All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Leftist infiltration of science in all its manifestations. Global warming, endangered species, habitats, landscapes and easily triggered tree-huggers.
This post from Laura Helmuth is pretty remarkable. Even the pharmacist who’s paid to spout the party line and would probably be fired if he said what he really thinks tried to help her, But she’s all in. If she dies tomorrow of myocarditis it will be “something else” that killed her, not the vaccine. She’s all in.
These people are now slaves. https://t.co/N7rApIaMw4
— Nick Searcy, INTERNATIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) March 23, 2023
I think her punishment for being wrong should be for her to be put in one of those dunk tanks and let all the non-climate alarmists get five baseball pitches to try and dunk her. With any luck she’ll drown.
Hi @GretaThunberg! Why did you delete this? pic.twitter.com/YRyrCje0L1
— No Bailouts Poso 🚫💰 (@JackPosobiec) March 11, 2023
Nick Searcy is that rarest of rare birds. He’s a gifted actor who’s also a normal intelligent individual.
Gee, this isn’t pompous or self-righteous or anything.
You credentialed lying pricks have ruined the country with your nonsense for long enough.
Go back to high school, Doc. You miss a lot of basic common sense when your head is up your ass. @IanCopeland5 https://t.co/1CnlsPUuKr
— Nick Searcy, INTERNATIONAL FILM & TELEVISION STAR (@yesnicksearcy) February 27, 2023
I thought he was one of the best things about in the series “Justified” and he’s almost the only denizen of Hollywood whose comments I can read on Twitter without reflexively swearing. Well there’s also Adam Baldwin but after those two I don’t have many possibilities left.
And I love the way he deflates Twitter leftists. It’s masterful.
Mandating battery driven automobiles would be an enormous change to the world we live in. It would, in one fell swoop, destroy enormous corporations like Exxon and British Petroleum. It would require the extraction of tremendous quantities of minerals such as lithium and nickel from the ground with devastating impact on the environment that is allegedly the reason for the change. It would require us to sacrifice the almost limitless mobility we currently enjoy for a greatly diminished horizon. And it would require an enormous upgrade in the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure. And hidden in the switch is a higher level of control on your access to energy.
I posed this as a question. But what it boils down to is a simpler question. Are the Millennials and Generation Z so docile and bought into the Climate Change argument that they’ll just go along with this change. My personal experience with these people says the answer is yes. They are a completely different animal from their parents and grandparents. They are easily led into actions that are painted as socially virtuous. They do not possess any instincts to question authority. And they like to move with the herd they identify with. Put simply they’re domesticated animals, let’s say sheep. And this is a generalization that of course has millions of exceptions but as a reflection of the majority of this cohort it is accurate.
This being the case I’ve been thinking about whether there is some combination of actions or events that could change this result. The only thing I could think of is if some states band together and resist this mandate and because of this make owning battery driven cars unattractive. For instance, suppose that the west coast states mandate battery cars but the rest of the west refuses. That would mean that people in the gas vehicle areas would continue to have enormous freedom to travel where they wish but the coastal state people wouldn’t have that advantage. I guess they could rent gas vehicles at the borders of their state and use these cars to travel for business or vacation. And even this would reinforce for these people just how pathetic battery cars are in comparison. In the east, with the smaller size of the states, gas vehicles could quite often pass right through a battery only state without running out of gas. For instance, let’s say that Illinois was a battery state. Someone in Indiana could drive right through Illinois and reach Iowa or Missouri without running out of gas.
So, the west coast, the Great Lakes and the northeast would become dead zones for gas cars and enclaves for battery cars. And the enclaves would put up restrictive laws. They would restrict or forbid gas cars from entering their territory, much in the way they restrict gun transport. Maybe the gas car states would retaliate to punish the battery car states with similar bans. That might be an interesting way to start driving wedges between the red and blue states.
