The Science is Unsettled by Torpenhow-Hill

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Science is Unsettled by Torpenhow-Hill

There is an uproar in the science community at the moment over the budget cuts that President Trump is proposing.  Apparently all the colleges will be closing and people will die.  How bad is it?  A bit of AI fu (because I refuse to dirty my internet with MSNBC or that ilk) finds:

            “President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to federal research spending for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins on October 1. The proposed budget calls for a 37% reduction in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and more than 50% for the National Science Foundation (NSF), marking unprecedented reductions for these major science funders.

 Additionally, the budget seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research and would cut NASA’s science budget by more than half, potentially ending major planetary missions.

The Trump administration has also moved to cap indirect costs for NIH research grants at 15%, which would reduce billions of dollars in funding for critical research aimed at developing cures and treatments for diseases. This policy has been met with legal resistance, as Congress has included a provision in annual appropriations bills since 2018 explicitly prohibiting such changes.

 The administration’s broader efforts to slash science budgets have extended to other agencies, including the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which would see a 14% cut to its budget, reducing it to $7.1 billion.”

Thank you AI for doing my dirty work.  Let’s see, National Institute of Health just formally cut funding for gain of function research IE the research that brought us COVID so that will save us a dollar or two.  Furthermore, even though he’s got a golden parachute that’s the envy of wall street, we’re not paying Fauci millions a year so there is that.  And Robert Kennedy has said that he’s going through the department with an ax to eliminate redundant positions.  What the private sector calls deadwood. 

I had to look up the National Science foundation.  Well, nsf.gov tells me that they support 1,900 organizations and 350,000 + teachers, researchers and entrepreneurs across the country.  What the website doesn’t tell me is if there is any oversight or if any of those projects are meaningful, useful or replicable.  Nor are we told if the taxpayers would have voted for them if given a choice.  I’m going to take a wild guess.

The budget seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research.  I’m going to point and laugh and move on.  For the DOE I did a quick abstract search using Arizona as a keyword.  Enjoy the results. https://pamspublic.science.energy.gov/WebPAMSExternal/interface/awards/AwardSearchExternal.aspx.  Then tell me which of these you want your tax dollars to fund.

Last but not least, NASA.  Who does not remember the glory that once was NASA?   I watched Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon.  But not only were they glorious, they were the only game in town.  By law.  Between 1958 when The National Aeronautics and Space Act created NASA and 1984 when the Commercial Space Act provided a medium for private entities to attempt space it was NASA or nothing.  And for those of us who remember the great Ma Bell days or the USPS or Public Education, well we’re a might bit skeptical about federal monopolies on – anything.  And the shuttle program (IMO and I’ll own it) didn’t get shut down because of the mistakes that were made.  The shuttle program got shut down because the government is by nature risk averse when it comes to public optics and human lives.  (Except for the military but that’s another post.)  So, while I sympathize deeply with the NASA people, they’re doing, not much by order of their bosses. 

Further            more we have problems.  Government spending on research drives out private spending. Not only does the government pull researchers from private industry, it then dictates what will be researched creating a monolithic worldview. The taxpayers have no choice as to whether or not they want to pay for the spending.  There is no oversight regarding the spending.  And we have a deficit the size of a hyperbolic stereotype.

There used to be private labs in industry, Bell, Westinghouse, and GE are the ones I know off the top of my head because I’m a tech.  Hospitals and colleges used to find funding from charities or businesses.  Even now, Saint Jude’s Childhood Cancer Center still pulls money from donations because societies tend to want to protect kids.  But providing tax breaks for research equipment got conflated by a specific subset of politicians with “loopholes, regressive tax policies, and corporate welfare” and not taxing capital expenditures for research became tax any capital equipment.  And the private labs became endangered species.  But the public pork kept rolling and became a secure source of funding.  All you had to do was-what you were told.  Awesome way to do science.  Much bold.  Very replicable.  Totes good for anything. OK not really. 

And oversight. Datarepublican could be working the rest of her natural life trying to find who is spending what on which programs and who ordered them.  They weren’t ordered by congress who are at least theoretically supposed to hold the purse strings.   And what science did we get?  Masks.  A vaccine that people are starting to sue for damages over.  In some cases successfully. Mutilated children.  And the deficit.  The interest on the deficit is larger than the budget for the armed forces.  And I’m over the tears and wailing.  We need to fix the spending and “science” especially what has been passing for it does not get an exemption.  I leave you with an NIH example from the Tweets:

86 thoughts on “The Science is Unsettled by Torpenhow-Hill”

  2. I can see telling NASA that it can do “pure science” (RESEARCH) and explore Mercury and Jupiter and Beyond. With Venus and Mars as a longer “for now” and the Moon as a VERY SHORT “for now.” Private research to/on the moon is WAY overdue. It has started, if just barely. I figure *some* overlap is reasonable.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And there is room for pure science (NASA: what’s the moon made of, how micro is microgravity, what is causing moonquakes, anyway?) and applied science (SpaceCo, LTD: can lunar dust be used as a better blasting media, what happens to moon ferret pelts under gravity and how much will people pay for a moon ferret fur collar?)

