I am accepting the fact that the blog from here to election day is likely to be politics heavy, and I regret that. It can’t be helped. Kamala Harris and the Democrats are operating the most nauseatingly and dangerously unethical election campaign nationwide since the days of Jim Crow, and the Presidential campaign that has been inflicted on America by Harris is stunning in its cynicism, relying on Big Lies and ad hominem attacks exclusively. A supplement to that is that the campaign is also relying on unethical, indeed anti-democratic journalism.
For the much coveted “October Surprise” that is supposed to save Harris, the best the Axis news media could come up with was an alleged Trump inflammatory quote regarding a dead soldier, one that was not even attached to a named source and that was subsequently denied by both the family of the soldier and others who were supposedly witnesses to the statement, and another private quote by disgruntled former Trump aide John Kelly supposedly praising Adolf Hitler. Yes, its back to that: after 12 years, a Trump term in office in which he resembled Adolf not at all, after a four years of a Democratic Presidential term in which Kamala Harris’s party emulated totalitarian attitudes and tactics (and that witnessed as well a frightening rise in anti-Semitism, we’re back to this…
…because, shockingly, that’s literally all they’ve got. Harris’s disastrous CNN “town hall” made this undeniable among all but liars and fools: she wouldn’t or couldn’t answer straight questions, periodically slipping into untranslatable Kamala-speak when she wasn’t obviously reciting memorized talking points.
How could such a metaphorical empty suit get to this point, where she is one national mental breakdown from the White House? Easy: she was yanked onto the 2020 Democratic ticket only because of her color and genes, handed the top spot four years later without once offering herself to voters as a Presidential candidate based on her performance as VP—which was uninspiring (and I’m being kind)—and then selected Soviet-style without giving national convention delegates a choice. And this is supposed to be a party obsessed with “choices.” It is also the party now warning the public that their opponents are threats to democracy.
If it were not so depressing, and if it did not have a chance of working, this last-ditch strategy would be funny. It should also signal the end of the Democratic Party. But it isn’t, and it won’t.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to write more about this; there is more of it than I have time for, frankly, but it’s important. You don’t have to, though. So don’t, not here.
Deal?
Ethics Alarms 
I would like to bring up the scientific fraud crisis.
Elizier Masliah was the head of the Neurology area of the National Insitute of Aging. He controlled $2.9 billion in annual research grants and was an expert in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Well, it looks like he has to retract 132 papers because he faked the data. That data was used to base further research and develop drugs.
Houa-Yan Wang of CUNY faked data in 2 dozen Alzheimer’s papers. These were used to develop new drugs that were found to do nothing in drug trials.
Over 6100 papers on photovoltaics were studied and 2400 were found to have used doctored images.
All of this came to light because of obviously doctored images. What happens when people start using AI to make the fraud very difficult or impossible to detect? We may be looking at 1/3 of studies are fraudulent or worse.
We are in a crisis caused by mediocrity in science. Instead of demanding excellence, we wanted to be inclusive, not just by race and sex, but by institution. We wanted to spread the research money around to people who ‘needed it’. I will write more, later.
Perhaps a moratorium for federal funding should be considered for the institutions involved and a ten year ban on involvement in federally funded research for researchers found to be guilty of falsifying data.
The problem is that this is the head of a government agency MAKING the grants.
Then, there is this:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-showing-puberty-blockers-not-190022856.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, from the medical director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, and the pediatrician behind a groundbreaking study showing that puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements among young people, claimed her team has not yet published the findings to avoid them being “weaponized” by critics of transgender medical procedures. The New York Times published the article (I did not link it because it is behind a paywall). The outlet confronted Dr. Olson-Kennedy on why the findings were never published nearly a decade after the trials began. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court,” it reported.