But the funny part of all this is that freight hauling trucks would probably still be running on fuel. Specifically, diesel fuel but probably there won’t be any battery-powered 18-wheelers. Will these battery car states dispense with trucks? Will they start building railway spurs everywhere and use only electrified tracks? I guess it’s possible. But what’s more likely is that they’ll leave diesel trucks as an anomaly, since private citizens won’t be able to have diesel powered cars. After all inconsistency isn’t a problem for them. It’s a feature of a quasi-religious approach to life.
Now, this is all spit-balling. But you can see that this push to eliminate gas powered cars could have unexpected results. And even if the whole country goes along with it, there could be strong reactions to the problems of mandating an inferior technology over an existing superior one. Eliminating gas cars might have the outcome of making hydrogen fueled cars suddenly attractive. These aren’t as convenient as gas cars but they eliminate the refueling time problem inherent in the battery cars. Trade-offs will be weighed and people will gravitate to what makes their lives easier. Even the sheep will choose between the bad options they’ve accepted to minimize the pain they have to endure.
I love the freedom that modern automobiles give us. Being able to pack my bags and drive five hundred miles and go camping or attend an event has become a feature of American life. The fact that the young would let this go to “save Gaia” is extremely depressing in my mind. But I think it’s accurate. Once again, we will witness soon whether the American dream will be sacrificed by our descendants or whether the will to resist still exists.
This article is by a radical leftist. She’s some kind of homosexual that supports the idea of transgender identity seeing as she says she’s married to a “transman.” She also worked at one of these transgender medical clinics so she has an insider’s knowledge of how they operate and what they do to children.
Here are some excerpts from her article.
“The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. ……
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care. …..
Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.”
The writer mentions that Sweden and Finland that pioneered these pediatric procedures and treatments have recently curbed these practices because they didn’t find any value to the patients. And England has closed down its one pediatric transitioning clinic for similar reasons.
When sexual deviants who base their identity on transgenderism reject the practice of pediatric transgender transitioning because of the obvious harm it does to children, it can’t be long before normal people realize just how reckless the medical profession has become with the lives of sexually confused children.
Reading this article about flagrant medical malpractice against confused children is nauseating. The doctors and other involved should be kicked out of the medical profession and thrown in prison.
It shouldn’t be too long before several Red States begin investigating these clinics and then the horror stories will come out and then the law suits and the criminal prosecutions will begin. It’s about time.
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
(from “The Hunting of the Snark, An Agony in 8 Fits” by Lewis Carroll)
Sabine Hossenfelder is a German woman with a doctorate in theoretical physics and a YouTube channel full of videos that discuss all manner of scientific and engineering subjects. Her area of research is “analog models of gravity.” So, she’s trying to visualize things like black holes and think up tests to add to our understanding of these outlandish phenomena. And she’s an obvious girl nerd.
What I like about her popular work (YouTube videos) is that she has no fear of exposing just how dysfunctional modern day physics has become. From dark matter and dark energy to string theory, to futile attempts by particle physicists to invent extraneous particles and then waste untold millions of dollars proving they don’t exist, she exposes the transparent mediocrity and obvious academic make-work that these pseudoscientists are engaging in. They are the hunters of the that altogether mythical snark.
And that brings me to this video. Sabine chronicles the last fifty years of mythical particles that have been proposed and have failed to appear. She describes how the creators of these unicorn particles keep them alive by moving the goal posts whenever the experiments fail to confirm their existence. And finally, she shows how this form of “science” is basically worthless because it has no chance of asking the right questions needed to extend our knowledge. She uses a couple of graphs with data and then the extrapolations associated with these junk science predictions to show how truly worthless this half century of make-work particle physics has been.
It is my belief that the only way to bring rigor back to theoretical physics is to use corporal punishment for failures in achieving successful experimental results. I’m not talking about executions or amputations. Nothing barbaric. I’m talking about caning, possibly flogging. No cat o’nine tails, nothing over five lashes. Barely enough to draw blood. All very civilized and calibrated to bring about the desired results. And I’ll be fair. The physicists can decide whether he’d prefer losing his tenure or being publicly lashed. What could be fairer than that?
