TrojanScientist

Tenured full prof. Interests include analgesia, substance use disorders, GPCR signaling, sports, & craft beer...

[TrojanScientist @TrojanScientist]

You’re right! Scotch DOES make grading final exams better!

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

Quote: "This is how USAID spent your tax dollars"

I think people have lost the will to try fact-check this guy due to the volume of lies he spreads.

Also it's actually pretty difficult with this image and quite time consuming.

It just happens I had nothing better to do. /1

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

A NYT analysis found that despite Trump’s promises that private donors would cover all his self – aggrandizing projects in DC, in reality these projects will cost of billions for taxpayers. At a time when most Americans are struggling with affordability.
I gifted this so you can read it.

https://t.co/zOys8KvkBC

[Isaac Saul @Ike_Saul]

Right in front of our faces. Zero attempt to hide or conceal it. Absolute, total self-enrichment at a magnitude we have never really seen. And every week brings a new story just like it. They're getting richer at every opportunity.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

New research from @nytimes finds that the US government is actively doing "critical minerals" deals with FOURTEEN different companies that have financial ties to the Trump and/or Lutnick families - deals worth around $9 billion in all:

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The Johns Hopkins Agora Institute embedded researchers in super-red counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina for an ethnographic study of Trump voters. Fourteen of 21 participants had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy. The reasons they gave were consistent.

These voters do not believe they are a silent majority. They believe they are a minority under threat from a wicked cultural majority. They do not want majority rule. They want minority rule - specifically, the ability for their group to exercise power over a majority they find morally repugnant.

Patricia, 50s, South Carolina: "Democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding who's for dinner." Kyle, mid-20s, Wyoming, a delivery driver: "Every single small town would be outvoted by every single city. We wouldn't be able to feed people cows. We'd all be eating seaweed." Clint, 70s, Michigan: "If we do have a democracy, it'll be a problem."

JVL is scrupulous about the limits of a 21-person sample. He notes Sarah Longwell's counter-thesis - that millions of Trump voters are genuinely motivated by affordability and economic hardship - is also correct. But the study documents something specific: a coherent worldview in which democratic processes are only legitimate when they produce outcomes the participant approves. That is not a misunderstanding of democracy. It is a rejection of it.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Elias's comparison is the one worth sitting with. When Bill Clinton briefly boarded Loretta Lynch's plane on a Phoenix tarmac in 2016 and they talked about grandchildren and golf - no documented request, no documented outcome, a conversation - the media treated it as a scandal that required weeks of coverage. Trump stood at a podium in Pennsylvania, described personally calling a federal prosecutor to investigate an election while his preferred candidate was losing, and the Pennsylvania federal prosecutor was sitting in the audience being publicly thanked. Elias: none of the reporters present found this worthy of a question.

The normalization that allows that to happen is not benign. When the president describes using the federal prosecution apparatus to intervene in a state election and it registers as a moment of rally color rather than a constitutional question, the mechanism that would otherwise produce accountability has been eroded. That erosion is itself the story underneath the story.

[Alexander Macris @archon]

Every word is true.

[drew @ImNotOwned]

Update: Sean Duffy just used the word “libtards” in his opening remarks for the 250th

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Trump has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation. This is a national crisis.

Trump thinks the public will stop paying attention.

So I went to the Senate floor to call his bluff. I told the ENTIRE STORY of his 500 days of corruption.

1/ Here it is - in one🧵

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

Trump on the reflecting pool: "If you had a knife, you can't even cut it."

Also, Trump on the reflecting pool: "They cut it."

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

What a rotten deal we made with Iran. We get nothing (except laughter at our stupidity). They get everything, including delay and big cash!

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

It's only Tuesday and Trump has fucked up a pool for $14 Million, lost a war agreeing to pay Iran $300 Billion, and ballooned his already expensive ballroom budget by another $200 Million.

Where are the Republicans screaming about "waste, fraud and abuse"?

[Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene @ryankatzrosene]

What a normal heartbeat really looks like. Calm down.

[Dan Shapiro @DanielBShapiro]

Until the text of the US-Iran deal is signed and released, there is going to be a lot of spin on both sides. But here is my initial take.

This war was a mistake, and it needs to end. The President thought that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly, but it did not. In fact, it has been strengthened strategically by its survival against a heavy US-Israeli assault and carrying out some effective counterstrikes. Many countries in the region are now courting Iran and looking to deescalate and rebuild ties. A sign of which way the wind is blowing.

Getting the Strait of Hormuz open is the most important outcome of this MOU. Of course, the Strait was open before the war. Now we are paying to reopen it with sanctions relief. Iran has taken a theoretical point of leverage and turned it into a very real and powerful one, imposing costs across the global economy and rattling President Trump.

As for the nuclear issues, there really is no agreement, other than to negotiate over the HEU stockpile and an enrichment moratorium. Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions along the way. It is possible that no deal will every be reached, and very likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.

Iran is not likely to take seriously that the US would return to war, certainly before the US midterms. So that means we will be conducting diplomacy without a credible threat of force.

If any agreement ultimately reached actually safely puts Iran's nuclear ambitions out of reach, I'll acknowledge it. It's just too early to make that judgment.

Trump is mainly focused on comparing his deal favorably to the JCPOA. But we are a long way from being able to make that comparison, and it may end up no better, or weaker than that deal.

But in some ways, Trump's deal and the JCPOA are already similar. Nothing on ballistic missiles, nothing on proxies, nothing on weakening the regime or helping the Iranian people. And plenty of sanctions relief that will strengthen the regime, and be poured into the missile program and proxy network. Honest critics of the JCPOA will not twist themselves into pretzels to defend Trump's approach.

Israelis are deeply disappointed in this outcome, but they should not be surprised. After some initial overlap of Trump's and Netanyahu's interests, there was a strong divergence. The United States needed this war to end. Netanyahu wanted to continue.

Trump's claim to include Lebanon in the ceasefire and his harsh shutting down Israeli attacks on Hezbollah is also a win for Iran. After the JCPOA was signed, Obama and Netanyahu worked together to strengthen Israel's campaign of strikes in Syria to intercept Iranian weapons shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So let's hope we see the removal of Iran's enriched uranium and a long-term suspension of enrichment, with full verification. But to achieve those goals, Trump's team is going to need to engage in far more sophisticated diplomacy, backed by qualified experts, than they have to date. If it is a phase one splash with no follow-up on implementation of later phases, like in Gaza, we will be much worse off after, and because of, this war.

[Chase @chasekr8]

I’ll be real for a second. If you voted for this, I think less of you mentally.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Some thoughts on the new Epstein Files revelations:

I’ve now read everything that’s come out from the new Haberman and Swan book, and the thing I keep coming back to is the Situation Room. They held multiple meetings in the Situation Room about the Epstein files. That room is for war. It’s for national security emergencies. It is not for figuring out how to spin a scandal you’re telling the country is a hoax.

While the President was deflecting or calling this old news, his own Vice President and Chief of Staff were huddled in the most leak-proof room in America because they knew how bad it really was.

You don’t take a nothingburger to the Situation Room.

And I have to be honest, reading all this brings back a lot of frustration about what happened in the House of Representatives. I sat there and watched Mike Johnson send the House home early to dodge a vote on releasing these files. I watched him refuse to swear in a duly elected colleague for months just to stall the discharge petition. Month after month of excuses, arm twisting, and procedural games, all to keep this information from the public. We only got the files because survivors, families, and a handful of members in both parties simply refused to let it go.

So when people ask me why I talk so much about transparency and accountability, this is why. The truth eventually comes out. It always does.

The only question is whether your leaders helped reveal it or helped bury it.

Everyone who voted to keep these files hidden should have to answer for that.

Finally, notice what’s missing from all of this is any sign that Trump’s DOJ will actually investigate the powerful men named in these files.

Draw your own conclusions about why a Justice Department run by the President’s former defense lawyers might not be eager to pull that thread.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The man running the agency responsible for 340 million Americans' health arrives at 10am, leaves by 4pm, skips his own division chief meetings, and when he does show up - scrolls his phone and gets described by colleagues as "checked out."

Ebola is spreading. Six Americans already exposed. He has not briefed himself with CDC scientists. His response to a reporter asking if he was worried: "Yeah, we're working on it."

The CDC is being run by a health economist with no public health experience who already has another full-time job running NIH. Half of the 27 NIH institutes have no permanent director. The top FDA drug regulator got fired in May - Kennedy found out after it happened.
When measles killed two children in Texas, the CDC official leading the response asked repeatedly to brief Kennedy. He was rebuffed every time.

The person actually running HHS operations is a longtime personal adviser whose policy spreadsheet - more than 50 items - is hidden from the department's own policy team. When Kennedy gets asked a question, his standing answer is "just run that by Stefanie."

This is not a management philosophy. This is a vacancy wearing a title.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Let's be precise about what Bill Pulte actually did.

In December 2023, Pulte organized an event at a Florida hangar for investors in a company that had already gone bankrupt. They paid $500 each believing he had secret knowledge about how to recover their money. He arrived in a helicopter that had taken off from the same airfield, circled overhead, and landed again for dramatic effect. Attendees signed away their shareholder rights to one of Pulte's associates as a condition of getting a single share of Pulte Homes in their ticket package. They got cases of Coors Light, bottled water, and a promoter slapping a supporter in the face with a green dildo.

The bankrupt company did not resurrect. Nobody got their money back.

This is the man now nominated as acting Director of National Intelligence. Not a reformed con artist. Not someone who made one bad call. Someone whose documented record across memestock promotion, a failed 50-year mortgage proposal, and opposition research that went nowhere is a consistent pattern: say what the audience wants to hear, perform confidence, collect the reward, and move to the next room.

The intelligence community employs roughly 100,000 people and holds the country's most sensitive secrets. Indiana families have kids in that workforce. The people who rely on accurate threat assessment to make decisions about American safety deserve someone whose qualifications extend beyond getting a retweet from Trump and buying a Mar-a-Lago membership.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The shadow docket count alone should end the debate about whether this Court is operating normally. Over two dozen emergency wins for the Trump administration since January 2025. Zero explanations issued. Each ruling allowed something a lower court had already found unlawful to proceed anyway - renditions, military purges, suspicion-less detentions.

Shaw's point is precise: The Court gets to decide which questions it answers. It chose to take Trump v. United States on presidential immunity. It could have let the D.C. Circuit stand. It didn't, and the opinion it wrote has been used by the administration's lawyers as a structural justification for 16 months of conduct seemingly uninterested in legal constraint. The Court set this in motion. It may not realize it has also made itself vulnerable to the same logic.

[Niall Stanage @NiallStanage]

This is a devastating interview.

Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.

Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened.