OPEC is cutting oil production

Now OPEC is going to cut oil production to prop up oil prices.

Now California's Governor Newsom will have even more reason to add a new windfall tax to "decrease prices".

Will Sleepy Joe investigate our domestic oil companies again for price gouging and greed? Will he ask the Saudis to increase production again even though they just ignored his request and did the opposite? I guess he'll just release more oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to make up for his stupid energy policies.

To think that just two years ago we had energy independence and dominance. Biden's whole plan to switch to electric transport is being wrenched from his hands by other world powers, and we get to pay the price for it. So much winning!

Our brains are all going to melt from global warming

-Dave BadPerson

Vote for Gavin Newsom for another term as Governor of California

After thinking about it for a while, I think the right thing to do is vote Democrat in the California mid-term election. Let's face it, I'm tired of arguing with progressive liberals on the internet about what they think is best for them. What's best for this state is what's best for me. So what we need to do is get rid of these people from California entirely.

To do that, we need to increase the cost of living in California so it becomes a place that only high income households like myself and my wealthy friends can afford to live in. One of the best ways to do that is to increase the cost of housing through land use restrictions, urban growth boundaries, regulations that drive up construction costs, tighter environmental regulations, and adding unnecessary and exclusionary zoning restrictions. Democrats are the political party to do all those things.

We also need to increase the cost of energy so that it becomes less affordable for the average person. As we know, the price of energy affects everything, so it's the perfect tool to decrease the affordability of this state. To drive up energy prices we need to prevent the production and usage of California's plentiful oil and gas, shut down drilling, shut down fracking, ban gas appliances in all new construction, increase regulatory costs on oil and gas companies, increase energy taxes, tighten environmental regulations, increase our usage of weak and unreliable renewable energy sources, require people to buy expensive new electric cars, and prevent construction of nuclear power plants that would produce large amounts of inexpensive power. Democrats are the party to do those things.

California should be a place of haves and have-nots, a place where the gap between rich and poor is getting greater. The more homeless people we see on the streets, the better, because it's an indication that the income gap is widening. People who can't afford to live here should be forced to move to another state.

Probably one of the best ways to get people to vote Democrat is to tangle up their housing and energy policies with hot button social issues like abortions, transgender rights, climate change, and environmentalism. In this way the poor pieces of crap will be made to think they're voting for a more just and equitable world, when in fact it will be their demise.

Muhahahahaaa!

-Dave BadPerson

Vote Democrat for California

So here I am checking out my California mid-term election ballot and I think it makes sense to vote Democrat up and down the line.

California should be a place for haves and have-nots, a place where the gap between rich and poor is widening. The best way to make this state unaffordable for ordinary people is to increase the cost of housing and energy. We need more land use restrictions, urban growth boundaries, and regulations that drive up the cost of construction. We need to stop the production of California's plentiful oil and gas, have tighter environmental regulations, switch to weak and unreliable renewable energy, and force people to buy expensive electric cars. Only the Democrats are the party that can do all these things.

Then we need to work on making water, farming, food, and everything else unaffordable. Then we need to destroy our industries and ship them to China so there are no jobs here for smelly working class people. Only in this way can we hope to squeeze out the poor pieces of crap and force them to move to another state, so that only wealthy people like me and my wealthy friends can afford to live here. 

California has had a democratic super majority for decades and look how much progress we've made towards making this one of the least affordable states in the country. A vote for the Democrats is a vote to crush the peons and make sure they don't have a future here, so that this can become a state for only the wealthiest and most successful people.

-Dave BadPerson

President Biden the energy dickhead

Biden says increases in gas prices are due to the Ukraine war, but any decreases in prices are due to his policies. He's releasing more oil from the strategic petroleum reserve before the mid-term elections, he says "It's not politically motivated at all", but to act as a "bridge" until domestic production can be increased.

What a fucking dickhead!

He's enacted policies to decrease domestic oil production from day one of his presidency, then investigated oil companies for price gouging, then released oil from the strategic petroleum reserve as a bandaid for his fucked policies, then asked OPEC to increase production to bring the price of oil down (and OPEC ignored him and is cutting production). Just two years ago we had energy independence and dominance, and this dickhead with jizz spurting out his mouth is still talking about oil company's price gouging as if it's their fault. The ultimate all-encompassing mega-dickhead. No wonder there's a red wave coming on election day. Let's hope this is just a one-term dickhead.

