The federal government has long been a major funder of basic and advanced research, but if Trump’s budget cuts are sustained, science and basic research will be gutted.
Research on climate change will be eliminated.
Let’s face it. The people in charge of the federal budget are ignoramuses, anti-intellectual, and hostile to science, creativity, and culture. To call them Neanderthals would be an insult to Neanderthals. Neanderthals look like intellectual giants compared to the Trump team of knuckle-draggers.
“Before he became president, Donald J. Trump called climate change a hoax, questioned the safety of vaccines and mocked renewable energy as a plaything of “tree-huggers.”
“So perhaps it is no surprise that Mr. Trump’s first budget took direct aim at basic scientific and medical research.
Still, the extent of the cuts in the proposed budget unveiled early Thursday shocked scientists, researchers and program administrators. The reductions include $5.8 billion, or 18 percent, from the National Institutes of Health, which fund thousands of researchers working on cancer and other diseases, and $900 million, or a little less than 20 percent, from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds the national laboratories, considered among the crown jewels of basic research in the world.
“The White House is also proposing to eliminate climate science programs throughout the federal government, including at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“As to climate change, I think the president was fairly straightforward: We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The man is an idiot – and it is unthinkable that all politicians, regardless of party, do not oppose his initiatives. He can’t have something on ALL of them, can he? They can’t ALL be brain-dead, can they? We shall see.
God help us all.
xx,
mgh
(Madelyn Griffith-Haynie – ADDandSoMuchMORE dot com)
ADD Coach Training Field founder; ADD Coaching co-founder
“It takes a village to educate a world!”
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This budget is the culmination of Republican ideology since Reagan. Ronnie famously degraded science & research when he quipped he wasn’t going to “subsidize intellectual curiosity”. He follwed suti by destroying the CA public education system- once a model for the world.
The Republicans followed lock-step to put Reagan’s ideology into practice for 40 years. Republican anti-intellectualism gave us Dan-women won’t mind if he’s dumb- Quayle, Newt- pseudo-intellectual Gingrich, Sara arm-piece intellectual Palin, and Paul manufactured intellectual Ryan.
The end of US scientific enlightenment was signed,sealed & delivered by Republicanism.
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A stupid and sick populace is easy to manipulate – and a party without ethics has no problem attempting to control by ANY means.
Don’t even go there with Reagan – he was a lousy SAG president, and I will never forgive him for ignoring the advice of Surgeon General Koop, giving AIDS a chance to become an epidemic in America during his time in office. I lost several of my best friends as a result of his ignorance – while friends dx’d once research funding had FINALLY been found are alive and healthy on the medications developed. Truly, I can’t stand even the mention of his name.
And then there are the Bush years – huge steps back for medical science.
I’m sure you are aware of the recent budget cuts proposed? OMG. Like I began this thread, this man is an idiot.
xx,
mgh
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You called Trump an idiot? Far too kind. Cutting the funding for medical research and climate science is not idiotic. It is vicious
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I am with you 100% – the reference is to his obvious lack of education. He clearly knows nothing about science (vaccination comments OMG) – and so little about much of anything beyond bean counting, meaning slashing funds to line his own pockets: a deranged Robin Hood stealing from the poor to give to the wealthy.
ADORE your blog, btw.
xx,
mgh
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Thanks, MGH!
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He is the Republican Party and the Republican party is him. They are one and the same and have been so since Reagan. With rare exceptions deplorables appealing to the deplorables . Democrats lose to these people because they are a corrupt party that has lost their way. It is difficult to frame your opponents as despicable when you are feeding off the left overs at the same corporate dinning table .
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You’ve got that right!
I hope the silver lining turns out to be Progressive Party reform, forcing the party of the wealthy and wannabes to rethink their strategies and policies to include what matters most to the rest of us in response.
I am beyond weary of the mud-slinging that passes for campaigning anymore – and I blame the sound-bite press for encouraging any of them by giving them ink and airtime. They ads are bad enough! As for Agent Orange post-election tweets – DISGUSTING.
A solid gold lining would be getting rid of the Electoral College and campaign finance reform – limiting contributions by individuals as well as Corporations and PACTS. The latter is not likely in my lifetime, but miracles do happen.
xx,
mgh
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Before he became president, Donald J. Trump called climate change a hoax, questioned the safety of
vaccinesI wonder if he had his kids vaccinated — polio, diphtheria, smallpox, etc.
