Moving fast/rev V

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday in Quantico, Va. In an unprecedented gathering, almost 800 generals, admirals and their senior enlisted leaders were ordered into one location from around the world on short notice. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In looking at this image, one question to ask is. Why the brown shoes? The pose is bad enough but the shoes? Maybe it's to match the color of the podium's wood. Who knows. Let's not talk about the security and logistics issue or if the senior commanders can get back to their posts as a shutdown looms but that's ok. It's lethality and looking at US cities as potential training grounds to learn the art of war up close and personal, right?

President Trump defended the use of U.S. troops in American cities and told top U.S. commanders that the military would be used against the "enemy within."

"This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it's the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control," Trump told those gathered for the highly unusual event at Quantico, Va. "It won't get out of control once you're involved at all."

Trump said he told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the U.S. "should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military," a reference to the Democratic-run cities that he has long said have high crime rates that make them uninhabitable.

Channeling the Nazi playbook comes to mind here. 

In closing ...

The presence of military leaders from across the globe at one central location presented challenges from both an operational and a national security perspective. The president's attendance added to those challenges.

The lack of detail leading up to Tuesday's remarks had led to speculation that Hegseth might use the occasion to fire generals. The defense secretary has long called for reducing the number of admirals and generals, who stand at more than 800, by about 20%.

Culling is fine as long as the people culled deserved to be culled. 

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller

Moving fast/rev IV

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu participate in a joint press conference.

President Donald Trump participates in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, on Sept. 29, 2025. | Will Oliver/EPA

Trump & company got what they wanted, the shutdown.

President Donald Trump is unconcerned Americans could sour on him
and the GOP if the government shuts down Wednesday, he said in an interview Monday night.

“I don’t worry about that,” Trump said during a brief phone call, “because people that are smart
see what’s happening. The Democrats are deranged.”

Any questions?

Moving Fast/rev III

National Guard troops patrol the grounds of the Washington Monument, with the Capitol seen in the distance, as part of President Donald Trump's order to impose federal law enforcement in the nation's capital, in Washington, Thursday, August 28, 2025 [J Scott Applewhite/AP Photo]

Al Jazeera nails it in an insightful article titled 
How much extra power would a government shutdown give Trump?

Plenty as layoffs along with consolidation of yet more power becomes the calculus here as the TA wants the shutdown to happen in order to pull the trigger on both agendas. As often stated before, Trump is Gladstone Gander personified as like Donald Duck's quietly obnoxious cousin, the Donald always has luck on his side although the grim reaper will have the final say on the orange menace residing in the White House.

Gladstone

Backgrounder: Gladstone Gander is a cartoon character created in 1948 by Carl Barks for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. He is an anthropomorphic gander (male goose) who possesses exceptionally good luck that grants him anything he desires as well as protecting him from any harm.

The gambit

A fight between Republicans and Democrats in the US could lead to an October 1 federal government shutdown.

Democrats are trying to leverage the must-pass bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies; the Trump administration is tying a shutdown to potential mass federal worker layoffs.

If the government shuts down, President Donald Trump and his administration – which has already defied norms on executive power – likely will seek to exert more power.

Trump’s Office of Management and Budget under Russell Vought has moved with more executive authority over spending, which is typically left to Congress. The administration took steps to cancel foreign aid and asserted power to withhold billions in domestic spending.

“I would expect this shutdown to look different than any other shutdown,” said Joshua Sewell, Taxpayers for Common Sense director of research and policy. He said he expects that the Trump team’s actions would be guided by what they believe achieves the most for them politically.

If lawmakers can’t reach a deal, Stier wrote, Trump and Vought “will have enormous latitude to determine which services, programmes and employees can be sidelined – decisions that could go far beyond what has occurred during past shutdowns”.

Beyond the Antideficiency Act, which says the government cannot spend money or incur debts without Congress’s authority, the shutdown process has historically been guided by traditions, not laws.

Moving fast/rev III applies. Read the entire Al Jazeera article. You will learn a lot. I certainly have.

Moving fast ... rev II

President Donald Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide "all necessary Troops" to protect ICE facilities and the city of Portland, Oregon. Allison Robbert / AFP - Getty Images

A possible cvil war looms as Trump moves toward declaring a national emergency due to the "incredible violence" in Democratically run cities to justify implementing martial law with the reason hidden in plain sight.
Shut down the midterms. 

President Donald Trump said Saturday that he was directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops” to Portland, Oregon.