-Dave BadPerson

University academics generally don't have any teaching qualifications

Saw this just now and thought to myself "Most university academics don't have any training or qualifications in teaching, and most universities don't require them to have any. Yet they teach. So they're really just hobbyist educators".


-Dave Badperson

Governor Newsom is at it again

Full page ad in the newspaper today from California's Governor Newsom, with my underline added. Yeah we better wean ourselves off those "unreliable" fossil fuels that have powered an industrial revolution for two and a half centuries, that have given us nitrogen fertilizers and mechanized agriculture to feed 8 billion people, that have allowed a century of explosive human population growth, that have made world travel and trade possible, that Europe can't seem to do without right now. Remember, California had rolling blackouts last year during peak electricity demand because we've switched to too much "reliable" renewable energy. This is the religion that climate change has become. Now you see why I call Newsom "The Prince of Darkness".

-Dave Badperson

Liz Cheney's election loss

And so... Liz Cheney's constituents have just voted her out of office by a more than 37.4% margin, and she will be replaced by Trump-endorsed opponent Harriet Hageman. Democracy at work. Oh the irony!

She didn't lose the election because she opposed Trump, she lost it because she didn't represent the interests of her people in congress. Instead she went off and did her own thing. That's a bad strategy in a democracy.

"It's been my honor to serve the people of Wyoming by spending my every waking moment fighting Trump, just like Abraham Lincoln did. I may not be able to win a mid-term primary, but you can be sure I'm going to run for president and win"

What an egomaniac!


-Dave Badperson

Support the FBI

That's funny, ever since the raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, we've seen the radical left go from "Defund the Police" to "support the FBI".

-Dave Badperson

Biden is awesome

Biden is awesome. He's got so many big spending bills through: Build Back Better, the Inflation Reduction Act, he's invoked the Defense Production Act, etc. All my stocks in lithium, rare earth metals, solar, uranium, and nuclear are going great. It was a decade of loose monetary policy that got us into this market bubble and inflation mess. Now the government is using money to skew the free market differently and create new bubbles in different industries. Follow the bubbles!

-Dave Badperson

2022 hurricane season

Erma Gerd! For the first time since 1941, the Atlantic has had no named storm activity (tropical storm or hurricane) from July 3rd-August 30th! But Joe Biden and NOAA and other experts warned us earlier this year that this would be another tough hurricane season. We already know climate change is killing the planet! I'll bet this has something to do with the US nuclear secrets the orange man had at Mar-a-Lago that he was going to sell to his Russian friends! That guy should be in prison, even if he hasn't committed a crime, simply because I don't like him! 😆

https://www.cnn.com/.../hurricane-august-no.../index.html

-Dave Badperson

Flex alert in California

Flex Alert declared in California. Remember to limit your electricity use from 4-9pm when you need it most. This includes not charging your electric vehicles. Never mind that just last week we banned all sales of new gasoline powered cars after 2035. Welcome to the future of energy and electric transportation! If we don't save electricity there will be planned rotating blackouts because we don't have enough generating capacity to meet peak demand. And yet we're going to add 30-50% more load to the grid by electrifying our transportation. Isn't that clever? Enjoy paying 50% more for electricity than the rest of the nation. Well at least for that extra cost you get to feel morally superior because you're saving the planet with renewable energy. It's just an unfortunate inconvenience that solar doesn't generate anything once the sun goes down. Just wait until you put a battery on your home solar system, we'll commandeer that to power the grid as well, and charge you for the privilege.
California, bringing you the problems of the future, today! 😂


-Dave Badperson

Trump vindicated again

"Reliance on a single foreign supplier can leave a nation vulnerable to extortion and intimidation... Germany will become completely dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course"

- Trump's UN address, Sept 25, 2018.

And they laughed at him. Here's the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKEycjREgPE

Who's laughing now that the Russians have completely shutdown the Nordstream 1 gas pipeline to Germany? You have to admit, it wasn't a good strategy for European NATO nations to make themselves dependent on energy from the very country that NATO was created to stop. Trump vindicated again.

