1609

Yeah. It’s very important to remember that Trump isn’t making the GOP do these things…He’s letting them do these things.

1610

Why these Alstein? They thrown themselves in with Trump?

And to the others, yeah, I guess it does hurt the wrong people. Frustrating that we’re to this point.

1611

No idea which of the 5 threads this should go in, so here we go.

1612

Owned by Art Pope- for North Carolina folks, he’s the primary reason North Carolina is crazy.

1613

Ah, good to know, will avoid. Thanks!

1614

Just got this charming 419 spam!

Do you suppose I should forward it to wikileaks?

1615

Twist: It’s not spam!

1616

I forgot how to take screenshot on my WiiU and was too lazy to look it up, so I snapped this pic off my TV with my phone. And I dunno which thread this belongs in, so this one wins.

I unknowingly opened a Breitbart article about a recent shooting in Texas, via Google news. This particular ad seems especially tasteless given the context of the article. Can’t say I’m surprised at all.

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1617

So much for America being the beacon of science, where the best and brightest from all over the world came to study and research:

Today, we learned that Trump is suspending the issuance of US visas to people from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Iran (but strangely not Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Wahhabist terrorism). This suspension might last just 30 days, but might also continue indefinitely—particularly if, as seems likely, the Iranian government thumbs its nose at whatever Trump demands that it do to get the suspension rescinded.

So the upshot is that, until further notice, science departments at American universities can no longer recruit PhD students from Iran—a country that, along with China, India, and a few others, has long been the source of some of our best talent. This will directly affect this year’s recruiting season, which is just now getting underway. (If Canada and Australia have any brains, they’ll snatch these students, and make the loss America’s.)

But what about the thousands of Iranian students who are already here? So far, no one’s rounding them up and deporting them. But their futures have suddenly been thrown into jeopardy.

Right now, I have an Iranian PhD student who came to MIT on a student visa in 2013. He started working with me two years ago, on the power of a rudimentary quantum computing model inspired by (1+1)-dimensional integrable quantum field theory. You can read our paper about it, with Adam Bouland and Greg Kuperberg, here. It so happens that this week, my student is visiting us in Austin and staying at our home. He’s spent the whole day pacing around, terrified about his future. His original plan, to do a postdoc in the US after he finishes his PhD, now seems impossible (since it would require a visa renewal).

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3167

1618

He’s not alone. Millions of people are terrified of what Trump will do. I’m sure it’s doing wonders for their production, and the economy will start to reflect it soon enough.

1619

The virulent anti-environmental policies of the current administration were going to happen under any Republican president; the GOP is after all just a fully owned subsidiary of resource extraction companies. The US House and red states have been passing bills and riders of this ilk for years now (much of it written by ALEC.) That Trump is rubber stamping this is no surprise, but it would not have been any different if Rubio or Romney were president (which is not to say Trump isn’t far worse for any number of other reasons.)

Edit: Quoting a post from a different forum that summarizes the impact of the EPA gag order.

Alright, so two things are happening here.

First, “a temporary suspension of new business activities at the EPA, including issuing work assignments to contractors” means that they have basically halted all EPA activities. The administration has crippled the EPA.

Second, the gag order makes it illegal for them to talk to anyone about it.

Aside from the aforementioned planned shift to have the agency go through the White House for future communications, what does halting all EPA activities mean, at this moment?

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act now have no primary regulatory or enforcement body. Let that sink in for a minute.

The EPA, their primary regulatory and enforcement body, isn’t taking any new business.

That means that for the time being, any violations will not be subject to primary scrutiny or enforcement. Secondary Organizations can’t step up because the EPA still technically exists, so it can’t automatically be bypassed thanks to procedural rules. As long as this order stands, State EPAs are the thin Green Line in terms of protecting the environment. But that’s dependent on not only the strength of the EPA state by state, but each state’s corresponding Environmental Regulations, as the State EPAs won’t be able to enforce on Federal Statutes due to the EPA still technically existing.

It’s really bad. Like really bad.

1620

Sooo, he announces a hiring freeze one day, then gives the go ahead to hire 15,000 new employees across two agencies.

That’s what, a $6+ billion per annum investment in people alone?

Oh, and this is what he looks like while doing it…

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1621

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1622

Random image from the internet.

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1623

Mexican President has cancelled trip to US following Trump’s tweets.

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1624

Good to see other countries standing up to the bullying.

1625

If Mexico is unwilling huh. I thought he had that deal in the bag… sure thing. You know, for those who don’t know how the world works.

1626

I dunno. I’m having a bit more trouble imagining agencies like NASA scrambling to archive their data onto private servers under a Romney or Rubio or Kasich administration. It’s one thing to ignore or sidestep the science community. It’s another to try and snuff it out.

I guess I agree this is what the GOP congress has always wanted to do in the deepest part of their blackened souls, but just never before had the convenient smokescreen of a president like Trump waving his shiny pocketwatch to the media via his endless whining about crowd sizes and vote totals.

1627

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

Several senior foreign service officers in the State Department’s regional bureaus have also left their posts or resigned since the election. But the emptying of leadership in the management bureaus is more disruptive because those offices need to be led by people who know the department and have experience running its complicated bureaucracies. There’s no easy way to replace that via the private sector, said Wade.

“Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there’s just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death,” he said. “The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace.”

1628

This is what Trump supporters want… change. They don’t even care what kind of change they just want “something different.”