In a post on Truth Social, the president wrote that the troops would “protect War ravaged Portland” and protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities that he claimed are “under siege from attack by Antifa and other domestic terrorists.”

Trump added that he is “authorizing Full Force, if necessary,” but didn’t clarify what that meant.

A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately respond to clarifying questions about which branch of the military would be deploying to Portland.

The president has repeatedly spoken negatively about Portland, including saying on Thursday that “anarchy” is taking place in the West Coast city.

“You go out to Portland, people die out there. Many people have died over the years in Portland. Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there. It’s amazing, but it’s, it’s anarchy out there. That’s what they want. They want anarchy,” Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Last week, in separate comments in the Oval Office, the president said people in Portland are “out of control.”

“Have you seen Portland at all? If you take a look what’s happening in Portland. It’s, it has been going on for years. Just people out of control, crazy. We’re going to stop that very soon,” Trump said.

The president has long been outspoken about his negative views toward Portland, a city that he declared in his first term to be an “anarchist jurisdiction.”

Tear gas fills the air as law enforcement responds to protesters at the ICE facility in Portland
on June 18.John Rudoff / Sipa USA via Reuters file

Moving fast applies.

You gotta move fast ...

Illustration: Maura Kearns/Axios

You gotta move fast as the economy's going to crap out (climate change, national debt, aging population, tariffs, AI driven job loss, etc., etc), ICE is out of control, backing genocide's not a good thing and the Ukraine disaster continues ever onward while the mid terms loom, promising to be a debacle for the repugs, if they actually happen, because people are beginning to get really angry about how the administration from hell continues to dismantle the once great nation known as America.

The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has delivered President Trump and the MAGA movement their first real taste of legal retribution — and likely not their last.

Why it matters: To Democrats and the legal establishment, the charges against Comey for obstruction of justice and lying to Congress represent one of the most brazen collapses of prosecutorial independence in U.S. history.

To Trump's base, the indictment is vindication — a long-awaited strike against a "Deep State" villain they've obsessed over for nearly a decade.

Now, MAGA's biggest question is how much further Trump will go in enforcing the political "accountability" that has animated the movement for years.

The big picture: The indictment came just days after Trump publicly demanded Attorney General Pam Bondi charge his enemies, including Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Trump declared the trio "guilty as hell," and linked the need to serve swift "justice" to the roles they played in the congressional investigations, criminal probes and civil lawsuits that have dogged his political career.

He took credit for firing the U.S. attorney who declined to bring charges against James and Comey — then installed personal attorney Lindsey Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience, to finish the job.

What they're saying: As the legal world recoiled in horror at Trump's breach of DOJ independence, MAGA erupted with glee and hunger for more.

Former President Obama and Hillary Clinton — plus liberal philanthropist George Soros — are viewed as the crown jewels of MAGA's retribution agenda.

Harris, as a former prosecutor, knows the drill and her take is spot on. It's not about politics any more,
 it's about dictatorship.

Vice President Kamala Harris stands at the White House during President Donald Trump's second inauguration on January 20, 2025. Nathan Howard/Reuters/File

“It’s frustrating, but more than that, it’s painful to see,” Harris said, speaking exclusively to CNN on Friday afternoon during a break in the Washington swing of her tour, when asked what she made of Trump’s term so far. “It’s painful to see. I mean what’s happening with Comey: Are you fucking kidding me? The United States Department of Justice?”

Before being elected to the Senate in 2016, the former vice president spent her professional life as a prosecutor, including her time as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, and issues of the law hit hard for her.

Harris warned during the campaign that Trump would go after people he considered his political enemies. The Justice Department bringing charges against Comey came after Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi and replaced the US attorney for the district where Comey was indicted.

“He said it; we knew he would do it,” Harris said. “But it is every day unrelenting.”

Asked whether she sees the indictment as the crossing of a Rubicon, or a boundary,
Harris said, “I don’t know. Define Rubicon.”

Lest we forget ...

President Richard Nixon's
Official Presidential Photograph, taken in 1971

 

Richard Nixon's enemies list refers to a compilation of major political opponents to Richard Nixon, the president of the United States from 1969 until his resignation in 1974, that was assembled by Charles Colson and written by George T. Bell[1] (assistant to Colson, special counsel to the White House), and sent in memorandum form to John Dean on September 9, 1971. The list was part of a campaign officially known as "Opponents List" and "Political Enemies Project".

John Dean's cover memo, dated August 16, 1971.

Eating the world ...

