[FRIAM] MUsk + trUMP's = MUMPS

[steve smith]

Nick:

As you may know already, we are peas in a pod.   I remind everyone here 
gently from time to time in various ways to use their <delete> keys with 
my missives of questionable merit.

As I age (grow more wise, more complex, more ??) I recognize that my 
ideations (too much encouraged/supplemented these days by my bar friend 
GPT) are perhaps "all over the place" relative to other's sensibilities.

When I saw your (and George's) cartoon, I had a sense of "I guess I had 
to be there", which is why I offered you my parsing.... even though we 
all know that "a joke should never be explained"...

I also know (from bits of feedback from various quarters) that fractions 
of my nonsense are parsed and appreciated but not (publicly) 
acknowledged.   I think you should continue (as you do) to share what 
you might, as you must...  even to deafening silence?

:Steve

> Steve, and others,
>
> 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.
>
> Nick
>
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>
>>     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.
>>
>     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.
>
>     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?
>
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>
> -- 
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthompson at clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
>
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