Those who follow the banners of Reason are like the well-disciplined battalion, which, wearing a more sober uniform, and making a less dazzling show, than
The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic– indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret–usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.
In the above linked video CBS journalist Margaret Brennan confronts Secretary of State Marco Rubio about JD Vance’s statement that Europe has a problem with free speech. She condemns Vance for defending free speech in Germany where she declares free speech was responsible for the Nazi genocide against the Jews.
I found this video interesting because I wouldn’t have guessed that Rubio would be as agile as he showed himself to be. He fired back that he disagreed with her premise and forcefully stated that there was no free speech in Nazi Germany but there was a totalitarian state there. And it blamed part of its population for economic and social problems and had no moral qualms with murdering these innocent men, women and children on an industrial scale.
I’ve never held the opinion that Marco Rubio was all that sharp. But he did a very competent job making Brennan seem ridiculous. Maybe he’s wised up over the years, maybe he’s more confident nowadays to speak sensibly out in the open because Trump has his back or maybe Brennan is just such a lightweight and her logic was so ridiculous that any half intelligent person can make her look like an idiot.
But whatever the cause it was stunning to see just how stupid her case sounded. But Brennan can’t take all the blame. After all free speech is not the law of the land in Germany, England or France. In fact, in Germany there are laws that ban the distribution of materials from groups like the Nazis or other “unconstitutional organizations.” These laws are being used to try to suppress the AFD (Alternative for Germany) party because they want to restrict immigration. So, JD Vance advocating for free speech is actually radicalism in a place like Germany. But Margaret Brennan managed to make it sound completely ridiculous by trying to blame the Holocaust on free speech.
What you see here is the difference between the American conception on free speech and the European fear of speaking uncomfortable truths. To them some things are too dangerous to say or even think. And that is the viewpoint that the Democrats tried hard during the Biden administration to import. That is the reason for the emphasis on misinformation. Apparently, people can’t be trusted to make up their minds about what is true and what isn’t. We are too stupid to figure out what’s true so the government and the media have to tell us.
And that is why organizations like CBS fought like hell to make sure Donald Trump didn’t become president. Because if he did people would be allowed to say what they really thought about things like transgender identity or how bad crime is and whether millions of illegal aliens were a good thing or not.
So here was CBS trying to condemn JD Vance for outraging Europeans with the opinion that denying their people free speech would come back to bite them. And it was a useful demonstration of where main stream media’s true beliefs sit. They are solidly behind the globalist position that regular people should just shut up and take at face value whatever the “experts” in the government (except Trump) or the media or the NGOs tell them. And if you voice a dissenting opinion then your guilty of spreading disinformation and in a perfect world you’d be silenced and sent to the reeducation camp. Very interesting indeed.
Kudos to JD Vance and (surprisingly) Marco Rubio. I guess Little Marco grew up.
Donald Trump’s All Star Barnstorming Travelling Medicine Show is approaching its one-month milestone. And I think it’s fair to say its hallmark is that he keeps the hand grenades flying and that keeps his opponents off balance. And kudos to him and his all stars for all their good work. Bravo.
What that made me think of was how for the last fifty years our leaders have been keeping us off balance with one crisis after another. There’s always another war or a banking crisis or stagflation, or COVID or Climate Change or civil rights or women’s rights or gay rights or you name it. For all of my adult life we have had to forget about normalcy and prosperity and instead we had to give up our rights or our way of life or mortgage our future or our children’s future or lately our grandchildren’s future to save the world or destroy our enemies or cure some “original sin.” It occurs to me that this is not an accident. This is the means of controlling us and keeping us from prospering.
If Donald Trump and his successors want to save this country their assignment should be to restore this country to normalcy. They need to allow us to get our feet back underneath us again and get back a sense of balance. End all of the emergencies. Give us some peace and quiet and allow us to live like Americans again instead of like serfs.
Fans of the “Lord of the Rings” know that the Shire is the most boring place imaginable. All of the adventure and excitement happens in places like Rohan and Gondor that are full of battles against the agent of evil; orcs, trolls, evil men and the like. But it’s also true that the greatest sense of loss for the hobbits is when they return home to the Shire only to find that these enemies have spoiled the boring peace and quiet of the Shire and replaced it with fear and danger. Because what you discover is that safe, boring, prosperous, well-ordered communities are the only place where healthy people can exist. Because they’re the only place where you can raise a family and earn a living and leave something behind for next generation.
And the only way to make that happen is to end the chaos. End the protests and the grievances. End the rancor. People in the 1960s were always making fun of the 1950s. They said it was boring and repressed compared to the sexual revolution and the revolution in the streets that came a decade after. They mocked the bland image of Dwight Eisenhower as the father of the country overseeing a boring but prosperous nation chasing after and realizing the American Dream.
Well, that sounds just about like heaven to me right now. Donald Trump and anyone who wants to follow him should be selling us on the idea that Washington should be moving heaven and earth to stop the chaos and give Americans a chance to be boring and happy. They should arrange for the people in this country to have a generation when the priority is to earn a living, raise a family and maybe watch a baseball game on a Saturday afternoon without thinking about war, crime, or civil unrest. The pursuit of happiness.
In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
This is an explanation for the “Test” post today. I’ve been struggling to eliminate delays in posts showing up on the front page of the site. There’s a thing called caching that cuts down on the site server’s work and therefore makes the site quicker. But if it delays updating the site then folks don’t see the new content quickly. I’m fighting a war to get the cache purge to happen every fifteen minutes. I may have succeeded but only time will tell.
And now I return you to your regularly scheduled test pattern.
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.
