Category: Current Events

Fake Science Exposed

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Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 15FEB2025 – Dirty Politics

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Politics has always been an advance auction of the loots able to be transferred to the victor. Very few are willing to go through the process of getting selected/elected in order to actually serve the common good. More are driven by the actual greed and envy. This becomes more apparent election cycle after election cycle. We willingly as a nation abdicate our personal responsibility and authority to the same people to try and curry their favor. We can not afford them, or more honestly have been out of for them and their “services”. As a nation we need to be more cognizant of where our treasure is allocated, some aspects of government require a veil of secrecy, but for the most part let the disinfectant light of day shine. Our political overclass has demonstrated pure contempt for the very people it claims to represent. Mandating equal outcome regardless of personal input, blatant 2-tier justice for politically preferred actions, sponsorship of NGO actions that are if not outright illegal, just plain shady. Let the sun shine in, if we only save a fraction of what is wasted that is something. The very people who are outraged told us elections have consequences and we need to shut up and stay in our place.

Rebuild the Middle Class

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In the comments to yesterday’s post was this one by TomD:

“For a number of years, I saw leftism coming and attributed it to a politically motivated elite with a brilliantly executed long focus political motive. There’s probably at least some of that but the revelations of last few weeks lead me to think that what we have been observing with such dismay over the past decade or so is coming from a much baser motivation: greed.

The revelations coming from DOGE seem to imply a very large and intricate network of NGO’s lavishly endowed from scantily controlled government disbursement programs. Apparently, the amount of money disappearing into these dark and uncontrolled conduits is well into the $trillions.

Everybody close to government is getting RICH and they do not want the trails to become illuminated.”

I think a lot of us who were just plain old patriotic Americans, or what they now call civic nationalists, assumed that the Left really was sincere with all the craziness they preached and that the waste and inefficiency were symptoms of their myopia and unwillingness to use meritocratic selection when populating the federal government with useless people of all imaginable types.

But just like TomD I’ve finally gotten it through my thick skull that for the most part all these people in government are just plain crooks stealing us blind.  And I include almost all the Republicans in that category too.  All they want is a way to cash in on their positions in the machine that prints money and hands it out to those in the know.

I suppose that I should be philosophical about all this.  After all, greed is what makes capitalism work supposedly.  And I suppose if they were just wetting their beaks but still doing their jobs to keep this country healthy, rich and strong I’d be inclined to say, “Well, that’s just human nature.  They’re just good old boys picking up some crumbs from the floor of the bakery.”

But it’s nothing like that.  They’re like Mitt Romney’s company Bain Capital.  They’re selling off the assets of a company (America) and sending the employees home without jobs and without their pensions.  They’re liquidators.  It’s a giant going out of business sale with us as the former employees forced to take temporary employment, boxing up the equipment as it’s shipped off to China and elsewhere.

But for as long as the Merry Go Round keeps turning, they get paid by skimming off of the proceeds from the sales of what’s still left.

Eventually, our bodies will be all that’s left.  And the only use for those will be as cannon fodder for the forever wars that still bring in value to the people running the show.  And that’s why Ukraine and the Middle East and Taiwan are always in the news and why we still have to hear about how important democracy is.  They need our sons to suit up and fly to the desert and die in the heat.

And that’s why we should hate these people with all the hate we can manufacture.  To them we’re cattle and that’s all.  They feel not the least kinship toward us and we should not have the least compunction about them failing, losing their jobs or anything else.  Hearing about how NGOs are laying off people means less than nothing to me.  In fact, I’m overjoyed to hear about some Harvard graduate who was making mid-six figures working for a George Soros “open society” NGO shocked and dismayed to be out of work and stuck with a huge mortgage on a five-million-dollar house in Northern Virginia.

Compare his plight to a family that’s been living for the last two hundred years in Ohio or Pennsylvania while the industries that were located there systematically relocated to China and left the working class more and more desperate and poor.  Trump has looked at what is going on and clearly seen the liquidation game for what it is.  If the rest of his team are smart, they’ll see that their only hope (and ours) is to continue this process to force the corporations to invest in us.  To quote a mythical small town American, “this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”

Call it populism, nationalism, whatever -ism you care to.  This used to be a great nation.  A balance has to be struck that allows for a prosperous middle class.  Instead, the masters of the universe think they can settle into a feudal system with them at the top and us as the serfs.  I think it’s time we let them know that if this is going to be feudalism then we might as well bring the time up to the French Revolution and make a big old bonfire out of their cool stuff.

Enough is enough.  Empty out Washington, slash the federal budget, lower our taxes, stand pat on the nuclear arsenal, fix all the broke stuff, bring back our jobs, fill up the prisons and rebuild the middle class.

