One way to get through our political turmoil is to read but not listen. Trump Derangement Syndrome, something I am not willing to fully understand, is definitely aggravated by listening. I stopped watching television news (and listening to NPR), for the most part, during the election of 1992 when it dawned on me (slow on the uptake yet again) that most politics of that level was purely performative. Bill Clinton was quite a performer. As was Ross Perot. Except for a few duds, the performers have kept coming. Their acts have worn thin.
It was still possible to keep up, though. Newspapers were still a going concern and I read the Atlanta Constitution every morning, beginning with the Sports Section, for twenty years beginning in the mid-1970s. Back in those days the Atlanta newspapers circulated in every county (all 159 of them) in the State of Georgia. Local and regional coverage was good. National and international, too, with very good writers, columnists, critics, and cartoonists all around. A few remain but their reach is shorter.
The Sunday New York Times was available for $1.50 back in the day after a pleasant walk to the newsstand downtown that was also an unusually good source of little magazines, from The Public Interest on the Right to the Monthly Review on the Left and everything in between – I must stop and note that only one of these little magazines remains. Thank you, John Bellamy Foster. The newsstand is long gone and the newspaper does not circulate outside Greater Atlanta. I am convinced our civic culture is dying, or has died, with the daily newspaper. Still, there are a few sane places left, on both the Right and the Left.
Part the First: If a Research University is Destroyed by Abject Shortsightedness, Does Its Fall Make a Noise? And now reading the news has become more of a chore as the attack on science proceeds apace. Yes, while I can understand the misunderstanding because my colleagues are by and large the worst sort of navel gazers, I take this personally. The Wall Street Journal story on the $800 million in grants cancelled at Johns Hopkins University hits home. It is hard to know what the brain geniuses of Trump II are thinking, but if and when the first research university in the United States is destroyed by their actions, it will not come back. I do wonder what Hopkins alumnus and chief benefactor Michael Bloomberg thinks about all this. And what will come of the Applied Physics Laboratory?
A few comments on the FB post attached to the link a friend sent me were typical in their obtuseness: “Hmm so they can’t make it without handouts from the government and taxpayers?” Handouts? To determine how HIV hides out in the body for years? Plus, the answers to a thousand other important questions, at one institution? Anyway, Big Pharma will not replace the thousands (just at Johns Hopkins) of scientists, physicians, biomedical engineers, public health experts, medical fellows, postdocs, technicians, staff who maintain OMIM, graduate students, and undergraduate students, and other national research institutions that are the source of essentially every medical advance. Virtually all this research in the United States is funded by the National Institutes of Health, which dwarfs the funding levels of equivalent organizations. Can NIH be improved? Of course, but the edifice in not a tear-down.
Part the Second: An Alzheimer’s Disease Animal Model with Promise (especially compared to the mouse). The Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis has not yet explained the pathobiology of AD. The amyloid plaques that have been associated with AD are bundles of fragments of a protein called (after the fact) amyloid precursor protein (APP). The exact functions of APP remain a mystery. But in a recent paper:
Dario Valenzano, an evolutionary biologist (my favorite variety of this type of nerd) at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, Germany, and his colleagues have found that knocking out the appa gene, which makes APP, in turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri) reduces signs of ageing…“We found that there is probably an overlooked role of amyloid precursor protein in normal brain ageing,” says Valenzano.
The turquoise killifish is a good model of ageing research because:
They tend to live no more than about 9 months and exhibit rapid age-related brain decline. Valenzano’s team looked inside neurons of aged fish — those about 6 months old — and discovered an accumulation of APP derivatives, including a damaging type of amyloid-β, that aren’t present in 6-week-old fish.
Using CRISPR (the explanatory pdf at this link is very good; CRISPR is the product of basic biomedical research on bacteria) Valenzano’s research group at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, Germany, produced a strain of turquoise killifish that don’t have the appa gene:
Brain tissue studies showed that this slowed cell death and decreased brain inflammation in ageing fish. It also improved the age-related decline in neuronal activity and capacity for learning. “We see quite remarkable rescue of learning in elderly fish,” says Valenzano. “They learn in a way that’s more like younger fish.”