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wdf1… wondering if all his grandchildren have had vaccines????? Willing to bet they have had their vaccines on schedule! If so, his daughter Ivanka (who I think even SNL mocked as “complicit”) should being speaking out against her father’s idiot “budget” … but she is as duplicitous as they come. So I am sure she will remain quiet with her crocodile smile. I keep shaking my head thinking this is just one bad nightmare but sadly it is reality.
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He and Melania did have Barron vaccinated, but “refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians” (from an article in the February 27 issue of The New Yorker).
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He was smart. its the three vaccine together causing autism.
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Joseph,
What is your source for saying that vaccines cause autism?
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Diane, I am sorry about your son and feel deeply moved. I also think of all of the children killed in shootings, yes all of them, in schools where children are on drugs which cause such violent episodes that are included in the warning labels. Medical funding needs to be targeted to the issues that make a difference, my point is that there can be better organization in the use of these funds, which would not limit the life expectancy of children, like your son. I also challenge funding for special ed that is wasted, when children are diagnosed with learning disabilities at too early an age, unlike in Europe ( age 7). It is becoming a jobs program for teachers, where kids are needed to fill the classrooms, as a former teacher. I know that a mother will claim heartlessness when it comes to special education. I have seen students wasting, when they could be a part of their peer group, and be helped by them if needed.
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Joseph,
It breaks my heart whenever a child dies because of guns or disease or the tragedies of war or car accidents or abusive parents.
We should do whatever is possible to prevent such deaths.
That is why I favor research on disease and I favor strict gun controls. I think the Founders wanted to protect our right to raise a militia or to own a musket, not the right to an assault weapon or a bazooka.
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“I think the Founders wanted to protect our right to raise a militia or to own a musket, not the right to an assault weapon or a bazooka.”
The Founders were not Oracles, nobody is and nobody will be.
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Yeah, really? Who needs unpolluted air to breathe, clean water to drink and uncontaminated food to eat? The polar ice is not melting. Seas are not rising. Extreme weather events are not more common. It is all a hoax. Research is not needed to investigate cures for diseases. Public broadcasting is a waste. Why should the masses watch opera on television? I am sitting here in my tin foil hat. Soon people like me who inhabit the lower classes will only have a rudimentary grasp of literacy to prevent us from rising up against our oppressors.
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In this excellent article by Huffington Post “The Blow it Up Billionaire” it is hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer’s libertarian ideology that is behind Trump’s heinous budget.
“a former colleague at recalls him saying in front of coworkers, words to the effect that “your value as a human being is equivalent to what you are paid. … He said that, by definition, teachers are not worth much because they aren’t paid much.”
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/
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Mercer is the money behind Bannon and Conjob
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Reading the original article on Mercer at the New Yorker, one gets the clear idea that the guy needs to be in a mental institution, along with his wife.
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I’m presuming DJT’s disdain for vaccines may be related to his youngest son’s rumored placement on the spectrum for autism, as some still debate their safety and the existing protocols regarding how they are administered.
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“Department of Dumb”
Department of Energy and of Health
Total waste, so shut your mouth.
We don’t need no stinkin’ science
Only greed and fact deniance
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Right, Mick Mulvaney. We get it. Spending money on an existential threat to all life on the planet is a waste of money, but billions for an unneeded border wall that your boss campaign-promised wouldn’t cost the U.S. a cent is a worthwhile expenditure of the highest order. Makes sense.
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I think I am starting to see their logic:
If all life on the planet is extinguished, there will be no need to worry about illegals from Mexico and hence, no need to spend money on a wall — or anything else, for that matter.
So by defunding climate research, they are really solving all of humanity’s problems in one fell swoop.
Who can argue with such powerful logic?
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On the other hand, members the Overclass are convinced that they’ll be able to escape the consequences of their insatiable avarice and smash-and-grab ethos, whether it’s Elon Musk’s fantasies of a billionaire’s colony on Mars, or Silicon Valley Creep #1 (and that’s really saying something), Peter Thiel, getting blood transfusions from young people (true!) on his oceanic floating city, or just run-of-the-mill hedge fund oligarchs buying farms in New Zealand. Thiel recently purchased Kiwi citizenship, so he apparently is covering all bases, and apparently must not be too confident about how The Orange One’s presidency will turn out.
