Francesca Gino

 https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/27/gino-tenure-revoked

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.

 

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.   

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.

 

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.    

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? 

 

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.

 

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. 

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.

 

 

                                    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. 

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.

 

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.

 

 

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.   

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. 

 

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.

 

Basquiat Masterpiece To Be Auctioned

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.

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.    

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.

 

Climate Crisis Causing Earthquakes

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."

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. 

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.

 

 

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.

  

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. 

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. 

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.

 dreamstime.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.    

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.

 

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?    

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.    

 

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. 

 italymagazine.com  

 

Vannevar Bush

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

  

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.

Sun Cable Fiasco

                              Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest

 

                               Mike Cannon-Brookes 

These two Australian billionaires are the men behind the Sun Cable project meant to suck up the plentiful solar  energy available in Northern Australia, convert it into electricity, push it along to Darwin from where it would move farther west and then travel by the longest undersea electrical cable ever to Singapore, 4200 km and about $30 billion away.  Big news when it was announced, it's disappeared from the top of the business page.

This proposed enterprise seems to resemble a brain-storming session by a couple of slightly inebriated jokers at a barbecue. But their intention is to remain billionaires so unless they can get their history of expertise in financial success to attract significant investment from others it won't happen. Such seems to be the case. 

The solar farm's electricity could be sent to southern Australia but that won't require anything other than typical transmission lines so a smaller project could still result.

This is just more evidence of the decline in financial interest in "renewable" energy. While the climate anxious remain committed to eliminating atmospheric CO2 those who can afford to engage in the Quixotic task, both business and government, are becoming less interested.   

Religious Tradition

The American today lives in an age of technology in which very few people farm--and even those few farms are mechanized--but he still observes a religious calendar that is a carryover of the annual changes in agricultural activities in the Mediterranean world. Americans who have inherited the religious traditions of the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean do not find it strange that a messiah should be born at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun is farthest away from the earth and is about to return. Nor do they find it strange that in the spring, when Nature is renewed in the Near East, the Hebrews should have set out from Egypt to found a new nation and the messiah should be resurrected. 

 

Farb, Peter, Man's Rise To Civilization As Shown By The Indians Of North America From Primeval Times To The Coming Of The Industrial State, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. New York, 1968.  

CO2 Sequestration Unknowns

 An article in the "Undark" website talks about some of the unknowns in carbon sequestration. The big question is what are the possibilities of the liquid CO2 escaping the designated area thousands of feet below the surface and contaminating lower and intervening aquifers? Since this process has never been done before, any answer is conjecture rather than science.

The only way sequestration will take place is to harvest federal subsidies and tax breaks. It won't be a feature of the free market, if such a thing even exists. The sequestration process is itself only an addition to a suspect ethanol industry that relies on government regulation of motor fuel, an unproven theory on CO2 climate change advanced by neo-Whig entrepreneurs and environmental innocents, distorted science promoted by compromised academia, daily apocalyptic media projections and battalions of government employees with an economic stake in the matter. In fact, the process of planting corn that might end in driving CO2 deep into the earth is financed in its entirety by the general population through government mandates and then taxes. Its difficult to imagine a more extensive con game unless one takes into account war and its preparation.

 

arinspiredpencil.com 

How a CO2 molecule would appear to you if you were really small.    

Swedish Battery Maker Gives Up

Sweden's  Northvolt, already bankrupt in the US, will go out of business and its assets sold in its home country. The most obvious competitor of Chinese manufacturers of EV batteries, its failure is a huge negative in a European elitist dream of carbon-free transportation. 

 etn.news

Millions of dollars in government subsidies will have evaporated with its demise, including losses to Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen.

Its optimistic blurb on its still present website says this: 

 " The world is turning its back on fossil fuels. With the change comes new opportunities and new demands for industry. Together, let's build a cleaner world."

According to Apollo News the German connection involved this:

Northvolt was originally supposed to build its own factory in Schleswig-Holstein. The company received subsidies totaling €700 million for this. Habeck also publicly and enthusiastically supported the project. "The industrial strategy is working," the Green Party politician praised the construction of the factory on NDR at the time . Habeck and Schleswig-Holstein's Minister President Daniel Günther even attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the factory.

 

 

Weeding Out Chinese EVs

In the twentieth century an amazing number of automobile marques in the US foundered and disappeared forever. The extinctions continue. There are no more Hudson Hornets, Studebakers, Plymouths, De Sotos, La Salles, Cords and scores of others.

In the much-feared Chinese EV industry that once included 400 manufacturers only 40 survive to this day and many of them won't last long either. The number is less in the already consolidated West.

 

autoreporting.com 

The Chinese car business can't escape the capitalist marketplace where the efficient survive and the rest perish. Replacing the internal combustion automobile, with its already well-developed infrastructure, is an even bigger challenge than simply building a better car. 

Lightning Strikes Wind Turbine

A non-operating Vineyard wind turbine off Nantucket, MA was further compromised by a lightning strike on February 27 according to the Coast Guard. Initially damaged during testing on July 13, 2024 the turbine has sat idle since. Scheduled for repair in May, it means that the unit will have been off-line for ten months in the most favorable circumstances.

 wired.com

While wind turbines are equipped with grounding systems to protect them from lightning strikes, federal authorities say that lightning is still a major cause of turbine damage.

