Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Drought And Copper

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, self-described as a "multinational professional services network" and one of the four largest international accounting firms, climate change indicated by drought will put at risk a third of global chip production by 2035. The copper mining process takes about 86 times as much water by weight to produce one unit of copper, says the accounting firm.

This overlooks the fact that practically all copper that has been put to use in the past is recycled and that substitutions for copper have been found in some industries.

Presently, only the copper mines in Chile, which produce 7% of the world's copper supply, are threatened by drought but the future could be grim for the production of chips needed for cell phones and other consumer products as well as AI data centers.

So what would this mean? In the case of the microscopic copper conductors used in AI data centers basic economics tells us that the price of the chips would increase and that some data centers wouldn't be able to function economically. Or that technology would come up with a work around. Or that droughts wouldn't increase by 2035.

The AI data center drum beat, and the AI concept itself, doesn't seem to have an indicated end point. How many data centers does the country and world really need to function efficiently? How much valuable raw materials like copper and electricity can be devoted to what amounts to an enormous digital filing system? 

While practically all Americans have a pocket-size computer that connects them to the internet, it seems to be a fact that the same is now true of AI, at least in its preliminary form. Will there be a choice necessary between copper as used for piping and copper used in AI chips and electricity pumped into data centers as opposed to  peoples' home lighting and washing machines? What's most important?    

Sunday, July 6, 2025

A Fraud?

The fellows at the Issues & Insights website are speculating that the existential threat of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere isn't just a scientific error but rather a calculated lie by parties with political and financial interests in the fable, that it's about power and money. 

One doesn't need to be very intelligent or educated to realize that climate, over the long haul, definitely changes. Incredible changes have occurred in geologically relatively short periods of time when few if any humans were around to release CO2 and greenhouse gases into the sky. About 9000 years ago, the blink of an eye in the planet's history, much of  what's the northern US was covered in the mile-high sheet of a continental glacier. As the mantle of ice melted it left many signs of its former presence, glacial Lake Agassiz, for instance, its beaches and pot holes that are now part of the Red River Valley and its neighboring areas in North Dakota and Minnesota.

 Glacial Lake Agassiz | Department of Mineral Resources, North Dakota

 North Dakota Mineral Resources 

The existence of glacial Lake Agassiz and its disappearance has been known and accepted by geologists since the early 19th century. It is just one of many examples of incontrovertible evidence of dramatic climate change over a short period of time with no contribution by humankind. Life went on.

This is no secret and those hoping to use climate change as a vehicle to power and wealth are even more aware of the truth than the typical person.   

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Tibetan Education

The paywall-protected Wall Street Journal published a front page article on June 30, 2025 titled "China Uses Kids To Gut Tibetan Ways". It describes how the Chinese government has, through its educational system, tried, with mixed results to initiate Tibetan children into Chinese language and culture.

Tibet is an autonomous region of China, whatever that means, and during the past twenty years its students have been the focus of efforts to make them part of the Chinese communist system. This includes boarding schools, instruction by Mandarin-speaking teachers, of children at a very early age.

One Tibetan lamented that the children returned to their homes to visit "with a different way of thinking". 

"They are brainwashed by Chinese thoughts and propaganda," he said.

One could edit out the words "China" and "Chinese" in this article and replace them with "United States" and the story would still ring true. This is exactly what the US has done and continues to do  with the indigenous population of the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii and other slivers of its empire. Unlike the US example, the Chinese don't appear to have made a serious effort to exterminate the Tibetans. From the beginning, the American Puritan political regime worked to literally kill as many native Americans as possible. The children of those pushed off their homes to inhospitable backwaters of the continent were sent to boarding schools to assimilate them into the Yankee consumer capitalist culture. Where schools were established on the miserable reservations English was the language of instruction. Boarding schools enrolled children of many different tribes and languages, English was the only common language of instruction. 

In what may have been a temporary benefit, in bush Alaska no public schools were provided for natives or whites until the Molly Hooch court case required them.

The Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed by this article which ignores an identical and even worse situation in its own backyard.   

Monday, June 30, 2025

It's Sweltering!

Reuters, always concerned with the inevitable destruction of man on earth by growing heat tells us of the first round matches at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club being played in "sweltering" heat, "soaring above 30 C". The sweltering heat of 30C corresponds to a temperature measured in fahrenheit units as 86F. According to one weather service the temperature in London may even "soar" to 88F later today.

But this is London, UK, a very small spot in geographic terms and it's temperature at any given moment doesn't reflect that of other locations only a relatively small distance away.

While athletic activity at this temperature is likely to produce perspiration, it's certainly no form of torture or even great discomfort. Maybe the fact that it's slightly unusual for it to be this warm in the UK, surrounded as it is by the ocean allows for such comments. 

We should be quick to note that during the summer months few residents of the warmer temperate regions of the world take their vacations in places known to be less sweltering. For instance Chicagoans are unlikey to spend a month in Nome, Alaska, currently 47F. An Italian from Naples probably won't haul his family to Hammerfest, Norway where it's 55F at this moment. Or try Hobart, Tasmania, 37F right now. In fact, one reason that those locations are sparsely populated is that they are generally uncomfortable from a climate standpoint.

 US industrial development is taking place in the southern, warmer regions rather than the uncomfortable northern plains and Rocky Mountains. A temperature of 88F just isn't all that hot.  The Disney theme parks are both in the very southernmost parts of the country. There won't be a Disney Planet in Havre, MT.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Fort Lee, Virginia Gets Its Name Back

Fort Lee, Virginia, named after Confederate Genera Robert E. Lee, was briefly called Fort Gregg-Adams during the Biden administration but is now once again known as Fort Lee. The Lee in question was a member of the post War Between the States units formed of former slaves in 1866 for the express purpose of destroying the native Americans.

The honored individual, Pvt. Fitz Lee, received the Medal of Honor for heroism in action in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

No record seems to have been kept of the number of native Americans killed defending their homes by Pvt. Lee and his "buffalo soldiers".  

