Einstein They Ain’t

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science , , , ,

“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.

photog Opines on Valentine’s Day

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , , , , ,

Every happily married man has to have an opinion on Valentine’s Day.  And being in that category (most of the time!) my opinion is well known to Camera Girl.  Being a very wise woman, she pretends that Valentine’s Day is of no concern to her.  But that is a façade.  The point is for me to show her that I have a way of making Valentine’s Day a useful ritual within our domain.  In this way she doesn’t have to seem to be dependent on this odd gift receiving dynamic while I can demonstrate my romantic aptitude and at the same time rightly honor her importance in the whole male/female dynamic.

Wow.  That was weird.

Anyway, I’ve long ago given her all the jewelry she needs or even wants.  I usually check to see if she wants any perfume but she’s pretty well stocked there too.  So, this year I said I’d take her out to eat.  And at first, I thought we had a plan.  But at the last minute she changed it.  We were supposed to have the grandkids over for a luncheon of delicatessen food.  But someone got sick so we postponed it.  But apparently Camera Girl was in the mood for pastrami, which, as everyone knows, is the most sensual of the salted cured meats.

So, her idea for Valentine’s Day was pastrami sandwiches at home.  She is a thrifty woman.  And I should be more grateful for that than I am.  So today she served up pastrami on Italian bread with melted Swiss cheese and tons of brown mustard.  There was egg potato salad and dill pickles on the side and a giant mug of very good, hot coffee.  Afterward there was a big slice of apple pie with three big scoops of premium vanilla ice cream.  Now that is what I call a Valentine’s Day celebration.

It reminded me of that scene in the Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade serves corned beef on French bread and coffee with brandy to Brigid O’Shaughnessy as they warily circle each other in their dance of murder and passion.  And after all Camera Girl is a femme fatale.  Her allure has side-tracked me from my intended career as a classical philologist by, as far as I can reckon somewhere on the order of forty five years, give or take.  And there has been many a night that I suspected she was contemplating smothering me in my sleep.  I have no incontrovertible evidence for this.  But for someone who knows her moods all the signs were there.  But I digress.

So, the key to a successful Valentine’s Day gift or celebration is buy-in from the woman.  There has to be an effort by the man to imbue the ritual with some special significance for the pair.  And to do that requires good will on both sides and for an established relationship the desire to break the monotony of a settled routine with something different and in some way exciting.

And exciting doesn’t have to be the Hope Diamond or a trip to Bora Bora.  The excitement is breaking the routine.  It’s talking about different things.  It’s putting a little more of your personality into your presentation than you normally do.  And, of course, it doesn’t hurt if you drag her off to bed to consummate the proceedings properly.  But, just like Sam Spade, remember that she may be hiding a revolver under her side of the bed so sleep with one eye open.  Especially if she has two or three aliases.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day

Here’s a Blueprint for Fixing Red State Colleges

photog Current Events , , ,

Ron DeSantis has provided proof of concept for disinfecting a college of its woke parasites.  The writer of this article goes through the why and the how of doing this to every Red State public college.  and he shows that even the private ones can be stopped from many of their worst excesses by anti-discrimination laws that prevent many of the equity hiring practices.

He draws attention to the fact that although college administrators were willing to adopt the progressive agenda of the woke movement, nevertheless they are easily cowed into following the mandates of the state that pays their salaries.  They’ll probably pay lip service to the cultural marxist outrage professed by the gender studies department but they’ll bend to the mandates of the governor and the legislature to keep their jobs and the gravy train of pension benefits.

And the same goes for the academics.  They know where their bread is buttered and they’ll back down and toe the line rather than lose their generous salaries and fabulous perks.  Kudos ot Ron DeSantis for pioneering this concept.  May all the other Red State governors copy his play book and rid half the country of woke campuses.

