Project 2025 redux

President Donald Trump signs an executive order at an indoor Presidential Inauguration
event in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Project 2025's alive and well with Agent Orange, the new POTUS, actively signing executive orders designed to implement the Heritage Foundation's view of a far right America controlled by the rich and religious described with passion as the Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

To whit

Of the 26 formal executive orders Trump signed on Monday, 16 mirrored at least in part proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page Project 2025 to reshape the federal government, according to an analysis by The Lever.

That includes orders that withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, end Biden’s electric vehicle mandates, and increase oil and gas drilling in Alaska — all proposals that first appeared in Project 2025 months earlier.

It gets better.

Several architects of Project 2025 are now filling out the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the former vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s sister organization Heritage Action for America — who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States — was nominated by Trump to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the agency tasked with developing the president’s proposed budget and executing Trump’s agenda. Vought previously headed the agency during the first Trump administration. 

Trump nominated Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission, the same agency that Carr wrote a chapter about for Project 2025. In the chapter, Carr calls to end the censoring of “political viewpoints,” specifically singling out Facebook and YouTube’s censorship policies. 

As for billionaires, the tech bros are in alignment.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recently announced that Facebook would begin promoting political content and end its third-party fact-checking program. Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, attended Trump’s inauguration. 

Musk as DOGE commander needs no introduction nor does Bezos

Regarding the environment ...

Other executive orders issued by Trump offer additional benefits to the corporate interests that backed the Heritage Foundation and his presidency. Several will roll back climate and environmental rules, as suggested by Project 2025. The moves are a win for oil and gas interests like Koch Industries, the petrochemical giant that funds the Heritage Foundation through its sprawling dark money philanthropic network.

Trump’s executive orders roll back Biden-era limits on oil and gas leasing on federal land, strip energy efficiency standards for household appliances, and eliminate incentives for electric vehicles. These victories for oil and gas interests were proposed in Project 2025, which instructed that a new administration “must immediately roll back Biden’s orders” on climate.

Trump also followed Project 2025’s directives to open up fragile Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling — even though the oil industry has been hesitant to take on such a project given the high costs and risks of drilling in far-flung, undeveloped land. In his executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential,” he reinstated a plan launched during his first administration to allow drilling and development in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, which had received new protections under the Biden administration.

In closing, profit "trumps" climate change, a take resembling Custer's Last Stand in the cosmic scheme of things as nature always finds a way.

Lithograph showing the Battle of Little Bighorn, from the Indian side.

Caught in the act

This artist’s conception of the mid-IR flare in Sgr A* captures the variability, or changing intensity, of the flare as the black hole’s magnetic field lines approach each other. The byproduct of this magnetic reconnection is synchrotron emission. The emission seen in the flare intensifies as energized electrons travel along the SMBH’s magnetic field lines at close to the speed of light. Credit: CfA/Mel Weiss

On 6 April 2024, the black hole let out a flare observed in mid-infrared wavelengths, followed by a radio flare counterpart.

Although Sgr A* belches out the occasional flare, this is the first time we've captured it in mid-infrared – one of the missing pieces of the puzzle of the black hole's behavior, according to a team led by astronomer Sebastiano von Fellenberg from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

"Sgr A*'s flare evolves and changes quickly, in a matter of hours, and not all of these changes can be seen at every wavelength," says astrophysicist Joseph Michail of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

"For over 20 years, we've known what happens in the radio and Near-infrared (NIR) ranges, but the connection between them was never 100 percent clear. This new observation in mid-infrared fills in that gap."

Our galaxy's black hole

The SA ...

 Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

The SA, AKA Brown Shirts, was the goon squad for the Nazis until the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 whereby they were replaced by the SS, a far more efficient tool used to enforce Nazi rule along with its involvement with implementing the Final Solution, now has an updated version when Trump pardoned more then 1500 rioters who participated in the January 6 fiasco to upend the Constitution in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election won by Joe Biden with a majority of over 7 million votes. 

Members of the Sturmabteilung arrest communists in Berlin.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy.

It's worse than that, what Trump did created a private army, ready to keep this guy in power when 2028 rolls around as the 1500 is but a morsel of the numbers of virulent MAGAs ready to support their guy if he makes the call for him to remain in power to keep America great again no matter the cost. 

The SA insignia

8 states ...

Schrödinger's Cat, forever residing in the nether world of being either alive or dead, is the glamor puss of quantum mechanics, the star participant in a theory most mystifying when it comes to trying to learn how reality works at deep level, is now being applied to building viable quantum computers thanks to Antimony, an element with 8 possible spin states leading to a better way to safeguard the inherently delicate qubit data generated by quantum computers. 