Thursday, June 26, 2025

A New Discovery For James Webb

It just keeps coming. The busiest telescope anywhere, the James Webb Space Telescope, has identified an exoplanet that has never been noticed before. Maybe that's because it's a relatively new planet,  about 6 million years old, but is only  110 light years away from earth , orbiting the star Antlia.

 "Webb opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far. This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve," said astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the French research agency CNRS and LIRA/Observatoire de Paris, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

How is it important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve? If the understanding actually occurs, then what? Studies that take place outside the solar system, or even in it, are academic exercises with no foreseeable utility for ordinary earthlings. The knowledge of an exoplanet has no bearing on anything on earth except the activities of researchers and manufacturers of their equipment. It's a hugely expensive and meaningless thing that's basically an extension of other smaller frauds that do affect the general population. Radon abatement, ozone depletion, and hydrocarbon elimination are prominent examples.

Knowledge that's been acquired by humans through the centuries is ignored in favor of the novelties of current academia. No one reads even 19th century thinking of philosphers and scientists like Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, Henry George and others. The findings of astro-physicists will do nothing to improve the life of anyone on earth now or in the future.

Furthermore, there are many things that we  don't understand here on earth. Our efforts, and money, should be directed at solving these problelms.   , opens new tab.

Trump and Names

Perhaps Americanos take President Trump a little too seriously. His verbal contortions don't seem to be quite statesman-like or even sensible at times.

An example is his changing the name of a large Atlantic bay from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It doesn't seem to have caught on with the general population of either country or the world at large but.

Trump's grasp of world history is undetermined but he's missing something. The ayatollahs of Iran now control a piece of geography that was once one of the most powerful nations on earth. That was Persia, not called Iran until 1935. The locals like the name Iran better.

For 21 years, until his assassination in 465 BC, Xerxes I was the emperor of the  Achaemenid Empire, now known as Iran. In a 1880s fit of listing conformity the sleepy Midwestern city of Minneapolis needed a name beginning in X to fit into the names of streets like DuPont, Cofax and Humboldt, arranged alphabetically to make urban navigation easier. With few names beginning in X, Xerxes became the pick and remains so to this day. If there is life after death, perhaps Xerxes sits on a cloud and marvels that his name remains, thousands of years later, on a street on the other side of the world.

Rest assured that there is no Reagan Avenue in Tehran. So why hasn't the president ordered the name change of a street in Minneapolis to something more American? That may not be possible in a solidly Democratic neighborhood like the Athens of the Plains but it could well serve as another rallying point for him and his followers. And Xerxes was hardly an example of the  democratically-elected leader that inspires Minnesotans.

 

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

A Big Black Hole

Gaia BH-3 is the name given to the largest black hole to be found in our Milky Way galaxy, said to be about 33 times the size of our sun and 2000 light years away. The information enabling this discovery was obtained by European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, launched in 2013 and in operation until earlier this year. 

The telescope analyzed the precise positions, speeds and trajectories of over 2 billion of the most visible stars and sent the figures to earth in four batches.

Now that the existence of this immense black hole is known, earthlings should be careful to avoid it.

 Stars and material falls into a black hole. Photo: Shutterstock

 

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

University Administrative Bloat


In a rare instance of commenting on serious financial issues the on-line publication of a major US research university has published an interesting article that basically outlines the reasons for high tuition fees.

The foremost of the reasons is a steady increase in the number of administrative positions created in the recent past and the increase in compensation awarded.

It mentions that increased enrollment has made for more student advising services and more emphasis on supporting student mental health. Are students examined for mental health problems before being accepted or is the university experience causing them?   

"There has been a shift away from paper forms and toward digital documents and accessibility screenings, This requires staff to handle processing and form development." Ergo, digital work is more labor intensive than composing and printing as it was done in the past. Who knew?

On the rare occasion when a major university administrator or professor is shown the door it's regarded as a calamity. Blue collar employees that maintain state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure are made redundtant every day and laid off.

It must be remembered that every dollar that goes to a university, be it from a state budget, government grant, tuition, patent award, etc. in the end goes to a human individual, an overpaid, decorative president for example.

Perhaps the argument could be made that compensation for university administrators should match that of similar business figures or the university people would run away to the commercial world. That doesn't seem to be a valid analysis. It's more likely that administrators look at dog-eat-dog capitalism as a stressful environment that makes their campus life look idyllic. The route seldom goes in the reverse direction. Universities inevitably get their admin people from somewhere else in the higher educational environment, not the business world. 

Sunday, June 22, 2025

It's Actually Very Cold Now

 

 the Washington Post

Leslie Eastman at Legal Insurrection pointed out something that might interest people swimming in their own perspiration for a few days this week. According to a scientific study by reputable researchers, earth's climate is now as cool as it's been in 485 million years. Furthermore, mammals have never faced temperatures as cold as they are now. 

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Climate Change Battle Ends In Victory

And all it took was some pink paint. The paint was smeared on a Pablo Picasso art work, L'hetaire, (1901) hanging in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

 Pinacoteca Agnelli on Twitter: "L'hétaire, was she "La bella Otero"? # ...

twitter.com 

Marcel, a young fellow agitated by the forest fires further west in Canada, believes that the recent abnormally warm temperatures in the area are an indication of a changing climate that governments aren't doing enough to remedy. Like others with a similar belief, he seems to think that defacing an obscure piece of art will arouse enough righteous indignation to spur action.

This is an example of a new development in western culture, that technology exists or can be found to solve any perceived problem.

Formerly, a very hot day was thought to be simply a weather extreme, to be temporarily endured until it cooled off, as it always has. The high temperature today in Regina, Sask. is predicted to be 62F with rain, actually kind of cool  for the area at this time of the year.

Now a secular religion seems to have been established that worships at the altar of academia/science and their government, media and business allies investigating things that aren't even real problems. The idea that the day-to-day climate of the entire planet can be determined with technological techniques is preposterous. In the many centuries that humans have wandered the earth they've not been able to induce peaceful behavior among their fellows, whom they understand fairly well and can circulate among at will. The birth of things like jet planes, satellites, microwave ovens, video streaming and cosmetic surgery gives urban barbarians the idea that something as complex as the earth's atmosphere can be modified just as the conditions in their bedrooms might be. A splash of pink paint could be all that's needed to set the thing in motion.

