Mark Armstrong

#NEWS: @Jim_Jordan urges the House Appropriations Committee to include language in upcoming funding bills that would limit the ability of rogue judges to misuse nationwide injunctions.

To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following: - Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible. - All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING! - The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily. The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already! Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Scientists Getting Political on Social Media Could Hurt Their Credibility, New Study Finds | Zaid Jilani, The American Saga Getting political on social media could have its upsides, but the downside is that you can hurt the trust of your audience. The COVID-19 pandemic could have been a unifying moment for Americans — as we all learned to come together to face off with one of the greatest challenges of our lives. But everything about the pandemic quickly became politicized — from who to blame for the deaths we suffered here in the United States to what kind of statement you were making to the world by wearing a face mask or not. Part of that politicization came early on, when many of the same public health officials we were relying on to give us sound advice about how to minimize our risks decided that these risks paled in comparison to the need to protest against racism. Many even urged people to ignore social distancing guidelines to join the demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted at the time. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” I’m sure many of the public health advocates and scientists who promoted this stance really believed in what they were doing. They were leveraging their prestige as scientists to advocate for a compelling social cause. But I always wondered whether there was a greater cost they were not factoring into their decision to become so openly political: what if they were harming their credibility among the broader public, who wanted objective scientific advice without a side helping of politics? How the public feels about scientists getting political It turned out that European economists and social scientists Eleonora Alabrese, Francesco Capozza, and Prashant Garg were wondering the same thing. “In Italy during the pandemic, many virologists and experts they were also known to have expressed online their opinion on other stuff — could be redistribution, could be anything political,” Capozzatold me in an interview. He noticed how these political expressions were coloring how other users perceived these scientists. “Twitter users were kind of retweeting or mentioning — yeah you shouldn’t trust this guy because this guy is clearly a left-wing or right-wing or whatever person. So whatever he’s saying about COVID might not be completely neutral or helpful for society because he or she has displayed political bias in other posts So he and his co-authors decided to do an experiment where they exposed both members of the general public and journalists to social media content from scientists to see how it impacted the view of credibility (as measured by how they view their profile and research and how willing they are to read their content). The scientist’s profiles were constructed — meaning they weren’t real people — but were then filled with a range of political content. Some scientists expressed Democratic beliefs, others expressed Republican beliefs, and some expressed themselves in more neutral ways. “What we find basically is that people rate the neutral scientist — the one who doesn’t express any political view — as the most credible. And any political expression in the way that we characterized it is penalized,” Alabrese explained. They illustrated the effect in the following figure. Neutral statements, as you can see, cost the scientists nothing in credibility. But strong expressions of political belief, on the other hand, walloped them: The more extreme the political statement — strong as opposed to moderate — the more your credibility takes a hit. The effect of conservative political expression was particularly strong for how journalists perceived the scientists: Why might that be the case? People in both groups tended to penalize scientists more for disagreeing with themselves — Democrats were more hostile to Republicans and vice versa. But the researchers suggested that one reason this might be is that journalists tend to a left-leaning group. Can we un-ring the bell on scientists getting too political? A similar study to the one I described above was released in 2023. It found that when the scientific journal Nature issued a presidential endorsement for Joe Biden in 2020, it reduced the trust that Donald Trump voters had for the publication while doing little to impact voting intentions. These studies add up the conclusion that being viewed as politically biased can limit the reach that scientists have on the world. According to Pew polling, trust in scientists fell about twenty points from 2019 to 2023 among Republican and Republican-leaning adults. This is a big problem because science is necessary for human thriving. Scientists have to have the trust of the public if they want us to do things that benefit society, like vaccinating our kids. If the general public thinks that scientists are only out to serve their political faction, they look less like neutral authorities and more like referees who are rigging the game. What’s happening among scientist credibility is also not limited to that field. A broad array of American institutions have seen their credibility collapse in recent years, with wide partisan divides opening up all over the place. The center is not holding. Does that mean there’s no reason for a scientist or someone else in a trusted profession to get political? I’d argue that there might be times when someone needs to take off their objective hat and become an activist for a cause they feel strongly about and where they could make a real difference. But the broad politicization of entire fields is also making it so that big chunks of the public just don’t trust them anymore. When public health experts told us that we have to isolate ourselves to protect ourselves from a pandemic but then told us that we should gather by the thousands to protest racism, we had good reason to ask: who’s really speaking now, the objective expert or the impassioned activist? Read more: theamericansaga.com/p/scientists-g…