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      1. Sort of unfair to the ASPCA types: in no atmosphere you can’t be heard marching back and forth outside the moon ferret facilities in protest. Sort of hard to march in a dignified manner in 1/6 g as well, I’d assume, not to mention the prohibitive logistical challenge of importing your protestors.

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      2. A rising tide raises all boats, so eventually everyone will be able to afford moon ferret fur accoutrements.

        As to NASA, on the one hand when they do publicity it’s always human spaceflight, Neal climbing down the LM ladder and Bruce McCandless in the MMU flying free all on his own on STS-41b – but on the other hand they grounded the MMU because it would be too much bother to recertify that actually flight-proven system for human use under the new post-Challenger rules, and we can’t go back to the moon because of the safety people sayin it’s too scary, and the planetary protection people saying we can’t contaminate the moon, and besides the Shuttle program is using all the human spaceflight budget…

        But science missions! We can send boxes to deep space with no danger of bad publicity, so we’ll just do that!

        Without Elon we’d still be stuck waiting for another Soyuz seat while Boeing worked out how to cost-plus charge for fixing their capsule mess as slowly as possible, and I’d bet the tradspace primes would be sucking up all the human spaceflight fraction of the NASA budget using SLS to launch ISS resupply missions the same way Shuttle sucked it up all those year.

        History has parallels. The great exploration fleets that the Ch8nese government sent out definitely reached as far west as the tip of Africa, and there is some evidence in the form of unique wheel shaped anchor stones found off California that Chinese ships reached the west coast of North America. But the program was cancelled, and the Chinese Emperor ordered the ships burned. Meanwhile in Europe privately funded expeditions, initially by the great Portuguese navigators as well as that Italian guy, opened it all up, for profit, and they just kept going.

        I vote for being Portuguese navigators, not Chinese government employees.

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    2. With Venus and Mars as a longer “for now” 

      I figure Elon is doing research on Mars. If he ISN’T, then the first crew that gets stranded there, he’s gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do.

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  3. Absolutely! I had to grit my teeth at Liberty Con when I got in a conversation with someone who was a firm believer in the status quo and completely anti-Trump anything, who was wailing the loss of NASA and of course claiming RFK Jr was a quack who was endangering us all because “he is making claims that have not been peer reviewed! He’s just spreading conspiracy theory!” Never mind that the claims about vaccine injury and all the other “conspiracy theories” out there aren’t peer reviewed because the monolith that is scientific research is so biased as to not allow anything in that might possibly challenge the status quo and the chosen views of the government who funds it. So I am with you – get the feds out of out and force these researchers to actually earn their money – force them to go to the public and make a case for what they are researching and open up the private sector to research things that the modern system has refused to look at. Let’s study seed oils for real and not just take the AHA’s word that “canola oil is good for you!” and study these food additives that the FDA just grandfathered in. People want to get to the truth and truth is never the first priority of a government monopoly.

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    1. “…of course claiming RFK Jr was a quack…”

      He is a quack. And he is spreading a conspiracy theory.

      Unfortunately even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even a nutbar like JFK Jr. can spot a criminal conspiracy when it is as big as the Food Pyramid. Turns out that freakin’ chemtrails are a real thing too.

      Peer review and the NIH et al ARE the conspiracy. You don’t have to go far to find “research” that is so dumb it makes you laugh. Just look for anything with “gun” in the title. My chief complaint with JFK Jr. just now is that he needs to swing the chainsaw -harder-. Never mind the dead wood, get busy clear-cutting the whole freakin’ forest. Take down the BIG trees and set the scrub on fire, that’ll take care of the dead wood as nice as you like.

      Anybody like watching Sabine Hossenfelder? She’s been getting in a lot of heck with all the physicists out there in Big Physics by ripping holes in their grant proposals and theories on YouTube. She’s been particularly harsh with the Big Collider crowd, saying that if you 10X the collider at CERN you’re not going to learn anything new.

      She also says that Physics as a whole has been pretty much standing still since the 1960s and I can’t really disagree with her. Distinct lack of anti-gravity, FTL drives and flying cars out there, given the amount of money being spent.

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      1. Sabine Hossenfelder is pretty much right, though there’s been a few interesting developments in the past few years. I think it was maybe five years ago I heard about the, I think this is the right name, Structured Atomic Model of physics. It basically says, “Hey, what if there’s actually no such thing as uncharged particles, and what we call a neutron is really a proton and an electron tightly coupled together?” They then calculate what the consequences would be — internal slight charge differentials within the nucleus because the proton-electron pair is slightly positively charged on one side and slightly negatively charged on the other side, and thus any given isotope of any given element would tend to end up in a specific shape due to the slight charges attracting or repelling each other. This would explain why, when you hit a uranium atom with an electron, it always splits in the exact same way each time; the Standard Model, with its “undifferentiated mass of neutrons and protons” model of the nucleus, has no way of explaining why uranium splits the exact same way each time. Which is one of the things that leads me to think the Structured Atomic Model may well be correct, or at least more correct than the Standard Model.

        I don’t watch Sabine Hossenfelder regularly, though, so I don’t know if she’s done a video on the Structured Atomic Model or what she thinks of it. But it’s one of the more interesting developments in physics in recent years. Nothing spectacular, but (if proven correct) a good advancement in our understanding, which MIGHT lead to someone coming up with a way to improve nuclear power. THAT would be a big benefit to the world (at least to sensible countries that use nuclear power).

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      2. Which conspiracy theory?

        Vaccines?

        After this whole Covid gain-of-function/Clot Shot debacle with revelations and solid data now coming in from various countries, there’s a lot of questions on how much trustworthy science is actually going on at the CDC, NIH, FDA and Big Pharma.

        And there appears to be more than a casual link between the huge increase of number of childhood vaccines and bad effects like SIDS and autism. Kids get 10x the number of shots we did growing up and aren’t huge improvements in their heath. Diet and food poisioning is also to blame, but look what happened to the shot schedule in the later ’80s.

        I think Jr. is swinging the ax as hard as the system currently allows. True justice would have teams of workers feeding hundreds of scum into woodchippers 24/7 for a few years. Just the top people. Maybe the rest of the doctors that sold out will get the message.

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      3. The success of smallpox and polio vaccinations led to heady times in public health. Doctors suddenly wielding The Power Of Life And Death decreed, “If any child ever died of X, all children must be vaccinated against X! No exceptions!”

        That mindset led inevitably to the mandatory COVID19 inoculations which are:

        1. Not vaccinations
        2. Still not FDA approved after 5 years
        3. Not safe, and
        4. Not effective

        Other than those leetle problems, hey, they’re fine. Big Pharma knew all that, too. That’s why they demanded pre-emptive immunity from being held responsible for ‘adverse effects’. If you call dying an adverse effect, that is. :-(

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        1. Now that we know how the FDA works, “FDA approved” is barely better than “front cover of some tabloid in the supermarket checkout aisle.”

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          1. They should have stuck to their original job: Veterinarians for on-the-hoof supplies for the Army.

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          2. Worthless or not, FDA approvals cost $Billions and take years to decades while people who could have been helped die and companies developing medical products go bankrupt. It’s Yet Another bureaucracy which exists only to expand its budget and add more bureaucrats.

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        2. 5. Cash cows for Pfizer, Moderna and every associated bureaucrat who skimmed billions.

          Effectively a money-printing license for politicians and crooks (BIRM).👿

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  4. You say you’re skeptical about federal monopolies, referring to Ma Bell. Later in the essay you lament the decline of the corporate lab. Bell Labs heyday was a consequence of the monopoly – corporate research largely exists in a thoroughly dominated/saturated market, where there’s a durable profit margin and no obvious way to expand the current market.

    But this is irrelevant from a federal budget perspective: SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense, Interest. Two have to go, from a spending perspective. Everything else is a rounding error, including the DOGE cuts, needed as they were.

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    1. DOGE seems to be a shot across the bows to the Swamp more than anything else. For #OrangeManBad to flat-out cancel the biggest cash-cow out there, #US-AID (or the biggest one we know about so far) is putting the Fear of the Almighty into many, many pilferers of the public purse.

      I recall that Elon mentioned he was in fear of his life from the swamp creatures on one of those Joe Rogan podcasts. He was quite candid about the fact that he was taking it easy in case he might anger a dragon hiding in one of those swamp caves. You know, like the intelligence community, or the banksters. Something big enough to eat him and Tesla for lunch. Something that buys and sells medium sized nations like #Canaduh.