On the other hand, how many people are even aware of the existence of L"hetaire? How does defacing a hundred and twenty-four year old painting advance climate science? In fact, how many people will ever be aware of this juvenile act or remember it? Perhaps one of the gigantic artificial intelligence complexes will maintain a file of art defacement activity through the years.  

Friday, June 20, 2025

The Immigration Thing

Immigration has rapidly become the foremost issue of the era for western countries. Ostensibly, at least for now, immigrants are accepted/tolerated in the economically successful and advanced nations because they are fleeing poverty and undemocratic, failing authoritarian governments. 

Of course, it's not that simple. Like everything else, politics is a game of numbers. In the last federal election in the US, the numbers didn't work out in favor of the left, at least in part because of the candidates presented. One way to rectify this situation is to civilize millions of immigrants, believing that they are automatically going to follow the dictates of the left.

That tactic might work in the short term but it's a big gamble. Rather than encourage the third world dissatisfied to reshape their own political and economic circumstances, developed countries assist them in moving to the west. Foreign students in western universities don't return to their home countries and change the politics and economies. They either stay in the west or take positions at home where they don't upset the system.

It turns out that for the interested parties, it is easier to ignore the laws concerning the admission of non-citizens than to change those laws. Enforcement of the laws is considered draconian.

What is the position of the governments and populations of the countries supplying illegal immigrants? No one from the media ever discusses the subject. If millions of Americans were moving to India or Australia or even Canada there would be much US speculation about how to staunch the flow. If it's been the goal of the US to spread democracy and the capitalist free market world-wide, as was supposedly the case during the Cold War, the effort has been a failure in many ways.

Isn't it possible that a substantial invasion of immigrants with a different cultural background will change the Overton window of American politics? Won't there be individuals among them with political ambitions that will use the numbers of immigrants to affect US elections in their favor and change the culture of the country?         

Cosmic Dawn


Researchers from Johns Hopkins University are leading a study involving four microwave telescopes that are attempting to detect evidence of the "Big Bang" from 13 billion years ago. The telescopes are sited in the Chilean Andes but are capable of doing their job without being in space. The results have been encouraging, apparently.

The question remains, however, in what the usefulness might be of any possible information regarding an event thought to have occurred long before the earth even existed.   NASA, which operates on taxpayer funding, is paying for this research. It's difficult to see how this expense might benefit the man on the cul de sac. It seems that it might be more appropriate to invest in research that might enable highway paving to last more than two or three years before being ripped up and replaced.

 CLASS Telescope Featured on NPR's All Things Considered | Physics ...

 physics-astronomy.jhu.edu

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The Un-elected Judge That Decides

 Judge Susan Illston Speaks on IP

aipla.org 

Susan Illston, Juris Doctor, Stanford Law School 1973 and an appointee  to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1995 has issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting President Trump from “reorganizing” or “reducing” staff at 22 executive branch agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (annual budget, $1.8 trillion), the Social Security Administration (annual budget, $1.5 trillion), the Department of Veterans Affairs (annual budget, $350 billion), and the Treasury Department (annual budget, $1.3 trillion} according to the Brownstone Institute in a recent article. All executive branch employees work for the head of the executive branch, which is the president of the country and the judicial branch has no say in the matter. No doubt there's a procedure to remedy this kind of judicial activision and we should be seeing it in operation soon. Maybe.

The Northvolt Fiasco

From Apollo News:  "More than one billion euros of subsidies and loans – 700 million euros from Germany alone – have now disappeared into thin air. Again, a project that was jazzed by politics, promising prestige and shown the voter's political competence, has failed crashing due to reality. The broad silence of the North Voltage case in politics fits into time: No one dares open criticism of the systemic failure of interventionism, certainly not on the Green Deal,EU-Europe should actually lead to a new era of clean production and free green energy."

The plan to build a Northvolt factory in northern Germany has not only been abandoned but the entire business, including its flagship facility in Sweden has gone into bankruptcy, leading to the unemployment of 2800.

The article is incorrect, however, in stating that the .7 billions of Euros "disappeared into thin air". That's not what ill spent money does. It has gone into the accounts of the highest levels of management, bankruptcy attorneys, suppliers of equipment, contractors hired to build infrastructure and so on. Certainly the principals involved in the project did not enjoy the financial success they might have if their dream had been realized but none of them will be begging on street corners either. Politicians don't worry about these kinds of failures since they don't have a personal interest in the huge sums involved. Subordinating business decisions to political visions is a recipe for financial disaster. 

 

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Francesca Gino


Sure, it's of little interest to the toiling masses when a tenured academic is found to be a dishonest fraud. But in this case it's a major professor and researcher at prestigious Harvard Univ. with a million dollar salary. It took over four years to come to a conclusion but Francesca Gino was eventually fired for massaging her research data to reflect her conclusions.

 Francesca Gino Faces Career Crisis: Fired Amid Academic Fraud ...

current-affairs.org

No one could remember such an inglorius event ever occurring before  in the nearly spotless history of the oldest university in the US. 

Once again, academics that use mendacity to get grants are guilty of fraud, just as lying on a loan application or overstating the value of mortgaged property. If the grant money originated as federal funds it is a federal offense. The lady should be expecting, and others committing similar deeds, to spend some time in the big federal study hall, perhaps reading up on ethics. 

 

Authoritarian

As is usually the case, media mimics hear a word new to them and they all try to use it every day. The new word now is "authoritarian". 

CNN's Brian Stelter: "For the most part, you have California Democrats saying, hey, it's the Trump administration that's trying to be inflammatory here. Don't fall for it. I know some other senators as well. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz calling this, quote, "authoritarian madness,"....

According to the on-line Merriam-Webster dictionary, synonyms for the adjective "authoritarian" are:

1.  of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.

2.  of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.