To whit.

Antimony

The new method encodes quantum information onto an antimony atom, which has eight possible states that enable data to be more safely stored than in a standard two-state qubit, or quantum bit.

The breakthrough is a vital step in making errors within quantum systems less likely to occur, and, when they do, make them more easily detected and corrected — a key barrier to the development of quantum computers. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (Jan.14) in the journal Nature Physics.

But if noise within a quantum computer causes this spin to suddenly change (as often happens), the quantum state would be lost, producing an error and destroying the information within.

To get around this problem, the researchers behind the new study embedded an antimony atom, which has eight different spin directions, inside a silicon quantum chip. The six additional spin directions of the antimony atom (obtained by the atom’s composite nature that adds multiple individual spins) means that, unlike in a two spin-state system, a single error isn't enough to destroy the encoded information.

"As the proverb goes, a cat has nine lives. One little scratch is not enough to kill it," co-author Benjamin Wilhelm, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, said in a statement. "Our metaphorical 'cat' has seven lives: it would take seven consecutive errors to turn the '0' into a '1'!"

Photo by Pacto Visual on Unsplash

Gobbledygook ...

This all too common trait expressed endlessly by cops, politicians and academics of all stripes, contradicts
The Elements of Style in ways boggling the mind.

Chart: The Economist

From “asymmetric allylation of aldehydes” to “pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations”, PhD abstracts had an unmistakably scholarly aroma. We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences (see chart), with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated. Ms Louks’s abstract had a reading-ease rating of 15, still more readable than a third of those analysed in total.

​​Other studies of academic writing have similar findings: scientific jargon and acronyms are on the rise. The blame does not fall solely on authors. Specialization and advances in technology require more precise terminology and a doctoral thesis often covers some of the most obscure research topics. With millions of views, Ms Louks might lay claim to one of the most-read PhD abstracts of all time. She has since posted, “I love that I have somehow equipped everyone with new terminology and frameworks!” But surging interest in olfactory ethics aside, the trend towards illegible academic writing stinks. Clear prose would be a breath of fresh air. ■

This is THE BOOK to read if you want to learn how to write. Concise, witty and above all else, competent, this little tome points the way to good writing with short commandments already adhered to by heavyweights like Hemingway, Faulkner and Orwell. Every time I reread Elements, I think of Orwell, master of the active tense and the self proclaimed enemy of turgid prose as seen by his insightful essay, Politics and the English Language.

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

June 13, 1863 & then some

Waiting for Godot :)

This pix indirectly shows your's truly's take regarding AI and its potential for dominance over man with its intelligence continuing to increase at rates far exceeding that of humanity. Seems this fear of machine takeover is not new by any stretch of the imagination as seen by a letter penned by  Samuel Butler on June 13, 1863.

Samuel Butler - Portrait by Charles Gogin

On June 13, 1863, a letter published in The Press newspaper of Christchurch warned about the potential dangers of mechanical evolution and called for the destruction of machines, foreshadowing the development of what we now call artificial intelligence—and the backlash against it from people who fear it may threaten humanity with extinction. It presented what may be the first published argument for stopping technological progress to prevent machines from dominating humanity.

Titled "Darwin among the Machines," the letter recently popped up again on social media thanks to Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. The author of the letter, Samuel Butler, submitted it under the pseudonym Cellarius, but later came to publicly embrace his position. The letter drew direct parallels between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the rapid development of machinery, suggesting that machines could evolve consciousness and eventually supplant humans as Earth's dominant species.

"We are ourselves creating our own successors," he wrote. "We are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."

Butler's letter dug deep into the taxonomy of machine evolution, discussing mechanical "genera and sub-genera" and pointing to examples like how watches had evolved from "cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century"—suggesting that, like some early vertebrates, mechanical species might get smaller as they became more sophisticated. He expanded these ideas in his 1872 novel Erewhon, which depicted a society that had banned most mechanical inventions. In his fictional society, citizens destroyed all machines invented within the previous 300 years.

Map of part of New Zealand to illustrate Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited

Butler developed the three chapters of Erewhon that make up "The Book of the Machines" from a number of articles he had contributed to The Press, which had just begun publication in Christchurch, New Zealand, beginning with "Darwin among the Machines" (1863). Butler was the first to write about the possibility that machines might develop consciousness by natural selection.[5]

Many dismissed this as a joke, but, in his preface to the second edition, Butler wrote, "I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr Darwin's theory to an absurdity. Nothing could be further from my intention, and few things would be more distasteful to me than any attempt to laugh at Mr Darwin."

Lest we forget ...

Ted Kaczynski after his arrest in 1996

Kaczynski, brilliant to the max, aka The Unabomber, railed against tech by killing three people and writing a 35,000 page manifesto tiled the Industrial SocietyAnd Its Future, contending that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential.

He contends that this relentless technological progress will not dissipate on its own, because individual technological advancements are seen as good despite the sum effects of this progress, and technological growth is beyond rational human control (i.e., autonomous).

 

His manifesto struck a chord in society as it expressed ideas that continue to be generally shared among the American public.[2] A 2017 Rolling Stone article stated that Kaczynski was an early adopter of the concept that:

We give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society's standards. That, and we're too plugged in. We're letting technology take over our lives, willingly.[3]

And this ...

The Leader of the Luddites, 1812. Hand-coloured etching.

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids.[1][2] Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.[3]

Last but not least, Bill Joy's brilliant Why The Future Doesn't Us beckons.

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

An extraordinary day

The start of something special, a high pressure front, complete with clouds, makes its presence known.

The front ... arrives

The Front | Sunset rev I

The Front | Sunset rev II

The end of an extraordinary day :)

It seems ...

Well, it seems entanglement may be everywhere now that researchers recently discovered it to exist in the proton with its constituent parts, quarks and gluons, exchanging information instantaneously in similar fashion to electrons and photons, thus proving spooky action at a distance may be the fundamental way reality is stitched together to enable space and time to emerge as needs warrant. 

The neutron awaits ...

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion process can split photons
into type II photon pairs with mutually perpendicular polarization.

Picture two particles that can communicate instantly, regardless of how far apart they are. This phenomenon, known as quantum entanglement, challenges our understanding of how the Universe operates. Once considered a bizarre paradox by Albert Einstein, who referred to it as “spooky action at a distance,” entanglement has been repeatedly demonstrated on a macroscopic scale. More recently, scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery: this peculiar phenomenon also occurs within protons, the fundamental building blocks of matter. This revelation is reshaping our view of the microscopic world and paving the way for new scientific explorations.

A hadron is a composite subatomic particle. Every hadron must fall into
one of the two fundamental classes of particle, bosons and fermions.

Quarks and gluons are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Scientists’ current understanding is that quarks and gluons are indivisible—they cannot be broken down into smaller components. They are the only fundamental particles to have something called color-charge. Quarks can have a positive or negative electric charge (like protons and electrons) Gluons have no electric charge.

A gluon (/ˈɡluːɒn/ GLOO-on) is a type of massless elementary particle that mediates the strong interaction between quarks, acting as the exchange particle for the interaction. 

Diagram 1: In Feynman diagrams, emitted gluons are represented as helices.
This diagram depicts the annihilation of an electron and positron.

The Proton

The valence quark content of a proton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.

Glimpses of Winter 2025

Rt Angle

Edge Line

The Front

A Delicate Meander

The Front | Sunset

Entropy 101

On Thin Ice

The end around ...

Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash

As my loyal readers know, I use AI from time to time but ... I make sure you know when I do as trust is hard to get but easy to lose and ... once gone, it's gone forever but some entities don't abide by this policy, especially when it comes to some landlords and their never ending quest to make ever more money using AI to make it happen. 

To whit

It turns out that many of the country's landlords are using the same artificial intelligence tool to jack up your rent.

Packaged as part of the popular property management software RealPage, the AI is nominally intended to give rent price recommendations to landlords.

But as we've seen elsewhere, the catch-all term of "AI" can be used to obfuscate what's really going on under the hood. According to a new report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and covered by Popular Information, the AI tool, called "AI Revenue Management," is being used to facilitate collusion between these proprietors, allowing them to inflate rental prices by a total of more than $3.8 billion every year.

This, the CEA argues in its report, and the Department of Justice alleges in its lawsuit against RealPage, is a form of "price coordination" — which is illegal.

The end around ...

Joint Effort

According to the CEA report, nearly 1 in every 4 multifamily rental properties use a RealPage pricing algorithm.

In some municipalities like Atlanta and Denver, that proportion is higher than 50 percent, where the price increase caused by landlords using the RealPage AI is as high as $181 per month.

When competitors in a market explicitly agree to set a price for a type of good or service, that's price fixing. The practice is federally outlawed by the Sherman Act, because it's considered an anti-competitive move that leads to higher costs for consumers.

The RealPages AI works as a price fixer for "landlords collectively," the CEA argues, because its algorithm "will recommend prices that are higher than the profit-maximizing price each landlord would set independently."

In effect, the AI lets landlords act as a cartel without ever needing to directly communicate, thus making price-fixing difficult to prove. 

It's all about the money/rev L

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash