The brain worm ...

Dr. Peter Marks Photo: Stephen Voss for WSJ

The brain worm, aka Robert Kennedy Jr., who runs HHS, is leading his agency into the dark ages with his push against vaccines and science promising to kill people in the months and years ahead, is beginning to happen with the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas. To this writer, it's going to get worse as HHS was the leading light in medical research and the watch dog for the world in terms of whether drugs produced by big pharma were safe for the public to take, something fading away under the auspices of a an individual totally unqualified to run anything as complex and sophisticated as HHS in any way, shape or fashion.

The top vaccine regulator ousted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify antivaccine narratives and pushed to water down regulation of unproven stem-cell treatments.

“I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the science as we see it,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration official. “That does not mean that I can just roll over and take conspiracy theories and justify them.” 

Marks, who is leaving his FDA post on Saturday after he was offered the choice to resign or be fired, described Kennedy’s tenure to date as “very scary” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday. 

“They broke something without real plans to fix it, because the people who were doing the breaking didn’t have any idea,” he said. “They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.”

Marks oversaw the FDA department that evaluated whether immunizations—as well as biotech drugs for cancer and other diseases—worked safely and should go into use. In the first Trump administration, he was central to setting up the Operation Warp Speed effort to speed development of Covid-19 vaccines. A “Star Trek fan,” he helped name the effort.

His expertise and steady hand was prized by the pharmaceutical industry, which has been concerned about Kennedy’s antivaccine rhetoric and had urged the White House to keep Marks.

Kennedy has also hired a researcher beloved by antivaccine activists to study a possible link between vaccines and autism—a link that other studies have concluded doesn’t exist. 

The outgoing FDA official said he had been speaking out and encouraging parents to vaccinate their children against measles as cases mount in Texas, where a child is shown getting an MMR vaccine. 

Photo Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images

Just another brick in the wall ...

President Donald Trump displays a signed executive order imposing tariffs on imported goods at the White House on April 2, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Vox nails it. Congress flatbacks by abdicating it's control of the purse to let Agent Orange wreak havoc on the economy in his push to become dictator. In real time, the status and very existence of this once great nation is going away as science, tech, medical and world leadership dissolves as the pols we have are gutless and clueless on how governance works at any level. 

To whit ... 

The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening?

One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are.

That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features.

Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports.

Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.

And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.

The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.

The unitary presidency lives, thanks to the supremes and to the pols whose only real purpose is to get reelected no matter what the costs may be. 

Another Brick in the Wall

 

A renaissance begins with good education. 

1500 & Counting

1500 & Counting as Agent Orange's "wonderful" tariffs take hold, roiling makes to the max. Question, how long will the gutless pols tolerate this train wreck of an administration incapable of doing anything right regarding the art of governance as it's time to get rid of Trump and company once and for all while a 

Constitutional crisis for the ages looms.

NEW YORK (AP) — Financial markets around the world are reeling Thursday following President Donald Trump’s latest and most severe volley of tariffs, and the U.S. stock market may be taking the worst of it.

The S&P 500 was down 4% in morning trading, worse than the drops for other major stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1,520 points, or 3.6%, as of 10:10 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 4.0% lower.

Little was spared as fear flared globally about the potentially toxic mix of higher inflation and weakening economic growth that tariffs can create.

Everything from crude oil to Big Tech stocks to the value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies fell. Even gold, which has hit records recently as investors sought something safer to own, pulled lower. Some of the worst hits walloped smaller U.S. companies, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks dropped more than 5% into what’s called a “bear market” after losing more than 20% from its record.

Any questions?

Energy Hog ...

Illustration: Molimit46/Getty Images

AI, love it or hate it, it's here and isn't going away unless our antiquated power grid surrenders given just how truly inefficient digital is when it comes to processing analog output of neural nets as AI must use analog in order to react to the real world in real time as analog uses differential equations to map the differences in textural, visual and audio data prior to delivering said content to digital systems to process and show a user the best way to check out the 

Grand Canyon.

Remember, digital counts, analog measures.

RIGHT NOW, GENERATIVE artificial intelligence is impossible to ignore online. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Or you might be prompted to try Meta’s AI tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.

This rush to add AI to as many online interactions as possible can be traced back to OpenAI’s boundary-pushing release of ChatGPT late in 2022. Silicon Valley soon became obsessed with generative AI, and nearly two years later, AI tools powered by large language models permeate the online user experience.

One unfortunate side effect of this proliferation is that the computing processes required to run generative AI systems are much more resource intensive. This has led to the arrival of the internet’s hyper-consumption era, a period defined by the spread of a new kind of computing that demands excessive amounts of electricity and water to build as well as operate.

There is no free lunch 

“In the back end, these algorithms that need to be running for any generative AI model are fundamentally very, very different from the traditional kind of Google Search or email,” says Sajjad Moazeni, a computer engineering researcher at the University of Washington. “For basic services, those were very light in terms of the amount of data that needed to go back and forth between the processors.” In comparison, Moazeni estimates generative AI applications are around 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive.

Going beyond environmental concerns, these data centers have the potential to overwhelm local power grids with their energy needs. “In Washington, there's a Microsoft data center building in Quincy,” says Moazeni. “I know there's a lot of concern that the power they are burning is basically sucking up all of the energy in that area.” Around the world, the server farms that train and operate AI models may compete with local residents and businesses for power—possibly leading to blackouts during peak times.