 Okay, we're back, we're live, two o'clock rock here on a given Friday with Ethan Allen. We're both hosting together, okay? And I guess the title of this episode is Inlikable Science, you know, some people don't like science. There are people who don't. They just don't like science. And we have to explore that today. And you found an article, didn't you, Ethan, indicating, we're talking about one scientist who is standing firm when his department, the Department of the Interior, United States Department of the Interior, diminished his scientific role in that department. Yeah. This guy was, he was formerly the Office of Policy Analysis at the Interior Department and was in charge of a lot of the issues with Alaskan natives and their land use and the issues of climate change on this and was raising a very valid point that these people are in danger, basically. These villages, these communities, this whole way of life is in danger. These places exist low on flat land. The sea levels are rising fast. They're in danger of any storm surge coming over, flooding their villages. There are no evacuation plans. There are no funding to move them anywhere else. All of these things that apparently the new head of the Department of Interior doesn't Hinkley? Yeah. It doesn't want shared. And so they moved this guy in and have him in accounts receivable now for some group getting huge processes checks from fossil fuel companies. Which is very ironic and sort of dark humor. Indeed. There's an environmentalist who's pressing your checks from fossil fuel companies. And he points out there's a whole, his boss basically has stated to Congress that you're using this method of transferring employees to very sort of inappropriate positions as a way to call the department and get rid of people who they don't like and push people out so they'll quit in frustration. Yeah. Well, it's like the Japanese notion of the room with a window. If you have fallen from grace within the corporate structure of a Japanese company, you get a room with a window. You get nothing to do. Just look out the window. And you know, you're retired in place. You're relegated to the margins. And that's what it sounds like happened to this guy. Right. And it's a huge waste of taxpayer money because you're taking people who are talented, have expertise, have talents, capabilities in one area. You're ripping them out of that position, sticking them in some other area where they don't have any expertise or talents, paying them to do that. You've paid for moving expenses and transferring, you're leaving the position. They weren't performing valuable service empty, so no one's giving them services. They were providing, yeah, it's a lose, lose, lose. Yeah. Well, for the country, for sure. Right. But you know, there's a lot of lessons to be drawn from this article. What was his name again in the article? Where did the article appear? This was in the Washington Post. Joel Clement was the director of the Office of Policy Analysis in the Interior Department. So where we thought that Trump's attempt to diminish the government's efforts in preserving the environment was limited to the EPA, that's not true. Right. It's across the board. Here in the Department of Interior, the same kind of thing that is happening in the EPA. Same thing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I guess in Interior, they're saying something like 4,000 positions are basically liable to be impacted within the near future. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me just on the surface of it is that this is really important that while we are knocking around with health bill issues that cover the front page and all the Russia investigation that covers the front page, the first 20 articles in The New York Times every day is about Trump. He had great ratings. Yeah. Anyway, he's doing this. It's quiet. Right. It's not in Congress. He's exercising arguably his power as president to make or unmake regulations and to do this kind of have his people, his cabinet appointments, do this kind of musical chairs kind of thing, effectively pulling the wings out of the environmental effort in the whole government. Right. Right. Totally dismantling structures, processes that were set in place to carry out the unneeded functions. I mean, we created the EPA to protect our environment so that we could live longer, healthier lives and be inflated against some environmental insults and basically Scott Pruitt got up there in front of the Congress last week or two weeks ago and basically tried to defend his request for the EPA, which was lower than any request. I think it's the 1980s for the EPA budget. The agency killing itself, thanks to him. Right. And he tried to make the argument that this lower budget was going to enable them to focus more cleanly on their true central mission and carry it out more effectively. So Jay, if I take away two of your cameras here and a half your lights, is think that going to be able to focus more clearly on doing what it is they do? Well, it's more than a crock. It's a lie. Yeah. It's a lie. It's pervasive, rather, through this administration that people lying is becoming the new normal for the officials around Trump. Trump points. Right. And this is a real problem when it comes to science because, well, science does not claim in any sense to hold a monopoly on the truth or even be the truth. Science is a relentless pursuit of the truth. We are always a scientist trying to get closer and closer and closer to the truth and in this sort of wholesale systemic dismantling