- The astronauts have returned, and Trump and Musk lie about what actually happened;
- The idea of blaming Mexico for the overdose epidemic is wrong, and will not work;
- Short items about eating less, globalism, cutting aid to the poor to fund tax cuts for the rich;
- White supremacy: Jackie Robinson, a repeal on rules prohibiting segregation, and dismissing human rights;
- RFK Jr spews childish libertarian nonsense;
- And Trump’s war on education, to fuel autocratic populism.
Well, when one side consistently, repeatedly distorts and denies facts, then how can it, as we already know, be on the side of science, which is about identification of truth and reality?
Ars Technica, Eric Berger, 18 Mar 2025: Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded?, subtitled “Let’s bring them home NOW, Sir!”
This is about those returning astronauts, who were “stranded” on the ISS for months when their original return vehicle was deemed too risky. (As Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out on TV the other day, they’re astronauts! They presumably love being able to be astronauts for months longer than planned. You didn’t hear them complaining; their only regrets were missing their families. But the media loves an institutional screw-up story.)
For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months—and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusive stories about this long and strange saga—the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.
In February, President Trump and the chief executive of SpaceX, Elon Musk, began to say that the two astronauts were “stranded” in space because the Biden administration did not want to bring them home. “They got left in space,” Trump said.
“They were left up there for political reasons,” Musk concluded.
Just what those political reasons were was never specified. But the basic message was clear: Biden, bad; Trump, good.
The reality is that NASA set a plan for the return of Wilmore and Williams last August. The spacecraft that brought them back to Earth on Tuesday safely docked to the space station in September. They could have come home at any time since. NASA—not the Biden administration, which all of my reporting indicates was not involved in any decision-making—decided the best and safest option was to keep Wilmore and Williams in orbit until early this year. Musk knew this plan. He had to sign off on it. Senior NASA officials earlier this month confirmed, publicly and on the record, that the decision was made by the space agency in the best interests of the International Space Station Program. Not for political reasons.
And still, the lies came.
With a long quote from the president that makes it sound like he personally demanded and brought about the astronauts’ return.
Things haven’t always been so.
One of the common refrains about spaceflight for decades and decades is that it is nonpartisan.
That is, the Apollo Program brought America together in the turbulent 1960s and helped make everyone feel good about the country. Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight. If you watch committee meetings in the House and Senate, the members always say this, and the discussions are nearly always cordial. As for the “incompetent” Biden administration, they didn’t really play politics with the space program. They liked the “Artemis Program” created by the Trump administration well enough that they simply kept it.
But if we’re going to start lying about basic truths like the fate of Wilmore and Williams—and let’s be real, the only purpose of this lie is to paint the Trump administration as saviors in comparison to the Biden administration—then space is not going to remain apolitical for all that long. And in the long run, that would be bad for NASA.
The current administration makes everything political, paints all others as incompetent, and takes credit for everything.
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Similarly, the current administration is not operating in a reality-based way. It reduces everything to stories about good (them) and everyone else (bad) that presumably appeal to their simple-minded MAGA fan base. This aligns with Timothy Snyder’s comments quoted yesterday.
Scientific American, Dan Vergano, 19 Mar 2025: Blaming Mexico for the U.S. Overdose Epidemic Is a Mistake, subtitled “Tariffs on Mexico and Canada won’t stop the demand for addictive drugs”
As a global trade war starts over President Donald Trump’s tariffs, and Wall Street careens madly downward, what continues to get lost is that this whole mess rests on a fallacy about what’s driving the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S.
In February Trump cited the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl,” to justify 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada. A March tariff-tempering easing for auto parts ditched undocumented immigrants for “[d]uties imposed to address the flow of illicit drugs across our borders” as a rationale.
It’s a lousy fix—both because it won’t work, and because it rests on a fundamentally wrong idea about why the U.S. has an overdose epidemic now killing around 84,000 people a year, according to the most recent preliminary CDC data. While the economic pain of the tariffs and the likely resulting recession would be bad enough, they are the wrong medicine for stopping drug deaths, and might just make them worse. A worse economy will only spur more drug use, increasing the demand that draws easy-to-make, deadly fentanyl into the U.S., and kills so many people.
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Short items.
A variation on “Let them eat cake”?
The Atlantic, David Frum, 18 Mar 2025: The Trump-Tariff Advice: Eat Less, subtitled “The policy’s real message is ‘Tax my voters; enrich my donors.'”
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Vox, Dylan Matthews, 10 Mar 2025: We’ll miss globalism when it’s gone, subtitled “Remember when elites cared about the rest of the world?”
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Media Matters, Emma Mae Weber & Reed McMaster, 11 Mar 2025: “You need to cut Medicaid”: Right-wing pundits call to gut health coverage for the poor
In order to fund tax cuts for the rich.
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More about the white supremacy movement.
NBC News, 19 Mar 2025: Jackie Robinson’s Army career wiped from military website in DEI purge, subtitled “At least one website about Robinson, who trained as an officer and was assigned to a tank regiment during World War II, was reinstated Wednesday afternoon.”
NPR, All Things Considered, 18 Mar 2025: ‘Segregated facilities’ are no longer explicitly banned in federal contracts, or as JMG put it, Trump Order Repeals Ban On Segregated Facilities
Why would they do this???
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Again: The Trump administration doesn’t care about human rights, except perhaps about whites in South Africa.
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Politico, Nahal Toosi, 19 Mar 2025: Trump drastically cutting back annual human rights report, subtitled “Sections on women’s rights and the security of LGBTQ+ people are among those being axed.” (via)
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This is more important.
Washington Post, 19 Mar 2025: RFK Jr. is spewing childish libertarian nonsense, subtitled “Vaccines are not a ‘personal choice.’ We give up some personal freedoms so we all stay alive.”
Or, I would say, life in a civilized society requires sacrificing certain personal “freedoms” in order not to harm others. (This is why I am not a libertarian.)
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. needs to stop saying vaccines are “a personal choice.”
They’re not. Speed limits aren’t a personal choice. Smoking on airplanes isn’t a personal choice. Paying taxes isn’t a personal choice. In wartime, the draft isn’t a personal choice. (Kennedy, who was born two weeks before me, is old enough to remember those days.) Sacrifices are what make us a nation instead of 340 million selfish hunter-gatherers. Each of us gives up some personal freedoms so we all stay alive. Opposing lifesaving mandates is childish libertarian nonsense.
Sadly, our top health official is a childish libertarian.
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And this.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 19 Mar 2025: “No future election is going to fix the problem”: Trump’s war on education is worse than it looks, subtitled “Legal scholar Derek Black: America’s schools are being targeted by Trump in a way that fuels autocratic populism”
Donald Trump is not a traditional conservative. Traditional conservatives respect existing norms, values and institutions. Trump does not. He is America’s first elected autocrat and aspiring dictator. In that role, he views such norms, values and institutions as something to be crushed and rolled over by the MAGA movement’s shock and awe campaign. The rubble of those institutions will be used as fuel and material for Trump and his forces to erect their New MAGA America, which will be a 21st-century version of Jim Crow and a White Christian nationalist herrenvolk fake democracy.