      Some things you can un-alive easy, like a lion. Ka-pow. Other things you have to harry and chase until they drop from exhaustion, like ancient Eskimos hunting a woolly mammoth.

      Tax cut. Starve them.

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      1. Elon can afford to hire all the Delta and SEAL and Secret Service folks who still want to work. Certainly a cruise missile strike could expire him, but lone nutjob type deniable stuff is unlikely to succeed.

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        1. You say that, but I recall a certain #OrangeManBad got shot in the ear recently by a deniable lone nutjob. Half an inch from a different timeline.

          Elon knows rockets. I’m sure he knows about a lot of scary stuff a state-sponsored outfit could come up with at need.

          I would venture that the important thing is to make them nervous so they run, rather than terrify them so they stand and fight. Once you get them running, you can chase them until they drop. That might take longer, but you lose less guys that way.

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          1. I guess my hope is extravagantly paid very dangerous direct employees will do a better job than GS schedule civil servants working under and at the direction of an administration on the other side from the protectee.

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          2. I wonder about the latest Starship exploding on the pad. A little sabotage here, a bit there, and SpaceX would be looking at massive losses.

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            1. Considering the mass of combustibles and oxidizers in the average rocket, and how many places might leak such, it is a wonder they do not all explode.

              Sabotage is certainly possible, but hardly necessary.

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            2. There are rumors about the COPD, which in failing appears to have caused this latest kaboom, being investigated as potentially suss.

              Since Musk has become png of the organized left, I would not be surprised at either paid suborning or a lefty agent attempting to get themselves hired in as an employee as SpaceX expands its workforce. The issue would be getting at or inserting someone who knows enough to damage a COPD in such a way that it passes preinstallation inspections and testing but fails later in actual use.

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    2. Doge was a way to untangle how embedded Dems were stealing money from various programs to fund protests, election shenanigans, a bunch of political pet projects, and, of course, their own NGO salaries. It shined a light on how our government was funding its own opposition and allowed at least some safeguards to be put in place.
      Definitely worth it.

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  6. If Elon isn’t planning to send 100 rockets of tools, supplies, etc to Mars before he sends the first human crew, he’s not as smart as he appears.

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    1. Which means he will have to do enough research to have a good idea of WHICH tools, supplies, etc. need to be sent.

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      1. And go beyond what research says. Because it’s a damned long way to the wally world. And failure is a lot more expensive than overpacking.

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    2. Elon and SpaceX says they will send a lot of unmanned rockets full of tools, supplies, robots and self-functioning machines before they send manned ships.

      Partly because they’ll need the infrastructure before they step on Mars. Partly because nobody’s landed a BFR on Mars.

      He’s got the plans.

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    1. The main priority of modern “scientists” or “researchers” isn’t science.

      “Grant whores in lab coats.”

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  8. Did the search on the recommended site. I forget which box I put ‘Arizona’ in, but MOST of the results actually looked like reasonable research, if perhaps a bit SPECIFIC. There were a fair number on the second page that fit in my “What the…???” list and seemed to be social buzzword bingo projects. YMMV?

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    1. The first page* looked reasonable, but I bounced off the 15 page selection menu. Oregon only has two pages. I couldn’t help but notice the scientific word salad for a lot of the items. Ticks off this retired engineer’s KISS tendencies.

      (*) Keyword box worked for me

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  9. I recall reading that a bigr driver of shutting down the Shuttle was parts availability for systems. iirc they were using ebay to find computer and controller chips, because what they used was old to start with (because well tested).
    Risk aversion actually lead to the second disaster. I related a story here long ago about a fellow trying to get them to fly off the mandated profile to shadow the wing, and quitting over them pretty much knowingly flying them to destruction instead, and Stephanie Osbourne replied she knew who I was speaking of.
    They were more worried about trying it and failing and getting blamed than increasing the possibility they’d survive.

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    1. They also claimed that there was no way to inspect the damage while in orbit. I wanted to yell at them, “Have you got a space suit and a rope?”

      What they really meant was, they hadn’t spent six months planning a ‘Wing Inspection EVA’ in excruciating detail for that mission. Hell, even if they had planned out an inspection for one wing, they would have refused to authorize an inspection of the other wing.