All kidding aside, scientific research, not only in this country but throughout the western world, has been stagnating and falling into disrepute. In the social sciences it has degenerated into gobbledygook with the results of the majority of research papers being unreproducible. Doctorates in sociology and psychology are now essentially worthless. Even in the “hard” sciences like physics and chemistry but especially in pharmaceutical research progress at answering fundamental problems has ground to a halt.
So, it’s very refreshing for someone in the academic world to be out there declaring that the emperor has no clothes. Now that’s not to say I agree with every one of her videos. She had a presentation about hydrogen as a fuel, the conclusions of which I completely disagreed with. But she at least lays out a lot of the facts and that allows an informed viewer to judge her opinion based on them. Kudos to Sabine.
On the more general front of scientific research today, all of this confirms something that has become clear. Government money, especially in the United States has turned academia into a racket. Research is a bottomless pit of money that funds unqualified “scientists” to waste resources without any hope of finding the results they are supposedly pursuing. All they accomplish is creating a bureaucracy of people defending their paychecks via government grants.
Other than weapons research the United States government needs to get out of the research business. If they want to incentivize scientific progress let them offer large monetary prizes for successful solutions to practical problems in the engineering and science realms, like the fabulous “cure for cancer” we’re always hearing is right around the corner. Even if the results are more incremental than this at least we would stop incentivizing fraud. Until then we will continue to hear about the latest search for the particle equivalent of the snark.
I feel it’s time for another physics rant.
Somebody named Paul Sutter wrote an article in Ars Technica called “ Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything. String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?”
I have some excerpts from the article that indicate the thrust of the problem with string theory.
“Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered.”
“A group of physicists took a mathematical technique developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion, they found the first strings—mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime. Unfortunately, this proto-string theory made incorrect predictions about the nature of the strong force and also had a variety of troublesome artifacts (like the existence of tachyons, particles that only traveled faster than light). Once another theory was developed to explain the strong force—the one we use today, based on quarks and gluons—string theory faded from the scene.”
So, look at this. They borrow a technique from someone who was extremely smart. But it was a technique that was discarded because it doesn’t work. They ignore the fact that it produces crazy answers and they try to nurse it along by expanding it into more dimensions and other complications. Shades of Ptolemy’s epicycles!
“Unlike its quantum cousins, when it comes to string theory, we have no fundamental theory—we have only a set of approximation and perturbation methods. We’re not exactly sure if our approximations are good ones or if we’re way off the mark. We have perturbation techniques, but we’re not sure what we’re perturbing from. In other words, there’s no such thing as string theory, just approximations of what we hope string theory could be.”
Wow. It’s useless and wrong and yet it lives on decade after decade.
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
They’re paying these people! No one’s forcing them to pay them but they keep on paying them.
“The beams of the LHC began their first test operations in 2008 with two main science goals in mind: finding the elusive Higgs boson and finding evidence of supersymmetry. Four years later, the Higgs was found. Supersymmetry was not. It’s now 15 years later, and there are still no signs of supersymmetry.”
Can we get our money back?
“The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.””
You sure have! And our billions in funding for this clap-trap!
“Most string theorists of the modern era don’t work on string theory directly but instead mostly on the AdS/CFT correspondence and its implications, hoping that continuing to probe that mathematical relationship will unlock some hidden insight into the workings of a theory of everything. I wish them luck.”
I don’t!
We really need to restrict the funds available to really smart people such that only the one really smartest guy in the field is allowed to waste his whole life doing this kind of mental masturbation. This is not physics. It has the same relation to physics as rhythmic gymnastics has to power-lifting. I mean should I get tenure for coming up with the new variant called string cheese theory? Does my background in mozzarella qualify me to expound my theory that the universe is really a large amorphous blob of Italian dairy product? I think not!