of a lot of government agencies that support science, the whole issue of truth becomes very vague. Who can you believe it's all fake news now, right? You know, Trump is always claiming that there's fake news everywhere except in his own brain, basically. And it's really terrible. It's destroying the public trust in science. And in government. And in government. Right. Right. And it's appalling. We can't operate if we don't trust our government, right? Unless you're going to have a dictatorship or, you know, trust in a dictator, right? We'll get to that. Yeah. Well, that's... But anyway, I mean, so what you have here is, it's not just environment. It's science. Right. That's another sort of inference you can draw from this article or this event Right. But it's not just the Department of the EPA, the Department of the Interior. It's through the government. And it's not just about environment. It's about science. I mean, he's defunding medical research. He's defunding, you know, all kinds of scientific research all around the country. Sure. The education department is being cut and its efforts to ensure equity and equality among diverse groups are being just flashed. They're being told not to pursue these kind of cases when they've been going after school districts that are handing out funds disproportionately. It's truly... And footnote to that is he's reducing or attempting, I hope he never gets a chance, but he'll be working at it, attempting to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people in the country and relatively increase them, proportionately increase them on the less advantaged people in the country, shifting the wealth from the poor to the rich. It's sort of Robin Hood in reverse. Right. I mean, and so you see all these, quote, savings that he's engaged in, but they're savings where, you know, it's going to endures the benefit of the rich. That's the benefit of the savings. Right. I mean, the healthcare bills that have come out have all been basically exactly that way, is the poor are getting less treatment, paying more for it, having higher premiums, having lower services, having it being harder to get, whereas if you're wealthy and can afford these tax shelter kind of things that they set up, then you can do really well by the healthcare bills. Yeah. Well, it's tricky to be wealthy. There we go. Why didn't we figure this out before? For example, Medicaid, you know, he's trying to cut Medicaid. I mean, it's just gross. On the note that he promised repeatedly as a candidate he would not touch Medicaid. He would not hurt Medicaid at least. And we have to explore at least what we think about the reasoning behind all of this. But let's talk about science for a moment. You're a scientist. And I think science has, in our lifetime, has expanded not only in its theoretical, you know, development and the progress, enormous progress in so many areas, but also in the fact of affecting our lives. Can you talk about that? Right. It's pervasive now. I mean, every day we're using science and technology more and more. We've all got our cell phones. We've got computers. I mean, this studio here that we're in is filled with a gazillion dollars worth of high-tech fancy equipment, you know, 30 years ago virtually none of this would have been available in any except in a crude as possible way. The cars we drive now have very fancy electronics, right? You can't, nobody can go and fix their own cars anymore, right? You can't get out your little, yeah, you can't get out your little gapper and do your spark plugs and that kind of stuff, you know? It's light years from what it was, you know, even 50 years ago. And with science and technology being ever more deeply and pervasively intertwined in our daily lives, it's very important that we teach our kids and we all gain some basic understanding of what science is really all about. And to see this, again, this sort of wholesale dismantling of the scientific infrastructure of this country, the departments and groups that support science is a very, very troubling trend. Well, science has, you know, since World War II, science has done remarkable things and it has become, you know, a central culture point for the United States anyway. It has made us, among other things, it has made us a world leader. It has. And there was a huge, actually speaking of cultural wars, there was a huge cultural war right after World War II with Van R our Bush being sort of leading one troop, one set of troops and I forget who it was, the senator from West Virginia leading the other. Bush insisting that scientists should basically be in charge of science, that they should determine how science goes and the West Virginia senator basically saying, no, the government should determine what science will or will want to investigate. Scary. And we went one way and yes, we've thrived immensely, although obviously, as was pointed out, some people have been left behind by the advances that science made and those are the people who largely voted for Trump, interestingly. So you know, we have communication has been tremendously affected. I mean, we could go on. Communication has been tremendously affected. Everything we eat has been tremendously affected. Our society has been transformed, not once, but continually, since World War II. We have come into a kind of space age by virtue of the science that we've done, mostly here in this country, although there's science elsewhere. But over time it seems to me that our progress in this country has been a beacon for the rest of the world. Absolutely. They