Just a Regular Old Thursday in the Age of Trump

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The increasingly shrill and desperate shrieks coming from bureaucrats and Democrats is truly music to the ears of hard-pressed taxpayers everywhere.  DOGE has found the mother lode and shutting off the spigots that siphon off billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the coffers of cronies and crooks at NGOs around the world is the greatest act of American patriotism since the Revolutionary War was fought by an army of ragtag lunatics two hundred and fifty odd years ago.  If Trump follows up on all of the executive orders he’s written and defends them against the fake judges attacking from all sides he has the potential of getting his face (and hair) on Mt. Rushmore.

And now he’s beginning to address Ukraine.  He’s begun discussions with Putin and Zelensky.  That’s going to be a long story but he’s begun well.  Those negotiations will be long and difficult.  A war that’s killed over a million men isn’t ended by turning a switch.  The Russians and the Ukrainians are fighting a grudge war and even though it’s going against the Ukrainians they haven’t given up yet.  In their desperation they might try some pretty awful things and that would make the Russians even angrier.  Probably the smartest course for us is to convince Ukraine that the longer this thing goes, the worse will be the eventual outcome for them.  Of course, most of this is the fault of American neo-cons who were responsible for the color revolution that installed the crazies in Kiev.  If we hadn’t provided them with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of arms and assurances that they would win, they never would have taken on the Russian bear and they would still have all of their land and all of their men.  Crazy.

So, what’s next?  We’ve become so jaded that we expect every day will include another Trumpian miracle.  Another attack on the Left and its stooges.  Well, they keep coming.  Gabbard and Kennedy are in office and Patel was just advanced to the full Senate for a vote.  All of that is going well.  I read that the Justice Department has halted the prosecution of New York Mayor Adams and because of that the lead federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York resigned in protest.  Well, if she can’t have her politically motivated prosecution, she’s gonna take her ball and go home.  Boo Hoo!

As Chemist mentioned in the comments yesterday, DOGE thinks they can shave trillion dollars off the price tag for social security and the other entitlements.  That’s not all the way to where we have to get but it’s about 40% of the way there.  That’s definitely nothing to sneeze at.  So initial indications are that the Trump administration and the Congressional Republicans are moving in the right direction to start fixing some of the biggest problems that plague us.  It’s hard to be critical of what’s going on so far.

In other news tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and I’ve agreed to spring for some Thai food and treat Camera Girl to a drive in my luxury sedan (well sort of) around the beautiful Dunwich environs.  We can make this trip because I spent the morning shoveling slush and water off of the driveway in anticipation of tonight’s deep freeze.  I reminded her of my prudence and diligence in attending to this situation and how her frail womanliness would never have been capable of the exertion and the sheer strengthliness of my manly effort.  She feigned indifference but I could sense her awe.

I’ve added a revolt within the ranks of the good guys in my story.  It sort of came out of nowhere but I now think it’s a good way to add tension and give the main character a chance to prove his leadership and shift the action away from the King of the Mole Men who is really more of a sage and businessman than a man of action.  I’m imagining a sort of St Crispin’s Day speech to rally the troops and head into the final crisis (whatever it turns out to be!).

Next week will be extra busy.  I have three separate extra commitments that will keep me hopping and neglecting my site work.  Such is life.  And so, it goes.

Tom’s World – 13FEB2025 – The Ultimate Pyramid Scam

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TomD

The Federal Government is history’s absolute worst fiduciary administrator even theoretically possible. SS and Medicare are supposed to be involuntary pay in advance programs for medical insurance and pension. I seem to remember having roughly 15% of my wages deducted throughout my life and sent to the Fed, supposedly to supplement or finance my retirement. So, how did the benefits for which I paid in advance throughout my working career become a line item expenditure on the federal budget?

If you are a pension fund administrator and spend every cent the second you get it and hopefully pay retirees from current funds, there’s a name for that: Pyramid Scam, a felony.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 13FEB2025 – $1T

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Talcove from LexisNexis Special Services testifying before the DOGE committee yesterday:

“What amount of fraud can be prevented in the entitlements programs and how?”

“By putting identity confirmation requirements in at the front end of payment systems, eliminating self-certification, and monitoring the back end – $1T.”

A trillion dollars sounds like a good start on cutting the budget.

 

 

Update:

Comment by TomD

Yeah, 1 $trillion as in 10^12th power, is a start. You want to see the logical conclusion of this process?

This is the largest real bill printed in the history of man. When I got the bill, the value was approx. 1/10th the value of the paper that it is printed on. Ironically, due to now scarcity, the bills are selling for well over $100 on ebay. I’m pissed, I bought 20 of them for $1 each and was giving them away as jokes/object lessons.

