Republican (R) meets Democrat (D) in coffee shop.


R: I’m guessing. I think you Democrats are concerned about your candidate who once again demonstrated that there’s nothing in her head.


D: She’s not Trump.


R: But have you followed her, actually listened to her?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: I might be misled here, but in a recent appearance in front of adoring Democrats—people who are in favor of electing Harris in spite of her record—she lost her teleprompter and without it could only repeat the last words she saw: “Thirty-two more days…32 more days…32 more days….” Surely you are aware that this woman is both incompetent and inarticulate.


D: She’s not Trump.


R: But what specific reasons, what positives in character and deed make you favor her?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: So, you’re all in for “joy and change" and “opportunity economy”?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: I get that. In fact the contrast between Republican and Democrat has never been greater. But could you define her policies or defend her record of incompetence, of driving inflation to Weimar-Republic highs, of opening the border?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: So, she’s in favor of gender operations for children, men in women’s locker rooms, and giveaways that will increase inflation. Is that what you want?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: Yeah, you keep saying that. But given Trump’s provable delivery of a strong economy, strong military, and strong stand for the survival of Israel, what do you mean by “She’s not Trump”? Are you suggesting that she’s the opposite as her record vividly shows. You know: Trump wants to close the border as he did in his term, wants to entice businesses to produce in the US, wants energy independence whereas she wants to spend hundreds of billions on green energy to make America imitate something like Germany that had to abandon its green program and restart its fossil fuel energy plants, and she wants to spend money on illegal aliens, including those who brought their criminal records into the country.


D: She’s not Trump.


R: I thought you Democrats were supposed to be there party of intellectuals, a thought perpetrated by your disdain for all things conservative and characterized by your calling Republicans yokels and red necks.


D: We are. We’re smarter on average. Maybe smarter by an order of magnitude—that’s a thousand times in case you don’t understand math and exponents.


R: And yet you choose to back a candidate who’s known for nonsensical word salads, a candidate who won’t answer any questions with specificity, a candidate who can’t speak off teleprompter like Obama who took one into an elementary school and Biden. Remember Obama’s rereading a sentence on the teleprompter? Remember Biden’s reading the instructions on his when he said, “Pause”?


D: She’s not Trump.


R: Thanks for the enlightenment. You inspired me to git me some edgeication. Wisht I was as smart as you.

Gosh? Was Galileo smart or what? Guy made his own telescope, made some discoveries about relativity, gravity, other physics stuff, and…architecture? Yep.


Galileo’s square-cube law states that the strength of any structure that is likely to fail because of material fractures cannot be predicted from models or from scaling up from previous experience. Here’s why: In a scaling up the weight of the structure will increase as the cube of its dimensions, but the cross-sectional area of the members that carry the load increases only as the square of those dimensions. Thus, the stress on the members of the scaled up structure goes up linearly with the dimensions.


Were he alive today, Galileo might apply his law to social program spending, say, for example, the money that goes into the Department of Education. The department’s 4,400 employees raked In over $179 billion in taxes this past fiscal year. One hundred eighty billion bucks! That’s quite a fiscal structure. And to show for it, the 4,400 employees have built…Well, who knows? Better teachers? Better educated students? Are test scores an indicator of the strength of the building? Was the department built with inherent flaws that made its failure likely as it grew? Is it possible that the supporting members, the teachers backed by the department’s innumerable programs, were too flawed to hold the stresses imposed by a large government building.


According to an assessment made in 2015, 36 years after Jimmy Carter christened the Education Department, in both science and reading, US students ranked 24th among other countries. In math, US kids ranked 39th. Those standings seem to indicate a building either on the verge of collapse or already collapsed. And that was a decade ago.


Flaws on One Scale Increase with Increasing Scale


In 1979 the US Department of Education had a $12 billion budget. Today’s education budget is 15 times larger. That’s not even close to the cube of 12, and already the structure has serious cracks, especially in the inner cities. One could, of course, argue that the problem lies with the states and not with the federal government and that all public education in the country is a local matter. But then, why spend $179 billion on 4,400 federal employees? What do they do? They aren’t teachers—at least, they aren’t teachers in their current capacities.


An Indicator


The burgeoning budget of the US Department of Education dooms the structure to catastrophic failure. We’ve spent more and more without getting a solid framework as evidenced by poor international rankings in science, reading, and math.


Hold on a sec. Maybe there’s good news in the most recent rankings. The Washington Post reports, “The relative ranking of the United States improved, even in math. It’s now sixth among the 81 countries in reading (from eighth in 2018), 10th in science (from 11th) and 26th in math (from 29th), primarily because other countries that once outperformed the United States — including France, Portugal, Iceland and Norway — posted scores that were statistically tied….” * Look, the US ranking rose from 29th to 26th in math in the newest assessment, a half century and billions of dollars after the department’s formation. Wow! All the way up to 26th. That’s what $179 billion gets us.


Can You Understand the Conservative Push for Smaller Government?


Bureaucracies are in the business of self-perpetuation. The Department of Education appears exemplify this principle. Yet, the politicians in Washington seem unwilling to quash the runaway growth of all the agencies. Instead, they pile more bricks onto teetering structures.


If Galileo were alive…NO, not so. Don't even try to make the point that he could explain why big government agencies are doomed to failure and to gobbling up more money. if Galileo were alive and writing about teetering government agencies on the verge of collapse because they cannot support their weight, he would face a new Inquisition prepared to silence him as that Renaissance Inquisition silenced him over Copernican astronomy.

​Call big government what you will, House of Cards, sand castle in the tidal zone, whatever; it's destined to collapse on itself as it looks more and more like some five-year-old's building block structure.  




*Donna St. George. Washington Post. Math scores for U.S. students hit all-time low on international exam.

I suggest that most Americans haven’t heard Madame Liberal’s recent call for censorship. Apparently lost in her losing (to Trump), Mrs. Clinton now says,


“We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted…But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter/X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control…And it’s not just the social and psychological affects, it’s real life.” *


Great! What we need is the totally unbiased view of some kid fresh out of a liberal school censoring us. The objectivity astounds! Unmoderated moderators with no bias, of course. Would’t want skepticism and debate to proliferate, would we, Hillary?


Free Speech Is a Bummer, Isn’t It?


Free speech is a bummer for anyone with a different opinion. Certainly, it’s been a bummer for Liberals since Musk turned Twitter into X. The very nature of “liberal” changed over the past two decades, especially after social media companies colluded with government agencies. Nothing shows this more than the debacle of the Mis (Dis) information Czarina, Nina Jankowicz (born 1988 or 1989).


First off, no one seems to know Nina's age. Wikipedia has her birth date as 1988 or 1989. Strange lack of information, isn’t it. How is it possible not to know her birthdate in the twenty-first century unless she was born in a war zone, in some remote valley in the Caucasus, in Papua New Guinea’s or Brazil’s rainforest, or on the Himalayan Plateau in a yurt? Were her birth records destroyed in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption? The confusion on facts about the Czarina reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s claim she was named after Edmund Hillary for his ascent up Mt. Everest. Clinton was born in 1947, six years before Hillary’s climb (29 May 1953). Misinfo? And then there was Clinton’s claim that she was shot at by snipers when she landed in Bosnia to receive flowers and a poem from a young girl. In Clinton’s words, would the birthdate or the sniper fire be pass-throughs?


Is There a Solution to Misinformation


Is there a solution to the problem of misinformation? Frankly, no, especially when the people who war against it are perpetrators of falsehoods.  Especially when thy exhibit no compunction over lies: Biden’s repeatedly saying inflation was high when he entered office, for example, Mayorkas repeatedly saying the border was secure. The newspapers  saying the laptop was misinformation and using as proof the word of partisan intelligence agents. The FBI pursuing a needless warrant on information provided by the Clinton campaign.

Mis(dis)information derives from both sides of the aisle. Liars to the Left of me; liars to the Right. Here I am stuck in the middle with you.All the weight of truth lies on your shoulders—and on mine. And if you’re like me, you’re tired of constantly doubting. But what choice do we have? Doubt is our protection against an Orwellian world. Doubt is our only surety.


The world can’t return to those days when lies were limited to neighborhood gossip and newspapers. We’re under siege. We have more information than can disappear down a super massive black hole. Think not 24/7 but 1,440 minutes multiplied by days into the distant future.


Oh! Sure. The biggest lies are relatively easy to spot. Millions knew that Adam Schiff had no proof of collusion, but the liberal media loved repeating the story. And in that love lies the danger. People in the media seem to have no compunction. They will bury any story that conflicts with their personal favorites. According to the Media Research Center's analysis of all morning and evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, in addition to their Sunday morning offerings such as This Week, Face the Nation and Meet the Press…from October 14, 2020 through the morning of April 18, 2022, the three networks spent only 25 minutes and six seconds combined on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal over 18 months.