-Dave Badperson

Inflation is only 8.3%

Excluding food and gas, inflation is only 8.3% 😃

-Dave Badperson

The fake Russian collusion story

So the Clinton campaign and DNC hired law firm Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired Christopher Steele, who was given misinformation from Russian citizen Igor Danschenko about the orange man's ties to Russia, including the alleged pee tape. Danschenko was also a paid FBI informant during the same period.

So they were colluding with a Russian to create the whole Russian collusion story, and that Russian misled them with false and fabricated information? Oh the irony! 🤣

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/fbi-mislead-danchenko-after-paid-confidential-informant


-Dave Badperson

Degrowth

It all makes sense now. The governments of the world can't directly control human population growth, so they plan to do it by limiting the supply of energy. Fossil fuels are what's allowed a century of explosive population growth. By limiting fossil fuels under the guise of "climate change", they can indirectly control population growth. It's the new world order. Now I sound like a conspiracy theory kook.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/what-is-degrowth-economics-climate-change/

-Dave Badperson

.

No change to China tarriffs

Well huh, the tariffs on Chinese goods that were instated by the orange man back in 2018 were due to expire this summer, but the Biden administration has decided to continue them. I seem to recall a lot of people at the time saying "tariffs don't work". More than a year and a half into his term and Biden has done absolutely nothing about the tariffs, and is even extending this policy of the orange man. Why isn't the media whipping the nation into a state of mouth-frothing mass hysteria over this? Oh, because it's not the orange man doing it, that's why. Well whodda thunk?

https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/news/woodworking-industry-news/chinese-tariffs-remain-place

-Dave Badperson

Letita James' lawsuit against the Trump organization

Well huh, that lawsuit recently filed against the Trump organization by New York attorney general Letitia James is actually a civil lawsuit, not a criminal one. That means no actual law was broken and no crime was committed, and instead she's suing the Trump organization for damages for inflating the value of their properties to get loans from banks. So who is the victim of these damages, is it the banks who gave loans to the Trump organization and have since been fully paid back with interest? So if everyone got paid back and made money, what are the damages exactly? Did these banks really give him loans based on valuations given to them by the borrower, because banks don't do that? If the banks lost money due to financial misrepresentation, wouldn't they have gone after the Trump organization themselves with their own lawsuit? And why is Letitia James filing this lawsuit just weeks before her own election, and does it have anything to do with her election promise to "get Trump". Is she trying to divert voters minds away from her bad record on crime in NYC? It all sounds oddly suspicious, like it's some kind of... witch hunt.

It'll get thrown out of court, but it's been specifically timed so it'll get thrown out of court AFTER the mid-term election.

And gee, I wonder what will become of the classified documents Mar-a-Lago raid scandal? Mind garbage.

https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/tto_complaint.pdf

-Dave Badperson

Border immigrant relocations

It's funny, I've seen a few people expressing their outrage on FB about the immigrants that were shipped to sanctuary cites by the Texas and Florida governors. Apparently it was very unjust. But did you think the immigrants wanted to stay in border towns already crowded with immigrants? We've had over two million apprehended at the border so far this year because our current administration has no solution to the border crisis. Do you think the border town's resources aren't already overstretched? Ask the immigrants, and they'll tell you, those people want to go further north into the interior of the country. They don't even have a plan of where to go, just anywhere but where they came from. And the sanctuary cities declared themselves as such because they're ready to welcome immigrants. And the governors took some of the immigrant burden off their state. So if everyone got what they wanted, what's the problem? Ask any of the outraged if they're prepared to set aside a room in their place to house, feed, clothe, educate and provide medical care for these people. Oh hell no! It's fake outrage on their part. Just a display of virtue to their FB friends with no understanding of the problem and no solutions. 