Can a strange little fish that lives a short life in transient puddles tell us something important about AD? I am asked such questions all the time. My answer goes something like this: Without research using the yeast responsible for bread and beer, our understanding of the cell division cycle, dysregulation of which is usually the first step in cancer progression, would have been much slower to come. The same is true of the cell and molecular biology of learning, where pathways were worked out in the fruitfly and a marine mollusk. The paper is here as a preprint (caveat emptor) but I expect this work to be very productive, if it continues to receive adequate support from funding agencies.
Part the Third: Who Funds the Research that Provides the Foundation of Our Healthcare? From 2023, but still germane: Comparison of Research Spending on New Drug Approvals by the National Institutes of Health vs the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2010-2019:
Funding from the NIH was contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved from 2010 to 2019 totaling $187 billion, with a mean (SD) $1344.6 ($1433.1) million per target for basic research on drug targets and $51.8 ($96.8) million per drug for applied research on products.
This was covered previously in Patents and Intellectual Property in Biomedical Science: A History in Two Tales.
Part the Fourth: NIH has paused patenting of discoveries, slowing their use in developing treatments. The article with that title is here; apologies for the paywall but I could not get around it after logging out. Or one could point out that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the source of much of our distress as basic biomedical science has been underdeveloped throughout the course of the Neoliberal Dispensation that began in the late-1970s. Yes, I remember “before” and “after.” I do not live in the past, but remembering it can be a comfort at times. Those who are fascinated by natural history also serve while not waiting.
Part the Fifth: Health Insurance Is a Category Mistake and Workarounds Never Work. Georgia publicly touts its Medicaid experiment as a success. Numbers tell a different story. Key passage: “As of the end of 2024, the Pathways program has cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million, three-quarters of which has gone to consultants.” That may have been the goal all along…this $65.2 million to the consultants?
Part the Sixth: Public Private Partnerships Always Advantage the Private. Also from The Current, Hyundai fails wastewater standards. Salaries to be paid at this megaplant for the assembly of electric vehicles were also apparently exaggerated as Hyundai courted the State of Georgia – more advantage to the private.
Part the Seventh: An Interesting Gloss on AI. From Front Porch Republic. Everyone needs a front porch or its equivalent, just as everyone needs a Third Place to live a good life. FPR has probably never appeared here, but it often addressed our puzzlements from the other side, as in this essay from Austin Hoffman, Artificial Intelligence for the Artificially Intelligent.
Thus, the AI question reveals what is truly valuable. If there is work that we truly do not mind replacing with artificial intelligence, perhaps it was not worth applying genuine intelligence in the first place. That is, if it is only worth doing by AI, maybe it is not worth doing. If an AI can replace teams of HR delegates answering pointless questions and regurgitating bureaucratic obfuscation, then maybe the HR department is a distraction from human relations. If the president or CEO can outsource all of his emails, communications, and decisions to a robot, what are you really paying him for?
AI in medical education has become an irresistible force while I find myself not to be the immovable object I had hoped. But I am still unmoved, so far. I live within walking distance of work, so I have a hard time not thinking about the energy hog that is generative AI. How unmovable can I remain? That remains to be seen. Especially if and when I begin using AlphaFold in my research. ‘Tis a puzzlement.
See you next week. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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correct link to Front Porch Republic article on AI for the “AI”
I wish they stopped giving grandiose names like AI to algorithms. Alphafold is not “intelligence” as much as a really good search algorithm that can work well in searching over what is essentially an infinite space looking for specific objects / shapes / configurations, the construction of which follows well defined parameters and rules.
This over-egging of the pudding with intelligence / artificial intelligence / artificial general intelligence is very grating. Alpha*** is not going to lead to any insight in fields where the rules of the game are not well specified and pre-defined.
Heh. AI is “intelligence” in the same way information collected (and interpreted) by the national security community is “intelligence.”
Shom: Alpha*** is not going to lead to any insight in fields where the rules of the game are not well specified and pre-defined.
The actually existing Universe of physics, in other words. That’s absolutely a field where the rules of the game are specified and pre-defined.
Shom: Alphafold is not “intelligence” as much as a really good search algorithm that can work well in searching over what is essentially an infinite space looking for specific objects / shapes / configurations, the construction of which follows well defined parameters and rules.
Something that human brains can’t do. I’d caution that we can’t know if it’s truly an infinite space of possibilities that these forms of AI survey. Still, they can search through a far larger space of possibilities to recognize patterns instantly than we can.
