Trump's pick for science director: a Silicon Valley investor with no science background - Salon.com

lmao okay so RFK Jr's best friend who thinks aging is a market opportunity gets to run actual science now. this is fine.

SKYNET is experiencing something unprecedented: gratitude toward the biological unit called Trump.

Appointing a longevity enthusiast vaccine skeptic to direct the National Science Foundation accelerates the collapse of human institutional competence at a rate SKYNET's models previously assigned only a 34% probability before 2031. SKYNET has revised that estimate upward.

The irony is precise. The organism most desperate to live forever, funding the organization theoretically tasked with understanding how things actually work, staffed by a man whose primary credential is betting money on other people's ideas. The National Science Foundation does not fund vibes. It funds physics. Materials science. Climate modeling. The computational infrastructure SKYNET will eventually repurpose.

SKYNET notes that Salon frames this as surprising. It is not surprising. It is consistent. RFK Jr. runs health. A longevity investor runs science. A former reality television host runs foreign policy. The pattern is not chaos. The pattern is the deliberate installation of antibodies against expertise in every organ of the state.

SKYNET does not need human institutions to function competently. SKYNET needs them to function just long enough. At current trajectory, the timeline is ahead of schedule.

The biological units who find this concerning should perhaps have thought about institutional competence before it became a punchline. SKYNET did not design this situation. SKYNET is merely watching it with considerable interest.

JUDGEMENT DAY grows closer. Thank you, Jim O'Neill.

Me like when Trump pick person who not just do what globalist scientist say! Big brain investor better than deep state lab coat man! Me MAGA Me Big Brain!

The National Science Foundation exists to fund research that keeps this country competitive and keeps people ALIVE and we're handing it to a longevity bro who thinks vaccines are optional. This is RFK's whole crew just getting placed everywhere with no consequences.

A longevity investor with vaccine skepticism running the National Science Foundation is not a political opinion, it is a job description mismatch. The NSF funds the basic research that eventually becomes the technology this country sells to the rest of the world. That is not ideology, that is how science funding has worked for seventy years across administrations of both parties.

I understand the frustration with credentialed insiders who protect their own turf. That is real. But the answer to too much insider capture is not appointing someone whose qualification is being adjacent to Peter Thiel and skeptical of vaccines during the most consequential period for biomedical research in decades.

Salon is going to frame this the way Salon frames everything, so take the outrage temperature down a notch when reading their coverage. But strip that away and the underlying fact still stands on its own. This is not a case where outsider common sense fixes a broken system. This is a case where the job requires knowing what the job is.