Getty / Futurism

Eating the world, a terrifying concept, goes prime time as text to video shows why video's a resource hog to the max. Yours truly does video and files sizes of same are immense. Did one for my town. Raw content, try 38 gigs. Crunched, 5. Now have ChatGPT or Veo do the drill of making videos using text to replace a video editor like DaVinci in real time. Video file sizes are similar but eating the world applies even more because AI hoovers up energy resources to the max to produce the video in question, a process far more energy intensive than previously thought.

Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought.

As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly.

For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

“These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design,” the researchers concluded in their paper.

Experts are warning that we’re rolling out generative AI tools without a full grasp of their true environmental impacts.

“Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes,” MIT Technology Review wrote in a recent analysis.

While image generators used the equivalent of five seconds of microwave warming to generate a single 1,024 x 1,024 pixel image, video generators proved far more energy-intensive. To spit out a five-second clip, the researchers found that it takes the equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour. If they’re consuming far more power as the length increases, the math doesn’t look good.

Endgame. Think of the energy requirements when the Veo's of the world do full length blockbusters
as this is going to happen because its cheaper. 

Yet another fubar ...

The White House is threatening firings for programmes that lack alternative funding
and do not align with Trump's "priorities". Michael Gold

Let's think about this. As a good account frriend of mine says,
"They are stupid as shutdowns are rare in other countries."

To whit ...

No other country has had a government shutdown like the U.S., where important services grind to a halt due to lack of funding. But Northern Ireland came close.

Why does a government shut down?

Typically, a government shutdown means that the legislative branch of the government failed to pass a budget. Government-funded services eventually run out of money without a budget for the new fiscal year.

In 2017, Northern Ireland’s government collapsed after Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigned. His party announced it wouldn’t replace him, the executive branch of the government subsequently collapsed, and Northern Ireland’s assembly didn’t sit in session for the next three years.

In those three years, the British government had to pass a budget for Northern Ireland to ensure its services didn’t run out of funds.

09/25/25 ... Here we go again with gutless pols and an out of control administration trashing this once great nation yet again with another possible shutdown along with an added bonus from the orange menace.

The White House has told its agencies to prepare for mass firings if Congress does not avert a government shutdown next week, according to a memo obtained by US media.

In the memo, the Office of Budget and Management directs federal agencies to begin drafting "reduction in force" plans for programmes whose funding will lapse if Congress fails to meet a 30 September budget deadline.

The warning came after Trump on Tuesday refused a meeting with Democrats who are seeking to secure healthcare funding as part of budget negotiations.

"We remain hopeful that Democrats in Congress will not trigger a shutdown and the steps outlined above will not be necessary," the memo states.

The budget office memo warns of permanent firings specifically for federal programmes, projects and activities that have no alternative funding sources and are "not consistent with the President's priorities".

Many federal government agencies rely on annual funding approved by Congress. Every year, these agencies submit their requests, which Congress must pass, and the president must sign budget legislation for the next fiscal year.

Question, what happens with the money not allocated when said workers are fired
when the shutdown ends? I thought so. 

Read it & weep ...

[1/7]U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, New York, U.S., September 23, 2025. REUTERS/Al Drago 

Just read the Reuters' piece in its entirety and weep. I know I have.

Wheeler's right

Wormhole pix

Oh Oh, it seems there might be wormholes, billions of them, knitting together the universe, something eloquently expressed in indirect fashion by John Wheeler and his revolutionary idea, From It to Bit.

"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. 

Note, this is NOT anthropomorphising, its the move from analog to digital, the ultimate collapse of the wave function enabling the universe to function as a consistent entity until the end of time.

John Archibald Wheeler

The signal

In 2019, LIGO and Virgo recorded something truly bizarre – a gravitational wave event less than a tenth of a second in duration.

Compared to the drawn-out chirps of black hole binaries on decaying orbital spirals, it was a sharp crack. The best explanation of the event, named GW190521, was a chance encounter of two black holes snaring each other in passing.

Now, a new paper has presented an alternative, far more exotic option: the echo of a black hole collision in another universe, reverberating through a collapsing wormhole that formed as a result of that merger.

To be clear, the black hole collision right here in our own Universe is still the preferred interpretation of the strange signal… but that preference is not strong enough to rule out the wormhole model entirely, writes a team led by physicist Qi Lai of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in a preprint uploaded to arXiv.

The details ...

A numerical simulation of the curvature of space-time during the merger that produced GW190521.
(AG Bernuzzi/University of Jena)

Of the 90 or so mergers detected so far, however, one stands out as very peculiar. Detected in May 2019, GW190521 emitted space-time ripples like no other.