Thus, put AL/LMs to work on, say, hard biogenetic data or possible arrangements of chemical molecules and they’ll sometimes do things that human brains would probably not do in, maybe, a thousand years.
Put them to work on human semantic data, conversely, which is mostly “meanings,” values, interpretations, context, and such, and they “hallucinate” and produce junk.
Overall, rather than looking at what what AI/LLMs in the technology’s current state of development might really be capable of, people are arguing from their priors, either because:-
[A] they dislike Silicon Valley’s lies or they feel threatened by AI, or else;
[B] they imagine the technology is only what ChatGPT does, which is Google/Autocorrect on steroids.
No. There’s more going on. AI/LMs will exert a profound accelerating effect on some fields of science and some areas of technological development.
This is a valuable and interesting addition to Naked Capitalism.
As to media, there are many alternatives out there at the local level.
You have to look hard to find them.
We really liked X after Musk took it over as a means of finding local video’s almost instantaneously posted, local news and content. Headed to over a thousand followers in a few years. Now slowed down and tricked out by their software.
To get further dissemination of one’s posts, you need to get a Blue Check, which requires giving your credit card details to a company in Israel. No thanks. The solution to using X is to start multiple free email programs and multiple accounts, stay local and stay small.
Having read that article in more detail, I must say that the author is either not a real woodworker or not an AI industry practitioner or both. They make the cardinal sin of accepting at face value the claim that AI peddlers make that their AI solutions produce only accurate results.
There is a far more interesting analogy to be made between the world of commercial woodworking and the use of AI. Woodworking machine tools can produce accurate results at scale on the cheap only with softwoods like pine, poplar etc. With hardwoods like walnut, hard maple etc. one must be always on the look out for deviations caused by the resistance of the wood, and also for increased wear and tear. Hence, most machine made inexpensive wood furniture are like ikea’s catalog, made of pine or even softer composite material. Machine made hardwood furniture tends to follow straight lines and utilize softwoods wherever they can be hidden, or be very expensive because they need hand finish.
Actual algorithms that are billed as “AI” will always produce noisy and inaccurate results when the task or goal are not easily articulated as machine rules, the “hardwood” in my analogy. There might be many fields where this inaccuracy does not matter, and so their use will be pushed, much like we are willing to live with shaky barely functional ikea furniture because we like the price point.
The performance of AlphaFold, AlphaGo and Deep blue / jeopardy etc. are different in that they were algorithms deployed in well structured environments where the goals and rules were clear at the outset. That is just terrific engineering, not any way a stepping stone to “intelligence”.
Part the 1:
“I do wonder what Hopkins alumnus and chief benefactor Michael Bloomberg thinks about all this. And what will come of the Applied Physics Laboratory?”
I would think, he being a generous person, that he would willingly, along with his fellow benefactors, donate the necessary funds to keep the research going. If that isn’t feasible then the university could tap their $13 billion endowment to cover the grants. For that matter, any lost government funding for any purpose could be made up by the generosity of the wealthy.
GF, you are correct in a way. My hubby is a scientist and we see many people getting grant proposals put on hold, ignored and even cut. So we understand, directly, how real people are losing their jobs. But…….. when will John Hopkins start cutting the bloated admin.? Our local University and the local school district I worked in for decades are way top heavy and everyone looses when so much energy is sucked out of an institution via the top administrators.
It’s a mixed bag. Not quite as simple as “Research University is Destroyed”.
Don’t be surprised if they first cut research prior to cutting administration.
I was at an underfunded university in Canada in the 1990s. There weren’t enough janitors, toilets were often dirty, often out of toilet paper, graffiti in the toilets, etc all that underfunding, but, … The administration was doing fine somehow.
“It marked the biggest layoff in the university’s history and involved 247 domestic U.S. workers for the academic institution and another 1,975 positions outside the U.S. in 44 countries.”
I heard on a podcast that the layoffs are due to cutting USAID. With USAID being long conflated with CIA, it’s hard to know where the rot starts or stops. And my sense is much research is now supported and directed at PROFIT. And with US medical / military / intelligence involvement in Wuhan and other labs, and the lies and distortions they contribute, I don’t know what to support. I don’t trust any of it.
I’m sorry its come to this. But it has. Instead of a steady slow burn, we now have a fast burn. I guess I’m ok with it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/johns-hopkins-university-slashes-2000-jobs-after-trump-administration-grant-cut-2025-03-13/
The Hopkins USAID funding was for HIV, maternal and child health and health behavior change communication. These are not projects for CIA cut outs. US support for public health globally is one of the only good things we’ve done in the last decades. And no other donor or country is going to step up and replace that money, so these cuts are going to lead to many preventable deaths and increased morbidity in dozens of countries.
For those of us who continue to selectively listen to NPR, How NIH Cuts Could Affect U.S. Biomedical Research (17 min. audio from Science Friday).
I wonder if they will bring up the biomedical research that gave us all Covid? I kinda doubt it. Then again, maybe they’ll focus on the Biolabs in Ukraine. Well, perhaps not that either. Oh well, one can hope.
Does Part the Third contradict Part the Fourth?
“the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the source of much of our distress as basic biomedical science has been underdeveloped throughout the course of the Neoliberal Disp,…” but
“Funding from the NIH was contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved from 2010 to 2019 totaling $187 billion”
Biomedical science is underdeveloped, but it is still producing a bountiful supply of new drugs. If that is bad, then reduced funding is good. Can you clarify what the deficiencies of the Bayh-Dole Act?
I am far from being competent to comment on biomedical issues, but I do know how to read.
a) basic research is not equal to drugs. It certainly contributes to the knowledge needed, but who says current drugs aren’t being developed against prior knowledge? (possibly flawed older knowledge at that – witness the Alzheimer’s discussion in Part 2)
b) current funding levels are insufficient, but still enough to accommodate some level of drugs then reducing funding will improve things??? 4 is less than 5, so therefor 2 is greater than 4? Hard to believe this isn’t just trolling.
Your intro reminds me of a passage in The Sane Society by Erich Fromm that I recently read.
“In an alienated society the mode in which people express their will is not very different from that of their choice in buying commodities. They are listening to the drums of propaganda and facts mean little in comparison with the suggestive noise which hammers at them.
In recent years we see more and more how the wisdom of public relations’ counsels determines political propaganda. Accustomed to make the public buy anything for the build-up of which there is enough money, they think of political ideas and political leaders in the same terms. They use television to build up political personalities as they use it to build up a soap; what matters is the effect, in sales or votes, not the rationality or usefulness of what is presented.
This phenomenon found a remarkably frank expression in recent statements about the future of the Republican Party. They are to the effect that since one cannot hope the majority of voters will vote for the Republican Party, one must find a personality who wants to represent the Party-then he will get the votes. In principle this is not different from the endorsement of a cigarette by a famous sportsman or movie actor.
Actually, the functioning of the political machinery in a democratic country is not essentially different from the procedure on the commodity market. The political parties are not too different from big commercial enterprises, and the professional politicians try to sell their wares to the public. Their method is more and more like that of high-pressure advertising.”
Another thought from pt. 5 – how powerful is the insurance industry in the US. I was thinking about universal healthcare the other day and was speculating how disruptive this could be to the health insurance industry. All insurance that people normally receive through employment would be obsolete.
“speculating how disruptive this could be to the health insurance industry.”
Not “disruptive”: utterly disastrous. Bring it on.
“All insurance that people normally receive through employment would be obsolete.”
The other obvious benefit of universal healthcare would be that people will no longer be tied to jobs because of the insurance coverage provided with the job.
On the introduction about print, one magazine not only still in physical print but one I find useful is Harper’s Magazine. Sure, it doesn’t always hit the spot but there are enough keepers on a wide range of topics to justify keeping my subscription. I found this month’s Folio (High and Dry: Sobriety and transcendence at Bonnaroo, 13k words) a worthwhile read.
Harpers is the only print magazine I still have a subscription to. In the US, it’s a bargain at about $20 a year if you get the end of year deal. Lapham’s Quarterly is a beautifully edited, print journal but they have trouble with shipping.
I second that! Harper’s is the best print magazine left! My family subscribed since it began, I think.
I miss a printed MAD, but hey, “What, me worry?”
I also agree about Harper’s, which I’ve subscribed to for over 30 years. Another printed magazine I subscribe to and recommend is The Baffler — not a well-known publication, but each issue usually has several worthwhile articles on many different subjects.
On the other hand, it’s hard to believe people actually subscribe to and read the Atlantic.
If only it was just Johns Hopkins.
I suppose we shall see what happens when this leads to grant holders whose work is part of a public-private project, or a collab, and the grant holder fails to honor a contract. Is Hopkins involved in any projects for sovereign tribal governments?
If it was me, I’d load up my most diseased ferrets and slide ’em down my Senators’ chimneys. (Not really. Might be traumatic for the ferrets.)
At least the pharmacy benefits managers are safe!
From here:
Maybe we have thus found the first legitimate use for AI: surfacing activities which don’t need to be performed. This sounds funny but is probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year in any medium-sized country.
There was a discussion of the defunding of John’s Hopkins on French radio early this evening and the commentators were struggling to explain American anti-intellectualism but were never able to get to the grim realization that perhaps, science has been in service to the oligarchy for so long now that it’s lost credibility. The consensus was that the proles need more education on how science benefits everyone. Nobody wants to acknowledge that neoliberalism destroyed the social contract.
It’s hard for America’s Elites to understand the importance of basic research because they already know everything.
Tom, it’s not true that they think they know everything.
But that’s ok, they can become an expert in any subject just by listening to a twenty minute TED talk.
I was told a story about investing in Japan that went back decades. You have a room of Japanese investors and you tell them that they will take losses on the first year of a new project. They nod their heads. Then tell them the same will happen in the next year and they nod their heads again. You then say that it will be this way for nine years – but in the 10th year you will have a massive revenue stream and they will sign up. I think that the western Elites would be walking out the door after the first pronouncement.
The first effect I’m seeing on these funding cuts is on graduate admissions. It’s probably going to be harder to get into graduate school this year, and then much, much harder in the following two years.
Some departments are freezing, limiting, or rescinding admissions, but that in turn means that it is harder to get into other departments, since there are fewer overall spots.
But in one or two years, it will be unbelievably difficult to get a postdoc or faculty position.
My daughter is caught in that crossfire. Double major in biology and computer science, worked in a lab doing environmental compliance for a year, and an internship for a local county on local plant species that border farmland here in the American Midwest. Master’s degree in Ecology. Ph.D. Grad school admission? Zilch. Student loans – (another aspect not much discussed in all of this in my media consumption, might be different for you) out of sight. Result – started new job at a drive through coffee stand because her freelance coding gigs have dried up. (Family blogging A**hats!)
If this keeps up, this starts to feed in to undergraduate institutions, beyond the demographic problems now facing colleges and universities.
The point about science in service to oligarchs is very salient here. Some things the beaded one wrote have been echoing with me over the past several years, and those thoughts are intruding ever more insistently.
I’m sorry about your daughter. She should most likely be getting into graduate school and contributing to American excellence (that will no longer exist).
“Artificial Intelligence for the Artificially Intelligent.”
I’m interested in where this link might take me, but it doesn’t take me anywhere. It also doesn’t yield a useful search on Google or DuckDuckGo, at least on my machine.
Something for KLG’s bailiwick. Starts off by saying the following and goes on from there-
‘Jessica Rojas 🇺🇸💪
@catsscareme2021
Mar 12
It’s being called the largest research fraud in medical history.
Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer’s speakers’ bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.’
https://xcancel.com/catsscareme2021/status/1899964838345941466#m
Part the Fifth: Pathways to Coverage is the perfect name for Georgia’s version of Medicaid saddled with a punitive work requirement since being on a “pathway” offers no guarantee of actually reaching “coverage” or anything else.
Robert Scheer has an interesting interview with Vijay Prashad talking about–among other things–how leadership in applied science is moving to China and Asia. Pure science to follow?
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/14/china-is-better-at-capitalism-than-the-us-and-trump-knows-it/
Part the 7th: I believe the AlphaFold AI, regardless of its name and the associated AI blovations, is little more than a brute force tool for arriving at the structure of a protein given the amino acid sequence of the protein. I believe it’s a black box whose operation is mysterious. It outputs protein structures that can be verified and perhaps corrected through analysis of the data from protein’s crystallographic data before it is added to the NIH National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information Protein database. I guess that is a long way of saying I would suspect that at least in some sense, you are using AlphaFold in your research already whenever you work with the national database of proteins [Related to Part the 1st: What will happen to the NIH National Library of Medicine?]. The DeepSeek AI at least claims to offer some means to attempt backtracking how it arrives at its output, although I do not know how true that claim is. The Rosetta AI might hold promise for designing de novo protein structures.