-Dave Badperson

Biden's energy policy sucks ass

Biden's energy policy sucks ass. From day one he's been working to destroy the American oil and gas industry, including blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, increased taxes on oil and gas companies, increased energy-related environmental regulations, has not had one sale of federal drilling leases, has slowed permitting of drilling permits, and discouraged investment in oil and gas. Normally supply would rise with demand, but oil companies can see that Biden intends to put them out of business in the long term, and so they don't want to invest in drilling, so now we have a disconnect between supply and demand. The result? Gasoline prices rose 48% from inauguration day to the week before Russia invaded Ukraine. To counter this, he asked OPEC to increase production to lower prices. This was despite us being the world's top oil producer in 2018 and having record oil production in 2019. Then he released oil from the startegic petroleum reserve as a band-aid, and asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil and gas company's retail prices, blaming their greed for the rising prices. Of course, the price of oil affects everything, so now we have the highest inflation in 40 years. Biden continues to propose and finalize regulations that restrict nearly every aspect of the oil industry - financing and private-sector investment, exploration and production, pipeline construction and operation, and consumer use. Decades of similar policies in Europe left them with no alternatives to Russian oil and gas, consequently disrupting global oil markets when the Ukraine war started, and contributing to high US gasoline prices. Gasoline is currently double the price it was on inauguration day, with no relief in sight.

So if you voted for Biden, then don't complain about high gas prices because this is what you voted for. He made it clear this was his agenda throughout his campaign. You got what you wanted, so shut the f*k up. 

https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/bidens-radical-anti-fossil-fuel-energy-policy-costs-americans-dearly

https://www.moran.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?id=629ACD7C-781E-448A-AD1C-1AD0F35EF0FC

-Dave Badperson

Destroy California!

As gasoline approaches $7 a gallon here in Calfornia, our Governor Newsom, aka The Prince of Darkness, is complaining that oil companies are ripping us off, and wants to instate a windfall tax on them for all the profits they're making. This is what happens when you enact decades of policies and regulations to destroy California's oil industry, and the people of California actually votes for more of it. Now the Prince of Darkness wants to add a tax to increase the price of gas even further. Brilliant thinking! This is the same Prince of Darkness that let Elon Musk walk away with a trillion dollars of investor money to build out an electric car industry. The same Prince of Darkness that wants all new cars to be electric by 2035 (so we can stop forest fires... that are often caused by electric power lines). Never mind that we have the most expensive electricity in the nation but rolling blackouts during peak demand. Vote for the genius of this tyrant in November, because oil is evil, profits are evil, corporations are evil, and wealth and prosperity are evil. Vote to Destroy California!

-Dave Badperson

The Truth About Burning Man - My four years inside California's sex and drug cult

Burning Man is a week-long "art festival" held each year in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. The event draws tens of thousands of people to the desert and they build a temporary city there called Black Rock City, which is the second largest city in Nevada while it's there. At the end of the week, the festival culminates with the burning of a wooden effigy of a person, hence the name "Burning Man".

Have you ever wondered what Burning Man is about? Well I'm about to let you know the big secret behind it. It's actually very simple. 

I've only been to Burning Man four times but I've hung out with some long-time burners for years, and I helped start a theme camp at Burning Man and was its leader for a couple of years. During that time I was also a part of the Burning Man community that exists all year round, not just during the one week of the Burning Man event, and I have attended various Burning Man endorsed regional events in Southern California.  

Burning Man itself is a large publicly accessible event.  It has law enforcement and is mostly a giant party and art festival on the dry lake bed of the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada.

What kind of people go to Burning Man?
Burning Man is a gathering of many different "tribes".  The event began as a counter-culture festival in San Francisco. Since its inception more than 30 years ago, the event has drawn people from various counter-culture communities such as:

• Disenfranchised artists
• Artists who work with unusual media such as fire and light
• Ravers
• Pagans
• Sexual deviants such as Swingers, Polyamorous, BDSM, and the LGBT community

There are also a lot of ordinary people who don't fit into the above categories, generally young people, thrill seekers, or those who go just want to see what it's about.

What unifies all these groups?

DRUGS!!  Burning Man and the Burner community are mostly about drug use.  This is why they often have their regional events on Native American reservations, so that law enforcement can't just show up and start nosing around at their big drug parties.