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      1. So lets say they HAD done the spacewalk on the Columbia and noticed the damage. Ok Now what? You can’t carry spares for the leading edge as all the pieces are unique and weight is needed for your mission. There were some dubious patch concepts later created, but Columbia had none of that. After Columbia there was always an extra shuttle ready to roll out (because of how they worked the schedule) but such was not the case with Columbia and roll out for a rescue would have taken considerably longer than the life support could provide for the 7 Columbia astronauts. This was effectively a Kobyashi Maru scenario. You give it a shot and hope the wing doesn’t burn through on reentry.

        The shuttle was an extremely advanced design for its period. It reached WELL beyond known capacities. Probably one or two intermediate designs should have been worked with and ironed out. But Congress (and Nixon) were uninterested in paying for that. In addition its design was played with in a variety of ways. Originally, it was to ride piggyback on a giant launcher aircraft that would then fly back to Kennedy/Canaveral. However that was too expensive, so we moved to Liquid fuel boosters but those were too expensive, so we went with solid fuel boosters. Because of the decisions that the Shuttle would carry everything to orbit it got bigger yet for military payloads causing a variety of hack changes. The original insulative foam for the fuel tank was changed when fluorocarbons were banned which may have contributed to pieces falling off of Columbia (and others, the others just got lucky that the foam wasn’t a big wet piece frozen to ice). Originally 5 shuttles were planned However, that was too expensive and honestly Enterprise was to darned heavy so it was never upgraded. When Challenger was lost spares intended for Enterprise were stuck together with some new hardware to make Endeavour. Atlantis was nearly lost in a manner similar to Columbia (but the burn through was less severe) before the loss of Columbia.

        NASA has a cultural history of hubris and letting the managers override the engineers, So far 17 astronauts have paid for that. Astronauts in Apollo 13, several of the Gemini flights, at least one Atlantis flight, and the recent Starliner came close. I understand compared to say the numbers lost crossing the Atlantic in the age of discovery or even the start of the age of aviation, are minuscule, but still being sloppy and rushing is not excusable.

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    2. I hadn’t heard that, but yikes! Pitchfork and torches vs rope and lampposts? I think I know what I’d prefer.

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      1. C- All of the above?😉

        Or possibly:

        Hang, then behead, then draw and quarter. Burn the results and scatter the ashes.

        Just, of course, to be sure…😈

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    3. What truly killed the Shuttle was that it was so darned expensive, basically being mostly rebuilt after every flight.

      NASA knew that chunks of ice were falling off and hitting tiles. From basically Day 1 of operation.

      NASA had repair kits designed for both white and black tiles, designed to work in space.

      NASA had ‘rocket packs’ designed to allow astronauts to do things like go around the Shuttle and check for damage and fix said damage.

      NASA had rescue shuttles, basically an early version of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, designed and preliminary mockups built. Said rescue shuttles could be launched on an Atlas or Delta rocket.

      NASA also sold the Shuttle program on the basis of ‘there would always be a 2nd Shuttle ready to go in case there’s an issue with the ‘active’ shuttle.

      NASA also had the Shuttle designed where the crew cabin, all of it, could separate and serve as a lifeboat in space or as an escape vehicle during launch (which, if operable, would have saved the Challenger crew.)

      Yeah. NASA sucks for manned flight after Apollo-Saturn. We could have gone with the next-gen Apollo (up to 85% reusable, replacing heat shields and life support and parachute systems) and next-gen Saturn (some vehicles designed to lift 500K tons or more to orbit, with lower stages reusable or with recoverable engine sections. There was even a study and serious research into a Big Gemini (basically a Gemini capsule writ large, able to ferry up to 15 crew to low earth orbit.

      Just look at what NASA (via Congress) has done with the SLS (Shuttle’s Leftover Sh…tuff.) NASA manned flight has been turned into a giant jobs welfare program, where cost overruns are justified in order to keep people employed.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. There was a proposal in NASA that if the Columbia crew could maintain if using bare minimum consumables, there was a chance that they could get Atlantis on the pad and launch in time with a four-member crew (launch teams working 24/7 and cutting normal safety regs). It would have been a dangerous mission with no guarantee of success (launching with the same ET flaw), then fly close formation belly to belly (no Canada arm) while they brought EVA suits and transfer the crew. Higher NASA had no guts to try it. I wish they had at least tried.

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        1. Senior NASA had/has the unavoidable disease of all bureaucracies; if you look up “risk-averse” in the dictionary you’ll see their picture.

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          1. “They’re probably going to die, but so long as we follow established policy and procedures we can’t be blamed for it. If we try something unapproved to save them and they die anyway, we will be blamed.”