have run parallel to it and they've emulated it. Look at China, you know, emulating our science for so many years and now effectively abreast with it and maybe surpassing it. And so it defines our society. You can't go back to Walden Pond and live the simple life anymore. Right. You can't. And there is a very funny sort of tension that is science calls for certain kinds of behaviors that are sort of contrary to maybe the human instinct, if I can use that term. Steve Pinker, I want to read a brief quote from Steve Pinker who put it rather well. He said, the success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic education, anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a senior professor. The mechanisms are more or less explicitly designated to counter human self-deception. People always think they're right and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out despite this ugly side of human nature. You know, I think he captures it rather well there, you know. There are points in there. One is that there is an ugly side to human nature. Remember we have had to survive for the last 120,000 years, and survival of the fittest means that you have mechanisms that make you survive. Sometimes they're not pretty. Sure. Fundamentally, we're all sort of green self-centered grasping beings, right? That's sort of what your genes are telling you to do, to get vibes for the next day. The other thing is that science is really important to take away from this show, for me anyway. The science is a search for truth, for the real truth. And of course, theoretically, morally, we like truth, but truth is always under attack somehow because there's a lot of untruth out there, and sometimes it works, you know, the tipping point goes the wrong way. But the other thing, and the last thing I'll take out of that quote in this discussion so far, is that it's not easy to find truth. Truth is problematic. Truth is elusive. And science is, as a search for truth, is elusive. You have to work really hard. Exactly. I'll read just another brief quote, if I may, from Sheila Jasanoff who wrote this in science and technology. She said, truth in the public domain is not simply out there, ready to be pulled into service neatly like the magician's rabbit from a hat. On the contrary, in democratic societies, public truths are precious collective achievements, arrived at just as good laws are, to the slow sifting of alternate interpretations based on careful observation and argument, and pains taking deliberation among trustworthy experts. And that's what Trump and his colleagues are doing, is taking away the trustworthy experts. They're getting rid of them. They're getting them out of government. So we can't have that. So we can't ever arrive at a public truth anymore that everyone sort of agrees. Like, yeah, we'll all say, like, this is OK. This is how the world's working. They want to undermine all of that. Yeah. And when we come back from this break, we should talk about why. How. And why. Ooh, Ethan, this is getting really interesting. That's Ethan Allen. He's co-host here on Likeable Science Today. He's usually the regular host. But today we co-host. Once in a while we co-host, we have great fun. We'll be right back after this break for more. Aloha. I'm Tim Apachele, host for Moving Hawaii Forward, a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic. We identify those areas where we do have problems in the state, but also the show is dedicated to trying to find solutions, not just detail our problems. So join me every other Tuesday on Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apachele. Thank you. You can be the greatest. You can be the best. You can be the king. Come back and know your chest. You can be, you can talk to God. Go banging on him. Hey, we're back. We're live. Ethan Allen and me talking about truth, talking about science as a way to find truth, and talking about government as a way sometimes that you undermine truth and science. And what's very troubling now is that we have apparent effort by this administration, this government to undermine science and truth. And on the point of truth, there was yet another article, I read the Leonhart opinion piece out of the New York Times every day, and he was talking about an update on their truth matrix, on their lie matrix. They picked the things that are clearly lies, not just half truths but lies, not exaggerations but lies that Donald Trump makes. And they keep a record. They put the matrix on it, and they update it every few days, and it's been growing like topsy. It's really big now, and it keeps on going, and perhaps it's getting worse. And so he's not only in a war with the press, he's in a war with truth. And so we should be very concerned because truth and science are the same. I mean, there is the science of finding truth. So what you have is the whistleblower Clements and many others. I noticed at the bottom of that article when you sent it to me that there were a list of similar circumstances, similar whistleblowings in various other agencies. This is happening across the board. It doesn't require congressional approval. It's just him pulling the wings out of what we have learned so far. And I'd like to make one other point before we go forward and try to figure out why. And that is that, well, back in the day of radio on HBR, we had Jack Balkan come around. Jack Balkan was still the dean of constitutional law at Yale Law School. And I was concerned about Bush, about W, and how he had rolled back a lot of the gains before him, which he