Do you like math? Do you like making climate activists cry? If so, this post is for you. 🫵 They advertise utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind as being “eco-friendly” energy technologies because they emit less CO₂ over their total lifecycle. Emissions is all the “greens” like to jack their sausage holsters about. But, when you point out to them just how land intensive their “green” energy technologies are, they squirm trying to justify being vehemently opposed to nuclear fission — a near-infinite, carbon-free, energy-dense electricity source — and working to destroying the landscape with massive amounts of solar cells and wind farms to save the planet. Let's run the numbers, shall we? 𝐍𝐔𝐂𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐑 𝐅𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 ⚛️ The standard nuclear reactor has a 1,000-megawatt (MW) rating. This means that each plant is, on average, installed with 1,000 MW of power capacity. A 1,000-MW nuclear facility occupies, on average, just over 1 square mile (640 acres) of land. To figure out just how many homes a single 1,000 MW plant could power, we can start by using the following equation, 𝑬 = 𝑷 × 𝒕, where, • 𝑬 = energy (megawatt hours, MWh) • 𝑷 = power (MW) • 𝒕 = time (hours, hr) If we assume a 1,000 MW nuclear reactor operates at FULL power during an entire calendar year, it will produce ~8.76 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year. 𝑬 = 1,000 MW × 24 hr (1-day) × 365 [days] (1 yr) = 8.76 million MWh / yr (8.76 TWh / yr) However, reactors do 𝒏𝒐𝒕 operate at full power 100% of the time because they come offline for refueling or to undergo maintenance. Therefore, we must take the capacity factor into consideration in our calculation. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of any electricity generation source in the U.S. at 0.93 in 2023. 🔗eia.gov/electricity/an… What this value means is that nuclear reactors in the U.S. operated at full installed power for about 93% of the calendar year in 2023. So, to figure out how much electricity that each plant produces in a year, we must multiply the previously calculated value of 8.76 TWh by the capacity factor of 0.93. If we do that, we get, 𝑬 = (8.76 TWh / year) × 0.93 ≈ 8.15 TWh / yr Now, to determine just how many homes this powers, we must divide 𝑬 by the average amount of electricity U.S. homeowners purchase in a year. According to the EIA, that number is ~10,500 kilowatt-hours (KWh) or 1.05 × 10⁻⁵ TWh. 🔗eia.gov/energyexplaine… Thus, dividing 8.15 TWh / yr by 1.05 × 10⁻⁵ TWh / yr gives us about 776,190 homes. Therefore, a 1,000 MW nuclear electricity generation station occupying one square mile of land, operating with a capacity factor of 0.93, can power more than 775,000 homes throughout the course of a year based on U.S. data. Now that is pretty energy-dense, eh? Why would any climate activist be opposed to that? Let's now compare nuclear to the greens' preferred solar and wind technologies. 𝐒𝐎𝐋𝐀𝐑 𝐏𝐕 ☀️ A utility-scale solar PV array requires at least 1 MW of installed power. 🔗cleanpower.org/facts/solar-po… A1 MW solar PV array requires about 5-7 acres of land according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). 🔗seia.org/initiatives/la… And, according to the EIA, solar had a capacity factor of 0.232 last year in the U.S., by far the 𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒔𝒕 of any energy source. What this means is that solar PV arrays only operated at full power 23.2% of the year in 2023 due to variable weather conditions and sky cover. By using the same calculations as above, a 1,000 MW solar PV array would occupy some 5,000-7,000 acres of land (mean of ~6,000 acres), all the while powering 193,523 homes, some 582,667 fewer homes than if it were nuclear power. Yikes, that doesn't sound very efficient. 😬 𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐃 A single utility-scale wind turbine occupies ~80 acres of land, which each turbine given a 2.5 MW rating. A 1,000 MW onshore wind farm would require about 400 2.5-MW turbines occupying some 32,000 acres of land area. And, according to the EIA, wind had a capacity factor of 0.332 in 2023, meaning that U.S. utility-scale wind farms operated at full power capacity for 33.2% of the year last year. If we employ the same methods as before, we'll find that a 1,000 MW wind farm could power about 277,143 homes for one year. Therefore, a 1,000 MW wind farm would power 499,047 fewer homes than a 1,000 MW nuclear facility while occupying over 50 times as much land area. That's not exactly efficient either, now, is it? 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐙𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐔𝐏 In order to power the same number of homes that a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant can, it would require either: • For 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐏𝐕: Approximately 4,000 MW of installed power (equivalent to four nuclear facilities) and 24,000 acres of land (some 37.5 × as much land area than a nuclear plant). • For 𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝: Approximately 2,800 MW of installed power (equivalent to 2.8 nuclear facilities) and 89,600 acres of land (some 140 × as much land area than a nuclear power generation station). But, I should caution you that these estimates are in fact conservative. Why? Because they do 𝒏𝒐𝒕 take into consideration land area required for battery storage due to their intermittency in overcast sky conditions, low wind speed and/or overnight. Based on land requirements alone, if climate activists were serious environmentalists, they would support deployment of more nuclear power. Some of them do, but most I have interacted with don't and find terrible excuses to support massive amounts of solar PV and onshore wind farm construction. Nuclear power represents both continued economic growth and a clean energy future. But, many climate activists don't want continued economic growth. They want to abolish capitalism and overturn western culture.