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              1. The old naval US Lifesaving Service had orders that no rescue attempt shall be abandoned until all possible means of rescue have failed. Their successor, the US Coast Guard rules can be paraphrased “The rules say you have to go out. They don’t say you have to come back”.

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  10. That image at the bottom is too fuzzy to read, but the title is enough. ‘White Ignorance’? How about researching ‘Woke Stupidity’ instead? That might be useful.

    As I have said before, ‘Politics perverts science’. And nothing to do with the government can escape politics. Government ‘scientists’ report what their political masters pay them to report, or they don’t get paid. They don’t get grants, they don’t get published. Eventually they get excommunicated. The ‘successful’ ones spend most of their time and effort navigating the bureaucracy in search of their next grant, with very little left over for actual science.

    None of that makes for good science, or good scientists.

    “97% of climate scientists agree” with what they are paid to say. The wonder is that even 3% try to tell the truth.

    Science is a method and a process which, applied properly, can lead to expanding our knowledge. Misused, it becomes a tool for endorsing politically popular lies. Good scientists have no use for bad theories, but politicians find them very useful.

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  12. I’m a failed scientist, so keep that in mind. This could just be sour grapes talking. But that being said…

    I’m skeptical that any of the scientific research we fund is doing anything close to accomplish its goal. When I was working in a lab, our professor was suggesting that we should apply for funding from breast cancer foundations. Bear in mind that our research had nothing to do with finding a cure for breast cancer. We had a method for investigating genes that could be applied to genes known to be related to breast cancer, that could find other candidate genes that might be related to breast cancer but would have to undergo further testing to be sure—testing that we were not equipped to do; best we could do was list those genes in a paper and hope that some biologist would read the paper and decide to do the testing. And, if those genes were related to breast cancer, it’s possible that they might be drug targets—which again is not research that we would be equipped to do, or even research that the hypothetical biologists who tested our genes would be equipped to do, but would require yet a third party to find the research of the second party and decide to continue it.

    I can’t help wondering how much of the research we fund is like that. At best, it’s background information that might be vaguely useful toward the nominal goal of the funding a decade or two down the road. At worst, it’s a slush fund that’s just funneling money toward favorite scientists.

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    1. “I can’t help wondering how much of the research we fund is like that.”

      Almost all of it, would be my guess. I spent some time hanging out at the labs during PT school, talking to post-docs doing all kinds of crazy stuff from fish eyeballs to AIDS. I heard some stories, let me tell you.

      Mostly stories about how hard it was to get anything done due to 1) expense due to 2) regulations and 3) politics. Also about how the lead researchers, the Big Name guys, did absolutely nothing but write grant proposals and schmooze deep pockets donors for funding.

      So sciency. Such research.

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  13. The problem with government funded science is that they pick winners and losers. No government in the history of ever has been filled with politicians capable of knowing and deciding which scientific ideas are worthy of public money. They are only capable of deciding which cronies and donors are going to receive funds from the public purse.

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    1. Yep. And that is exactly the part most conspicuous by its absence when some dolt says “The science is settled!”

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  15. The first paper I wrote for my master’s back in 1987 could be summed up as “Kill NASA Now”. At least as far as being a space operations organization vs a science and R&D organization. Nothing that has happened since then has done anything to change my view point.

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  16. Literally (possibly not literally) every Federal agency in existence distributes research grants.

    We get grants from DOI, BLM, Forest Service, and USDA, in addition to NASA, NSF and that’s in addition to the various state agencies that give us money, just for a Forestry department.

    The rest of the university get more, including from HHS, DOE, and who knows what others.

    That’s one of the places that needs to be looked at and cut, in addition to all the NGO funding (regardless of what it’s for).

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    1. first God was for true faith.

      then lords used prists to cement their rule.

      first science was for finding truth.

      then the government and the rich used it for justification of their goals.

      average Joe can not be an expert in everything.

      so those who hire all kinds of experts have the final say.

      unless you do not argue with expertise but question the motives of those who pay the expert.

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    2. I don’t remember who all supported the UConn Oceanography department, but I know that NOAA was a biggie. DOD was probably in there too; I know my father got huge grants from them back in the 70s and 80s when he was at Michigan and Galway. (I spent summers when I was in college helping him put together the massive annual report to show what he’d been doing with the funds. 160 copies of a 123 page report, using massive copiers which couldn’t do double sided. At least once a summer I’d have every copier in the UCG copy center down for maintenance at the same time. Then manual collating and binding. What took me 2 to 3 weeks can be done today in probably a day.)

      I don’t understand (well, I do, but it’s because they are stupid, greedy, and/or evil) why everyone is so het up about putting a limit on the amount of research funding that can be used to pay for the uni administration. 15% seems a quite reasonable maximum to me; I know I wouldn’t want to donate to a charity that uses more than that for admin rather than the actual point of the charity, so why should I be expected to pay for random college admin types instead of the research?

      UConn used to get the SeaGrant funds and sit on them for as long as they could before disbursing them to the actual grant recipients (the longer they kept them, the more interest they could earn). When complaints were made, the admin would say “Well, the grant recipients can just get loans to cover costs until we get them the funds.” Daddy, as head of the state SeaGrant program, would argue back that the funds were for research, not to pay off interest on loans to do the research. He’d then have to threaten to pull the program to a different institution and suddenly folks would get their grant money. I’m sure UConn and many other universities still pull the same crap. Gotta keep those huge endowments huge.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Of course they do. They pull every sneaky, corrupt trick you can think of, along with a lot more that would never occur to any moderately honest person. That’s why they got those jobs, for being the biggest chiselers the colleges could find. It’s why government ‘science’ is corrupt from top to bottom and all the way through. It’s why they need their snouts yanked out of the public trough, permanently.

        Leftroids believe that if something does one tiny bit of good, it justifies allowing a thousand times that much corruption and outright evil.

        Liked by 1 person

  18. two versions of a long post stuck in moderation limbo.

    for short:

    power captures any source of truth.

    speak truth to power only works until the speaker is bribed by the power.

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  19. Frankly, everyone at NIH involved with gain of function research should be put in prison for life for felony violation of ratified U.S. treaty banning bioweapon development.

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      2. Some traditions really are more honored in the breach than in the observance. Tempting though it may be to observe them. The 8th Amendment was drafted and ratified for good reasons.

        Better to go with symbolism: Construct historically-accurate replicas of the gallows used on the Nazi and Japanese war criminals, and apply them as the method of execution for those convicted of crimes against humanity for their parts in attempting to dissolve the people and impose a New Normal.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Woodchippers are the new gallows.

          Justice goes “BRRRRRRRRRRRRR” and creates compost.

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          1. Sarah has the right idea; it discourages recidivism and “encourages the others”. Yours is OK, but keep that compost away from my food crops!😉

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        2. Ban is of cruel and unusual.

          Any punishment, to work, must by nature be cruel. Or it is not punishment.

          The trick is to make it usual. Ponder the typical executions of the 18th century: beheadings, slow hangings, volley of musket fire, keelhauling, etc. Plus “non-lethal” punishments such as flogging, branding, solitary confinement under appalling conditions that are almost certainly fatal.

          Those are all theoretically fair game, as long as we do so often. The first kiddie diddler we axe might have an argument. But by the 14th tisket-tasket-basket, the argument is moot. The best one can argue based on the times is that they wanted the end to be -quick-, they we probably ought not to no-drop hang or crucify traitors. And impaling rapists is probably out, unless its via posterior-applied 7.62 suppository.

          But lack of cruel is lack of punishment, and is eventually lack of civilization.

          “We are not being nice enough to our convicts!” as crime rates soar, is not really a conundrum.

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          1. “cruel and unusual”

            No punctuation between them, linked with a union of ‘and’.

            So, punishment must not be both cruel and unusual. But it can be (and arguably should be, cruel and usual.) Not effective if it’s not cruel, even if it is unusual – tickling their nose with a feather to make them sneeze all day just doesn’t cut it.

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  20. Thanks for the advice in the Promo comments. I recently decided that I could not learn more by simply studying one thing at a time (which probably makes sense to some of you), so I started learning Python and trying to build useful tools for work, write the stories in my head, look for a new job before I’m downsized/deep-sixed, and study the stuff my bass wants me to learn.

    As with all of life, no one ever learned to swim by reading a book. They had to get their feet wet. And I am grateful for all the estimates, suggestions, and encouragement. At least, I interpreted it as encouragement.

    May God bless us, every one.

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      1. I trust the mullahs to keep working towards their stated religious goals with religious fervor. They have, so far, been utterly stubbornly reliable at such.

        If they dug the one deep facility, and we were openly saying we could bomb it, why would they not dig another several much deeper? The Iranians are not stupid. They are actually fairly clever. And stubborn. And proud. They, for example, can keep embargoed F-14s flying 45+ years. It was hard enough for the USA to keep them flying. The Mullahs can buy any modern Russian plane they want, with much greater capabilities, yet they insist on keeping those fossils flying. Clever and stubborn, eh? And all because we forbade them to keep flying them. Hmm.

        Folks in South Africa run mineshafts to staggering depths in search of gold, reliably and successfully. How hard is it to hire those engineers and miners for a really deep clandestine “precious metal mine”? Besides, we already have the Kims of Norkland as examples of deep burrowing crazycakes twitweasels.

        And no one seems to be discussing the mullahs -plutonium- producing reactor that no one destroyed. (And just how many downwind neighbors would have gone apeshit if someone had?) Setting one up under a mountain somewhere is not exactly out of the realm of locally practical. We put working reactors under the Greenland icecap, you may recall.

        We can delay the inevitable, for a while, and wake up to a couple of glassed cities and an ultimatum, lose millions of Americans and Israelis then kill millions of Iranians.

        Or, we can finally cut the fucking head off the fucking snake.

        C’mon, man.

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    1. Even if they elect this wack-job, all of those deranged policies are implemented, and they turn New Yuck into the world’s biggest, deepest shit-hole — the virtue signaling idiots won’t learn a thing. They will still support the same policies. “This will work!” “Next time for sure!” “They just didn’t do it right!”

      Nothing is ever real socialism, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The problem, and I really don’t see a good answer, is the cost of that lesson to the rest of us. Because NYC will have to be permitted as a Hamas safe haven, CCP safe haven, cartel safe haven, or crushed. Maybe enough of the right targets can be killed, but that’s going to take turning the switch into a knob.

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        1. It might be time to put Operation Noah in place and grab the contents of the Met, Frick, and a few other museums, invited the conservative remnant to flee, and then cut the rest of NYC loose and float it over to the EU. ;)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Unnecessarily complicated; all cities are vulnerable because no city is even remotely self-supporting. Warn the population and strip the museums, then a week later cut the food and water supplies, close the roads in and out, and turn off power to the city. In a month the problem will solve itself. Harsh? Yeah, but if they elect this piece of photogenic human(?) garbage it’s their own choice.

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        2. You are being -far- too rosy in your outlook. (grin) The productive folks with brains are already making the “move to Florida” prep.

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  23. A new Gundam TV series apparently just ended (“Gundam Gquuuuuux”; apparently the name was never explained). It was set in an alternate universe, and Kycilia Zabi – the tough as nails daughter of Degwin Zabi – is still alive. Apparently at one point in the series, she wistfully expresses a wish that she could have been a mother.

    This has – predictably – set off a furor among a certain crowd, with cries that it’s out of character for Kycilia.

    Only, there’s a problem with that argument…

    Back when the original Gundam series aired, the creator – Yoshiyuki Tomino – wrote a trilogy of novels retelling the story of MS Gundam. The novels aren’t well-known in English-speaking circles, and they are very non-canon, as they diverge dramatically from the animated versions of the story. But they were translated into English back in 1990 (which is when I read them), and they represent a more mature take on the story than what Tomino could put in a kids show.

    Long-time Gundam fans who own the translated novels have found a quote from Tomino’s novels where Kycilia wishes that she could have been a mother. Or in other words, it’s the “How dare they mischaracterize her!?” fans that are mischaracterizing her, and not the writers of the just-ended series.

    Heh.

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    1. There’s a joke that since Gihren Zabi was very smart, he must have known the best outcome for humans in that setting, and that if he had just had things work out for him, none of the later bad things in UC would have happened.

      In all seriousness, even if the other older Zabis had been entirely sane, Gihren is more than crazy enough that growing up around him would have been a disturbing experience for Kycilia. I kinda really doubt she ever processed her upbringing fully and healthily.

      It would sorta be normal for her to feel some attraction for the road not taken. Many people do. I think reasonable people could disagree over whether her claim about her thinking is true or not.

      (I don’t think the critics were reasonable.)

      Anyway, I agree with OP. I vehemently agree that there are major problems with modern academic science, and the politicized and consensus oriented focus. OTOH, I over idealize the past academic or universities, and we actually do know that those were imperfect, and had major issues.

      Back OT.

      https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/06/research-risk-breaking-down-barriers-autistic-job-seekers

      Turns out Trump is halting the research that would have allowed autistics to be hired for engineering positions. Oh shock and horror.

      (Lots of autistics can be underemployed, or unemployed, and at the same time I can also doubt that ‘disability experts’ can do anything but screw things up even worse. I can also think that they may be talking about something that is actually a real notable problem, and also be presented as extremely absurd.)

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      1. Wait – we have a shortage of autistic engineers? Do they want the number up above 95% or something? I am a Son of Martha, and I know my people…

        Liked by 1 person

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