did. But his rollback is nothing like Trump. Trump is some way logarithmically more. Anyway, I said to Balkan on the radio, he's a good guy, said to him, you know, can we reverse what Bush has done? You know, is this going to spring back like a rubber band as soon as he's out of office? And I mean, in some ways it's a naive question. He said no, no, Jay, it's not going to do that. It's history and history moves on and always moves forward no matter what. And when we get to another president, when Bush is out of office, we're going to have to cope with what he did. And we're going to have to work and fight, just like we did in the first place, to realize these points of progress. They don't come back automatically. You have to fight for them yet again. And I think we have to recognize that what Trump is doing is much worse. He's pulling the wings out of the best improvements, the best progress we've made in our lifetimes. He's rolling us back to another time. Some people think it's the 12th century, but it's another time, a long time ago, and it's a time that was not nearly as enlightened as we have had in recent years. And so can the same question to Jack Balkan, can we reverse that when his term is up and I hope it's up soon? I mean, we all hope it's up soon. Even the people don't admit they hope it's up soon. Everyone hopes it's up soon, the damage he's doing at every level. But can we reverse that like a rubber band when he's finished? The answer is no. If you pull out the wings on EPA regulations, you have to start again from scratch later. We are actually being rolled back in every way right now. It's very hard to recapture what we've lost. He still has not filled a whole bunch of the government positions that he was entitled to and supposed to fill. He's basically going to let a large chunk of the government die from attrition and that will become the new normal and we'll all decide, oh, it's okay. We can get by without this kind of oversight, without these kinds of regulations, without these kinds of watchdogs. I don't think we can, frankly. It's changing our country. You want to deny that, you want to ignore that, oh, please don't. I don't want to be close to this issue. We all want to just cover our eyes and ears and bury our heads and things. That's a tendency. Right. And like Leonhard said in one of his other columns, he says, if you find somebody who is a Trumper, who doesn't want to talk to you, who actually sort of gives you a kind of a moral imperative, don't talk to me about this because I'm not going to agree with you. You have a duty to talk to that person, to try to bring that person back to reality. We live in a polarized community right now. We should all be working on getting civil discourse as a routine part of, even though that is not being modeled well by our president at all. And now the big question. I mean, I've been waiting this whole show to open this with you. And it goes to this article I found this morning. Why? Why is Trump and the people around him, Manin, for example, why are they doing these things? Why are they pulling the wings out of our progress over the past 50 years? Why are they doing that? Is it ideology? I mean, for example, he's knocking on, you know, right to life and abortion and all that issue. He's knocking on that every day. And there are things happening around this country where, you know, people are trying to diminish, you know, women's choice and undo Roe v. Wade every day. And he's behind that. He's doing that. Not to reverse the damage they are doing to our society and especially these disadvantaged people. They're the ones who suffer, you know. Oh, yeah. The people sort of the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum are the people who are bearing the brunt of all this. I don't know. So why? Is it ideological? Is it religious? Is it political? I mean, have we come to- I think a lot of it's just due to simply the greed. Greed? Yeah. You keep coming back to it. I think Trump and his ilk basically believe that your value as a human being is largely reflected in your monetary value of your goods and possessions that you control. And, you know, those with the money count. And thus anything that brings more money into his pockets and the pockets of his family is basically almost by definition good. You mean he's president to make a buck? Oh, yeah. Oh, I think so. I mean, almost everybody, as I understand it, goes through the presidency, comes out considerably richer than they walked into it and with a lot of earning. And nothing else than writing books. A lot of earning potential at the other end. Now, some people- It's different for him. Yeah. Some people like Jimmy Carter do great. You know, Jimmy's still out there at 91, 92 hammering away on houses for Habitat for Humanity. And I think that's just wonderful. He's out there getting heat stroked the other week from that. You can't imagine Trump doing that. He's not an idealist at all. Well, you know, I ask you provocatively, you know, you still believe that. And the answer is I believe it too. And I'm coming to a kind of shattering realization here, just watching being an observer on what's happening and seeing the literature and seeing the news stories that come out. I think you have a major point there. He's doing it for greed. And the people around him are doing it for greed. And we're not talking about little greed. We're talking about greed as a hundred stories high greed. Right. And it's utter sort of lack of a moral compass. Right? I mean, Trump Jr., when he was presented with