- How Thomas L. Friedman has never been more afraid for our country’s future;
- How RFK Jr.’s claims about autism are nonsense;
- And a deep piece at NYT about migration patterns around the world.
As with the manufacturing jobs item yesterday, Trump wants to bring back *coal mining*.
NY Times, Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman, 15 Apr 2025: I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future
So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”
The last comments are especially nonsensical; how does Trump know? Conservatives have an odd penchant for presuming to know what others think (and how they should behave).
This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.
He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day — and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”
But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned. Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.
The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.
Followed by details of how other nations will be treating America. And how China *does* have long-term strategies, unlike Trump.
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The latest nonsense from RFK Jr.
Washington Post, 17 Apr 2025: RFK Jr. said autistic people don’t work or play sports. They say he’s wrong., subtitled “The health and human services secretary on Wednesday suggested that autistic children would never play baseball or pay taxes, enraging those in the community.”
Autistic people and their loved ones have swiftly and publicly rejected statements by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, that people with autism will never play baseball, date, pay taxes or have a job.
They say the health and human services secretary’s comments Wednesday, during his first official news conference, misstate the capabilities of many people with autism — and they flooded social media with counterexamples.
ABC News, 17 Apr 2025: RFK Jr.’s comments on autism draw reactions from parents and experts
“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children,” he said at an HHS press conference in Washington, D.C.
Autism advocates were dismayed to hear Kennedy’s blanket characterization of children with autism: “They’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
This is *nonsense*; it applies to only to the extreme cases, and if recent statistics were filtered to divide those extreme cases from the many more cases that have been identified in recent decades under relaxed guidelines for identifying autism (it’s a spectrum, as they say), I would bet money that the number of such extreme cases has *not* increased. What’s increased is the number of cases of people (like me) who exhibit some elements of autism — in my case, a relative lack of sociability, and an extreme distaste for crowds and noisy environments, and I suppose my distaste for sports, which some people think is some kind of disorder. (As I alluded to in my discussion of that famous Mark Haddon novel, here.)
And it’s a peculiarly American arrogance that it occurs to no one to wonder, what about autism rates in other countries?
Scientific American, Stephanie Pappas, 17 Apr 2025: RFK, Jr. Is Wrong about Cause of Rising Autism Rates, Scientists Say, subtitled “Autism rates are rising, but RFK, Jr. is wrong about the reasons. Here’s what the science says”
But Kennedy’s greatest breach with the scientific consensus was likely his insistence that autism is an “epidemic” that must be caused by an environmental exposure that has been introduced within the past several decades. In fact, researchers say, autism is between 60 and 90 percent heritable. And in up to 40 percent of cases, doctors can find a specific set of genetic mutations to explain the condition. While there are environmental risk factors for autism, such as air pollution, rising rates are mostly attributable to broadened diagnostic categories and more comprehensive screening.
As has been noted again and again.
Another thing I’m going to say again. Autism is not a disease; it’s a point in the range in human psychology about perception and interaction with the world. The opposite of being autistic is being a con man, like Trump. Just as intelligence is a range between smart and dumb. One doesn’t “have” smartness, one is smart. One doesn’t “have” autism, one is autistic or not. And being smart, or dumb, or autistic, or not, is not a crippling or enabling factor in one’s life.
The real issue is: why is RFK Jr. so obsessed with autism being an environmental diseases, despite decades of research that indicates otherwise? Perhaps it is RFK Jr. who has some mental condition. About needing to simplify the world into clear causes?
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Here is a huge topic, which Americans interpret only through their narrow self-interests. (Though I suppose other nations do the same.) Foreigners bad. With some cool graphics.
NY Times, opinion by Kathleen Kingsbury, 17 Apr 2025: To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First, subtitled “New estimates based on location data from Meta reveal a picture of humanity in motion.
The human species is on the move. Last year there were more people living outside of their birth countries than at any other time in modern history, according to the United Nations. It’s a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations.
It’s no coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for incumbent political parties, as leader after leader was voted out of power in democracies at the center of the human storm.
This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn’t collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
A very long piece, mostly about trends, not causes. Though some of those causes are easily understood, albeit denied by conservatives.