What kinds of drugs?
First and foremost, Burning Man is about hallucinogenic drugs.  These are the drugs that spawned the hippie era of the 1960s in the USA and other western nations. These drugs make you hallucinate, but they also make you feel "peace", "love", and "oneness with the universe".  From my experience I have personally seen or heard of the following drugs being used within the Burner community:

Hallucinogens

• LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)
• Psilocybin-containing mushrooms (Psilocybe and related species)
• DMT (dimethyl tryptamine)
• 2CB & 2CI (Bromo-dimethoxyphenethylamine and Iodo-dimethoxyphenethylamine )
• Mescaline (from Peyote and other cactuses)

Stimulants

• Cocaine
• Ecstasy (MDMA - Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine)
• Amphetamines of various types

Dissociatives & hallucinogenic dissociatives

• Nitrous oxide
• Ketamine
• PCP (phencyclidine)
• Deschloroketamine
• GHB (gamma hydroxybutyric acid) and GBL (gamma-butyrolactone)

Legal drugs

• Alcohol
• Cannabis
• Designer drugs that skirt around controlled substance laws by having a different molecular structure but have similar effects as the drugs they're intended to mimic.

From that list you can see that the drugs being used among the Burner community are mostly party drugs, the kind of drugs that alter your consciousness or that allow you to party all night like a rockstar.  Not surprisingly, you don't see nervous system depressant drugs being used much at Burning Man. Drugs like heroin, morphine, opiates, opioids, benzodiazepines such as Xanax, rohypnol, and barbituates don't seem to have a following.  They may get some usage but I didn't encounter them at all. Perhaps I just wasn't moving in the "right circles".

In short, Burning Man is about creating art that is inspired by, and intended to enhance the drug experience.

That's it, that's what Burning Man is mostly about.

DRUGS!!

So when you hear Burning Man being self-described as an event focussed on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance, what they really mean is....

A HUGE WEEK-LONG DRUG PARTY WITH ART THAT WILL ENHANCE YOUR DRUG EXPERIENCE!!

And that's without me even mentioning all the people and theme camps that cater to nearly every form of sexual deviation.

- Dave Badperson

Testing new email subscription service

 Testing testing, 1...2...3. Is this thing on?

The Amazing Evolution of the Monkey Tail Cactus

These pictures show a plant known as the Monkey Tail Cactus, Cleistocactus colademononis. It lives on cliffs in Peru and Bolivia and has become highly adapted to the cliff habitat.

The most notable thing you can see about the Monkey Tail Cactus is that it hangs down. It actually grows downwards. This is odd because most plants exhibit positive phototropism and negative gravitropism, meaning they grow towards light and against gravity.  These are fundamental factors for the survival of most plants as they seek to grow upwards towards their only source of energy, the sun.

So think of the evolution of plant growth regulation that was needed to make a plant grow away from the light and following gravity. The genus Cleistocactus are generally tall, thin, upright growing cactuses. However, it must have been a terrible disadvantage for a tall thin cactus to grow upwards on a cliff with only small root space and poor footing. Such a disadvantage in fact, that most early cactus colonizers of cliffs fell over and did not succeed in this new habitat.  Over time however a few plants were less inclined to grow upwards and so natural selection was towards plants that grew downwards. 

Eventually however, if they kept growing downwards, they would all end up at the bottom of the cliff. So they developed flowers, fruits, and seeds favored by birds, so the birds would carry their seeds upwards and start new generations of the cactus further up the cliff.

- Dave

References

https://wiki2.org/en/Gravitropism

https://wiki2.org/en/Phototropism

A new acquisition at the botanic garden, the Tassel Fern, Huperzia squarrosa

A new acquisition at the botanic garden, the Tassel Fern, Huperzia squarrosa (aka Phlegmariurus squarrosus, Lycopodium squarrosum). It doesn't look anything like the fronds of a fern. In fact it's a living fossil that sits somewhere between a moss and a fern, and first appeared on Earth about 380 million years ago during the Devonian period. This was a time long before the dinosaurs, known as the Age of Fishes, when the sea was dominated by jawless and armored fishes, when the first primitive sharks evolved, and the first lobe-finned fishes began to haul themselves onto tidal flats to become the first land vertebrates. This was a time that marked the first extensive colonization of the land by plants, and without any large land-dwelling herbivores, they thrived.

Don't ask me how much this thing cost, or how long it took me to find one, too much and too long, but I think it's a worthy addition to the botanic garden.

- Dave

The Fake News Media Exposed

For Memorial day, I'd like us all to take a moment to remember that the big bad orange man did not refuse to visit the dead American WWI soldiers at Aisne-Marne cemetery in France because they were "losers" and "suckers". We know this story is untrue because: 1. Whitehouse staff who were present that day have publicly refuted it. 2. The Atlantic magazine, who originated the "losers" and "suckers" story, covered the incident two years earlier when it happened, but made no mention of why the visit was actually canceled, despite them probably having been told the reason. 3. Electronic communications from the US Navy obtained under the  freedom of information act show that the visit was canceled by the Navy because Marine One was grounded due to bad weather. 4. Noted orange man hater, John Bolton, in his book states that the visit was canceled because Marine One was grounded by bad weather and the security and logistics of a long motorcade to the cemetery were impractical. He also states in his book that the media turned the story into one about the orange man being afraid of the rain and gleefully pointing out that other world leaders still traveled to the cemetery that day. 5. The orange man gave a one hour keynote address at another American WWI cemetery near Paris the next day, but this got no mention in the mainstream media.

Then, once this story came out in The Atlantic, coincidentally just two months before the 2020 election, and two years after the incident occurred in 2018, the Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Washington Post all ran The Atlantic's story as if it was fact. 

All this reminds me of a certain saying the orange man had...

FAKE NEWS!

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/4/21422733/atlantic-trump-military-suckers-losers-explained

- Dave Bad Person

A message to the countries that laughed at the USA's COVID response

Well here we are on May 2nd, 2021, with 243 million doses of Covid vaccine administered in the US and 103 million people fully vaccinated, or 31% of our 332 million population. That's an amazing pace.

So how is vaccination progress coming along in those countries that laughed at us as the stupidest nation on Earth with our anti-vaxxers, surging infection rate, Trump president, and mask-denying free-dumb lovers? Well...

The pompous Brits have only managed to fully vaccinate 22% of their much smaller population of 67 million. You don't look so superior now, do you, you hopeless British idiots!

The "highly efficient" Germans have only vaccinated 7.7% of their 83 million population. If that's the power of German engineering then German engineering is SHIT, just like their unreliable shit cars!

The socialist utopias of Norway and Sweden, where everything is "free" and we should be more like them? They've only vaccinated about 7%, their tiny populations of 5.3 and 10.3 million. Maybe they need to scrape the frost off their brains and stop being so PATHETIC!

Switzerland, the headquarters of many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and one of the most organized countries in the world? Only 10.8% of their tiny 8.5 million population is fully vaccinated. Hopeless AND pathetic.

New Zealand, the model of how it should have been done, have only fully vaccinated 1.2% of their tiny population of 4.9 million. What's wrong Kiwis, are you STEE-OOO-PID?

Australia? They don't even have data on how many of their 22 million population have been fully vaccinated because they're a third world country, and the total number of doses administered is just 2.2 million, which indicates the number fully vaccinated is much less than 10%. Maybe if they stopped shagging the sheep all day and night, they might have time to go get a vaccine?

Ah yes, it sure is great to be living in the greatest nation on Earth and be fully vaccinated, for free, and be able to get back to normal life. I think I'll go traveling and eat out and go to pubs and enjoy life while I laugh at all those other hopeless flailing nations. 😊

- Dave Bad Person

P.S. yes, the big bad orange man didn't do such a bad job, despite all the incessant whiners saying he was just leaving us to die of Covid. Seems these other countries are leaving their people to die of Covid.

References

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
https://www.griffinsautorepair.com/truth-german-car-reliability/
https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2012/05/are-german-cars-reliable-myth-german-engineering.html

https://www.google.com/search?q=german+cars+reliability&rlz=1C1GCEU_enUS901US901&oq=german+cars+reliability

Ongoing studies into the goals and utility of academic research

I saw this article in the newspaper today and posted my thoughts about it on Facebook.  I've since deleted the post, but here is a copy...

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I always love it when scientists discover things that ordinary people have known for centuries. So it turns out those pelicans you see gliding above the waves are actually saving energy by catching updrafts off the waves? Whooda thunk?!