"Its morphology and explosion-like structure are very different from previous observations," says astrophysicist Rossella Gamba of the University of Jena in Germany.

She adds, "GW190521 was initially analyzed as the merger of two rapidly rotating heavy black holes approaching each other along almost circular orbits, but its special features led us to propose other possible interpretations."

Something's afoot.  - Sherlock Holmes

The Shadow Docket strikes again ...

From left, Federal Trade Commissioners Lina Khan, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya attend a House Judiciary Committee hearing in 2023. (Shuran Huang/For The Washington Post)

The supine sc does it again, using the shadow docket to make a ruling letting Trump fire a federal employee without for cause. As stated in Total Control, these are the steps needed for the orange menace to take over the country's finances as needs warrant.

Phase one. Fire a federal employee without for cause

"For cause" refers to the specific reasons that justify the termination of an agreement, such as an employment contract or business relationship. 

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire the sole remaining Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission, the latest victory in his aggressive push to exert greater control over the federal bureaucracy.

The justices overturned a lower-court injunction that reinstated Rebecca Slaughter to her position with the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection issues while litigation over her removal works its way through the courts.

The ruling — while provisional — is significant because the high court also said it will hear arguments in December on overturning a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to set up independent, nonpartisan agencies insulated from political interference by the president if they do not wield executive power.

As is customary in cases decided on the emergency docket, the justices did not offer reasons for their ruling and it was unsigned, so the vote count was unclear.

The decision came over the objections of the court’s three liberal justices, who have regularly argued against such moves in a series of rulings by the high court allowing the president to fire the heads of several independent agencies.

“The majority, stay order by stay order, has handed full control of all those agencies to the President,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”

Phase 2. Fire yet another without for cause

The final case is Trump v. Cook, which is likely to reach the Supreme Court as soon as Tuesday. Cook involves Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, in violation of a federal statute which only allows Fed governors to be fired “for cause.” Late on Monday, a federal appeals court denied Trump this power — although it did so over the dissent of a judge who previously worked in Trump’s White House.

Trump, in other words, seeks total control over US monetary policy. He seeks the power to cancel federal grants or even eliminate entire federal programs at will. And he claims the power to raise trillions of dollars in new taxes by his mere decree.

It's inevitable ... it's about time

US President Donald Trump expressed his disagreement with recognition during a state visit to the UK last week
and a meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer [File: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP]

It's inevitable and ... it's about time.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced the United Kingdom’s decision to formally recognise a Palestinian state more than 100 years after the Balfour Declaration backed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, and 77 years after the creation of Israel in the British Mandate of Palestine.

“In the face of the growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and of a two-state solution,” Starmer said in a video statement Sunday.

The historic move comes as Canada and Australia also officially recognised Palestinian statehood two days before the start of the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), where Palestinian sovereignty after decades of occupation and apartheid by Israel will be in focus.

In closing ...

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said “today’s historic decision, taken alongside some of our closest allies, to recognise a Palestinian State, reflects our unwavering commitment to a two-state solution and affirms the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

As stated before, it's inevitable and ... it's about time.

Why does a dog ...

Image by Getty / Futurism

Chirality: is the property of an object not being identical to its mirror image. An object is chiral if it is not identical to its mirror image; that is, it cannot be superposed (not to be confused with superimposed) onto it. Conversely, an object is achiral (sometimes also amphichiral) if its mirror image cannot be distinguished from the object (i.e. can be superposed onto its mirror image), such as a sphere. A chiral object and its mirror image are called enantiomorphs (Greek, "opposite forms") or, when referring to molecules, enantiomers. Chirality is a property of asymmetry important in several branches of science.

Two enantiomers of a generic amino acid that is chiral

Human hands are perhaps the most recognized example of chirality. The left hand is a non-superposable mirror image of the right hand; no matter how the two hands are oriented, it is impossible for all the major features of both hands to coincide across all axes.[1] This difference in symmetry becomes obvious if someone attempts to shake the right hand of a person using their left hand, or if a left-handed glove is placed on a right hand. 

In the case of life, it's left handed, Why? Magnetism may be the answer. 

An RNA-making molecule crystallizes on magnetite,
which can bias the process toward a single chiral form.S. Furkan Ozturk

In 1848, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules essential for life exist in mirror image forms, much like our left and right hands. Today, we know biology chooses just one of these “chiral” forms: DNA, RNA, and their building blocks are all right-handed, whereas amino acids and proteins are all left-handed. Pasteur, who saw hints of this selectivity, or “homochirality,” thought magnetic fields might somehow explain it, but its origin has remained one of biology’s great mysteries. Now, it turns out Pasteur may have been onto something.