In reality, the corporate state embodies blind submission to its authority and the many functionaries that exercise it. These range from a local patrolman telling a driver to move his illegally parked car to nine black-robed justices making a decision that affects citizens from Prudhoe Bay to Guam.

It's likely that there's no longer any novelty in describing a political or cultural adversary as a fascist, commie or Marxist. "Authoritarian" could easily describe the health inspector that decides if your new pizza parlor is satisfactory for the customers' safety, on what date you are permitted to catch fish in a certain location, the features that must be present on a bicycle before it can be commercially offered for sale. 

The primacy of authority is simply something that goes along with all governments.   

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Government Agency Abolished

It's been mentioned here that the US State Department has financed an entity called the Global Engagement Center since 2016, ostensibly to combat the supposed proliferation of misinformation with a negative effect on US interests. A change in US politics and extensive criticism led the State Dept. to terminate the effort in Dec. 2024.

Allegations of censorship, particularly in the response to the Covid plague, were a major factor. The closing of a govt. agency is a rare event and this one seems to be significant. A government agency with even a peripheral focus on free speech flies in the face of democracy. It's efforts were concentrated on digital social media, dead tree communications no longer being an object of concern since they are now considered obsolete.

Governments in other nations, Germany for instance, fight "misinformation" in a much more draconian manner. Economic minister Robert Habeck was referred to as an idiot by a pensioner which ultimately led to large fine and a jail sentence.

 

Friday, May 30, 2025

Techno Issues

It's been mentioned before but depending on technocracy for solutions to serious problems brings along its own sets of problems. There's many examples that never see the light of day but the latest one, the impersonation of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on the phone, is going to need some repair. Her nemesis could have ordered a pizza with anchovies from some unsanitary ghetto parlor delivered to innocent congressional interns. Then what?

As people lean more and more on equipment and processes beyond their "complexity horizon" the chances for real disaster increase dramatically. Just ask the Hamas communications experts on how well their pager program worked out. No doubt  publicity has brought the auto-pen guys some badly needed overtime to meet the new demand. The latest rocket explosion is another "what went wrong?" moment. At some time in the very near future an unnecessary self-colliding car will squash a group of school children.

It's obvious that the never-ending evolution of mysterious and dangerous technology and behavior needs to be re-evaluated to see if the risks involved are really necessary.    

Saturday, May 24, 2025

Rachel Hardeman

Rachel Hardeman, until recently the  the director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota, is a member of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2024. Unfortunately, in what's become a frequent development in academia world, she plagierized the work of a fellow researcher, Bridgette Davis, in a submittal for a grant from  the NIH. While Davis's article was written in 2019 she didn't realize until recently that the Hardeman work was almost a verbatim copy of her own. Hardeman has since resigned. 

Since Hardeman's departure the University of Minnesota has decided to close the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity.

What are the consequences for using fraud to apply for federal funds? Are academics ineligible for prosecution when lying to obtain research grants? How much effort do universities exert in guaranteeing the truth of applications for grants? Why isn't Hardeman out on bail right now? 

 

Friday, May 23, 2025

Apollo News Translation

By Max Roland

 A statue of Venus must be removed – it discriminates against women, says an equal opportunities officer. Institutionalized feminism has finally closed the great circle between Islamism, the Middle Ages, and "progressive" moral terror.

 "Nuditas criminalis" – criminal nudity. This is how the European Middle Ages largely viewed the sculptures of the ancient world. The Romans and Greeks celebrated human beauty, but in the "Dark Ages" it fell victim to ecclesiastical dogma.

Over hundreds of years, we have slowly but surely left such things behind us. From the Renaissance to the Neoclassical period, Europe not only revived the art and architectural styles of antiquity, but also gradually buried the religiously prudish narrow-mindedness of the Middle Ages. Or so it was thought. But this narrow-mindedness is making a comeback, albeit under different auspices.

Where the priest once stood, there now stands the equal opportunities officer – but the fury of a regressive prudishness remains essentially the same. The case of the "Venus de Medici" – an ancient statue that has become a political issue – demonstrates that modern regressive feminism and everything that is often summarized under a term like "woke madness" now seems like a fundamentalist, religious, medieval dogma.

A bronze replica of this Roman statue has now been removed from a federal office because an equal opportunities officer was bothered by the depiction of the naked Roman goddess of love. There were allegedly complaints. The statue may be incompatible with the Federal Equal Opportunities Act, according to a report by Bild (read more).heremore).

 There's nothing sexist about this statue, of course: The Venus de Medici is about as misogynistic as Michelangelo's David is misogynistic. No one would ever argue the latter—but the Venus becomes a political issue. A scandal.

Behind this lies an ideology that, like in the Middle Ages, places prudishness and moralism above all else. Its illogical dogmatism could almost be considered a religion. It calls itself "progressive," but it is anything but. It is, in fact, so regressive that, strictly speaking, such an equation does an injustice even to the historical Middle Ages.

When an "equal opportunities officer" suddenly acts the way a Saudi Arabian morality watchdog would, it's called a "full circle moment"—we as a society have regressed. Yet this is precisely the core of woke madness and regressive fundamentalist feminism: a yesterday's prudishness that could also fit into Taliban Afghanistan. They would have removed the Venus statue from one of their offices just as a federal equal opportunities officer did.

The mechanisms behind this are the same as in fundamentalist Islam—the immediate association of nudity, especially female nudity, with sexuality and sinfulness. This logic culminates in the hijab, the niqab, and the burqa. Modern feminism has long since reached the point of absurdly turning the headscarf, imposed on women, into a symbol of "empowerment."

The dogma is the same: Here, modern feminism and Islamism join hands. Strangely enough, they also join hands in the total sexualization of the female body. It no longer has anything to do with what we understand as Western values. This postmodern nihilism ends not in liberation and equality, but in the iconoclastic moral terror of a dark past.

Throughout history, those who toppled statues and banished works of art were never the torchbearers of freedom and progress, but rather their gravediggers. From the excesses of the Reformation to the National Socialist and Communist concept of art to Islamism, those who censored, removed, and outlawed art with virtue and dogma behind them were and are always the enemies of freedom and the thwarters, even the reversals, of progress.

 The Equal Opportunities Officer specifically responsible for this issue probably just wanted to prove she was working with her rebellion against the Venus statue—after all, she's one of dozens of Equal Opportunities Officers who have to do something all day. Instead of institutionalizing moral terrorism, these officials could be given more meaningful work. It would be desperately needed, given these excesses.

 

Venus de' Medici in Stuttgart - nach 1952 verschwunden

christianvonholst.de

Galaxy News


Who are the artists that provide the pictures used as illustrations for media articles about galactic activity taking place billions of years ago and a similar distance away? One must assume that their work is based on either visible versions acquired from telescope analysis or verbal descriptions provided by astronomers. If the source of the images are available to the astronomers to look at themselves and then pass them along  to artists, why not just use the initial images? 

theroyalheirpost

If you've taken the trouble to leave the couch on a cloudless night and gaze into the depths of the sky you'll see, just as every human in history has, an uncountable number of stars. In fact, you are seeing the very same stars that proto-humans once saw many thousands of years ago, in the same positions they are today. 

The modern proliferation of various telescopes has allowed researchers to assume a position corresponding to the astronomers of antiquity who used their familiarity with the cosmos to hold positions of importance in society that usually included a place in government and religion. Today's astronomers must be satisfied with a say in dispersal of research funding and a sinecure in a field where they are the ultimate authority of essentially useless information. 

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Eleven NASA projects may not be funded


According to on-line NASA cheerleader Big Think the stupendous sums necessary to investigate various aspects of the universe millions of light years away may not be realized because of "unprecedented, ill-motivated budget cuts." They point out that NASA isn't just exploring space, it also  "includes Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics",  the mastery of which our current crop of urban barbarians needs to keep the balance low on their credit card accounts. Ill-motivated budget cuts are the same as lack of money or the realization that the money needed is better spent on other things.

 A satellite in space, an image of a galaxy with a zoomed-in bright core, and an artistic illustration of a black hole with glowing material.

 

                                    NASA

An example, PRAXyS, or the Polarimeter for Relativistic Astrophysical X-ray Sources, is a small explorer/mission of opportunity that uses an X-ray telescope to explore how space’s shape and curvature has been distorted by black holes and neutron stars, along with their associated nearby magnetic fields. It's important that the distortions caused by black holes, neutron stars and magnetic fields be analyzed, probably to determine their potential for war in space. Only people engaged in this research are even capable of a basic understanding of it which their income depends upon. The general public doesn't know if they're successful or not. Much of NASA is dealing with subjects closely akin to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Whatever they discover will be of zero use to humans now or in the future. 

Monday, May 5, 2025

Ivanpah Solar Plant To Be Shut Down

https://www.eit.edu.au/a-solar-tower-at-ivanpah-solar-power-facility-caught-on-fire/

 

The multi-billion dollar Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert of California will be closed and demolished soon.The combination of bird deaths, threats to the endangered desert tortoises, unpredictable sunlight and failed economics have made the installation a disaster in every way.

Fortunately, the remaining recipient of this purchased free power, Southern California Edison, has appointed to its board of directors an effective and well known expert on energy issues, former Secretary of Energy  Jennifer Granholm.

 What Jennifer Granholm's appointment as energy secretary means for ...

bridgemi.com

According to Politico on April 14: 

GRANHOLM’S NEW HOME: Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is headed downtown after her time in the Biden administration, to join global consultancy DGA Group as a senior counselor.

— Granholm, who served two terms as governor of Michigan prior to her four years leading the Energy Department, will advise multinational companies, investors and energy and infrastructure firms on a variety of issues, she said in an interview, including on cross-border strategy and policy, reshoring manufacturing and how to navigate “difficult geopolitical and regulatory environments” as well as the clean energy transition.

— But one of the key pieces of Granholm’s legacy on the latter issue is under threat, with Republicans across Washington pushing to repeal or roll back clean energy incentives that were created under the Inflation Reduction Act and implemented by Granholm’s DOE.

— Granholm told PI she was encouraged by congressional Republicans speaking out in support of those provisions, which she argued are in alignment with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities and noted have overwhelmingly supported projects in red states. “This transcends administrations, transcends political parties,” she said. “It’s really good for America to have the full suite of technologies built in the U.S.”

— Beyond that, Granholm told PI she hopes to put her leadership roles at DOE and in Lansing, Michigan, to good use for her clients. Her experience in both positions will be useful for international clients, for example, “to understand, what do states deal with when it comes to siting projects or connecting to the grid?” she said.

— Though Granholm won’t register to lobby and will not represent any clients before the Energy Department, she noted that she can “certainly say what the Department of Energy has been doing, and certainly I keep my eye on the ball about what the strategy is going forward.

 

 

Friday, May 2, 2025

The Rules-Based World Order

 "Donald Trump has waged an often unpredictable campaign that has upended parts of the rules-based world order that Washington helped build from the ashes of World War II."

Point 1. Rueters, AOL, The Economic Times, RTE, Times Live, Asia One, Dawn.com, The Kathmandu Post, The Straits Times, US News, MSN, News 24, Yahoo News and who knows how many others have used the identical verbiage in the same order to describe the havoc wreaked by the second time POTUS. Does this mean that all of their work is written by the same individual or that lesser typists are given detailed instructions or that the copy is a product of AI? 

Point 2. The "rules-based world order".  Is there a book somewhere that spells out the rules? Does everyone believe and follow the rules?. Amazon will sell you a world rules book,  

"Singapore’s State-Led Capitalism in a Rules-Based World Order", but that's probably not exactly what's needed. No doubt the Orange Man chatted with his underlings in an effort to  find out what their thoughts might be on the subject. Making Canada a 51st state, changing the name of a large area of ocean to the Gulf of America, incorporating Greenland as a province, occupying the Philippines, taking over an independent state, The Republic of Hawaii, forking over $7 million for Alaska. All, no doubt, perfectly legitimate according to the rules-based world order.   


Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Bullying Trans Kids

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is taking the federal government to court over executive orders that forbid male athletes pretending to be girls to compete in women's sports. 

 Keith Ellison Elected Minnesota Attorney General | HuffPost

huffingtonpost.com

By denying access to women's sports teams Ellison says that the would-be girls are being "bullyed". Kind of the same thing with getting a driver's license before age 16, smoking cigarettes, buying and drinking liquor, etc., all examples of bullying. but are in fact illegal.

"The orders attempt to ban trans children from school sports and define two sexes — male and female — that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

Ellison called the Trump administration’s actions “bullying tactics — plain and simple." His position is that he is enforcing the law as it applies in Minnesota

Federal legislation dating back to 1972, Title IX, was meant to gain a measure of equality in men's and women's sports. Schools were required to offer similar sports opportunities to both sexes, in terms of both numbers of participants and financial commitment. It didn't mention boys participating as girls.

 

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Basquiat Masterpiece To Be Auctioned

Baby Boom - Jean-Michel Basquiat - WikiArt.org - encyclopedia of visual ...

wikiart.org

Christies estimates that the 1982 example of finger painting known as "Baby Boom" could sell for as much as $30 million at their May auction.   That sum would be small in that other examples of Basquiat's work have been gavelled down for over $110 million.

What does this say about the modern art world? Are those with the funds to purchase this kind of art merely taking advantage of the possibility of owning a near priceless work, leaders in the appreciation of immense talent or followers of a trend initiated by others?

We'll need to wait until the response is measured to a Basquiat being stolen off the wall or splashed with tomato soup. It will be harder to determine if its value is related to what appears to be a steady decline in what is called culture and civilization.

Monday, April 7, 2025

Reward Modelling

"Reward modelling" is the term used to describe a process that guides a Large Language Model toward human preferences in generative artificial intelligence. The Deep Seek development team and others at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China are preparing to release version 2 of their economical  GAI in the near future. 

Human preferences? Human preferences are dependent on the combination of particular cultural factors and individual idiosyncrasies, the number of which could easily be infinite. Like every aspect of GAI in whatever form, its development is structured by those doing the developing. No large language model will be able to incorporate something as yet undiscovered. 

An authoritarian regime could easily use directed GAI to explain and justify its policies to its population, just as genuine humans have in the past. It's unlikely that if the human preference is found to be greater personal freedom policies will reflect that. 

The Deep Seek phenomenon is already having repercussions in the US data center growth picture. If smaller scale or more efficient GAI installations become part of the US data center complex, electrical demand will be a fraction of what is currently projected. More Deep Seek publicity will put the brakes on funding needed for what could be called "conventional" data center development. It will also be necessary for reliable customers to buy in to the concept and make GAI profitable. Nobody knows yet if that will be the case but some are willing to accept the risk rather than being left on the sidelines.    

Sunday, April 6, 2025

An MIT Analysis Of The Tariff Fiasco

First of all, in a society that values freedom, there are no tariffs. A free citizen is free to purchase whatever legal item he or she wishes from anyone who cares to sell it to them. Both sides agree on the terms of the transaction without government interference. This was the ultimate message of Adam Smith's seminal book from 1776, The Wealth of Nations, free trade, accepted as gospel even today.

According to an MIT Technology Review article: "  Trump administration cuts to the Department of Energy and other federal programs could also take away money from demonstration projects that help cleantech companies test and scale up their technologies. And if Congress does eliminate certain subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, it could halt billion-dollar projects that are being planned or perhaps even some that are already under construction."

Perfect logic. Keep spending taxpayer funds that will be used for planned or commenced projects in spite of their lack of viability.

“The biggest challenge for companies that are making hundred-million- or billion-dollar capital investments is dealing with the uncertainty,” Turner says. “Uncertainty is a real deterrent to making big bets.”

 Yes, as Ben Franklin is credited with saying, "There's nothing certain but death and taxes." Other wise it wouldn't be a bet at all. The Neo-Whigs that wish to get in on the clean tech gravy train want to do it with taxpayer funding. They want a sure thing, not a good bet.

Former Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that tariffs on Chinese solar panels and other "clean" products are needed if the move to non-hydrocarbon energy is to proceed. Ergo the existential threat to life on earth is economically dependent on making some products more expensive. If an exploring space ship from another galaxy appeared and gave away solar panels for free it would be a disaster, according to the academic economist.

 

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Climate Crisis Causing Earthquakes

https://rp-online.de/imgs/scaled/32/1/9/0/3/8/2/0/7/w940_h528_x470_y264_b5f0ee2950268b77.jpg

rp-online.de

Simone Peter, a member of the German Greens party

 and an elected member of government for over nine

 years and currently a lobbyist, says that climate

 change has been the cause of earthquakes, including

 the recent disasters in south Asia. 

According to German media Apollo News: " Since 2018, the

 former Green Party leader has served as president of 

the German Renewable Energy Association (BEE). Her 

goal, she explained at the time, is to use this approach

 to initiate a comprehensive transformation of the

 economy and society."

Thursday, March 27, 2025

The James Webb Telescope Again

The James Webb Infrared Telescope gets almost as much

 media coverage as Donald Trump. The difference is that the

 orbiting telescope is supposedly telling us about things that

 happened millions of years ago and millions of light years

 away while the Trump narrative has immediate complications

 for everyone. 

Spending millions in taxpayer funding to acquire information

 that is of no possible use to any living human while neglecting

 the mundane condition of heavily traveled highways, underfed

 and diseased humans, world-wide migration and impending

 warfare smacks more of religion than science.

This is distributing the wealth of the mass of the uninterested

 for the benefit of a small portion of academia and the

 information that astronomers gain doesn't do them any good

 either. 

https://pwonlyias.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1-11.webp

According to NASA the four goals of the Webb Infrared 

Telescope are to 1. search for light from the first stars and

 galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang, 2.

 study galaxy formation and evolution, 3. understand star

 formation and planet formation, 4. study planetary systems

 and the origins of life.

Even if the telescope could acquire accurate information about

 the light from the first stars, galaxy formation, star and planet

 formation and planetary systems and the origins of life, this

 information can be of no practical use to anyone, including the

astronomers involved. The information can't be used to make 

decisions other than funding for more expensive and

 meaningless deep space investigation. While private parties 

should be free to indulge in this kind of science it's very wrong 

to use public money, extracted by force from the non-academic

portion of society, to finance it.

 

  

Nobody Goes To Jail

For 11 years after 2005 Wachovia Bank and the Seminole nation of Florida had an agreement that the bank would manage an investment portfolio meant to assure funding for a program set up to benefit Seminole youth. The bank was purchased by Wells Fargo but dissatisfaction with returns and high management costs lead to cancellation of the agreement in 2016.

Finally, on March 25, after 6 hours of deliberation, a jury awarded the Seminoles $832 million in damages for mismanagement of the trust and $7million in compensation for fees collected. Eight bank officials were also sued by name, but the jury ordered them to pay only token damages of $50 to $500 each.

Anywhere but in the hyper-capitalist West these eight would be safely behind bars, as an example of what stealing millions for your employer can be the result. Instead they will probably remain at their posts or move along to similar positions. It's little wonder that Wells Fargo has a terrible reputation among banks. 

Of course with an award of this magnitude Wells Fargo has no choice but to appeal the verdict. This case will probably simmer along until all the adults, both plaintiffs and defendants, have moved along to the happy hunting grounds.

 

 

Friday, March 21, 2025

World Day For Glaciers

Yesterday, the Vernal Equinox, was also World Day For Glaciers, as decided by the UN General Assembly in 2022. It is celebrated to promote the world conservation of glaciers, a critical source of drinking water.

Glaciers don't normally vary much in extent unless there are changes in climate and they seem to be shrinking now because of global warming induced by human activities. According to Sulagna Mishra of the World Meteorological Organization, by the end of the century glaciers may have disappeared.

 https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/279760052736000-1443711402386_Q512/Sulagna-Mishra.jpg 

researchgate.net 

Sulagna Mishra

Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich says that glaciers have lost 9 trillion tons of mass since 1975. 

https://wgms.ch/downloads/michael-zemp.jpg

wgms.ch

Michael Zemp

The Glacier of the Year for 2025 is the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, USA, continuously monitored since 1952.

The European country with the most glaciers is Switzerland and Glacier Monitoring Switzerland maintains that if the global temperature rises more than 2 C survival of their glaciers is unlikely. 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

German Insanity

The German Greens, noted for dismissing reality, will be raptly watching the destruction of the two boiler units of the Hamburg/Moorburg coal-fired power house this coming Saturday. A 3 billion Euro project that came on-line in 2015, the idea of efficient, relatively clean, electricity was so repellent to the likes of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck and Hamburg's Senator for the Environment Jens Kerstan that it was only allowed to produce power until 2021 and has been inoperative since. Demolition of one of the countries newest and most efficient hard coal plants began soon after.

 https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/hamburg-moorburg-retired-power-station-birds-eye-aerial-drone-view-coal-fired-plant-details-installation-304713523.jpgdreamstime.com 

The plant was able to supply most of power required for the Hamburg area but its presence was a constant source of irritation to German environmental NGOs who were financed with taxpayer funds.

All is not lost however. While the boilers are no longer providing the steam to spin generators, the plant is being reconfigured into a hydrogen electrolyzer that will be in operation by 2027 to produce truly clean electricity.    

Wednesday, March 19, 2025

The Scary Chinese Navy

It's the business of the on-line Asia Times to make one worry, basically about China. It's also a general topic of conversation among US government officials. For some reason the status and future of the PLA Navy is giving them nightmares. The reason is that the Chinese have committed to building a large and effective navy and the US is either unwilling or unable to respond in kind.

 https://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1623470/liaoning-aircraft-carrier.jpg

Photo Reuters/Bobby Yip

 The first Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, as described by International Business Times.

It isn't that the US is impoverished or lacks the expertise to weld together the components of navy or commercial vessels. The Yankees are more committed to assembling fields of solar panels shipped from China, installing phalanxes of wind turbines offshore and in farm fields, sequestering liquid carbon dioxide in rural North Dakota and trying to convince everyone to buy an EV . China is actually doing most of the same things, but how?

Uncle Sam, with a defense budget that's bigger than the rest of the world combined, can't seem to put together a believable audit of the Pentagon and has a total budget shortfall in the trillions.

Why should Americans worry about a bigger Chinese navy anyway? The Chinese ships mostly sail around in the waters adjacent, never seen off Miami or Malibu. If they actually did present some kind of a threat to the US mainland or anywhere else couldn't the vaunted US navy easily fend them off with the effective and expensive weaponry at their disposal? 

Time marches on and commentators say that the US navy is outdated and obsolete. Won't that also be the case with that of the Chinese in a few years if the US can somehow resist the temptation of trying to blow them up?    

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Artificial Ignorance


The Tow Center For Digital Journalism, part of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and, as they say, "where technology and journalism meet, and where education and practice meet" has done a study of eight AI models, the results of which show them to be wrong, or gave incorrect answers, about 60% of the time. The chat bot Grok 3 was wrong 94% of the time.  

The Climate and the Crisis


About a year ago the editorial board of on-line "Issues and Insights" wrote a piece entitled "How We Know The Climate Crisis Is Not About The Climate". In it, they pointed out that the impetus behind the crisis is "about choking capitalism, punishing wealthy societies, and establishing a socialist-collectivist governance model."

This line of thinking still predominates in the portion of society that rejects climate alarmism. It is, of course, wrong.

The climate crisis isn't about saving the planet, although some of its most vociferous advocates rave about it. Those most concerned with the arson of the earth are the remainders of dying capitalism, the new Whigs that are joined at the hip with government, media, academia and the legal profession to extract as much rent as possible from the population. You could call the entrepreneurs that build solar farms and wind turbine complexes capitalists but you would be wrong. These people don't operate in a free market economy. Their business activity wouldn't be possible without government constructs like subsidies, tax incentives and carbon trading schemes.