How is this use of tax dollars ethical?
jvb
This is similar to a Nature article that claimed to find unprecedented amounts of warming in the waters of the Pacific since the 1960’s. They used a new technique to measure it. Once published, an amateur mathematician noticed that they had made a math error in the way they processed the data. Once corrected, it was found to show NO warming at all in the Pacific since the 1960’s. They retracted the article completely instead of merely correcting it. The technique was found to be a remarkable new tool in the fight against global warming when it gave them the results they wanted. When it didn’t, the technique was found to have no merit.
Our science and medicine have been politicized, as you would expect, as a result of a Marxist educational system. In Marxism, everything is ideology. There is no absolute, fixed reality. There is no absolute truth.
We have a serious problem in science that will be very difficult to fix. Science has been under attack on several fronts for years and I wonder how long it can continue before it has the same believability as the social sciences. I want to try to explain the problems, what caused them, and what has to be done to fix them.
Forty years ago, there were very few Ph.D.-granting research institutions in science. This meant that the people engaging in the research were the best in the country and that they received sufficient funding as long as their programs warranted it. If their research didn’t warrant funding, they were replaced with people’s who did. Graduate students were supported in summers and sometimes more with pay from the research grants. Postdoctoral positions were available for the best people paid for by grants. The people in these positions as PI’s were driven, brilliant, and hardworking. They were independent and exacting in their criticism of scientific works.
Well, that is as far away as rotary phones.
Fist, we had an incessant push to include more diversity in the top researchers. It became evident almost immediately that these positions were not really compatible with women who wanted to have children. Men in these positions either waited until after tenure (~age 35) to start a family or they married a woman who was OK with not seeing their spouse much and mostly raising any children. Women are not really willing to marry a spouse who will take care of the house and kids and not see them much. A lot of work went into trying to work around biology, but facts are facts. The reason our research used to be the best in the world is that people are most creative before 35 and we worked our most creative people under high stress from the ages of ~28 to ~35 in these jobs. Postponing the jobs doesn’t work well, they really are designed to eke out every bit of creative genius the top minds have at their peak. Trying to set up gymnastics so people can begin an Olympic gymnastics career at 45 doesn’t work well. The only way you can make it work is to forbid ANYONE from starting until 45 and the product you get is far inferior. It also became evident that there just were not enough minority candidates to fill the positions demanded by society. These positions require extreme people. They need to have extremes of intelligence, education, drive, and ability. There are not an unlimited number of candidates for these and you can’t just find people who ‘will do’. As it became obvious that these positions would remain male and white for quite awhile, pressure mounted to relax the requirements.
There also is the matter of money. The few R1 research schools recieve ~50% of the grant money as overhead. Their professors’ grants give them a lot of money to use for a variety of things. Other schools wanted that too and started clamoring to have their own research programs. This is both inefficient and quickly runs out of top-level people and worthwhile problems to work on. It is inefficient because these departments need expensive instrument labs on site. When everyone is in one place, they can share these. When you have a lot of programs, you have to multiply them. The second part, however, became a blessing for the previous ‘problem’. With the supply of first rate talent and problems exhausted, it became necessary to hire people from the next tier or two down. With standards relaxed, the diversity hires and the ‘right people’ hires could begin in ernest.
The dilution of talent that resulted is a big problem. Imagine taking all the top NCAA basketball players and putting 1 on each high-school team. Would those players ever develop the talent that they do in the NBA surrounded by other top talent? No. Great people surrounded by great people achieve more than great people surrounded by mediocrity. The latter is our current research model.
We have too many schools and too many projects. Everyone needs to publish for grants and tenure. The resulting reports are mostly noise and it is hard to find any signal. This makes publication more of a crapshoot. It used to be, you knew if you had publishable material. You also had a good idea of what level journal it belonged in. Now, with so much noise, it is hard to know, and acceptance and rejection seem more arbitrary. This pushes up the incentive to cheat. If you need to publish to keep your job and nothing you can think up seems to be publishable, why not cheat? Other people seem to be publishing stuff that I think is inferior to mine. That’s not fair, so I need to cheat to get what I deserve. What is to stop people from cheating?
What kept people from cheating is peer-review. Peer-review only works, however, if you have confident, 1st rate people. If you are a researcher at North by Northwest Regional Alabama University of Pennsylvania and you are asked to review a paper that looks like it came from the head of the National Institute for Aging, are you going to point out that his figures seem altered? I mean, how sure are you and what happens if you are wrong? What if you get your funding from the National Institute for Aging?
Professors used to be pretty independent. Tenure protected them from retaliation from such things, but those days are over. When the Challenger probe was wrapping up, they asked Richard Feynman to sign it. He refused because it was a cover-up. He wrote an opposing report about the accident that was significantly different. They couldn’t intimidate him, he had tenure and was at the end of his career. He knew they were lying and confident enough in his own assessment to say so. Very few faculty could do that today.
We also have the concept of cooperative science. Throughout its history, science was propelled forward by great rivalries. These drove people to new innovations through competition. However, this is now considered ‘toxic masculinity’. Instead, we are supposed to all cooperate on projects. The first such project was global warming. The problem with cooperative science, however, is what happens to criticism and scrutiny if you are supposed to be ‘one big happy team’? Criticism is suppressed, people with different ideas are exiled from the community and forbidden to publish. The American Physics Society has stated that you cannot question the mainstream narrative on global warming. No such paper may be published. Ideology takes over and truth suffers.
Finally, we have become a less Christian and less religious field. Science was founded in Christian societies and its practitioners had a Christian worldview that included the concept of a created universe that was governed by its own laws that were universal and applied to everyone and everywhere. They also adopted Christian morality, where cheating and lying were not tolerated. Well, we are past that now. If you have to cheat to publish, that is what you have to do. Everyone is doing it, who are YOU to say that it is wrong? Bring out every argument you ever heard for smoking marijuana and tolerating those who did from the 80’s and 90’s and that is now what has been recycled to justify ‘fudging’ and fabricating data in science. Without the absolute morality and the belief in a definite reality and truth, science cannot work.
Science went from a competitive field of top-notch people working on cutting edge projects to a diverse area of people whose work will support the proper narrative and provide good jobs and status to people with the right demographics and ideological beliefs.
I think this is COTD worthy, Michael. Of course that means that I agree with what you have to say, and think it was more eloquent than I could have said it, while making the same points. However, I really do think this is well said.
My experiences in graduate school would cause me to second much of what you said.
What SB said!
PWS
I agree with Sarah B. This is an excellent comment. Your research and academia experience differs from mine. Yet, I see it in newly minted lawyers. Caveat: By no means am I William Jennings Bryant, Justices Brennan or Scalia, or Clarence Darrow. But, I do think that I am above average and damn good at what I do. Yet, the young lawyers I meet do not seem to grasp intricacies of legal problems. Their arguments are “passionate” and/or driven by ideology.
I wondered why that was. Then, it dawned on me: When I started law school, the average credit hour cost $150.00. When I graduated, it had increased to $350.00 per credit hour. There was not a marked difference in costs of the school or education; it was driven by market forces. My law school’s first time bar passage rate was around 94%. Recently it has plummeted to around 65%. Again, why? Well, as the costs increased, and there were/are less demands in the market for lawyers, the school decided to admit more students (which, oddly is counterintuitive). Admitting more students means less qualified law students are attending law school, which in turn means less qualified lawyers are practicing law.
Recently, I have had the displeasure of representing a client in legal proceedings waged by someone who wants a free house. She represents herself (mostly) . Since April 2023, she has filed no less than 20 different lawsuits, appeals, evictions, bankruptcies, removals to federal court. Now, remember that my client has a final judgment awarding it title and possession of the house. Yet, the battle rages on.
This week, the woman filed an eviction to gain possession of the house. She named the plaintiff, “Liberty Property Management, LLC, a Texas limited liability company” and the defendant, an individual who I am fairly certain does not exist. My client intervened in the lawsuit, claiming that the lawsuit seeks to divest my client of possession of its property.
An attorney appeared at trial, asserting that the plaintiff actually owned the property, with no evidence whatsoever. Any conversations were met with stonewalling and stony glances from the lawyer. After a few minutes, I realized the attorney either had no idea what was going on or was too stupid to care. She made patently false representations to the court and effectively suborned perjury. She has also run around telling courts all over the fucking country (yeah, New York bankruptcy courts, Delaware bankruptcy and US district courts, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and every level of state courts in Texas as well as Texas US bankruptcy and US district courts – I think that counts as “all over the fucking country”) that she represents my client and has settled the dispute.
The sheer level of arrogance, combined with ignorance and belligerence, has been astounding. It has cost my client in excess of $40.000.00, with absolutely no hope of ever recovering a red cent from these people. This attorney, I fear, is one of those who should have never been admitted to law school, should never have been admitted to practice law, and the law license should be pulled off the wall and run through a shredder.
jvb
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Yes, these aren’t just academic concerns anymore. This isn’t “The Women’s Upside-Down Undederwater Basket Weaving and Starbuck’s Latte Criticism Degree people aren’t getting the training they used to”. Boeing is one of our last aerospace companies and they can’t do anything because their people have had terrible training from terrible faculty. As pointed out, it is likely that well over 1/2 of our clinical trials have been faked an 1/2 of the others are done so poorly as to be meaningless. We can’t build things because all the research on how to build things is untrustworthy.
It is also a national security issue. When the country has a problem, the government needs to know who to ask about solving the problem and they better be able to solve it. This used to be handled by the National Academy of Sciences, a body of scientists whose job it is to look in the scientific literature and answer those questions the government has. But what happens when the puberty blocking study is suppressed so they can’t read it and the global warming studies have all been faked or are done so poorly that they are meaningless or only the ones that reached the ‘right’ conclusion were published? What if the members of the NAS are no longer competent to sift the fake from the real? We end up destroying the economy, taking people’s rights, making people live in squalor, giving them useless drugs with horrible side-effects, and build bridges that collapse and houses that can’t withstand severe weather effects like they are supposed to.
This is why communist countries don’t succeed. Ideology is king and truth is relative in communism. Modern science succeeded because it said that reality is king and all ideology would conform to it. We gave in to communism and now our society may collapse because of it. Every year, it seems more and more likely that “Idiocracy” was a prophecy sent to warn us.
Sorry, I just saw a perfect example of this. Joe Rogan asked Trump if he just floated the idea of replacing income tax with tarrifs and Trump said yes. It is an interesting idea, but what is the likely outcome?
If you do it, you encourage people to buy American which will strengthen the country and make people’s lives better in the long run. However, if the tariffs have to be so high that essential foreign goods become too expensive, it can cause a big problem. So how do you set each of the tariffs to not cause a specific problem while providing the revenue needed. and not cause a trade war that will cripple our vital export areas like agriculture?
Now, it should be feasible to do this, the amount of money you are extracting from the people is th e same income tax v. tariff, but does it place too high a burden on low-income people (since high-income people pay a huge % of our income taxes)?
The country needs people who can answer this question CORRECTLY for the president and Congress. Do you believe that we have economists who understand how the economy actually works and can answer this question to some degree of correctness? What are the chances that all of our top economists are communists and their economics models are too influenced by ideology to even try to answer such a question?
Hockey season has started, so I’ve come back to life…. Last Saturday in Salt Lake City, our Boston Bruins captain Brad Marchand (often named by other players as the ‘most hated, but most wanted on our team’ player) blew a completely routine play that directly led to a Utah goal. Before the next face off, the TV cameras show coach Jim Montgomery pushing him on the shoulder and absolutely laying into him for a solid 30 seconds… and you didn’t need to be a lip reader to know that there were more than a few f-bombs…
The media (especially in Canada) clutches their pearls because Monty made physical contact for the nudge, and for reading the Captain the riot act… In a presser afterwards, Marchand said:
“Its unfortunate how coaches are scrutinized over things like that. There’s a lack of accountability nowadays because people cant handle the heat. You make a mistake like that, you deserve to hear about it”.
Brad Marchand, Ethics Hero in my book.
See my comment below about current management philosophy (which seems to boil down to “management is not entitled to manage anything.” Seems to be prevalent in sports as well: everybody has a say in everything, and no one should ever be “called out” or “shamed” for unacceptable behavior. “Be kind.”
Assholes.
“Be Kind” is the new Lefty yard sign; up in these here parts, leastways.
PWS
Agreed – and an odder ethics hero would be hard to find. But his comments at the presser were spot on.
But one must remember that Marchand is a thoroughly old-school player. The kids coming up today are phenomenally skilled but, even in a game as demanding as hockey, often demonstrate those Millenial and Gen-Z traits us oldsters can find so annoying. Nobody who makes it to the NHL got there on the strength of participation trophies, but the mindset is there in parts.
For me, Jake DeBrusk is Exhibit A. Capable of brilliance when he wants to be brilliant, a slacker when he doesn’t. He was one of the instigators in getting Boston’s previous coach fired (for those that don’t follow, he was snapped up by Las Vegas about four days after he was fired and did that city a solid by taking home the Stanley Cup his first season in the desert).
DeBrusk did do well initially under the next coach, but wasn’t impressive last season. The good news? Now he’s Vancouver’s problem, and if he thought Bruce Cassidy was a hardass I’m dying to see how he reacts to Rick Tocchet. The bad news, of course, is that Vancouver also picked up Danton Heinen – another ethics hero of the game, IMO. Not flashy, ultra-dependable, keeps his nose clean, slot him in anywhere and he’ll contribute.
Why the Bruins let Heinen walk is a mystery to me, and he’s already making a name in Vancouver (doesn’t hurt that he grew up about half an hour east of the city). Given the way the Bruins have played so far, they’d have been far better off to keep him.
For those who consider this thread drift: apologies. I feel the same way about hockey and the Bruins as Jack does about baseball and the Red Sox.
Not at all. I think playoff hockey in particular is perhaps the most exciting sport you can watch.
I never minded the scrutiny placed on Ozzie Guillen when he coached the White Sox. That guy was a well-paid thug that I thought had no business as a #1 in the dugout.
… clutches their pearls…
I thought his response was well worded and respectful but then summarized it in my own mind with a “bite me” sort of attitude thinking that he should have responded “It’s hockey, not p**** grabbing.”
What’s going on with government employees?
Who Leaked U.S. Intelligence on a Possible Israel Attack on Iran? › American Greatness
Evidently every person who works in government gets to make policy decisions. If an employee doesn’t like Israel, they are entitled to try to sabotage Israel’s effort to defend itself when it’s been attacked. You know, Donald Trump’s an existential threat to the United States but Iran is wonderful and is just joking around when they say they want to wipe Israel off the map, or they launch four hundred ballistic missiles into civilian areas in Israel. What is wrong with these government employees? And what is wrong with their employers?
Ironically, I think the only saving grace is that the “intelligence community” most likely has no idea what the Israeli’s have up their sleeve. The “intelligence community” has shown itself to be completely inept, probably ever since it was invented by Wild Bill Donovan. I suspect the Israelis are laughing at this page of useless speculation ginned up by some member of the “intelligence community” using snippets that have been cut and pasted from old memos.
This is one of the weaknesses of multiculturalism. If everyone is expected and encouraged to divide their loyalties, who can be trusted? Early suspicion was on and Iranian-American with access to the information and who posts on Iranian sites. Now, we are blaming it on New Zealand.
The “intelligence community” can’t be trusted. Creating and spreading disinformation is their mission.
Kevin O’Leary seems to get it:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DBjhbw8yv1K/
jvb
Turley has a good post today you may be interested in covering:
Dr. Jay’s Slam Dunk: Blacklisted Scientist Receives Prestigious Award for “Intellectual Freedom”
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/10/29/224756/