In three new papers, researchers suggest magnetic minerals common on early Earth could have caused key biomolecules to accumulate on their surface in just one mirror image form, setting off a positive feedback that continued to favor the same form. “It’s a real breakthrough,” says Jack Szostak, an origin of life chemist at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the new work. “Homochirality is essential to get biology started, and this is a possible—and I would say very likely—solution.”

Why all this quoted material, because Mirror Life is something else altogether.

To whit ...

In a mirror bacterium, all of the chiral molecules of existing bacteria—proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites—are replaced by their mirror images. Mirror bacteria could not evolve from existing life, but their creation will become increasingly feasible as science advances. Interactions between organisms often depend on chirality, and so interactions between natural organisms and mirror bacteria would be profoundly different from those between natural organisms. Most importantly, immune defenses and predation typically rely on interactions between chiral molecules that could often fail to detect or kill mirror bacteria due to their reversed chirality. It therefore appears plausible, even likely, that sufficiently robust mirror bacteria could spread through the environment unchecked by natural biological controls and act as dangerous opportunistic pathogens in an unprecedentedly wide range of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

The argument ...

Scientists have warned that research into "mirror life" organisms — hypothetical life forms made up of molecules that perfectly mirror those found in regular life — should be stopped.

Theoretically, it's a cool idea. But some scientists are worried that these life forms, if they're ever realized, could turn into a major risk for the world around us by turning into an unstoppable force that spreads without limits, overrunning and choking out natural organisms in its path.

As Nature reported last year, mirror organisms could pose risks to pretty much all existing life if unleashed. They'd be like the ultimate invasive species, with no natural predators, and capable of evading pathogen detection systems found in nature because they're just so radically different.

In a 300-page technical report published by Stanford University in December, scientists laid out the risks posed by mirror life, from pandemics to crop losses and ecosystem collapse.

"The consequences could be globally disastrous," coauthor Jack Szostak, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago, told The New York Times at the time.

Other scientists, however, say these risks are completely overblown, as Nature noted in a follow-up article this week, pointing out we're likely still many years away from synthesizing larger mirror molecules, let alone entire organisms. And even if it did come to exist, and it did escape the lab, some experts think that nature would have ways to defend itself.

The disagreement has shaken the scientific community. This week, researchers convened in Manchester, UK, to debate whether research into mirror life should be allowed or halted.

Proponents of the research argue that "reverse chirality" molecules could be used to create promising new drugs, as they're not as readily recognized by the human body's enzymes and immune system. At the same time, such a resistance could be potentially dangerous, allowing drugs to proliferate uncontrollably in the body, according to Nature.

Biochemist and pharmaceutical founder Sven Klussmann told the publication that it's worth considering the risks.

"But we should not panic yet, and we should not restrict research too early," he said.

This is akin to Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. Think Edwin Teller and The Super.
Easier to produce than fission but Oppie opposed it. Guess who won. 

Ivy Mike, the first full test of the Teller–Ulam design (a staged fusion bomb),
with a yield of 10.4 megatons (November 1, 1952)

The real Dr. Strangelove

I first met Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist and father of the H-bomb, while researching a television series about Robert Oppenheimer. Teller was seen as the embodiment of Dr Strangelove, the eponymous scientist in Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy, and though he hated the association, it seemed appropriate enough.

In the luxurious house of a friend of Teller's in downtown Hollywood, the scriptwriter Peter Prince and I listened while Teller delivered an impassioned monologue justifying his actions over the Oppenheimer affair (of which more later). His words were given additional weight by his rich, Bela Lugosi baritone and we left feeling we had experienced something of the force of personality that had prevailed for 50 years over congressmen, generals and presidents. It was that meeting that drew me to write Teller's biography.

As well as "fathering" the H-bomb, it was at Livermore that Teller initiated the Polaris programme, which revolutionised nuclear strategy by producing warheads small enough to be launched from ever-elusive submarines. It was here also, during Eisenhower's presidency, that Teller generated a stream of technical objections why it would be impossible to maintain and monitor a test ban with an enemy as devious as the Soviets. In doing so he thwarted Eisenhower's dream of a test-ban to end the arms race. If Teller had trusted the Russians to negotiate the world may have been spared the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis.

Physicist Edward Teller was for many years the chief force
lobbying for research into developing fusion weapons

Whenever someone poo poos or supports something potentially really dangerous,

hubris or money is inevitably involved. 

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut