All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell
A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.
Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences. And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.
Now Sabine is far from a conservative. She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas. But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.
She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.
I agree with her. Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science. It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.
I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies. It should be a mighty bloodbath. And that will change the universities too, for the better. They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.
I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious” circumstances. The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition. The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation. Well, we’ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.
I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman’s career under happier circumstances. But better late than never. I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.
| 1969 | Marooned |
| 1971 | The French Connection |
| 1974 | The Conversation |
| 1974 | Young Frankenstein |
| 1978 | Superman |
| 1886 | Hoosiers |
| 1992 | Unforgiven |
| 1994 | Wyatt Earp |
| 1995 | Get Shorty |
| 1998 | Enemy of the State |
| 2001 | The Royal Tenenbaums |
It’s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres. He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles. What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable. You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he’s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he’s on the screen.
My favorite of his films was “The French Connection.” I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip. We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality. Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie. And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle. Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. It didn’t get better than that. I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived. If he had, he would’ve been the only white man living there at the time. It was a very tough place.
I enjoyed Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the first Superman movie. It might have been the only discernible acting talent in the series but he managed to make it fun. He was good in Unforgiven. He was pretty over the top in the techno-thriller Enemy of the State alongside Will Smith but he gave it his all. I’ve been told by film aficionados that “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a very good movie. Well, I saw it but didn’t really “get it.” But I’m unsophisticated. That was the last movie I saw with Hackman.
Based on his versatility and skill I would say Hackman is one of the best acting talents I ever watched. Maybe Brando or Pacino played more dramatic parts. Robin Williams was a funnier clown. Maybe Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis blew up more stuff than Popeye Doyle. But on balance Gene Hackman was the consummate professional. He made the character real and he always stole the show for me.
Well done, Mr. Hackman.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
George Orwell
So today was my scheduled zoom call with the guys. It’s a group of eight former employees of the old firm who formerly used to take the (very) long walk every morning (and sometimes afternoon) down to the cafeteria and back to talk about “work.” None of us was truly Left and most of was were decidedly Right but we tolerated a certain amount of centrism on some topics. During the early years of the millennium, we were mostly hawkish and after Obama got in, we became increasingly angry over social issues like race and sexuality.
But one thing always seemed true. We were disgruntled. Now back in 2016 I famously championed Donald Trump and took a lot of grief because of this. I made a small bet with one of my fellow coffee-walkers and when he had to pay up, he magnanimously framed the bill and hanged it on my wall for all to see. Out of fear of the cleaning staff stealing the cash I replaced it with a Donald Trump million-dollar bill. But the victory was very sweet.
Over the four years of Trump’s first presidency the tenor of our discussions varied but until 2020 they were generally on the optimistic side. But once George Floyd and then COVID laid waste to the country we slid into disgust and the November fake election was the last straw. Now whenever we got together (and after COVID it had to be remote) we uniformly despaired for the future of the country. I guess you could say the Biden presidency was the term of our “resistance.” Personally, we had our good and bad days. And also, we one by one left the old firm. But we valued the Wednesday zoom call and the solidarity it provided. Interestingly the most left-winged of our number had a quasi-conversion and in 2024 voted for Trump! Which we all considered a minor miracle.
But over the course of 2024 it was easy to see that our optimism for the political future was increasing drastically. After the debate it was almost comical how excited everyone had become. And after the election it was something like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when all the munchkins are dancing around singing about how “the wicked old witch at last is dead.” And so as with everyone else on the Right we’re almost ecstatic with the activity and results we’re seeing in Washington as Trump and his merry band rip up all the floor boards in the deep state’s hideout and dig up the pots of gold they’ve stolen from the American people.
And now it’s gotten to the point where we’re so jaded that even revolutionary change is not enough and instead, we’re talking about ludicrous phantasmagorical things like eliminating the IRS and making the income tax a middle school math calculation like everyone pays 8% of their income or making it just a sales tax. Next, we’ll be expecting Trump to announce that dunk tank with Democrats like Pelosi, Schumer and AOC in it that we can all get a chance at dunking.
So, yeah, it’s getting out of hand and that means we’re about to hit a wall and will have to come back down to Earth. And that’s fine. Life is mostly a serious matter and we shouldn’t be walking around laughing like idiots for more than a few weeks anyway.
But even if we calm down, let’s look at what we’ve gotten. We’ve gotten back our hopes. We’re looking at actual good news. There is a way to course-correct and shrink down the federal bureaucracy and eliminate the deficit and defang the security state. These are all wonderful things and way beyond what we expected from Trump just a scant few weeks ago. Trump has gotten the upper hand on the establishment uni-party. McConnell is a ghost of his former self and the Democrats have become a laughing stock without a path forward or a strategy for dealing with Trump other than hoping for some disaster to strike. They’re probably praying to Gaia for COVID25 or something equally injurious.
So, at the call today we all acknowledged that the morale boost from all this winning is an enormous positive result above and beyond any and all of the actual policy changes that we enjoy. Joy has a value. Emotionally, psychologically and maybe even spiritually it enhances our lives and makes every part of our lives better. I go to sleep easier. I wake up more rested and I look at the world as a much better place. Even the bad things are better because I feel more in control of the world and more confident that I can repair whatever needs fixing.
The Trump bump is real.
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
George Orwell