 

Larry Fink Running The Panama Canal

Larry Fink and his Black Rock private equity conglomerate will take over not just the Panama Canal but also over 43 ports in 23 countries, including Mexico, the Netherlands, Egypt, Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

The deal was made between Hong Kong based CK Hutchison Holding and Black Rock for $22.8 billion. The transaction was billed as protection of US interests from the godless Asian Commies. On the other hand, who is going to protect Americans from Black Rock? Are their interests one hundred percent aligned with the US man on le cul de sac?  And, if this was a deal meant to protect the Yankees, where did the money come from? Could some of it be from the US Treasury?

Perhaps there's no need to worry. Fink can hire people that actually know something about running ports or even leave the current lowlies in place. Most of us don't care how ships move from place to place anyway until one of them wrecks an interstate bridge.   

The Autopen

 

An issue has appeared in the national press after the

 Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project

 discovered that many of the papers that needed the signature

 of the ex-president had been made with an autopen. The auto

pen is a device that’s meant to imitate the signature of an

 individual on important documents. It’s needed because

 important elected officials, bureaucrats and management

 figures just don’t have the time to graphically approve them.

 A machine does it instead.

In the case of a particular ex-president it seems that he may

 not have had the mental capacity to understand the issues

 that his signature was meant to approve. It’s suspected that

 the autopen was used by those surrounding him with their

 own ideas.

An on-line publication by the American Association of Notaries

 illustrates the problems that can arise in such a situation and

 how they are handled professionally. This is not to say that a

 similar process wasn’t followed in the case of the signatures

 by the ex-president. He was no doubt surrounded by

 attorneys giving him advice. At the same time, the general 

public should be aware that the man with the nuclear football

 is incapable, for one reason or another, of approving or 

initiating government policy and action.

While there will be many who say, “It’s just the way things are

 done now”. there will be many others that will consider the

 process fraudulent, further dividing the country pretty much

 along the same lines as at present. The auto pen should be

 forbidden in any part of government.

 

damilic.com

Not Good News For Carbon Dioxide Pipelines

Summit Carbon Solution's plans for an $8.9 billion, 2,500-mile  pipeline network gathering the CO2 generated by 50 some ethanol plants in the midwest ran into some problems today. South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden signed legislation that forbids the use of eminent domain specifically for liquid carbon dioxide pipelines. The C02, ostensibly the cause of the existential climate change now destroying the planet, is supposed to be captured at the ethanol plants, liquified, pumped through the as yet imaginary pipelines to a location northwest of Bismarck, ND and injected into the ground where it will remain forever unless it's needed for fracking oil wells or making dry ice for vacationing fishermen. Well, there's also the small matter of federal subsidies and transferable tax credits, too. The project wouldn't be considered for a moment if it had to operate as a genuine business.

 

governorsbiofuelscoalition.com 

Could a project of this size actually be built for about $9 billion? That seems to be just one of the doubtful aspects of this whole affair. In fact, the South Dakota action could be the deciding factor in its inevitable failure. While Summit Carbon Solutions has little, if any, developed infrastructure of their own in place, some one must be prepared to come up with $9 billion+ to finance the project, with inflation increasing the cost daily. Funds of that amount aren't just sitting around waiting for the traffic light to change. Those who have them want them invested in productive, profitable enterprises. The time line for the operation is a negative as well. It would be years before a freezing drop of liquid CO2 could be pumped into the North Dakota prairie. Even if the Summit scam had been approved in some way it likely couldn't find the financing in an increasingly skeptical venture capital environment. The big money guys have moved on to AI data centers.     

Transgender Girls

The Minnesota Star-Tribune has published a news article describing the failure of a state house bill to prohibit boys from competing in athletic events restricted to girls. Rather than use the term "boys" in the article, males that wish to compete against girls are referred to as "transgender girls". 

There's actually a considerable amount of confusion in the very concept of transgender theory. While there have probably always been men who wished to be seen as women, no surgical procedures had been developed to disguise their gender. By dressing as women they became, by definition, transvestites. Transvestites dress like women in order to obtain sex from men who prefer sex with men dressed like women. They are, cross dressers, a sub-species of the homosexual genera. 

While pseudoscience has come up with theories to justify males competing in female events, altered testosterone levels, for instance, none of this makes any sense in the competitive sports world. Males have an advantage over females in physical sports even if they are called "transgender girls". Nothing can change that. Their gender is determined by their chromosomes and DNA. The only difference between a male and a "transgender girl" is in the gray matter of the latter.

We don't hear much about the motivation of men pretending to be girls entering female athletic events. The justification seems to be that having been losers as men they have more opportunities for victory as "transgender girls". Maybe there's a connection between this and a culture where "winning" is the most important thing. An Olympic gold medalist is famous for the rest of their life and beyond, number four in the event is unmentioned even though their scores or times were nearly identical. The economic struggle for individual supremacy has filtered down to the lowest levels of the capitalist, corporate, bureaucratic, consumer society. So men will pretend to be women in order to stand in the spotlight, if only for a moment.

Ultimately, it's never mentioned that even a male surgically altered to resemble a female, will never experience something that only a female can, menopause.

Once again, we can thank academia and its affiliate pseudoscience for taking a stand on culture. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, 2015,  there has been a change in the diagnosis for transpeople of all ages from Gender Identity Disorder (GID) to Gender Dysphoria (GD), in part to better indicate the distress that transpeople may experience when their gender identity feels incongruent.      

The hullabaloo over boys in girls' sports is a weird and rare distraction that will hopefully go away soon so we can worry about the negatives experienced by "transgender girls" due to climate change.

Timeline of US Immigration