The rest of them should be forced to do this crap in their spare time if they want to when no one can see them and during working hours force them to do something that pays the electric bill. Maybe they can get an engineering degree on the side and design quantum screw drivers or something.
Look at this quote again:
“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”
These guys have been futzin’ around with this thing for fifty years and they still haven’t got a theory to justify their paychecks. In China they would have been taken out behind the building and shot and their families would be forced to pay for the bullets they were shot with. Here they should have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Princeton on a rail.
Camera Girl has often told me off for being, in her words, “scholastic-asstic.” By this she means too smart for my own good or more precisely an educated dope. And often she is exactly right. I wouldn’t dare tell her about this outrage to common sense because she would hit me for trying to waste her time listening to this nonsense. She would equate it with ecclesiastical scholars attempting to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. That is if she had ever heard of that concept before, which I’m fairly certain she has not.
So instead, I’m bringing this here for the larger audience to hear. Albert Einstein figured out relativity while working as a patent clerk. That should be the model. When someone figures out anti-gravity or faster than light pizza delivery then we can talk about a cushy office in the physics department at Cal Tech and maybe tenure. But if they’re going to spend forty years of academic salary and perks for this drivel, we need to break out the Chinese model. Who knows, maybe we can throw in the cost of the bullets for free. After all we are reasonable people.
You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
“A New Jersey congressman is demanding an investigation into whether offshore wind projects are killing whales off the coast of the Garden State and the state of New York.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., announced on Friday that he would be calling for an investigation into the increasing number of dead whales that have washed up off the coast of New Jersey over the last month once committee assignments for the 118th Congress are finalized.
In less than two months, seven dead whales have washed up along the New Jersey-New York coastline, local media have reported.”
I have to admit I don’t see how offshore wind turbines are killing whales. Sea birds yes but unless these are flying whales I don’t get the connection between the turbines and the dead whales. But based on the track record of the geniuses in the green clown show I wouldn’t bet against it being so.
Well I guess the whales are just going to have to suck it up to save the planet. Maybe next time it can be the polar bears’ turn. Or the pandas. Thanks Gaia.
There was a giant uproar, “On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion.”
Specifically, the breakthrough was,
“In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That’s the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.”
But, not so fast!!!!!
“As we noted above, the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.”
So, the real situation is that if we expend 300 MJ of electricity, we get 3 MJ of heat in return. Then we can take that heat and heat a hot water loop and extract some fraction of that energy as electricity. Woohoo!
“Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.”
Sixty years of R&D and they’re still two orders of magnitude away from breaking even! Calling this a breakthrough is beyond pathetic. But instead, the idiots in charge of our national energy policy ignore fission plants. Plants that produce gigawatts of electric power day in and out. Honestly, we’re led by idiots practicing to be imbeciles.
Well, what can I say? These people are completely predictable and completely clueless. But at least they keep Ph.D. candidates employed for decades on end. Well, the road to perdition is at least clearly paved. Send in the clowns.
For the last twenty plus years researchers have single-mindedly chased the amyloid hypothesis as the solution to Alzheimer’s Disease. And this has led nowhere. Finally after hundreds of drug trials and billions of dollars spent, they’re waking up from their delusion and realizing that amyloid is a symptom of the disease not its cause.
More than anything this is an indictment of the system of selecting research and development targets in biomedical science. But ti also may reflect the waning of the scientific method in the West too. Considerable fraud was involved in a landmark research project that perpetuated the mistaken direction of Alzheimer’s research for decades.
The government/industry/academic “partnership” is at the center of the dysfunction that has become endemic across America and Europe. The complex no longer rewards merit and is highly influenced by gender and racial politics and other irrelevant considerations that limit the scientific method.
But at least now maybe some progress can be made in this terribly debilitating disease. In fact it might turn out that small molecule solutions that aren’t as costly or require such long development times as the antibody drugs might turn up now.