I just read “The Masque of the Red Death” by Poe with my students, and intend to follow it up with articles about how billionaires think they’ll be able run off, heedlessly, and leave the rest of us behind. Poe, however, was prophetic, and knew what would really happen in that situation, and that wealth and power provided no exemption when “darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
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Trump’s sugar daddy Mercer is so confident in his superior understanding of science he picks sources of information untouched by experts or the National Academy of Scientists. In addition to not believing in climate change, he thinks the radiation from nuclear bombs at Hiroshima & Nagasaki made the Japanese healthier. As an avid proponent of nuclear power, he believes nuclear accidents aren’t such a big deal. He thinks African Americans were better off before the Civil Rights movement. He thinks racism in America is exaggerated, there are no white racists, that the problem is really black racists. He subsidizes a biologist who runs a sheep ranch in Oregon who does experiments in projects to forestall aging.
He believes humans have no inherent value other than how much money they make.
There you have it. Leaving the rest of us behind in a catastrophe is what we deserve for not being billionaires like him.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency
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Now the opinion of a guy who says
“I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody.”
</em
and prefers the company of cats to humans, really matters in social issues.
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Just before the French revolution, the overclass had probably also made arrangements for “island getaways.”
Easter Island might have been a good place to get — and keep — ahead.
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Yeah, without basic science, there would be no GPS to guide oil tankers, no airplanes to carry the president to his vacation spot every weekend, no nuclear bombs to dominate the world with, no computers to shuffle the president’s businesses to avoid paying taxes, no TV to watch unbiased news from Fox 24/7, no ipad to tweet teenage thoughts segments, no microphone to take and transmit primitive, unfinished sentences.
And the Constitution is just standing by. No wonder: most people never understood, and will never understand what today’s basic science and the arts will bring them 100-200-300 years from now. It’s just all a useless dream for them.
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In days like these, I take comfort in a wise old saying
I twit a tweet, a tweet I twit
Upon a twitted tweet I twip
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Trump is questioning vaccines because of an aversion to needles. If you had colluded with a hostile foreign power to subvert an election . Committed TREASON, you would have an aversion to needles as well . The only question I have is should they !! be executed or just jailed for life.
This is not the first time Republicans have committed Treason to win an election with little consequence. It is the third. Nixon Vietnam ,Reagan Iran, Trump Russia
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That DUMP want to “Make America GRATE again!”
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I can’t help but think all of this is meant to distract and frighten us from the real agenda. What are 45 and company really up to? When is the other shoe going to drop? What happens then?
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I wonder how large the voter turnout will be in 2018 for the midterm elections.
Will the GOP be able to continue to stop and/or bloc enough voters from voting so they keep winning through their extreme gerrymandered districts while continuing to close, and get away with it, locations to vote in areas with larger populations of registered Democrats?
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Lloyd,
Sad as it might sound but I’m slightly buoyed by the the fact that the IPOTUS’s brief period in office is such a fuster-cluck that maybe his GOP enablers will not be able to do much of anything apart from constantly run around putting out his fires. This may leave them less time to deal with items like voter suppression, Paul Weyrich’s ALEC call-to-arms way back in 1980.
I’m also buoyed by the appearance that the “fake news” outlets almost seem to be coordinating with each other, that the judiciary appears to not cower before the IPOTUS and that there are so many energized who seem to actually paying attention.
On the other hand, Steven K. and the words “martial law” simply won’t go away.
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Have you heard the word “succession” out there for the West Coast and Hawaii?
If the West Coast of America succeeded successfully with the malignant narcissist starting the 2nd Civil War, the four states would have a combined Gross State Product (GSP) of
in billions
California $2,702
Hawaii $86.5
Oregon $237
Washington $484
For a total of $3,509
That would make the U.S. West Coast Republic #4 in the world behind the U.S., China, and Japan and before Germany.
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp.php
What remained of the U.S. under Trump would still be #1 but not as big as it once was.
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I’d vote for this, Lloyd, no doubt. What still worries me is the strong economies that remain to influence the world.
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There are so many dangerous drugs out there, many discovered by the National Institute of Health and “given” to the drug companies to rip us off with obscenely high prices. Prescription drugs is the number one cause of death in the country. Cutting funding to the NIH could be a wise move. Tax money should no longer go to this corrupt paradigm.
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Joseph,
I assume you support ending basic research on cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, and ALS.
What’s the value of medical research? Don’t you miss polio?
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All of the these are worthy concerns, but there is an indifference to the things that cause these diseases that should equally be addressed. Europeans are way ahead of us in this area. After all of these decades we have lost the war on “curing cancer”, as if its a disease with a quick fix and a magic bullet cure, everyone puts on a pink ribbon and dumps billions into this black hole, march in a parade and feel that they have done something, then expose their breasts to nuclear radiation, go figure? We spend billions on new vaccines for diseases that disappear in a months time, What happened to H1N1?, Ebola? the disease from Brazil? It’s on the media long enough to spend billions for vaccines and then disappears.
It should have its budget examined. The CDC and WHO is a racket.
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You are so right, Joseph. It is a waste of money to try to find cures for disease. Unless, that is, you or your family have one of them. For example, my little boy died at the age of 2 of acute leukemia in 1966. If a two-year-old today got the same disease, he or she would have a 90% chance of surviving due to research.
Joseph, count your blessings. I am sure you will save about $5 a year in taxes when Trump eliminates the budget for cancer research.
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The CDC and WHO are not frauds like the malignant narcissist in the White House. The FDA is also a vital agency.
Finding cures for cancer means research and research costs money.
For instance:
“The Food and Drug Administration has given so-called ‘breakthrough’ status to a treatment that uses the once-feared polio virus to target aggressive forms of brain cancer, in the hope of speeding it to market.”
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/05/13/fda-gives-approval-to-using-polio-to-fight-terminal-brain-cancer.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/polio-cancer-treatment-duke-university-60-minutes-scott-pelley/
In addition, there is now research and development of genetic medicines designed to treat hereditary disorders. This is called personalized medicine.
Abstract
The treatment of the more than 1,800 known monogenic hereditary disorders will depend on the development of ‘genetic medicines’ – therapies that use the transfer of DNA and/or RNA to modify gene expression to correct or compensate for an abnormal phenotype. Strategies include the use of somatic stem cells, gene transfer, RNA modification and, in the future, embryonic stem cells. Despite the efficacy of these technologies in treating experimental models of hereditary disorders, applying them successfully in the clinic is a great challenge, which will only be overcome by expending considerable intellectual and economic resources, and by solving societal concerns about modifications of the human genetic repertoire.
https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/dec2013/feature1
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Joseph alleges that the number one cause of death is caused by prescription drugs.
WRONG!
The #1 cause of death is heart disease. Heart Disease is caused mostly by lifestyle choices, not the prescription drugs doctors recommend to their patients to survive heart disease.
Cancer is the #2 cause of death. Prescription drugs are used to fight cancer and keep people alive after they are diagnosed with cancer.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
A misuse of prescription drugs can contribute and lead to an early death but first the patient has to have an illness that is treated by a prescribed drug.
Yes, there are many dangerous drugs, but most of them are used to treat diseases that are even worse.
What causes heart disease, the leading cause of death?
ANSWER: “Plaque buildup thickens and stiffens artery walls, which can inhibit blood flow through your arteries to your organs and tissues. Atherosclerosis is also the most common cause of cardiovascular disease. It can be caused by correctable problems, such as an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, being overweight and smoking.”
The most common cause of cardiovascular disease is an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, being overweight and smoking — not prescription drugs.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/basics/causes/con-20034056
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Lloyd, the drug companies are going to advertise it? Hospital visit are up there too.
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That is a really stupid statement, Joseph. Hospital visits are the cause of death?! I know from a recent report that medical error causes a significant number of in hospital deaths, but going to the hospital actually saves a lot of people who would die if they didn’t get medical attention. Of course people die in hospitals! Why are most people in them? I guess I should avoid all medical attention because they might kill me. Seriously?
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Note, it’s NOT big pharma which gets cuts but medical research. The drug prices are still going to be insane—if anything, they will go up because the market will be made “freer”.
Here’s an example for all to see: Here is what I’d need to use
https://www.goodrx.com/tazorac
As you see, $377 for 30g
In Canada, the same thing by the same company is $61
https://www.bestpricerx.com/buy-tazorac.html
So the US price is more than 6 times the Canadian’s. Does my insurance pay for the US one? No, because it’s too much. They refuse to pay even a dime (same for the generic version).
I need 120g per month of this stuff—$1,500 per month. Can I afford it? Nope.
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And of course we can expect that the regulation of drugs will be less stringent as well. Anyone for more thalidomide babies?
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