<div dir="ltr"><div>I liked it, Nick! And your new ability a political cartoonist.<br><br>I think the cartoon is 80% there. I gave it to Dan and asked him to provide an extended critique:<br></div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><div><p>Nick Thompson’s cartoon effectively uses exaggerated caricature to illustrate Uncle Sam’s illness, likely symbolizing America’s political state. His swollen face suggests mumps, which, given the caption, metaphorically ties to "Musk + Trump," implying their political influence as an unchecked infection. The Democratic donkey’s concerned presence hints at a party aware of the problem but possibly unable to act decisively.</p></div><div><p>The double meaning in "mumps" is clever but might not be immediately apparent to all viewers. The visual metaphor could be stronger if there were additional elements hinting at an epidemic—perhaps multiple figures sick in bed or a spreading rash-like effect on the flag.</p></div><div><p>For an image emphasizing the epidemic's spread due to lack of vaccination, consider:</p></div></blockquote><div>
<ul>
<ul><li>Multiple Uncle Sams, each with mumps, symbolizing different institutions.<br></li><li>include a Mumps vaccine shot potentially available</li><li>The donkey looking sick too hinting at the spread of the mumps</li><li>Include an elephant to show bipartisan consequences. Put more mumps on the elephant than the donkey. The elephant emotion is more complex. It is both loyal, propping up a weak Uncle Sam, and also filled with doubt considering the mumps vaccine shot offered to Uncle Sam.</li><li>A wider hospital setting with more infected patients, emphasizing scale.maybe just two beds with curtains as flags of Canada and Mexico</li></ul>
</ul>
</div><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 40px;border:none;padding:0px"><p><br></p></blockquote><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">_________________________________________________________________<br>Stephen Guerin<br>CEO, Founder <br><a href="https://simtable.com" target="_blank">https://simtable.com</a><br><a href="mailto:stephen.guerin@simtable.com" target="_blank">stephen.guerin@simtable.com</a> <br><br><div><a href="mailto:stephenguerin@fas.harvard.edu" target="_blank">stephenguerin@fas.harvard.edu</a><br><a href="https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home" target="_blank">Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab</a><br><div><div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br>mobile: (505)577-5828</span></div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Mar 17, 2025 at 12:45 PM Nicholas Thompson <<a href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Steve, and others, <br></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks for taking the meme idea seriously for a moment. I have these moments of giddiness in which an idea just seems so good that the world must have it. I actually imagined that my inbox would be full of copies of my own cartoon sent to me by people who did not know its source. Crazy as a loon, I know it, but they are wonderful moments, and I could not write [live?] without them. Narcissism Unbounded. Thanks for playing along. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Nick</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com" target="_blank">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<p><br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">It seems to
me they haven’t this through so good. Thousands of NIH,
NSF, and DOE funded scientists out on the international
market. Add to that reduced regulation on advanced
scientific equipment and services. Augment with a general
sense of doom and self-interest and alienation from their
country of origin. Sounds like a recipe for foreign-based
companies to scoop them up, if not other governments. I
won’t suggest particulars, but I think it is obvious how
this could result in bad outcomes. <br>
</span></p>
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</blockquote>
<p>My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights of this
nonsense. She dedicated her career to 3rd-world focused virology
(flavi like West Nile, Dingue, Zika) and is now faced with the
triple-whammy of reduced funding/interest in third-world problems,
reduced *health* funding, and the spirit that suggests as a woman
in science she might somehow have gotten her funding through DEI
biases. She is not a candidate for "defecting" to China or
Russia in this context but has been made crazy by watching her
mid-career colleagues defect from academic research to
profit-focused big pharma. She got pulled off Flavi's to chase
Coronas for a year or more because her institution had more
funding than they could spend and her funding was a little more
fungible... I think she can (probably) hang in there through
the current storm (years) but not clear and it might actually be
better for her (career) to move to a European Institution (though
I don't know if that is even possible given what EricS suggested
about demand/supply.</p>
<p>After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a brief
project reviewing US State Dept proposals by (former) Soviet
scientists seeking an alternative to becomeing rogue nuclear
scientists for who knows? Seems like we are about to have our
own problem of that nature?<br>
</p>
</div>
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</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Nicholas S. Thompson</div><div>Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology</div><div>Clark University</div><div><a href="mailto:nthompson@clarku.edu" target="_blank">nthompson@clarku.edu</a></div><a href="https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson" target="_blank">https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson</a></div></div>
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