this, you know, the Russians approached him and said we have this damaging information about Hillary. Anyone with an ounce of moral sense would have said, let me go to the FBI right away. Because I'm being approached by a foreign power who's trying to interfere in our election. He said, oh, goodie. You know, yes, I'll take the meeting. And to this day, he's never sort of apologized for it. He's never sort of said, well, that was a mistake, or gee, I couldn't get through or whatever. He doesn't apologize for it. Not even in discretions in the locker room. Right. Yeah. Again, it's an appalling model. Let's look at it in a slightly larger sense, because he's not alone on this. Now, there's two kinds of followers, I think. One is the follower who has no clue about, you know, why he's doing this. Who follows him blindly because he wants to see that kind of anti-establishment populist thing come up. He's beating up the establishment, beating up the Beltway. He must be right. Even if you have questions logically about why he lies and does all these really stupid things, that's one kind. But the other kind is the kind that's closer in, like Bannon, who have philosophical motivations, who have strategies and plans that are large, that are 100 stories high. And it's about greed. It's about their view of capitalism in this country. And I want to tell you about my article that I found. It's called, wait, there it is. In The Guardian. It's a responsible news organization, right? The title of the article is A Desperate in Disguise, One Man's Mission to Rip Up Democracy. And it's written by a fellow named George Monbio. And the guy they're talking about, it's a little ambiguous here, because the guy they're talking about in the article is James McGill Buchanan. Who's deceased? But you get the distinct impression, reading in this article, and they urge everyone to read this article. We're not talking about James Buchanan. He died a long time ago. We're talking about Donald Trump. And it's tripped off this book. It's called The Missing Chapter. Well, it's not the name of the book, but the article begins to describe it. It's The Missing Chapter. The key to understanding the politics of the past half century. You have to read Nancy McClain's new book, quote, Democracy in Chains, Colin. The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America. To see what was previously invisible that we didn't see before, before the Trump administration has revealed this. Right, by being just right out front with this, this is naked greed. What was the first thing when Trump met with the leaders of India that he talked about? Was it, you know, the growing population in India, their role, shifting role in the world, pollution issues? No, it was his hotels. And that was the subject of their first meeting. I'm not sure I fully understand the Stealth Plan, but I understand it in gross terms. And I understand it well enough I got to read this book. But I think from the article, the one in The Guardian a couple of days ago, it's something like, we want to use democracy as a way to express our greed. We want to use democracy to take as much money as we can possibly take. We want to be so rich, you know, it hurts. And we don't give a rip about anyone else. And we bring our buddies in, the ones who like us, we like them, we have a little club. And that club, you know, all works together to take the money from the poor and give the money to the rich. And if you start thinking about that as a larger plan, as a James Buchanan plan, as a Trump plan, you know, you think, gee, maybe that's why. We don't give any money to science, to research, to education. We don't give any money to medicine. We don't give any money to Medicaid. We take it all away from the people who can lease the fort having money taken away. We make tax reform that gives breaks to the rich and, you know, does regressive things to the poor. All these things are consistent with moving the wealth more and more into the hands of the rich and away from the regular ordinary people. And this is the scariest thing that has yet surfaced in evaluating what kind of administration we have here. Right, right. Hell. So what can the scientists do? Like Clement did, he would speak out. You stand up and say, this is wrong. He filed a complaint basically not only on sort of a whistleblower thing on him being fired, wrongly transferred basically, but basically that by leaving his position empty, the interior is doing harm and not carrying out their mission that they should be, that they are obligated to do. So, you know, sort of fight with every tool that's your disposal. Yeah. Well, it sounds like, you know, all little elements of a larger plan to sort of defrock the government, to change the government, change the way the government works, and to change the way the people support or don't support the government. And all in all, you know, this idea about expanding capitalism or changing the notion of capitalism, I'll tell you more after I read the book, you know, it sounds like a kind of new fascism. Yeah. It sounds like an industrial fascism, and as we saw in Germany back in the 1930s. Yeah. So, all these are in-disha, right, maybe of that plan, and I think we have to watch these in-disha going forward to see whether it plays out consistent with that theory. Right. Can we see the pattern emerging early enough to do something to stop that? I don't know. Yeah. Sort of helps out. Yeah. Don't think about it. Thank you, Ethan. Thank you, Jay. Great to talk to you on this. Pleasure to always. Aloha. Indeed.