Well now we have a mathematical model of this phenomenon. Do you know what we can do with this information? Nothing! Do you know what business or government agency will use this information? Abso-fucking-lutely none!

This information has now been published in the scholarly journal "Movement Ecology", which is so obscure and has a readership so tiny, that probably no more than 10 people in the world will read this research paper in its entirety. The researcher however, got to play around with physics equations, which is no doubt their idea of a fun time. Now they'll get kudos from their fellow researchers, and go on to live a life contributing very little to society, and be able to go to international conferences and take sabbaticals, and generally be on vacation for the rest of their life, at taxpayer expense.

Thank gawd most of the important research going on in the world doesn't happen at fucked universities and isn't conducted by stupid people with PhDs. 

https://movementecologyjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40462-021-00247-9

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An oceanographer scientist that I know saw my post and responded as follows...

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Why are you so angry all the time?

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This was clearly a defense mechanism, an indication that she had no intention of answering the questions I'd posed in my post, but rather, to sidetrack the discussion and make it seem that my opinion is worthless and there's something fundamentally wrong with my psyche.  So, rather than create a kerfuffle in front of a large audience online, I messaged her privately....

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Why am I so angry? Because I never get an answer when I ask what the goals and utility of that kind of research are. What is its application?  After 17 years of working in academia (and not being good at the job), and another 15 years working in the research center of a major Silicon Valley company, I can see the difference in research styles. In the mid-20th century scientists were splitting the atom and going to the moon. My PhD thesis, submitted in the year 2000, was about a mathematical model of a neuron. Here I am 20 years later and  what has that achieved? Meanwhile, literally billions of people have miniature computers in their hands and a high-speed roving connection to the internet, which has enabled a whole slew of other technologies to exist (like this messenger app we were using for example).

That's ok. The things I want to say about it are best not said on Facebook and not said to you, as a matter of respect. I have a blog for that kind of stuff. My blogs get more readership than most scientific papers, and I know that because I have the numbers.

Peace, love, and stuff. 😊

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To this she responded with silence at first, which is another defense mechanism commonly used by academics when confronted about the application of their work).  So I wrote to her again...

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Actually, your comment "Why are you so angry all the time?" was a defense mechanism to avoid answering my questions. I've seen academics and scientists use various defense mechanisms when confronted about the goals and utility of their work. They change the subject, get defensive, give a strawman argument, compare themselves or their work to great scientists or discoveries of the past. That's ok, I get it. It's all very very important things they're doing.  Gotta keep the dream alive.

Peace, love, and stuff 😊

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She finally replied....

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Jesus. No, I really wanted to know why you are so angry. I didn’t read the article you posted, just saw that it had something to do with pelicans. I did see a release from Scripps that describes it and it sounds like the utility is in the area of improving flight efficiency (they specifically cited drones) and also a more general result of a better understanding of the ocean/air interface, which is important for things like weather prediction. But I know, in your opinion it’s useless if it doesn’t put a better microchip in your pocket. Anyway I have to get back to working on locating fronts for the navy (so they can use their sonar to locate and kill the bad guys) and determining how good our ocean/atmosphere resolution has to be to get it right.

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To which I replied...

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Oh yes, the uses that scientists dream up for their research AFTER they've done it are truly amazing. "Well, it could be applied to this, or that, or something else". But it probably never will be. They like to stretch idea of what it might be used for. I'm glad you've found a use for your work. I was beginning to think I'd get no response at all, which is another commonly used defense mechanism. This discussion is rounding out my blog nicely. After all, you're a public figure, so you won't mind if I put your words in the public domain.

P, L, 😊& S 

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There was some more discussion about funding for academic research, and the state of my apparent anger. We caught up on old news, and then I gave my final reply...

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I guess that's the difference between academic research and engineering research. In academic research you apply for funding and justify it with a use. There is a lot of competition for the limited amount of funding available. In engineering research you have a product people want to buy, that provides a service they want or solves a problem they want solved. You don't have to ask people for money or justify it, they are willing to give you money because they want and need your product.  The use is inherent and obvious to the product. The product can end up becoming so popular that you cant find a rake big enough to rake in the cash you get for your product, and the cash piles up in enormous mounds. 😊

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And that was that.

- Dave Bad Person