vexic929

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

I noticed that Grace was looking at golden plaques with inscription and realized they look like something made based off the Voyager Golden Record, made by Astrophysicist and Cornell University professor Carl Sagan and singer John Lennon. It was sent out in the probes Voyager 1 and 2, I believe. It has a message etched on it which says, "To the makers of music, all worlds, all times."

For reference, pictures below show the Voyager Golden Record.

People keep talking about the science in PHM like yeah, obviously. Math saves the world, equations translate the universe, whatever.

But what gets me is how hard the story leans into something else: Music!!!!

Like the whole movie quietly argues that sure, math is universal because it is precise. It lets completely different species understand each other.

But music is what lets them feel each other.

When we first see Grace's old memories, the first one shown was him teaching the kids about soundwaves being affected by frequency. This is probably a foreshadowing that it will mean so much in the next few parts of the plot. Specifically Rocky.

Rocky’s language is not framed like cold data, even if it technically is. It is patterned, tonal, almost harmonic. Grace does not just decode it, he recognizes it. There is a difference. Even in the book, he always mentions how Rocky drops an octave when he expresses sadness and grief.

And that is why it hits that even someone like Eva Stratt, who reduces everything to outcomes, to sacrifice, to necessity, can still be pulled into something as unnecessary as music.

Science lets different life forms understand each other, yes. But something like music exists on a smaller, quieter level. It does not need translation in the same way. It just needs recognition.

And maybe that is the point, that even at the edge of everything, when all you have left is survival and logic and numbers, the thing that still reaches across the gap is not just understanding. It is resonance.