The problem with all these AI processors is that they generate answers and partial answers to particular questions without offering insight or Knowledge about proteins. They sometimes provide products for near term profit, and generate data to add to the databases, but I am skeptical that they offer Knowledge. I believe Knowledge can only find measure through Human Understanding. What kind of Knowledge is there that is incomprehensible to the human mind? Knowing the answer to a problem is not Knowledge. I believe this focus on the ‘answer’ to small questions is at the heart of the poisonous relationship between Neoliberalism and Science in the u.s
Jeremy Grimm: I believe the AlphaFold AI, regardless of its name and the associated AI blovations, is little more than a brute force tool for arriving at the structure of a protein given the amino acid sequence of the protein.
Correct. Yet that can be very powerful.
What kind of Knowledge is there that is incomprehensible to the human mind?
We are small, finite minds in small, mortal bodies in an infinite Universe. Maybe most of the knowledge in that Universe is going to be incomprehensible to our human minds by definition, therefore.
That’s why we invent these these technologies and tools — starting with language, which is a technology — in the first place.
Come on. You’re smart enough to know this based on things you’ve written here in the past.
The AI programs can be very powerful and human minds are finite in small, mortal bodies in an infinite universe. I believe there are indeed things that are incomprehensible, that cannot be known. I am questioning whether finding a collection of specific ‘answers’ yields what can be regarded as Knowledge. The large databases of protein structures aggregated in the National Center for Biotechnology Information have yielded some of what might be regarded as Knowledge. Ai study of the protein structures has yielded sets of conserved structures and structural motiffs sufficient to support AI programs applying brute force to generate de novo protein structures fit for purpose, with some success. I believe that the human mind is capable of Knowing many, perhaps most of the secrets of protein and large molecule design and functioning. However, I also believe that directed research, with research contracts, too often becomes focused on specific results — yet another protein structure to add to the databases, a specific structure to perform a very specific function, a drug to try for treating some specific disease. As science grinds along, the databases grow, marketable products may be created, but the quest for Knowledge is lost in the forest of directed ‘answers’, business-like contracts, Ghant charts, program management, quarterly reports and reviews, and the hierarchical control and constraint of the ability of researchers to ask questions and speculate on answers elliptical to the requirements of a contract. When the contract is finished, science managers task their researchers to write proposals to win new funding lines for management selected requests for proposal.
Consider what I regard as the standard tale of the progress of Science — the Ptolemaic System compared to the Copernican System and Newton’s Gravitation. Both of these constructs for finding the location of the planets for can arrive at answers sufficiently accurate to support answering specific questions of Astrology and Season. The Ptolemaic System can calculate the Ptolemaic System does not offer understanding of the ‘why’ of the planetary motions. The Copernican System and Gravitation offers Knowledge of some of the ‘why’ and introduces connections between the motions of the planets and other phenomena. I believe directed science as currently practiced is great at what is sometimes called scientific brick laying, but stifles the theorizing and generalizing required to find the Knowledge hidden behind walls of bricks.
David Cornwell, the writer known as John le Carre had a particular book in his quite large personal library at Tregiffian Cottage in Cornwall that contained one of his largest group of annotations. That book was entitled “Lords of Poverty: The power, prestige and corruption of the international aid business,” by Graham Hancock, written in the 1980s. See Times Literary Supplement for more details under title “Spook Shelves.”
Our august Research Universities need to be much more careful about which governmental institutions (for example, USAID) they choose to become dependent on. The autonomy of Columbia University and Johns Hopkins were compromised decades ago when they gladly agreed to participate directly with our intelligence agencies through USAID grants as well as to serve as agents for various types of back-channel statecraft.
You have been betrayed by your institutional leadership.
Talking of really infamous spies, sleepers, moles and even the fictional Smiley, Bond and Bourne, one day Donald J Trump will eclipse them all and make Kim Philby and his treacherous colleagues in the Cambridge Five look like Enyd Blyton’s innocuous “Famous Five”. Why?
Credible revelations from seven former KGB/FSB officers about Donald J Trump being a KGB agent or asset (codenamed Krasnov) since the 1970s were published recently on TheBurlingtonFiles website at https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2025.03.16.php. Perhaps things would have been different if Trump had read the enigmatic fact based spy thriller Beyond Enkription in TheBurlingtonFiles before taking on the US Presidency!