Jordan T Becker

Again, you cannot unplug 1/4-1/5 of an R1 university's budget & expect the same quantity or quality of "things" on campus. The math simply doesn't work. And pretending it does & we can uphold our "core values," & not talking loudly & publicly about how it doesn't, is not a strategy. It's madness.

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And the best way to do this is to organize and unionize with @aaup.org!

Join and get involved with or start a chapter at your university.

I have been saying this since the election. Universities need to unionize. Academic-serving biotechs and private foundations need to step up. What does @leslievosshall.bsky.social think @hhmi.org labs will do in two years when they are doing research alone in dark empty buildings on campuses?

I think he’s just not very smart. Maybe he used to have content expertise on 90’s era environmental issues. But his brain is scrambled eggs. At face value, this statement is nonsense. Being anymore generous requires like giant leaps of guessing what he means. He is “not even wrong”, he’s just lying.

This is like if Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Gladiator detailed his lineage at the end of the Coliseum fight when everyone already hates him. “I am Andrew Cuomo. Shitty son of a disappointed father. Loser son of a sad mother. Cheating husband of my every partner. Harassing boss of many broads.”

Another email to Bhattacharya about his interview and his continued statements that NIH's gain of function research caused the COVID pandemic and killed millions of people.

1/8

Amid a potential TACO, remember the eventual goal of any individual measure still exists - they only temper the pace and ferocity pushing then receding until they succeed. Abortion. Muslim ban. ICE. Department of Ed. One Great Leap Forward attempted. Small steps back, but only if noticed.

If someone can talk me down, please do. But trainees are expected to stay up, finish papers, wake up, do experiments, and subsist. But no one in academia is fighting. I hope old grey beards still know how to do bench work. Because in three years, they’ll have tenure, empty bays, and cold pipettes.

Maybe this is just for this year. That will mean revision or subtraction of the next years budget for NIH. Then the next year. Drip. Drip. Drip. In 2029, how quickly would a President AOC, Beshear, Ossoff, or Warren turn the faucet back on? That’s best case.

Tell me I’m wrong. Or call your legal counsel and the university presidents to start fighting. Unless you want every NCAA football game emptier and emptier. No one buying shoes or jerseys. Buying beer on Saturdays. No jumping around or rowing the boats or dotting i’s.

If allowed and unfettered, loss of hundreds of millions of $$$ and thousands of jobs will be rapidly deleted from regional economies. Restaurants will then go up. Stores, cafes, bars, breweries. Then trades will have no work. Rent/mortgages unpaid. Biotech and healthcare. Then radiating out.

In Project 2025, it was clear that the proposed administration would wield and use all levers possible to eliminate the federal government. Those levers don’t yield to norms or traditions, only power and the desire to assume it. No idle university (or college town/region/economy) will survive.

First geezers said, “We’ve seen this before and made it through [2006, 2010, 2017].“ Since February, we’ve been told, “NIH is operating normally. Grants are coming in, grants are going out.” I said on like November 14th, we’re screwed and other funders need to step up. But that’s not enough.

A Quiet Policy Shift That Could Devastate American Science Why NIH’s sudden move to multi-year grant funding should alarm every principal investigator and university

More about the “policy” that isn’t a policy. Most ICs haven’t updated their funding policy websites, but NCI describes the “recently implemented” MYF requirement in their July 23rd update to explain the lack of payline (but essentially 4th percentile)

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

Bending the knee only gets you this. It was never going to be anything different. University leaders who surrender don't just sell out their own institutions and communities, they encourage the persecution of others, as well

“Say Don, I hear you like ‘em young. You better not ever release video from Little Saint James”

Reposting to ask if anyone has been able to download the whole library “just in case”.

Sorry. Awesome! As above, insects aren’t known for having red blood cells - but perhaps these are from the blood meal of a mammal/bird?

I am increasingly of the mind (especially if it’s on Bluesky and suspect ai/crypto/racist/etc) that I want to call it out and if I’m wrong I’ll own it. On Bluesky, if it’s off - say something and we’ll figure it out. If I can “yes and” anyone calling out slop/bs/hate, I’ll do it.

They definitely don’t. Don’t want to speculate but render is doing a lot of work that I hope isn’t just “AI” slop. No one needs this animation regardless.

Yo, fuck those people. Shoot em like a dog. Drown em like a kid.”

We gotta get this ai slopbot on the major block lists.

@majorityreport.bsky.social This thread!!!

We have decided to ban the use of GenAI for research, writing & creative work at our organization.

In fact, we make people sign an agreement saying that their research, analysis, writing, and creative work are *theirs* and not done by GenAI.

This is correct. Any candidate cynically “triangulating” on trans kids is a non-starter, and now is the time to say so. There’s still so much time to advance candidates that DON’T suck.

Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor It is the tech oligarchs, not young radicals, who have turned against the system that made them.

“They have betrayed the society that enriched them, and have put us at serious risk of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, lawlessness, and stagnation. They have betrayed the values that made that society great, values which they apparently only ever held superficially”

Some say, “Things are operating normally at the NIH. Grants are going out. Study sections are meeting.”

And yet, the water seems warmer today than yesterday. And now that I think about it felt warmer yesterday than the day before. Probably nothing to worry about.