100-trillion-zimbabwe-front

TANSTAAFL!

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I was looking at the latest available numbers for the federal budget (fiscal 2023).

Mandatory
Social Security $1.3 trillion 1,300,000,000,000
Medicare  $839 billion 839,000,000,000
Medicaid $616 billion 616,000,000,000
Welfare $448 billion 448,000,000,000
Other $502 billion 502,000,000,000
subtotal 3,705,000,000,000
Discretionary
Defense $805 billion 805,000,000,000
Non-Defense $917 billion 917,000,000,000
subtotal 1,722,000,000,000
Interest on the Debt $659 billion 659,000,000,000
Grand Total 6,086,000,000,000

And we only brought in about 4.4 trillion in revenue that year so we ran a deficit of about $1.7 trillion dollars. And that is equal to all of the “discretionary” spending which by the way includes all of defense spending. Now that is a grim picture.  But as the kids say, “It is what it is.”  What we should be shooting for is a budget that doesn’t exceed our revenues minus our debt payment.  So, our budget should be around $3.74 trillion dollars.  Or roughly speaking we have to trim the budget by 40%.

That’s a lot.  But you know, I’ll bet it’s about in line with the amount of waste we could delete from the budget if honest people were looking at it.  Even line items like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are riddled with inefficiency and featherbedding employment practices that a determined auditor could ferret out and eliminate.  If Elon Musk could fire 70% of the staff at Twitter without any noticeable diminution in the capability of the business surely the federal bureaucracy can be pared back by 40% without too much trouble.  Let’s face it automation probably already does most of the work that these people get credit for.

It may not be possible to reduce all that spending within a year or even four years but what is needed is a detailed plan to do just that. The plan needs to be a continuous improvement process that allows managers to apply metrics that tell them how many people to remove from the system on a monthly basis and how the remaining human resources are allocated and rated to determine who stays and who goes.  It will be as murderous and cutthroat as the private sector is.  Basically, it will be hell for bureaucrats and many of them will run away screaming just to avoid the stress.  But it is exactly what’s needed.  We can’t afford to make the federal government a jobs program for the dim-witted and lazy people who can’t make it in the private sector.  At the very least the first thing we should do is lower all salaries by 40%.  And I understand there may be some lower paid employees for which this is an unreasonable cut.  But that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis.  But it’s a good estimate for what we’re trying to do.  And as far as boondoggles, we know there are plenty of those.  Probably not two and half trillion dollars’ worth but still plenty to trim.

And let’s be honest.  We all probably benefit from many programs that will have to be cut.  So be it.  Everybody will have to suck it up to some extent.  Who knows, it may turn out that we can’t have free Chat GPT because it’s really paid for by our tax dollars.  Fine.  We’ll have to pay for that and probably a whole bunch of other things ourselves.  Well, in the words of RAH, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

12FEB2025 – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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If you attempted to access the site today for some period between 9am and 10 am EST you may have seen the dreaded 404 ERROR message on your screen.  And so did I!  A week or so ago I upgraded my site.  I needed more memory and resources.

And so for a day I experienced some wonky stuff where my posting disappeared and my hair fell out and I turned into a werewolf briefly.  But then everything was okay.  Well, today I was on-line and doing this and that when suddenly my connection to the site turned into that 404 ERROR message.  I tried the limited things I could think of and they were completely ineffective.  Then I went to my site host and started crying and shrieking and after about an hour of fiddling with settings it got fixed.

They never warned me this was going to happen.  To be fair it’s more complicated than that.  They didn’t check to see if I had a particular firewall arrangement that has to be aligned with any changes to the host IP address.  But as everyone knows I’m the lamest web master in the multiverse so there was no chance of me anticipating the problem that came up.

Anyway, apologies for any interruption to your viewing pleasure and back to the show.

Stamp Out the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Once and for All!

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The latest EPA scam to prevent energy production employs a favorite old ploy.  Namely, create a full species out of a small slightly differentiated population of some animal (in this case lizards) and then claim this new species is endangered because there are so few of them.  And the difference between the two populations can be almost non-existent.  A different number of scales on their chins or a slightly smaller overall average length or whatever.  Now the truth of this is that every species with a large enough range develops slight regional variation.  And things like color will vary in order to blend with local conditions.  Even over short time spans moths have been known to genetically select for darker or lighter color based upon the advantage in blending into backgrounds that had more or less coal dust in different parts of London in the 20th century.