10FEB2023 – An Open Letter to Our Leaders on the Right – Get Organized

photog Current Events ,

As the prospective candidates for the Republican presidential nomination circle each other warily I would like to make a suggestion.  Instead of running each other down, why not show which of you are the real leaders by trying to accomplish something useful.  Specifically, why don’t you all start taking action right now to produce an actual foundation for the future.  Stop investing in the Babylonian Captivity that is Washington DC and instead, build an organization that exclusively represents the Right.  Before what remains of Old America is snuffed out gather the embers together into one place and add fuel to the fire and protect it from the deluge.

Some might claim that the Republican Party is that organization.  But that would be a lie.  The Republican Party is a grifters’ trade organization that sometimes accidentally contains a few individuals that got lost while looking for an actual conservative political home and joined out of exhaustion after the futile search.

What is needed is a nexus for coordinating the efforts of those who want to save this country.  It won’t be a new political party.  We don’t need one.  We need a leadership council.  Every Red State governor, state legislator, business executive, police chief, school superintendent and even the few US congressmen and senators who aren’t on the take should meet regularly, even if usually virtually,  to plan strategy specifically to neutralize the harmful effects of the federal government on the lives of the citizens of the Red States.  Setting up a council like this would show the American people that these people intend to make change now and not just string us along until the next presidential election when they’ll promise the moon and accomplish very little.

If they did this then we could take them a lot more seriously when they go on the stump in 2024.  By combining the clout of all the Red States, they can produce actual change in the behavior of even the largest corporations and other organizations.  Imagine if a combination of twenty-five states confronted the American Medical Association with an ultimatum about prescribing puberty blockers to adolescents.  If faced with the choice of having their association discredited in those states or modifying the stance they take on gender dysphoria I’m betting they’ll back down from their current insane stance.

Similar pressure can be applied to outfits like the cable companies and tech companies.  A carrot and stick policy could be applied to force them to stop discriminating against conservative individuals and organizations.  A small beginning has been made by Texas and Florida in suits against internet companies deplatforming those on the Right.  Much, much more needs to be done.  And it has to have teeth that won’t be beholden to federal judges.  There have to be actions that will sting these companies.  Penalties have to be losses in revenues that quickly rise into the millions and in some cases billions of dollars.

These states could also standardize and optimize the policies they take with respect to schools and colleges and their tendencies to proselytize young people with leftist ideas.  Ron DeSantis has recently taken the first stab at this with a Florida state college.  Multiply this by a thousand and it will be a home run for our side.

And how about all the corporations that knowingly turn a blind eye to the use of illegal alien workers.  If all these states started coming down very heavily and in tandem on even a large company like Walmart, I’m sure it would create enormous pressure on that company to toe the line.  And that would have a positive effect on the legal residents of these states.  Salaries would rise and job opportunities would open up for young people.  Certainly, some jobs would disappear, basically slave labor types of work.  But that’s what automation is for anyway.

One industry that we could really impact is the book sellers who cater to the public schools.  Rejecting any critical race theory (CRT) propaganda in the school books should be a priority.  And mandating these changes across the country would in one fell swoop force these book companies to change their ways or lose out on what must be billions of dollars in orders.  Now that would be a tremendous victory for the Right.

These kinds of actions only happen when a clearly thought-out plan is instituted and maintained by intelligent and dedicated individuals.  And it won’t work unless it is coordinated across all the remaining Red States.  The financial clout of tens of millions of people and the power of state governments acting in unison will catch the attention of every organization that has to make a profit or depends on the approval of state agencies.

Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have done important things that show they understand our plight.  To a lesser extent other leaders on the Right have responded over the last few years to the provocations of the Left.  But it’s not enough and it won’t get us anywhere.  One state will be attacked by the feds and maybe brought to heel.  It will take a continental scope, maybe even including one or two of the saner Canadian provinces to successfully resist the poison being exported by Washington DC.  We need to organize and coordinate if we ever hope to win back this country.  And it needs to start now in February 2023.  Not in 2025.  Wake up gentlemen, the clock is ticking.