Americans in particular have offered up the lives of their sons and their personal wealth to become involved in obscure European spats over borders and ideologies, not realizing that none of this could occur without the say-so of the leaders of what now passes for a capitalist economy, who became world masters, and rich, after all the artillery fire ended.

US financial managers, the company that is taking over CK Hutchison's world port operations, for instance,  controlling trillions of dollars in assets, pass for capitalists in the current milieu. They're the unelected government that arranges such travesties as the Inflation Reduction Act, not the mini-Marxists that are hanging around university coffee houses.

It's beginning to look like the wave of climate anxiety is going to break on the shore of financial reality. The earth itself can't produce enough wealth to pay for a process of rejecting modernity. At least the bubble didn't include a lot of napalm and explosives but it's still early on that score.    

 

Friday, March 14, 2025

AI and Mount Vesuvius


If you're one of those skeptics that doesn't see a bright future for Artificial Intelligence the following will change your mind.

Remember back in 79 CE, 1946 years ago when Mount Vesuvius blew its top and incinerated Pompeii, Herculaneum and large parts of the local Roman countryside? Ever since, interested parties have been digging through the ash looking for insight on the life of the Roman elites that lived in that unlucky neighborhood. Many scrolls have been found that are certain to contain interesting information of one sort or another but the charred rolls of papyrus couldn't be opened without destroying them. Now sophisticated X-rays and AI have been put to use and darned if some words haven't been made visible in some way. It's good to know that AI has become truly useful in important work.

Investigators feel that at least one of the scrolls contains work by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Maybe Romans cherished the ideas of happy-go-lucky Epicurus enough to have scrolls of his stuff piled up in the living room instead of the Roman counterpart of Zippy the Pinhead or maybe not. But perhaps their sense of humor wasn't quite as developed as their descendants. 

 https://www.italymagazine.com/sites/default/files/feature-story/leader/vesuvius-naples-view.jpgitalymagazine.com  

 

Vannevar Bush

You might wonder who Vannevar Bush was and why there might be any interest in him.

 https://www.full-stop.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1945-Vannevar-Bush-TIME.jpg 

full-stop.net

People have a tendency to believe that the advance of civilization from naked nut gatherers to designers of AI data centers was a sort of inevitable path, a kind of evolution. Aspects of that may well have been but in the recent past almost all of the changes and developments in society are the product of decisions made by influential individuals. Bush was one of the most influential.

 In Science, The Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the president of the United States, Bush called for an expansion of government support for science, and he pressed for the creation of the National Science Foundation.

Some quotes from his report:

If the colleges, universities and research institutes are to meet the rapidly increasing demands of industry and Government for new scientific knowledge, their basic research should be strengthened by the use of public funds.

A permanent Science Advisory Board should be created to consult with these scientific bureaus and to advise the executive and legislative branches of Government as to the policies and budgets of Government agencies engaged in scientific research.

The time has come, however, for a careful evaluation of the questions raised by direct Federal aid to private institutions. Our universities clearly stand in need of increased financial support if they are to strengthen their basic contributions to the scientific life of the Nation. Financial aid may also be required to speed up the transition between basic discoveries in university laboratories and their practical industrial applications. The committee has therefore felt compelled to examine from the standpoint of public policy the question: Is a  substantial increase in Federal financial aid to scientific research in educational and other nonprofit research institutions necessary and desirable?

The Bush recommendations were adopted. Billions of dollars have been awarded, especially to the members of the American Association of Universities, whose purpose is to secure federal funding for their members. They have been hugely successful at this. It's doubtful that Bush would have been able to predict that a prostrate China, a conquered colony of Imperial Japan, would, less than 80 years later, be considered a threat to the US and its ally Japan. But he was aware that there would be some threat from somewhere. 

"Science, The Endless Frontier" seems now to be a strange name for the report. While there will probably be research into biological mysteries for many years to come, most of the issues in chemistry and physics are well under control. The efforts have turned to the trivial, translating scrolls damaged by volcanic eruptions, authenticating the artists of paintings, intercepting the light from stars millions of light years away. Keeping up with the Chinese in the artificial intelligence arena is part of that nonsense. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

$800 Milliion Haircut For Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins, the celebrated Baltimore university and research institute and member of the American Association of Universities, has had revoked $800 million in grants from the beleaguered USAID. Its response has been to lay off 247 employees in the US and 1,945 in the 44 other countries where USAID funds finance their operations. That means that the employees shown the door were making an average of $365,000 annually.

Previously, USAID grants to Columbia University, also a member of the Association of American Universities, totaling  $400 million have been clawed back, ostensibly as punishment for the school allowing students to riot over Israeli activity against Hamas in Gaza. 

In 2023 Johns Hopkins spent $3,801,585 on research and development activities, the most of any university in the country by a considerable margin. The total spent on R & D by American universities was $108,841,148. 

Statements made by the AAU:

 The Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) has written to Appropriation Committee members requesting that the National Science Foundation (NSF) receive at least $9.9 billion in funding for Fiscal Year (FY) 2026. This amount would restore NSF's funding to its FY 2023 level.

 The Coalition for Aerospace and Science (CAS) requests Congress appropriate at least $27.18 billion for NASA in fiscal Year 2026, a vital increase to maintain development of ongoing missions while initiating work on new groundbreaking endeavors.

 AAU has signed a letter from the Energy Sciences Coalition (ESC) recommending that Congress allocate $9.5 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science in FY 2026 to maintain U.S. competitiveness.

Since the general population of the US is fairly well fed, clothed and out of the rain, driving somewhat reliable automobiles and endlessly entertained, these funds aren't marked for improvement of their lot. They are being used in a strange competition with "China", whoever that is:

 "Even a temporary stoppage of critical scientific research is a self-defeating, unforced error. On the very same day that headlines announced a breakthrough indicating that China may have, at very least, caught up to the U.S. in some aspects of artificial intelligence, the federal government put on hold critical ongoing work to make U.S. scientific and technological advances. If you are racing neck-and-neck, stepping off the track for any amount of time is a gift to your competitors." AAU President Barbara Snyder, January 28, 2025.