So here comes the dunes sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus arenicolus) a small drab creature that is part of a family that includes 114 so-called species that extend from New York State to California and from the Canadian border to Panama.  And even more pathetic, until very recently (1972) the arenicolus was considered just a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard (Sceloporus graciosus) which is in no way endangered.  Now government funded biologists live to produce new species in order to have a reason to apply for a government fund to study this new endangered species.  And as you’ll read in this article, the dunes sagebrush lizard is disappearing because oil and gas are being extracted from its home range.

My thought is, “Too damn bad!”

Let’s suppose that what they say is true.  Oil and gas extraction is bad for the very important lizard and if extraction is expanded then the very important lizard will go extinct.  Dead, gone, buried, finished.  Well, guess what.  In twenty years, the sagebrush lizards on the other side of the dune will begin moving into that territory left vacant by the demise of the dunes sagebrush lizards that were just too delicate to make it.  And in a hundred years they will adapt to the exact climate in that dune environment and guess what?  They will look and actually be indistinguishable from the extinct dunes sagebrush lizard cousins they replaced.  Hooray for evolution!

So, my advice to President Trump is to have his EPA not only delete the dunes sagebrush lizard from the endangered species list but also reclassify it as a subspecies of the sagebrush lizard and forget about it forever.  And while they’re at it do a review of all the other endangered species to see how many of them are subspecies with tiny ranges that have been elevated to full species rank just so that their range can be excluded from useful human activities like building houses and fishing in lakes and drilling for oil.

In the same way that Democrats use the USAID as a piggy bank to fund their wish list of stupid causes, the National Science Foundation is a source for endless grant money for things like inventing endangered species and spending whole careers walking around studying these unimportant populations of common species for no meaningful reason.  Being the champion and greatest living authority on the dunes sagebrush lizard should be a badge of shame.  And at the very least should be a pursuit unfunded by the United States federal government (in my opinion).

How Many Generals Has Pete Fired?

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February has been keeping me busy with snow and ice removal.  Three snowfalls in one week are predicted.  And the day job has been hectic.  But I’ve managed to write several thousand words on my story this week which is pretty good.  I follow as best I can in the news how Trump is doing in his epic assault on the “managerial state.”  We’ve reached the point in the dance where various Obama-appointed federal judges will veto everything he does.  It’ll be interesting to see if he honors the decisions or just ignores them.  I rather hope he just goes full speed ahead and deals with the consequences later.  It would be so much quicker to just make the changes and let the Deep State deal with a fait accompli.

I didn’t see the game but I watched a few minutes of post-Super Bowl celebrations going on in Philadelphia.  A mob of inebriated cretinous goons combined their strength to yank a traffic light pole out of the ground, smash it with their hands and feet and then throw into the back of an enormous dump truck that they somehow got their hands on.  Unfortunately, it fell out of the truck and onto several of their fellow rioters.  But obviously a good time was had by all.  Ah, the transformative energy of sports.  I’m sure the City of Brotherly Love will rise to new heights on the spiritual boost this championship will provide.  Well, anyway, the rioting, looting and arson probably won’t continue much past Monday.

The world situation grows more chaotic by the week.  The Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange seems to be wobbling and the Ukraine war grinds brutally on.  Trump’s latest tariff project seems to involve imports of aluminum and steel.  I believe we get a lot of aluminum from Canada.  The hydroelectricity in Quebec makes Canadian aluminum competitive with any other world producers.  I’m not sure if Trump is taking another slap at Trudeau.  I think a lot of the steel comes out of China.  I wonder if Trump is serious about that.  It would be a real shot across the bow of Xi Jinping’s economy.  We’ll see.

I’m curious to see if Trump will give a speech where he lays out his big plan for the changes he’s making to government spending.  I mean, it’s great that he’s shutting down the patronage and pork at USAID and other left-wing fronts.  And reducing the federal payroll by as much as possible is also admirable.  But I tend to think that he has some bigger, more comprehensive program in the works.  Now maybe he wants to wait until he’s put out some of these fires like the judges blocking his executive orders.  And maybe he’s working with the Congressional Republicans to push forward some large bill that contains a lot of the items he intends to use to transform the economy.  But right now, it’s very hard to tell what’s going forward and what’s been halted.

I guess I’ll have to be patient for a few more weeks.  After all he hasn’t been in office even a month yet.  It just seems longer because of all the activity he’s produced.  I’m impatiently waiting for Patel, Kennedy and Gabbard to get their votes in the Senate.  I feel like that’s dragging.  But that’s not Trump’s fault.  The Senate Republicans are a sorry looking lot and can barely keep from tripping over their own feet.  But one thing I’d like to hear about is how many generals Pete Hegseth has fired this week.  I think maybe that’s the metric I would use to gauge the effectiveness of the Trump administration.  Yep that’s the one.