This was from a professor at UMass Boston, who wrote this story after being forced to attend seminar on "Decolonizing Rigor in STEM. He made up scary story where Alice and Bob are in attendance and drop rigor from their science work and blow up UMass Boston with the help of LLNL.
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/gibbs-phenomenon
The following is based on recommendations from "Decolonizing Rigor in Higher Education" by Mona Abo-Zena and Kerrie Wilkins-Yel, Center for Innovative Teaching, University of Massachusetts Boston, January 31, 2023.
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President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $35 million to start planning a new national laboratory to study the impact of climate change on poor communities. The new lab would be aimed at resolving problems facing “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.”
Former Harvard Engineering Dean Cherry Murray was the head of DOE’s Office of Science, which manages 10 of the national labs, from 2015-2017, and pointed out that ‘Current global climate models don’t provide enough spatial resolution to allow local policymakers to come up with plans tailored to the needs of their constituents.’ As she put it in a Science Magazine report about the new Biden proposal “Coming up with community-scale climate models is a huge challenge,” Murray says. “Nobody knows how to do that now.”
Kinda of gloomy 4th https://www.axios.com/2023/07/03/americans-down-on-god-family-country-patriotism-polling
60% or Republicans are very proud to Americans down from 80%, only 29% of democrats are very proud to be American down from 65%. 2 in 3 Americans do not know the meaning of Independence day. Only 12% of Democrats between the age of 18 and 34 very proud of being American.
Before someone goes off on "but this is a LLNL blog!" Just ask yourself is it a good sign that so many young people are not particularly proud of being American?
Also try this
Here are just a few of the American grievances. Just replace “he” (the King of Great Britain) with Washington D.C. and you’ll get the idea.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. (Federal agents of every variety)
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.
Sound familiar?
I think the anti-American stuff about the Declaration of Independence was pulled off Zero-Hedge which was founded by someone from Eastern Europe, it has a variety of pro-Russian stuff and news about financial turmoil and suffering, dysfunction, and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge
Of course, being willing to print things not in the mainstream media, it could have some interesting content, but one critique of alternate media might be that it is divisive since it promotes extreme views, either on the right or the left, or extreme predictions, which by themselves promote political polarization, dysfunction, and discontent.
Certainly the mainstream media has contributed to these trends as well -- those who do not like Trump may remember the extensive news coverage he was given prior to the 2016 election, for example, while it is also true of course, that journalistic standards have dropped, and there is little investigation of anything in depth, with various forms of explicit or implicit censorship applied to news media and social media and so forth.
The Trial by Jury point, is correct, I think, there has been an overuse of plea bargaining, under which lesser charges are agreed to under a sort of duress, and Grand Juries also have some issues related to how they operate under the present system.
7/06/2023 2:51 PM
The problem I have is wikipedia itself is known to very inaccurate and one of the founders has said that current version is very corrupted and full of inaccuracies. When someone links to wikipedia I do not accept it as a credible source.
That being said Zero hedge is kind of what you said with lots of stories about economic suffering and gloom but most of the stories are just picked off the internet or from other news sites. They keep saying stuff like there is going to be economic downturn, at some point there will be because economics is cyclic, they will then say "see I told you!!!". One thing they got right was in Jan, Feb and March of 2020 they said this Covid thing in China is going to spread everywhere and shut down the world, kill millions and so on. In fact there was effort to censure them for this and they lost all there social media sites like twitter, facebook and so on. The issue I have is
that they just take the worse case scenario on everything, so they are bound to be right on occasion. They also overestimated Covid and said it was going to kill 1 to 1.5% of the earths population or about 80 million
to 100 million people, when it killed about 7 million, or 10 times less. To be fair the 1% death estimate was also used in other media a lot but that was simply inaccurate.
The COVID death toll you are citing, does not include true numbers from China, India, or many other countries. As you might be aware, when China lifted its zero-covid policies there was a pandemic wave so most people who contracted the virus, received little or no treatment, and the best estimates for fatality rates in that case are 1 to 2% meaning probably 15 million or so deaths in China alone. They are also facing repeated waves of mutated virus, in fact, and there were many deaths in India and other countries that were also under reported. The true death toll worldwide is probably no less than 25 million by now, but as it continues to mutate in the face of ineffective non-mRNA vaccines the worldwide death toll could indeed reach 100 million.
We are (perhaps) complicit in this since we funded the Wuhan lab, if indeed the virus escaped from there our government may have been partly responsible, for this outbreak which killed more than Nazi Germany.
On the other hand, as I would point out, Zero Hedge has a lot of senseless doom and gloom stories, COVID was pretty serious as you know, but most of the bad news they represent on there is inconsequential. And in terms of the relation to the financial markets, they are largely decoupled from real world problems, for example French stocks are doing mostly fine despite the riots there, and so on, fossil fuel stocks are doing well despite green energy, etc.
7/09/2023 8:10 PM'
You have a good point that we simply do not know the true death count from India, China and Africa, so it could certainly be more. At the same time we do not even know how many people got since it is possible that most people on earth got infected and and even infected more than once over the course of the 3-4 years. A 100 million could be possible after 10-15 years.
However with all that you have to remember (1) that just say the flu kills up to 100 million people over the course of 20 years as well.
(2) Most of the people that died where old or had many co-morbities with a reasonable probability of dying within 5 years anyway. The death toll in Africa is very hard to estimate for Covid is right now considered very low but is that because we did not the data or that fact that the aervage lifespan in these places is like 50, so you had very few 80 year old diabetes?
I keep seeing the argument that "Covid killed more Americans than died in ww2" or more people in the world than ww 1 or other such nonense. 20 million 80 year olds dying is not even close to 20 million 20 year healthy people dying. In fact I have claimed that if Covid had hit the US in say 1968, or 1970 that there never would have been a lockdown since back than the fraction of the population over 65 was very small. It would have just been considered a bad flu. The 1918 pandemic hit young people very hard.
Another question is would Covid have closed the US in 1980, 1990, or even 2000? I think probably not and the lockdown was driven by the internet revolution that allowed people to stay at home. In 1970 you actually needed a big chunk of the population to be working or society would not function. Even in 1918 there was no massive lockdowns like we had.
The other question I have is did the massive lockdowns the way we did help or hurt or made no difference in the long run? One possibility is that we could have kept the world opened but focused on select groups like older people or people with co-morbities.
"On the other hand, as I would point out, Zero Hedge has a lot of senseless doom and gloom stories, COVID was pretty serious as you know, but most of the bad news they represent on there is inconsequential. And in terms of the relation to the financial markets, they are largely decoupled from real world problems, for example French stocks are doing mostly fine despite the riots there, and so on, fossil fuel stocks are doing well despite green energy, etc.
7/09/2023 8:10 PM"
Agreed it is not just zero hedge but there are all sorts of news sites and even intellectuals that are always saying, everything is bad and about to crash. By chance they are right on occasion but it seems like mostly random noise.
Covid did do an awful lot of damage, many of the survivors who have "long COVID" actually have brain damage, as you know the virus in particular can infect the brain through the olfactory nerve, and also causes impaired neurological function through a variety of mechanisms, and this was the case for millions of people in the US and elsewhere who survived the illness, including of course, unvaccinated children and others.
This is one reason that millions of people have left the labor force, they are not counted as unemployed since they no longer look for work, also it may be a partial reason for the high crime, as well as homelessness, outbreaks of mass shootings and hysteria, demonstrations and riots, such as those following the George Floyd murder, as well as January 6th, and various forms of anarchy and lawlessness that have emerged.
It is believed of course, that over time this will lead to increased incidence of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's syndrome, and a greater burden to care for the aged. Of course, the lowering of our life expectancy also helped Social Security in regards to budgetary constraints.
As you might imagine, the same things are happening in other countries which did not have access to our mRNA vaccines and used less effective vaccinations.
The lockdowns of course, may have served a dual function by moving corporations' activities out of city centers which would be most vulnerable in case of future attack or disruption, just as Green energy may create a more robust and redundant power grid, in fact many US workers have even become digital nomads who are domiciled in foreign nations -- something which will help the US over time, to spread American values worldwide, and counter communist expansionism.
Part of the point here, of course, is that because we are a dominant superpower, we stand to benefit from anything that causes worldwide chaos, or the adoption of disruptive new technologies which displace existing industries and power structures.
Certainly if funding that Wuhan lab was viewed as a good decision, the circumstances our nation must be facing would be truly dire. Let's hope Biden and Kamala lead us to victory, and continue to make the hard decisions that are demanded of them! Slava Ukrani! And down with communism, and tyranny!
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