until this year partially funded by the U.S. government, shows the U.S. in decline during the most recent reporting period, from June 1 of 2024 through May 31 of this year.
The United States’ overall information landscape remained vibrant, diverse, and free, and the legal framework still provided some of the world’s strongest protections for free expression online. However, select aspects of internet freedom declined during the coverage period, as federal authorities exerted pressure on online speech and expanded digital surveillance following a change in government in January 2025. The government did not impose restrictions on internet connectivity, and the First Amendment of the federal constitution limited the government’s ability to restrict online content or block websites.
The administration of President Donald Trump sought to remove two Democratic Party members from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in March 2025, leaving the five-seat regulatory panel with just three members from the Republican Party, to which the president belongs. The fired commissioners sued, arguing that the removals were illegal, though one of them ultimately resigned.
Throughout 2025, the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) carried out investigations and enforcement actions that touched on forms of speech protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. For example, the FTC investigated several advertising and advocacy groups, including the Democrat-linked civil society organization Media Matters, over their efforts to convince advertisers to boycott social media platforms that allegedly failed to curb hateful content.
Multiple reports indicated a rise in online self-censorship during the coverage period, including among noncitizens, journalists, academics, and medical researchers. Topics on which people said they were self-censoring included criticism of the Trump administration, views on the war in the Gaza Strip, and specific terms that the administration had sought to suppress, such as those relating to transgender identity and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
Still, the report says,
While the United States retained its overall status of Free, growing restrictions on civic space drove the decline in its score. The administration of President Donald Trump detained several foreign nationals for one to two months after revoking their visas over nonviolent online expression, as part of a larger program to arrest and deport noncitizens. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission threatened or carried out politicized investigations into civil society organizations and media and technology companies, often focusing on their content moderation, editorial decision-making, or forms of speech that are protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. More broadly, the administration’s actions have chilled the atmosphere for digital activism.
One can expect that the 2025-2026 report will reflect further deterioration, assuming Freedom House manages to replace enough of the lost U.S. government funding to cover their research and publication costs, and that the report is accessible here.
(Lest one think that government attacks on free speech began on January 20, we should remember that the Bidenaires were quick to join in both the characterization of pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protesters as anti-Semitic—probably as much from political expediency as genuine belief—and the pressure on universities to crack down on the protests and punish the protesters. In fact, you would be pressed to find an administration that didn’t assault free speech in some measure.)
The reason all these things together—the stripping of any independence from federal agencies with the attendant opportunities for corruption and authoritarian measures; the demonstrated pursuit of violence as a first resort against people protesting the government’s militarized immigration excesses; the vast expansion of what activities or beliefs can get you marked as an enemy of the state, along with the refusal to rule out lethal violence against such unfortunates—can be considered apocalyptic is that they represent the imposition of a dictatorship, maybe with electoral trappings or maybe not.
And that doesn’t even include what they’re attempting with respect to elections.
Addendum: while the regime claim the absolute right to murder people on the high seas with no oversight, they stooped to getting a warrant to seize that tanker full of Venezuelan oil.
Music
This one’s an absolute banger: La Luz, “Strange World”
Greentea Peng, “One Foot”
Allah-Las, “Right On Time”
Ouzo Bazooka, “Space Camel”
Shannon & The Clams, “Big Wheel”
mui zyu, “the rules of what an earthling can be”
The Beta Band, “Push It Out”
The Black Tones, “Ghetto Spaceship”
Los Bitchos, “Kiki, You Complete Me”
Yin Yin, “Lecker Song”
The Lazy Eyes, “Fuzz Jam”
Mary Timony, “No Thirds”
And that, Comrades, is all I got and more. As ever, please share it and let me know if you like it, and feel free to subscribe, free or otherwise, if you’ve not already.
Be well; take care.