No big deal, right? But those media outlets kept their audiences in the dark. Nothing to see here. Move along. We censor to protect...our agenda.


So, trust not. That’s what we’ve learned. It’s a lesson worth learning. It’s a lesson not to forget. Lies and censorship are corollaries that manipulate a society. The Nazis knew that. The Soviets knew, also. And, of course, we Americans have our own versions, such as a woman put in charge of a truth squad as she literally sang untruths on social media.


You’re on Your Own


Truth and freedom of speech are always involved in a war with misinformation. All of us are gullible enough to fall victim in this war, as the letter about Russian “disinformation”  from fifty intelligence agents reveals. Were they suckered in by media reports? Were they simple partisans waving “heil” to liberal politicians? Were they evil themselves as shown by perpetrating a lie?


The Left has been screaming “Fascists” for the last decade, claiming that those on the Right were exemplars of Nazis. Yet, censorship of conservative voices appears to have been rampant.


You and I are on our own. Neither of us can fear repercussions from the censors and the liars. We’ll never be rid of them. They will come at us from both sides of the aisle. Our best defense is to say repeatedly, “Prove it; prove it; show me unshakeable evidence. Otherwise, censor yourself. That is, shut up, Adam, Nina, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, and Hillary. And, yes, in some matters, Fox, too.”


*https://nypost.com/2024/10/06/us-news/hillary-clinton-warns-that-allowing-free-speech-on-social-media-means-we-lose-control/

TV weather forecasters say this with every major weather event: “The European model predicts…” and “The American model predicts….” The former is the ECMWF (European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model); the latter, GFS (Global Forecast System). You hear both mentioned when a hurricane or large storm system like a potential nor’easter threatens. Both models produce predictive tracks within a cone of probability. Recently, Hurricane Helene’s predicted tracks had people from eastern Florida through the Florida panhandle watching in anxiety. The storm did little damage to central Florida around the Orlando area (I know because I was there in Winter Park, where the only damage I saw was Spanish Moss blown off some trees) but devastated the eastern panhandle’s Big Bend region. Neither model, however, prepared people on the Blue Ridge or below in Asheville for the oncoming rain event that killed more than 150 and wiped out towns as the Swannanoa overflowed its banks after some 10-20 inches of rain (24”+ at Spruce Pine) inundated western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.


Helene took her own path. Helene broke the trend. Helene was an outlier in the historical data. The storm deviated from the usual turn to the right, toward the east and northeast, that such storms have historically taken in the Prevailing Westerlies, the wind system that dominates continental United States under the effect of the Coriolis (apparent) Force.


Trend Line


Living in the present, but always concerned about the future, we humans see what’s next in the context of the past. Helene didn’t do what previous storms did; those in the hurricane’s eventual path couldn’t anticipate, but even with preparations, they couldn’t have foreseen the intensity of destruction they were about to undergo.


So, how good are those models? When they appear on TV during a storm’s development, they appear as a set of projected tracks centered on a cone of probability. The variation in prediction is evident as the westernmost tracks diverge from the easternmost tracks, uncertainty growing over the predicted life of the storm.


Should we use R-squared as a predictor? The graph shows the trend when all the elements fall in place consistently. We can assume that if it were for hurricanes, each dot would represent a match with a set of hurricanes that follow a predictable pattern. But storms like Helene would show up as outliers, dots off the trend line, eliciting from us, “Hey, this doesn’t match. The data here fall outside the trend line.”


Trend Line for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz


With a verifiable past, Harris and Walz have given us a series of data points against which we can plot the potential future. For those serious about historical data, the coming storm of incompetence appears to be quite predictable. A Harris-Walz Administration will fall in line with the Biden-Harris storms of illegal alien entrees moving into the country like Helene. We should see continuing inflation, climate-driven mandates that stress the energy grid, spending on those illegal aliens that robs Homeland Security’s FEMA of emergency funding for American citizens (as Helene has revealed), weak foreign policy, and kowtowing to special interest groups that put biological men in women’s prisons, restrooms, and locker rooms.


I’ll play TV weather forecaster here. All models point to more of the same. The coming storm will not be an outlier to the Democrat trend of wild spending subject to waste and fraud as we have seen with the COVID money, unguarded borders requiring money for foreigners entering illegally, and a feckless foreign policy that does little to nothing to stop the aggression of Russia, China, and Iran. The only difference between the past trend under Democrats and the future is that the coming storm will intensify more rapidly.


If you want a model of America’s future of “joy and change” under a President Harris, see videos of the towns along the Swannanoa.